Imagining a sustainable city

merrill findlay
writer
ABN 50 187 552 579

Imagining a sustainable city
by Merrill Findlay
First published in Issues magazine, No. 36, August 1996
Australian Council for Educational Research

Making the world’s villages, towns and cities socially and ecologically sustainable is humanity’s most urgent challenge for the 21st century and demands changes to almost everything we now take for granted.

The goal of sustainability also requires a general acknowledgement that we humans are part of nature, not separate from it, and that our ongoing well-being depends upon complex ecological processes that we are still only beginning to understand.

As Roger Jones, from CSIRO’s Division of Atmospheric Research, noted at a recent Melbourne workshop on urban design, the real challenge is to redesign and build our human systems so they co-exist with the natural ecosystems on which they are imposed. (In this context, human systems include all living beings associated with cities or towns; all buildings, roads, pipes and other infrastructure; all industrial activities including production, storage, distribution and consumption of energy, water, food and fibre; modes of transport; gardens and open space; the ways in which we are governed; interpersonal relationships; and all the diverse beliefs and assumptions we humans are embedded within.)

The complexities involved in making natural and human ecosystems co-exist should never be underestimated, because, as economic historian Tony Dingle, from Monash University, told the same workshop, cities have always been very ‘profligate’ places. ‘They’ve always drawn resources to themselves that smashed up natural ecosystems, and they modify ecosystems for many kilometres around themselves,’ Professor Dingle said. 'They generate hinterlands that are geared up to feeding the people and those people develop all sorts of network technologies that give them massive energy in massive quantities as cheaply as possible, and they can make it cheaper because they [consumers] live closely together and so on. They’re profligate on people, and it’s only just over a hundred years ago that cities stopped killing their populations off more quickly than people could breed up again. Death rates at cities were always higher than birth rates. The public health revolution of the late nineteenth century solved that sort of problem.'

'What I would suggest though is if we’re gong to move one step further to stop cities being so profligate, there has to be a kind of environmental revolution to match [the public health revolution],’ he said. ‘It’s really an enormously difficult task to turn these places around,’ he admitted. ‘We can think about tricky little ways of doing it around the edge, like self-composting toilets here, or something there, but it needs a whole shift in lifestyles in cities.’

The environmental revolution required to transform our unsustainable present into a globally sustainable future will, according to people associated with the World Watch Institute in Washington, require at least six fundamental transitions ‘within a very few decades’, and it is naive to talk about making our cities more sustainable without considering all six of these in both a global and local context. In general terms they are as follows.

'1. A demographic transition to a roughly stable population.
2. A technological transition to a minimal environmental impact per person.
3. An economic transition to a world in which serious attempts are made to charge the real costs of goods and services, including environmental costs, so that there are incentives for the world economy to live off nature’s ‘income’ rather than depleting its ‘capital’.
4. A social transition to a broader sharing of that income, along with increased opportunities for non-destructive employment for the poor families of the world.
5. An institutional transition to a set of supranational alliances that facilitate a global attack on global problems and all various aspects of policy to be integrated with one another. [I’d also add national, regional, local and intra-community alliances.]
6. An informational transition to a world in which scientific research, education, and global monitoring allow large numbers of people to understand the nature of the challenges they face.'

The power of positive imaginings
These six necessary transitions imply radical changes which might seem overwhelmingly difficult to achieve, or even completely impossible in the short term. But what would a sustainable city, or a sustainable world look and feel like? This is an important question because, according to Dutch sociologist, Fred Polak, our images of the future ‘act as magnets on our behaviour in the present’ to precipitate social change.

Polak sifted through western civilisation’s images of the future and found that in most of them, the future was described as somewhere positive where many of the problems of the present had been solved. It was a place for people to look forward to. He suggested that positive visions were what mobilised Europe towards those great periods of social transformation we now call ‘The Renaissance’, ‘The Reformation’, and ‘The Enlightenment’. And in more down to earth terms, such images of a better world mobilised us towards the abolition of slavery and child labour, the emancipation of women, parliamentary democracy, universal suffrage, universal literacy, the eight hour day, and Mabo … all those milestones that we in Australia now hold sacred, but which were once considered, by those resistant to change, to be ‘impossible’. Yet, over a period of several generations, the conservative forces have been proven wrong in each of these cases!

I’d like to suggest that ‘sustainability’ is the new collective vision of the future that is dragging us all into a better world. Even though the vision is still very fuzzy and ill-defined, it is mobilising millions of us to voluntarily change our behaviour in the present to help make that imagined future real. (And we can expect, over time, those conservative forces in our society who don’t want to change, to go the same way as the people who told us that women, or indigenous peoples, would never have full citizenship rights!)

Painting the future real
But let me repeat that question: what would a sustainable city look and feel like? This is the question my organisation, Imagine The Future Inc, is seeking to answer with an innovative sustainable futures R&D project called ‘Painting the future real’, which explores what a sustainable agro-urban-industrial system (or city) might look like in the coastal basalt plain between Melbourne’s Docklands and the Bellarine Peninsula in southern Victoria, within the lifetime of a child born today.

Before Europeans arrived, this bioregion was exclusively Kulin territory, but is now home to people from an extraordinarily diverse range of backgrounds. It includes the municipalities of Brimbank, Hobsons Bay, Maribyrnong, Melton, Wyndham, the City of Greater Geelong, and the City of Melbourne; the waters of Port Phillip Bay, the catchments of the Yarra, Maribyrnong, Werribee, Little and Barwon rivers; and many streams and creeks. It also includes internationally significant wetlands and some highly endangered remnant native grassland ecosystems, where a number of species, like the beautiful Gold Moths Orchid, have been pushed to the brink of extinction by agriculture, or urban and industrial development.

This project looks at the linkages between the natural ecological systems and human systems in the bioregion, and this means we are very interested in all the present-day social challenges, such as the very high levels of unemployment (Footscray’s official rate is 18.6%, for example); the inequitable distribution of resources and opportunities; the high car dependency and poor access to public transport; and the very unsustainable urban and industrial development, including the ever-sprawling outer suburbs of Melbourne and Geelong.

Multimedia image
A major focus of ‘Painting the future real’ is the creation of a large-scale composite multimedia image about the pasts, presents and possible sustainable futures of the project bioregion. The image content is being developed by the project team from in-depth interviews with people from many different backgrounds, who have thought deeply about issues relevant to social and ecological sustainability – and are doing practical things in their daily lives to bring us closer to this goal.

We are asking these people about the sustainability issues they are most concerned about, the strategies and actions they believe are most appropriate to deal with those issues, and what they themselves are doing to effect change. We are then asking them to describe their personal vision of a sustainable future – which is something most people have never been asked to do before.

The interviews are very revealing and when read together, clearly articulate some of the complex relationships between natural systems and social systems. Gaye Hamilton, Director of the Werribee Zoo, spoke about biodiversity issues, for example. In her vision of the future, all the back and front yards (where they continue to exist and all the roadside and railway verges, have been replanted with indigenous plants so ‘all those tiny little orchids and other species that are non the brink of extinction now will be safe’.

‘We will also be seeing more and more native birds and butterflies and bandicoots and all those other fantastic creatures that belong to the grasslands, and large flocks of the now-endangered orange bellied parrots, rather than just an occasional very, very fortunate sighting,’ she said. ‘And all the rabbits and foxes and feral cats that are now so destructive in the Australian environment will have long gone.’

Gaye Hamilton also spoke about linking remaining corridors of native vegetation along some of the creeks and sewage lines and railway verges in the bioregion ‘so our wildlife can move from coastal areas through the basalt plains, either to other coastal areas or into the woodlands or rangelands.’

In her vision of the future, the bioregion was also served by excellent public transport systems and very efficient energy systems, and people lived less resource-dependent lifestyles. ‘I’m not suggesting that we should deprive ourselves of aesthetic pleasures,’ she said, ‘but for me, those pleasures must includes being able to watch a sunset or sunrise over undisturbed wetlands, or a flock of orange-bellied parrots flying by.’

Not surprisingly, John Hennessy, Director of the Western Regional Economic Development Organisation, emphasised local economic self-sufficiency in his interview. ‘In my vision of the future, this region is leading the way in the transition from the world of today to the world of tomorrow,’ he said. ‘This future world will probably be a lot more focussed on home-based activities, a lot more focussed on small enterprises, and people will have a much more global perspective. There will be no be reason why people who are developing products and services in the West can’t market them all over the world with the telecommunication technologies that are coming on stream right now.’

‘You can already catch glimpses of this future,’ he explained. ‘At Melton, for example, a pilot project based on the employment node principles … is being developed on about 500 hectares of land. Employment nodes are about creating self-sufficient local communities where people can work, recreate, educate and live in the one area rather than having to commute to and from Melbourne each day as 90% of the workforce in outlying growth areas like Melton, Werribee, Sunbury and Craigieburn does at the moment. So you might have light industry adjacent to household living and socialising areas next door to some sort of tertiary education facility, and all set in parklands with a lake.’

‘I think it’s harder to visualise what telecommunications will mean to the way we live and design our urban spaces in the future though,’ John Hennessy admitted. ‘People can already study, shop, bank and be entertained from home, but we probably haven’t thought enough about the social implications of this yet. It might not take a great deal of community investment, however, to redesign amenities so people don’t feel isolated working from home.’

Local self-reliance was also an important issue for urban planner, Peter Atkins, from Maribyrnong Council. ‘In a sustainable city, people would recreate locally and produce their food more locally,’ he said. ‘We would not be frightened to grow green leaf vegetables in an urban setting, for example, because we’d be dealing with our airborne pollutants. And the natural environment would be reclaimed and enhanced. Our river environs would be treated with greater respect in terms of what drains into them, and what’s located next to them … I think a sustainable city would also be more self-sufficient in a social sense. There’d be more opportunities for friendships and personal support, for example. And that again would reduce the need to travel.

‘I guess I’ve been focussing on some of the social aspects of sustainability, because people often forget that there are significant social solutions to environmental problems,’ Peter Atkins said. ‘We can list any number of ecological outcomes that are necessary if we are to ever create sustainable cities, but what I’m interested in are the social and economic linkages.’

Painting the future real effectively represents a collective re-imagining of a whole bioregion. It focuses on real people doing real things in a real place in real time – and on the image of the future that are motivating them. You can read the ‘Painting the future real’ interviews and background material on Imagine The Future Inc’s web site. But let me ask you that question again: what would a sustainable city look and feel like? And what are you doing to help make such a town or city real in your bioregion?

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At the time of writing Merrill Findlay was founder/director of Imagine The Future Inc, a very small community-based cultural development and futures organisation auspiced by the Australian Conservation Foundation in 1990 with support from other institutions, including the Australian Multicultural Foundation and Arts Victoria.

Painting the future real was situated at Victoria University of Technology within the project bioregion, and was funded by the Sidney Myer Fund, the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts advisory body, and the Department of Transport and Regional Development. This project evolved into the community-based futures projects Re-imagining your neighbourhood and Redreaming the plains.

Content last revised 21 January 2008.