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In mid-2024, I was commissioned by the Smart Energy Council in Australia to prepare a desktop study of the state of reuse of solar modules in Australia and internationally.

This was part of a strategy to develop a product stewardship scheme for redundant solar modules. The strategy included the design and implementation of a trial stewardship program. This work was supported by the Queensland Government as the groundwork for a national scheme. The report I prepared was delivered in October 2024, and the trial completed in mid-2025, with reporting from the Smart Energy Council following soon after.

In early January this year, the Federal Government committed to funding a national trial of the proposed scheme. At the time of writing, this has not yet commenced.

As the report had been ultimately commissioned by the Queensland Government, I could not make it available here until they gave the Smart Energy Council permission to make it available on their website. The report sat with the Queensland Government for some time, made slower by the change of Government in late 2024. As of June 2025, the report was still under an embargo. I figured that it would never make the light of day, and stopped looking out for it. Then last week I went for a dive into the Smart Energy Council website, and found that it had been published there. Not sure of the date it appeared, but its great that its now out there. Its a piece of work that I am very proud of.

In the two years since I started work on the report, there is no national scheme yet and solar panel waste is still piling up, but the good news is that positive developments have happened in the space:

A joint statement in September 2025 from 60 organizations calling for a national scheme;

Installation of a commercial-scale solar system using re-used solar panels on a Council facility in Dubbo NSW, through James McGregor and the Blue Tribe Company;

Construction of a small-scale community-owned solar farm in southern NSW, also through James McGregor;

Major improvements in technology for field testing redundant solar panels and certifying for reuse, through Michelle McCann and Prof. Laura Jones of PV Lab at ANU;

Major improvements in material recovery in solar panel material recycling across a number of businesses; and

Advent of a Circular certification system for new solar farms by the Circular PV Alliance and certification of two solar farms: at Bell Bay Solar Farm at Bell Bay Tasmania for Climate Capital; and Stubbo Solar Farm, Dubbo NSW, for ACEN and the Stubbo Solar Project Trust. (Declaration: I carried out the Independent 3rd Party Review for both sites).

I have included the text of the executive summary below and a copy of the full report for downloading. You can also access the report on the Smart Energy Council web site here, along with many other reports of interest in solar panel reuse and recycling.

Solar Module Product Stewardship Reuse Desktop Study

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Background

When I was offered a new position in the School of Architecture at University of Tasmania at Launceston, we moved from Cairns to northern Tasmania and lived there from early 1999 to late 2002 . As part of that role, I commenced my PhD candidature at Murdoch University in Perth.

One of my PhD strategies was to prepare conference papers to help me develop my ideas in real time and to form the basis of one or more chapters in my thesis. This paper, presented at the Ecology-Culture-Community Conference at the University of Queensland in 2001, was my first exploration into the question of sustainability culture. It was also a development of my ideas around system interventions and where I referred to achieving a sustainability culture as a “second nature” - this idea stayed with me and reemerged in the name of this publication some 20+ years later!

I originally submitted two papers for this conference - one on the culture of sustainability; the other a case study of sustainable development in a Western Desert Indigenous Community. Both papers were selected for presenting, but when the program was announced, I only received one slot. I merged both papers into one. I think it worked ok, although I went a bit overtime!

Reflection

Another 25 years on from writing this paper, I am still having enormous difficulty with my lifestyle! We have made two more interstate moves in that time, raised a family and now face getting older and sliding into retirement. We have experienced 12 years living in an inner Melbourne Bayside suburb; carried out energy efficiency renovations; and embraced public transport as a way of life; amongst other sustainability initiatives.

Yet we miss being close to nature, and we are planning what should be our final move to the countryside near Melbourne, where we can fully implement some sustainable living practices which enable us to slow down, grow food, engage with small communities, plant trees and care for country: off-grid if possible, with energy and water independence and zero bills for utilities.

As I say in this paper below: One day, I may just behave consistently with my green beliefs!

Introduction

This paper explores some key issues and questions concerning the cultural gaps between the current lifestyles of our communities and possible cultures of ecological sustainability, beginning with the personal. It also considers how people sustain their behaviours and technologies where they live; further it considers cultural factors which create obstacles to sustainable behaviours; and finally, it explores whether the modern technological cultural paradigm driving most of our development (and its subsequent ecological destruction) is capable of the paradigm shift needed to develop a culture of sustainability.

Questions of Culture

In a previous paper (Parnell 2001), I developed contentions regarding the synergies hidden amongst things that are widely known and studied:

• Culture

• Relationships and Connectedness

• Technology

• Place and Economy

• Learning and Personal Capacity

• The Process of Development

I believe, from my experience in working with people and technology, that these factors, working synergistically, have the potential to foster sustainable development. In the paper referred to above, I outlined some questions that places culture at the heart of the sustainability agenda, and which will be explored further here:

• Do cultural factors help people sustain behaviours and technologies?

• Do cultural factors create obstacles to the adoption of sustainable behaviours?

• Can the Western technological cultural paradigm bring about the cultural change necessary for sustainability, when it has largely been responsible for global unsustainability?

In the literature of the sustainability agenda, there are relatively few references to culture and its significance for sustainability. Perhaps because I am reflecting on cultural issues, I have noticed in recent times that some writers are turning their thoughts toward cultural factors of sustainability. This is an inevitable path foranyone who has been an advocate for ESD, especially in the rational realms ofscience and technology, and who has experienced deep frustration in the slow pace of change.

To illustrate this point, having been an advocate of ESD issues for over 20 years, including writing a book on solar housing (Parnell and Cole 1983), it has been an on-going source of frustration for me that simple technical solutions which would make housing energy efficient, make it more healthy and more comfortable and reduce global warming, are generally not adopted by housing consumers and the housing industry. The increase in the average house size and appliance expectation shows that money is not the problem. It is not ignorance – these ideas have been around for some time, and are regularly featured on numerous television lifestyle programs (usually as a separate lifestyle choice just as picking paint colours, choosing which café to have lunch at, or wearing expensive running shoes are lifestyle choices). It must be something else; I believe it is largely cultural.

While these thoughts arise out of my experience of people with housing issues, I believe that they are indicative of how people develop their attitudes towards environmental issues generally.

Personal Declarations/Personal Culture

Culture is ultimately personal because we absorb so many different cultures as we grow, develop and mature; such a cocktail of cultural milieux tends towards the unique. In my experience working in a cross-cultural environment with an Indigenous NGO in Central Australia, there was an opportunity to observe many cultural worlds colliding. Culture can be so personal that it is difficult for an individual to perceive their own culture if not consciously looked for:

There must be many aspects of my life that represent deep and invisible culture; although experience combined with an open mind tends to bring such material to the surface. For example, my experience with Indigenous people in remote communities has highlighted for me certain cultural baggage that I either wasn’t aware of or was in denial about. (Ignorance, racism, insensitivity, and so on).

Similarly, travelling in Third World countries has a tendency to highlight my status and culture as a rich, white, Western male. At the risk of being confessional, some of my cultures can be described variously as:

• Anglo-Celtic white

• Male

• Sydney northern beaches surfie

• Catholic (lapsed)

• Middle class

• Wealthy

• Post-hippie

• Over-educated Intellectual

• Hearty outdoorsy Tree-hugging, duck-squeezing Tasmanian greenie

• Problem-solving outcomes oriented

• Rugby-mad

• Rough Tough Building Professional (I know everything)

• Frustrated improvising musician and drummer

• Technophiliac

• Technophobic/Neo Luddite

• Materialistic

• Ascetic

It’s a wonder I can get out of bed in the morning as I could probably add many more to the list. As I reflect on the mix of these cultures, I can see that some are quite obvious when they kick-in, and indeed, when doing a building project, the Rough Tough Building Professional (I Know Everything) Culture is more useful than most others. But for the most part, I am not conscious of what might be driving my behaviours at any given time. The making of such lists is an interesting analytical tool, but ultimately of questionable value:

Personal Sustainability

The line of thinking presented in this paper has caused me to attempt to make visible my own cultures and behaviours and examine them in a fresh way. The reasons for dwelling on my personal cultures is to highlight that for all my education and experience, I am having enormous difficulty with my lifestyle: What is it about my life that has made it difficult to live sustainably, even though I am consciously biased towards such notions? And more to the point, if someone who is so favourably disposed is having difficulty in changing behaviours, what does that mean for people who are not similarly disposed, particularly when the movement to sustainability requires behaviour change on a global scale?

These questions have significance from the local through to the global. Yet my personal experience highlights how difficult it is to manifest behaviour change. I have lived the “purist” green existence at several stages of my life, reducing my needs to the barest minimum, and using minimum amounts of energy, the bulk of it being renewable. I have lived with no running water, basic sanitation and a very small ecological footprint, as a cliff-dweller in a depression era hut overlooking the entrance to Sydney Harbour. I hitch-hiked in lieu of a car as often as I could, even while living in a remote valley in the Hunter region of NSW. When I bought a car during this period it was small and energy efficient. I felt very self-satisfied about my choices, my voluntary simplicity and being more thoughtful and environmentally aware than most. Yet I have never thrown myself in front of a bulldozer, or chained myself, Chipko1-style, to a tree.

Life moves, priorities change to meet the demands of work, the drive to gain experience of the way the wider world works, and the needs of relationships and family, with considerations other than the purist. There are also the inevitable maturing views that the purist position is a middle class luxury or a reason to dis-engage with the world; it certainly is not a realistic solution to our ecological crisis.

I feel that I have absorbed much that could be described as green culture, but am yet to make it a solid part of my behaviour.

I live in a thermally inefficient house requiring substantial quantities of electrical energy and biomass to keep it comfortable for eight months of the year. I currently drive a thirty year-old gas-guzzler 20km to work which also pumps out lots of pollution (and until LRP, lots of lead) and greenhouse gases. We also have a van for family use. I live on an idyllic half-hectare block, very much in the landscape, close to lots of native animals and water birds; I am cursed with lots of introduced grass species that needs mowing by a ride-on mower or slashing with a petrol-powered brushcutter. I don’t have time or patience to manage a flock of ungulates, who cannot keep pace with the growth when it really needs cutting. I do not use the convenient, but limited, public transport that will pick up and deliver at the front gate, because of timing and connection issues.

While, as an academic, I am on a good income, I also have a mortgage, and like anyone hovering on the verge of financial over-commitment, I am having trouble sustaining my place and my technology: I can’t afford to maintain essential transport, only the barest minimum servicing to keep the cars moving; when the TV or video breaks down, it stays broken for some time. There are several other broken non-essential appliances and lots of blunt tools that are yet to be fixed. I find that the management of the land is a major drain on time, and contributes to wear and tear on equipment. In three years I have not managed to improve the land, to regenerate the bush, improve bio-diversity, re-introduce bush tucker and reduce the introduced plant species.

The grand plans of making the house energy efficient, and a low producer of greenhouse gas, have been put on hold indefinitely; so too the solar hot water system, the greywater recycling and the rainwater collection. Even the technological fix, while straightforward in conception, is not possible at this time.

The main outcome of this situation has been that I have been engaged in a very deep relationship with my piece of country while meditating on these themes astride the ride-on or while swinging the brushcutter. Most of my thinking that informs this paper is a summary of insights that have arisen during these times. In my most positive outlook on this situation, I feel that while I have not done much to further my personal ecological sustainability outcomes, I am nevertheless connecting with my place, feeling the ecological cycles, watching the tides in the Tamar river as they expose the muddy banks, rejoicing at the snow on Mt Barrow, feeling the space and the depth of the rolling hills in the distance and celebrating the afternoon light, the fog and the rainbows. This is part of my cultural change, and indicative of my personal capacity and current sustainability.

I believe this issue is central to ecological sustainability: behavioural and cultural change, at the personal level, where we live. One day I may just behave consistently with my green beliefs.

The Trajectory of History

In spite of my personal situation alluded to above, I have always believed that people, societies and cultures can change for the better: the improvement in human rights, equality for women, social justice, reduction in poverty and conflict in recent decades in some parts of the world is testament to that.

While meditating in uneven circular patterns during many mowing sessions, a theme occurring consistently is how personal sustainability is linked to the global sustainability prospect. There seems to be a series of intersecting domains that go way beyond our daily life in our local communities, dwarfing our aspirations. However, I have found a number of points of view that have helped me appreciate the trajectory of history, and the implications such a trajectory has for the sustainability movement in a globalised world:

• Clive Ponting has elaborated at length on the connections between cultural and technological development and the collapse of many societies through history as a result of environmental overshoot and collapse. (Ponting 1993)

• Jared Diamond approaches history from a different perspective: geography and environment are the prime drivers of cultural and technological sophistication, and that many things we take for granted as “natural” are the result of sustained co-evolution of humanity and environment over long time frames. Further, very few technological improvements have been made independently: most are appropriated from somewhere else. Cultures that have flourished have been ones that have a tendency to adopt innovative technologies, to the extent that they often absorb neighbouring cultures. (Diamond 1998)

• Frank Wilson demonstrates compellingly that, in an evolutionary sense, what we as humans are today, particularly in terms of brain structure and function is as a result of co-evolution of the hand with tool usage: that is, we are inherently technological beings.(Wilson 1999)

• Stewart Brand elaborates on the concept of deep time and the long view as a counterpoint to short-term thinking, and proposes that human development is intimately linked with time cycles that range from the immediate and fashionable to others that allow for long term cultural change. (Brand 1999)

• O.B.Harbison Jr , reviewing the relationship of culture to technology, has identified that technology, and communication technology in particular, is intimately connected to human cultural development in a movement that is, in the long view, continuous. (Harbison 1989)

These writers, taken collectively, may perhaps indicate that there is a trajectory of history, which has had its own unknown, unconscious power which will be theonly long term sustainability; as to whether this sustained power results inecological sustainability in the short, medium or long terms, while a compelling and necessary aspiration, is anybody’s guess.

The conclusions I reach on reflecting on these combined viewpoints is uncomfortable for me, and goes counter to my usually desperate sense of optimism.

This trajectory of history could conceivably go in opposite directions: a positive one where technological innovation for sustainability is possible and successful (the technical fix approach); and where cultural change is possible, with successful cultures being the one’s who adapt their behaviours (using the power of the trajectory) to stave off ecological collapse. The negative outcome is that theworld overshoots and its ecological systems collapse at a rate faster than local and global cultures can respond.

Culture, Behaviour and Lifestyle

While some of us are in denial, the issues of the environment are covered and discussed widely in the media, on the Internet, in triple-bottom-line corporate reporting; and not just in the developed world. Environmental education in schools has been occurring for some time now; whether people agree with the full prognosis of impending ecological catastrophe and the worst-case scenarios does not alter the fact that most are aware of the situation and have some kind of viewpoint on the matter.

And, still, the changes to behaviour and cultural absorption of those changes lags, to the extent that most ecologically positive changes tend to be small, unconnected, of a “boutique” or enthusiast nature, and small change compared to the rampant, headlong development still occurring here, in North America and particularly in Asian countries, such as China.

Ecological ideas may spring from a base of ecological culture, but more often via a pragmatic or cynical hedging of bets on the future, and the potential profits, political or economic, that may arise. This is the culture of self-interest and domination, not ecological sustainability.

The key to understanding the change of behaviour lies in the understanding of how people sustain their behaviours over long periods of time: that is, their life as lived, whether by conscious choice or not. People may be influenced by fashion in short cycles. Occasionally this benefits environmental issues – there have been at least three cycles of ecological fashion since the early seventies that I have experienced.

Most people, including myself, tend to be habitual beings. Life is too complex to think about what one does and its ecological effects. Yet most of us find our own level of life, with ups and downs. We don’t cope well with change, risk or lack of security. We keep doing our thing, and maybe only change over long spans of years. Finding our own level of sustainability (ecological or not) is largely an unconscious process. Raising the energy to sustain a higher order of conscious activity is a difficult task for all.

This is where the cultural aspect is important: I think culture and behaviour interact in a systemic way. Some conscious behaviours by individuals or groups are acted out at key leverage points in systems, and can have a wider effect: change of policy, legislation, improvement of service delivery, facilitation of environmentally positive behaviour by wider groups of people. These kinds of interventions in the system can change culture, making it easier for people to raise the energy of their behaviour and improve their overall lifestyle with little conscious effort:

The overall capacity of communities to sustain, in terms of personal and group effort, any form of systematic, self-organising behaviour is a prerequisite for sustaining ecology; but no guarantee of the desired outcome.

There are many prescriptions for making things different, from Naess’ humble request for us to develop our personal ecosophies (Naess, 2000), Karl-Henrik Robert’s Natural Step2 process to Government pamphlets advising us politely: all part of the cultural change, but perhaps too distant from most people. There are also uncounted checklists of “how to save the planet”, which are worthy, entertaining and diverting, and useful for those consciously embarking on cultural change, but which usually don’t amount to much.

Case Study: Housing in a Western Desert Community

Further to the question of how people sustain behaviours is the question of how people sustain the technologies that support settlement and placemaking. Answers to both questions are crucial for ecologically sustainable development.

Since 1995, I have participated in housing and infrastructure development in a remote indigenous community in the Western Desert region of Central Australia. This experience has identified for me the problems implicit in the relationship of technology and local culture in small communities. People in such communities have, for the most part, not been participants in the process of technology selection and implementation, while being responsible for sustaining such technologies. Many of the technologies transferred to communities have not considered local cultures and their ways of living. Such technologies fail regularly and have proved very difficult to sustain.

Note that I make no claims to be speaking on behalf of the people of the Western Desert. The identity and location of the community is not stated to protect their privacy.

Local Cultural Practice and Housing Usage

The concept of a western-style town plan and its associated housing and infrastructure sits oddly with local needs and behaviours. There is an aspect of equity (albeit from a shallow interpretation) driving the process, such that western-style housing is built within a town plan unmindful of living preferences and practices which are acted out. Local people are exposed to images of western-style housing through the housing provided to community staff, on trips to Alice Springs, on satellite TV and videos. This contributes to a local housing aspiration, building up pictures of what constitutes “housing”, without consideration of the differences in lifestyles between mainstream and remote indigenous communities.

Houses are a focal point of the family camp, often merely serving as a cupboard and ablution facility, and mainly providing shelter during rainy periods, cold weather and dust storms. Much of the living occurs outside the enclosed area. Living practices which are at odds with housing design includes: preference for spending most time in shaded and protected outdoor living areas and yard spaces; overcrowding of houses caused by fluctuating numbers of occupants/users (depending on who is visiting, whether a particular house is the centre for extended family business, or the need to provide temporary security for people from elsewhere in the community); insufficient toilet and ablution facilities; inadequate laundry facilities; lack of safe, secure and healthy food and personal storage space; insufficient (and even non-existent) food preparation areas; traditional bush tucker preparation and cooking on open fires ( considerable robust bench space is needed to effectively cut up a kangaroo). Conventional housing also provides obstacles to the ability to keep a clear view of people coming or going, and thus makes it more difficult for occupants to maintain control of access to their living space and yard areas. Another area to consider is the accelerated wear and tear caused by social problems within the community, where hardware and building fabric become the safety valves/focal points for anger, frustration and anti-social behaviour brought about by family breakdown, petrol sniffing and alcohol abuse (whenever brought in to what is an otherwise “dry” community). Further, the lack of activities and programs to reduce boredom for children has a flow-on effect in creating behaviours contributing to damage of such items as glazing in solar water heater collectors.

The result of the combination of housing aspirations with acted behaviours is that the majority of housing in this community struggles to provide suitable support for local lifestyles. Things wear out and break down quickly.

Obstacles To Maintenance

Given such local conditions and behaviours as described above, maintaining houses in a minimal functioning condition is a constant challenge for this community. For the life of this community there has been a chronic shortfall in available funding. Most funded housing programs are for capital works only, and handed over to community responsibility on completion. The community is required to collect rents to pay for maintenance, but even if the full amount of rent is collected for each house in a given year, the cost of maintenance exceeds it. Collecting rent is problematic: people have been reluctant to pay rent on houses which have not been maintained, creating a vicious circle leading to, in some cases, total failure to maintain healthy living.

Towards Sustainability Culture

This experience in adopting Western technologies to meet the needs of an indigenous culture has great lessons for the global sustainability agenda. Implicit in these technology transfer processes is the transfer of superior technology under the mastery of the transferring culture. In terms of the sustainable development agenda, the existence of global environmental problems, caused by modern technological development, demonstrate that we have not achieved the mastery implicit in the technology transfer process. We fool ourselves about our technological mastery.

If possible, feedback to the mainstream of the remote community experience is a kind of “reverse technology transfer” that may help the wider world understand its relationship to technology and its embedded culture, and thus may help to foster development of technologies closer to the aspirations and world view of local cultures, bringing sustainability closer.

This experience has dramatically altered my personal world-view, and has been instrumental in helping to frame the issues investigated in this paper.

This seems a negative, but realistic, point of view if we pay attention to the trajectories of history: whatever it is we try to do to change culture, the outcome may not be what we envisaged.Given the uniqueness of the current global situation with respect to globalised economies, global megatechnologies, unprecedented population and the pace of material development, it is difficult to say whether the trajectory of history described above would still apply. Without the benefit of a crystal ball, we must assume that the development of a culture of sustainability must come from within this trajectory, otherwise we would be in a difficult struggle against our deep, hidden and environmentally co-evolved tendencies.

There are many obstacles that prevent change from happening, and these are well articulated by McKenzie-Mohr among others:

On reflection, it seems to me that the following are the major obstacles to developing a sustainability culture:

• the energy input needed to raise the collective level of unconscious behaviour, especially against the trends of desire and consumption, and our co- evolutionary tendencies.

• finding appropriate points of leverage for intervening in systems, and then having the time, energy and capacity to direct efforts at these points.

• sufficient time for systemic feedback to demonstrate that energy levels and leverage is working.

How can sustainable behaviour be fostered in a way to get over these obstacles? Social entrepreneurs are at work everywhere, in communities, organisations, institutions, corporations and governments. They are talking it up, designing programs and technologies, promoting, educating and politicking. They are developing processes such as Community Based Social Marketing (CBSM) (McKenzie-Mohr 2001) and Robert Chamber’s Participation-Reflection-Action (PRA)3 and others to build capacity and foster sustainable behaviour.

All these outputs of individuals and small groups cannot be measured in a broad cultural sense, although specific actions that lead to ecological improvements can be measured.

So, given these obstacles, all the energy-raising and leverage, the contested meanings of sustainability and its over-use as jargon, what would sustainability culture be like?

Sustainability culture, in maturity, must feel as comfortable and unregarded as our current personal cultures, a “second nature”.

References

Adams, Douglas Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Pan, London 1980

Brand, Stewart The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility Phoenix, London 1999

Diamond, Jared Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years, Vintage Books, London 1998

Harbison, O.B. jr Disappearing Through The Skylight: Culture and Technology in the 20th Century, Penguin Books, New York 1989

Ponting, Clive A Green History of The World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilisations, Penguin Books, New York 1993

Lewis, Martin Green Delusions: An Environmentalist Critique of Radical Environmentalism, Duke University Press, Durham and London 1992

Naess, Arne Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Reprinted 2000

Parnell, Matthew, Hidden Synergies: The Way To Sustainable Community Is Not Clear - It Is Hidden Among Things We Already Know, Community Technology 2001, Murdoch University, Perth 2001

Parnell, Matthew and Cole, Gareth Australian Solar Houses, Second Back Row Press, Katoomba NSW 1983

Register, Richard Failure to Change Culture Explained! Culture Change Magazine, culturechange.org/issue19/failure.htm

Wilson, Frank R. The Hand: How Its Use Shapes The Brain, Language, And Human Culture, Vintage Books, New York 1999

McKenzie-Mohr, Doug Quick Reference: Community-Based Social Marketing, www.cbsm.com 2002

Background

I prepared this paper in 2005 while working with Coffs Harbour City Council on a project under the manager of the Sustainability Unit, Garry Hankinson. This project was part of my PhD research - an action research case study - and contributed to one of my Case Study chapters.

The paper represented the completion of the first stage of work in a project scoping creating and embedding a culture of sustainability within the Council organisation. It was prepared for the 2nd State of Australian Cities Conference at Griffith University, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, in November/December 2005. The paper was accepted for presentation and inclusion in the conference proceedings.

However, attendance at the conference was essential for the paper to be included in the conference proceedings. When preparing the paper, I was told that the Council was happy for us to present about the project and that they would pay for our conference registration fees, but at the last minute they decided not to fund it. As a result, Garry and I could not go, so the paper was not presented nor published.

I had submitted it with Garry as lead author, although he did not contribute to writing; this was in recognition of his role in spending many hours with me discussing ideas, strategies and methods for sustainability transformation.

As permission to present had been given by Council regarding the content, I feel that its appropriate to publish the work here some 18 years later. Any of you working in change and transformation might find this case study informative.

Reflection

I spent a number of stints working with CHCC on the sustainability culture project between 2005 and 2010. The reason for the stints was that it was a volatile period for local government and CHCC in particular, largely to do with the Global Financial Crisis and changes of State Government; the latter involved many program and funding changes, with sustainability programs negatively impacted the most. Many sustainability and environmental staff lost their jobs in this period, and remaining staff experienced three major organisational reviews and re-structuring in the period of my involvement. I know that another disruptive period occurred in the 2016-2016 period, also affecting sustainability and environmental programs.

Since we prepared this paper, I have lost touch with people at Coffs Harbour City Council, as I have been living in Melbourne; occasionally I get dispatches and news about events there. While there have been many ups and downs, there is still evidence that sustainability culture persists. For example, more recently, the Council procured a state of the art green building to house community spaces, library and Council offices. In another example, the “Our Living Coast” program, which was established about 16 years ago, still persists - I just received the latest email newsletter today! So this is good news.

Please cite this paper as: Hankinson, G. & Parnell, M. (2005). Sustainability at the local level: Pursuing cultural change in Coffs Harbour City Council. Paper prepared for the 2nd State of Australian Cities Conference at Griffith University, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, in November/December 2005 [Unpublished manuscript].

Keywords

Sustainable Development, Local Government, Cultural Change

Abstract

Coffs Harbour City Council has been nationally and internationally recognised for its leadership in promoting sustainable development and creating a liveable community. It was the second local government in Australia (after Melbourne City Council) to institute Triple Bottom Line (TBL) reporting and decision-making. The awards and TBL processes are indicative of how the Council and the broader Coffs Coast community value the local environment, and of widespread support to preserve, protect and restore it.

In recent times, however, there is evidence that the process towards sustainability is losing momentum and that Council’s focus is more towards infrastructure and kerb-and-gutter issues. Current promotion of sustainable development and innovation by Council is less pronounced than in the past, as evidenced by there being no reference to sustainable development in the current Draft Management Plan 2005-2008. Further, there have been significant problems in bedding down the TBL process in both reporting and decision-making.

Recent commissioned research showed that in Council operations and processes requiring a Sustainability Assessment using Council’s TBL tool, only 62% of reports included such assessments. Research conclusions indicate that there is a gap between goodwill of Council staff regarding sustainability and the extension of that good will towards required sustainability processes and outcomes. In addition to concern about the bureaucratic processes beingonerous, there was also concern that the process was not being fully supported by management. Overall, there is a sense that the culture of sustainability is not deeply enough embedded in the organization to ensure that Council actions are commensurate with its public face as a leader in sustainable development.

This paper describes a new action research project within the Council’s Sustainability Unit aimed at strengthening the sustainability culture within Council. It reviews key thinking about social and cultural change, learning within organizations and methods for applying these ideas in the sustainability domain. This paper reports on progress to date, and draws interim conclusions about the process of developing sustainability culture.

The project aims to map and analyse the birth and development of sustainability culture over the last ten years; to use that analysis to identify emergent strengths and weaknesses; and to develop a change management process to provide a renewed impetus to strengthening the sustainability culture. A variety of methodologies will be used to explore the fundamental questions about how people in organizations with a responsibility to foster sustainable development internalise behavioural and cultural change.

The project commenced in February 2005, and will complete by the end of 2006.

Introduction

Coffs Harbour City Council (CHCC) has been nationally and internationally recognised for its leadership in promoting sustainable development and creating a liveable community. It has been recognised as a sustainable city through Banksia awards. It was recognised in 2003 as the world’s most livable city (under 70,000) by the Nations in Bloom awards, with particular commendation for its environmental performance, and was followed up by recognition as the best enhanced environment (although not maintaining world’s most livable status)

CHCC has also progressed through the levels of the Cities for Climate Protection Program, having entered the CCP Plus program in 2004. The Cities for Climate Protection program is an initiative of the Australian and New Zealand Branch of the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI).

It was the second local government in Australia (after Melbourne City Council) to institute Triple Bottom Line (TBL) reporting and decision-making.

The awards and TBL processes are indicative of how CHCC and the broader Coffs Coast community value the local environment, and of widespread support to preserve, protect and restore it. This performance to date has set a high standard for future city expectations.

In recent times, however, there is a perception that the process towards sustainability is losing momentum and that Council’s focus is more towards infrastructure and kerb-and-gutter issues. While CHCC has made sustainability- positive decisions about management and process, won sustainability awards, and is held up as an example of best practice, there are questions as to how deep the principles of sustainability have penetrated the organisational framework and its dynamic operations: that is, questions about the depth of a sustainability culture.

Current promotion of sustainable development and innovation by Council appears less pronounced than in the past, as evidenced by there being no up-front statement in the current Draft Management Plan identifying sustainable development as a core value, as was the case in previous Management Plans (Draft Management Plan 2005/2008, 2005).

Further, there have been significant problems in bedding down the TBL process in both reporting and decision-making. Recent research (International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives: Review of Sustainability Assessments for Council Reports, 2003) showed that in Council operations and processes requiring a Sustainability Assessment using Council’s TBL tool, only 62% of reports included such assessments. Research conclusions indicate that there is a gap between goodwill of Council staff regarding sustainability and the extension of that good will towards required sustainability processes and outcomes. In addition to concern about the bureaucratic processes being onerous, there was also concern that the process was not being fully supported by management. The research generally concluded that to many staff, there is a sense that the culture of sustainability is not deeply enough embedded in the organization to ensure that Council actions are commensurate with its public face as a leader in sustainable development.

This paper describes a new action research project within the Council’s Sustainability Unit aimed at strengthening the sustainability culture within Council: The Sustainability Culture Project. It reviews key thinking about social and cultural change, learning within organizations and methods for applying these ideas in the sustainability domain. This paper reports on progress to date, outlines future actions and draws interim conclusions about the process of developing sustainability culture.

Vision 2020: Beginning of Sustainability Culture

The beginnings of sustainability culture are generally agreed by long-term CHCC staff to have developed out of the Vision 2020 process (Vision 2020: Developing a Strategic Plan for Coffs Harbour City Local Government Area, 1993). Vision 2020 was a Council project during 1992-93 with the objective to develop a long-term vision for the city. It has not used the term sustainable development, although many aspects of what would be in a sustainability plan have been covered. There was extensive community consultation via community workshops during May and June 1993. Environmental issues were strongly represented as an indication of widespread community feeling about the need to protect and restore the local environment.

As an effective starting point, the Vision 2020 process has been a qualified success, and some years progressed before significant change developed. Many of the principles and proposed strategies have been followed through since 1993, and a brief analysis of the document shows positive progress against the many principles and performance benchmarks. It did, however, take a few years and a substantially new elected Council for change to occur.

There was also a call for a review to be carried out within 3-5 years, backed up by later documents such as the Coffs Harbour State of the Environment Report 2000 (Carter, 2000) which refer to a 1995 Review. No such document could be located, and thus appears to have never happened (Hankinson, 2005b).

In conclusion, Vision 2020 was an important vehicle for harnessing community opinion about future development of the Council area and a way of strongly linking environmental issues to such development. References to Vision 2020 are made in some of the reviewed documents, but not all: it is like a conscience that appears from time-to-time, informing Council processes and decisions, and not always explicit. Over ten years later it still retains some power to underpin sustainability principles, and its reference in the Our Living City documents (for the current sustainable settlements process) is testament to its on-going after-effects (Our Living City: Discussion Paper: A Settlement Strategy for Coffs City to 2030, 2005). Since 2005 is short of the halfway point to 2020, the nascent sustainability values expressed in Vision 2020 are still likely to be respected as current vision until an updated community-based visioning process occurs.

The Triple Bottom Line Process: Developing Sustainability Culture

Introduction to the TBL Framework and Process

A Triple Bottom Line Framework and Process was introduced to improve Council’s economic, social and environmental performance and to drive cultural change (International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives: Review of Sustainability Assessments for Council Reports, 2003 p.2); it achieves this by involving “all levels of Council (from Councillors to officers)”. This is the main vehicle for individual staff members to interface with and assess sustainability issues in relation to specific projects and activities.

The development of the TBL reporting process in CHCC occurred as a truly emergent process, with no specific driver other than that growing out of the relationship with ICLEI and store of goodwill within the Council. It is also clear that, in spite of the long hiatus, the Vision 2020 process clearly influenced the development of the TBL Process.

The TBL Framework includes two mechanisms: The Sustainability Assessment (SA), which is a new section added to CHCC reporting proformas; and the TBL Tool, a checklist of economic, social and environmental factors. Sustainability Assessments are the main mechanism that CHCC is using to assure TBL Reporting and Decision-making. All CHCC reports require a Sustainability Assessment, but only ones recommending action require the use of the TBL Tool, although its use as a checklist is encouraged at any time.

The TBL Tool is currently a web-based document (from February, 2003), originally appearing in print form in October, 2002 (International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives: Review of Sustainability Assessments for Council Reports, 2003 p.1). It is tabular in format and requires staff to work though Key Sustainability Aims encompassing nine environmental factors, six social factors and seven economic factors. A series of questions are asked for each factor, accompanied by prompts to refer to relevant documents and people within CHCC who may be able to help.

The TBL Framework is a bottom-up approach, which causes many individual staff to assess their activities in accordance with sustainability principles. It means that there is a need for staff to be acquainted with sustainability principles,as they apply to their work areas. Interactivity of this kind on a daily basis is potentially the key advantage of the TBL Framework in terms of driving cultural change. The question is whether the TBL Framework actually works this way in practice; so in order to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses in the use of the TBL Framework, it was reviewed, both internally and externally.

Triple Bottom Line Reviews

The first Review investigated the status of TBL Decision-making. It states that “results were generally very disappointing.” (Executive Summary of Internal Audit Report Card: Triple Bottom Line Decision Making: The Report Card, 2003). While on face value it appears that this implies a cultural problem, from this summary, this cannot be concluded; it could very well be a bureaucratic issue.

The second Review focussed on application of SAs, and not the process against the broad aims of the SA process (International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives: Review of Sustainability Assessments for Council Reports, 2003 p.2). The Review did not assess the transparency of decision-making, the enablement of informed decision-making, or the process of cultural change. It offers an insight into Council efforts to institute actions aimed at increasing sustainability. While the SA/TBL process is clear and relatively easy to use (notwithstanding some comments by users), and while some resistance to use SA derives from anti-bureaucratic attitudes, the gaps in individuals perceptions and performance are largely cultural, in spite of the fact that some of those surveyed indicated that they believed that the SAs had contributed to cultural change.It should be noted that the purpose of the Review was not to assess cultural change. Identification of cultural gaps was a default situation.

The major cultural issue to emerge from the ICLEI Review is the perception that middle and upper management are not supportive of the process and are not using SAs in decision-making, with the implication that many CHCC staff perhaps see themselves as being sustainability supporters stymied by an unsympathetic management and bureaucracy.

Since May 2003, CHCC staff are more experienced in doing SAs. However, anecdotally, there still is an extant sense that the TBL process needs some further development, towards simplification (Hankinson, 2005a).

The third Review is a brief document representing the Sustainability Accounting Committee’s (SAC) response to the ICLEI Review (Review of Sustainability Assessments for Council Reports: Sustainability Accounting Committee Meeting, 6 August 2003, 2003). It ratifies the ICLEI Review, and makes no argument with its findings.

The fourth Review (Nicolson, 2004) follows on from the May 2003 ICLEI Review, investigating the issues raised after another year’s experience with the TBL Framework. The main findings are summarised:

• 95% of staff interviewed demonstrated an understanding of sustainability (Nicolson, 2004 p.20)

• The Sustainability Unit is subject to substantial criticism from some staff

• The personal and subjective approach to preparation of Sustainability Assessments (SAs) appears to have backfired, by reducing the effectiveness of the TBL Framework for decision-making

• Resentment of the bureaucratic nature of the TBL tool is eroding sustainability culture

In both the ICLEI and Nicolson reviews, the fact that many staff do not use the electronic versions of the TBL Tool is seen as a major negative in terms of cultural change and for tracking the use of the tool (International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives: Review of Sustainability Assessments for Council Reports, 2003 p.6; Nicolson, 2004 p.16) Both reviews report that many staff are using the hard copy version of the TBL Tool as a resource in many areas outside of the required areas of application. While staff have complained about compulsory use of the tool, many staff have commented how valuable it is as a general checklist. This informal use of the TBL Tool should be viewed as a major achievement in terms of cultural change, and indicates that resistance to use of the TBL Tool may be indicative of an anti-bureaucratic culture than an anti-sustainability one, where staff are actually resisting the current bureaucratic, coercive nature of the Framework, not its intent.

The Nicolson Review identified some aspects of an anti-innovation culture with some staff and managers (Nicolson, 2004 p.24) that is causing resistance to sustainability. This may be connected to professional respect issues and people within the organization being pushed too hard. There is an element of resistance to environmental issues being generated in opposition to the efforts of the sustainability champions within the organization.

It can be concluded from these reviews that the philosophy and intent of the TBL Framework and Process represents a major leap in the development of a sustainability culture within CHCC, but it needs a major re-working to make it more user friendly and to facilitate decision-making.

The Sustainability Culture Project: Strengthening the Culture

Overview

This paper describes progress in the early stage of a new action research project within the CHCC Sustainability Unit aimed at strengthening the sustainability culture within CHCC: The Sustainability Culture Project. The project reviews the development of sustainability culture since late 1993 and maps significant milestones achieved over this time; emergent strengths and weaknesses are analysed and gaps between vision and action are identified, especially in areas where Council promotes its achievements to the community.

The Sustainability Culture Project frames a response to the current state of play of sustainability within CHCC (as evidenced by the TBL Reviews) by developing a change management process to provide a renewed impetus to strengthening the sustainability culture. A variety of methodologies will be used to explore the fundamental questions about how people in organizations with a responsibility to foster sustainable development internalise behavioural and cultural change. The project will investigate key thinking about social and cultural change, and learning within organizations.

Several drivers for change influenced the development of The Sustainability Culture Project:

• Calls over several years for Council to develop a sustainability driver document

• The implementation and evaluation of Councils TBL reporting and decision-making process

• An interest within Council’s Sustainability Unit to validate two reports reviewing Council’s TBL process (International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives: Review of Sustainability Assessments for Council Reports, 2003; Nicolson, 2004)

• An identified need to develop community-based sustainability indicators (Deville & Hankinson, 2004)

• A proposal by one of the co-author’s to investigate the sustainability culture within Council as an action research case study for a PhD program in sustainable development with the Institute of Sustainability and Technology Policy at Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia.

Practical methods for applying these ideas in the sustainability domain will be identified, and a methodology for a change process will be proposed. This will be described later in this paper.

Links to PhD Research

The PhD research project referred to broadly investigates the interrelationship of technology, culture and learning and its significance for the emergence of a culture of sustainability. The investigation of the emergence and development of sustainability culture within CHCC is consistent with the theoretical basis of the research and thus The Sustainability Culture Project is an ideal case study.

As a consequence to the PhD proposal, from late January 2005, the PhD researcher has entered into a formal partnership arrangement with CHCC where, in addition to the author’s research outcomes, outcomes useful for Council are delivered. The main outcome for CHCC is the placement in service of a professional for up to two days per week for almost two years at no salary cost, courtesy of a Murdoch University Research Studentship (MURS). Other outcomes are open at this stage, but potentially include:

• Reports and evaluations on relevant issues, including a final case study report

• Information sourced from academic networks reflecting current theoretical and practical knowledge in cultural change for sustainable development

• An opportunity for on-going focussed dialogue with an external researcher

• A greater understanding within CHCC of the strengths and weaknesses of its sustainability culture

• Improved capacity of CHCC to draw on its internal sustainability culture to

• Respond to its duties and challenges in fostering a sustainable community

Stage 1: Mapping Sustainability Culture

Introduction

Stage 1 commenced in February, 2005 and was completed in June 2005. In Stage 1, the process entailed the mapping the development of a sustainability culture within Coffs Harbour City Council, by reviewing a range of Council documents with bearing on Council’s sustainability performance (Parnell, 2005).

The methodology of this stage of the research project took a “coarse graining” rather than a “forensic” approach to gain a global sense of the development of sustainability culture. Within the timeframe, there were very practical limits to what can be achieved, and as a result the Brief did not allow for surveying of staff in Stage 1: this would be carried out in Stage 2. Staff surveys had been carriedout in previous evaluations, and it was considered prudent not to carry out another staff survey without a clear sense of its purpose.

The concept of a “marker” was used to highlight significant events or factors in the ebb and flow of sustainability issues, particularly if indicative of an underlying cultural change. In the mapping phase, only key, mainly public domain, documents were reviewed and the following markers of sustainability culture were sought out:

• Inclusion: explicit and implicit mentions of sustainability, with emphasis on strategies and commitments as markers of sustainability culture

• Language: the way sustainability is included and discussed

• Depth: are sustainability issues covered in depth? What hasn’t been included?

• Frequency: how often are sustainability issues included in documents

• Priority: how important were specific sustainability issues and processes?

• Budget: were funds allocated to support sustainability inclusions?

• Action: did the sustainability action occur? What were the gaps and omissions?

Documents Accessed

Documents were accessed in three ways:

• An initial package of documents compiled by the Sustainability Unit

• Documents accessed from CHCC web pages

• Documents identified through reference in previously accessed documents

It should be noted that the methodology for this stage had limits affecting outcomes:

• There may be relevant documents that were not readily or publicly available or widely circulated in CHCC.

• It may not be possible to assess if all sustainability-specific strategies were funded, implemented and completed.

• There was little scope to interview staff with corporate memory to determine the real stories behind the final documents.

• There was not enough time to go through Council Meeting and Planning Committee Meeting minutes to assess how the sustainability culture has developed within detailed decision-making - this may still be done during Stage 2.

• Finally, the researcher’s role, while based on action research and a participatory approach, has no delegated authority to obtain sensitive documents. Outcomes were based on goodwill amongst staff towards the research.The proposal for Stage 2 of the Sustainability Culture Project is covered later in this paper.

Analysis of Sustainability Markers

Twenty-five documents dating from 1993 to the present were reviewed. An analysis of each document was included in The Sustainability Culture Project at Coffs Harbour City Council: Stage 1 Report (Parnell, 2005). The analysis identified where there was a strengthening and weakening trend respectively. Significant markers of the state of sustainability culture are summarised in the following table:

These markers indicate that nothing can be taken for granted in the dynamic process of developing a sustainability culture. The business of running a Council organization combined with the responsibilities of environmental stewardship involves interaction of nested hierarchies of complex, dynamic socio-technical systems with natural systems. As with natural systems, there are periods of growth and decline, shocks and changes. Resilient systems respond to change with system integrity.

The story told through the CHCC documentation is one of changing, growing, resilient systems. There have been moments of great achievement in sustainability culture, and other less certain times, but the general trajectory is towards stronger culture. There are signs of deeper change emerging, even if the language to articulate it is not used. There is evidence of struggle between two paradigms of thinking: reductionist/bureaucratic versus holistic/innovative.

Sustainability within the organization needs to show resilience to cope with political change, change of personnel, loss of champions and periodic downturns of interest. This appears to be the state of play within CHCC at present.

Stage 2: Proposal for Strengthening Sustainability Culture

Introduction

Having identified the significant markers of change over the last ten years or so, it is important to build on past processes to bring cultural change into the daily life of CHCC. With limited amounts of time, energy and people to allocate to the change process, actions must be directed at key leverage points to maximise productivity. Therefore, in setting out to foster change towards sustainability in CHCC, it serves to have a sense of how change happens to help shape the range of possible actions.

Themes in Cultural Change

Sustainability and Change

Much thinking about sustainability incorporates a mind-set that assumes that sustainability, when “achieved”, will be a state of static equilibrium. This is not likely to happen because human systems do not work like that. Aiming for a non-changing system is self-defeating because the energy in the system will break out elsewhere in spite of barriers and restraints. Static systems are also not resilient and have less capacity to cope with sudden external changes (Gunderson & Holling, 2002).

Sustainability is about change: creating change and adapting to change as part of a complex, dynamic system at the meeting of the social and natural world.

Complexity theorists identify states of dynamic equilibrium, where change and stability exist in constant movement (Cohen & Stewart, 1994). In dealing with the type of change needed to bring about sustainability, a way of thinking is needed that is flexible and resilient and in constant movement.

Change – the big picture

There are some broad ways of viewing change:

• change brought about by heroic individuals (or champions) reacting to specific key conditions and events

• change through social movements

• change as a conscious, planned process proactively driven by social and cultural leaders

• change as an emergent quality of complex, dynamic human systems

The first describes change that appears out of nowhere, often unplanned: it is a reactive approach that relies on considerable foundation efforts from others, and yet it often appears that the heroes are acting alone (Sztompka, 1993). We have a deep cultural belief that certain individuals champion the changes shaping society, and this tends to govern our approach to thinking about change. We focus on individuals doing specific things: we believe that the right actions, the right knowledge, by the right people at the right time will effect the desired change. If change doesn’t occur as desired, then we are likely to blame individuals within the system. It is not an approach to plan for. However, if enough heroes emerge at key places in the midst of a planned process, then they can provide substantial momentum. However, when the heroes fail to bring about change, they are just merely rugged individualists.

The second, change by social movement, occurs when ideas about change become internalised by social groups and gain focus and momentum to bring about the agreed changes (Sztompka, 1993). The movement to sustainability has much in common with the idea of social movement.

The third is the approach of politicians, business leaders and change agents who have an objective and go about seeking it. Such change usually occurs in organizational and governance contexts where the change agents have the backing of the organization and requisite authority to act. In this approach, cultural change is driven by behaviourist thinking heavily dependent on rewards and punishments: sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

The fourth is what mostly happens over time in most human contexts. Human systems have a habit of defying straight-line causal thinking. Change emerges as a new pattern of behaviour and understanding from the complex field of knowledge, values, attitudes, behaviours, agents, characters, relationships and events. It is often as a result of intersecting systems (Gunderson & Holling, 2002). It is a process of diffusion and transformation (AtKisson, 1999; Rogers, 1995). When change emerges, it is often different from that envisaged.

Domains and Cycles of Change

Change also occurs in different scales, domains and time-cycles: long, slow, cycles of nature and human culture; shorter, faster cycles of governance and infrastructure; short, fast cycles of commerce, innovation and fashion (Brand,1999; Sztompka, 1993). It is important to appreciate these cycles: change that is driven by cycles of fashion gives the illusion of cultural change; but once the fashion has moved on, there may be no real change remaining. Unfortunately, this has occurred frequently in the development of sustainability thinking over the last 25 years.

It is also important to distinguish deep, shared cultures behind whole social systems from the smaller cultures (operating on the fashion cycle) pervading smaller scale domains of human activity, such as organizations, clubs, political parties, communities, communities of practice, tribes (traditional and post-modern) and subcultures.

In looking at cultural change within an organization such as Coffs Harbour City Council, the cycles perspective as described above must be kept in mind. Proposed activities are part of a process that has been going on in one form or another for over ten years, and will continue far beyond the scope of TheSustainability Culture Project. Any activities must be carried out with the aim of contributing to deep change while being philosophical about the short-term variations such as described in the mapping process described earlier.

There will inevitably be changes in the project context (and indeed some changes have already occurred since this project started): elected representatives, staff (voluntarily or not), community attitudes, economic conditions, new priorities, new laws, fuel price increases and so on.

Change Processes

When considered in terms of change of organisational culture, there are a number of approaches that could be applied:

• changing structure: relocate sustainability actions and oversight at the heartof the organization.(Proposed Relocation of the Sustainability Program, 2003)

• changing policy: making pro-sustainability decisions – often dependent on a base level of sustainability culture.

• providing incentives: finding ways to move people from thinking about sustainability to pro-actively facilitating sustainability.

• reducing barriers to change: make it easier for people to make the conceptual leaps for behaviour change (McKenzie-Mohr & Smith, 1999).

• supporting leadership: focus on people at key leadership points in the organization.

• learning processes: fostering new knowledge and attitude change (Senge, 2001).

• innovation diffusion: not forcing change, but allowing change to emerge.

• changing systems: understanding the flows of knowledge and external drivers, outputs of behaviour, decisions and actions, stocks of human capital, and where the appropriate intervention points are located. (Gunderson & Holling, 2002)

While the above are all essential for a change process, the extent to which the above approaches will be used may have limits, depending on who will be initially active in the process.

Methodologies to facilitate cultural change in CHCC

Dual Strategy

A dual strategy has been planned:

• An internal organisational strategy and

• An external community-based strategy.

The dual strategy can accommodate aspects of the suite of change processes listed in the previous section. The purpose of the dual strategy is to focus on interior processes of culture change while linking in community views aboutsustainability as a driver of internal cultural change. As an extension, the community-based strategy will also foster sustainability learning in the broader community.

The community-based approach will be designed around the development of community-based sustainability indicators. CHCC management has agreed in principle to support this process, although no resources have yet been allocated to commence. It is hoped that this process can be commenced in the latter half of 2006.

The Internal Approach

The first step in the culture change process will be to work at the middle-management, executive and Councillor level. As identified in TBL Reviews, this is where most resistance to change can be found. At this level of the organization, policy, learning, removal of barriers and leadership support approaches can be applied.

A non-threatening approach based on dialogue will be used, both in one-on-one sessions and in small focus groups. The point is to engage these groups in an on-going discussion about sustainability, to identify reasons for resistance to change and to work co-operatively to gradually reduce the barriers to change, real or perceived.

A parallel process will focus on the individuals in the organization generally. While staff perspectives will be sought, direct surveys will not be used, in favour of a new dialogical story-telling based methodology as part of an overall organizational learning approach to change: The Most Significant Change (MSC) technique (Dart & Davies, 2003). It is a dynamic values enquiry aimed at engaging everyone in the change process, allowing significant stories of change to emerge to help map the process of change and to “focus the direction of work towards explicitly valued directions and away from less valued directions” (Dart & Davies, 2003 p.137). All members of the organization will be encouraged to share their stories of significant change, as they perceive change to have happened. The MSC technique has been used in a variety of contexts from organizations and regional development in developed countries and in village development in the third world (Sigsgaard, 2002).

The MSC technique allows for the creation of up to four value categories or domains of change. Domains of change are broad areas, allowing flexibility of classification. Stories are collected and classified by a focus group featuring staff from different parts of the organization. On a regular basis, weekly, fortnightly or monthly, the collected stories are reviewed by the focus group and sorted into the value categories. From each category, the stories regarding the most significant change are collected and published as feedback to the staff and management, possibly every three months. It can then be analysed in a number of staff forums and focus groups.

At CHCC, innovative ways of collecting the significant change stories are being considered. A public noticeboard where stories can be pinned up for others to see; submission directly to the Sustainability Unit, if anonymity is to be preserved; or a web-based interface for both collection of stories and publication of the most significant ones.

The project hopes to link up with an organizational psychologist to help the project team reflect on the emergent outcomes of the process.

Another aspect of the culture change methodology is that any significant issues that arise from the management groups and the MSC stories can be identified for action during the process, rather than after the process is complete.

The published stories can then help to inspire people to feel good about the changes that have happened, to have confidence about the direction the organization is taking and to allow sustainability culture to strengthen.

The External Approach

The development of community-based sustainability indicators is regarded as an important part of the sustainability culture process (Bell & Morse, 2003). It will however require a level of resourcing which has been unavailable to date. The lack of resourcing is itself an indicator of a weakening sustainability culture. The project team considers that once the internal process is underway and beginning to take effect, the value of engaging the community in sustainability becomes more appreciated and some resourcing may be available to commence the community process, albeit at a broad, rather than detailed, pattern.

A detailed plan for the external process will be developed as a Stage 3 of The Sustainability Culture Project. Some ideas include using the MSC process via a web-based interface, holding community workshops and school-based activities, setting up focus groups and a sustainability round table: all to engage in dialogue about sustainability values and aspirations, for community learning.

Application of Change Processes

The change processes described earlier will be applied as follows, internally and externally:

• A process of changing of structures has been in place for some time: in 2003, the Environmental Services branch recommended to relocate the Sustainability Unit to the corporate arm of Council operations (City Services), so that it is positioned as part of Council’s general business, rather than an arm of Environmental Services (Proposed Relocation of the Sustainability Program, 2003). The intent was to address the issue of perceived lack of support for the TBL process from middle management. The Sustainability Unit moved to Strategic Planning in mid-2005. Discussions about a move as recommended are still continuing.

• Pro-sustainability policy change may develop through dialogue with management and Councillors.

• Incentives in the form of recognition or awards will be instituted.

• Identified barriers to fostering participation in the TBL Framework will be progressively removed once the MSC process is underway.

• Dialogue with the executive and management will support leadership.

• Dialogue and MSC processes are essentially learning processes to help develop a sustainability-oriented learning organization and allow innovation in sustainability to diffuse throughout the organization.

The point of the above is to foster change in a “whole systems” way: a low-key approach to cultural change, spread across the organization will provide a counter to “silo” thinking which in itself is a barrier to sustainability. Any effort focussed at one part of the organization in isolation will not create systemic change.

Project Timeframe

The project commenced in February 2005 with the Stage 1 mapping process, completed in June 2005. Stage 2 has been going through a planning process to date, consulting with Councillors and the executive. Formal activities will commence at the beginning of 2006. The PhD process as described is due to complete at the end of 2006, with initial outcomes for reporting. At this stage the process will continue beyond 2006, especially with respect to the development of community-based sustainability indicators.

Conclusions

In The Sustainability Culture Project to date, it is evident from the mapping process that a sustainability culture exists within Coffs Harbour City Council, and that it has developed substantially since the Vision 2020 process. However, it has ebbed and flowed according to a range of internal and external drivers, including personalities, processes, hard environmental limits, changes of elected representatives and legislative requirements. It has not developed consistently through all areas of the organization, and there are naturally varying levels of commitment to sustainability principles over time.

Nevertheless, the base level of commitment to sustainability is consistent, representing widespread understanding of the issues and a useful cultural grounding. It is only when sustainability becomes demanding, when people have to change the way they do things, when problems require more commitment and energy to solve them, that the base level of culture may not be strong enough at present.

The Sustainability Culture Project has been designed to assist CHCC staff to continue the long process of cultural change and to strengthen the emergent sustainability culture within the organization. The methods chosen are gentle approaches, avoiding compulsion and bureaucracy, designed to stimulate thinking and discussion, to highlight successes, to remove obstacles, to encourage staff at all levels of the organization to engage with sustainability thinking and to incorporate such thinking into their daily work, all for the benefit of the community.

Because of the systems nature of change, there is no guarantee that actions taken under The Sustainability Culture Project will directly lead to cultural change or that change will be as envisaged; nevertheless, the actions are contributing to the complex field of potential and a strengthened culture may yet emerge. Doing nothing is not an option.

References

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Background

Dr Kurt Seemann and I prepared this paper to report on the completion of the scoping phase of The Housing Lifecycles Project, part of the Desert Knowledge Cooperative Research Centre, Southern Cross University node.

We presented the paper at the National Housing Conference - Building for Diversity, in Perth in November 2005.

Kurt is a colleague of mine, and we have worked together at the Centre for Appropriate Technology, Southern Cross University and Swinburne University. Kurt was the Chief Investigator of The Lifecycles Project, and I lead the community engagement/field work component. We both worked on the strategic approach, and we-co-wrote this paper.

We were able to finish the overall research project to the satisfaction of DKCRC and release a detailed monograph based on desktop work. Our recommendations were robust, creative and innovative and if applied, could have driven a major re-think in Indigenous housing.

As it happens, the report was nicely printed up, but DKCRC leadership declined our offer to make presentations to the Territory and Commonwealth Governments. They also did not actively distribute it, other than making it available on the DKCRC website.

Reflection

As you’ll see in the paper, the next stage was to include an activity, which we called the Housing Stories Project. This was to be my major contribution to the research, and I had verbal agreements to partner with several communities, arising from the previous 18 months of effort over multiple roadtrips to communities. In the visits, we presented the project and why we wanted to do a story-telling based process. All the communities we presented to validated our proposed approach and agreed to partner with DKCRC. The next stage was to formally enter into MoUs with each partner community. MoU’s were drafted and submitted to the DKCRC leadership for approval.

Not only did DKCRC not approve the MoUs, they prohibited any further expenditure on fieldwork to remote communities, scuppering the 2 years prior work. So the Housing Stories Project never eventuated. The decision that was made was led by academics that, ironically, had very little experience in housing and infrastructure projects in remote communities, and did not have any frames of reference to understand what were were proposing and the backgroud to why we were proposing it. They just saw it as an unnecessary expense.

Of course, I was the one that had to contact all the communities to advise them that we were no longer going to do this shared work! Not a good look, and a personal disappointment for me. I can only imagine that the Indigenous people I spoke to then wrote me off as just another whitefella making big promises with no follow-through.

When I read through it now, I am struck by how hopeful we were for the research project and its potential outcomes for remote Indigenous communities back then, especially in Central Australia.

All I can say is that nothing much has changed in remote Indigenous housing 18 years and several billion dollars later. What a lost opportunity!

Abstract

This paper reports on the outcomes of The Lifecycles Project, a scoping project investigating housing and infrastructure lifecycles in remote desert communities for the Desert Knowledge Cooperative Research Centre (DK-CRC). The project aims to extend the life of community housing and infrastructure through research and development of innovative intervention strategies, with particular focus on indigenous settlements, using a total capital approach. Thus the research identifies and models housing systems, technology choices, materials performance and cost-critical events, incorporating knowledge gaps, technacy education patterns, organisational systems, economic capacities, and local user experiences in community living. The research combines desktop research using state of the art lifecycle computer modelling techniques with community-based research.

To date, desktop research in the scoping stage has identified and analysed indigenous housing and infrastructure data from funding agencies, government stakeholders and housing management organizations and tested and analysed existing models using such data. Preliminary conclusions are that this data is incomplete and does not incorporate local experiences. Pilot participatory methodologies have been identified and validated at the community level to assist in identifying local knowledge gaps in the funding, design, delivery, operation and maintenance of housing and infrastructure. The paper concludes by outlining necessary work for the next stage of research.

Introduction

This paper reports on the outcomes of The Lifecycles Project, a scoping project investigating housing and infrastructure lifecycles in remote desert communities for the Desert Knowledge Cooperative Research Centre (DK-CRC). The project aims to extend the life of community housing and infrastructure through research and development of innovative intervention strategies, with particular focus on indigenous settlements, using a total capital approach. Thus the research identifies and models housing systems, technology choices, materials performance and cost-critical events, incorporating knowledge gaps, technacy education patterns, organisational systems, economic capacities, and local user experiences in community living. The research combines desktop research using state of the art lifecycle computer modelling techniques with community-based research.

The Desert Knowledge Cooperative Research Centre (DKCRC) is committed to creating economic opportunities for desert people, and to making a demonstrable difference for remote Indigenous communities. One of its key partners is the Housing and Environment Branch of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Services (ATSIS) (now in the department of Family and Community Services, FACS). Based on demographic trends, ATSIS has estimated that over $3 billion is required to meet demand for housing, while the utility of houses was estimated as having a lifecycle of approximately 4-8 years depending on local factors (Taylor, pers. comm. 2005). The Federal and State/Territory’s Grants Commissions and public housing and infrastructure agencies require a clear understanding, useful models, decision tools and new knowledge to form the basis for innovations in services, policies and technologies that could reduce this cost (or extend the lifecycle of public housing from 8 to 12 years or more).

To pursue an innovative approach to extending housing and infrastructure lifecycles, research activity is focussed in the following key areas:

• Socio-technical inputs and process

• Software Decision Tools and Models

• Technacy education

• Local values of housing and infrastructure

• Policy, ownership agendas and economic contingencies

Socio-technical Inputs and Process

The Lifecycles Project uses a socio-technical/physical systems framework to conceptualise its data collection and theorems to manage the many elements of the research being undertaken across the team. The systems diagram (Diagram 1) below summarises the framework, based on the assumption that a more effective flow and use of all capital and capability will ultimately result in improved desert livelihoods.

The Lifecycles Project is based on the proposition that socio-cultural, educational, economic, technical and climatic factors combine to form complex cause-effect patterns that affect the life of housing and housing service effectiveness in communities. As such, The Lifecycles Project seeks to account for the main contingencies and relationships inherent in housing services (as a service cycle), quantify where possible the total lifecycle costs and lifespan impacts and distil the main ideas that would have the best chance to improve housing services for sparsely distributed desert communities.

Software Decision Tools and Models

Conventional software used to schedule the maintenance of public housing in urban, normally coastal regions of Australia was developed by the CSIRO and is currently used in the Queensland Department of Housing. (Tucker, 1996)

The objective is to identify the combination of factors and how these factors are valued to predict infrastructure and housing being extended over a number of years. Also, it is expected that the research will identify what is currently available and what can be constructed as a theoretical framework and model of what is happening in communities to identify and predict outcomes to plan out a more sustainable housing model.

In terms of the hypothesis to be tested, the question considered during the modelling stage is:

The question will be tested considering the total cost of the house properties including recurring costs, nonrecurring costs, capital costs and social costs.

Technacy Education

Whether the solution to extending the life of housing and associated amenity technologies is based on better management systems, designs or maintenance regimes, local sustainable capacity and education is most likely to be a key part of the solution’s take up rate. The goal of this key research area is to understand the gap in capacity continuity, describe its impact on the task of sustaining services in the built environment and explore improved education strategies building on concepts such as technacy education. The research describes this as a technacy gap, where technacy is a conceptual framework for understanding the capacity to think and work creatively in the field of technology. (Seemann & Talbot, 1995).

The Lifecycles team has considered how this technacy gaps connect to sustainable investment in desert communities, especially with respect to any improved software- based management tools reliant on local capacities: sophisticated tools require a sophisticated capacity to extract value. Central to this capacity is research grounded in firmly established understanding and commitment to the utilisation of technacy within the community development framework.

Local Values of Housing and Infrastructure

Another aspect of The Lifecycles Project concerns the importance of the local view of housing. Experience with housing in desert communities indicates that the living space is where two quite different value systems meet: the values embodied in the mainstream notions of house and the values expressed by desert people in their everyday usage of housing and its related infrastructure. The technology of the house, particularly the funded, standardised, codified version, has an embedded culture of funding, design, construction, usage and maintenance. For desert people, this embedded culture is not always obvious, acknowledged and valued, with substantial discontinuity in understandings of how to manage and maintain their housing (Pholeros et al., 1993).

All people act out in some way either their inherent preferences for living, whether in full control of their physical settlement environment or not. People interact with their buildings and technology by adapting to situations or manipulating situations according to inner and outer drivers. It cannot be assumed that anyone’s adaptive interaction with their buildings and technology is a fully conscious activity. Research questions are aimed at articulating desert peoples’ preferences for living well on country, commensurate with their lived behaviour.

This meeting of values is a fundamental reality, often obscured or ignored by the process of productively delivering housing units for the lowest up-front cost. The Lifecycles Project recognises that the place of intersection of these value systems is where the both the problem of existing short housing lifecycles and the opportunities for extending housing lifecycles lie.

Housing and infrastructure in Indigenous Australia is periodically evaluated for performance against a range of benchmarks and desired outcomes. Such evaluations are driven by the needs of funding agencies and their interpretation of the needs of individuals in remote communities (ANAO, 1999; Fletcher & Bridgman, 2000; Sheehan et al., 2001; Spring, 2005) They take no account of the imposed embedded values and cultures of the process of housing and infrastructure delivery.

Conventional housing and infrastructure evaluations are very clear about the limitations of direct, short-timeframe surveying methods. Consequently, a long-term process, embedded at the community level, allowing time for the deeper meanings of housing to emerge, is proposed.

A Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation (PME) methodology has been identified to facilitate storytelling to explore these issues of local values and preferences in housing and settlement development (Guijt & Gaventa, 1998). The Lifecycles Project proposes to use this participatory approach because it increases the chances of obtaining a fuller picture of what value people place on their housing; their usage behaviours; and critical events that impact on the life of housing. A suite of many specific participatory research and analysis techniques have been proposed; that is, a participatory methods tool box (Chambers, 2000; Davis-Case, 1990; Walsh & Mitchell, 2002; Wates, 2000).

The participatory process will be responsive so that methods can evolve in ways sympathetic to priorities of local people; local people will be encouraged to develop culturally appropriate research techniques.

The Lifecycles Project seeks to establish research partnerships with identified communities, because they present opportunities for mutual benefit.

Policy, Ownership Agendas and Economic Contingencies

There are two fundamental assumptions regarding the impact of a policy shift towards modes of housing and services that encourage greater private ownership and government-community partnerships. These are that:

• A policy shift will extend the lifecycle of these technologies, in turn reducing costs to government and householders; and,

• Technologies will provide enhanced amenity as a consequence of design, maintenance agreements and financing that accord with householder needs and capacities.

Such a policy shift also assumes the following conditions are present:

• End-users have access to appropriate educational services and low income models of financing that support an owner-occupier and/or micro-financing model of housing and technical services;

• Government agencies associated with housing and infrastructure programs are able to deliver flexibility with respect to community and user agreements for design, servicing and levels of financing;

• Cultural perceptions of land ownership and stewardship found in desert communities can be harnessed in support of responsibility for individual and community infrastructure;

• Views of men and women are brought into decision making regarding infrastructure planning, design and management;

• End users and community leaders have the capacity to negotiate and honour contractual agreements.

The research proposed therefore explores the extent to which the assertion that a policy shift towards privatised desert housing and improved government-community partnerships in infrastructure service models, and the community educational demands implied, will result in extended lifecycles of technologies and technical services, and greater amenity for households could be sustained.

Results to date

Socio-technical Inputs and Process

The review and consultations on householder (social and physical) capital in housing maintenance affirmed that the repair of houses in desert communities is affected by a mix of social and technological factors (Seemann, 1997).

Two key conclusions are the needs to (i) reconsider early educational priorities in schools towards more generic problem-based learning in various technologies and (ii) rationalise services to housing sufficiently to reach a local critical mass of capability and householder tools and resources (for minor “do it yourself” household improvements).

The most substantial improvement in housing repair ratings occurred where the householder possessed a broad range of housing repair tools in a community that showed both a higher amount of ‘non-technical’ vocational expertise (such as health workers and clerks) and more semi-serviced (or transitional)1 houses.

Semi-serviced houses effectively resulted in only a few fully serviced houses needing full repair attention. That is, the semi-serviced houses were not expected to enjoy full service support, leaving more resources to be allocated to houses that had all its normal infrastructure services. The implication was that more fully serviced houses in communities were likely to increase pressures resulting in shorter lifecycles.

There are many other significant findings. Reasonable indicators for whether communities were able to sustain serviced houses were skills at social organisation, completion of non-technical vocational education qualifications, individual access to appropriate tools and a proportionally large number of semi-serviced transitional shelters.

Technical expertise was substantially under represented on communities, but where some communities had technically qualified expertise, sustainability was enhanced by the diversity of skills represented rather than any one specialist skill category; and also by a training emphasis on work organization, problem solving/ “research” skills and cross-cultural communication rather than specific repairs and maintenance (or trade-oriented) skills alone.

Technical occupations are at a disadvantage relative to teachers and health workers who had schools and health clinic centres and worked with resident professional peers (nurses, doctors, teachers) to whom they could refer. Furthermore, health and education occupations had dedicated government support with administrative centres in or near communities and stable on-going funding programs: that is, they worked under stable systems and so had stable resource flows. In contrast, industrial occupations were not operating in this context, and were very unstable.

Where government or private technical support and funding was available, it was usually supply-driven and divided along technical specialisation areas such as housing, power and water, and transport departments. Funding was risky, project-based, stop-start, and bidding-oriented from year to year, as well as not being locally based. This affected gender employment issues too - men’s work was sporadic and opportunist, whereas women’s work was steady, institutional, developmental and programmed.

Another finding was that two distinct shelter types prevailed within communities:

• Light weight/local resource/temporary (implying handy-person tools), and,

• Heavier/externally sourced/permanent (implying specialist tools/high level and longer training (may not be affordable)).

The temporary building materials in communities generally did not require the use of many specialised or powered tools to shape, position or transport them. In contrast, the more permanent building materials imply a more sophisticated collection of tools and equipment to construct, repair or modify them. This affects the degree of local participation in household repair and maintenance.

Software Decision Tools and Models

In order to fill out the understanding required to apply the conceptual socio-technical systems model, The Lifecycles Project has explored the use of existing lifecycle software though undertaking a review of prior research in the area of householder (social and physical) capital in housing maintenance.

The initial results of testing this software with stakeholders primarily in Central Australia, by scoping housing data and the understanding of local maintenance processes, suggests that there is inadequate quantified data to validate the model. A mind map schematic which sketches the kind of factors and their possible relationships now being explored in the design of the software decision tool (Diagram 2).

The implications of this model are that funding agencies will need to modify their data collection processes and content, and local level evaluations of lifestyles and user behaviour must be effectively incorporated.

The desktop review process also investigated other approaches and models:

• function-based condition indexes and

• cost-based condition indexes.

The function-based procedure requires inspection of the components of an asset and technical assessment to be made based on the ability of the component to carry out the function and provide optimal performance. This method utilises concepts like remaining-life or utility of the components to assess the condition of an asset. The cost based method does not consider the function of the component; rather it utilises a measure of the state of disrepair of a component and values the cost of returning the component to as new state. In each case the methods require assets to be broken down to component level. When a dwelling/asset/facility is broken down into its elements, it enables a more accurate assessment of its condition. The data on the specific elements needs to be accurate and the accuracy must be maintained with regular audits for the index to be accurate.

A number of indices were reviewed. The Housing Stock Condition Index (HSCI)(Tucker, 1996) has been identified as being an appropriate base index to develop. It was created by combining the condition measure for a dwelling with weightings related to each dwelling and summing the measures to provide a total. The dwelling is considered to consist of a number of components of which the cost of the required maintenance can be assessed, with the components covering all parts of the dwelling which can be repaired/replaced. This approach was the basis for the development of the Property Standard Index used by the Queensland Department of Housing to assist in the management of their property portfolio.

The research recommendation is to develop both a cost based condition index based on the HSCI and supplementarily develop a function-based index.

Local Values of Housing and Infrastructure

Community visits and follow-up discussions have occurred over the year to date with potential partner communities. These discussions have included a general overview of proposed participatory methods, the possible outcomes of the research, and return-of-service to communities. Formal letters of invitation to join in partnership with The Lifecycles Project have been sent.

Feedback about the appropriateness of tools and the overall participatory methodology has been offered by people at the community level. Through extensive consultation with a wide variety of people in remote indigenous communities, indigenous community organizations and other stakeholder groups, there has been an expression of substantial support for The Lifecycles Project and its storytelling-based participatory approach.

The offer of return-of-service for access and information has been well received and it has been contrasted against other survey-based methodologies that take, but don’t give. People are seeing that there are potential benefits for their communities in both the short and long term. This level of support at the early stage of community engagement is very positive and positions The Lifecycles Project to develop meaningful outcomes for communities, stakeholders and researchers alike. Desert people also appear to appreciate the long timeframe for the project, and that community people will not be rushed into telling their stories.

In particular, a favourable response has been received for the following: the employment of local people as Community Researchers; the involvement of Community Researchers in designing community-based activities; the use of visual-based methods; and that research activities will contribute to local people solving pressing problems in communities.

This level of support at the early stage of community engagement is very positive and positions The Lifecycles Project to develop meaningful outcomes for communities, stakeholders and researchers alike. As a result, a pilot process has been planned for the first half of 2006 in a community north of Alice Springs.

Four communities and community organizations have agreed to enter into a partnership agreement with The Lifecycles Project and will sign a Memorandum of Understanding when it has been made available by DKCRC.

Technacy Education

The Lifecycles Project has identified the need to address research in technological problem-solving as a contribution to emerging capacity development – particularly the development of generic understanding and skills in creativity and innovation for working through technological ideas and projects.

The major capacity gap in most isolated small desert community schooling occurs at two levels. At the first level, most educational services stop for most desert children after around 11 to 12 years of age, not to be re-engaged until early vocational education is considered around 16 years of age. By this time there is a very small likelihood of uptake and completion in further education. Secondly, the time spent at primary schooling in many cases barely dedicates time to fostering technacy capacities, let alone to locally interesting and engaging learning. The seriousness of this gap, in both engagement and in content, affects a community’s capacity for managing, choosing and engaging in a contemporary material culture and economy in their region.

Conclusions and Recommendations for Future Research

This paper, in reporting on the outcomes of the scoping stage of The Lifecycles Project, has identified the theoretical basis of the research, proposed key areas of research activity, commenced initial desktop and field investigations and analysed initial findings and feedback.

The results reported in this paper highlight the need for an integrated and persistent approach to technacy on communities, as well as the need for some technical research on lifecycles. However, the main thesis of the Lifecycles Project is that technical and economic considerations alone are inadequate for developing innovative responses to these needs. It is critical also to understand social factors and end user experiences and how these can affect the decisions for extending the life of housing, so as also to enhance local livelihoods. The knowledge gained from research on these matters will significantly influence housing and technical services policy, and community education policy. In addition it will provide substantial insights into changes needed in the role and structure of government extension and education services associated with infrastructure programs in desert communities, particularly in relation to understanding the systems requirements to deliver more appropriate and cost-effective technical services, education and housing technologies.

In the four key research activity areas, the following should be incorporated into the next stage of research:

• Capacity development through institutional and creative delivery of technacy education, focusing initially on the critical middle schooling years normally in the range of children from 10-14 years old, to assist and explore, over the long term, the development of critical capacities in choosing, valuing, problem solving, and skilfully applying technology to meet human needs.

• The extent to which a policy shift towards more private ownership of desert housing will stimulate extension of the lifecycles and costs of housing, and what preconditions in terms of training and community rights might be critical for this.

• The telling of local stories of living with housing and infrastructure and the incorporation of these stories in the development of new lifecycle models.

• The development of software models and trialling of these models with partner communities and government stakeholders.

The current stage of research will complete in early 2006, with the next stage being phased in over 2006.

References

ANAO. (1999). Audit Report No. 39 1998-1999 Performance Audit: National Aboriginal Health Strategy - Delivery of Housing and Infrastructure to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Communities. Canberra: Australian National Audit Office, Commonwealth of Australia.

Chambers, R. (2000). Whose Reality Counts? Workshop Notes. Melbourne: IDSS Professional Development Program.

Davis-Case, D. (1990). The community’s toolbox: The idea, methods and tools forparticipatory assessment, monitoring and evaluation in community forestry. Rome:Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

Fletcher, P., & Bridgman, D. (2000). Living Spaces: An Evaluation of Housing in Remote Aboriginal Communities. Darwin: The Architect’s Studio.

Guijt, I., & Gaventa, J. (1998). Participatory Monitoring & Evaluation: Learning from Change. IDS Policy Briefing(12).

Pholeros, P., Rainow, S., & Torzillo, P. (1993). Housing For Health: Towards a Healthy Living Environment For Aboriginal Australia. Newport Beach: Healthabitat.

Seemann, K. (1997). The Socio-Technical Sustainability of Shelter Systems and Hardware in Remote Indigenous Australian Communities. Unpublished PhD, University of NSW, Sydney.

Seemann, K., & Talbot, R. (1995). Technacy: Towards a Holistic Understanding of Technology Teaching and Learning Among Aboriginal Australians. Prospects, 25(4).

Sheehan, J., Jenkins, A., & Phillips, G. (2001). The lifecycle of Indigenous housing in rural and remote areas. Canberra: Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.

Spring, F. (2005). Unpublished Review of Fixing Houses For Better Health (FHBH) and the Indigenous Housing Management System Maintenance Project (IHMSMP). Canberra: Commonwealth Department of Family and Community Services.

Tucker, S. N. (1996). Housing Stock Condition Index. AHRF Project. Melbourne: CSIRO Division of Building, Construction and Engineering.

Walsh, F., & Mitchell, P. (Eds.). (2002). Planning for Country: Cross-cultural approaches to decision-making on Aboriginal Lands. Alice Springs: Jukurrpa Books.

Wates, N. (Ed.). (2000). The Community Planning Handbook: How people can shape their cities, towns and villages in any part of the world. London: Earthscan.

This paper was prepared as part of the Humanitarian Habitat program in the Centre for Design Innovation at Swinburne University over 2016 and early 2017. Lead author, Dr Yenny Rahmayati and co-author Vivien Himmayani, invited me to work to help them develop their research into a paper suitable for publication in a significant journal. As Yenny and Vivian were not experienced in preparing academic work in English for an Australian and International audience, my role was to help them develop their ideas; to help frame their ideas and integrate them coherently; to make sense of the work they did in the field; to validate their approach and theoretical grounding; to assist with writing; and to review and edit the text.

At the time, Yenny was working as a post-doc with the Centre for Design Innovation at Swinburne and Vivien was an academic at Binus University in Indonesia. Yenny had extensive experience in processes of recovering after disaster, having founded an NGO in the wake of the Indian Ocean Tsunami to help reconstruction in her home provice of Aceh, which was hit badly by the Tsunami. Yenny knows what she is talking about!

For some time Yenny and I discussed doing a joint paper on cultural mapping underpinning disaster recovery, especially in the case of substantially destroyed communities where outside agencies tend to impose a model of recovery contrary to the cultural maps of the affected communities that people still carry with them - in mind, body and soul. While this is not the paper we discussed doing, many of the ideas we raised are present in this case study. Vivien and Yenny conducted most of the on-ground research, with Vivien doing most of the interviewing of informants in the case study community at the centre of this work.

While I did not contribute to fieldwork, we were hoping to use the paper to develop our ideas further and to seek funding for further research - with prospects for me to participate in on-going field work in Indonesia if successful. However, Yenny’s post doc contract was not extended, and she subsequently went to teach in Saudi Arabia and momentum to turn this into an active research area stopped, for me, at least.

The paper was first delivered by Yenny at the ANZDMC Conference on the Gold Coast in 2017 and later published in the Australian Journal of Emergency Management (Volume 32 No.4, October 2017).

As a post-script, this paper has been the most cited paper I have been involved in!

Abstract

Disasters contribute to the complexity of urban problems such as water and sanitation, waste management and infrastructure damage. For some countries illegal settlements, slum areas, urbanisation, internal migration and employment dislocation exacerbate these problems. A common urban disaster that occurs in many Asian and Pacific countries is flooding, especially during the rainy season. Floods in Jakarta affect vulnerable communities situated on the riverbank of the Ciliwung River. Temporary shelters have been used in response, but they have not answered the needs of these communities. While many studies argue that socio-economic factors are significant contributors to community resilience, this study found that cultural and historical connections, ‘connecting to place’, was a significant factor that helps people survive and adapt. As such, relocating communities to safer locations is not always the answer and may contribute to other problems. This study supports designs for temporary shelters and facilities following flood disasters through community-led design processes that meet the needs of communities without disconnection from place, temporarily or permanently.

Introduction

Global urban transformation caused by population shifts to urban centres has increased exposure to disasters (Killing & Boano 2016). Climate change-driven natural events have severe urban impacts (Watson 2016). Annual flooding is a common urban disaster that occurs in many Asian and Pacific countries, especially during the monsoon season. Flood events are more frequent compared to landslides, wind effects, droughts or forest fires (Marfai, Sekaranom & Ward 2015). In addition, cities are growing ahead of housing and infrastructure planning and development, which affects the capacity to cope of existing urban systems (Watson 2016).

Jakarta is the capital of Indonesia and a megapolitan city with a population of 10 million. It has been dealing with regular flood events for hundreds of years (Hellman 2015). This flooding affects vulnerable communities situated on the riverbank of the Ciliwung River, the main river that runs through the inner city of Jakarta (Hellman 2015). Communities in slum and squatter settlements dominate this area (Marfai, Sekaranom & Ward 2015). Annual flooding is generally classified as a small-to-medium-scale disaster. Such classifications are important for shaping the nature of disaster response (de Boer 1990, Gad El-Hak 2008, Glade & Alexander 2016).

Jakarta is divided into six regions: Central Jakarta, West Jakarta, East Jakarta, South Jakarta, North Jakarta and Thousand Islands. These areas are flat, coastal lowlands with an elevation of less than 10 metres above sea level (Marfai, Sekaranom & Ward 2015) resulting in regular floods that date back to the 1600s (Fiyanto 2014). The Ciliwung River is part of a dense river network susceptible to monsoonal rains and exacerbated by high tides during full moon events (Marfai, Sekaranom & Ward 2015). The worst flood in recent history was in 2007 when 454.8 square kilometres were inundated and caused 5.2 trillion rupiahs in damage (Fiyanto 2014). Eighty people were killed during the flood and around 320,000 people were evacuated (Fiyanto 2014). The urban village of Kampung Melayu in East Jakarta and its neighbourhood precincts has consistently been the area most devastated due to its exposed location.

The impact of flooding is worse for poor or urban communities. Overcrowding, marginal and unstable land, inappropriate or substandard materials and poor building construction are among the factors that increase the vulnerability of riverbank communities during monsoonal floods (Cronin & Guthrie 2013).

Some solutions for sheltering people have been proposed in response to flood events but they do not adequately address the needs of the Kampung Melayu community (Marfai, Sekaranom & Ward 2015). This paper outlines results of a study examining the resilience of the Kampung Melayu community during annual flood disasters.

Kampung Melayu, Jakarta

The community of Kampung Melayu in Jakarta Timur was selected for the study due to its location in the centre of Jakarta, and its urban context, as well as being one of the more significantly affected riverbank communities on the Ciliwung River. Flooding has become more frequent and more severe over the past decades (Fiyanto 2014).

Kampung Melayu, is located in Jatinegara sub-district, East Jakarta (Figure 1). The focus area of this case study are the neighbourhoods of Kebon Pala and Tanah Rendah both are located within the Kampung Melayu precinct, less than 15 metres from the river (Figure 2).

Kampung Melayu was established in the 17th century by Malay communities from the Malay Peninsula (Chilmy & Widyawati 2013). During the Dutch colonial period in Indonesia between the 16th and 19th centuries, Kampung Melayu was a busy trading area (Chilmy & Widyawati 2013, Marfai, Sekaranom & Ward 2015). The Ciliwung River has traditionally been the busiest trading route, facilitating movement of goods and people. The location remains a principle hub for transportation in East Jakarta (Chilmy & Widyawati 2013). The main livelihood of the Kampung Melayu people is from trading, such as street vending or small business owners (Chilmy & Widyawati 2013). The current population is no longer predominantly of Malay descent. Most are migrants from other parts of Java Island including West, East and Central Java. These ‘internal migrants’ have settled in the area for at least three generations.

Response to the Jakarta flood, 2013

The most recent worst floods in Jakarta in 2007 affected 60 per cent of Jakarta; being 89 villages including Kampung Melayu. The highest flood level occurred in Kampung Melayu, reaching 3.5 metres (Fiyanto 2014). During this event, the community in Kampung Melayu evacuated to a local mosque as a temporary shelter, particularly for children and the elderly. Assistance from the local government, political parties and the Red Cross came on the second day of the flood. However, response was not very successful, mainly due to a lack of coordination among responding organisations (Marfai, Sekaranom & Ward 2015).

Learning from the 2007 flood, in 2013, the Government of Jakarta City developed and implemented a Flood Contingency Plan through Jakarta Regulation No. 1, 2012, with support from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) (Rakhmat 2013). The government established flood evacuation zones in 13 localities, incorporating 307 temporary shelters (Rahmat 2013). Kampung Melayu was one of the evacuation zones where the temporary shelters were made available. Public buildings, religious buildings, schools and open spaces were used to erect temporary shelters. Statistics from the Jakarta Regional Disaster Management Agency summarising the impact of the 2014 flood are shown in Table 1. Table 1 shows that Kampung Melayu ranked second for the number of people affected, second for the number of ‘internally displaced people’ (IDP) living in temporary shelters and second for the total number of IDP and temporary shelters.

Connection to place and disaster resilience

The monsoonal flooding events suggest that the community of Kampung Melayu has a resilience capability, developed in response to the experience of regular flooding events. According to Watson (2016, p. 24), resilience ‘demonstrates that local areas can have the ability to withstand extreme natural events without suffering devastating losses, damage, diminished productivity or quality of life’. Further, socio-economic factors have been identified as the main contributor to the resilience of communities in disaster-prone areas (Hellman 2015). Hellman (2015) also argues that socio-economic factors are the main reason for community members to stay and deal with flooding rather than move permanently to safer locations that might threaten their capacity to maintain livelihoods. According to de Boer (2016), the resilience concept covers principles of preventing, preparing and responding to disaster and becomes the key issue of concern in humanitarian development. Similar concepts are raised by Sanderson (2016) who stated that pre- and post-disaster actions are part of a resilience-based approach. This concept is commonly applied by aid agencies to assist their response to developmental challenges or disasters (IFRC 2014).

While socio-economic factors support the resilience of communities in disaster events, this study argues that cultural and historical connections enable ‘connecting to place’ as a significant factor that helps people survive disasters and adapt to the impact. Therefore, relocating affected communities to safer locations is not always the answer and may contribute to other problems. For example, the community of Kampung Pulo accepted the resettlement program under the Normalisation of Rivers Project proposed by the Jakarta Government in cooperation with the World Bank (Hellman 2015). Under this program, the community relocated to high-rise, government-owned flats. As a result of the move, many residents lost their income and have been struggling with finances and to pay rent. The resettlement program has created insecurity in affected communities (Hellman 2015), not only socio-economically, but also in terms of culture and history. The historical and cultural values of communities in flood-prone areas have developed through, and are bound in with, everyday life. Ignoring these values in disaster response and mitigation is problematic and has negative impacts on the community (Rahmayati 2016, Sanderson 2016). However, resilience, as a community capacity does not diminish community needs for sustainable solutions in responding to and dealing with floods (Marfai, Sekaranom & Ward 2015). Enabling communities to design, procure and maintain temporary shelters and facilities that accommodate their needs without disconnecting them from their place, either permanently or temporarily, becomes critical in addressing the flood challenge.

Method

The research method applied in this research is the case study approach. It consists of desktop research, field observation and ethnography through site visits and participatory research including interviews with community informants. It was supported by in-depth interviews with external stakeholders including urban experts, architects and planners, non-government and government representatives. The external stakeholders were chosen for their broad perspectives of the flood events and associated issues in Jakarta and to provide a comparison with the stated community experience.

In 2016, four site visits to Kebon Pala and Tanah Rendah were conducted to generate data through community consultations. Several other short follow-up visits were made to validate and verify the data with the communities and external stakeholders. The site visits were conducted in September and October 2016 and February and March 2017. The February visit was carried out during a flood event in order to observe the impact on the neighbourhoods and the people, and the combined local and government response to the disaster. It was followed by another site visit 12 days after the flood when community life had reverted to normal.

The site visits consisted of physical direct observation and informal conversations. Activities were conducted by a group of researchers with architecture, urban planning and building science backgrounds. The physical observations focused on the houses including the typology (construction, size, quality and appearance); accessibility (access to the main road and to the river); public buildings, public spaces and markets; streets and pathways and infrastructure and facilities. The observations were recorded using photographs, sketches and note-taking.

Participatory research with community members was carried out with people living closest to the river. About 45 people were involved in interviews; 60 per cent male, 40 per cent female, 70 per cent were adults and 30 per cent were elderly and children. Interview topics included individual background and personal experience. Between site visits, in-depth interviews with experts and external stakeholders were carried out to gain a broad perspective of flood problems and related issues in Jakarta. The data gathered from observation, participatory research through interviews and interviews with experts were recorded and analysed using a qualitative approach.

Results

Research activity analysis revealed significant information about the lived behaviours of people in Kampung Melayu during flood events. Responses to flood events were strongly influenced by the village layout, network of streets, street widths and building form and typology. Most of the houses in the two neighbourhoods of Kampung Melayu are two-storey (Figure 3) and densely populated houses with narrow lanes (Figure 4). The location has easy points of access and is located very close to the main arterial road in East Jakarta. However, there is a range of lane widths across the settlement, resulting in different neighbourhoods having varying degrees of access. Some laneways widen to create spaces used for community interaction and small markets. Public buildings and spaces identified in the precinct included a food market, a school, some mushollas (small mosques) and a volleyball field.

In some areas, there are no open sites in a safe place on higher ground suitable for erecting temporary emergency shelters provided by government and agencies. The area has limited sanitation facilities. Not all the houses have toilets, some rely on an inadequate public toilet. In some places, a public toilet serves one residential cluster (about 50-80 people). A clean water supply relies on ground water with reticulation by electric pump. When this fails, and there are no clean drinking water facilities available, residents have to boil water before drinking or buy bottled drinking water.

The only public open site available in the flood-prone lower area is a volleyball field. There is no other appropriate open site available in safer zones on higher ground for temporary shelter. A yard of the primary school is available but has limited space to adequately accommodate the whole community.

This flood-affected area is included in the government’s urban redevelopment program that requires residents to move out from the location permanently. The community rejected the relocation plan for livelihood reasons (as they might lose their job or income from small businesses) and because of their multi-generational connection to Kampung Melayu. Residents feel connected to the place, and their historical-cultural bond has been strengthened by their shared experience during flooding. One community member (female 65) said:

Relocating to high-rise flats is qualitatively different from their current living arrangements and breaks neighbourhood structures. Broader community networks are affected as different neighbourhoods may be relocated separately. This has been experienced by the residents of nearby Kampung Pulo neighbourhood when they were resettled.

Kampung Melayu residents not only refuse to be relocated under government relocation programs, they are also reluctant to be evacuated during flood events. Another community member (female 30) said:

Many residents have lived in Kampung Melayu their entire lives and the community has built an adaptive capacity to respond to floods. For example, if flooding is less than a half metre, people move to the second floor of their houses and access other buildings via the streets (Figure 5). However, it the flood increases to three metres access and egress becomes difficult and they evacuate to safer areas in nearby neighbourhoods. They move their valuable belongings (mostly TVs, fridges, gas stoves, fans), food and groceries to the second floor and lock the house. They relocate livestock (mostly chickens) and vehicles (bikes and motor scooters) to safer areas along the road or in the vicinity of temporary shelters. The men travel between temporary shelters and their houses to ensure their property and stored belongings and valuables are safe.

During this recent flood event, one of the mushollas was used as a temporary shelter (Figure 6). However, due to space limitations, only women and children were sheltered there.

A private primary school established in the location and managed by a religious organisation was used as temporary shelter space during the flood (Figure 7). However, due to the space limitation, it could only accommodate the members of the organisation. According to community members, additional facilities needed during flood events are sanitation and toilet facilities, clean water, electricity and water-based transportation.

Flood events can last for a few days up to two weeks. People expressed their preparedness to adapt to the situation for this period of time. During post-disaster periods, community members participate in community-led recovery and clean-up activities. This usually focuses on public services and infrastructure rehabilitation, then moves to adversely affected houses. Once each neighbourhood is cleared of silt and debris, they return to normal life. Community leaders contribute significantly to leading the recovery. This behaviour, through repeated flood events, has created deep community connection and strengthened the capacity to respond to each event.

Discussion

The Kampung Melayu community face many problems, including:

• lack of facilities, especially access to sanitation and clean water

• lack of privacy

• space limitations

• effects of humidity

• water damage to buildings

• mould build-up and related health effects

• maintaining continuity of livelihood

• security problems caused by disruption and loss of

• control of private space.

These problems are unproblematic, not only for those who choose to stay in their houses, but for those who are evacuated. Resilience does not mean that the community and its residents thrive under the conditions of annual flooding. The community needs solutions and interventions to help them remain as a community during flood events, with improved comfort, amenity, health and safety. The longer-term solution is to design and prototype shelter, health facilities and responses to livelihood continuity and to improve the community’s quality of life.

Community consultations to date have identified several key community preferences in the design of interventions. The preference is to have better temporary shelter with appropriate support facilities, to help them remain in their houses and neighbourhoods. This was supported by one community member (a male 50):

Based on observed patterns of lived behaviour in this study, the main challenge in designing better temporary shelters is how to find approaches that accommodate the needs of the community without disconnecting them from their place, temporarily or permanently. A solution may be to develop and implement a community-led design process with high-level local participation.

A co-design or participatory design process delivering better results, tested in context and with higher levels of community acceptance through local ownership and commitment will sustain the intervention (Wates 1999).

Other important issues raised in this study:

• Flexibility: shelters and facilities should conform to the conditions, supported with appropriate infrastructure, although not necessarily permanently.

• Security: shelters should be secure, private and be erected in the right locations with easy access for loading and distribution.

• Portable shelters and facilities: these should be stored in places to allow quick deployment. Multiple storage sites may be needed and these must be secure, protective of equipment and materials accessible during different flood levels.

Questions regarding the nature of shelter and facilities, especially given the lack of open space, remains. Some forms of shelter can be erected inside larger buildings such as schools and mushollas. Indoor shelter is better matched to small to medium-scale events.

According to experts consulted, communal shelters are better for large-scale or long-term disasters as the provision and management of services, logistics and security is easier. There is a long history of evidence from the Appropriate/ Intermediate Technology movement dating from the 1960s of the benefits to small communities of local involvement, not just in the design of technology, but in the making and maintenance of technology (Fathy 1979, Hamdi 1991, Schumacher 1999, Willoughby 1990, Papanek 1991). Such benefits include empowering people by giving them control of the technology, strengthening local technical and organisational capacity (especially through erection, dismantling and management processes) and developing local livelihoods. Design briefs should include sustainable materials and methods and processes at an affordable cost and with appropriate durability to promote low maintenance. Alternative materials and systems may be needed if local resources are limited. Deployment methods for any new shelter systems must also be part of the design process, including storage, distribution and construction during flood events. The facilities most needed to support the design and deployment of temporary shelter systems are likely to require a degree of permanence: public kitchens, sanitation facilities, electricity generation and clean water.

Due to space limitations in the case study location, any outdoor communal temporary shelter is problematic and a low priority for targeting of resources. Therefore, the designs should be focus on the improvement of the current locations and buildings used as temporary shelters, such as the local musholla and school. The improvements should be on the additional facilities needed and the alternative solutions possible to make people comfortable and less stressed during evacuation periods. There is also an urgency to identify vulnerable groups in the design process including women, children and the elderly and to design specific services and shelter types to meet their needs. Alternative designs include portable shelters for single family use, using balconies and other external spaces. Based on the inputs from the community and external experts, some options for facilities are proposed in Figure 8, as complementary to temporary shelters.

The next stage of the project will commence in late 2017, with a series of community-led design workshops on site with community representatives as well as staff, researchers and students from Binus University, Indonesia and Swinburne University of Technology, Australia. Other stakeholders such as non-government and government representatives will be invited.

Conclusions

In this study, the identified, lived behaviours of the residents of Kampung Melayu community and its neighbourhood precincts in responding to annual flood events demonstrates a high degree of community resilience. Such behaviours shows that cultural and historical connection to place is a significant driver of their desire to remain in their flood-affected riverbank location on the Ciliwung River. This paper outlined a community-led design approach to create innovative and appropriate temporary shelter and technical interventions to support community preferences to permanently remain in place. The approach combines community participation as well as advice and input from experts to enable flood-affected communities to produce satisfactory designs in accordance with their immediate and future needs. Further, it is possible that the outcomes of this design approach are applicable to any urban flood events in modern urban villages, not only in developing countries but also in developed cities in the Asia-Pacific region.

References

Chilmy V & Widyawati K 2013, Perkembangan Pola Permukiman

Masyarakat Kampung Melayu, Faktor Exacta, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 87-98.

Cronin V & Guthrie P 2013, Community-led resettlement: From a flood-affected slum to a new society in Pune, India, Beyond Shelter after Disaster: Practice, Process and Possibilities, Routledge, London and New York, pp. 58-74.

de Boer J 1990, Definition and Classification of Disasters: Introduction of a Disaster Severity Scale, Journal of Emergency Medicine, vol. 8, pp. 591-595.

de Boer J 2016, Risk, resilience and the fragile city, Urban disaster resilience, New dimensions from international practice in the built environment, Routledge, New York and London, pp. 76-86.

Fathy H 1979, Architecture for the Poor: An Experiment in Rural Egypt. (Paperback ed.) Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Fiyanto A 2014, Memahami Banjir Jakarta, Greenpeace Indonesia. At: http://m.greenpeace.org/seasia/id/high/blog/memahami-banjir- jakarta/blog/47986/.

Gad El-Hak M (ed) 2008, Large-Scale Disasters: Prediction, Control and Mitigation, 1st Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Glade T & Alexander DE 2016, Classification of Natural Disasters, in Bobrowsky PT ed, Encyclopedia of Natural Hazards. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.

Hamdi N 1991, Housing Without Houses: Participation, Flexibility, Enablement, London: Intermediate Technology Publications.

Hellman J 2015, Living with floods and coping with vulnerability, Disaster Prevention and Management, vol. 24, issue. 4, pp. 468-483.

International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies 2014, IFRC Framework for Community Resilience, Geneva: International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

Killing A & Boano C 2016, Reconstructing the city, The potential gains of using urban planning and design practices in recovery and why they are so difficult to achieve, Urban disaster resilience, New dimensions from international practice in the built environment, Routledge, New York and London, pp. 35-53.

Marfai MA, Sekaranom AB & Ward P 2015, Community response and adaptation strategies toward flood hazard in Jakarta, Indonesia, Natural Hazard, vol. 75, pp. 1127-1144.

Papanek VJ 1991, Design for the real world: human ecology and social change (2nd ed.). London: Thames & Hudson.

Rahmayati Y 2016, Post-disaster housing: Translating socio-cultural findings into usable design technical inputs, International Journal ofDisaster Risk Reduction, issue. 17, pp. 173-184.

Rakhmat B 2013, Contingency plan program DKI Jakarta Province, UNOCHA. At: www.docs.unocha.org/sites/dms/ROAP/Indonesia/ Documents/Jakarta%20Contingency%20Plan.pdf.

Rekapitulasi Kejadian Banjir Bulan Januari 2014, Badan Penanggulangan Bencana Daerah (BPBD-DKI Jakarta Province). At: http://bpbd.jakarta.go.id/assets/attachment/document/ REKAPITULASI_KEJADIAN__BANJIR_Dari_Bulan_Januari_sd_ Agustus__TAHUN__2014.pdf.

Sanderson D 2016, Urban disaster resilience, New dimensions from international practice in the built environment, Routledge, New York and London, pp. 3-15.

Schumacher EF 1999, Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered: 25 Years Later...With Commentaries (2nd ed.). Berkeley: Hartley & Marks.

Wates N (ed) 1999, The Community Planning Handbook: How people can shape their cities, towns and villages in any part of the world. London: Earthscan.

Watson GB 2016, Designing resilient cities and neighbourhood, Urban disaster resilience, New dimensions from international practice in the built environment, Routledge, New York and London, pp. 21-34.

Willoughby KW 1990, Technology Choice: A Critique of the Appropriate Technology Movement. London: Intermediate Technology Publications.

About the authors

Dr Yenny Rahmayati is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Centre for Design Innovation, Swinburne University of Technology under the Humanitarian Habitat and Design Project.

Dr Matthew Parnell is a senior lecturer in Design Management and Strategy at Swinburne University of Technology. He is a researcher, educator, author and sustainability practitioner in the built environment, education, research, business and social enterprise.

Vivien Himmayani teaches in applied technology at the Binus University in Indonesia. Her research includes socio-cultural and community resilience in Jakarta to understand community resilience of low-income communities.

As many of you may have read in a previous email, I am in the long process of migrating all my prior writing to this site, Second Nature with Dr Matthew Parnell.

So far, I have set up a Retrospectives section, which will eventually contain all the articles, conference papers and books that I have worked on over my career.

I have also set up a Legacy Blogs section which contains all my blog articles from my web site, www.parnell.earth, covering 2021-2022. My blogging on my website stopped after I set up this Substack.

I have also included Blogs migrated from my even older Greensynergy Consulting web site covering 2008-2013. Both websites are now closed, and re-direct to this Substack.

I have also lost a quite a few Blogs as I have had three different websites, and not all Blogs survived the migration across to the newer web site.

The time gap between Blogs from 2014 to 2021 represents the time I was full-time at Swinburne University, and any writing I did was for articles, conference papers and project reports. Some of these have already been uploaded under the Retrospectives and Practice Notes Tabs.

I have done some tidying up; corrected spelling; added images that didn’t migrate; and checked links. In some cases I have added some extra images. and I also had trouble finding other images from my archives.

I have added buttons below each blog to enable easy navigation through the Blogs.

So if you have navigated this far and begin exploring these Legacy Blogs, you’ll not only get further insight into the way my thinking and practice has developed, you will also get a sense of the progress of sustainability in Australia over the last 18 years!

Matthew

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Living systems and self-organization

In this article I focus on what I consider to be one of the more significant aspects in a living systems approach to sustainability: the phenomenon of self-organization and how it manifests across natural and human systems in both similar and different ways.

In the living systems approach, there is a strong emphasis on encouraging people to embody an understanding of living systems as a fundamental approach to our lifeways and livelihoods, so that we will better connect to nature; place our human-centric views of the world in right relationship with nature; and then develop sustainability cultures that preserve, protect, restore and regenerate the earth and its ecosystems. We also have to deal with the fundamental question of how we sustain our actions to achieve the impact we need.

Further, we don’t just have to regenerate the earth where we can, we have to generate new ways of living for a planet approaching nine billion people, and with self-organization highly contingent, we can’t sit back and assume that the phenomenon of self-organization will do the heavy lifting.

I refer to two foundational concepts when talking about the phenomenon of self-organization in living systems: the Gaia Hypothesis of James Lovelock12; and the systems view of life from Fritjof Capra34. At the broadest interpretation of these two concepts, the earth, as a living system, has a self-organizing capability which includes self-maintaining, self-regulating and self-regenerating.

The systems view of life is about how we can relate to the planet’s natural systems as a living system as well as seeing human social and technical activity nested within the world’s natural systems. As a complex dynamic process of living interaction, this includes our:

• socio-ecological systems;

• socio-technical systems;

• socio-economic systems;

• socio-educational systems; and

• socio-cultural systems.

These living systems are examples of complex adaptive systems. Complex adaptive systems involve many entities in dynamic relationship, interacting in real time and making small and large adaptations, often in unpredictable ways.

Complex adaptive systems also generate new patterns of behaviour in real time – this is called “emergence” in complexity thinking. And emergence is the single most important aspect of complexity for human systems, and by extension, living systems and sustainability practice. In complexity, emergence has a similar meaning to self-organization.

Given that emergence describes the new patterns that emerge from complex, adaptive interaction without apparent singular causality, these patterns can emerge in transformations, but they usually defy prediction.

Consequently, emergent patterns can represent threats as well as opportunities. Entering a transformation process places the context broadly within the realm of complexity, which will increase the number of emerging patterns, and these patterns may manifest as weak signals at first, and if not identified may destabilize the transformation.

The phenomenon of emergence is a key factor in why human system transformations fail. Even the most noble, ethical actions can generate undesirable emergent patterns and system impacts.

Self-organization as a phenomenon, then, has its own internal purpose and goals and we can only understand this by observing patterns and conducting experiments.

Qualitative differences between natural and human systems

Seeing our human systems as complex adaptive living systems does not, however, mean we can readily transition to our desired future. While humans and nature are both living systems, there are qualitative differences between them that have substantial implications for the transition and our ways of sustainability practice, when new patterns emerge.

Natural systems encompass the earth’s geosphere, biosphere and atmosphere. Human systems are fully nested within natural systems, and both are living systems with shared and differing qualities as listed below. The diagrams below each list are updates of the Natural Systems and Human Systems Pattern in the Pattern Atlas. They extend the system qualities listed below and better reflect these qualitative differences. For brevity, I won’t include an explanation of the Elementals in the Patterns, as this will be provided in the coming Pattern Atlas update.

Natural and Human systems generally share the following qualities:

• adaptability to change

• many diverse and dynamic interrelationships

• instinctive ability to self-organize in response to changes in the environment

• expression of dynamic equilibrium and non-equilibrium, depending on context

• open to internal and external influences

• subject to phase changes and tipping points through metabolic processes

• experience emergence, creating new patterns from system interactions

• co-evolving in relation with other living beings

• create stable patterns in form, behaviour and resilience

• constrained by system qualities

• nested, intersectional and fractal

• capable of self-maintaining, self-regulating and self-regenerating.

Human systems also have some significant qualitative differences from natural systems:

• a multi-faceted, interactive and relational character – we can be many different things, often at the same time

• integrate our social, technological, economic, educational and cultural systems with ecological systems

• purposeful - we can choose a regenerative path or a degenerative path

• creative and self-efficacious – we can conceive of alternative futures and take steps to create them

• capable of personal and group reflection

• values-based - expressing moral, ethical + cultural values (or lack of)

• conscious in our approach to self-organization, rather than instinctive, generating both wanted and unwanted outcomes regardless of intent

• consciously cooperative and competitive

• tends towards being extractive and disruptive to natural systems, causing damage beyond ecosystem limits

• pattern-seeking for meaning-making

• able to experience life and relationships with others from a transpersonal perspective

The differentiation between systems is the purposeful centring of human agency. I understand that many sustainability and regenerative practitioners disagree with this approach, preferring to adopt an indigenous worldview, seeing other-than-human life as “kin”; or they hold a “more-than-human” awareness. I believe it is important that we switch to more-than-human perspectives to put what we do in context and the right place, although I think we tend to do as a metaphor rather than for real. It’s also possible for practitioners to hold both human and other-than-human perspectives concurrently!

Stories of traditional indigenous practice in caring for country and being in right relationship with all living things can inform our understanding in a valuable way. However, this position can also be ethically problematic due to widespread appropriation, misinterpretation and oversimplification of the indigenous perspective. The “more-than-human” approach might be a more realistic and secularized for non-indigenous people.

This is why the centring of humans as having special characteristics is important. We must understand that we are living systems nested fully within the natural systems of the earth and that we are the one’s consciously and unconsciously degrading earth’s natural systems. Because of our special qualities, we must consciously take responsibility for the impacts of human activity on the natural world, and to change the destructive path we are on. Observing and listening to natural systems will help us meet that responsibility and would be a good start.

Sustainability practice and self-organization

When we use the term “self-organization” we can apply it as an everyday term when people just get together to decide to act on a shared, purposeful endeavour, without outside direction from a leader, supervisor or authority. Often this happens in a largely simple, linear way (in a systems sense), and may not have emergent qualities.

Many people adopt this understanding of self-organization, where transformed and evolved people will sustain the good that we achieve, because a state of sustainability will be self-organized by the forces of life on earth. This is a common understanding in the regenerative movement, for example.

After all, the Gaia Hypothesis tells us that the earth is a self-regulating living system; and the systems view of life places self-organization as the force that drives planetary regeneration!

There are a couple of problems with this: sometimes we use self-organizing when we really mean self-regulating, which is also a dynamic of natural systems. Others also conflate self-organizing with autopoesis56 (from biologists Varela and Maturana), which is more like self-regulating or self-maintaining.

We can also understand self-organization from a complexity perspective as an emergent phenomenon. From a human systems perspective we can also observe that self-organization happens everywhere, everyday already! Many of the structures we see in human affairs began as emergent, self-organized patterns that stabilized over time, rather than through conscious design and strategy. An urban wasteland or abandoned building is often an emergent outcome rather than an outcome by design.

Go for a walk in your local area, and really look at the physical and relational patterns in the built and natural environment around you: what is designed, and what is emergent? Were the designed things good or bad and the emergent things good or bad? Do you see adaptations that bear little resemblance to the original design intent? What would you learn about self-organization in what you see? Can you see self-organization in any urban and natural degradation?

It’s also fair to say that much of our human system self-organization tends towards degeneration of both human and natural systems because of conscious destructive activity as well as unforeseen, destructive emergent patterns in spite of the best of intentions! So just saying that the earth will self-regulate is enough to sustain our transformation is just incorrect

Perhaps our destructive path is actually the action of Gaia clearing the way for a world without humans! Climate change, toxins, plastics, destruction of ecosystems – you name it – are all part of this cleansing process. As the late comedian George Carlin said: “The earth will just get rid of us like a bad case of fleas”!

Of course, I don’t really believe this, other than in a cosmic time-scale – yet we have no choice but to do what we can where we can. It’s healthy to challenge ourselves like George Carlin did! It keeps us grounded and realistic, with the forces of generation, degeneration, self-regulation and regeneration seen as dynamics within living systems.

If the Gaia Hypothesis and the Systems View of Life hold true, then clearly our self-organization towards degenerative practice is an inherent part of the earth system, and by extension, our efforts in transforming our current trajectory must be purposeful, conscious and embedded in our culture as a continual, complex and largely emergent process to have any chance of being sustained.

We also need to be mindful of the differences between human and natural systems, because it is critical for assisting us to sustain our responsibility to care: we can be creative in the work we do, watch for patterns as they emerge; apply appropriate strategies in response; reflect on our actions; learn from experience; and apply that learning to transform the world and sustain what’s desirable, all for the service of both human and natural systems.

V1.0 24 Feb 2026

Reflection

As with the previously published paper on urban traffic congestion, students were encouraged to connect with businesses, organizations, start-ups, non-profits and social enterprise to work on embedded projects at the service of the partner organizations. One of the students worked for a Melbourne-based medical devices company as their research and innovation lead. The company owners kindly allowed us to publish this paper on complexity in small-scale innovation organizations and present it at the DMI London Conference.

As before, I reserved the right to edit the paper and add any further theoretical and practical information and insights that I thought necessary, while respecting the students’ work.

The students for this paper - Marco Regis, Paloma Leon Ravest, Nadine Burgel Moschetta and Anisha Sharad Bijur - wrote a very professional beautifully illustrated report and presentation for their client partner and reworked the report as the submission to me for their unit assessment. As with the previous paper, I reworked the content to make it fit the academic requirements of the conference and added substantial text to strengthen it.

The paper was accepted for inclusion in the conference program. As with the previous paper, my Swinburne colleagues, Dr Maria Camacho and Brigitte Engeler, presented on our behalf.

On reflection, the level of treatment of the complexity of the practice setting by the students and their approach and methodology uncovered valuable insights which were beautifully framed such that the client partner could begin to implement the new organizational design.

Introduction

In this paper, we report on an organizational development project within a small-scale medical device company in Melbourne, Australia. Like many growing companies operating at the leading edge of innovation, success leading to growth creates new organizational problems, especially when internal processes hinder the overall company vision. This project supported the objective of improving the company’s development strategy, by using a complexity-oriented strategic design approach. The project was carried out by students from the Master of Design Strategy and Innovation course in the School of Design at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia between August and December 2017.

There is an increasing interest in managing companies and organizations by considering them as complex living systems, because conventional linear, mechanistic approaches to change regularly fail to deliver desired outcomes. By using a holistic complexity-oriented approach to strategic design practice in organizational development and change, there is potentially greater capacity to respond to unpredicted emergent patterns and to activate the energy inherent in organizational networks. Such approaches enable development problems to be re-framed within the context of networks of social interactions. Because conventional Design Thinking has limitations concerning long term sustainability in complex organizational development practice, a complexity-oriented approach to strategic design was proposed as a complementary practice to achieve meaningful innovation within the company.

For the purposes of this paper, we consider strategic design to be the application design-thinking based methods to the development of organizational strategy and change. Further, a complexity-based approach extends design thinking by accounting for the degree of complexity of the practice context and the potential for emergent, rather than just designed, outcomes.

Theoretical Frameworks

Traditional problem-solving involves the examination of problems and components in isolation of its larger context (Mair, Martincova & Shepperd 2009). However, the world we live in is far more complex and interconnected for this to be effective. As with ‘wicked problems’ (Buchanan 1992), challenges exist at multiple scales and are hardly reconcilable to a mechanistic view of the system in which designers are called to operate (Brown, Harris & Russell 2010).

The internal environment in an organization is one of such spaces. Viewed as a Living System, it is open, self-organizing and composed of rich interactions and relationships between actors (Meadows 2008). In such an environment, traditional design and management problem-solving tools focus on synthesis and help achieve short-term incremental innovation. However, these linear, mechanistic approaches often fail to cause the desired change and deliver outcomes. The limitations come from not having a macro-level understanding of the system in which they operate. As a result, there is an increasing interest in considering organizations as a Living System.

The need for big-picture-thinking and analysis of systems is evident to develop strategies that are able to better cope with present challenges. By using a holistic complexity-oriented approach to strategic design practice in organizational development and change, there is potentially greater capacity to respond to unpredicted emergent patterns and to activate the energy inherent in organizational networks.

A large body of research has been carried out to identify models and tools to effectively translate the systems theory into meaningful strategies to activate, implement and sustain the desired innovation (Rogers 1995).

Organisational development has recently been drawing from concepts such as Emergence and Complexity (Capra, 2002; Checkland, 2006 Gharajedaghi, 2011; Nedopil et.al, 2011). Studying the emergent behaviour within a system, of relationships between its actors, is helpful for developing effective strategies to activate change within. Additionally, a sense-making framework offers a better understanding of the context in which a company operates. By identifying simple, complicated, complex and chaotic processes, it is possible to address them appropriately using different approaches (Boone & Snowden 2007;Cognitive Edge 2009, 2010). Recognising the levels of complexity enables decision makers and strategists to use appropriate tools and make informed decisions, resulting in more effective outcomes (Cognitive Edge 2009).

Often when there are no predefined strategies within an organisation, a strategy emerges based on the behaviour inherent within the system (Walloth 2016). Harnessing emergence is important for activating change processes within a network, since organic responses may threaten to overthrow the rigid linear-based initiatives (Walloth 2016).

To overcome these limitations, the focus on implementation, adoption and sustainability of innovation and change is important. The understanding of how such processes can be fostered and maintained can be found in Arnstein (1969) who proposed the engagement of the people within an organisation as crucial for the achievement of sustainable innovation. Arnstein proposed a model of participation that showed the various levels and types of participatory behaviour that actors in a society or system may exhibit. This hierarchical system can be used to observe and categorise how individuals function, communicate and interact within a system. It helps identify whether the organisation is characterised by manipulation of information and ideas, or by partnership and participation among staff and departments.

Further contribution to this area came from the anatomy of cultural change model proposed by AtKisson (1991), that examines how the diffusion of innovation and change occurs in a system. Atkisson (1991) identified nine different types of actors in this system: Innovators, Change Agents, Transformers, Mainstreamers, Unwilling Laggards, Reactionaries, Iconoclasts, Spiritual Recluses and the Renunciate Curmudgeons. They demonstrate reactions that contribute to the system’s adoption and acceptance of change.

These lines of study provide fertile grounds for practical application and investigation. Although the theoretical overview offered above is considerably selective and constantly evolving, it nevertheless offers a unique approach to support organizational development while overcoming limitations of linear-based approaches. It is therefore important to investigate the applicability of the proposed methodology as a complementary practice to achieve meaningful innovation within organizations.

Methodology

The investigation of this project is focused on the internal culture, processes and dynamics occurring within the subject company. Design research methods and participatory tools were used to gather data, while the theoretical frameworks supported re-framing and analysis.

The objective of the project was to: (i) understand the company’s functioning, expression and language, (ii) map out the formal networks and highlight underlying informal structures, (iii) identify areas of improvement from an organizational development perspective; and (iv) develop a strategy informed by a living systems perspective and complexity-oriented decision making, to improve internal alignment towards the company’s vision.

With regards to the design research, qualitative methods were applied. Interviews were used to capture qualitative data, especially regarding subjective and internal dynamics-related topics. Semi-structured questions were posed to the managerial level of the organization, so as to have an overview of the company’s functioning and insights on the internal perception of the processes’ level of complexity. To get further inputs on those aspects and to map the informal network (human relationships) of the company, shadowing and observation were used to capture unconscious behaviour and dynamics exhibited by the company’s employees in an everyday routine.

Day-to-day situations in the office, including social interactions, relationships and organizational behaviour were recorded during the research activity. Emerging patterns were also tracked. To track this without influencing the outcome, an internal staff member was recruited to anonymously acquire the data and observations. This approach was particularly successful as it prevented employees from acting unnaturally and gave the possibility to study the company’s functioning in an unbiased real-life setting.

The observations were then compared with survey data, with the purpose of investigating and uncovering the relationships and understandings that employees had with the company’s ethos and vision. All employees responded to a short anonymous survey, in which questions ranged from their vision of the company, their understanding of its strategy and the people they connected the most with during work.

As part of the qualitative research, participatory workshops were then performed with employees in the company premises and outside. The different spaces offered them the opportunity to freely express their thoughts outside a formal, corporate environment to foster the emergence of a shared solution that would be most relevant and relatable to the employees rather than to create one independently and imposed upon them (Sanders & Stappers 2008).

The Team Dynamics Activity (Wujec 2015) was used to observe team dynamics and individual behaviour when engaged in problem-solving situations within groups. For this purpose, the ‘Spaghetti Challenge’ was organised, with participation from all employees (except the chairman). Conducted in multiple teams of 3-5 people each, this was a fast-paced team activity inspired by the ‘Marshmallow Challenge’ (Wujec 2015). It helped observe the behaviour of individual employees and the group dynamics when members engaged in a collaborative activity, in a medium-stress situation.

The interpersonal relationships between employees was further investigated through a journey mapping activity. All employees, working in two mixed teams, were asked to map out the entire product development, production and delivery cycle based on one particular previous complex experience. After mapping the specific tasks, people, feelings and feedback gathered from that experience, the teams were invited to compare and contrast their work with each other, which allowed a collective reflection. It leveraged team knowledge by connecting the diverse departments and uncovered the potential of a joint reflective practice in improving company’s internal functioning and processes.

Finally, selected employees were engaged in a strategic-planning exercise through The Future Backwards workshop (Cognitive Edge 2009). They were identified based on their prominent network and relationships within the company, informed by previous research. They were engaged in a scenario-generation process, drawing on the company’s history and milestones, and extending its trajectory towards possible thriving or failing scenarios. They were asked to recount the milestones and events during the company’s past growth, and then iterate the process for possible ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’ situations in the future. Doing so enabled the employees to more consciously see the pathway towards the ideal outcome, and how the company’s strategy and actions would need to be refined to support it.

In total, throughout the duration of the study, seven interviews with the management, six hours of workshops, one survey, and forty hours of shadowing were performed, enabling the mapping of internal company dynamics and emergent behavioural patterns.

Categorization of Complexity in the Organisation

To propose a strategy to support company growth and innovation, experiential scenarios were presented to the management and staff. Its aim was to use foresight storytelling to bring about engagement and positive discussions around these topics. The outcomes were narratives that followed the company and personnel trajectories amidst the hypothetical implementation of the strategic design work carried out for this study.

When referring to the Cynefin Framework (Cognitive Edge 2009; Cognitive Edge 2010) and examining the internal perception of the company’s processes, it could be observed that the staff clearly considered business purpose, strategy, and decision making as chaotic and unordered activities (Figure 1a). This categorization implies that these processes do not respond to logical cause-effect relationship, or to directional or purpose-driven forces. This was reflected in how employees described the activities around those topics during the semi-structured interviews.

On the other hand, the great majority of the other processes were seen as best practice, meaning that much of the company’s processes were carried out in a simple space. Best practice areas included competitor analysis, customer management, healthcare policies, knowledge/skills management, manufacturing process, internal policy, internal procedures, mission and vision, and culture.

Other processes were classified by staff as either complicated or complex, depending upon the related level of expertise or knowledge of the respondent. Processes and activities regarded as complicated were: current product offerings, internal communication, and the management and planning of activities. Processes and activities regarded as complex were: managing research partner relationships and engaging with regulatory bodies. In the latter case, this was because multiple process iterations were required and uncertainty existed. Additionally, staff believed that the use of best practices or “champions” was not the best approach to identify and implement improvement strategies.

When applying the same processes from the Design Team’s perspective, differences emerged in the classification. This affects primarily the ‘simple’ quadrant, as shown in Figure 1b, in which only healthcare policies and internal policies are left. In addition, ‘simple’ processes include decision making and partner relationship. As supporting evidence, basic cause-effect relationships can be identified for both processes: decision making is carried out daily on the basis of the resources/knowledge available, while partner relationship is managed on a subcontractor level. Being in the ‘simple’ quadrant, there is a risk that oversimplification of these processes may push it into a chaotic realm.

On the contrary, complex processes include customer management, competitors analysis, internal procedures, and user understanding. While it is believed they are regulated by best practices and knowledgeably managed, there are gaps that make categorization difficult. Customer targeting is not fully developed, competition is under-researched and possibly underestimated, and internal procedures and user needs are usually neglected. While these issues are common in early start-ups of this size, correct identification and categorization helps tackle them appropriately.

Manufacturing processes, knowledge/skills management, regulatory bodies engagement and culture are more understood and established processes. They require compliance to pre-established patterns (regulatory bodies) or support for continuous improvement practices (culture, manufacturing, knowledge). Therefore, despite an internal perception by the company of these aspects being simple or complex, they have been categorized as complicated.

Notably, while communication is perceived as a mechanical process improvable through formal introduction and regulation, it is indeed a chaotic process. Neither rules nor hierarchy are followed in sharing information and assigning tasks, and this results in a problematic, interconnected communication process. Despite identifying communication as a major challenge, underestimating its level of complexity results in a lack of appropriate measures put in place by management and staff.

Findings

Based on the activities reported above and on the Cynefin Categorization process, the Design Team has identified appropriate communication, with particular focus on bridging management and staff needs; and fostering the internal culture around a shared, co-designed strategy as critical to organizational development.

A significant factor that is currently responsible for the imbalance in the company’s culture is the divergence in the comprehension of its vision. Whilst the founder and current chairman have a strong and inspiring vision for the near future, differences in understanding and feasibility of the strategy within the company emerged during the research. Despite recent attempts to communicate the vision internally (mainly through a top-down informative approach carried out by the founder himself), findings indicated that further time and actions will be needed for its ‘buy-in’ and understanding internally within the company.

This issue was particularly highlighted by comparing the founder’s vision taken from the interview and the results of a company-wide survey. The results revealed that the company’s vision as understood by the staff, was scattered in two different directions. For the majority of the staff, the vision was manufacturing and product-centric, instead of service-centric as proposed by the founder. As a result, concerns on company’s future and havevalso emerged. Word clouds reporting these insights are illustrated in Figure 2.

The company vision is not perceived differently by all employees, because the milestones and short-term strategies to reach it are constantly changing and are poorly understood within the company. The resulting internal perception is of a lack of a uniform and coherent strategy. This generates confusion, conflict and risks alienating management and staff. While flexibility and speed of action is maintained, committing to common milestones must not be seen not as a threat to company agility, but as an opportunity to build internal confidence and resilience.

Through this process, it has been possible to identify behavioural patterns that offer an insight into the way the company operates internally. In order to better describe these emergent patterns, findings have been compiled at both, an individual and at an organizational level.

At the organizational level, formal meetings and communication occur frequently with the aim of managing and maintaining consistency in operational activities. However, this does not always result in effective collaboration for everyday practice, leading to functional silos being created.

This widening functional separation has resulted in the emergence of strong informal networks and relationships between staff. This is also a result of the company being small in size and relatively co-located. Such informal communication connects the majority of the organization and ensures its functioning.

High dependence on the informal network risks the exclusion of certain individuals whose presence and involvement is important, but can potentially be bypassed. Additionally, the information discussed informally is not always relevant to company business. Leveraging these networks for business-related communication can risk the loss or misinterpretation of objectives and priorities.

As is true in many companies, most positions demand a balance of hard and soft skills. In addition to this, the match between personalities and the demands of a role are essential. Every individual at the medical-device company has the skills that help them successfully fulfil their duties on a day-to-day basis. However, when unforeseeable situations arise, the lack of common objectives and strategy causes individuals to fall back upon their inherent personal capabilities to deal with the situation. A mismatch of capabilities in key positions can cause roadblocks and conflict.

To map out this human aspect, individual reactions and behavioural patterns were identified and synthesised into seven common archetypes. These sought to highlight the different behaviours and attitudes exhibited at one point or another by individuals or collectively within the company (Figure 3). It must be clear that these archetypes are potentially extreme on their own. Most people may adopt one or multiple of these traits on different occasions. Recognising these traits enables the prediction of potential negative consequences and establish appropriate preventive strategies.

The archetypes in Figure 3 need some further explanation, and are thus described as:

• Self-Servers: more focused on personal growth & opportunities;

• ‘Yes-Sayers’: working to please their managers, or to align with their views in a non-critical way;

• Functional Workers: unable to comprehend or work towards the larger company vision and often push for short-term tactical decisions, potentially compromising long-term strategies;

• The Lost: suffering a loss of faith in company strategy, due to frequent changes and their struggle in contributing to the vision & strategy, where they may not make their ideas heard;

• The Faithful and Invested: continuously progressing the work and achievements of the company, believing in the team’s capabilities to tackle any situation they may face;

• Road-blockers: standing in the way of the two-way ‘flow’ of ideas and opinions, especially by imposing their ideas on others while often being unreceptive to different opinions; and

• The Energy Conductors: optimistic and positive transmitters of energy to others.

While the archetypes are situational and identify individual behavioural traits, a complementary approach can map out functional behavioural patterns at the organizational level. In the next section, this approach has been applied to the company’s internal dynamics through a metaphor-based narrative that identifies the functional and operational components needed to work effectively and collaboratively towards the company vision.

As a complex living system operating in a world of equivalent complexity, the company must set in place appropriate pathways to achieve company objectives, while also addressing needs and expectations of internal stakeholders (Capra 2002). To do this, an analysis of the organizational constituency and behaviour must be conducted and translated into meaningful strategic activities, for implementation within the company environment.

Finding a Narrative

Without a clear and shared strategy, executing a company’s long-term growth plan at an operational level is difficult, and can often end in failure to achieve desired goals. An insightful way to understand the company’s functioning and operation as a Living System can be sought through establishing a comparison between the organiational chart and the physiology of a cell (Figure 4). As a cell’s organelles execute its living and replication functions (cell metabolism), the company is composed by a range of multidisciplinary sub-groups. How they interact with each other informs performance, outcomes, and innovation capability.

The narrative can be synthesised as follows.

Nucleus (Management board): the nucleus contains the company’s genetic material, its DNA and essence. Long term information is stored in its members’ innovativeness and foresight, coding company’s mission and vision, and transported into the whole cell by transcripts that regulate cell activities, constituting the company strategy. Currently, the company’s strategic plan is not aligned with long term vision: as a result, cell actions are not targeted, causing a discomfort which is compromising its functioning.

Ribosomes (Department leaders): ribosomes translate the genetic material and convert the transcripted information into synthesised proteins that will be then processed by the other cell organelles. The company’s strategy must be segmented and unpacked by company leaders into purposed and meaningful actions involving all the company processes. Currently, ribosomes are responsive to signals that have been incorrectly processed in the nucleus (lack of strategic planning) and are producing unforeseen actions for company functioning (non-linear decisional processes).

Cytoskeleton (IT Department/Operations): The cytoskeleton acts to organise and maintain cell shape, anchors organelles in place, helps during the uptake of external materials, and moves parts of the cell in processes of growth and mobility. There are a great number of proteins associated with it, and it’s essential to cell stability and life. The company’s cytoskeleton involves networks processing and transmission of data and knowledge and is currently being limited by the nature of the provided proteins (inputs) to build with.

Membrane (Business Development Department): The membrane is a semi-permeable wall acting with both the function of transporting the cell products outside of it ensuring they are needed and used by other entities, and to selectively accept external inputs useful for cell growth. Currently, company protective and exchange functions are hacked by the need for additional elements for the cell metabolism (company growth), and as a result company is inadequately protected from the external forces acting on the medical device ecosystem (healthcare policies, market, regulations, competitors).

Mitochondria (Staff): Mitochondria are self-replicating organelles that can be present in various numbers, shapes, and sizes. They are responsible for the respiration process, an energy generating mechanism using oxygen to release energy stored in cellular nutrients. Currently, the inadequacy of company’s metabolism is hindering the activity of a large group of potentially enthusiastic/engaged people that produce a limited amount of energy, barely necessary for its basic functions, making company’s respiration (operational tasks like customer service, design, production) extremely difficult.

In order to ensure company’s cell metabolism and growth are preserved and nurtured, it is essential to identify and activate both ribosomes (future leaders) and mitochondrias (energy conductors), which have to achieve the company’s mission and vision.

Design Response

The research and analysis showed that the lack of alignment and participation in the company’s mid- and long-term strategy is an internal weakness. As a result, (i) informal networks override the company’s formal structure and functioning and (ii) an emergent adaptive behavioural pattern has been observed.

In response, the Design Team proposes that the informal emergent behavioural pattern should be leveraged and aligned to a shared strategic plan, that is, to implement a reorganization of the company’s working teams based on the company’s informal structure.

Taking into consideration the staff capability, functional roles, visibility and knowledge, the formation of three teams have been suggested: the Future Team, the Energy Team and the Advisory Team (Figure 5).

Inspired by informal networks, these formal teams will work cooperatively to develop semi-formal relationships around the organization to propose and implement strategic decisions and activities. They are explained as follows:

Future Team: They are crucial to translate the Advisory Team’s larger vision into feasible short- and mid-term goals, and enable the rest of the organization to take action.

Energy Team: They connect all areas of the organization to generate buy-in and enthusiasm around the common goals developed by the Future Team. The members of this team can perform their function interspersed between their daily work using informal channels.

Advisory Team: Being knowledge and corporate memory holders from different parts of the organization, they ensure that the Future Team’s map aligns with the long-term vision of the company.

According to the observations gathered throughout the project, it has been possible to identify potential members for the above-mentioned teams. The proposed system will operate with the specific objective of facilitating the decision-making process and engaging the entire organization towards a shared vision and the realization of the defined milestones.

By creating a discussion space around the company’s directions and vision, the Future Team will engage the vice presidents towards the co-creation of a designed strategy, while the Energy Team leverages the optimism and proactivity of the company. It will then be possible to execute an integrated innovative strategy at every level of the organization using the most appropriate people in each position.

Further research is needed to include the design of a strategic plan for the implementation of the proposed changes within the organization, including the application of foresighting techniques generating scenarios and narratives to foster increased participation and engagement within the company. This will ensure sustainability of the proposed practices, stimulate discussion and harness collaborative practices towards enhancing the engagement in future oriented behaviours (Candy & Dunagan 2016).

With this perspective, and with the role of strategy facilitator, the Future Team will be ideally positioned to test these techniques in a range of activities and workshops.

Conclusions and Recommendations

To survive in today’s volatile, unpredictable, complex and ambiguous world, companies must attempt to stay agile and innovative. In the process, it is apparent that these companies will eventually face organizational development problems. This project investigated the case of development of a small-scale company, applying a multi-layered approach centred in complexity-based strategic design practices.

When considering sustainability and long-term innovation, strong contextual and system analysis adds significant value by complementing traditional synthesis processes. This is especially true in understanding and managing complex living systems. Research tools and theoretical frameworks were used together in a complementary fashion to view the organization through a unique perspective and gather deep relevant insights accordingly.

Through the combined use of these methodologies, internal company dynamics were mapped and emergent behavioral patterns identified. This research addressed communication and strategic issues concerning the company’s internal functioning, aiming to promote activities that foster culture and resilience. By viewing the company’s internal ‘health’ through a focus on individual roles, interpersonal relationships and a shared common vision, it ties the company success to its people more tightly. The activities and collective reflection conducted within the organization opens lines of communication and further reflection. The support of open discussion and internal ownership aims to promote coherent growth and meaningful sustainable innovation.

This work contributes to the field of Design Management by promoting a complexity-oriented strategic design-based approach towards strategy-alignment and organizational development. It aims to significantly advance the management in small-scale companies through a sustainable innovation mindset, fostering the central role of design in the contemporary management of businesses and organizations. While this project supports future organizational development initiatives in small-scale companies, there is potential to scale the approach and find applications in medium and moderately-large sized companies.

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Reflection

This paper had an interesting genesis. When I was leading the Master of Design Strategy and Innovation in the School of Design at Swinburne University, I had created a Unit called Strategic Design Practice to enable the teaching of complexity in the context of strategic design. In this Unit, students were encouraged to connect with businesses, organizations, start-ups, non-profits and social enterprise to work on embedded projects at the service of the partner organizations.

During the course of Semester 1 in 2018, I was approached by two groups of students working on separate projects proposing to turn their project/client partner reports into academic papers for submission to the Design Management International Conference in London later in the year. This post is one of the papers: investigating complexity in the issue of urban traffic congestion.

I thought this was a great idea: for the students and for me (and a lot of additional work for everyone). In supporting this, as lecturer and supervisor, I reserved the right to edit the paper and add any further theoretical and practical information and insights that I thought necessary, while respecting the students’ work.

The students for this paper on urban traffic congestion - Mattia Vettorello, Brendan Donoghue and Ben Perez - did an amazing job in taking the client’s brief and responding in a professional, yet challenging way in their report. They prepared the draft of the paper, based on their reworking of their report for their client partner as well as the submission to me for their unit assessment. One of the digrams they prepared was truly spectacular!

Because the team’s focus was on generating useful information in their final report, there was a lot of theory and insight that was missing for it to be a good paper to present at the conference. I reworked the content to make it fit the academic requirements of the conference and added substantial text to strengthen its theoretical basis; arrive at robust conclusions; and reinforce its original thinking.

The paper was accepted for inclusion in the conference program. My students and I could not make it to London due to other commitments, so my Swinburne colleagues, Dr Maria Camacho and Brigitte Engeler, presented on our behalf.

In reviewing this work over 7 years later, I’m still impressed by the freshness of thinking, the application of complexity thinking to re-frame urban traffic congestion, and especially the courage in challenging of the client partner’s underlying thinking in the brief. I think its a good read!

Introduction

This paper reports on a student project within the Unit DDD80018 Strategic Design Practice, in the Master of Design Strategy and Innovation Course at the School of Design, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia. In this Unit, students are encouraged to carry out “live” projects with real industry partners, applying a range of complexity-based strategic design approaches.

The Design Team partnered with a small start-up company developing a mobile application (app) to assist motorists in finding street-based car-parking spaces at the end of their commuter trip. While the start-up company was focussed on app development, they engaged the students to review the assumptions under the existing business model and provide alternative strategies.

The company’s value proposition was that a ‘peer to peer’ app-enabled, solution may be the answer to the congestion challenge currently being experienced by many major metropolitan cities around the globe. By reducing the amount of time that a person spends looking for parking in their destination neighbourhood, the amount of urban congestion present in cities could be dramatically reduced, especially if motorists were enabled to find a parking spot within five minutes of arriving.

In reviewing the Design Team response to the design challenge, this paper identifies the design research methodology applied, outlines the context of the strategic design activity, questions the existing business model, and reviews the Design Team’s development activities. The paper concludes with the proposal for a set of strategic design “practice patterns”, to not only help the partner to better target their app, but to generate a strategic framework for expanding their offering into an ecosystem assisting with other dimensions of urban traffic congestion to support not only the Project Partner, but also any urban traffic system designers to improve the system.

Design Methodology

The Unit Project Brief required students to engage with an Industry, Government, Social Enterprise or Community Partner. The Partner could be an existing business going through a development phase; an early stage start-up developing their business model; or any kind of group, business or organisation working on an organisational or community development problem. In this case, the Partner was an early-stage start-up.

Students were required to assist the Partner with their problem, with emphasis on a process using strategic design methodologies. The Partner was asked to deliver a brief to the students (the Partner Brief). Ideally, students would review the Partner Brief, give constructive feedback, and where possible, critique and challenge it.

After receipt of the Partner Brief, the Design Team reviewed it to further understand the design context for the parking app, then adapted the Unit Project Brief to fit the Partner Brief, applying the following methodology:

• Review case studies of strategies to reduce urban traffic congestionApply complex adaptive systems thinking to understanding the existing context and future possibilities

• Create journey, system and dynamic network maps

• Map the levels of complexity in the urban traffic congestion context

• Frame a set of strategic practice patterns to assist with future shaping of congestion reduction strategies and an app ecosystem.

For the purposes of this project, complexity-based strategic design is the application of strategic design thinking extended by complex-adaptive systems methodologies at the systems level of a complex problem. This methodology extends conventional design thinking methodologies to account for the phenomenon of emergence. Complex adaptive systems in this context are socially-situated, and of a socio-technical nature. Such systems are in continuous processes of adaptation to change, which makes prediction problematic. Such systems also create emergent patterns of system behaviour, which should become working hypotheses for strategic designers. This approach enables strategic designers to understand and prepare design responses from a whole-system perspective.

Informing Case Studies

The first step was to review two case studies to highlight where cities or organisations had attempted to decrease urban congestion: London with its congestion charge introduced in 2003 and Waze, an Israeli built wayfinding app that is now used daily by 65 million people globally (Hall-Geisler, 2016). These two case studies were chosen due to their high-profile; their time since implementation; and their different contexts – city-imposed versus user-centred.

London Congestion

Congestion charging was introduced in London in February 2003 (BBC, 2003) in an attempt to reduce the number of cars entering the City of London. The scheme, administered by Transport for London, operates by charging all vehicles who enter the city a fee upon entry, with exemptions gradually introduced for ‘green’ vehicles.

The concept of the scheme was simple: by imposing a fee onto motorists, the cost of travelling into the city would increase, and alternative transport methods would then be seen as a more viable alternative. The stated purpose of the scheme was to reduce the number of trips made by car into the city and to reduce the amount of pollution associated with these trips. Each day there are 31 million trips made over the greater London transport system and the congestion charge aimed to move people from car trips and onto either public transport or to self-propelled transport means such as bicycles.

The scheme has had problems: it has been actively opposed by Central London businesses since its inception. Some detractors for the scheme see the blanket charge as a regressive tax, owing to the fact that the poorest of motorists are charged the same as the wealthiest. Another complaint with the system was the complexity of the payment process. (Munford, 2017).

Despite the clear goals of the scheme, and the complaints of the detractors, the impact of the congestion charge has been difficult to measure. The size of this system and the many variables impacting it make it possible to read differing outcomes from the same data. The areas of both financial impact and actual congestion are still open to debate with both sides claiming either failure or success of the scheme.

The complexity of the system is greater than may have been envisaged by the original planners of the charge. The charge was a bold step to prioritize the health and wellbeing of the city over the interests of vehicle commuters. But the difficulty in being able to accurately track outcomes, as well as predict future behaviour serve as a perfect example of the complexity that can exist within a system that deals with metropolitan transport. When dealing with these types of complex systems solutions must be multiple in number and adaptable to emerging human behaviour to remain effective. While the charge has been a boon for finances and has managed to reduce the number of cars on the road, albeit with lessening success over time, its overall impact is hard to quantify, and is therefore difficult to support as being a significant change towards the public good. The architects of the charge appeared to believe that a single, well-run charge, could permanently improve the experience of driving in the city. This has not been the case though, with travel times impacted by a variety of unforeseen issues and stakeholder behaviour. Additionally, the charge has potentially had a negative impact on the quality of life of some residents and on the financial health of some city retailers.

Waze – A Wayfinding App

Waze is an Israeli-founded navigation app that seeks to combine the features of a traditional guidance app, such as Tom Tom or Apple Maps, with both dynamic and crowd sourced information about roads and traffic. By giving users the power to identify and tag traffic bottlenecks, road works, and unplanned incidents, Waze hasbeen able to build a navigation platform that can efficiently guide motorists to destinations quicker when compared to standalone solutions, such as Google Maps, or simple human intuition and memory. Waze was viewed as such a successful idea that it was acquired by Google in 2013 for USD 1.1 Billion. (Lunden, 2013). Asof the end of 2016 Waze was used by 65 million people a month, in 185 countries.

Waze is a sophisticated platform due to its access to real-time data sourced from both users and government agencies. When these rich data sets are integrated, Waze is able to accurately show the conditions that affect a user’s journey and then give advice in real time to enable motorists to avoid problems and bottlenecks.

A key strategic design decision is that Waze treat all roads, highways, arterial roads and suburban streets as of equal priority and simply aims to get users to their destination as fast as possible by any route. In Los Angeles the impact of this decision has seen once quiet streets become busy thoroughfares as Waze directs drivers down such streets to avoid freeway gridlock (Moore, 2016). This has placed a load on city streets that are not designed to handle this and exposes them to a risk of faster decay and degradation. It trades one positive experience, a reduction in traffic, for another, quiet enjoyment of one’s home and street. Residents in these streets have appealed, unsuccessfully, to Waze to have their streets removed. They have also engaged in ‘digital guerrilla warfare’, using the app to falsely submit information about crash and other hazards so that the app would direct users away from their neighbourhood. Some users in Tel Aviv have even taking to suing Waze for the damage the app has done to their suburbs (San Francisco Chronicle, 2017).

Furthermore, the singular focus on the reduction in travel time has placed the importance of quickly arriving at one’s destination over social cohesion and amenity. The app exposes the dangers of an outsourced approach to city traffic management. The use of an app or algorithm to drive decision-making that affects millions of users places enormous control in the hands of limited individuals that may not appreciate the consequences of their decisions. The removal of the decision maker from the ‘on the ground’ world of the city means that their decisions can lack the appreciation that would have otherwise come from a resident or local government member.

The rise of the dynamically updating navigation app Waze on the transport systems of the world has thus had far reaching, intended and unintended, consequences that has undermined their original goals and, in some ways, amplified the very problems they intended to solve.

The Design Context

Both of the case studies showed that, despite some improvement in the experience of motorists, both had ended up delivering either less-than-expected benefit, or traded one benefit for another, and made the situation worse. The extent of unintended consequences indicates that the challenge of reducing urban traffic congestion fits the description of a ‘wicked problem’ (Rittel & Webber 1973): a class of social system problems which are ill-formulated, where the information is flawed, incomplete or unavailable; where there are many stakeholders and decision makers with conflicting values; and where individuals in the system do not understand whole-system behaviour. Wicked problems defy conventional linear approaches to problem solving, which are better-framed through a systems-thinking approach, especially one based on complex adaptive systems.

Given the brief for the Melbourne congestion project, a series of systems thinking tools were identified to map out the components of the Melbourne road transport system, to understand significant interaction factors and to understand the ways in which the system might be influenced towards an improved state. In this respect, many nested systems contribute to urban congestion phenomena, including, but not limited to:

• Mechanical systems: cars, bicycles, buses, trucks, trams

• Sensing systems: traffic lights, sensors, traffic cameras, control centres

• Habitation systems: homes, buildings, offices, shops, factories, industries

• Biological systems: parks, rivers, vegetation, local climate

• Institutional systems: governments, organizations, business and industry, police

• Built environment systems: cities, regions, towns, streets, roads, tram networks, bicycle paths

• Social systems: consumers, motorists, passengers, pedestrians, cyclists

• Cultural systems: behaviours, values, attitudes, norms

• Economic systems: jobs, pricing, fees, grants, fines

Every workday the abovementioned systems “metabolise” 12.9 million trips taken in the metropolitan Melbourne. (Bureau of Infrastructure, 2014). Additionally, there are 385 new permanent residents per day, or 140,000 new people a year, moving to Melbourne (Population Australia, 2016). Each of these new citizens expects infrastructure and services which they pay for by working at jobs where they commute using roads or public transport. Congestion also exists in a system that expands and contracts on a minute by minute basis and identifying the system boundaries is problematic.

While urban planning organisations or regulatory bodies, like VicRoads, and other State and Federal Government Departments, might be seen to play a major role in managing traffic congestion, in practice this system is more fluid. While “harder” elements like road and parking rules provide some guidance about use of resources, the system is open to events that can impact it in unexpected ways. For example, a car parked in a Clearway is an unpredictable and hard-to-quantify event and can have an impact on the system far outside of what the definition of the system might expect.

Urban traffic congestion is the result of a large number of interactions and elements within the system. Human decisions and the adaptation of behaviour result in complex flows of inputs and flows throughout the system. The Design Team created a detailed urban journey map to aid in understanding of the journey-to-work flows and motorist experience (Figure 1). The issues identified in this mapping are discussed in the next sections.

Urban Traffic System Dynamics

From the urban journey map, the Design Team considered that the urban traffic and parking system is predictable to a degree and consistent patterns may emerge over time, if motorist behaviour is relatively consistent. This is driven by shared knowledge amongst motorists about expected traffic conditions through a learning-by-doing process in real-time. They involve socio-technical structures and dynamics where people, technology and culture intersect to support human needs of mobility, service and value creation.

However, it is not always possible for members of this system to understand the system hierarchies, structures, internal processes and natural boundaries, especially when unforeseen disruptions change the entire balance of the system.

The systems-oriented view enabled the Design Team to think about congestion not simply as cars on roads but as part of a larger living system. This mapping activity led the team to debate the meaning of words, the meaning of actions, the real and perceived inputs and outputs of these dynamics, as well as some simple measures for how feedback might be gathered to track what is happening within the system. From the systems view, a narrative emerges as shown in the Input-Output-Feedback Map in Figure 2:

From Figure 2 it is evident that cars are a primary input into congestion and so solving how many cars there are or where those cars are allowed to park is a very important factor in a larger collection of driving factors. From the system mapping, it is further evident that congestion is an output of the system: it seems to be an emergent property that sits within the system and between the participants, but never fully under the control of any of the system stakeholders.

The mapping was very helpful in creating a shared understanding of what exists in this system. It is not enough to take a user perspective in isolation, when their decisions have effects and reactions right across the system; and further, deciding what information or knowledge might be allowed into the system is also an important consideration. Just because information is knowable, accessible or available does not mean that it will have a net benefit, and when we understand that knowledge directs action, it is not certain that action will ultimately lead to the right outputs as it is transformed, adapted, interpreted and actioned through many complex dynamics.

One the key challenges identified through the process of system mapping is the that the intersecting systems in the congestion context have competing goals. Further, as motorists travel into the system from the outer suburbs, and trucks commute between major capital cities inbound to Melbourne, as a living system it is hard to define the system boundaries and truly explore our context. From a goal-setting perspective, the intended goal of the system is to provide access to road transport to enable motorists to get to their intended destinations and to park their vehicles.

A number of key inputs have been identified in the system map. In particular, the major inputs are: people; cars; roads/infrastructure; money/wages; governments/regulations; and knowledge/data/apps. Inputs result in flows addressing system goals, creating stocks (such as traffic bank-ups). Stocks such as road capacity and parking space availability create dynamics around congestion; but as the nature of space on roads and space to park changes minute-by-minute during commuter periods, stocks must be understood as a general pattern or system condition: for example, even if ten available parking spaces may be a constant state, it may not be the same ten spaces in the same streets at any given time, making the need for timely knowledge the key aspect of a healthy road transport and parking system.

Feedback, a controlling factor common to all systems, is also a major consideration in the dynamics of the urban traffic system. The type and quality of system feedback is dependent on the levels of complexity. In a traffic system, most of the system feedback operates through linear cause-and-effect relationships. This means we can measure qualities like pollutant and CO2 levels, number of cars and trucks on the road, journey times and congestion rates. It has become clear that the feedback mechanisms are difficult to measure the true system impacts of any one input/output causal relationship (such as in the London case study). However, we can see congestion as feedback signalling other impacting events within the system that will influence behaviour change amongst motorists and traffic controllers as they seek to re-orient towards a more favourable journey and parking regime. The single-purpose parking app under review is entirely dependent onmsimple feedback loops created as car spaces become available.

The urban traffic system has a number of positive and beneficial outputs such as commerce, employment, and user amenity through mobility. But we also have many unrealized negative outputs such as deaths or injury and even displacement of long-established communities.

Dynamic map

In the next phase of assessment, the Design Team created a Dynamic Map to uncover how elements of the system interacted and impacted on other elements. Following the guidelines laid out by Gharajedaghi (2011, p29 - 55) the team were able to visualize the interconnectedness of all elements within the system and use this to generate key insights into the behaviour of the system (Figure 3).

From the above map a number of insights and questions emerged: Firstly, in a world where population growth is only likely to increase, and where the Australian Federal Government pursues a high-growth, pro-freeway, neo-liberal agenda, this will continue to increase the number of motorists and demands on the capacity of available resources and infrastructure, and pressure State Governments to prioritise increasing the capacity of freeways and arterial roads.

The second insight is that public transport is valued as a highly positive public good because it attracts citizens and reduces cars and pedestrians. It has a major impact on primary inputs (cars, people) while still maintaining many of the benefits of personal transport, such as appropriate mobility. This may not be a particularly revelatory insight but it does show that public transport needs to be a very primary consideration in the overall solutions to be considered.

Thirdly, all levels of government have an important role to play but many of the dynamics can be difficult to interpret or hard to balance effectively. Governments want people to be employed, and so they increase infrastructure to support this, while simultaneously reducing amenity and green space that their constituents would want to use for alternative purposes. Additionally, governments want to support local commerce with simple parking options to use business, while knowing that this creates congestion on streets and lower productivity for others while this space is under-utilised.

Finally, the place of mobile apps should be considered in terms of overall system dynamics. Navigation or citizen support apps relating to congestion aim to provide benefits to citizens and governments, but it is not clear whether this really happens. As most regular road users have information from Google Maps and other navigation apps such widespread use has not impacted greatly on urban congestions – and it may contribute to congestion because of mass motorist reaction in response to the same information. A key task for designers, then, is to understand how apps can value add to any solutions at key leverage points, rather than helping to minimize just one or a few of the symptoms.

Sense-making

To better understand and classify the information collected, the Design Team employed a Cynefin Categorisation Map. Initially developed through Knowledge Management at IBM, this ‘sense-making’ framework offers designers a methodology to help guide decision making by categorising observed phenomena into different levels of complexity and order (Kurtz & Snowden, 2003). When using the Cynefin Framework (Figure 4), decision-makers can classify information into four key levels of complexity: simple, complicated, complex and chaotic; and three dimensions of order: ordered (simple and complicated domains), unordered (complex and chaotic domains) and disordered, in effect the opposite of order as conventionally understood. The Cynefin framework applies the term “unorder” as a qualitatively different type of order – an emergent order rather than disordered.

Each complexity level requires different practice approaches. Simple space applies known processes and practice can be linear. Complicated space requires many different experts applying known processes in a high order form of coordination and project management, with analysis the pathway to sense-making. Complex space requires a sense-making approach with the primary task of identifying and interacting with emergent patterns of system behaviour. Chaotic space requires any type of action towards system stabilisation before any sense-making is possible.

In this project, the Cynefin Categorisation Framework was used to interpret urban traffic congestion and parking issues in terms of levels of complexity to aid in framing a design response to the Partner Brief. There are two ways the Design Team applied Cynefin Categorisation:

• Mapping the current system to position levels of complexity amongst the socio-technical elements of the system; and

• Understanding the phase changes in the urban traffic situation as a function of time whereby whole or parts of the system traverse through the levels of complexity from simple to chaotic.

Categorising the Current system

Simple Space

Within the various systems at work within urban traffic congestion, there are many known cause-and-effect relationships. Driving creates pollution (which creates sickness or reduces health) and emissions from vehicles make a significant contribution to CO2 levels in the atmosphere. As such, the cause-and-effect link is usually well known. For instance, a shorter trip is likely to contribute less pollution than a longer trip (all other things being equal), such as a longer time spent driving is likely to cause more pollution than a shorter time. Additionally, as pollution increases we can identify ill-health effects related to vehicle pollution.

Simple space approaches to easing congestion often use various incentives (rewards and punishments) to impact on user behaviour or linear inputs into the system. Often these incentives are financial; taxes or tolls aligned to certain behaviours or actions that it is hoped will create the outcome that designers or planners are hoping for as discussed earlier in the London case study.

There are well known cause-and-effect relationships between growth and a demand for services. Growth of population creates additional inputs into the system, needing to be supported by increasing levels of capacity and infrastructure. As employment grows, there is more income or wages to be spent on commerce, potentially requiring increased mobility to access goods or services.

An example of a simple space solution is the way that ride-sharing services tend to have an impact on reducing congestion (Li, et all., 2016): that by “ride-sharing” we reduce the number of cars when compared to travelling alone, although this insight would only be robust if such services replace a single car journey. For example, Uber is arguably adding to car numbers as it has created a newer market from non-taxi users and non-vehicle commuters due to its non-surge price-point, particularly since many Uber drivers are now purchasing cars for the purpose of being an Uber driver rather than using existing under-utilised vehicles.

One of the most significant risks in simple space is the oversimplification of response and the assumption of simple, linear cause-and-effect relationships where the reality could be quite different. A simple example is to assume that addressing one cause will lead to a better system-level response. For example, an initiative as simple as a congestion tax not only creates a monetary incentive for one specific type of behaviour, it also creates the possibility or space for other alternative behaviours. The risk with taxes is that they effect users in different ways, and act in a narrowly channelled way. In short, the alteration of the environment may not impact the cause, let alone the cause leading to a linear reduction in the effect.

Complicated Space

In complicated space, cause-and-effect relationships in the systems are knowable but are not generally well understood, due to it being the domain of expert knowledge. Improving efficiency in the system may or may not reduce pollution, illness or other phenomena like congestion. When there is a maximum capacity in a system, seeking maximum efficiency is associated with use of all resources individually being the most efficient. This is the approach of technical experts such as traffic and software/IT engineers. Yet, the synergistic effects of such multiple initiatives may have limiting returns that don’t achieve overall reductions in congestion that each specific initiative may achieve in isolation.

Removing the inefficiencies associated with both road congestion and congestion caused by parking-seeking behaviour, encourages greater use of the system. As the Waze case study showed, increasing the capacity of the system can lead directly to increased demand and a reappearance of the original problem, but at a greater scale. This is commonly known as the Jevons Effect, where the ability to create efficiencies in resource use, encourages greater use of the resource (Mayumi & Giampietro, 2009).

Changes to one part of a complicated system may lead to flows to other parts of the system. In complicated space, it should be possible to measure, understand or test scenarios of what secondary impacts might be. Often roads share space with parking, with unutilised or under-utilised parking limiting capacity. A more efficient system might be to simply remove the parking and allow the roads to run at full capacity, such as in a clearway. Road capacity is a valuable resource and as such it should be considered as a factor in design.

Complex Space

In complex space, the system has cause and effect relationships which defy categorisation or analytic techniques, because patterns emerging from system interactions can be perceived and mapped but are difficult to measure and predict. In the urban traffic congestion context, this is largely due to the “human” element, where individual motorists make their own adaptations to the traffic conditions they experience. When many motorists make such individual adaptations seeking to maximise their own benefits, the system moves into complexity, which will then affect the state of the system through new emergent patterns.

The fact that we continue to put in place apps and big data solutions provides us valuable insight into what has gone before in terms of patterns of behaviour. The use of apps and big data can be very useful in stabilising complexity and moving the system back into complicated space, along with increased predictability. Providing guidance through apps like Waze can increase system efficiency and reduce congestion, until the apps create new adaptations in response to the original information and patterns. In this way, apps and big data play a dual role as both analysers and creators of emergent patterns.

As traffic control systems adopt AI platforms and as autonomous vehicles gain traction and increase in number, there may be increased chance of urban traffic systems remaining in complicated space for longer, thus being more predictable and efficient. The synergies of such systems are a long way off, and policy decisions about reducing car dependence will be necessary.

Autonomous vehicles interact with many elements of the system. For example, an autonomous vehicle today can drive, stop, navigate amongst many other capabilities, but it is the ability to do this while absorbing all of the information a human driver does, and then being able to flex within the system to accommodate the unexpected that means we still rely on human drivers. (Muoio, 2016) Over time many of these challenges will be solvable while many of the “black swan” or unexpected events will remain too chaotic for autonomous vehicles to interpret.

Added to this complexity is the fact that human drivers will co-exist with autonomous vehicles for an extended period of time and may change their own behaviour in response. In regards to the system, the coming age of autonomous transport may place a time limit on many current technological responses to congestion, particularly those related to driver information.

Chaotic Space

Chaotic space is where patterns of system behaviour have not settled and the only action is to take action. Some might argue that the congestion systems explained already operate with such complexity that they are on the edge of chaotic.

For example, human behaviour is the primary cause of car accidents. (Foy, 2013). While efforts have been made to reduce accidents through speed limits, road rules and better roads, accidents still persist within all traffic and congestion systems. One reason for this is the unpredictable human element. Humans crash while not paying attention, while texting, or simply because their mind is elsewhere because of reasons as varied as daydreaming or personal issues that, while completely unrelated, do cloud judgement.

From a systems and complexity perspective, it would seem a little outrageous to put “human personal situation” as a system input, yet the example above does show that in a living system it is possible to go very deep when looking for potential inputs that may have influence. And even in doing so, and choosing to include them, that they will remain entirely unpredictable.

The increasing use of AI in smart cities and autonomous vehicles also remains unpredictable (Williams, 2017). Given that AI is human coding with the ability to interpret new information and to react and adapt, it is entirely unpredictable to anyone what this intelligence might do with this information. The unpredictability of AI is shown by the recent example of a Google created AI inventing its own language. (Coldewey, 2016) This AI developed knowledge about connections between words not fully appreciated by humans, and then proceeded to communicate this way as it was more effective. This creates many questions about how AI might respond in the space of traffic congestion, such as finding new ways of subverting road rules and creating trip efficiency. All we do know is that our decisions about how far we allow AI to go into directing our transport is likely to have many unexpected consequences, far removed from what we might even perceives as risks.

Disordered Space

In the Cynefin Categorisation Framework, disorder is the domain of currently uncategorisable data, or data that changes too quickly to determine what level of complexity the issue or phenomenon sits. The domain of disorder is quite hard to determine in urban road systems exhibiting congestion. Disorder may be most relevant to the constant ebb and flow of participant desires and needs.

In urban congestion, disorder may exist in the process of future capacity expansion. Often traffic engineers apply known methods and techniques, as they almost always operate in complicated space, and their expertise applies a cognitive bias towards known, tested and measured solutions. As space for increasing capacity becomes increasingly problematic, it is likely that “decisions-not-made” about particular interventions are the disordered representations in the system.

In this way, government is particularly central to, and must be highly cognisant of, the competing demands on them that can create, exacerbate or potentially reduce disorder. This leads to the question: what is government’s primary concern? Government nominally exists to help regulate satisfaction of the public, but is this through amenity, green space, services, employment or the many other needs and wants of the participants in the urban congestion system. By asking this question and focusing on how it relates to disorder, governments might bring greater focus to the right long-term approaches for addressing congestion and categorise possible interventions into the appropriate level of complexity.

Understanding Phase Changes

Complex systems can go through phase-change processes over time – these effectively mean that different states of complexity are related to time; that is the system can be, in one phase, in simple state, with known behaviour. A change of input into the system can move the system into complicated space, or alternatively tip directly into chaos. The urban traffic congestion system can demonstrate such phase changes: at quite times ofthe day, the road system is operating simply with minimal controls – its behaviour is known to the motorists and no adaptive strategy is required. The system can move to complicated, especially when users increase, and more active control is required by traffic system controllers; however, the system is knowable, and motorists know how to cope with the changes. Further, control systems allow smooth flow.

Once a tipping point is reached, such as where the number of cars increases, and flow changes phase to a more complex condition, motorists then engage with multiple adaptive strategies in competition with other motorists, with uncertain outcomes until inputs each and traffic can gradually disperse outside of peak periods.

A phase change to chaos can happen at any time and at any level of complexity, the key factor being that the system or a large part of the system cannot deliver its primary function of enabling mobility. An early morning truck roll-over in Melbourne’s Burnley Tunnel is an instant phase-change from simple into chaos.

In designing a strategic response to urban traffic congestion, phase changes are very important consideration in the design response.

Design Response

In the preceding sections, the key issues concerning urban traffic congestion have been reviewed, including the application of complexity-based sense-making principles by the Design Team to understand how complexity and emergence impacts on the operation of the urban traffic system, including end-of-trip parking-based neighbourhood congestion and the experience of motorists within the system. The Design Team developed a coarse-grained working design hypothesis situated in complexity whereby the ability for a single action app, or single mandated change, is unlikely to bring about the intended reduction in urban traffic congestion when it undergoes a phase change into complex and chaotic behaviour (unorder). For the Partner, this means that the scope of the app may need to be expanded and potentially included as part of a wider congestion strategy – an ecosystem of apps connected to widespread motorist and traffic controller behaviour change.

To assist, the Design Team created a set of coarse-grained complexity-based strategic design practice patterns to support not only the Project Partner, but also any urban traffic system designers to improve the system and to apply the concepts of systems thinking and complexity to the role they can play in reducing urban traffic congestion. These practice patterns are listed in Tables 1 and 2:

The strategic design practice patterns in the above tables are not a complete or thorough guide to resolving urban traffic congestion, as they are very coarse-grained, and are presented as a working hypothesis. The limitations of a student project – time availability, access to data, prior knowledge – are not an impediment to future action based on complexity-based strategic design – they are a start on moving the problem to a better state. Just as important is the demonstration of the application of complexity thinking to conventional design thinking, as a model for the next stage of development of design thinking so it can be appropriately applied to complex, “wicked” problems.

Conclusions and Recommendations

The process outlined here was a valuable developmental and learning-by-doing experience. By linking with a real client as a Project Partner, students developed skills in consulting and understanding a Partner Brief.

Further, by application of a range of complexity-based strategic design methods, the Design Team extended the Partner Brief into conceptually different territory, in order to understand the intersecting systems of urban traffic congestion and its associated parking-seeking behaviours through a holistic view, and to challenge assumptions in the development of a single-purpose mobile parking app.

Informed by a complexity-based approach, the Design Team proposed that a single action app, or single mandated change, is unlikely to bring about the intended reduction in urban traffic congestion, especially when it undergoes a phase change into complex and chaotic behaviour. For the project Partner, this means that the scope of the app may need to be expanded and be potentially included as part of a wider congestion strategy – such as an ecosystem of apps connected to widespread motorist and traffic controller behaviour change.

As an alternative brief, the Design Team developed a set of coarse-grained strategic design practice patterns as a working design hypothesis to aid the Partner in developing an app ecosystem with capability to cope with phase changes in the urban congestion space, and to provoke change of practice through extending strategic design thinking into a complex adaptive systems approach.

Acknowledgements

The Authors acknowledge the contribution of Zubin Pratap, Melbourne, Australia as Project Partner.

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Reflection

This paper was prepared for the Unmaking Waste Conference in Adelaide, South Australia in May 2015. Our team consisted of lead author, Flavia Marcello and co-authors Bridgette Engeler, Kirsten Day and myself. Flavia presented the conference paper. My colleagues and I represented the Centre for Design Innovation at Swinburne University of Technology and were all academics in the School of Design.

As I had a long-standing interest in sustainability at Local Government level through my PhD Case Study into sustainability culture and practice at Coffs Harbour City Council, and as a new academic at Swinburne, I saw this as an opportunity to link up with the City of Wyndham for more potential research into sustainability practice in local government. To this end (and as noted in the paper) we participated in four community workshops held as part of the Wyndham 2040 planning process. This helped us to make connections with multiple staff and Councillors.

Another driver for the paper was to lay out some principles for a grant application to contribute to the Low Carbon Living Cooperative Research Centre LCL-CRC). The grant application was not successful. Feedback from the chief investigator showed that it didn’t conform with the requirement that projects demonstrate tangible carbon savings. We could have demonstrated this more explicitly in our application, as we intended to use the Wyndham community centres to run energy and carbon saving workshops for local businesses. This was a major strategy error on our part! Unfortunately our participation in Wyndham 2040 did not directly lead to further research activities at City of Wyndham, partly because the co-ordinator of research and development had left the organisation and the position was closed. I had spent a bit of time working with the research coordinator to frame an on-going research project.

But it wasn’t all gloom and doom: I did connect with the facilitator of the Wyndham 2040 planning workshops - Andre van Eymeren - who ended up being my first recruit into a PhD candidature, researching human flourishing in the context of sustainable cities! Andre used his on-going work with City of Wyndham as an action research contribution to his thesis - completed a few years ago, and he is now Dr van Eymeren!

Abstract

Community centres have the potential to reach beyond their architectural envelope and become central hubs of place, community and value change education around Low Carbon Living (LCL) practices. This can be done by building on the previous successes and efforts of LGA policies, actions and outcomes around sustainability awareness, inserting the community centre and its activities within a broader process of place- making, and making good use of existing social capital and community networks to educate through the promotion of value change. Lastly, community centres in major growth areas need to be considered within their future contexts as driven by the economic forces of development, the statutory framework of precinct and metropolitan structure plans and the imperatives of a minimum-waste, low-carbon future.

Introduction

Community centres, as pieces of architecture, are seen by default, as one of the principal drivers behind community engagement (Thornham & Parry 2015, 25). But what if the way they are designed – their location, planning, circulation, spatial characteristics and symbolic elements make it difficult for people to really connect? What if the mix of services they provide are not geared to respond to local communities ever-changing needs and desires? The key question is how can community centres go beyond their architectural envelope and become hubs of place, community and value change education around Low Carbon Living (LCL) practices?

If community centres can be an effective conduit for local government areas (LGAs) to provide a range of community services, how they can take on another, important role connected to sustainable development and community resilience: promoting and implementing behaviour change around LCL in those areas where it is most needed - outer metropolitan suburbs where an increasingly large majority of Australians live? To do this, the barriers to and opportunities for their potential role as promoters and enablers of LCL practices needs to be better understood through documenting, quantifying and mapping existing (and future) community networks in close collaboration with LGAs. Low density, outer growth suburbs of Melbourne are a example of an urban system that is wasteful and encourages unsustainable energy use and material flows. Their combination of car-dependence, demographic profiles, business practices and housing types result in a large carbon footprint that make them waste-engendering communities. This comes about through a complex interaction of state and local-level planning and development decisions, developers’ financial bottom lines and householder desires for large houses built from new materials, often with a high embodied energy. LGA-driven sustainability education initiatives such as Livewell Yarra have the means, demographic, and inner-urban infrastructure that predict high levels of success (Livewell 2015). The real challenge comes with implementing similar frameworks in outer growth suburbs, similar to the Eco-Acupuncture interventions carried out by the Victorian Eco Innovation Laboratory in Sunshine and Broadmeadows (VEIL 2010).

Purpose

We are here to, first, pose a set of questions; second, propose a context in which to answer them and third look at an initial case study. There is no exhaustive and conclusive argument but the initial excursion into a broader project that looks at the role community centres can play in the promotion of LCL practices in the principal growth areas of the recent Plan Melbourne metropolitan strategy (DTPLI, 2013). By mapping the accessibility, built form, use patterns and integration of outer-suburban community centres in the day-to-day civic and community functions of the areas they serve we will gain an understanding of the role they play today and allow us to design strategies for the future. Community centres are not simply architectural shells waiting to be filled with pre-determined ‘community’ activities – the ‘build it and they will come’ principle. If they are inserted within the broader context of place-making strategies and building on existing social capital and community networks, they can become catalysts for new forms of community engagement. When properly resourced, configured and connected, community Centres have the potential to integrate with the fostering of social capital and help in creating bridging networks which create of positive outcomes for health and well-being, positive parenting and child development, employment and business and ageing (DPCD 2011, 14-18). Based on this, how can processes of value change in LCL practices be woven into bridging networks to create another category of positive outcomes? Ife and Tesoriero have argued that community work has the potential to become one of the more effective ways to develop a more sustainable society (Ife & Tesoriero 2002, 23), corroborated by Gilchrist 2004 and Homan 2011.

Community Centres – existing roles

The role, function and purpose of a community centre varies from offering formal and informal learning, training and education, to a place to find leisure and sports facilities, dance classes, youth and children’s activities, clubs and societies, health and age support services, and spaces for other people-centred events and activities. It can be open for the whole community to access or made available to specialised groups within the greater community for certain times. Thornham and Parry have argued that community centres which partition space for individual use and function for specific activities and times are less successful in fostering a sense of community than those which provide flexible, ‘make-do’ spaces for group use (Thornham and Parry 2014).

Activities provided at Tarneit Community Learning Centre are devised and delivered for the benefit of the community, presumably based on what is popular, what is needed, what may reflect the skills requirements of certain demographics. However, this means centres are frequented by ‘customers’ who use these services on a ‘come-in and come- out’ basis according to their individual needs and desires (Thornham and Parry 2014, 31-2). And although such classes and activities can engender a sense of belonging to a group, they still operates at a certain level of individuality and do not help create what Gilchrist has listed as the more traditional elements of community development: informal self-help and solidarity, reciprocity and mutual aid, philanthropy and voluntary service (Thornham and Parry 2014, 34).

From the perspective of some local councils their construction or provision is a top- down deliverable, a tangible expression of a promise and a symbolic representation of ‘broader forces’ such as wider policy initiatives, socio-political and economic activities and intended statements of investment (Thornham and Parry 2014, 29).1 This deliverable includes community education activities centred on skills and knowledge-based programs such as Maths and English Tutoring or Women’s Literacy. However, behaviour change around sustainability and LCL practices operates more on attitudes, beliefs and values that cannot be ‘taught’ in the same way as skills and knowledge. In addition it is not the type of learning that occurs overnight but more through a process of time and practice, trial and error (Murray 2013, 130 & 135). These forms of value shift and behaviour change are more likely to happen in an informal, reciprocal and voluntary context where personal development and sustainable development run parallel (Murray 2013, 149). They should therefore be modelled more on informal, community-driven initiatives that leverage existing social capital such as Bollywood Dancing, Sewing Groups and Arabic Community Kitchens.

Community Centres – future roles

Effective behaviour change is not about creating new values but mobilizing existing values and tying them to beliefs and attitudes (Murray 2013). Strategies and approaches to educating outer suburban communities towards LCL can draw on similar approaches from technical and higher education contexts and adapted as necessary (Murray 2013, Mann et. al. 2013 & Shephard 2008). One barrier to this kind of education, particularly if it comes from a local council, risks it turning into yet another instance of being ‘told what to do’.2

So how can community centres be re-thought and re-considered to further facilitate their integration into bridging networks that generate positive social practices (DPCD 2011)? How can they play an important role in place-making processes? How can their potential to overcome barriers and drive change be unlocked and put to work to turn LGA community policy frameworks into reality?

More fluid, dynamic and malleable models for community engagement can inform the construction of new community centres but, more importantly in the context of waste- reduction, must include re-fitting and re-configuring existing facilities, adaptively re- using existing buildings and making more use of cyclical and/or temporary sites for community engagement such as ‘mobile’ venues and pop-up spaces.

Tarneit: an initial Case Study

Our first case study is Tarneit Community Learning centre in the South-Western suburbs of Melbourne, managed and funded by Wyndham City Council.

Wyndham, one 27 major councils of Melbourne’s metropolitan area, includes 16 suburbs and covers an area of 542 square kilometres. Its 2011 population was 161,575, having risen to over 201,000 currently and is projected to almost double by 2036 to 384,275 (City of Wyndham 2014). 90% of the population lives in a free- standing houses and 80% are family groups. 15.4% are in mortgage stress (where payments are 30% or more of their income), which is 5% higher than both the Victorian and the Australian average (ABS 2011). Wyndham was chosen as one of our first areas of focus for a number of its developing characteristics:

• it has estimated population growth to 2050 of 500-650,000 and is touted in the Melbourne plan as an area of focus for the city’s fastest growing region (DTPLI 2013, 155)

• has a critical level vulnerability for mortgage, petrol and inflation risks and expenditures (VAMPIRE) (Dodson & Sipe 2008)

• it contains the emerging East Werribee employment cluster that is expected to provide over 50,000 new white collar jobs in the health, education and high-tech research areas (DTPLI 2013, 48)

• is classed as peri-urban under Melbourne plan and will therefore become one of Metropolitan Melbourne’s permanent boundaries (DTPLI 2013, 140-2)

• will be served by the only two new stations of the soon-to-be-completed Regional Rail Link (Regional Rail Link 2014)

• has a number of effective and well-organised community organisations and networks (Wyndham City 2014)

Of Wyndham’s thirteen existing community centres, Tarneit centre is of further interest for three reasons: its particular location, it is the most recently completed and it is currently being expanded with the construction of a new library opening in 2015. It sits on Leakes Road Tarneit which today (beginning of 2015) acts as a dividing line at the very edge of the metropolitan boundary: with single family home suburban development to the south and unused farming land to the north.

However, by 2050, the scenario will be a different one. This starts in 2015 with the opening of Tarneit railway station on the new Regional Rail Link connecting Melbourne to Geelong and the completion of a library as an extension to the existing community centre. Further, there are six applications for subdivisions under the proposed Tarneit North Precinct Structure Plan (PSP) for 3,300 new homes and three new schools. Of these new homes, less than a quarter will be within 10 minutes walk of the Tarneit community centre although the PSP anticipates the construction of three (as yet unspecified) community facilities. There are general guidelines for their siting and parking provisions of future facilities but no other specifics are given.

Tarneit Community Learning Centre’s aims, as stated on its website, are to:

“encourage life-long learning, personal growth and well-being through the provision of widely accessible programs, services and facilities” and to

“provide opportunities for involvement and participation by the residents of Wyndham North and to foster a sense of place through collaborative partnerships with Wyndham City, other key stakeholders and the wider community.”

The question is, how can what it aims to do and what it actually does properly align? How can the construction of a lone building, on a long arterial road with a car-park out the back be widely accessible, foster a sense of place and facilitate collaborative partnerships? At present, barriers to its use and accessibility are related to: its distance from public transport (the nearest bus stop is 10 minutes walk away and services run no more frequently than 40 minutes) and the positioning of its entrance from the carpark side. Its interior plan layout does not help. Its compartmentalised rooms are assigned their designated functions and are organised around an oddly-shaped courtyard with no weather protection.

One answer to this question is make it more central to the process of place-making. While public places and architecture play a key role in building community, placemaking can empower local communities to create a sense of belonging through the creation and communication of place, because it ‘provides an important mobilizing discourse and identity for collective action’ (Martin 2003).

Community centres should be hubs of activity, a central connection point for a community and a place of hope and change but they can also become an all-purpose term to convey the desired synthesizing of community connection and relationships that is often not reflected in its uptake and use. For a place to form, it must enable the existence of one or more ‘centres’ or spaces that offer ways of encounter and/or gathering (Friedmann 2010). It then requires identification to designate its location, locale and sense of place. Placemaking can mark the birth or rebirth of a community, but it is not simply the act of building or refurbishing buildings and spaces: it can be a significant and compelling re-examination of everyday settings and experiences that ultimately brings positive change into a community and the lives of its people and can therefore act as an ideal venue for value change around LCL practices.

If placemaking is about creating spaces where people and businesses want to be, then the community centre is one of its critical elements because of its potential to bring people together. Placemaking is a set of social, political and material processes by which people create and recreate the experienced geographies in which they live.

Creswell identified the characteristics of urban places as reiterative social practices, inclusiveness, performability and a dynamic quality, to which Friedman suggests adding size (small), being inhabited, and becoming cherished or valued by its resident population for all that it represents or means to them (Friedmann 2010). As we will see, these notions connect closely to the factors known to shape the less physical idea of community and its all-important networks (Gilchrist 2004, 2-8). The power of placemaking and the power of a community centre are one and the same. Both lie in their connectedness: the inherently networked process by which socio-spatial relationships link individuals together through the common frame of place. Ultimately, both placemaking and community centres support and facilitate greater interaction between people to foster healthier, more social, and economically viable communities. If citizens are tied to the community through sense of place there is a greater potential for empowered action (Murray 2013, 143-4).

Building on Local Government Sustainability Initiatives

Over the last thirty years of the sustainability movement, local government has placed itself at the forefront of change towards sustainability. This has resulted in an extensive track record of efforts to change practice towards better environmental performance and more sustainable communities, with varying degrees of success (Parnell, 2005 & 2010). This suggests that sustainability efforts require regular “refreshing” to re-activate efforts of long-term council staff and residents (with the long view and corporate memory of past actions), as well as younger people and newcomer council staff and residents alike.

Our future work with Wyndham will recognise past successes and failures from other LGAs and build on what are valuable current initiatives, programs and processes. In particular, their “Green Living Series” which includes workshops on LCL-related issues such as: Designing and retrofitting for a more Sustainable Home and Climate Change Risk Management in Wyndham.

Policies, programs and other documents centering on sustainability change efforts and community “strengthening” (Wyndham City, 2014 & Wyndham City, 2011) will also be a valuable starting point.3 Tarneit responds in broad terms to their Community Strengthening Policy and Framework document (Wyndham City, 2014). More empirical research remains to be done to see how the centre and its activities are perceived by local residents in how it promotes and sustains their sense of community. But how does it (or can it) play a role in Wyndham City’s Environment and Sustainability Strategy (Wyndham City, 2011) to 2015 and beyond? The research team have been invited to observe the upcoming community district workshops under the Wyndham 2040 program, a community visioning and strategy incorporating a district planning process and community-led action (Wyndham City, 2015). These also present an opportunity to present on LCL strategies as a ‘road test’ for how LCL may be incorporated into future programs and pave the way for community centres to become a nexus where both community and environment policies achieve their outcomes.

Conclusion

Community centres are not just architectural shells, an LGA deliverable that signifies to the community that they are fulfilling their promises and providing tangible outcomes to enact the aims of their various policy documents. There is also an urgent need to reduce waste in contemporary society through the promotion of LCL practices centred around on bottom-up, community-driven value change. Nowhere is this more urgent than in the developing outer-metropolitan suburbs. Here low-density, car-dependent communities are made vulnerable to mortgage, petrol price and inflation risks in an environment which exacerbates climate change, creates waste and increases carbon consumption. Communities are not simply designed and built, they are the result of a much more complex network of processes and people. Low-energy homes, public transport and recycling are not enough to engender LCL practices, new forms of community engagement are needed. One solution is to re-configure the community centre into a space which allows for fluid, dynamic and malleable models of community engagement. Community centres which are inserted within the broader context of place-making strategies and build on existing and emerging social capital and community networks.

With the long view of change for sustainability, the impact of change can be observed, but its driver may be unclear: over time a range of influences on social and individual behaviour are at play in a complex web of influence and interaction: from the local to the global: friends and family; social networks; government programs; economic conditions; demographic progression; environmental education in schools and so on.

The reality for our research, then, is that our participation with local government and the communities they serve, can potentially be a contributing influence to the local cultural system of LCL.

References

Australian Bureau of Statistics. 2011. “Census QuickStats. All people - usual residents”, Wyndham (C), Code LGA27260 (LGA) http://www.censusdata.abs.gov.au/census_services/getproduct/census/2011/quickstat/ LGA27260 [Accessed 13 February 2015]

Agnew, J. (1987) Place and politics: the geographical mediation of state and society Allen and Unwin, Boston MA

Dodson, Jago & Neil Sipe. 2008. “Unsettling Suburbia: The New Landscape of Oil and Mortgage Vulnerability in Australian Cities”, Research Paper 17, August. Griffith University Urban research Program.

Friedmann, John. 2010. “Place and Place-Making in Cities: A Global Perspective”, Planning Theory & Practice, 11:2, 149-165.

Gilchrist, Alison. 2004. The well-connected community : a networking approach to community development Community Development Foundation (Great Britain), Bristol, UK: Policy Press.

Homan, Mark S. c2011. Promoting community change : making it happen in the real world. 5th ed., Belmont, CA : Brooks/Cole--Cengage Learning.

Ife, Jim & Frank Tesoriero. 2002. Community development : community-based alternatives in an age of globalisation. 2^nd ed., Frenchs Forest, N.S.W. : Pearson Education Australia.

Livewell Yarra. Communities Achieving Low Carbon Wellbeing. http://livewell.net.au/about/who-we-are/ [Accessed 5 March 2015]

Mann, S., J. Harraway F. Broughton-Ansin L. Deaker K. Shephard, (2013), “Seeking richer descriptions of learners’ sustainability attributes and learning needs”, International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, Vol. 14 Iss 1, 90 – 100

Martin, Deborah G. 2003. “‘Place-Framing’’ as Place-Making: Constituting a Neighborhood for Organizing and Activism”, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 93(3), 730–750.

Pope, Jeanette. 2011 Indicators of Community Strength in Victoria: Framework and Evidence. Why social capital can build more resilient families and communities. State of Victoria, Department of Planning and Community Development.

Murray, Paul. 2013. “Leading by Design. Cultivating Self-leadership for Sustainability.” In Motivating Change. Sustainable Design and Behaviour in the Built Environment, edited by Robert Crocker and Steffen Lehmann, 130 & 135. Abingdon: Routledge.

Regional Rail Link 2014 “Tarneit Railway Station” http://www.regionalraillink.vic.gov.au/construction/stations/tarneit [Accessed 13 February 2015.]

Shephard, Kerry (2008), “Higher education for sustainability: seeking affective learning outcomes”, International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, Vol. 9 Iss 1, 87 - 98

State of Victoria, Department of Transport, Planning and Local Infrastructure. 2013. “Plan Melbourne. Metropolitan Planning Strategy”

Thornham, H. & Parry, K., “Constructing Communities: the Community Centre as Contested Site.” Community Development Journal 50: 24-39.

Urbanalyst, “Final designs of Wyndham Vale and Tarneit railway stations unveiled”, Urban Analyst 2013 http://www.urbanalyst.com/in-the-news/victoria/1771-final-designs- of-wyndham-vale-and-tarneit-railway-stations-unveiled.html [Accessed 13 February 2015]

Victorian Eco Innovation Lab, What is Eco-Acupuncture? http://www.ecoinnovationlab.com/project_content/what-is-eco-acupuncture/ [Accessed 5 March 2015]

Wyckoff, Mark, A. (2014) “Definition of Place-making: Four Different Types”, MSU Land Policy Institute. http://www.canr.msu.edu/uploads/375/65824/4typesplacemaking_pzn_wyckoff_january 2014.pdf [Accessed 7 March 2015]

Wyndham City, 2015. Wyndham 2050. Your Community, Your Vision. http://www.wyndham.vic.gov.au/aboutwyndham/consultation/wyndham_2040/communit y_engagement

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Wyndham City, 2014. Growing Wyndham’s Community Strength. A Community Strenghtening Policy and Framework for Wyndham City.

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Wyndham City, 2011. Wyndham City Environment and Sustainability Strategy 2011- 2015. http://www.wyndham.vic.gov.au/aboutwyndham/planspolicieslocallaw

Reflection

This is a paper I prepared and presented at the Spirit of Learning Conference, Byron Bay Region in September 2003.

In 2000, 2001 and 2002, I was running a series of learning-by-making studios in the Architecture course at University of Tasmania. In these studios students experienced designing and building real projects in partnership with a community group in North-Eastern Tasmania.

In addition to the learning outcomes achieved by students, the studios also gave me a chance to engage in action research for my PhD studies. As with the Hidden Synergies paper, this activity helped me sketch out my ideas around the topic of meaningful learning as a dimension of developing a culture of sustainability. The paper also was an early stage draft which ultimately became the core of one of my PhD chapters.

In reflecting on this paper - and the action research experience - I re-lived all the highs and lows of these projects, as well as developed a new appreciation of what an amazing experience it was to be immersed in small, but complex, projects with multiple learning outcomes for everyone involved. This experience reinforced the importance of deep participation in supporting meaningful learning and action research.

Introduction

This paper explores the connections between meaningful ways of learning and its impact on behaviour and cultural change. It explores how these links may promote sustainability of small communities and beyond.

Sustainability is a concept (and a process) that is gaining increasing currency in many different domains. It is constantly being defined and redefined, as it matures. The most common definition comes from the Brundtland Report: Our Common Future (World Conference on Environment and Development [WCED], 1987); it is frequently recycled in most of the sustainability literature. Many environmental organizations, government organizations and corporations have their own definitions of sustainability and sustainable development.

This paper chooses not to define what is, in effect, a dynamic process other than to describe a general vision: to explore and develop ways of living which restore and protect ecosystem quality and services while improving quality of life for people; and to embed these ways in a new cultural paradigm.

Questions concerning learning and community sustainability are raised in terms of the failure of our socio-technical systems, resulting in negative ecological systems impact. There is a large, and growing, body of research and anecdotal work attesting to the adverse local and global effects arising from our socio-technical behaviours (Yencken & Williamson, 2000; Australian State of the Environment Committee, 2001; Worldwatch Institute, 2003).

In discussing communities, this paper is considering the role of the place-based physical community, because this is where we act out our behaviours, and make the majority of our ecological impacts. It is where we are most likely to reduce our ecological impacts through changed behaviour. Small communities are considered because, for the most part, we move in a human-scale world; we spend most of our time in a small number of places where we build our social relationships.

Behaviours are individual actions, but the influence of culture is represented in hidden ways. There is often a dynamic tension between behaviour and culture; but culture runs deep and can influence our (conscious and unconscious) choice of behaviour; yet behaviour change on a large enough scale, or applied at key points in our social systems can bring about culture change.

In reviewing the role of learning in sustainable development, questions are raised about the adequacy of formal education in contributing to the types of extensive behavioural and cultural changes that are needed. Such questions remain valid in terms of current formal education which implicitly or explicitly promotes ecologically sustainable development principles. Assessing whether such formal education is ecologically meaningful in terms of actual cultural change is an important task, and this paper merely represents a starting point in such an assessment.

In this paper, meaningful learning is discussed in terms of formal and informal frameworks, and their value, relative to each other and to the sustainability movement. This paper contends that, while a base of formal education potentially opens up myriad possibilities for behavioural change, it is the informal, reflective learning that arises from real-world action and experience that provides the most potential.

In the sustainability context, our communities undergo a considerable amount of education but arguably very little meaningful learning. Given that the global ecological crisis has been part of our awareness for several decades now, and that we still have not changed our behaviours much in response, it appears that we are not learning the lessons needed to move to a sustainable world. From a practical point of view, to further the movement to sustainability, learning must be considered as a completely different issue from education. Formal education is part of a paradigm that is separate from the natural cycles that we must learn to experience and understand. Formal education may also conflict with the real learning that occurs informally, especially when people are motivated to make real changes in their lives.

This is where the focus on the small community is important: there is immediacy about the effects of unsustainable behaviours; there is also immediacy about the learning opportunities that arise from these effects. Such behaviours need to be unlearned, and sustainable behaviours learned. The track record indicates that this will only occur through our direct experience: a silted up water hole; a polluted water supply; poor air quality; dramatic fuel price rises; surfing in raw sewage; release of genetically modified organisms and so on, can initiate appropriate action and the learning required to change behaviour. Change is difficult when feedback is slow, so we usually don’t act until the symptoms are obvious. Thus the real issue of learning concerns personal and community capacity building for change.

Behavioural and cultural change

The purpose in developing a new cultural paradigm is to attain an intrinsic state – a second nature - where sustainable behaviour is a part of life, a deeply informing impulse in our actions, a new social ecology. Behaviour and culture, as areas of study, are fraught with layers of meaning and many perspectives. In this paper, it is enough to name them as critical factors in a sustainable world; the key approach of this paper is to concentrate on the role of learning systems.

The deep nature of the cultural change required is problematic for formal education: we need to see changes in not only the behaviour of individuals, but of our groups, associations, organizations, companies and governments. This indicates that change is not going to come from the study of one module, or a unit, or a course or a degree. It will happen in slow cycles, building up over what Stewart Brand calls “deep time” and the “long now”(1999, p.37). Brand identifies a series of cycles that map how change occurs. There are the long cycles of nature and culture, the shorter cycles of governance and infrastructure, and the shortest cycles of commerce and fashion. Fashions change quickly, even ecologically sustainable ones. Culture changes very slowly.

In this paper it is assumed that deep cultural cycles are significant influences on behaviour. Notwithstanding this, cycles of fashion can bring about sporadic, short-lived behavioural change; it is, however, possible that some fashion cycles foster cultural change in specific domains in the short to medium term.

The implication here is that while the periods in our lives where we engage in formal learning provide the scaffolding for how we act in the world and develop our capacity for change, it is not enough to change our behaviour, which we act out over our whole lifespan. Formal education, while for some penetrates deeply, for others it is a surface thing, perhaps part of a fashion cycle: while an essential foundation, it alone is insufficient for cultural change. Informal learning links our periods of formal education; it transcends the quick fashion cycles and is fundamental for significant change over deep time.

Learning theories and sustainable development

The standard teacher education texts summarise the main theories guiding present day formal education: Piaget, Vygotsky, Bloom, Bandura, and Gardner amongst others (Woolfolk, 2001; McInerny & McInerny, 1998). These ideas focus not only on the development of children and young people, particularly in terms of syllabus-centred strategies in compulsory education; they also propose useful ideas for the discussion about the role of meaningful informal learning in the development of a sustainability culture.

Ironically, while this paper is reporting on behaviour change, it is contended that strictly behaviourist views of learning are not the most useful for deep cultural change. The behaviourist approach would represent the kind of behaviour change bought about by policy, regulation, taxes, reward and punishment. This approach has its place in the sustainability agenda, but the type of cultural change engendered by this approach is questionable: it may be shallow, fickle and begrudging. Cognitive views of learning, rather than behaviourist, may be more useful for deep time sustainability:

Cognitive theorists believe, for example, that learning is the result of our attempts to make sense of the world. To do this, we use all the mental tools at our disposal. The way we think about situations, along with our knowledge, expectations, feelings and interactions with others and the environment, influence how and what we learn.

(Woolfolk, 2001, p.240)

This view describes the type of process where people engage in self-motivated learning; it has positive implications for the meaningful. In the cognitive domain, other useful theories include: Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory of Development; Bruner’s Scaffolding metaphor (Woolfolk, 2001) and Bandura’s Social Learning/Social Cognitive Theory and concepts of Self-Efficacy (Bandura, 1997). These ideas stress that much learning takes place in social and cultural settings: such situated learning occurs in a process of acculturation to a community’s beliefs, values and norms; it reinforces behaviours appropriate to such a community. In the sustainability context, if acted negative environmental behaviours are representative of cultural norms, then formal education for sustainability may be of marginal value in the short to medium term. The converse may also be true: communities who have developed a sustainability culture over time tend to accelerate their learning about sustainable practices. Curitiba in Brazil (Lovins, Lovins & Hawken, 2000) and Portland in Oregon, USA (Newman & Kenworthy, 1999) are examples.

There, are, however, educational theorists whose ideas may shed some light on the value of informal learning frameworks. Dewey’s real-world views about the role of education in society (Dewey, 1997a; 1997b) have significance beyond the formal and the school setting:

What avail is it to win prescribed amounts of information about geography and history, to win ability to read and write, if in the process, the individual loses his own soul: loses his appreciation of things worth while, of the values to which these things are relative; if he loses desire to apply what he has learned and, above all, loses the ability to extract meaning from his future experiences as they occur?

(Dewey, 1997b p49)

Dewey further identifies that learning is most effective when tied to experience. Apart from the social learning aspects of this position, experience opens up further opportunities for learning, creating a spiral of deepening interest and understanding (Dewey, 1997b p37).

Dewey is critical of formal educational structures which are divorced from experience: for example the knowledge acquired in order to pass an exam, later lost and needing to be re-learnt. Education for sustainability in formal learning frameworks is flawed, if it is not grounded in experience. This learning in isolation:

….was segregated when it was acquired and hence is so disconnected from the rest of experience that it is not available under the actual conditions of life.

(Dewey, 1997b, p.48)

Some theorists and educational commentators present views highly critical of formal education. For example, Ivan Illich’s radical prescription is to eliminate formal education altogether (Illich, 1977). While this would be unrealistic and socially unacceptable, such an extremist view does help to highlight the problems with formal learning frameworks.

In a sense, these views indirectly support the idea that for meaningful learning to take place, it must connect deeply with the individual and their world-view, their aspirations and what they want to achieve through their actions in the world. Illich proposes:

The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing and caring.

(Illich, 1977, p.7)

While written some time ago this point of view has relevance, and seems to have predicted the informal ways of learning currently developing like wildfire on the internet.

Illich’s use of the term “educational webs” has proved highly prescient. Illich reinforces this idea with the following comment:

Most learning happens casually, and even the most intentional learning is not the result of programmed instruction.

(Illich, 1977, p.20)

Postman and Weingartner (1971) are critical of syllabus-centred learning because its primary aim is:

…..to prepare them to be docile functionaries in some bureaucracy and to prevent them from being vigorous self-directed learners

(Postman & Weingartner, 1971, p.72).

A tempering view on learning based on experience comes from Peter Senge (2001).Coming from the management paradigm, he applies systems thinking to the learning process and identifies that there is a problem with the experiential model. Experience works well when feedback is timely:

But what happens when we can no longer observe the consequences of our actions? What happens if the primary consequences of our actions are in the distant future or in a distant part of the larger system within which we operate? We each have a “learning horizon”, a breadth of vision in time and space within which we assess our effectiveness. When our actions have consequences beyond our learning horizon, it becomes impossible to learn from direct experience.

(Senge, 2001, p.23)

This systems framework indicates how difficult it is to achieve meaningful learning for individual behaviour change, let alone achieving the kind of learning needed for cultural change. This systems view of learning is especially important in gaining real outcomes in cultural change, and has great potential for connecting hard-won meaningful learning to sustainability. Bawden (2001, p.24) reinforces this idea of learning systems for “the propensity and capability for responsible collective action.”

What is meaningful learning?

Meaningful learning is a context-specific idea – both for individuals and communities. It equips people to act to achieve the things they value for themselves, their families and their communities. Meaningful learning is possible in any learning framework; Postman and Weingartner also draw on the idea of meaningful learning:

Simply said: there is no learning without a learner. And there is no meaning without a meaning maker. In order to survive in a world of rapid change, there is nothing more worth knowing, for any of us, than the continuing process of how to make viable meanings.

(Postman & Weingartner, 1971 p85)

This process of making viable meanings has significant currency for learning for a sustainable society. This is also predicated on whether individuals personally find meaning in the content of formal education for sustainability, in order to be motivated to learn what is needed for sustainability.

Formal education and capacity building

Many of our environmental problems have been created by technologies developed by people with highest levels of formal education available in Western society. This did not stop the development of technologies and associated behaviours that contribute to ecological degradation.

Formal learning is the basis of contemporary Western society; it is a broad community and social expectation, and it is legally prescribed for young people. Formal education is based on a structure of qualifications (degrees, diplomas, certificates) made up of courses, streams, units, modules, syllabus, curriculum and content. These qualifications are a form of tribal initiation into various domains; it is assumed that learning is the basis of the passage of the uninitiated into the initiated realms. Learning praxis, in formal structures, is for the most part, geared to the necessities of making that initiatory passage,not for the value of learning per se. The rhetoric behind every course, qualification and syllabus is full of the broad educational aims of study, the development of the person, the acquisition of knowledge, skills and attitudes; however, in reality, the application of course content falls below this aim: pass the exam! get the grade! higher pay! are the norms.

Formal education, because of its qualification focus, often creates very fragmented views of the world, with no crossovers between disciplines. It packages a whole area of experience, a body of knowledge, into something digestible in a relatively short time frame. Our short cycles have no room for the traditional twenty-year apprenticeship. It is due to the fragmented nature of education where the things that may be learned in formal processes are not internalised by the student: it does not have the transformative content that results in deep behaviour change.

Notwithstanding this critique of formal education, there have been significant changes in formal education structures in recent times to accommodate sustainability thinking and practice. The point of the critique of the formal in this paper is not saying, after Illich, to abandon the formal. Transformation of the formal sector is essential for better capacity development, as shown in the following examples.

In the school system, requirements to include sustainability are increasing, particularly in the sciences and Design and Technology (Board of Studies NSW, 2003). This is demonstrated by the release of a comprehensive policy on Environmental Education in NSW schools. (NSW Department of Education and Training Curriculum Support Directorate, 2001) In the Vocational Education and Training sector, nationally accredited courses such as those in renewable energy1 environmental building2, water and wastewater management3, and appropriate technology4 are appearing.

University courses in architecture, engineering5, planning, environmental studies/management are featuring substantial sustainability content. Specialist sustainable development courses are also increasing in number and popularity6. An example in the University sector is the Building Technology in Design stream of units in the School of Architecture at the University of Tasmania at Launceston: it is an example of recent national benchmarking of education for sustainability in the built environment by the Institute for Sustainable Futures at University of Technology, Sydney (Mitchell, McGee and Carew, 2002).

In a framework sense, these trends have been formalised under the heading of Environmental Education (EE) (Lucas, 1979, cited in Lang, 2003, p.2), a recognised aspect of formal school curricula, university courses and environmental learning centres; but recently, the term, Education for Sustainability (EFS) has emerged (Lang, 2003), and is being increasingly used to describe the efforts of formal education frameworks aiming for cultural change. Education for Sustainability:

….involves approaches to teaching and learning that integrate goals for conservation, social justice, appropriate development and democracy into a vision and a mission of personal and social change. It seeks to develop the kinds of civic virtues and skills that can empower all citizens and, through them our social institutions, to play leading roles in the transition to sustainability.

(Fien, 2003, cited in Lang, 2003, p.3)

It is unquestioned that formal education develops capacity in the individual, and has the potential to foster sustainability culture. Our structures of education create the foundation for learning – we learn the basics of literacy, numeracy and technacy (Seemann, 2003); we develop our abilities to research, to analyse, to synthesise, to create, to evaluate; we develop knowledge, skills and attitudes; and we do this all through pre-school, primary, secondary and tertiary education. We journey through this process with our capacity primed: to get a job, start a career, launch a business, become a social entrepreneur or even choose to do nothing much. This capacity alone does nothing, however, for the development of a sustainability culture.

Developed capacity, with its increased knowledge skills and attitudes, does not automatically lead to changed behaviour. It needs another ingredient; it needs motivation to apply the new knowledge, skills and attitudes to bring about change; it needs then to actively seek out what it needs to bring about change; it must reflect on real-world action and experience; it must be applied at key points in human systems: and this is where meaningful, motivated informal learning has most significance.

The importance of motivation in informal learning

In terms of motivation, there are many commonalities for both formal and informal learning. While formal education can equip us with the knowledge, skills and attitudes needed for sustainability, motivation may be more focused on passing the course than contributing to sustainable society. In the informal approach, the motivation to change comes before a motivation to learn what is needed to change; even though there may be periods of formal learning, the overall motivation in this case is to learn informally through a personal reflective process. Thus, such a motivated person is better placed to achieve change.

In the field of educational psychology, motivation for learning is described in a theoretical framework of expression, approaches, goals and self-schemas (Woolfolk, 2001; McInerny and McInerny, 1998). Motivation can be expressed as intrinsic or extrinsic, that is, from personal interest or outside influence. People can be partially motivated in both ways; or they can move from extrinsic to intrinsic motivation as a learning process progresses.

Intrinsic or extrinsic expression of motivation can play out through four general approaches: behavioural (rewards and incentives); humanistic (need for self-actualisation and self-determination); cognitive (thinking, making plans, developing goals, interpreting and responding to events); and socio-cultural (participation in the life of the community/communities of practice).

These theoretical motivation frameworks also describe the behaviour of learners as being goal-directed, with four broad kinds of goal: learning goals (knowledge/skill/task-centred); performance goals (demonstration to others/ego-driven); work avoidance goals (participation is highly conditional); social goals (extension to social relationships beyond task).

Self-schemas, or beliefs about one’s ability, also play out in the motivation mix, particularly if from an incremental perspective where the belief is based on the possibility of increasing ability through learning and experience.

It should be noted that these motivational frameworks do not fully describe the whole learning process as dynamic and changing. People move through the motivation framework as their motivation responds to a changing range of intrinsic and extrinsic factors. For motivation to provide the missing ingredient, it must be closer to the humanistic and socio-cultural, with learning and social goals uppermost.

Some possible pathways

Some of the better thinking in the connection of meaningful learning and sustainability is coming from researchers, facilitators and extension workers in regional Australia. A recent publication from the Centre for Research and Learning in Regional Australia at the University of Tasmania (Falk, 2001) highlights a study of learning, cultural change and sustainability amongst pastoralists in the tropical savannahs of northern Australia (Arnott & Benson, 2001). The study showed that pastoralists engaged in cultural change by a combination of place- and situation-specific processes embedded in a network of relationships with other pastoralists, extension services and educators. Timeframes were important: pastoralists motivated to change constantly chose to do so in their own time. It also demonstrated that pastoralists gained their motivation and knowledge through largely informal means, based on their own diagnosis of their own contexts. They also accessed formal education when they deemed it necessary.

There are many other exemplars showing how informal ways of learning that could help us to “care for country” and to connect us, and our behaviours, to the needs of local ecologies. Much work in developing countries, in remote indigenous communities and in the mainstream has been based on a meaningful learning approach.

Community-based Landcare groups (including Coastcare, Rivercare, Bushcare and Wildcare) have demonstrated how much cultural change can be achieved in land management practices through a highly motivated, informal learning approach (Landcare Australia, 2001, p.12).

Settlement planning projects in Indigenous communities incorporate learning processes to further develop the capacity of community members to make decisions about their long-term future on country, and to take action to make their visions a sustainable reality. A community in North Queensland engaged in an intensive planning project over a three-month period, followed up by regular workshops to focus on specific areas. (Centre For Appropriate Technology, 1997; Mona Mona Community, Djabugay Tribal Aboriginal Corporation & Centre For Appropriate Technology, 1999) The planning process was essentially learning-based; people needed to learn that they can make their own decisions about their communities future, and more importantly learn the strategies for successful decisionmaking.

Another planning process example in the east Kimberley region of Western Australia, responded to an existing motivation for change where there were strong views about what was needed to ensure a viable, sustainable community. The project was structured to facilitate the community’s own decision-making (Anda, Yuen, Calais & Revell, 2001).

There is a growing body of experience of participatory development projects in remote Indigenous communities, demonstrating how informal learning can contribute to cultural change. Haar (2003) describes a self-build project in the Torres Strait Islands in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, where the learning, though facilitated, was essentially informal; the project fostered substantial individual and community change, although political realities of land tenure and national politics has since stifled progress. Scally (2003) describes a successful approach where a mix of formal and informal learning structures has bought about significant development of outstations in the Top End of the Northern Territory. In a participatory project report, the author (Parnell, 1995) describes how an informal learning process on a real, locally valued project bought about change in a small outstation community in Central Australia.

Another example is a long-term slum community redevelopment project in India where sustainable development is a key goal. Learning has been built into the process, including the production of a planning handbook developed to record and reflect the long term aspirations of the community and to ensure the path to sustainability is followed (Burnham, 2002). The project is unfolding over a ten-year time frame to better foster change to a sustainability culture.

Conclusions: connecting meaningful learning to a culture of sustainability

An ethos of active and self-directed learning is the only way in which individuals and society can manage change in an inclusive and equitable fashion.

(Kingma & Falk, 2001, p.241)

Much of the ideas and contentions in this paper about learning and cultural change, arise from the author’s reflections on experience as both a learner and educator in formal and informal learning frameworks and in community development.

Where we currently stand is at a point where a sustainability culture is a long way short of being intrinsic, a second nature. Learning will be part of the process of achieving that second nature. It is crucial for us to understand: how and why we learn what we need to know; and how to connect what we learn to facilitate changing our culture from the ecologically destructive to the restorative. We must also maintain awareness of Senge’s (2001) warnings about the importance of time lags in feedback in our learning systems; it is ironic that this parallels the slowness of feedback from ecological systems.

When it comes to actively seeking change, the author believes that an informal approach to learning, on a foundation of developed capacity, applied in meaningful ways, in real-world actions and with a high level of motivation, is essential to create a culture of sustainability over deep time.

References

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Anda, M., Yuen, E., Calais, P. & Revell, G. (2001). Gelalba Nawarrangim: Community+ Settlement + Country – Phase 2 Report: Cultural Inventory & Analysis. Perth: Murdoch University/University of Western Australia.

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Burnham, R. (2002). Community Action Planning: Processes, Ideas and Experiences. Mumbai: YUVA

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Haar, P. (2003). Community Building and Housing Process: Context for Self-Help Housing, in Memmot, P. Ed. Take 2: Housing Design in Indigenous Australia. Canberra: The Royal Australian Institute of Architects.

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Landcare Australia Ltd. (2001) Landcare Australia Limited Annual Report 2001. Sydney: Author

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McInerny, D.M. & McInerny, V. (1998). Educational Psychology: Constructing Learning. (2nd Ed.) Sydney: Prentice Hall.

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Reflection

This is a paper I presented at the Community Technology conference at Murdoch University, Perth, in 2001. I was the first paper I produced exploring themes that would inform my PhD research, and the first piece of work I presented in front of my supervisors, Professor Peter Newman and Dr Laura Stocker. Needless to say, their feedback was “interesting”!

Reading the paper nearly 25 years later, and in spite of my obvious enthusiastic naivety, I’m struck by how much ideas in this paper have persisted and are being more widely discussed in the broader sustainability and regeneration movements now.

With respect to my current work with practitioners in the regenerative practice and culture zeitgeist, many of the ideas discussed in this early paper come up frequently in contemporary discussion, although often in the context of regeneration being “beyond sustainability” because sustainability is merely “less bad”. People can have a hard time accepting that these issues were being considered in the forefront of the sustainability movement 25 years ago and more.

This is particularly ironic, because even though I was (and am still) fully on board with sustainability as a model for human development and environmental protection and restoration, at the time, I was also severely critiquing then current sustainability practice as lacking both a depth of culture and a systems perspective informed by such ideas such as connection to land, interconnectedness between people, the importance of local action, the influence of indigenous worldviews, and understanding of complex socio-technical systems.

At the time I raised many contentions about the problematic intent of sustainability, leading to my position at the time that sustainability practice needed a deeper approach; yet I never described sustainability as a mantra of “less bad, keep things as they are” that’s often raised in the regenerative literature and by regenerative practitioners repeating this mantra as if it was fact!

Having said that, over the last 25 years my ideas and approach have developed substantially further, having been tested in my practice and teaching, and through substantial reflection. The development of one’s personal practice never stops.

I hope you enjoy this early piece of mine!

Introduction

To help small communities to move to a more sustainable basis, this paper proposes a different theoretical approach. The key contentions of this approach are derived from reflections on the author’s personal experience in working with indigenous and other communities in Australia and form the theoretical basis of a doctoral research program being carried out through the Institute of Sustainability and Technology Policy at Murdoch University.

In much of the recent sustainability literature, there is considerable emphasis on the use of technology to solve fundamental problems. Further, there is a belief that the combination of technology and government policy provides the key. Much of the language used in the sustainability agenda uses words like “could” and “should” as a presage to a recommended practice change, usually with respect to technology (Beatley, 1997; UNEP, 1992; ACF2000). This way of thinking excludes consideration of a range of social issues that provide momentum to actual human activities and behaviours that supports the movement to more sustainable communities.

The research focuses on the small community. The small community provides a counterpoint to globalisation as demonstrated by such phenomena as economic rationalism, information technologies, genetic engineering and biotechnology. These phenomena are beyond the control of most communities and are in many ways making sustainability more problematic: improvements in local sustainability are matched by a myriad of unsustainable actions and developments on a global scale.

This paper contends that there are ways to sustainability, but they are not chiefly determined by technology and policy. These ways are much closer to the actions and behaviours of individuals in small communities, and are perhaps hidden amongst things we already know, which we haven’t yet connected in a meaningful and useful way.

Contentions

The role of the small community

The small community is where most of us live: the village, the suburb, the inner city block, the remote community, homeland or outstation, the small country town or provincial city. Many of us work in our small community or a nearby small community.

In the global economy, we spend more of our time at work and not necessarily with our families, friends and neighbours, and so we often create community within our workplace. Our lives are simple in essence, yet we live them in complex ways, often as a result of the global pressures and consumer seductions weighing upon us.

For most of us, we rely on the quality of our personal relationships to provide some meaning to our lives. It is in the small-scale arenas of our lives where the opportunity to experience community exists. This is where personal relationships are most effective and social capital is strongest (Putnam, 2000; Kelly and Sewell 1988). This is where we display our behaviours, our cultures, our beliefs and our personal capacities. This is where the capacity to sustain any path or action is strongest and consequently where the change of behaviours necessary to further the sustainability agenda will be most effectively fostered.

Listening to the land

It has been stated that western culture has lost the ability to “listen to the land” (Mander, 1991; Sinatra and Murphy, 1999; Nannup, 2000). This is not a metaphor but a practical, meaningful and ancient skill, and still alive in the indigenous domain. By listening, we can gain some of our data about managing ecology and landscape (”country”) from the land itself (Nannup, 2000). The roots of our current unsustainable behaviours lie in this lost capacity.

Ecological sustainability issues such as ecological carrying capacity of landscape, resource sources and waste sinks are intimately related to long-term natural cycles that do not conform to the short-term cycles of a global economy (Brand, 1999). While science is able to listen to these cycles and to quantify their effects, the listening is only being done by a small sector of society; it must be done by most of us.

Learning to listen to the land is not about appropriating an indigenous way of life; our post-modern western global culture is not capable of that. It is also not assuming that all indigenous people can listen to the land – colonialism and assimilation policies have taken away learning opportunities. It is mostly about taking inspiration and guidance from the deeper, living aspects of how indigenous people connect with their country, so that we can create new development paradigms that are based on an intimate understanding of natural cycles.

Placemaking

A subtext to the concept of listening to the land is tied up with how contemporary western culture views placemaking. Home and place has become commodified and defined by work opportunity, economic advantage, affordability, style and preferred social identity rather than the spirit of a place and our deep connection to it. (Marcus, 1995) We skate across the landscape, spending short periods of time in one place, selling up and moving on. While this can open us to a global view of the environment and the variety of bioregions and landscapes and the variety of cultures therein, it tends to limit our ability to engender deep connection to place. Indigenous people can teach the rest of us this deep connection to place, if we stay in country for long enough and listen (Nannup, 2000).

Reverse technology transfer

In Australia, the development of physical infrastructure in remote indigenous communities is determined largely by the orthodox western-centred view that is focussed on transferring sophisticated, so-called superior technology to communities that may have little or no experience with these technologies.

This research turns this view around to contend that issues of sustaining technology in remote indigenous communities are similar to the problems of sustainability for the technologically advanced mainstream. Its just that the issues are more obvious in remote indigenous communities and the technologically advanced mainstream have become very good at hiding and denying their technical failures (Yencken and Wilkinson, 2000). Thus the failure of technology in remote indigenous communities is as much an early warning for the technologically advanced mainstream as it is an indicator of the problems of technology transfer.

Things we know

The above contentions are linked to issues that are broadly known to us. These issues are to do with culture, our relationships, our technical responses to problems, the basis of economy and how we learn what we know. These issues and their synergistic effect are not often considered in terms of the sustainability agenda.

Culture and the culture of sustainability

We live in a multi-cultural society, and most of us are happy to enjoy the fruits of the meeting of cultures. But maybe our cross-cultural awareness is restricted to the comfortable and the shallow. For many, multi-culturalism has contributed to a harmonious society; for others, it has heightened their fear of difference. The curious thing about culture is that we are not conscious of it until confronted by difference. We tend to live our lives without being demonstrative of our culture, unless we are in a situation to compare cultural experience.

Placing culture at the heart of the sustainability agenda raises many questions. Do cultural factors create obstacles to the adoption of sustainable behaviours? Do cultural factors help people sustain behaviours and technologies? How do they do this?

It may even be considered a racist issue to talk of sustainability in terms of culture, given that race and culture are entwined. But culture can be considered without reference to race – it can relate to ways of thinking and behaving that arise out of experiences other than race. And given that our behaviours are at the core of our unsustainable way of life, we should consider whether behaviour arises out of given, largely fixed cultural factors. It may be worth asking whether culture is an agreed set of behaviours, in which case the agreements can be changed in response to the needs of the times. And the need of our time is the movement to sustainability. As a consequence of these factors, it is contended here that the cultural/behavioural mix has the potential to foster sustainable development.

A further conundrum is that these questions indicate that we are trying to solve problems of sustainability from within the Western cultural paradigm that created much of the problem in the first place. There is a great opportunity here for the indigenous worldview to inform the Western cultural paradigm to help foster a behavioural/cultural change. There is a compelling necessity to develop ways to a culture of sustainability where the other sustainability factors can dwell and thrive: in effect, a cultural revolution (Mander, 1991). This culture must be capable of crossing cultural boundaries.

Relationships and connectedness: significance for sustainability

A common theme in critiques of contemporary Western culture is the decline of community, the loss of connectedness to others and the reduced quality of personal relationships (Putnam, 2000). The pace of modern life, the reliance on high technology, the global consumer culture, work and economic pressures may all be contributing factors to the decline of community. We have forgotten that we are interdependent in a social sense.

Further, the lessons of ecology and bio-diversity stress the interdependence of land, climate and biology, and our place within the whole. So, not only can’t we sustain our sense of community, we can’t sustain the landscape within which our communities must live. It follows that an important aspect of a sustainable culture is a higher degree of interdependence and connectedness.

The ideas of social capital stress qualities such as trust and reciprocity in addition to connectedness. They don’t indicate a causal relationship between abundant social capital and sustainability: a community may exhibit extensive connectedness in the undertaking of a joint enterprise that can be environmentally destructive. We see this in many small communities that have been founded upon the exploitation of a single natural resource.

Is the decline of social capital an impediment to furthering the sustainability agenda? It is reasonable to assume that to build social capital is to foster sustainability –interconnectedness may make it easier to make the necessary cultural and behavioural changes. However, since the concept of social capital as a useful way of looking at communities has only emerged in the last ten years or so, the linking of the concept to the sustainability agenda is in its nascent stages, let alone the linking of it to a cross-cultural situation. It bears further examination.

The technical fix: problem-solving as an obstacle to sustainability

Most symptoms of our current unsustainable world are physical and can, for the most part, be quantified and debated as items of fact. Such symptoms usually have a technological source: the coal-fired power station, run-off from agriculture, exploitation of fisheries and so on. The technological worldview would then propose that these symptoms are best dealt with by better or cleaner technology: a technical fix. That is, as identified above in the discussion of cultural factors, the sustainability problem is again to be solved by the paradigm that helped to create it. This is a common theme in just about any writing in the sustainability debate: technology will solve the problem, and behaviours need not change.

We run the risk of problem-solving our way down inappropriate paths in the pursuit of sustainability. It will certainly speed the sustainability debate towards some fairly hard limits. And maybe then, we might realise that our behaviours must change, regardless of the technological approach available.

The experience of the remote Indigenous community highlights the problems with the technical fix approach. Remote communities have experienced waves of technical fixes that have failed to deliver the outcomes of safe, adequate housing, safe water, reliable power and a healthy living environment. This is not to say that the technologies are failures per se, but the lack of consideration at the design and consultation stage of a range of local social factors is a significant contributor to the failures (Pholeros et al, 1994). Such experience shows that transfer of any technology, green or otherwise, to any domain will not be successful or useful without careful consideration of local cultural and social factors.

Place and oikonomia: economy as a process of place making

The discussion about a sense of place and caring for country should include consideration of economy as part of the process of placemaking. Given that the Greek oikos, (house) and oikonomia, (management of a household over the long term for all family members [Hawken, 1993]) are the root words of economy, it stands to reason that economics is an integral part of placemaking and being on country.

Further, in the contemporary world, economy is what allows people to dwell in a place. It also, on the other hand, is responsible for the continued degrading of our places and their broader ecological footprints through a narrow view of accounting that does not place value on natural, human and social capital (Hawken et al, 1999).

Unless placemaking is sustainable, if not restorative, the economic system will be one of diminishing returns. New views of economics are needed for small communities that are connected to the global economy but are not forced into unsustainable practices by imposed structures. This is a tricky balancing act for small communities. It is particularly problematic for remote indigenous communities who are disadvantaged through lack of economic opportunity and welfare dependency, yet need an economic basis for their communities. For example, remote indigenous communities are developing networks in the international art market to maximise their economic returns for reinvestment in maintaining their country (Warlpawun, 2000).

If the economic basis of placemaking is considered in terms of the indigenous practice of listening to the land and caring for country, perhaps communities will voluntarily limit development for long-term sustainability.

The learning community and personal capacity building

In the sustainability context, our communities undergo a considerable amount of education but very little learning. Given that the global ecological crisis has been part of our awareness for several decades now, and that we still have not changed our behaviours much in response, it appears that we are not learning the lessons needed to move to a sustainable world. From a practical point of view, to further the movement to sustainability, learning must be considered as a completely different issue from education.

Education, training, teaching and schooling are part of a paradigm that is separate from the natural cycles that we must learn to experience and understand. Formal methods of education also seem to conflict with real learning that occurs informally, especially when people are motivated to make real changes in their lives.

This is where the focus on the small community is important: there is an immediacy about the effects of unsustainable behaviours; there is also an immediacy about the learning opportunities that arise from these effects. Such behaviours need to be unlearned, and sustainable behaviours learned. The track record indicates that this will only occur through our direct experience: a silted up water hole; a polluted water supply; poor air quality; dramatic fuel price rises; surfing in raw sewage; release of genetically modified organisms and so on can initiate appropriate action and the learning required to change behaviour.

Thus the real issue of learning concerns personal and community capacity building which is the best hope for behavioural and cultural change.

The process of development

Our current modes of development are still very much embedded in a paradigm that doesn’t recognise limits (Meadows et al., 1992). The paradigm is based on a short-term economic view based on quick financial returns and a narrow accounting view as mentioned above.

The paradigm also tends to limit community participation, whether it is in the planning and design of an extractive industry, a new subdivision, a new factory on a greenfield site, a freeway or an agribusiness. Much of the current development paradigm has anti-democratic tendencies; often it takes massive mobilisation of community opinion to put up opposing views to environmentally destructive developments. The movement to sustainable communities allows for greater local democracy than at present – development decision-making must stay as close as possible to the communities affected by such decisions. This is not to say that the dynamism of the business world cannot be part of a sustainability culture, but it must become the servant of a community development paradigm that places small communities and their local ecologies first.

Hidden synergies among the things we already know

Much of the debate on sustainable development is based on isolated treatment of the issues discussed above. It is a fragmented debate which is trying to transform existing development paradigms within the terms dictated by those paradigms. The issues described need to be considered from a different point of view based on their synergistic effect. Although ways to sustainability are hidden in the interrelationship of these issues, they are not readily observed, experienced or given life.

So, how can we bring these things we know to life?

This research is not about to propose solutions at this point, although lessons drawn from the sustainability experience to date indicate it is worth pursuing the space between the ideas:

Small communities provide a human-scale arena for identifying problems and proposing solutions which may be of value to both the small community and the wider world.

A contemporary way of listening to the land will empower people in small communities to be better observers of their landscapes and ecologies, and to focus on socio-technical solutions that are appropriate to local scales and economies.

Indigenous communities in particular demonstrate early warning signs of failure of mainstream and imposed technologies. Their experience in sustaining their communities and maintaining country should inform the development of non-indigenous communities.

An understanding of culture, whether it is the broad culture of an ethnic group or the culture of a segment of society, will help inform the development of appropriate technologies and ways of making technologies available to communities. It will assist in tailoring sustainable technologies to learning processes. It will help to engender a new cultural paradigm of sustainability.

Sustainability is not a state to be reached through the technical fix. It is a dynamic created by behaviour. It is ultimately driven by the personal and the subjective. It is not a fast, straight-line process as commonly practiced. It also must be an extensively participatory process, promoting personal and community capacity. It is a “sea of events and people” (Kelly and Sewell, 1988).

These learning and cultural factors when combined with significant reserves of social capital have potential to contribute to community capacity to manage development in a sustainable way.

The strengthening of communities through development of learning and social capital will contribute to a greater questioning of technology that will reduce reliance on the short-term technical fix approach.

A learning community listening to and responding to their local ecology will better inform the process of placemaking and its economic basis.

A change in our development processes to a more democratic basis will be lead by cultural change brought about by a learning community.

There may be a whole raft of hidden synergistic outcomes awaiting discovery out of the interrelationship of these known sustainability factors. However, in spite of the complexity of the factors discussed in this paper there may not be as much for us to learn as we think.

A change of perspective may be all that is necessary to harness the power of things we already know.

Conclusions

The importance of our small communities in the sustainability agenda lies in the fact that these are the places where a more direct experience of sustainability issues is possible. They are where the success will be most readily observed. Most of these factors discussed here are known to us, but not necessarily in a connected way. If we can give life to the synergistic effect arising from things we already know, and stop the mechanistic, isolated approach to sustainable development embedded in the current way of thinking, we may have a more realistic chance of making our communities of all kinds more sustainable.

All of us “live on Country”, but only some of us know it.

References

Beatley, Timothy and Manning, Kristy, (1997). The Ecology of Place: Planning for Environment, Economy, and Community Island Press, Washington USA

Brand, Stewart. (1999) The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility Phoenix, London UK

Hawken, Paul, Lovins, Amory and Lovins, L.Hunter, (1999). Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution Little, Brown and Co., Boston USA

Hawken, Paul, (1993). The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability Harper and Collins,New York USA

Kelly, Anthony and Sewell, Sandra, (1988). With Head, Heart and Hand: Dimensions of Community Building Boolarong Press, Brisbane Qld

Krockenberger, Michael ed.,(2000). Natural Advantage: A Blueprint for a Sustainable Australia Australian Conservation Foundation Web Site www.acfonline.org.au/blueprint/index.htm

Mander, Jerry, (1991). In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations Sierra Club Books USA

Marcus, Clare Cooper, (1997). House as a Mirror of Self: Exploring the Deeper Meaning of Home Conari, Berkeley USA

Meadows, Donella H., Meadows, Dennis L. and Randers, Jorgen, (1993). Beyond the Limits: Confronting Global Collapse, Envisioning a Sustainable Future Chelsea Green Publishing Co., Vermont USA

Nannup, Noel, (2000). Talk and cross-cultural workshop delivered as part of Introduction to Sustainable Development at the Institute of Sustainability and Technology Policy, Murdoch University, WA.

Pholeros, Paul, Torzillo, Paul and Rainow, Stephan, (1994). Housing For Health Healthabitat, Sydney NSW

Putnam, Robert D. ,(2000). Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community Simon and Schuster, New York USA

Sinatra, Jim and Murphy, Phin, (1999). Listen to the People, Listen to the Land Melbourne University Press, Melbourne Vic

United Nations Environment Programme, (1992). Agenda 21: Environment and Development Agenda UNEP Web Site www.unep.org/Documents

Warlpawun (The Place of the River Wallaby): A Proposal for a Partnership Between Argyle Diamonds, Rio Tinto Pty Ltd and the Gija People from Juwulinypany and Rugan Communities East Kimberley Western Australia, (2000).

Yencken, David and Wilkinson, Debra, (2000). Resetting the Compass: Australia’s Journey Towards Sustainability CSIRO Publishing, Melbourne Vic.

This is a paper I prepared and presented at the Architecture MPS Conference at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, in June 2016 - Future Housing: Global Cities and Regional Problems.

Preparing the paper gave me the chance to do a catch-up on the state of remote indigenous outstations - an interest I developed while working in Central Australia and Far North Queensland with the Centre for Appropriate Technology and the Desert Knowledge CRC in the 1990s and early 2000s.

I further developed this interest in the early stages of my PhD research in the Kimberleys, the Western Desert and Anmatjere region of Central Australia.

From what I understand now, the defunding of outstations is still an on-going issue for remote Indigenous Australians wanting to live on country. This paper then, retains some currency in reviewing the issues of the sustainability of remote outstations, especially how outstations can better sustain their outstation infrastructure.

Introduction

Indigenous community governance in Australia is currently undergoing a change through an emerging economically rationalist approach, as promoted by Australian Federal, State and Territory Governments. This approach characterises outstation life as a lifestyle choice at the taxpayer’s expense (Martin & Owens, 2015). This change is manifested through increasing rhetoric about the withdrawal of funding for services to outstations and in some cases, the “closing” down of remote outstations (or homelands) due to their “unviability” (Altman, Kerins, Fogarty, & Webb, 2008; Kerins, 2009; Solonec, 2011). There are serious questions about the impacts of such closures on the residents themselves as well as the impacts on the larger communities and towns to which outstation people are re-settled. Such drastic measures have deep effects on Indigenous people, especially elders with a deep cultural need to maintain connection to country; yet this does not appear to be a consideration of policy under such an economically rationalist approach. This paper therefore reviews recent outstation policy at Federal, State and Territory levels and proposes some alternative ways to enable outstation people to live well on country.

The points of view expressed in this paper are based on my experience working with people in remote indigenous communities between 1995 and 2008, and observation of the direction in Indigenous policy from then to the present.

Outstation self-build project, Anmatjere region, Northern Territory, 1995: Image by Dr Matthew Parnell with community permission

The Outstation Movement

After awarding Land Rights during the Whitlam Government (1972-1975), the question of how indigenous people could not only have access to country, but how indigenous people could “live on country” emerged (Return to country: The Aboriginal Homelands movement in Australia, 1987). While some land returned to Indigenous ownership included cattle stations with basic living infrastructure, others, being very remote, had no services or accommodation to support living on country. Regardless of the level of servicing, Indigenous people in remote areas expressed a strong desire to move from the larger settlements (often former missions) back to country (Young, Taylor, & Walker, 2010). In the case of the Western Desert communities of Mt Liebig, Haasts Bluff, Kintore and Kiwirkurra, the driver to settlement in the early 1980s was to leave the former mission at Papunya where co-location of several distinct tribal groups was becoming problematic in both a cultural sense and in the allocation of resources (Folds, 2001). This growing movement was acknowledged by an Australian Government Senate Committee review in 1987 (Return to country: The Aboriginal Homelands movement in Australia, 1987).

Outstations vary in size and population, but are generally based on smaller extended family groups, where the family, as the traditional owner, has responsibility to maintain the land. Maintenance of country can be practical: clearing waterholes and patchwork burning of grasslands; or it can be spiritual: conducting ceremonies, singing the country and upholding tribal law (Newman et al., 2008; Solonec, 2011).

As the outstation movement gained pace in the early 1980s, Indigenous organisations such as the Centre for Appropriate Technology (CAT) in Central Australia focused on delivering minimalist infrastructure to enable people to live on country. This included, hand-powered water pumps, Ventilated Improved Pit Latrines (VIPs), hot water chip heaters made from recycled LPG cylinders, and prefabricated shower/laundry blocks. In the mid 1990s, efficient wood-fired drum ovens and bush “microwaves” extended CAT’s offerings (Young et al., 2010). Such technologies transferred through many communities and outstations in Central Australia and beyond, until supplanted by programs delivering housing of varying designs and standards from the mid-to-late 1980s. As communities grew, the basic infrastructure described was still used to accommodate large groups of visitors arriving for cultural business or sports events and to enable outstations to be established.

In other parts of Australia, outstation development followed a more mainstream model with outstation establishment enabled by delivery of housing, centralized reticulated water, septic tanks, road grids and the like.

In other places where access to appropriate technology was not possible, indigenous people created settlements through use of scrap materials to create simple shelters, although sanitation and access to potable water was problematic. This is still a strategy in use whenever remote indigenous people have the need to escape the pressures of main settlements.

While non-mainstream low-cost models for enabling Indigenous people to live on country have existed in the recent past, until the current prospect of outstations closures emerged, a combination of remote community people’s housing equity expectations and governments being seen to provide “proper” public housing have meant that such models have not be considered as policy, let alone for funding. However, the question of people’s choices in the light of the closure agenda is now open for renewed discussion.

The political push to “close” outstations

Determining whether there are funds to be allocated to outstations is one thing: cutting off services and closing them down is another. In framing outstations as a taxpayer-funded “lifestyle” choice (as if remote indigenous community dwellers had a fully transferable capability to go anywhere in Australia for economic purposes), it has become the main driver of Indigenous Policy. The current state of play for outstations can be summarized as:

• No funding for new housing;

• No funding for housing refurbishments;

• Minimal or no funding for housing maintenance;

• Progressive withdrawal of services (clinics, schools, stores, police etc.); and

• De-facto “closure” of communities.

Viability is used as the justification for closures, and the term plays on the broader communities’ fears about how governments spend taxpayer’s money. It is easy to characterize remote communities as unviable, and make policy on that basis. But this raises the question: what does “unviable” mean, and should it only apply to funding for Indigenous communities? For example, the unviability of Local Government throughout regional Australia has been well documented through studies over the last 10 years, showing that most regional Local Governments cannot sustain themselves without regular injections of State and Federal Government funding (Local Government Finances in New South Wales: An assessment by Access Economics Pty Ltd for the Independent Review Panel January 2006. (2006).

By extension, current policy drivers are based on assumptions that the cost of delivering services to Indigenous people are more effective once they move into larger centres. It is questionable whether the process of resettling people in larger towns, with pressures on their services and housing demands, is more economic. Research into the cost spent per capita on health services in remote communities and outstations shows that people serviced by remote outstation health services receive less than 50% of the funding on indigenous health services in the larger centres (Solonec, 2011). As people move to larger centres, the health bill may actually increase as indigenous people access mainstream services at cost rates commensurate with mainstream Australia, assuming they have services to actually access (Burgess et al., 2009).

The impact of outstation closure

For Governments considering outstation closure, it is important to review the benefits of outstations in Indigenous wellbeing. Yet the considerable research into the value of outstations for promoting wellbeing (Kerins, 2010) is mainly carried out by the non-government sector. The most recent study was carried out by Amnesty International (2011), extending studies carried out by Burgess et.al. (2009). The Amnesty International Study identifies the maintenance of better Indigenous health outcomes as the key benefit of outstations in addition to the support of cultural practice and caring-for-country.

The Bulldozing of Oombulgurri

The change of Government policy towards closure reached denouement at Oombulgurri in 2014. Solonec (2014) reported that closure began with the progressive cessation of services: first the shop; then the clinic; then the school; then the Police station; and finally power and water services. This forced people out “voluntarily” to seek access to services in the regional centre of Wyndham. The clinic closure particularly impacted older people. In 2011 the remnant people were forced out with two days notice, leaving behind most personal belongings, furniture and whitegoods. The community lay unoccupied until October 2014 when the community was bulldozed and buried.

Solonec (2014) identified following impacts of the closure:

• Some residents were homeless three years after eviction;

• Children did not go to school in Wyndham;

• Some children have been removed by the Department of Child Protection;

• Teenagers had increasing exposure to alcohol and drugs, and engaged in petty crime;

• Alcoholism became common;

• Many live in sorrow, disbelief and hopelessness: they cannot understand what happened; and

• People yearn for their homeland.

However, to date, while services are still being withdrawn, no further communities have been bulldozed due to some backlash from the broader Australian community at the time.

While Oombulgurri is an extreme example, the precedent has been set as a “do-able” solution, and it is still a current instrument of policy and has changed the nature of the relationship between outstation people and Government.

Opportunities from the wreckage

In the recent past, it has been difficult for outsiders to propose options for different ways of living on country, because the equity of access to public housing is a major driver of policy for community development, housing design and delivery, and is a major aspiration for Indigenous people. The demand for public housing in remote areas similar to that in mainstream cities and towns is a reasonable demand, but one that has not always served Indigenous people well, especially in light of variable occupancy combined with large extended family structures and their related responsibilities (Morel & Ross, 1993; Ross, 1987). Given that the policy of closing off services, closing down communities and potentially bulldozing them has yet to run its course, perhaps the time for proposal of alternative solutions to living well on country without government assistance, and to a minimum standard, has come. Further, it may be that many people in remote homelands may be receptive to a range of options that enable them to access country.

What is the minimum to live on country?

Assuming the above situation is policy for the foreseeable future, what can outstation people do; what kind of funding would be needed; and how would people generate the funds to enable people to live on country.

Seemann (Seemann, Parnell, McFallan, & Tucker, 2008) proposed new ways of thinking about remote communities that my assist in developing new pathways. Keystone strategies were identified: of these, the strategy of developing desert performance standards applies to the outstation context. A socio-technical approach to settlement standards was proposed, reversing the normal funding model. The starting point was the minimum standard that could be maintained by local people within the available funding regimes and within existing skills and capacities and which would be accepted by outstation people? The minimum funding input needed for such a standard would depend on:

• Nature of land tenure;

• Level of existing development;

• Proportion of existing legal ownership of housing and infrastructure;

• Needs of local people;

• Capacity of local people for self-management;

• Level of income of the community as a whole;

• Availability of alternative sources of income and funding; and

• Skills base of people in the community

The extent of land tenure determines the rights of people to enter country. For example the people of Oombulgurri did not have Native Title over the land on which the settlement had been established (Solonec, 2014) and were threatened with trespass if they returned. This should not be an option for government in the event of Native Title being in force.

Given the range of development types, it is problematic for the more established outstations to source and manage the funding necessary to maintain themselves. Ironically, the less established outstations with simpler technologies have more scope for independent management because the maintenance demands are significantly less.

Assuming that all funding is cut-off, and communities still have some legal ownership over the infrastructure, what options do they have for upholding ownership of all or selected items of infrastructure? If such legal ownership exists, then they can continue to use the infrastructure, but will have to manage on-going maintenance and operational expenses from their own resources. This will be problematic for most communities.

Indigenous people have continually demonstrated their resilience when confronted with difficult living conditions. There are many examples where people have chosen to live in a simple camp arrangement rather than have the burden of housing management, dealing with government officials and the fall-out from excessive community “humbug”. When the general principle of public housing equity in is removed from the options, and when given a choice to live simply on country, or to not be able to access country at all, the main option for Indigenous people are autonomous forms of development similar to the early days of outstation establishment. This is worth further discussion with Indigenous people.

Options can be:

• A basic camp set-up to enable short visits to country, using basic technology as VIPs, hand-operated water pumps, chip water heaters, and a combination of recycled materials and natural vegetation to form wind breaks and create semi-private outdoor zones.

• An extended camp set-up to enable seasonal access – for example, during the dry season for settlements in the tropics; largely simple self-built structures, with portable solar systems for basic power.

• Simple buildings, perhaps just open walled roofed structures with concrete slabs or raised platform floors; bush kitchens, shower and toilet blocks with composting toilets or VIPs, rainwater harvesting and small solar PV systems.

• Maintaining existing housing and infrastructure, but perhaps with reduced servicing: rainwater harvesting versus diesel powered bore pumps; some small scale PV systems instead of central power reticulation.

Matching the chosen minimum standard with sources of funding

Regardless of the standard chosen, there are issues of how to fund the chosen level of development at the level of capacity of the people concerned.

As far as skills and capacities are concerned, many people in outstations have a range of skills from bush carpentry to bush mechanics. While every place will have a different range of skills, the challenge will be to match skills with technology choice, and technology choice to a source of funds to procure, install, operate and maintain technology. Given that a range of skills exists in small communities, the principal question is, how to fund living on country in the absence of government input. The following options have some potential:

Pooling extended family income: For many remote indigenous families, this is part of life, especially with income quarantining instituted under the 2007 Intervention, and still in force today. However, using family funds for outstation maintenance will require a re-structure/re-allocation of spending that may be difficult under typical family pressures. And assuming that such a restructure is possible, any funds set aside in this way would only be able to maintain technology at a basic level, such as the basic camp types as described above. This would suit situations where no outstations have been established on land, or where infrastructure has been removed.

Philanthropic funding: Philanthropic funding is available for remote Indigenous people, but these are usually highly targeted programs that generally fund the areas that Government does not fund. The question is whether such funders will provide funding for limited outstation maintenance once government funding has stopped. It is more likely that such funding could be sought to fund individuals, often in education or capability development that could indirectly contribute to outstation development. The Funding Network Australia is one such potential source.

Crowd funding: While crowd funding is generally targeted towards business start-ups, there is scope for “public good” and social enterprise funding. There could well be a global audience for small funds to install small-scale technology such hand-powered or solar water pumping or basic shelter systems.

If small outstations could connect their need for basic infrastructure to tourism or arts development, for example, there could be scope for crowd funding that supports outstation maintenance yet develops economic infrastructure that could provide an income stream into the future. Such offerings can potentially attract funding with minimal or no expectations for a “return on investment”, although return on investment could be opportunities for a tourist experience or an artwork or craft item. Social good crowd funding platforms, such as Start Some Good provide crowd funded solutions for Indigenous people. Typical projects funded so far are oriented to education, health and social support, and there are no examples of funding for remote outstation settlement development or maintenance.

NGO sponsorship: Some Non-Government Organisations (NGOs) that traditionally work in international development have been increasingly involved in Indigenous community development. Organisations such as World Vision and Caritas have many different types of programs, but these generally centre on educational, health and art programs in established, larger communities. World Vision has also created home-ownership-on-community-land programs that are potential models for outstation assistance through such programs.

Microfinance for development and business establishment: Microfinance has become an accepted way for assisting small communities to develop their places and to establish small businesses. Pioneered by the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, microfinance has spread to low-income communities throughout the world, with high levels of success for borrowers and high levels of repayment. Microfinance typically enables borrowers to purchase equipment that enables people to create an income stream: such equipment has included sewing machines; portable timber mills; flour grinders; welding equipment and so on.

Organisations providing microfinance to the indigenous sector for business development include Community Sector Banking (50% owned by Bendigo Bank) and Many Rivers Microfinance. These organisations do not currently have pathways for funding of remote outstations.

A recent development has been the linking of microfinance systems with crowd funding platforms to enable low-income people to post proposals for small loans for personal and community development. Kiva has funded a limited number of small programs in the Pacific Region, but has not worked in Indigenous Australia as yet.

Partnership with mainstream Australian communities: Another potential approach is to connect people in mainstream Australia with remote communities to provide direct funding for projects and to connect people with skills to help on a pro-bono basis. Organisations such as Indigenous Community Volunteers link communities with skilled outsiders, but this model relies on Government funding with some additional funding through volunteers as part of project development and delivery. There could be scope to extend such an organization into alternative funding methods or to design a platform where mainstream communities could connect with remote communities to fundraise and provide expertise.

Conclusions

In this paper, the change in the relationship between Government in Australia and people living in remote Indigenous outstations has been reviewed. The new reality described means the end of outstation life for many Indigenous people, unless other options are investigated. The options for development and for alternative funding proposed in this paper will be challenging for Indigenous people, because the proposal may appear to promote a lesser standard of living that does not meet conventional Australian values of equity. The proposals in this paper have been made in appreciation of the tangible and intangible benefits for Indigenous people in living on country and are offered as a basis for a realistic discussion with outstation people about their future living space under changed policy regimes.

References

Altman, Jon, Seán Kerins, Bill Fogarty, and Kate Webb. (2008). “Why the Northern Territory Government needs to support Outstations/Homelands in the Aboriginal, Northern Territory and National Interest: Submission to the Northern Territory Government Outstation Policy “ CAEPR Topical Issue 2008 (17).

Burgess, Christopher P, Fay H Johnston, Helen L Berry, Joseph McDonnell, Dean Yibarbuk, Charlie Gunabarra, Albert Mileran, and Ross S Bailie. (2009). “Healthy country, healthy people: the relationship between Indigenous health status and “caring for country”.” Medical Journal of Australia 190 (10):567-572.

Folds, Ralph. (2001). Crossed purposes : the Pintupi and Australia’s indigenous policy. Sydney: UNSW Press.

Kerins, S. (2009). The Future of Homelands/Outstations. CAEPR Topical Issue No. 01/2010. Canberra: Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research.

Local Government Finances in New South Wales: An assessment by Access Economics Pty Ltd for the Independent Review Panel January 2006 (2006). Canberra: Access Economics.Martin, Sarah, and Jared Owens. 2015. Remote communities a lifestyle choice: Tony Abbott. The Australian March 11 2015. Accessed 22nd August, 2015.

Morel, Petronella , and Helen Ross. (1993). Housing design assessment for bush communities. Alice Springs: Tangentyere Council, Dept. of Lands, Housing and Local Government.

Newman, P, D Marinova, R Armstrong, M Raven, J Marley, N McGrath, and F Spring. (2008). Desert Settlement Typology: Preliminary Literature, DKCRC Research Report 35. Alice Springs: Desert Knowledge CRC.

Return to country: The Aboriginal Homelands movement in Australia. (1987). edited by House of Representatives Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service.Ross, H. 1987. Just for Living: Aboriginal perceptions of housing in northwest Australia. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.

Seemann, Kurt , Matthew Parnell, Stephen McFallan, and Selwyn N. Tucker. (2008). Housing for livelihoods: The lifecycle of housing and infrastructure through a whole-of-system approach in remote Aboriginal settlements. Alice Springs: Desert Knowledge Co-operative Research Centre.

Solonec, Tammy, ed. (2011). The land holds us: aboriginal people’s right to traditional homelands in the Northern Territory. Edited by Amnesty International. Sydney: Amnesty International.

Young, Metta, Peter Taylor, and Bruce Walker, eds. (2010). History - Centre for Appropriate Technology 1980-2010., Our Place. Alice Springs: Centre for Appropriate Technology Ltd.

Circular models in the built environment

The consideration of the Circular Economy in the building and construction industry is gathering pace, both here in Australia and internationally. We are seeing circularity requirements embedded in green building rating schemes; newly-published guides to selecting materials for circularity; increasing numbers of exemplar circular buildings; and here in Australia, the growing trend to recover bricks for re-use when buildings are demolished.

This piece is not about circular construction per se; rather, I’m interested in how material ecosystems create their own life and how that life can promote circularity in buildings, yet trivialize circularity as a form of greenwashing. When I talk systems here, I mean complex adaptive socio-technical systems hence my interest in exploring the socio-technical dimensions of recycled material ecosystems. To do this, I want to consider a common material choice as a socio-technical expression: baked clay bricks.

The following issues come together in this story:

• the recycling of bricks in building construction;

• the utility of bricks in buildings; and

• using recycled bricks as decoration on, inside or outside buildings

When I use the term “decoration”, I mean the use of the material in a additive way that contributes minimally to construction performance other than its aesthetics (or appearance).

Brick and masonry systems in housing

Masonry systems - whether natural stone, baked clay brick, or mud brick - have been used in the construction of buildings and human settlements for thousands of years. In the 20th century, concrete bricks and blocks were added to the masonry materials palette. In order of sustainability priorities masonry systems have thermal storage capacity and durability. Structure, fire protection and acoustic performance are a lower priority because they can be readily delivered by lightweight construction systems.

In Australian single dwelling and low-rise multi-dwelling housing, traditionally three broad approaches to construction have been used: timber framed and clad; full brick construction (also called cavity brick); and brick veneer. Brick veneer won the battle of suburbia over the last sixty years, but lightweight construction is making a comeback.

Traditionally, the outer layer of bricks in brick veneer construction provided the appearance of solidity, a low-maintenance durable house exterior (especially if not rendered and/or painted) and a good acoustic barrier for a cost marginally different to timber cladding (yet more expensive than fibre-cement clad walls) and much cheaper than cavity brick construction. When paired with pre-fabricated timber wall and roof frames, brick veneer has been difficult to shift as the first choice construction method. In recent times, increasing density of single dwelling detached housing and townhouses, less of the building’s exterior is seen from the street, such that lightweight cladding is often used on the sides and rear of buildings, with brick veneer reserved for the street-facing facade.

In the 1970s passive solar design movement (not to be confused with the later Passiv Haus movement), brick’s thermal behaviour in storing heat and coolth - their thermal mass - became a key part of designing buildings capable of running with minimal artificial energy input, taking advantage of natural ambient energy of sun and wind. This movement highlighted that typical brick veneer houses with the bricks on the outside did not get the benefit of internal thermal mass - except for the 1960s to early 1980s fashion for a brick “feature wall” in the main living room! The book I co-authored with Gareth Cole in 1983, Australian Solar Houses, reviewed these principles in some depth. I carried out a retrospective review in an earlier piece - link here.

I consider that recycled bricks are potentially the best way to improve the thermal performance of lightweight buildings through reverse brick veneer construction, where bricks are used inside the timber-framed walls and the insulation is in the outer layer.

Climate and carbon aspects of brick

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the potential of recycled brick as a serious construction material supporting the move to circular and low carbon buildings. Sometimes I like to go back to my first (professional) love: sustainable building!

As we learned more about climate impacts, and the need to take action to protect the climate, we have begun to question mass materials such as bricks because of their high carbon footprint. Virgin bricks have a high carbon footprint due to substantial heat required to turn natural clay to a ceramic material. Concrete, likewise, due to the heat needed to manufacture cement powder from limestone.

Amongst the climate conscious there is a trend away from using mass material such as brick and concrete - even in multi-residential construction. Note that this doesn’t hold for mass-market project homes where concrete slab floors are still the most common floor structure.

This is where recycled bricks have found their currency: they are a low-carbon way of using brick, although the performance aspects driving their choice are focused on secondary structure (mostly against wind loads), durability of enclosure, fire protection and aesthetics. Effectively, much of the usage of recycled bricks is driven by aesthetics because the enclosure function can equally be met by other common lightweight construction systems.

Recycled bricks can have climate and carbon benefits for buildings because of their thermal mass capability. In a previous incarnation of my sustainability consulting, I did a lot of energy modelling for housing - single and multi-residential. Reverse brick veneer with high levels of insulation and high-performance double glazing, combined with thermally improved window frames and appropriate shading, achieved the high ratings over all Australian climate zones in energy modelling, gaining better than 9 stars in cold, cool temperate and temperate climates. And note that an energy rating is an indication of a building’s operational carbon footprint.

In warm, humid and hot regions, I found that it was very difficult for lightweight construction to achieve more than a 4.5 to 5 star rating; even with double glazing ratings fell short of 6 stars. Rather than acknowledging this as a fault in the rating tool - particularly the allocation ofnsummer and winter energy thresholds, the National Construction Code (NCC) developed workarounds for such climate zones where extra stars can be won by adding extra features such as Solar PV systems and shaded outdoor living areas with ceiling fans. These workarounds could not be modelled because these were not included in the NatHERS rating system and its accredited software! In my opinion, this was incredibly lame. However, add some mass with reverse brick veneer, and 6 to 7 stars was possible in these climate zones. Add a lot of mass, even better - 9 stars.

I also think there is lots of untapped potential for retrofitting recycled bricks to existing lightweight buildings to provide the mass for better thermal performance. My interest is also personal: I’m also thinking about how I can use them in our next possible house project when we eventually make our planned move from Melbourne to the bush. I’m particularly interested in how to retrofit recycled bricks as an internal low-carbon thermal mass material in existing lightweight timber framed buildings and the structural adaptations that may (or may not) be needed.

Recycled bricks in Melbourne

I currently live in the inner west of Melbourne, and the last few years have seen a dramatic increase in conversion of large single dwelling lots and former industrial land to multi-residential developments: two-to-three level townhouses, single and two-storey duplexes and low-rise apartment buildings. Further west, in the sprawling new “extruded” suburbs moving into the western grasslands of Melbourne, single detached dwellings are in demand.

Many examples of new development feature recycled bricks - mostly in non-loadbearing external walls facing the street; balcony walls; in landscaping as screens, fences and planter boxes; and as decoration, such as in building foyers and small sections of external walls.

I see recycled bricks everywhere, now. How do I know they are recycled? Recycled bricks come from two different streams - leftover unused bricks; and recovered from building demolition.

Leftovers are common - because they are the cheapest brick option, especially if the exterior walls are rendered - no need to worry about colour or texture differences. If you see a wall on a house under construction with a variety of different colour and texture bricks laid with no concern for aesthetics, you can be almost sure that they are leftover bricks that will be rendered and painted.

Recycled bricks can be also be cleaned and processed to look like new bricks or can be partially cleaned up, leaving paint and mortar residues. If fully cleaned it may be difficult to tell that the bricks have been recycled - perhaps an unusual colour or texture that is no longer available may be a clue. Bricks are partially cleaned because they are cheaper to prepare, resulting in the unintentional creation of a new brick aesthetic.

In the following image it is genuinely hard to tell if the mottled brickwork is fully recycled; a mix of new and recycled; a mix of leftovers; or a mix of recycled and leftovers! My guess is the mix of recycled and leftovers. The white brickwork features new brickwork exclusively.

Generally, I’m willing to guess that most of what I see are recycled, and the paint and mortar residues demonstrate they have been recovered, with a performative dimension publicly stating: “My house is new, but my bricks are recycled”!

As in the image below, new bricks can be painted to match the appearance of recycled bricks (badly) - a crime against aesthetics! It looks tacky, and the bricks should have been left alone.

In the image of the same building below, the designers have allocated ground floor bricks in a way that suggests that the most of the facade is brick; yet substantial sections of the ground floor and all of the first floor are lightweight construction. The set back of the upper level, plus choice of colours makes the lightweight construction less visible. They are essentially going for a mass brick aesthetic appearance, yet the majority of the building’s walls are lightweight. This could be considered clever design, but I consider this to be a largely aesthetics-driven use of recycled bricks.

On larger buildings, I have seen many examples of this pursuit of “visible sustainability”, where precast concrete has been used for walls and columns, and recycled brick is used as pastiche to “pretty-up” the concrete. This can be seen in the image below, where recycled bricks have been used on the ground level to hide concrete structural elements and wall enclosure elements. Yet the concrete structure on the upper levels has been expressed with refined detailing that adds to the appearance of the building. I think that this detailing is attractive, and the designers should at least have continued the concrete detailing to ground level, even if the infill walls still used the recycled bricks!

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Recycled materials, aesthetics and decoration

Brick, stone and earth buildings can be beautiful, too. Many of my favourite historical and contemporary buildings use brick and other masonry in very creative ways. For example, the heritage-listed Post Office in the town of Glen Innes in New England region of New South Wales is a beautiful example of the melding of aesthetics and structure in a full brick building:

You may think from my critique that I don’t care for the aesthetic dimension. Not so - I strongly believe that aesthetics are an important part of creating great places as well as for gaining widespread adoption of new building methods.

My critique, however, is when the aesthetic becomes the prime driver of material choice, the technical constraints are forgotten or downgraded in importance.

I’ll draw on two parallel examples of sustainable building features that illustrate my concerns - shading devices and recycled timber - and extend that concern to recycled bricks. I’ll also draw on the case of problematic carbon offsets to illustrate how potentially sustainable practices are misused and become forms of greenwashing.

Example 1: Shading of Buildings

I’d like to say that the Australian house-buying public has become more aware of the need to build for the climate, but there is ample evidence to show that our predilection for black tiled roofs and black window frames is showing the triumph of aesthetics over climate reality. Nevertheless, in some parts of the building ecosystem, there has been more awareness of the need to shade buildings (and specifically windows in buildings) over the last 20 years, supported by minimum energy efficiency standards in buildings. This is also complemented by the variety of shading devices and systems now on the market, making good shading possible.

The increasing use of high-quality shading systems on buildings, such as screens, awnings, louvres and adjustable systems, created an aesthetic of something attractive fixed to the outside of a building. It didn’t take long for the utility to be a secondary consideration as socio-technical system effects emerged.

In our cities and suburbs, we can see many examples where shading systems that were inappropriately applied to walls and windows for their orientation; and in the places that need shading, it has not been used because it would affect the overall aesthetics of a particular facade! This often results in winter sun being permanently excluded and western windows unshaded in summer!

Sometimes the correct form of shading has been placed on the correct facade, only to be ineffective. In the image below of a multi-residential development, the west facing facade has been fitted with orange-coloured shade blinds. This is an essential addition for a west-facing building: vertical shading system, floor-to ceiling; located externally to glazed external walls and not on the inside of the windows; and a high level of sun blockout. However, there is not full coverage of windows to protect against afternoon summer sun! Only half of each unit’s facade is protected. The provision of some shading gives the appearance and aesthetics of shading - yet it is only mostly ineffective for its primary job - excluding afternoon sun in summer. I suggest a combination of aesthetics and cost cutting were the decision drivers here. If shading was the driver, then I’d expect to see the entire facade protected. The designers are relying too much on the double glazing to do the work. Imagine a summer day approaching a peak of 38 to 40 degrees, and the sun hitting the glass around 2pm and still penetrating into the interior during the early evening.

Example 2: Recycled Timber

Recycled timber is being increasingly used in buildings, especially if a green rating is being sought or the home-owners want a more sustainable house. Further, as timber production cannot keep up with demand in Australia, the value of recycled timber has increased, and timber from building demolition was increasingly recovered directly or diverted from landfill. The value issue is especially true for recovered old growth Australian hardwoods.

In recent years, green building ratings began to give points for use of recycled materials, including timber. This has led to increasing use of recycled materials being used in building fitouts, building foyers and building facades (usually those facing the street, especially at ground or podium level).

Again this has created a recycled timber aesthetic, leading to use of recycled materials for its appearance only: used as an extra finish layer over other materials as a base layer - effectively, used as a very thick wallpaper. Usually such timber materials are in good condition, so there will remain the question of whether its a good use of the material. Note that if recycled timber is used as the main structure and the main cladding and lining elements, then that’s a good use.

However, it can get worse: virgin timbers that have been treated to give the appearance of being recycled are being used as wall linings and in furniture. For example, I have seen furniture in cafes around Melbourne using this technique. And it has been done so well, you have to know what to look for to be able to tell the difference. I’m sure many of these cafe owners have been fooled into thinking they have invested in recycled materials to demonstrate their sustainability credentials.

Example 3: Carbon offsets

While carbon offsets are not a direct comparison to recycled materials, the crossover issue is that they are increasingly being used in trivial ways as a form of greenwashing.

When the largest company in the world - also the largest fossil fuel company in the world - Saudi Aramco, can make the claim that their operations have achieved net zero for Scope 1 and 2 emissions, largely through carbon offsets, then something is wrong. This is greenwashing writ large, and its being repeated by many global corporations to continue increasing the extraction of fossil fuels and as a way to avoid to taking meaningful action. This is an incredibly inefficient (and unethical) allocation of scarce natural resources.

The problem as I see it, is that there will most likely be insufficient carbon offset sources for this type of unsustainable behaviour. Further, there has not been enough study to demonstrate if there is an upper limit to offsets, especially soil carbon and forest projects - especially if more offsets are needed to enable fossil fuel extraction and fossil fuel intensive industries to continue well into the future.

Impact on availability

The demand for recycled construction materials is likely to outstrip our capacity to demolish existing buildings and recover those material stocks, so that they flow back into the recycled materials market. Population growth and demographics generally will end that.

Just as I am concerned with the allocation of limited land area to carbon offsets for fundamentally unsustainable business models, I am very concerned about the similar flow-on effect on limiting availability of recycled bricks for important thermal capacity and durability performance.

Fundamentally, scarce materials should be used judiciously by not wasting a valuable resource with the appearance of sustainability, yet doing little to reduce carbon emissions and other environmental impacts.

Having said that, I’d like to see some more research on projected material flows for specific recycled material streams, especially for bricks. This should look at projected building demolition rates, estimates of stocks released back into the materials stream, and demand for recycled material stocks on an annual basis, factoring in for increased demand.

So this means that recycled bricks should be only be used for serious structural and material functions (as per highest level of utility). A material that can provide low-carbon thermal mass to help naturally manage interior temperatures and the related energy use in buildings - particularly in residential - should be driving the choice and application of recycled bricks.

And I have no problems with the aesthetics issue with recycled bricks, if the higher levels of utility, especially thermal and low carbon performance, are present.

Brick recycling as a socio-technical system

The issues I have identified with recycled materials have happened because the building materials ecosystem is an example of a living system of a socio-techncial character, where humans create technology, and the technology in turn creates human culture, often by emergence rather than intention; often contrary to human purpose.

When home-builders use recycled bricks in a trivial way - such as in architectural features, and street appearance - they create a new aesthetic that then becomes a fashion that drives material choice. This is an example of an unintended consequence - an emergent pattern - that if continued, would waste the potential for low-carbon recycled bricks to be used in significant ways, especially for thermal performance, durability, structure, acoustic protection and fire resistance.

From a systems perspective, we need to amplify the use of recycled bricks while dampening the demand for recycled bricks for decoration. This is easier said than done - when people become habituated to a particular fashion, it can become persistent for some years in the wider system.

Taking another perspective, the pricing for new and recycled bricks in Melbourne starts around AUD700 per thousand, whereas new bricks start around AUD1100 per thousand. However, there is quite an overlap in the cost structures for both recycled and new streams, depending on the style of brick, with many types of recycled brick - especially heritage styles - being substantially more expensive than new common bricks as well as new lower cost range face bricks!

As demand for recycled bricks increases for all the reasons I’ve described, prices could go up and the current cost advantage may disappear. Such price signals may provide some of the system “dampening” needed.

Further dampening may come from emerging aesthetic trends displacing the aesthetic of recycling in favour of more authentically sustainable applications at the highest level of utility, freeing up supply while the aesthetic circus moves on.

Closing thoughts

The reality is that technology and material choice is often driven by aesthetics rather than performance and all things being equal, the more aesthetic option is usually chosen, within preferred price ranges. Humans generally don’t seem to have much resistance to the external appearance of objects of desire, so changing this directly will be challenging.

In the meantime, the current flow rate of recycled bricks may be mostly driven by demolition rates that are within current rates of demand. In this case, it may be counterproductive and impractical to try to preserve stock for the future, at this point.

Industry and academia have an important role role here, especially where built environment and related industry organizations are already promoting circularity and sustainability. I’d like to see more guidance and encouragement from industry and academia towards higher-utility applications of recycled materials as an ethic of care as sustainability stewards. This can buy time for price effects and the inevitable fashion changes to do the work while preparing for future scarcity by leveraging industry influence on home buyers, home builders, architects and designers, developers and project managers.

As future scarcity kicks in, we can then consider the next phases of maintaining higher utility:

• Where planned use of bricks are for facade purposes, and the rest of the building specifies lightweight methods, bricks should be eliminated from the materials palette in favour of all-lightweight lower carbon construction methods.

• Further, we should be actively discouraging use of recycled bricks in applications that add nothing to the improvement of sustainability and circularity in the built environment.

• And we should keep doing this even though we may continue to lack research and understanding on the balancing of recycled brick material flows and demand.

Version 1 - 30th July 2025

This is a paper I wrote with Mark Dewsbury outlining the educational process for enabling University of Tasmania architecture students to learn technical decision-making for a project designing and constructing a mud brick dome in a forest reserve near Lilydale in northern Tasmania in 2000.

Mark was a mature age student at the time, and had extensive earth building experience from having built his own mud brick house in the New England region of NSW. Mark is now Dr Mark Dewsbury and a Senior Lecturer in Architecture at University of Tasmania at Launceston. Mark is also a subscriber to Second Nature!

Building this dome was a crazy, risky yet purposeful process, not just because of building a desert-climate earth dome in a cool temperate forest where it rains a lot, but especially because students carried out most of the decision-making about design and process. This could have been a disaster, but it wasn’t!

We had so much fun designing and building the dome and this paper captures some of that spirit. I have added some reflective comments throughout the text as appropriate.

Abstract

This paper describes a Learning-by-Making Studio conducted by the School of Architecture at the University of Tasmania at Launceston, Australia.

This Studio was as much about the process as the product. Students were given the freedom to make their own decisions about technical issues and about constructional process. This created space for students to make mistakes so that reality could be the teacher, and the students learn through their own experiences.

Student evaluation of the studio indicated a high level of satisfaction and appreciation of the process of making their own decisions.

Introduction

The DOME studio was an extension of the successful Learning-By-Making Program in the Bachelor of Arts (Environmental Design) in the School of Architecture at the University of Tasmania at Launceston. The DOME Studio was offered in Semesters One and Two of 2000. Most building projects in the Learning-By-Making Program have focussed on lightweight materials, fabricated substantially in the Architecture Workshop with minimal time spent on site. In contrast, the DOME Studio changed this emphasis by focussing on a site-based, hand-made, mass material project with a much longer time involvement compared to other Learning-By-Making Studios.

Objectives

The objectives of the DOME Studio were to develop:

• An appreciation of the issues involved in the design and construction of buildings for the majority world

• A working knowledge of common technical strategies for building with earth and other low embodied energy, natural and local materials

• An understanding of how to develop strategies which facilitate a building project

• An understanding of the issues of self-help building and local participation, and how these can support community development

• Manual skills in basic earth building and other techniques

• An ability to work in groups

Location

The site is the School of Architecture’s experimental building facility at Hollybank State Forest, about 15km north-east of the University’s Launceston Campus, on the Lilydale Road. The site is in a sub-alpine eucalypt re-growth forest above 400m altitude, below the adjacent peak of Mt Arthur, some 1200m above sea level.

Reflection: Hollybank has since been developed with a mountain bike park, a ropes course, and walking tracks. I am not 100% sure about the fate of the patch of open land that was loaned to UTas Architecture for experimental building. I was told that a few years after construction, the dome collapsed, and the immediate site had to be fenced off. I’m not sure of the fate of the timber structures built by students in previous Learning-by-Making studios.

Methodologies

General Process

The Studio was planned as a one-semester project, but there was scope to extend it into a second semester if necessary. Students were only required to commit to one semester.

Twenty students participated in Semester One, eleven in Semester Two. There were seven students continuing from Semester One.

The Lecturer resisted pre-empting student decision-making by proscribing processes and techniques even though this would have enabled construction to start sooner (other than that the building would be made from earth and it would be a dome).

This Studio was as much about the process as the product. Students were given the freedom to make their own decisions about design, techniques and processes. This created space for students to make mistakes so that reality could be the teacher, and the students learn through their own experiences. As a result, it was important for the lecturer (also the principal author) to take a back seat in the process, and to resist directing the process as much as possible. Students also had the responsibility of following through on agreed tasks to ensure the process maintained momentum.

Students had flexibility in attendance, especially with regard to extra sessions that were scheduled on some weekends. Students could make up hours if they missed days during the week.

Reflection: This was in some ways more challenging than I thought it would be. However, once students understood what it meant to actually make decisions and follow through with them, things progressed smoothly for the most part.

Research Process – Initial Phases

During Weeks 1 and 2 of Semester One, students divided into small groups for intensive research. This allowed for a quick and efficient interchange of information within the group. The specialist research groups informed the rest on the particulars of their findings.

Some students started pushing for an early start to the design process, wanting the design process to throw up the issues for further research. The group decided that the gaps in the knowledge could be dealt with as the project unfolded.

Design Process

The Design Phase occurred over Weeks 3 and 4 of Semester One, with students working individually or in small groups in order to develop designs based on the information identified in research.

The design process was driven by modelling, using potter’s clay, with focus on the trialling of some of the techniques and patterns for dome and vault building. Students were required to make decisions of size, scale, technology and buildability.

Individuals sketched ideas, forms and sizes. The modelling phase provided a useful visual and constructional exploration of the sketches that people had drawn. It was broken up into two stages:

• An exercise in form-making based on individuals explorations.

• An exercise of designing to scale with miniature bricks.

As students created ideas of similar form three models emerged. Students selected the design for further development which featured a circular floor plan of approximately 4m diameter with a curved intersecting courtyard wall which provided extra stiffening across the doorway to the inside (Photo 1). At the time the group also discussed the intersection of the wall and the dome, and it was agreed that a vaulted structure was needed to strengthen this point.

Reflection: To make design models of the dome using potter’s clay, similar fundamental material used in construction was a delight of this phase of the process, and it enabled students to develop a feel for the material at a small scale and making the project less of an abstraction.

After this first phase of modelling and a soil test, advice was sought from an engineering consultant. The group then agreed that the general dimensions should be finalised: a 4m diameter, a 450mm thick base wall up to 1m above the footing, a parabolic dome approximately 4m to the apex from the ground, a vaulted entry about 1.8m long and about 2m high: all on stabilised rammed earth footings 500mm deep and 750mm wide.

A visit to the site by a majority of the students was made to select the exact location and orientation of the dome.

Budgeting

During the design phase a budgeting process was set up; this was to be managed by the students, but given the amount of preparation required on other tasks, the lecturer largely managed this. Students assisted by visiting suppliers and researching prices for a range of materials and equipment that had been identified in the research phase.

Construction Process - Semester 1

Preparatory Processes

There was a range of required tasks to be done for a start to happen in Week 5. Lack of attention by the purchasing group to the concept of “lead time” meant that gear was not secured until Week 6. This was one of the first big learning experiences in the project – it was a significant loss of time. Excavation and site clearing also proceeded early in Week 5.

A group of students determined the sizes of the bricks for both the base wall and the parabolic shell. They also took responsibility for making brick moulds - sufficient quantities of moulds were required to make the process efficient.

Brickmaking

Students determined the brick quantities of each type of brick. Initially brickmaking proceeded on the basis of being unstabilised, but this changed after observing that the bricks were taking too long to dry. It was decided that cement stabilisation was the only way that bricks would be suitable for use early enough to achieve progress on the building by the end of the semester. It also allowed for a quicker reuse of the limited brickmaking space, and for early laying.

Students decided the process for brickmaking and soon became adept at the brick production process (Photo 2), including setting up at the start of the day and cleaning up at the end of the day..

Reflection: The original approach was to use the natural earth as found on site for the bricks (notwithstanding that we had intended to stabilise the rammed earth footings with cement). The reason for using unstabilised earth for the bricks was that building an earth dome in this environment meant that the building could decay, and the natural materials could be re-used in a different project or used to remediate the pit we created by removing earth materials.

We also ensured that the brick pit was shallow enough (say two bricks deep) and with angled sides, that it wasn’t a trip hazard for anyone walking through the area. And it meant that vegetation could regrow if the dome stayed as a structure.

Building Set Out and Footings

With brickmaking nearing completion, construction commenced in Week 10. The dome site was set out - the stringlines and datum points were re-set, the centre of the dome was pegged, and footings were marked out on the ground using a straight edge, rotated about the central peg and hydrated lime powder. This set-out process was completely worked out and executed by the students without supervision.

Rammed earth footings were then constructed from finely sieved clay soil mixed with 10% cement by weight – the same formula as the stabilised bricks. This mixture was then compacted in situ with mechanical compactors.

Bricklaying

The base cylindrical structure was a simple introduction to the laying of earth blocks, and students adapted very quickly to the process; they were unprepared for the continuing demand for more earth for the mortar. The main difficulty was keeping the wall plumb. Two sessions in Weeks 11 and 13 completed the bricklaying of the cylindrical 450mm thick base wall.

At this point it was agreed that the group would suspend works to allow them to work on their major Design Studio Projects and other assignments, to reconvene after the Folio submission period. It was anticipated that a core group of students would be available for at least a week after Folio submission to commence the bricklaying on the main dome. This did not happen: some students already had organised holiday work, some were too exhausted, some had disappeared on holidays and the rest had lost interest because the dome was not completed within the semester.

Construction Process - Semester 2

Initial Discussions

The Studio was continued in Semester Two with fewer participants and some new faces. By discussion with participants, it was agreed to work two weekdays as well as Saturdays in order to finish the structure by Week 6. The group would leave the dome to cure and return to site in the last two weeks of Semester Two to do the render and to clean up the site. This freed them up to put energy into their other subjects for the majority of the semester.

Bricklaying

In the planning for the laying of the bricks to the parabolic shell, the aim was to use empirical methods, taking inspiration from the traditions of the Nubian Masons, with a little help from the computer to substitute for a few thousand years of building culture.

It was decided that a template was needed to give shape to the dome and to identify the brick courses. Robin Green, the Architect Workshop manager developed a rotating template base, using a dumpy tripod. A group of students did detailed calculations of parabolic curves to arrive at the most integrated engineering arrangement. This was translated onto the flat bed router that cut out the 1:1 template from plywood.

One of the great concerns was whether the bricks would adhere to the wall, especially where the slope was increasing. Laying of the brickwork for dome proceeded with minimal problems. After a bit of adjustment, the template worked well and was able to keep the curvature going. This was a very satisfying period with high levels of enthusiasm and wonder, especially when it became obvious that the dome was not going to collapse. (Photo 3) The word “awesome” was used extensively. Only once did a brick fall off the wall after laying.

Reflection: This was a brilliant process and enabled the students to lay dome bricks symmetrically, following the correct curvature, which was essential for stability, especially in the lower third of the dome. Creating a dome was risky, but care and consideration by students achieved a stunning outcome.

By Week 6, bricklaying was complete. This included building some buttress walls to the entrance vault and a low wall for seating. The Studio group reconvened in Weeks 11 and 12 to finish off.

Rendering

During the recess, research on rendering techniques continued. The student who was originally assigned this task at the beginning of Semester One continued with this research. A 20mm cement-stabilised render with PVA additive was applied, and coated with a breathable stabilised earth water repellent.

Flooring

Early on in the process, a poured earth floor was considered, but the site excavations produced a substantial quantity of stones. Some students were keen to lay a stone floor in a stabilised mud mortar using the waste stone. The poured earth experiment was off the agenda. They carried out the floor laying while the rendering was in process. In addition, many of the large earth blocks were used to make seating inside the dome, and this was carried out at the same time.

Internal Finish

The interior of the dome proved to be quite dark, even with bottles laid in the wall. It was decided to do a traditional whitewash to the interior. This was slapped on very quickly, without much care about other surfaces.

Fireplace

A fireplace, hood and flue were installed. A group of students were determined to make this work – they had a vision of using the dome as a meeting place. This phase went through many smoke-filled stages, developing a life of its own and it continued beyond the completion of the dome project.

Reflection: I was very doubtful about this step, and I think it would have been better to stick to the original plan to create a skylight from glass bottles. I gave my opinion, but did not impose it, so the students ran with their flue idea, which was sourced second hand. I acknowledge that students were very happy with their decision.

Timeframe

At the completion of construction, this project, although started in March and completed in October, required a total of 24 days on site for brick making, bricklaying and finishing. (Photo 4)

On-site design detail resolution and technical problems

As part of the enablement process, students were encouraged to think ahead and make decisions about what would need to be done each week, without prompting from the lecturer. The site-based decision-making process challenged many students, especially when they felt on top of a particular process and didn’t want to deviate to accommodate change or to introduce new materials or a new process.

The students made many mistakes and errors of judgment during the mud-brick making and construction stages, largely due to challenges of decision-making. When errors became evident to the students, they were given the option of removal, amelioration or acceptance of the work. These decision-making processes represented the major learning experience of the project. Some of the technical problems included:

• Incorrect placement of damp course

• Inappropriate positioning of bottles for light wells

• Maintaining curvature

• Underestimation of brick quantities

• Co-ordination of template and scaffolding

• Poor quality of render.

• The decision not to render internally

• Laying the floor before whitewashing

Final cost

Construction of the dome was achieved within the lower end of the usual Learning-By-Making Studio cost range of $3,000 to $5,000. Taken over two semesters this cost is acceptable, given the intensity of the project and the outcomes achieved.

Assessment

In Semester One, assessment was based on:

• The demonstration by the student of having achieved the Unit Objectives

• Quality of participation, with evidence of participation through attendance records, self, peer and teaching team assessment

• The compilation of a Log Book which recorded the process of research, design and construction.

Assessment in Semester Two was similar to that of Semester One, except that there was no requirement for a Log Book or similar.

The Log Book became a point of contention towards the end of Semester One, because many felt that it was a cumbersome way of communicating their experience. The group held a meeting on site to discuss its pros and cons. The lecturer, however, contended that this may have been unfair on the students who had kept up with the Log Book, and the wishes of such students should be considered in their deliberations. The lecturer did not participate and gave the undertaking that the group consensus would prevail.

The consensus was that students could produce any form of recording the process of research, design and construction. Work handed in was in Log Book format, report format, pictorial summaries and a video summary among other things. Work handed in under this part of the assessment generally measured up to the assessment criteria.

For both semesters, students were asked to rate their own and their peers’ participation and performance in terms of contribution and team work. Criteria for rating performance were given.

One problem with this process is that with a large group, some students were not aware of the extent of the contribution of others. Students were advised that they could abstain from assessing peers where they felt they had insufficient information about their peers’ performance. This occurred in several assessments. It was also interesting to note that some average performers rated themselves as high distinctions, possibly in the knowledge that their peers and the lecturer would mark them down.

Student evaluation of teaching and learning

As with all Units at the University of Tasmania, students are given the opportunity to evaluate the performance of teaching staff and general Unit issues. This is a formal process managed by a discrete division within Student Administration. The evaluations are considered as part of the Performance Management System and are also used as a teaching performance benchmark for academic promotion.

Student evaluation of the studio indicated a high level of satisfaction and appreciation of the process of making their own decisions. There was, however, obvious frustration from some students that the dome was not completed within the timeframe, even though it was made clear at the outset that completion was not guaranteed. This frustration may in part explain the attrition rate from Semester One to Semester Two, whereby only seven of the original twenty elected to continue; it is also likely that positive feedback from the continuing students may have been instrumental in recruiting four new students. Other Specialised Studios on offer in Semester Two can also explain lack of continuation of Third Year students.

Comments from student evaluation in Semester One include:

“The openness of the lecturer to student ideas and directions is unique; it allowed the project to be ours rather than his.”

“Eventually enthusiasm by students waned and the weather was not in our favour to complete the dome.”

Semester Two comments included:

“The opportunity to have a Unit spread over two semesters opens up lots of extra opportunities for building and experimentation.”

“It was fun to be able to work outside from the classrooms – to be outside encourages everyone to have fun.”

“It was good to be able to have a lecturer place himself at our level and be eager to teach us and also learn as he was going along.”

Conclusions

The outcomes of a Studio like this cannot be measured by number of bricks made and laid, and whether the dome was finished within the timeframe. All Unit Objectives were generally achieved although, with respect to the group work objective, the Semester One crew became a bit fragmented in the middle of the semester, with some students happy to stick with one task and one sub-group. The process didn’t become cohesive until footings and bricklaying started.

Informally, however, there were wider and no less important outcomes:

• Inter-year discussion between second and third year students

• Social discussion and jam-sessions around the camp-fire

• Extensive reflections on our approach to dome building

• Team building, particularly in Semester Two

• Acknowledgement of the power of the object that had been created, and the ensouling of the internal space by sitting in silence or chanting as a group

• Positive comment from other teaching staff, students and members of the public who use Hollybank for recreation.

Finally, the opportunity to do projects of this scale and complexity should, in future, be considered in the context of two semesters from the outset.

Reflection: Over 20 years later, I still find it hard to believe that we did it. The project could have failed in any number of ways, yet every problem was worked through with good results.

In hindsight, I also think this was one of my first big experiments with emergence, in as much as I set the parameters of the project including the site with its constraints, worked the students into the project by modelling and research, and then let them make their own decisions and test them in safe-fail experiments based on the patterns that emerged from their interactions with the brief and the context. All I had to do was create feedback as appropriate, and help them to amplify or dampen actions and look for patterns emerging in their local system.

The confidence levels of students were sky high at the end, which I’ll take as justification for the approach. I left UTAS Architecture two years later, moving back to the mainland. My only regret is that I didn’t stay to deal with the collapse of the dome and to see the material returned to the earth. I understand that it was demolished completely at one stage, so I’m hoping that the logical thing was done and the material was used to fill the mud brick pit.

I often wonder what kinds of things we could have achieved with experimental buildings if I had have stayed on. I am still in contact with students from that period in my life, and many have gone on to great careers in architecture and related professions, and many have their own practices, here in Australia and overseas.

References

Student Evaluation of Teaching and Learning, Dome Specialised Studio Semester One 2000, University of Tasmania June 2000

Student Evaluation of Teaching and Learning, Dome Specialised Studio Semester Two 2000, University of Tasmania November 2000

Dewsbury, Mark DOME Specialised Studio Log Book, University of Tasmania October 2000

Parnell, Matthew Lecturer’s Studio Notes and Files, University of Tasmania, October 2000

Before progressing to the article proper, take a few minutes to view this recent news report from Australia’s ABC1, then find a quiet corner somewhere close to reflect on the absurdity. When you feel a bit better, read on.

Whole systems?

The concept of “whole systems” is central to the points I make below and the key reason the present state of waste in the solar industry is so appalling. So I’ll start with a brief explanation, some critiques, and why “whole systems thinking” is so useful, if applied with awareness.

“Whole systems” is a rhetorical “systems thinking” device applied in sustainable development, as well as many innovation and change initiatives, especially for the transformation of networks, organizations, and communities; and our material economy with its multiple-order upstream and downstream impacts. It has been applied effectively in many initiatives as a way of challenging the primacy of linear thinking. So far so good.

The reality of thinking in whole systems is that it is difficult, if not impossible, to conceive of what is a whole system. So much of the world system is not visible or coherent to most of us. That’s why in complexity-based change, we use system mapping, and notional, contingent system boundaries and system graining to see how a transformation might play out in different layers, intersections and scales at varying degrees of detail.

Some critics say that the concept of whole systems is meaningless, largely because of the way it is considered in change. Dave Snowden of Cynefin fame is highly skeptical of its use and recommends against using the term, preferring to deal with the adjacent possible2 in a more bounded systems approach. Australian economist, Nicholas Gruen, in a recent interview was scathing in his critique of systems thinking and whole systems 3. I appreciate why they take their positions: the rhetoric of whole systems has been extensively misused. Many change practitioners use the language of whole systems to describe their intent, but then proceed in a linear fashion. Or they apply the concept in vague ways showing that they don’t know what they mean by whole systems nor understand how many individual rational choices create new emergent patterns that are contrary to purpose - but that’s another topic for another time.

Generally, I don’t agree with these critiques - I think they are a negative reaction to poor and thoughtless application of the concept in practice, peppered with a simplistic application of “straw man” arguments in an unhelpful way.

I believe we need a prompt to help us shift to a way of thinking that is different to that applied in a linear, single-outcome, problem-solving, simplistic approach to the world’s complex problems: an application that often make things worse. And if that useful prompt is the concept of whole systems, then I’m in favour. I’d add, however, the caveat that the concept of “whole systems” should be used in the context of exploration, hypothesis development and self-aware sensemaking to avoid so-called unintended consequences4 , or just snapping back to a linear approach. Just don’t be too vague in your application of the term and don’t get carried away with the rhetoric! And keep your cosmic interpretations of whole systems to yourself as a general rule.

The case of renewable energy systems in Australia

I want to examine the whole systems concept further by looking at a case where failure to consider whole systems has resulted in downsides and unintended consequences: the case of renewable energy systems, particularly solar energy systems and large-scale solar in Australia. In Australia, we have been wildly successful in rolling out renewable energy systems: on domestic, commercial and industrial rooftops; and in large-scale solar farms. The contribution of renewable energy into the national grid is growing at pace. South Australia consistently operates at above 100% renewables contribution, and regularly exports excess electricity to other States. Electric vehicle use is quickly rising, as is the move to whole-house and whole-building electrification, on the promise of increasing quantity of renewable energy at low cost. The Federal Government’s target of 80% renewable contribution to Australia’s electricity system by 2030 is arguably achievable, even with current development bottlenecks and grid limitations.

Yet the renewables industry is an industry that has neglected to think in whole systems, and this failure has created a raft of cascading negative impacts, with recent news items and related social media posts highlighting system failures including:

• increasing wastage of functioning solar PV panels, driven by system upgrades to take advantage of lower cost battery storage systems.

• limited solar PV panel recycling rates, causing redundant panels to be directed to landfill; illegally dumped; or sent overseas to create waste problems in poor communities.

• insurance companies replacing entire systems when only a small percentage of solar PV panels have been subjected to storm damage.

• insufficient legal and technical support to divert functioning solar PV panels for re-use.

• incompatibilities of used solar panels with new technologies.

• permanent loss of critical metals from the material stream.

• insufficient material flow of redundant non-functioning panels to make recycling procedures viable.

• lack of development of a mandatory product stewardship scheme for solar PV panels.

I will add to that list a few more multiple-order impact issues:

• Land clearing to facilitate development, especially clearing of old-growth native forests and woodland.

• Lack of consultation with communities affected by the impact of the development, creating a backlash to renewable energy development.

• Consideration of negative biodiversity effects.

And our hope for such technology is to lead to a more sustainable world - not creating more problems than we have solved. All of these problems are emblematic of the failure to at least try to think in whole systems and prevent for negative system impacts. The drive to cash-in on the solar revolution, with a single-minded focus on installation is successfully accelerating installation, yet leaving considerable waste and multiplying negative impacts in its wake - and all the while claiming that they are just unintended consequences.

Project work in circular solar

In the latter half of 2024 and in early 2025, I participated in two projects framed to shed light on these issues:

• The Smart Energy Council/Queensland Government solar PV panel reuse trial5. I prepared a report on the state of solar panel re-use in Australia as one of the three trial projects.

• The Circular PV Alliance assessment tool to certify the circularity of large-scale solar farms 6. I reviewed the assessment tool drafts and made recommendations for improvement after each iteration; then conducted an independent third party assessment of CPVA’s evaluation of a solar farm.

My participation in these projects gave me insight into what’s wrong with the current system of renewable energy development that need to be urgently addressed by both Government and Industry.

The report for the Smart Energy Council has not been officially released yet, waiting for all three parts of the solar PV panel reuse trial to be completed. The report contained the results of a rapid desktop review of current academic and industry literature on solar PV panel reuse and recycling. One hundred and twenty-seven documents were accessed and analyzed, with special focus on thirty-two Australian documents with high-relevance to solar PV panel reuse. Issues and recommendations from the literature were categorized in terms of policy, technical, economic, reverse logistics and capability themes. The literature review was supported by a validation process with project’s Advisory Group and additional experts.

Insights

Across the five themes, twenty problematic issues were identified in the literature, with fifty-eight discrete recommendations for change. I sorted these into nine high-priority areas based on Advisory Group feedback:

1. Enforce an end to landfilling of solar PV panels.

2. Establish a consistent national approach for mandatory product stewardship

3. Establish standards for reuse to build consumer trust in the emerging second-hand solar PV panel market.

4. Extend the Small-scale Technology Certificates (STC) program to allow for reuse of solar PV panels.

5. Extend CEC solar PV panel accreditation time limits.

6. Develop collection and transport protocols for safe handling, stacking, and transport of decommissioned solar PV systems.

7. Establish a centralized, fit-for-purpose database that captures all solar PV panel installations and removals.

8. Provide financial incentives to encourage business and residential consumers to purchase properly tested, repaired and refurbished solar PV systems.

9. Develop more recovery facilities and collection points across urban, regional and remote Australia.

The recent articles in Australian media reinforce these findings and stress the urgent need for action.

Based on the findings of the report I prepared, plus the more recent articles, I can unequivocally say that the inability to design for whole systems has contributed to the situation where solar panel recycling is limited, most redundant functioning panels are not re-deployed, and valuable functioning panels end up as waste.

In my opinion, it demonstrates that participants in the renewable energy field are so focussed on the roll-out, that they neglected to consider the multi-order system effects of their decisions. This is more than likely due to the mistaken belief that because they contribute to the growth of renewable energy, they are inherently acting sustainably. They are not.

I expect this from the mainstream business-as-usual sector; but to see this in the renewables sector is disappointing. Even a cursory bit of low-grade, vague, almost-whole-system-thinking could have avoided this unsatisfactory system state.

In response, the CPVA initiatives creating a circular certification platform is a timely innovation that will certainly introduce a degree of whole-system thinking to the large-scale solar industry. I hope that ongoing advocacy from the SEC and the supporting ecosystem of academic and industry leaders gain traction in driving implementation of these recommendations, especially towards a mandatory product stewardship scheme for solar PV panels.

Our Federal, State and Territory Governments and industry must do better than the current state of affairs. Time to step up, for the sake of the whole system - even if that’s contentious and difficult to do!

Note: I understand (via Darren Johannesen of SEC) that that the Queensland Government will soon release the desktop report as well as the reports of the solar PV panel reuse trials. I also understand that once that happens, the SEC will place all the trial reports on their website for public access. I further understand that the SEC is in the process of sharing outcomes with other Australian State Governments. I’d like to share the report with subscribers, but I won’t until it has been officially made public.

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Version 1.0 June 20 2025

For most of my professional life, I have championed experiential learning amplified by what I call “learning-in-relationship” – an ethic of care, support and intrinsic motivation emerging in the interaction between educator and learner. This is embedded in my work here on Second Nature, and is especially important because of the challenging nature of practice in a complexity and a changing operating landscape.

Extending my previous experience teaching sustainability, strategic design, innovation and complexity practice at Swinburne University, I continued to experiment with different learning contexts to gain a rich picture of the different ways to engage participants in embedding challenging content and adopting complexity-relevant practices.

Over the last few years, I’ve experimented with webinars; intensive structured multi-week workshops; one-to-one mentoring - both in person and online; and a rolling 8-week workshop program structured on a drop-in-as-needed basis.

Reflecting on these experiments, I have a strengthened conviction that developing capability in a living systems approach to sustainability practice is best experienced in a mentored real-world workplace project, community project, or a challenge.

Further, capability development should also be situated in a one-to-one or small group context over enough time to allow for plenty of semi-structured conversation and experimentation over an action-learning-reflection cycle.

I also think that the availability of ongoing support of a community-of-practice and peer learning (plus the growing resources on Second Nature) will embed the core learning in Living Systems Practice.

This is the focus of my work in growing the sustainability transition, resulting in a simpler approach to my services offering:

Mentoring

Through Mentoring, I work with individuals and groups, either solo or within an organisational context, to engage in experiential learning in applying Living Systems Practice, and support their agency over transition efforts in their own social context – their network, community, organisation, institution, group or team.

Mentoring sessions can be face-to-face or online by arrangement. Group mentoring can be offered in semi-structured workshops or as community-of-practice sessions.

Alternatively, an on-going engagement embedded in your organisation is offered as a bespoke activity. This gives me an opportunity to work with you over a longer time frame, which will assist in embedding new practice in the culture of your organisation.

Participants will work on on authentic problems and complex sustainability challenges from their own workplaces or projects.

Community-of-Practice

A community of Living Systems practitioners is slowly emerging who are keen to explore sustainability practice at the intersection of complexity, emergence, strategic design, experiential learning, participatory methods and sustainability culture, whether its my model of practice or something adjacent.

If you are interested in this living systems approach to practice, consider participating in this growing Community-of-Practice. This will support your ongoing learning and development in a living systems approach, through: the Second Nature platform content and chat tools; my Linked In posts; and in on-going conversations on an ad-hoc basis.

With your subscription to Second Nature, you can be part of the broader community of living systems practitioners. Access the chat here or just drop me a line via email or DM me through Linked In.

Fees

Dr Matthew Parnell

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Link to Second Nature here.

You can find all my work on a living systems approach to sustainability practice there. This includes the Foundations articles and Course; the Living Systems Pattern Atlas; and my general writing on sustainbility issues!

Subscriptions to Second Nature are free.

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Matthew

The wild - often dismissed as savage and chaotic by "civilized" thinkers, is actually impartially, relentlessly, and beautifully formal and free. Its expression - the richness of plant and animal life on the globe including us, the rainstorms, windstorms, and calm spring mornings - is the real world, to which we belong.

Gary Snyder1

Cluster: Fundamental Living Systems Patterns

Type: Essential Practice Pattern

Purpose

The Human Systems Pattern maps the complexity of human systems, connects it with our relationship with technology and embeds that complexity within ecosystem limits and planetary boundaries.

Pattern Description

Human systems are fundamentally complex and adaptive, responding to signals from the human, technological and natural environments to create an ever-changing emergent state of culture. All action, whether personal, social, economic or technological create cultures around the action, and those cultures then shape the on-going adaptation of actions as well as the development of new ways of doing things.

Thus the Human Systems Pattern maps the forces at play in human systems, and how they manifest in our domains of practice (such as business, industry, technology) and how they influence our approach to our daily pursuit of livelihood and lifeways in every context of action and agency.

The interacting drivers, contexts and feedback pathways influencing our actions are what creates the continuing emergent impact on our natural systems, including our overshoot of ecosystem limits and planetary boundaries, and demands that we transform our systems towards nature positive pathways of protection, preservation, restoration and regeneration.

Elemental Patterns

Drivers of Change: The world is in continuous state of change, with forces both near and far, with signals both strong and weak, impacting human systems at all scales and domains. In experiencing such forces, human systems adapt to those changes in some way, whether by circumstance or by design, while searching for stability, yet with the possibility of new opportunities for positive change. Such drivers can be a combination of environmental, social, political, economic, technological or capability factors; so understanding and mapping them is crucial for designing a change process if known; if not known, then futures methods may be needed to understand what might emerge in the adjacent future.

Practice Domains: Transformation is not implemented by any one thing or practice: in addition to normal operational tasks there are what I call “practice domains”: these are abstract system patterns that interact across all organizational procedures and processes: ecological; cultural; social; knowledge; technological; livelihoods; and institutional. All these domains are nested within the ecological domain. This Pattern is critical for practitioners because of the implications they have for the approach to practice and the tools and methods being applied. Each domain requires careful thought about how to activate transformation and demands that the sustainability practitioner has an appropriate capability for the domains of practice.

Practice Context: Any field of human endeavour is a field of sustainability practice: economics, governance, engineering, health, science, design, business, education and so on across the Practice Domains.

Sustainability practice often concerns how decisions are made, their contexts, the methods applied, and what emerges from action. Some sustainability practice is situated within narrow boundaries, and generally simple, linear approaches are appropriate: the practice gaps are generally minimal, and can be readily dealt with by a normal professional mind-set.

When practice contexts become complex, such as in working with people, communities, organizations and institutions, when the rules are less certain, or do not exist, or where the practice space is highly contested, the sustainability practice gaps become more evident, and the need for different practice approaches becomes more important. What’s most important, however, is the understanding that all areas of human action happen within ecological systems, and their impacts and multiple-order consequences directly or indirectly impact ecological system health.

Socio-Ecological Interaction: With more pressure from humans , on natural systems than ever before, the scars on the environment indicate the state of our socio-ecological system interactions. All our efforts towards change over the last fifty years have been overtaken by increasing population, economic growth and material demands, with ecological systems under stress and most Planetary Boundaries exceeded. Our social and ecological connections are increasingly disengaged, even though socio-ecological integration is more urgent than ever. Thus inclusion of this Element in the Human Systems Pattern consciously connects to the ethos of the Natural Systems Pattern in this Patterns Cluster.

Socio-Technical Interaction: The key to understanding transformation in human systems is that collectives of interacting people with explicit /implicit and formal/informal rules are actual living systems – this is not an “ecology” metaphor: human systems are alive! Further, we must deeply understand that technology and human culture are intimately linked in dynamic patterns of mutual influence - they are complex and adaptive. This means that as you interact with others (amplified or dampened through mediation with technology) in pursuit of personal and social goals, the system changes in real time as you work with it and often in unpredictable ways.

The ability to restorr and regenerate will be intimately related to technology, even if good holistic and sustainable technical solutions need time to develop and be accepted. Wise technology choice and application in the context of an understanding of living systems is critical for our future survival.

Systems of Learning: This Pattern grounds the concept of systems of learning providing the primary feedback pathway in human systems. An informal approach to learning, on a foundation of developed capacity, applied in meaningful ways, in socially situated real-world actions, at critical intervention points, and with a high level of motivation, is an essential part of the process needed to create a culture of sustainability over deep time. The capacity to reflect while in the process of taking action is critical to establishing a sustained ethos and culture of care.

Emergent Culture: A sustainability culture should emerge through sustainability practice over time through drivers of change towards interaction of the other Elements in this Practice Pattern: systems of learning; systems of socio-technical interaction; systems of socio-nature interaction and human systems feedback.

Culture emerges through engaged participants empowered to make their own meaning of sustainability practice and culture in the parts of the network, organization, institution, community, group or team where they have agency. Engagement should accommodate diverse ways of being and acting, which is particularly important as our development of sustainability culture is an on-going endeavour.

Example Applications

Aligned Practices

Coherent Tools

Knowledge Base

References

Useful Links

Atlas Navigation

• Go to the Elemental Patterns within the Human Systems Pattern (under construction):

  • Drivers of Change - Practice Domains - Practice Context - Socio-Ecological Interaction - Socio-Technical Interaction - Systems of Learning - Emergent Culture

• Go to the Natural Systems Pattern within the Fundamental Living Systems Pattern Cluster

• Go to the Sustainable Systems Pattern within the Fundamental Living Systems Pattern Cluster

Return to Pattern Atlas Base

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Version

Version 1.1 - 8 May 2025