我们的生态城市（一）How do we become an ecocity?（1）

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我们的生态城市（一）How do we become an ecocity?（1）

CHRIS HATZIS 
Eavesdrop on Experts, a podcast about stories of inspiration and insights. It'swhere expert types obsess, confess and profess. You’ll meet people who youwouldn’t normally meet, but will be glad you did. I’m Chris Hatzis. Let’seavesdrop on experts and see how these 21st century explorers are changing theworld… one lecture, one experiment, one interview at time.

It’s an uncharacteristicallybeautiful sunny day in Melbourne and a great opportunity to escape from theoffice into an urban oasis – Lincoln Square, a park just south of theUniversity of Melbourne’s main campus. Even though we’re amongst the hustle andbustle of city life – trams, commuters, buses and helicopters, there’s acertain tranquillity when coming down to the park to sit under the massiveMoreton Bay fig trees. 

Our reporter Dr Andi Horvath ishere to have a chat with Dr Seona Candy – an academic at Architecture, Buildingand Planning at the University of Melbourne, and an expert in the importance ofurban green areas. Seona is talking about food and water systems at the EcocityWorld Summit in July 2017 – a conference that will bring together councillors,academics and business to discuss how we can make our cities healthier, happierand more environmentally sustainable – or, in Seona’s words, how we can create resilientcities.

DR ANDI HORVATH 
We're sitting here on a picnic table in the middle of the city, and the city isMelbourne, Australia. There are helicopters going, you're going to hear fireengines, there's a bus stop just there and we're in among a whole lot of highrises. Seona Candy, you're someone who's involved in this ecocity future, whichmeans taking cities to a new sustainable and, in your words, resilientfuture. 

DR SEONA CANDY  
At the moment, I'm a research fellow in resilient urban systems, with aparticular kind of interest and experience in food systems analysis, foodsecurity and integration of urban systems. The city is a complex thing. There'slots of different systems and I think there's a potential for these differentsystems to interact to make a city more resilient. So, for example, we have oururban gardens but we also have our peri-urban agriculture, for example. So it'snot just about community gardens and that kind of thing. Most - like thepowerhouse of our food production comes from peri-urban areas. But what we alsohave to do in the city is we've got issues with water, both not enough and toomuch at times, particularly with climate change coming on and all that kind ofthing. We've also got waste management which is a massive logistical exercise.So getting - I think there's, what is it, something like 1.7 million householdsin Melbourne and every one of them has to get a bin emptied once a week. 

But I see, particularly aroundthe areas of food and water or even energy, that there's so much opportunityfor these things to take up some of the slack and turn waste into something wecan actually use. So the outputs of one system can actually be the inputs ofanother. So could we harness our stormwater and water our gardens? Could we useour food waste, compost? Could we use it for urban biogas to power our buseslike they do in many other places? I think there's just so much opportunity.These initiatives, these I suppose sustainability initiatives, on their own inindividual systems are all well and good, but often not considered feasiblebecause - if they're operating in isolation. But what I want to find out is, ifyou link them together, do they become more feasible because you're taking thewaste and you're putting it in to something else.

DR ANDI HORVATH 
Now in 2017 in Melbourne is going to be a huge international conference aboutthe ecocity. Is this the city of the future or the city of the now that we wantto see happening? Is this the discussion that brings together all thesesystems? 

DR SEONA CANDY  
Look, I think ecocity is probably a fairly broad term. It can mean a lot, a lotof things. Traditionally I suppose it's - when people say eco, they think ofenvironmental outcomes and they think of sustainability. But I suppose thesedays eco is not just about sustainability and maybe reducing our footprint, butit's also about actually changing the structure of our cities to make us moreadaptable, more resilient. So it's not just about tinkering around the edges,an ecocity is about transforming cities.

DR ANDI HORVATH 
So what are your current research adventures? What are you doing with some ofyour students?

DR SEONA CANDY  
So I'm working on two that are around - that are funded by the CooperativeResearch Centre for Low Carbon Living, so they're around low-carbon cities. Oneis called the Visions and Pathways project and it's about bringing togetherstakeholders from the built environment area and bringing them together andtrying to put together visions of what a low-carbon city would look like in2040. We've actually produced four separate visions. So they're different, butall of these visions have seeds in the present. So at the moment now we'reworking - we've got the visions for 2040 but now we're working on the pathways,what is it going to take to get us there. Another project I'm working on islooking at - again, it's a low-carbon city project. I'm working with sixstudents and we're looking at urban interventions for low-carbon cities, butthat also have implications for resilience. So a particular focus ondistributed systems. 

So in our cities we've typicallyin history had centralised - you know, like our power is produced in one great,big power plant and trucked in, our water's collected in one big damn and pipedin, and all that kind of thing. But distributed network cities is where weactually start to either produce or gather or generate resources within ourcities. So it's this concept of what they call a prosumer. So previously we'reconsumers, right. In cities, all the stuff that we need gets trucked in and weconsume it and then our waste goes out. But what prosumers do is they actuallyproduce some of the stuff that they consume. So this is whether we produce, tosome extent, some of our own food if we have an urban garden; not saying thatthat's the solution to food security. Or do we collect some of our ownrainwater, do we generate some of our own energy? So to kind of offset thecentralised systems that have historically supplied our cities. 

DR ANDI HORVATH 
I'm going to be the grumpy devil's advocate, but is this too hard to do? I meanthere are companies out there that are just interested in profit, there'd bebody corporates that just go too hard, can't afford. There must be a dissentingvoice.

DR SEONA CANDY  
Absolutely. I mean you - the uptake of rooftop solar has been amazing over thepast few years. So that kind of thing, people are actually really interested intaking a bit back, taking control. There's microgrids already popping up. Theseare the seeds of change that we're looking for, this is for our pathways thatare going to lead to better cities in the future. So there's a microgrid on theoutskirts of the city, say in Mooroolbark, which is - it's grid connected, butit's mostly just people sharing batteries, solar panels, all that kind ofthing. So with new technologies coming in, we've got to figure out ways toincorporate them into the social fabric of the city. So you can't just plonk atechnology in there and expect it to work. So this is where the study ofresilient urban systems is very much: a city is a socio, ecological,technological system. So it's all these things intermixed and you can't dealwith one and not incorporate the other. 

So part of a resilient city isalso building awareness in the community. Bringing - finding these prosumers orfinding the ones who are interested in becoming prosumers and working out howthese different systems can actually fit into their lives. Because there'sgoing to be some give and take on either side. Maybe the give or take justhappens. So one of my students is doing a project where he's looking forpeople, he's setting up a simulated microgrid amongst groups of about sixhouses. So they each have a little dooverlackie in their house which tells them- it connects to their smart meter, it tells them how much they could -simulated - be producing in this microgrid that links all these six houses. Butwhat he's really looking into is, if these people have some awareness of thepotential - and what they can see is in their microgrid, this simulatedmicrogrid, whether they're going over or under their allotted power or thepower that's available to them. 

So then he wants to see if thatwill actually bring down consumption. So people actually being able to managetheir own power - bring down - you know, we have some of the highest energy usein the world and the highest carbon footprint in Australia per capita. So willthis actually change that? Because it's got to come from both ends; not just production,it's got to come from consumption. 

DR ANDI HORVATH 
I'm ashamed for our fellow Australians, we're going to have to get our acttogether. Okay, Seona, let's start retrofitting some of the city here. We cansee various style buildings, ranging back from the '70s, '80s, definitely somebuilt this century, some really beautiful ones, colourful ones as well. We'rehere in the middle of Melbourne, let's start retrofitting, let's fix things.Where do we start, Seona?

DR SEONA CANDY  
Well, I would start looking at some of the older buildings and the olderbuilding stock for things like rooftop gardens. They're particularly goodbecause those buildings are typically over designed, so they're strong enoughto retrofit a rooftop garden. So that would be one thing I would see. Maybethese new apartment buildings that are less over-designed, I'd want to seeplants hanging over their balconies, vines growing up the side. It doesn't haveto be one of those amazing, but sometimes quite complicated, green façades. Youcan have vines growing up buildings. They have it - there's a couple of -non-destructive vines. That green kind of skin, it would improve the urban heatisland impact.

DR ANDI HORVATH 
Urban heat island?

DR SEONA CANDY  
Yeah, so the urban heat island effect is basically when a city doesn't cooldown at night. We've all experienced that on a hot summer's day when the sungoes away but it's still hot. This is because what happens in a city is thatthe sun comes down and it gets absorbed by all the concrete and whatever thatwe have in a city. Unlike in the country where it's still hot during the day,but at night when the sun goes away there's not all this stored heat in thearea. So in the country it's much cooler in the evening in summers that it is inthe cities because all that heat can dissipate. What happens in the cities isthat all that heat that's stored in all the buildings and the roads and theconcrete surfaces and all that kind of thing then starts to radiate back. Soeven when the sun's gone away, it radiates between all these surfaces, so itnever actually leaves the city and it stays hot. So then the next day when thesun comes out again, it just heats up even more. So it kind of builds andbuilds and builds on itself. That is a key problem, definitely in the city ofMelbourne and many other cities that are in warmer climates, is this issue ofurban heat island. 

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