According to UTS academic Dr Pernille Christensen, there’s a lot to be encouraged about with the next generation of urban planners and property developers she sees going through her course. Her special focus on resilience and security in the urban environment are particularly complex problems but the experience her students are gaining in working alongside her and other experts – such as Beck Dawson, chief resilience officer for metropolitan Sydney, the City of Sydney and Landcom – are invaluable, she says.
THE UTS SERIES: Urban planning professionals increasingly need to design for the security challenges that can threaten cities and communities — from climate change to crime and terrorism, says Dr Pernille Christensen, course director for the Bachelor of Property Economics and senior lecturer at UTS’ School of Built Environment.
Resilient urban development is about taking a systems approach to the environmental, economic, and social aspects of urban planning. The key takeaway from this approach, Christensen says, is that urban resilience is extremely complex, and that one cannot simply focus on one problem in isolation.
Australia might have reduced its terrorism (or social risk) threat level from probable to possible during Covid but global risk reports note this might rise again dueto misinformation and conspiracy theories that permeated into many Western countries during this time.
ASIO also indicated in December 2022 that the threat level might need to go back to probable in the future.
Multiple outcomes are possible
Christensen, however, says that solutions can yield much bigger and better outcomes than simply focusing on the threat – whether environmental or social.
For instance, it’s possible to address the immediate problem of climate change while also having positive effects on multiple other issues, such as improving the safety and security of places. This can create a cascading effect where the solution has exponential benefits, instead of solving just one problem.
Christensen who, in addition to her role as course director, teaches in the postgraduate planning and property development programs, has focused her research work on urban resilience in terms of social and environmental disruptions, and strategies for adaptation and mitigation to these challenges.
Specifically, she looks at the impacts of climate change on the built environment, and how climate change mitigation strategies may also be adopted as protective security measures.
Her big question is, “what is the role of the built environment in creating safe, accessible, resilient urban places?”
Cross-sectoral collaboration and integration
A challenge is the different priorities of different groups involved in urban planning and development, which can lead to confusion and misunderstandings.
“I’ve always fought against this idea of disciplinary silos,” she told The Fifth Estate.
“One of the things that came out of my PhD was the fact that, sometimes, the same terminology can mean different things to different groups.
“We have to be really careful about the language that we use.”
And because the word sustainability has become a word that “means everything to everyone,” that too can be confusing.
“As a result, we can end up having conversations like ships in the night sometimes. And I think that’s a concerning problem in the industry.”
For example, developers might use the word sustainability to describe their inclusion of green spaces or more sustainable materials, whereas property managers might think of it more in terms of strategies that cut energy consumption or provide social amenity, she says.
Institutional investors, on the other hand, might be more concerned with ESG reporting and may therefore focus on keeping the carbon footprint and energy costs low, or on how key stakeholders are consulted on decisions.
Community responses to environmental security and resilience
Creating safe places means better integrating project delivery, threat vulnerability and risk assessment into the planning and design stages and then again in the operations stage, Christensen says. This creates an iterative assessment process that helps to ensure that the development is safe and secure.
In the 21st century, environmental security has taken on a new meaning as sustainability and natural resource protection have become essential to national security.
Mitigating the security threat of climate change means creating urban environments that withstand the impacts of flood and fire and ensuring that buildings do their bit to reduce carbon emissions.
According to Christensen, “without good urban planning, buildings are just pieces randomly placed in a landscape”.
Her work with Beck Dawson at Resilient Sydney, is focused around engagement with stakeholders and ensuring a rigorous process for how learnings and insights from the initial Resilient Sydney Strategy engagement process are incorporated into the next phase of a program.
“We look at the various strategies and stages used in the community engagement process, identify the learning and outcomes that emerged from that process, how this information was used to inform the initial Resilient Sydney Strategy, and how everything we learned can be used to influence the engagement process for this next stage of the Strategy development over the next few years.”
From the community member’s point of view, the strategy aims to create both bottom-up and top-down actions with input from community, business and government stakeholders.”
One of the practical outcomes from this process is the Get Prepared app by the Red Cross. People input their own information and create a network of support with three key contacts that they know they can ask for help in an emergency.
It also helps users to make a plan and share that plan with others.
In other words, it enables people to support each other in resilience.
“It’s beyond calling the triple zero; it’s improving community cohesion and engaging the community in the process of being there for each other.”
The work with Beck Dawson’s Resilient Sydney team is about creating a learning history – and to ensure that the strategies and actions are aligned to the organisation’s mission and vision.
Each year, her students also take part in some of the work, and present some of the more innovative ideas to the team.
Over the past few years Christensen’s students have also worked with the NSW state government land development agency Landcom, to investigate how to effectively use “staging land” around new Sydney Metro stations, including for social benefits and biodiversity outcomes.
Work extends offshore as well
Christensen will soon head to Coventry in the UK to help develop a readiness toolkit for councils and organisations to implement resilience thinking in strategy and planning for property and public places.
This builds on her research project that was funded by a Landcom university roundtable grant and involved collaboration with the Hunter and Central Coast Development Corporation and its liaison officer Anna Chubb, and colleagues from the University of Newcastle, Dr Kim Maund and associate professor Thayaparan Gajendran.
This project involved developing an integrated project delivery framework. One that merged the NSW Gateway Process for new Infrastructure projects, with the stages of the design and development process, to ensure early engagement with issues of threat, vulnerability and risk assessment.
Key, says Christensen, is to get these assessments in place from the start of a project, not simply as a kind of check list after the design is completed “as more often happens”.
Unlocking the promise of young minds
Despite these challenges, Dr Christensen is encouraged by the next generation of urban planners and property developers. She believes that young people are more open to the idea of integrating resilience, safety, and security into urban planning and development.
This is particularly true in the commercial office industry in Australia, which she believes is “quite forward-thinking”: spurred on in part by international institutional investment driven by sustainable outcomes.
“The big end of town… the premium buildings, are definitely driven by sustainable outcomes.
“In Australia, that particular sector of the industry does it better than many places in the world. They do a good job and they’ve got some really talented people, really smart, open, critical – in the sense that they’re really willing to self-reflect on their own industry, and how that industry fits into the solutions for the city.”
The UTS Series is part of our plan to develop deeper connection to universities and their evidence-based knowledge, research and skills training that we need to amplify the ESG transition in the built environment. As part of this project The Fifth Estate is currently based at the UTS campus at Ultimo.