Architecture, Building and Planning - Research Publications
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ItemBIM Competency Framework for Australian Universities(Deakin University, 2022-01-30)Building Information Modelling (BIM) has been widely praised as a new paradigm and the next digital transformation in the architecture, engineering, construction and owner/operator (AECO) industry, moving towards a more productive and agile industry. This research is an attempt by the Australian BIM Academic Forum (ABAF) to fulfil two key ABAF objectives by: 1. Collectively promoting BIM education and learning across Australian universities and 2. Develop the minimum requirements for BIM-related curricula, with the objective of bridging the gap between BIM university education outcomes and workplace performance requirements. Driven by the needs of the Australian AECO industry, this framework is the first in Australia to set minimum requirements for BIM/DE education across Australian universities, with the aim of creating a sustainable pipeline of graduates in AECO-related courses, who possess the knowledge, skills and abilities required by the Australian AECO industry. As a result, the framework recognises the need to cover the education of BIM/DE-ready graduates across wider generic fields to address issues throughout the whole asset life cycle.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableUrban Observatories: A Comparative Review(Connected Cities Lab, Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne, 2021)The growth of data within, about, and from cities has been one of the fundamental trends in contemporary urban governance. Yet who knows what about cities? A desire for urban knowledge based on the collection, analysis and interpretation of large, complex datasets innately requires platform(s) capable of performing these operations. Furthermore, data needs to become the basis for decisions about how cities are managed. There are organisations that are designed to ‘bridge’ and navigate this ‘knowledge transition zone’ between research and decision-making. ‘Urban observatories’ – urban research organisations that work across policymaking and academia – have emerged as a visible, if broadly defined, class of institutions operating within this knowledge transition zone. Produced jointly with UCL and UN-Habitat, this scoping study aims to understand the role of urban observatories, their institutional organisation, capacity and value proposition as drivers of more informed city leadership.
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ItemOn bank pricing of single-family residential home loans: are Australian households paying too much?(Global Research Unit, City University of Hong Kong, 2021)
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ItemON WELL-BEING OF HOUSEHOLDS IN JAPAN AND POST-DISASTER REINSTATEMENT(Asian Development Bank Institute, 2021)There are multidimensional short- and long-term impacts of disasters (natural and man-made) on human well-being. Despite this, restitution strategies have predominantly relied on asset-based approaches to measure disaster losses and craft such strategies. There is a growing realization that for comprehensive restitution of disaster-affected households, it would be necessary to take account of multiple dimensions of households' well-being and reconstruct all that constitutes it. When viewed from Sen’s “capability approach,” reconstitution of well-being equates to rebuilding households’ central capabilities that are necessary for a decent quality of life, e.g., having shelter security, food security, physical and mental health, and the like. With the intention of designing a “resilient compensation mechanism” that reinstalls the “capabilities” of households recovering from losses post-disaster, this research aims to identify essential determinants of households’ well-being that will be the focal point of post-disaster compensation or recovery mechanisms. The research uses Japanese household panel survey data (JHPS/KHPS) wherein households report their satisfaction with overall life and its five dimensions, namely housing, leisure, health, income, and employment. Further, this research identifies the main factors (including resources, personal characteristics and familial characteristics of households) that constitute households’ satisfaction across each of the five dimensions. Findings suggest that all five dimensions make significant and positive contributions to overall well-being, with leisure and health as the most dominant contributors followed by income, housing, and employment (in that order). Based on these findings, this research argues for designing a “resilient compensation mechanism” with a combination of monetary and nonmonetary strategies that assist affected households in reconstructing capabilities across multiple dimensions of life.
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ItemSchools as Community Hubs Development Framework: Workshop 1, Emerging Themes & Insights(University of Melbourne- Melbourne School of Design, 2020)
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ItemLand use management strategies for equitable infrastructure and urban development: overview of strategies and tools(Asian Development Bank Institute, 2020)In the absence of concise conceptualization of planning and land use management strategies, the scope of their discussion in literature has been wide, with different nomenclature for almost similar concepts. This paper attempts to provide an overview of the models and tools used for land management by grouping these models and tools, known by different names across disciplines and countries, along a primarily urban or periurban development continuum. The objective is to streamline the discussion on land management strategies on the basis of principles on which models and tools are based rather than their nomenclature.
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ItemThe housing conundrum in India(City University of Hong Kong, 2020)Recent housing policy discourse in India, which aims to achieve housing for all, has ignored the way households meet their housing needs and adjust deviation between desired and actual housing consumption. As in the past housing programs, there is reliance on an aggregate notion of housing shortage in recent central government program for housing for all, Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY), which gives credence to new housing construction. This chapter highlights the importance of distinguishing new housing construction from the requirements to upgrade or extend an existing house to adjust gaps in housing consumption. These other methods of adjusting housing gap is the practice that households adopt on ground. The other emphasis that this chapter places is on the understanding of housing gap at the state level as due to cultural, climatic and institutional differences, the nature of housing problem at the state level differs. As discussed in the chapter, there are differences in housing affordability and housing gap at the state-level. Access and penetration to formal finance and development approval processes also differ. These together indicate that an approach to addressing housing gap will require a shift away from the macro notion of housing shortage and would need sub-national interventions, which are contextual to states and augment households’ own efforts to adjust their housing consumption. This would mean programs should place larger emphasis on self-help construction activities and improving penetration of formal finance in less well-off states. Experience of PMAY also indicates that assisting upgradation or extension will have better success than building new to meet household housing consumption requirements.
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ItemDesigning Fair Compensation for Compulsory Acquisition of Land: Empirical Estimation of Hope Value, Blight, and the Negative Impact of Landowners’ Caste on the Value of Land in Bengaluru (India)(Asian Development Bank Institute, 2019)Public agencies often rely on their power of compulsory acquisition of privately owned land when it comes to procuring land for large infrastructure projects. Over the years, the process of compulsory acquisition has evolved to compensate the affected landowners better, to the extent of paying additional monetary compensation or solatium. For example, according to the most recent improvements made to the Indian legislature on compulsory acquisition of land, the acquiring agency should make an additional payment of two to four times the original market value of land to the affected landowner. This is the polity and law’s indirect acknowledgment that fair compensation extends beyond the market value of land, although there is less clarity on the theoretical and empirical justification for the same. There is an existing body of literature, such as “Functionings of Land” by Rao (2018), that has applied Sen’s capability theory to explain the value of land as a cumulative value of usefulness (or functionings) for its owner, of which the monetary value is only one functioning. While there are many non-monetary functions of land, which deserve compensation, this research limits the scope of the discussion to measurable monetary losses associated with land. Advancing the discussion on adequate monetary compensation for the affected landowners, this research argues that compensation extends beyond the market value of land to include other forms of financial losses that compulsory acquisition imposes, such as (i) the loss of financial benefits accruing from improvement in land use in the future (or the “hope value” of land), which ranged between 39% and 527% in the case of the Bangalore-Mysore Infrastructure Corridor (BMIC) project; and (ii) the reduction in land value due to acquisition notification, which amounted to approximately 31% in the case of the BMIC project in India. In addition to these objective losses, which are common across all landowners, there are person-specific characteristics that influence the market value of land. For example, research has found that the landowners’ lower caste negatively affected the value of land around the BMIC project. This reduction could be a joint outcome of the legal protection of ownership rights of Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribes (which curtails purchase by non-SC/STs) and the lack of bargaining power due to the lower social status of SC/ST landowners. The above findings suggest that a fair compensation model extends beyond the market value of land to take account of the comprehensive value of land to its owner, and it is possible to derive this as a joint function of personal and land characteristics.
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ItemAn Urban Forest Horizon Scan in Canberra, Australia. Report for the Clean Air and Urban Landscapes Hub(Clean Air and Urban Landscapes Hub, 2019)In attempting to glimpse the possible futures for the urban forest, insights can be gained into key current policy and research needs that will better prepare the urban forest, and its managers and users, for these future scenarios. The horizon scanning workshop provided the forum and opportunity for researchers and policy makers from a range of backgrounds to come together and for one day imagine scenarios for future forests. These discussions generated new conceptions of future cities and the roles of the urban forests within them. Discussions pointed to both opportunities and threats for urban forests, associated with technological developments, increasing climate change impacts, globalisation and population growth. These scenarios could be further developed to identify key research and policy priorities that can better prepare our cities to capitalise on the opportunities and manage the threats. The workshop also opened possibilities for increased transdisciplinary collaborations between workshop participants and their colleagues.
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ItemAn Urban Forest Horizon Scan in Melbourne, Australia. Report for the Clean Air and Urban Landscapes Hub(Clean Air and Urban Landscapes Hub, 2019)A horizon scanning workshop was held in Melbourne in June 2018, with participants from academia and institutions such as City of Melbourne, the Nursery and Garden Industry Victoria and the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria. The workshop aimed to explore the future challenges, issues and opportunities for urban forests, in the context of climate change, urbanisation and demographic changes and uncertainties. Through a series of semi-structured activities, the following themes and future scenarios emerged as challenges and opportunities for Melbourne’s urban forest: • The urban forest is a term that is yet to be well defined in research and practice, but could form the basis of a diverse, inclusive and dynamic approach to urban vegetation management on public and private land, for a wide range of meanings, functions and services. • Data will be important for planning and managing the urban forest effectively, but will management focus narrow to the things that are easily measured, and devalue the many aspects of the urban forest that are difficult or impossible to quantify? • Technology will be more important, and genetic engineering could expand the urban forest’s functions and services to provision of glow-in-the-dark trees and air pollution filtration, but how will virtual nature and technological nature allow for the multi-dimensional sensory nature of human nature interactions? • Land use change in response to emerging technologies may generate new opportunities for urban greening. Fleets of autonomous cars may reduce the need for parking and distributed, wireless infrastructure could free up linear corridors, providing new space for the urban forest. Could flying cars free up roads, allowing us to “peel back the concrete”? • Risk aversion is a major brake on the urban forest, resulting in removal of large trees and limiting new plantings; will this lead to treeless, low-risk cities? Alternative futures may embrace risk, by giving urban dwellers the ‘dignity of risk’ or by mitigating risk in the built environment. • Participatory approaches to urban forest planning and management may recognise the multifunctional nature of the urban forest, and the heterogeneous communities that dwell in it. Yet how can we ensure good decision making and the inclusion of expert opinion? • Adapting the urban forest to changing community values and attitudes is needed for success, reducing inequity and increasing access to the urban forest by diverse communities. • Reconciliation between Indigenous and non-indigenous Australians will underpin increasing recognition and involvement of traditional owners in urban forest management. • The environment will continue to change, with increasing risks from hotter temperatures, rising sea levels and storm surges. Adapting to these changing conditions could also create unintended consequences if the effects of species change on urban forest meanings, services and ecologies are not well understood. The key recommendations for policy and management to better plan for the future urban forest are: • Manage and plan at the urban forest scale, rather than the individual tree scale. • Plan for future social and biophysical environments, rather than past ones. Learn from success and failure. • Increase diversity to reduce future risk – including genetic, species, age-class diversity, and cultural meaning. • Increase participation in urban forest decision making to better represent the diverse views of the community. • Foster capacity within land managers to better plan and manage the forest, through internal resourcing and collaboration across management authorities. • The multifunctional benefits of the urban forest need to be acknowledged and managed. • Facilitate acceptance of risk in the urban forest. New research questions to help smooth transition to future urban forests include: • Increase social science research on public opinions, attitudes and values of the urban forest and its management. • Understand the effects of artificial lighting on the urban forest. • How can we use the urban forest to reconnect people with nature, and increase the acceptability of risk from natural systems? • How can we have a dense city and an outstanding urban forest? • What will the outcome of using ‘climate ready’ tree species be on urban forest meanings and ecology? Understand the effects on the urban forest of other dimensions of global environmental change such as sea-level rise. • How can we secure water for irrigating the urban forest? • How will pests and diseases change in future environments and future regulatory environments e.g. banning insecticides.