URBAN GREENING 2023: According to Peter Bottero, founder of Tensile, a company that specialises in architectural and green infrastructure solutions, Australia’s demands for data and evidence places it well infront of other nations in urban greening
Bottero, who will speak at Urban Greening 2023, recently attended a global conference in Switzerland that featured urban greening as part of its agenda. “A lot of the European designs tend to be done on the fly”, he says, “whereas Australians tend to be more risk averse. And we’re not prepared to accept that it just looks pretty and have a go.
“We strive to get some benefit out of it. So, in Australia, we have some of the European design flair but we do it with a technical background, because, as a society we want to know, what are we going to get out of it? Why are we doing this? That’s a fundamental difference. Whereas the Americans are more litigious. They don’t want to do anything until all the parameters are known.”
At the Swiss conference, Bottero sat in discussion with representatives from Europe, as well as Canadians, Americans, South Americans, and a few other regions to discuss urban greening.
“We were shown a pitch that had been made to several European cities to build these trellis structures over the town squares to reduce summer heat, to be done in conjunction with modelling from Zurich University.”
The results were bound to be good, Bottero said, but missing from the conversation was data and measurement to prove the benefits, or least set a base case of the potential benefit.
Comments from people in the room indicated the data collection side of the work was “just brand new” Bottero says, “but for us, this is 15-20 years old now. So we’re miles ahead.”
Despite this Australia is still seeing a cavity of missed opportunity.
“These bigger projects we see coming through, while much more thought out in terms of integration, are still really just an aesthetic consideration.
“There’s no effort to link them with other benefits of the building or to make it a functional part of the whole. But it’s about the data, right? We don’t have the data to guide this process.”
Much of the industry, he says, wants government to mandate urban greening.
“And that’s step one towards massive industry take up. I sit on the other side of the fence, where my belief is that we need to prove the business case. Because if you prove this, then everyone will jump on board anyway. And there’s a lot of us in this space who are starting to put hard numbers on it all to build up a business case.”
This is important in an environment where investment in green infrastructure may be increasingly expected to provide indoor environmental benefits such as cooling.
Data is critical to this. “So, we can actually turn around and say, well, this meets this Section J under the NCC [National Construction Code] or provides a payback on your capital expenditure within x number of years, and so on.”
With data in mind, Bottero and his team are also focused on the pressing issue of the urban heat island effect and proving the case for urban greening to play a major role to manage the issue to keep city populations safe from sweltering heat.
The rest of the industry, he says, is on the tail of other important and promising areas. Fytogreen, (whose botanist Erik van Zuilekom will appear at Urban Greening 2023) for instance are honing in on making sure we plant the right plant, in the right place, given this factor is of utmost importance where longevity is concerned. Junglefy is focused on air quality within our urban landscape.
While there are gaps to fill here in Australia in terms of lagging opportunities, the industry is working to shift the momentum forward.