Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Constructive voices, the podcast for the construction people with news, views and expert interviews.
[00:00:07] Speaker B: Hello, I'm Steve Randall, and welcome to Constructive Voices. Coming soon, we'll be bringing you a brand new podcast featuring more inspiring and innovative guests from the construction world. So make sure you follow or subscribe to this podcast channel to get all the episodes automatically. And remember to visit our website, constructive voices.com. Don't forget the dash to find out more about the podcast, our training programs, and much more. On this episode, we're off to Australia as Jackie de Burker speaks with another exceptional guest.
[00:00:39] Speaker C: So, my name is Julian Bolleter. I'm the co director of the Australian Urban Design Research Centre. We're a research centre of the University of Western Australia and we conduct research for state and federal government. And we also run a master's program in urban design.
[00:00:55] Speaker A: Brilliant. You're very welcome, Julian. Thank you very much with the time difference for making it to be with us today. Now, one of my own favourite words that having researched yourself in a fair bit of depth that I believe can be applied to you is the word prolific. And it's hard to know really where to start. Should we go back to your early foundational years when you were a child, Julian, did you have sort of a special connection to your environment?
[00:01:21] Speaker C: I mean, I grew up in the australian dream, which was the big quarter acre lot, had a house and it had a huge back garden full of old trees. My parents were not fastidious gardeners and the whole thing grew into a kind of overgrown jungle. It had a big impact on me. I spent a lot of time up trees, basically.
And also after reading the great Escape, a lot of time digging holes and building underground cubbies. So that was my kind of thing. So, yeah, had a real significant impact, I think, growing up, even though I probably didn't realize it at the time, but the connection with what I ended up doing in terms of landscape architecture and urban design came through building model railways. I was really fascinated with building model railways as a kid, and not so much the trains, but actually just crafting landscapes out of big blocks of polys diarrhea and creating little worlds. And that's, I think, the thread that eventually connected me through to landscape architecture and then urban design.
[00:02:18] Speaker A: What an amazing grounding between that outside space you had as a family and obviously your hobby as a child, Julian, you've also worked in quite a few different countries. Would you like to touch on how each of these countries and places might have affected you in your work?
[00:02:34] Speaker C: I thought if I was going to be stuck in an office, which it seemed to be. That's what being a designer was. I might as well do it in some exotic locations. Worked in Sydney for the Sydney Olympics and then jetted across to Dubai for the boom years there in 2005, leading up to the GFC, where things were really escalating quickly. Some time in Boston and then London. Dubai was probably the most influential for me, and I ended up writing a phd on Dubai's urban development model because I was still struggling to process the experience of working there a couple of years later. So it was sort of therapy to go back to that experience. Dubai was wonderful in the sense, as my boss of the company I was working for said, the great thing about Dubai is you get to make ten years of mistakes in the things you design and build in one year. And I think I probably exceeded that. But it provided a really steep learning curve because things you would draw in the morning seemed to be getting built that afternoon. Something which for good or for bad, doesn't happen in Australia. But it really threw up a lot of issues for me, both in terms of how urban design does a couple of things in those spaces. One is that it can serve to legitimize the rule of a benevolent dictator like Sheikh Mohammed, but also the way it know trash remnant desert ecology, which actually does exist, and the way that it can be totally reliant on an apparently unskilled kind of labor force who are treated very badly. So I think that experience threw up a few issues for me, which took a while to untangle, but at the same time, what a fascinating place to work and get things built.
[00:04:11] Speaker A: Now, you're a published author of six commercial books.
[00:04:14] Speaker C: That's correct.
[00:04:15] Speaker A: And you're also the co director, as we mentioned earlier on, of the Australian Urban Design Research Centre. Let's talk about that role and what does it involve?
[00:04:24] Speaker C: Okay, so the role involves working with state and federal government, state and government particularly, who are generous funders of us, to really pursue issues which need research focused evidence to generate policy. We are currently working on a project called Future Climate Future Home, which is looking at different urbanisms up and down the west australian landscape in different climate zones. Because we have a whole number of different climate zones through WA and actually looking at urbanisms for the degree to which they have a significant or high climate performance. We measure that through both the thermal comfort within buildings and within the public domain. We measure it in terms of water use required for irrigation, and energy use for cooling and cooling houses. So we're doing an assessment essentially throughout Western Australia's climate regions, of the climate performance of a whole bunch of different urbanisms. But then fast forwarding into projections for 2000 and 52,090 to go, well, how do they put. If they're performing badly now, as some of them are, how do they perform mid century or towards the end of the century? So that's typical of the kind of research we're doing for state government, which has obvious relevance for policy, for how we do urban densification, for how we build new suburbs, for how we even design parks. All of these have huge implications on thermal comfort and climate performance. So that's my kind of day to day role, as well as doing a bit of teaching and trying to somehow thrash out a book or two in the evening, in front of the tv at night.
I'm told I'm too prolific, actually, and that sometimes I should probably just settle down. And if you read some a little bit carefully, you might agree.
[00:06:05] Speaker A: I'm glad you mirrored back the word that came to my mind as I was researching your background and your work. Obviously, one of the research interests that popped up, obviously, around new city development, urban infill development, and also the design of multifunctional public open space. Talk about your thoughts and your ideas that I think most likely are related to. But you might tell me differently. The ghost cities of Australia, a survey of new city proposals and the lessons for Australia's 21st century development.
[00:06:38] Speaker C: Yeah. So Australia has a history, sorry, I should say colonial Australia has a history of making vast projections for future populations which this continent could support. They range from projections as high as 200 million people. And there's been this ongoing kind of colonial idea that we just need to properly tame this place and settle it and kind of teach it a lesson. And that the old kind of english idea, that Australia would be populated by small little hamlets amongst rolling green hills if we could only redirect rivers to flow inland and build big enough dams and transform this place into a kind of green wonderland. That book, the Ghost Cities of Australia, was basically a chronicle of 200 years of quite entertaining and often quite ridiculous propositions for how we could properly settle this place according to a kind of imported ideal, generally from England. Frankly, that the image of pastoral England and its beauty that anglophile settlers held so dear has led to nothing but disaster when it's been attempted in Australia. So the Go cities was about historic propositions for huge scale population growth, but also contemporary proposals. For instance, the last federal government had a plan to quadruple the population in northern Australia, despite the many many impediments to that happening and the fact that it's one of the world's last great remaining wildernesses. So this book was really about trying to hold some of those ideas up to the light and to, I guess, see them as a cautionary tale for policymakers now going forward, because we have a pretty bad habit of repeating ourselves in that space.
[00:08:21] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, obviously a very worthy cause, to say the least. It's an understatement. What about another of your books, scavenging the suburbs, auditing Perth for 1 million infill dwellings?
[00:08:34] Speaker C: Okay, this book got me in a lot of trouble, and this one was probably a case study in being too prolific. So there's a surprising thing with Perth, because it was very well planned by planners who were impressed by the Abercrombie plan for London in 1944 and actually were students, I believe, of Patrick Abercrombie. Alastair Hepburn and Gordon Stevenson came out to Perth in the 1950s. They did a plan, the first big plan for Perth, the city I live in, which is the capital city of Western Australia, now getting up over 2 million people. But they reserved a huge amount of land in public ownership, whether it's river, foreshores, parkways, along freeways, golf courses. So Perth now is 220 km long. And we try and do infill, but we only really look at private areas, areas in private ownership. Scavenging the suburbs sort of drew the attention back to some public landscapes and said, well, what is their capacity to support more urban densification? Not so much is it a good idea in the first instance, but know what is the capacity? And we found there was huge capacity in Perth for doing urban consolidation, which could be sensitively done in golf courses where we have a declining number of members. People don't have the time and the money necessarily to invest in expensive private golf membership in huge areas of car parks. Perth is the city that cars designed. The idea of developing infill development above car parks more carefully, sometimes in freeway reserves or rail reserves. Huge amount of land is bound up in rail reserves sometime with only a double railway line in a 50 meters wide reserve. So scavenging the suburbs got me into a lot of trouble. It visualized what you might be able to do with some of these landscapes. And I was a lot younger and a lot more naive, but the media looking for clickbait material found plenty of it. In this book I went with the idea that any publicity is good publicity, to the point where it started getting a bit too personal. And then I had to retreat into my shell. So, yes, scavenging the suburbs is a book that might have been an example of being a little too prolific, but it was polemical. It got a reaction, I guess, got people thinking.
It might have only just really got them thinking that they hated me, but it got them thinking about something.
But that was a few years ago. Now, that book, I think it's 2015.
[00:10:54] Speaker A: One of the points that you've obviously worked with us, constructive voices for our training series, beyond biodiversity net gains. So for those who haven't delved into the training series, this recording is obviously for a podcast episode. And I would like just to bring up one comment that you made towards the end of your module of the training series, Julian, which really struck home with me, which is the fact that nature is making us more humble, or those of us who maybe are that way inclined. Let's chat about that a little bit.
[00:11:24] Speaker C: Yeah, well, nature's got a long memory, right? And in Australia, and in Perth in particular, Perth is a city of wetlands along the Durbal Yarragon, which is the indigenous word for the Swan river. And we spent the better part of the 19th and at least the first half of the 20th century filling in wetlands and reclaiming areas from the river for development. The idea being that the river was just a tiger snake kind of infested, reedy, marshy, muddy kind of embarrassment, at least as it applied to much of the river in urban areas, and particularly the city center. So we spent a lot of time reclaiming areas from the river, which are now sometimes urban development and sometimes parkland. But in terms of being humbled, we're going from this situation where in the 19th and 20th century, we're able to assert our dominance over nature and hydrological systems. That's very much coming back to bite us. With sea level rise, with increasing density, storm events, a lot of those areas which we reclaimed are now being truly reclaimed, I guess, in a much more accurate sense of that word from us again. So there's a kind of humbling of the city, I think, that goes with that process. And this is happening across multiple areas, that the urban land that seems so safe to us now, bushfires were something that happened out there, they don't happen here.
We're finding a lot of these assumptions are not true anymore. And there's a humbling which goes with that. There's a kind of uneasiness. And a new word has been coined by an australian philosopher, Glenn Ulbricht, which is solastalgia, which is about.
[00:13:06] Speaker A: I've come across yes.
[00:13:08] Speaker C: Yeah. The loss of familiar attachments, that's happening with climate change. It's a kind of homesickness for the land, the country that you're in as it changes around you. And it's a word that's definitely on the zeitgeist here.
[00:13:22] Speaker A: Yeah. So one book that comes to mind that isn't one of your books in this instance, is one that I have been reading recently. Ben Wilson. I don't expect that you're necessarily going to have read it, but just in case. Ben Wilson, urban jungle, have you come across it at all?
[00:13:41] Speaker C: I haven't. I wish people had stopped. I can't keep up.
[00:13:44] Speaker A: So, yeah, this is one for when you decide not to be in a prolific mode and you take a break to read somebody else's book. Why is it really interesting? He's a really good british writer and his book goes a lot into the history of what you've just touched on in your answer to my last question, what's been done in various areas around the world, and obviously how that brings us to where we are today and so on. So I just thought I'd throw that in. That might be of interest to you.
[00:14:12] Speaker C: I'll look it up. Thank you.
[00:14:13] Speaker A: Okay. And going back to your own books, take me to the river. Which is obviously, we're touching back into what you mentioned about rivers just a few moments ago. Take me to the river. The story of Perth, for sure. Now, rivers, for me personally, have always been a source of fascination. What about the subject matter of the book in this instance? Can you talk us through it?
[00:14:35] Speaker C: I can. This is highly Perth specific, this one. Well, let's see what your listeners make of it. So the Swan river, or the durbal yarragan, as it's called. So Perth was the Swan river colony before it was Perth. The naval admiral James Sterling was very much impressed by it when he first sailed up in 1827. I think it's been flying for 50 million years.
And the book was about interpreting. There's been so many schemes, particularly for the urban kind of front garden of Perth city centre as it kind of adjacent to the Swan river. There's been so many schemes for its design over the years, and one of the really interesting thing about this sort of geological stratum of drawings that have been produced, there's been international design competitions, local competitions, solicited proposals, unsolicited proposals. But one of the really interesting things about it is that the schemes all communicate kind of culture struggling or attempting to kind of relate to the indigenous landscape and to some extent, to indigenous culture. So they can be kind of read like a psychoanalyst might read dreams, I suppose the book was about kind of unearthing many of these now quite old schemes and holding them up to the light and trying to understand what they say about us as this kind of colonial, post colonial culture in terms of how we're relating to that landscape in Australia. The landscape can be viewed as very much other in a way that in England, my experience is the landscape is very much more domesticated and soft. But the landscape in Australia is something which has mocked settlement in most areas. And when you look at the place names in Australia, Mount buggery, useless loop, devils, marbles, the place is full of place names like this. So our relationship to landscape here is a complicated one. And so this book, even though it's quite focused on Perth foreshore, which sounds kind of boring, to be honest, it's a lens through which you can understand much bigger shifts within this colonial, post colonial culture that brings us quite nicely.
[00:16:42] Speaker A: Onto the link between urban planning and biodiversity.
And I have to mention for the audience, yes, Julian does have a book on this topic as well, which, if I have my facts correct, it was co written with Christina E. Rommaglio. Correct. And the name of this book is green space orientated development, reconciling urban density and nature in suburban cities.
Would you like to share a little bit about the book, Julian?
[00:17:10] Speaker C: Yeah. Thank you. So, in Perth, urban densification is promoted by policymakers, quite rightly, as being a way of trying to alleviate further urban sprawl on the edge of the city. This is important. Perth sits within a biodiversity hotspot. Biodiversity hotspots are regarded as the life support systems of the planet. There's only 35 of them. They're exceptionally biodiverse, and they're threatened. We've cleared 93% of it. So urban densification has got to be a good thing, except the way we deliver it. Typically, it occurs at the cost of urban forests within existing suburban areas. So in a way, you're trying to prevent biodiversity loss on the edge of the city. And quite rightly. But the way we densify our cities means that we're losing greenery and urban forest canopy cover within the city. And we know that's not just the trimmings. It's so important in terms of creating urban or suburban areas where we have green systems which mitigate extreme heat events which provide mental and physical health benefits, provide biodiversity. I'm sure your listeners are aware of all these benefits, but we were thinking, how can we find a model for densification which can densify both urbanism, but also densify the provision of ecosystem services? So Perth has a lot of fairly banal parkland in the middle ring suburbs. So the idea was essentially taking large parks within a reasonable walk or cycle of train stations, densifying around them in the form of low rise apartments, and using the council rates and taxes that that generates to seriously upgrade the parks to make them sort of wonderful, multifunctional communal back gardens with a lot of canopy cover. So it potentially enriches the park. And the park benefits from the urbanism around it, because there's people who can generate the money which can be used to upgrade them, to be more elaborate and to maintain them. We can recycle gray water from areas fringing the park to be used for irrigation. We can have communal composting to be used in the parks. But at the same time, the densified catchments around the park, and this might only be 100 meters or so, they get microclimatic sort of regulation, so extreme heat events are lessened. They get all the mental and physical health benefits of being near a green space. Looking at it can even make you healthier, let alone if you go for a walk in it. So there's a lot of synergies. It's kind of like a synergistic density. Of course, putting people next to train stations is a great idea too, but life's about a lot more than getting to work on the train. People in Perth have a very kind know, actually. Generally, I think people who seek the suburbs have a kind of landscape view of the world, and this is a way of being able to hang on to that, while you also provide the benefits of urbanity. So a bit like Ebenezer Howe had brought together town and country in the joyous union of the garden cities. We're bringing together the bests of suburbia, the leafy greenness with the best aspects of urbanity, which is its vitality and activation in one model, in this hopefully happy marriage of green space orientated development. And yes, no coincidence, it was written with Christina Ramlhers, an urban ecologist. So she was able to really talk to the green space and its function in a way know is really detailed.
[00:20:27] Speaker A: Excellent. So that sounds like a great read. Know many of the people who would be listening to this, I believe. Julian, are there any cities that you admire currently? And if so, where are they and for what reasons?
[00:20:40] Speaker C: Most cities are kind of patchwork of optimal outcomes and terrible outcomes. So it's probably a little hard to select, just mean, as the ghost cities of Australia indicates, and my current research, a lot of that is around population decentralization and new cities. So what I'm excited about at the moment, and these are not necessarily models for what we should do, but they're exciting opportunities. So the whole history of new city thinking and building is this idea that there's a kind of utopian strain that goes with it, that we can kind of start again.
And that is, I guess, what's drawn me to the whole new city kind of movement. We're building hundreds of new cities across the world, and often in the west. We kind of think that that was a sort of post World War II english Newtowns kind of movement, and that's a kind of historical curiosity or whatever. But actually there's a vast amount of new city building which is going on through Africa. As the crumbling african megacities get harder and harder work, the rich and affluent, expatriates and locals alike are seeking escape hatches, which are essentially new cities built within a kind of convenient orbit of these crumbling megacities. So that's been my. In terms of cities I'm fascinated about. I don't think they're models to be pursued. I'm really drawn to this. So it's happening through the Middle east, it's happening through Africa. Africa, we know, is where urbanization is going to be the most concentrated in the next decades to come. We'll go from where there was one in ten people in the planet were living in Africa in the mid 20th century to four in ten by the end of this century. And most of them will be in cities, and some of them will be in what are now planned new cities. So I think what draws me to them is this opportunity to kind of start again and to rethink cities, because we know it's so difficult to adapt cities. We have to do that. I don't deny that's where our attention should be. But new cities provide also, it should be set, a pretty fascinating diversion.
We see some of them, like Mazda City, truly experimental, truly problematic. But I guess in answer to your question, I think Mazda City, the attempt at the world's first carbon neutral city, which is on the edge of Abu Dhabi, provides a pretty interesting kind of case study and laboratory for new city thinking and new technology.
[00:23:09] Speaker A: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Julian. Now, my final question is, what advice would you like to offer to those in urban planning positions around the world?
[00:23:19] Speaker C: It's hard to talk across context, but one general reflection I think we need to be very careful of is this. We sometimes are generating an increasingly quantitative view of the city. We see this, particularly times of austerity generate this, but also an increasing reliance on AI, where we're so interested in the data, the analytics, and in Perth it expresses itself as this is how many new dwellings we've delivered in a housing crisis. This is the percentage that are infill, or these are the percentage on the fringe. And I understand the need for targets and I understand the need for accountability, of course. But I do think that sometimes we lose a more qualitative assessment of place and the kind of worlds we're creating. We can become very blind to the more qualitative dimension when our world is so clouded, when our ideological lens is so much driven by quantitative data. So I guess if I could say one thing to policymakers and planners around the world, it would be to try and to gaze beyond that sort of bubble we're in at the moment, which is one which is really to a large degree quantitative, to try and spend time in the spaces and places we're creating and think, are we creating places to begin with?
I'm really wary in an increasingly AI driven kind of culture, as we all exist, in that our focus becomes more and more quantitative and we lose that much more place based kind of understanding, which I think is so important to the work we do. And we can see the cautionary tales around us of where the focus has been too much about dwellings delivered rather perhaps than the lived experience of them. For instance, we see that in Perth, in a struggle to deliver affordable dwellings, we may deliver dwellings which are affordable to buy, although that is contested too. But they may not be affordable to live in when it comes to the commuting, when it comes to the air conditioning, when it comes to the effects on your mental and physical health. So I think it's really important that we remember we're dealing with real people. We're not just dealing with anonymous population projections. They're all real people with their own needs and dreams and fears and desires. And I think we need to be, as much as we can be in these constrained times, alive to the complexity and sensitivity of that. That's certainly experience something I've become more aware of as I get older, and perhaps that it's of use to people. Perhaps they already know that I couldn't say.
[00:25:54] Speaker B: Jackie de Burker, speaking with Dr. Julian Bolliter. And you can find out more by visiting our website, constructive Voices.com. And that's all for this episode of Constructive Voices, please take a moment to share it with others who may find it interesting. Follow or subscribe to get the latest episodes automatically on your favorite podcast app, and rate and review the podcast if you can. You can also listen to the latest episode by saying, alexa Play Constructive Voices podcast.
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