MUtopian vision
[ The University of Melbourne Voice Vol. 5, No. 7
12 October - 8 November 2009 ]
The problem is clear – Melbourne’s population is growing at a time when suitable land and water are diminishing. A new project headed by Engineering looks to find the elusive solution. Shane Cahill reports.
By the year 2050 Melbourne will have to accommodate well over a million more people.
Just where they will live and work, be educated and relax is not clear.
Endlessly stretching the city perimeter beyond its current circumference of 200km is not desirable on environmental or social grounds. Increasing density in existing developments has already begun, but it too has its limits.
To ensure the city’s reputation for livability is maintained and improved it is essential that greenfield and infill developments maximise the potential of the sites, minimise contributions to climate change, as well as accommodate predicted effects of climate change.
“On paper the equation is simple: reduce water consumption, energy usage and waste emissions while increasing the density and size of the population,” says Professor Priyan Mendis, from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “However, solutions will require much thought, clever design and innovative implementation.”
Professor Mendis is part of a small group along with Associate Professor Hector Malano, also from Engineering and Professor Ian Bishop, from Geomatics, heading up this project.
Hence MUtopia – an emerging partnership between the University, government and the private sector to provide the research and monitoring bases for these solutions. Within the university, a project team is being established with Professor Colin Duffield, Dr Tuan Ngo and Professor Ian Johnston from Engineering; and the Director of the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, Professor Craig J Pearson. From outside comes Jose Alfano, Associate Director of architects Fender Katsalidis, Professor Peter Newman from Curtin University as well as interest from a range of other organisations including the Committee for Melbourne, and designers, engineers, planners and business consultants ARUP. A small secretariat of Andrew Jaspan and Carolyn Ingvarson has been established. This team will expand as the project grows.
“Until recently, integrated assessment of environmental, economic and social indicators within a single system has occurred on an ad hoc basis,” Professor Mendis says.
“Only recently has the technological capacity emerged to enable multiple indicators to be visualised and analysed at a detailed level over a large study area. MUtopia intends to utilise these technologies and contemporary engineering theory to enable the sustainability of future engineering constructs to be tested.
This project will integrate the development of a visualisation-modelling platform with the implementation of a new or retrofitted urban or suburban area that meets a wide range of criteria for environmental sustainability.”
MUtopia will push Australian research ahead of international practice.
“Other countries have proposed development of green suburbs such as the UK Ecotown concept for 10 new green towns of 15 000 homes, but these have not been linked to systematic research focused on modelling and monitoring,” he says.
“The aim of the project is to design a demonstration model for a potential Melbourne site that will represent best practice in all aspects of sustainable urban living on a large scale. The project will represent a large-scale, relatively controlled environment within which the efficacy of the state-of-the-art can be assessed in real time in a practical and co-ordinated way.
“The project will not only assess the viability of introducing sustainability best practice from an engineering point of view – water recycling, thermal efficiency both passive and active, smart systems, dwelling and transportation design, construction and maintenance – but also aspects such as architectural and urban planning, sociological and community issues, economic modelling of the capital and operating costs and benefits of such an undertaking and other aspects yet to be determined.”
The successful development of the project would see the refinement of a tool that could be used to assess and monitor sites in Melbourne and internationally.
“There are changed purposes and redevelopments occurring in many parts of Melbourne,” Professor Mendis says.
“With forward thinking some of these might be transformed on a large enough scale to solve Melbourne’s population challenges and at the same time demonstrate how this might be done also in other cities both in Australia and internationally.”
The tool will short circuit the cycle where facilities are allowed to reach the end of their usefulness and often allowed to become derelict for considerable periods of time before being considered for rehabilitation.
“Typically urban renewal starts once a site has been run down, then thinking begins on what to do with it,” Professor Mendis explains.
“We are proposing a different approach – think about the future before the site becomes fully redundant from current use.”
“We would use this project to create a Vision for the Future of Cities, sustainable with high livability status – somewhere that people will want to live.
“What we have here is the chance to develop a pilot and tools for sustainable development which are transferable to any site, anywhere in world.
“Such a package would be characterised by being sustainable, smart and secure, meaning it would inherently be aware of climate change, information technology and security right from the start.”
The other winners will be students.
“The project will provide an outstanding opportunity for both undergraduate and graduate research education and training. True multidisciplinary projects are rare and seldom sufficiently accessible to students. MUtopia will provide a test bed for emerging ideas of alternatives in build materials, energy, water management, planning and design, livable and sustainable urban infrastructure and transportation, virtual environments, environmental process modelling, virtual reality and 3D data infrastructures,” Professor Mendis says.
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