How to make nature an urgent priority

Date: Tuesday 4 June, 1-3:15 pm

Location: Online via Zoom

An interactive masterclass on how to shake up the way we design, maintain and value critical natural assets in our urban environment. No more value engineering.

Nature touches us all – and protects our world. It’s inseparable from our net zero ambitions. But it needs our active care and attention. We need to value it; and make sure its creation, maintenance and replacement is funded in local government asset planning.

Above all we need to be creative and be prepared to totally upend our preconceptions about how our landscapes should look. We need to learn how rewilding can generate biodiversity and habitat for endangered species – and save a fortune on lawn mowing.

Extreme Green Infrastructure brings you presenters who are at the nexus of the change we need.

Extreme Green Infrastructure just got its Andy Warhol mojo

We just love eking out the spicy hints of what will be in our upcoming masterclasses. This one is particularly important so we need to make it super exciting, with cut through solutions.

You can help us!

We want to prod the bear of conservative well meaning engineers who take things too far, boring landscape designers and the rusted on habits of finance people who won’t treat green infrastructure with the same respect as they do our roads and bridges!

But first up – times are tough Since we designed this masterclass, there’s been a federal budget, and businesses going…

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Why Gail Hall is the perfect co-moderator for the Extreme Green Infrastructure masterclass

Gail Hall turns out to be the perfect co-moderator for the Extreme Green Infrastructure masterclass.

She’s a planner, so she understands that the biggest barrier to better, more resilient infrastructure is often planning – which are rules and regulations made by people. And anything made by people should be changed by people, right?

Her background is in local government in Victoria and Gladstone in Queensland, so it’s a given that she has plenty of experience negotiating change in a politically charged environment, we reasoned.

At the City of Melbourne, where she was invited to join a group of landscape architects…

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Meet the experts

Jon Hazelwood

Principal – Public Realm Sector Leader
Hassell

Jac Semmler

Director, Plant Practitioner
Super Bloom

David Jenkins

Chief Executive Officer
IPWEA (Institute of Public Works Engineering Australasia)

Gail Hall

Co-founder & President
Australasian Green Infrastructure Network

Related

Change at a precinct level

Jon Hazelwood is a principal of Hassell with the job of co-leading the public realm and landscaping work at the massive $1.7 billion Melbourne Arts Precinct. Jon wants us to consider the benefits and opportunities of extensive biodiversity installed in our cities spaces, and the realities that can block their installation. Management and maintenance costs, plant availability, and public perceptions all contribute to urban nature being compromised. He wants us to consider the Blue Banded Bee being as important as the commuter.

The power and the passion for plants in a climate crisis

Jac Semmler is the author of Super Bloom, a horticulturalist, plant practitioner and director of Super Bloom Plant Practice who brings radical new thinking to the world of plants and how they add so much value to our lives. There’s the resilience of biodiversity and avoidance of monocultures. Why we may need to reimagine our view of landscape that’s constantly battered by the reality of the climate crisis. And there are the rewards of understanding plants as evolving things – not set and forget.

Why green infrastructure needs to be part of councils’ asset and financial management plans

David Jenkins is chief executive officer of IPWEA (Institute of Public Works Engineering Australasia). He sits at the pointy, influential end of local government engineers whose job it is to keep us safe. A major project he’s leading is why it makes sense to get green infrastructure onto the same assets register as “grey” assets, with its own planned maintenance, replacement and valuation schedule because, in the end, they perform similar functions. Think of mangroves doing the job of sea walls. Then there’s the clear value of street trees, gardens, parks, nature reserves, green walls and roofs, rivers, streams, water sensitive urban design components and living shorelines.

Why there’s a new Australasian Green Infrastructure Network

Gail Hall is a planner based in Melbourne and she understood early from her work with the City of Melbourne, other councils in Victoria and at Gladstone in Queensland that Australia needed national standards for green infrastructure and a better understanding of how to ensure design, protection and maintenance of this important asset. It’s why she co-founded the Australasian Green Infrastructure Network. See our article on her here