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July 1, 2009
The Adelaide Festival of Ideas says that it aims to be a sort of ‘over the horizon’ radar for public discussion. The object is to discern the ideas that will shape the coming decades, not just the coming months.
The context in Australia is not just the collapse of the economic boom, the global financial crisis, the global recession; it is also the effects of climate change and the need to shift to a more sustainable society and a low carbon economy because of natural limits.
The shift here is one of economic growth being decoupled from environmental harm, moving beyond constructing environmental issues as ‘jobs versus the environment’, and policies which accept that the switch to renewal energy is necessary to long term security and sustainability.
Interestingly, the 2009 Adelaide Festival of Ideas is about limits. The blurb says that:
On the one hand there is pushing the limits to each new ideas, experiences, products and plans.On the other hand, the limits push back. For example, the Murray Darling Basin and world financial markets have been pushed too far and the consequences are serious. And in public policy, the limits of tolerance are always a matter of passionate debate.
What is offered on the website is minimal: a programme and a biography of speakers, but, as in previous years, there is no material online about the sessions or links to online background material to the issues under discussion. As the format is still the traditional one of citizens going along to hear the experts inform them about the issues, and then asking a few questions at the end, we bloggers need to do our own research.
My own interest this year is in the shift to sustainable cities in the context of climate change. This is a moving beyond the ‘urban good, suburban bad’ (or vice versa) polarity that has marked Australia’s urban debates in the context of the culture wars, urban consolidation and growth-obsessed State Governments ever anxious to keep the building industry going. We need to look at our evolving cites from an more eco-urban system perspective-- the city embedded within its ecology--and the need to steer change and mould it to ensure urban sustainability and resilience.
There is a session on Friday entitled Limits of Cities with Ruth Fincher, Professor of Geography, and Interim Director of the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, Brendan Gleeson and Khalid Koser, Director of the New Issues in Security Course at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy.
This session appears to about the social aspects of cities (diversity, inequity, migrants). Only Gleeson, the Director of the Urban Research programme at Griffith University, has a background in both the sustainablity of cities and in ecological modernization, which refers back to the 1980s idea of sustainable development.
This is important since Australia has a big problem with ecological modernization. It has a poor record of technological innovation outside of the agricultural and mining sectors. A large part of its production and export earnings come from the extractive industries that mine and refine non-renewable resources, particularly coal, gold, alumina, and iron ore and ecologically modernising the Australian economy necessitates the creation of economic incentives to reduce the nation’s dependence on these commodities. As Gleeson says Australia does need to address:
by good design and planning the vulnerability of cities to resource shortages, notably water, coal [sic] and oil. The ambition is part mitigative – to slow the inevitable decline of key resources – and part adaptive, to heighten the resilience of urban landscapes in a context of rising resource finitude. In the fight against global warming, planning’s prime contribution is adaptation in search of climate resilient cities. This means the creation of urban environments that will withstand the vagaries of a harmed climate and rising resource shortages.
Neo-liberalism's ‘growth fetish’ needs to be replaced by an urban effort compelled by the immediate ecological and social imperatives facing Australia’s climate threatened cities.
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I checked out the sustainablity of cities link---it is a paper entitled The Endangered State of Australian Cities Climate Threat and Urban Response by Bernard Gleeson. He says:
The problem here is that the overwhelming majority of urban citizens reside in some form of suburban setting and there is a significant wealth divide between lower density suburbia and the inner urban higher density domains.
So the task of adaptation means suburban renovation with an emphasis on equity.