Solving design problems - from Florence to Broadmeadows

A unique project at the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning’s Victorian Eco-Innovation Lab (VEIL) is addressing problems found in cities throughout the world – from Melbourne to Florence – through a design process which concentrates on the idea that sustainability requires social change as much as technological change. 

Deputy Director Dr Michael Trudgeon says VEIL’s research program was about allowing for the possibility of people behaving differently. 

“People will only behave differently if their lives will be better, and to do that, you have to think about the system, or the network in which they live, and think about how resources in a community are exchanged.

“This thinking has given rise to the idea of distributed systems, where rather than having a central point, you have multiple nodes which produce and consume.

“Inserting something new to positively affect the network around them will also benefit all the networks around it and change their potential,” Dr Trudgeon says. 

Among VEIL’s many research projects is the ‘EcoAcupuncture’ project, which focuses on the idea that making small design interventions in cities, like putting in a market, can affect the whole system. 

This way of thinking about design has led to local governments as far away as Florence requesting VEIL’s help to start the design process to create sustainable futures and deal with existing problems. 

Professor Chris Ryan, Director of VEIL, explained how the work in Italy came about. 

“The Mayor and Deputy Mayor of Florence realised the city faced increasing pressure from emerging environmental issues (particularly climate-related) and they have a massive strategic problem in preserving the historic city (a UNESCO world heritage area) while adapting to the sustainability pressures of the next 25 years,” he says.

“The Mayor’s office talked to the New York University Florence campus because NYU has worked with them on other issues, but they don’t run any Architecture, Urban design or Environmental design programs.

The director of NYU had seen a presentation of VEIL’s work and suggested a joint Florence project. The old city was not well-placed to deal with the realities of a changing climate and was vulnerable to extreme weather events – high temperature days, water shortages and floods. 

Almost 30 Masters students in environmental design from the University of Melbourne and the Technical University of Delft joined NYU Florence undergraduate students and doctoral students from the University of Florence Architecture School to imagine alternative sustainable futures for the city. 

They then worked in small design teams to focus on different sites throughout the city as potential locations for Urban EcoAcupuncture interventions, centred around locations like the River Arno, including a plan for Florence’s 2015 fashion festival to be held on pontoons on the river.

“The reason for focusing on the Arno is water – flood and drought – is critical for the city and its vulnerable future yet they treat their ‘original water of life’ (the river around which the settlement first formed) much like a gutter,” Professor Ryan says.

“Florence is in the second year of a major drought. It has recorded the hottest summer days ever during the past two years. This is the time for them to rethink their relationship with water – with collection and storage of rain-water and use of grey water.” 

Dr Trudgeon says the project provided students a unique learning experience. 

“To be designing for real people in a real environment transforms design education: if students can meet the people, talk to them and see where they live, that situates design in a real context.

“The two critical narratives of architecture are place and identity. There’s nothing like being there: it transforms the richness of the knowledge gained and the students create far more sophisticated designs for real people. Those things have an enormous impact on the quality of the outcomes.”

The visions from the student work generated considerable local media attention and debate in Florence. The Mayor’s office described the project and its early outcomes as something they were following closely and exactly the kind of thing that needed to be part of the city’s planning. 

Professor Ryan says to have Melbourne staff and students invited to ‘take on‘ Florence where others have been unable to do so, was a high accolade for the VEIL Eco-Acupuncture approach.

“It also recognises that Melbourne, with five years of local Eco-Acupuncture projects, has something to teach other cities about designing for resilience and low-carbon emissions.”

VEIL tested the proposition and ideas with local councils in Melbourne including Broadmeadows and Sunshine. Students worked with experts within these councils to use design and thinking about distributed systems to improve experience, resilience, productivity and diversity of each suburb. 

“It seems strange to talk about Florence and Broadmeadows in the same breath, but when you look at them from the point of infrastructural systems thinking, you can see universal threads emerge.

“This idea that you can bring change and there are solutions – we can be accused of being optimists instead of realists, but solutions don’t come from thin air. “They have to be conceived, honed, tested, crafted, and that’s what we’re doing.”

www.ecoinnovationlab.com

www.abp.unimelb.edu.au