Architecture, Building and Planning - Research Publications
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ItemTracking the Trends in City Networking: A Passing Phase or Genuine International Reform?(University of Pennsylvania, 2019)
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Item‘BLT’ is not a sandwich: learning & teaching emerging building procurement methods; Australian, Asian and European perspectives(Central Queensland University, 2019)A clear understanding of procurement methods for built environment professionals is paramount. The current building process continues to evolve for both, governments and private sector clients and in cases also for combined public-private concessions. Over the last 25 years clients have become more knowledgeable on procurement, project finance and construction delivery mechanisms. Some institutional clients have evolved to become industry experts, in other cases contractors have become project investors such as in Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) or Build-Lease-Transfer (BLT). As building and construction procurement methods continue to change it is then paramount to bring this knowledge into Master and Higher Education programs related to the built-environment. It is important to clearly understand the emerging procurement methods and mechanisms to successfully deliver and operate projects including building with quality, stakeholder engagement, risk sharing, owner life-cycle operations and project financing strategies. It is important is to learn how to identify key project attributes before selecting a procurement route. This matching exercise is explained in the paper utilising six techniques. This paper then discusses on learning and teaching procurement as experienced by the authors with experiences in Australia, Asia and Europe in particular with research and teaching to Master and Honours students in architecture, engineering, building operations and construction management.
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ItemA review of the evolution of flexible learning environments in Australia: For a better match of primary school design and IEQ(Architectural Science Association, 2019-01-01)Over the last decades Flexible Learning Environments (FLEs) arose as an enabler of a student-centric approach to teaching and learning. Despite its penetration in the Australian public school sector, the interior design of FLEs hasn't been sufficiently investigated when it comes to Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) conditions provided within its open-plan configuration. FLEs' design typology creates the challenge of providing IEQ conditions that work for different zones used simultaneously by the mobile student population. In addition, current guidelines used in Australia are based on the traditional classroom with little, if at all, adaptations to FLEs' open-plan configuration and activity-based way of learning. By looking into the physical configuration of ten primary classrooms, this paper aims to identify potential shortcomings of the interior design FLEs along with a critical review of existing literature and existing NSW-state government guidelines. Results indicate that for a mobile cohort of occupying FLEs, there is a mismatch between IEQ conditions provided and the guidelines in use, as it tends to overlook students' non-stationary state and variety of activities, they are involved in. The adaptability of existing guidelines is therefore needed to better guide the design of Australian FLEs.
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ItemHow knowledge from innovation competitions can advance sustainable innovation targets in architectural design competitions(Central Queensland University, 2019-11-08)Modern interpretations of sustainable building design are founded upon innovative application of new products and technology, often for the first time. Such examples are at the forefront of the ‘prototype’ nature of buildings that result from both design and technological innovations. Architectural design competitions are the primary competition in the construction industry, primarily concerned with design innovation, and are a popular procurement method for large public projects. Although such conceptual competitions often lack the physical dimension such as prototyping, they have been shown to be very effective in generating project specific radical designs. More broadly industry-based contests can be used to trigger research and knowledge creation, as well as investment in industry, with the competition rules and judging criteria critical to directing the entrants towards radical designs and technological solutions. The limitation of architectural design competitions to design criteria is limiting to the advancement of functional, performance criteria in the industry. This lack of emphasis is restricting the application of innovative sustainable solutions in the building industry through such competitions. This research demonstrates how knowledge from innovation contests in other industries can benefit the application of sustainable innovation and technology in architectural design competitions. This can be achieved primarily from a modification to the design of the competition environment, including scope and judging criteria and expected degree of resolution. The results of this study show that a design competition with a comprehensive scope and demonstrable outputs are more likely to result in more focussed sustainable innovation solutions.
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ItemAffordability and Availability in Melbourne’s Self-Organizing Student Housing Markets(Analysis and Policy Observatory, 2019)The State of Victoria houses over 200,000 international students. Inadequate or unaffordable housing can adversely impact the academic success and personal well-being of these students, making their housing an important issue for both education and urban policy. A robust literature documents the challenges these students face in securing affordable, adequate housing, but only a few studies examine students’ accommodation experiences in nonconventional living arrangements like room sharing and converted rooms. We conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 19 recently arrived international students in Melbourne. Our interviews covered the housing search process and affordability. We find that students are attracted to unconventional rental arrangements’ lower rents. Students are also pushed into these arrangements by barriers to and dissatisfaction with formal rental market options like purpose-built student accommodations (PBSAs). Many of these arrangements are then passed on to other students through nationality-specific social networking groups with only minimal involvement of formal rental market actors. Students choosing to live in modified accommodation generally expressed satisfaction with their living environments, comparing the amenities and prices of their housing favourably against PBSAs. Our findings suggest that market-led PBSA developments will not help resolve international student housing issues unless the market can deliver more affordable PBSAs.
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ItemCities as Forerunners: Local Climate Governance and the Carbon Neutral City(Analysis and Policy Observatory, 2019)Climate change threatens major disruption to cities around the world, including from extreme weather events, as well as impacts on infrastructure and resource flows. Simultaneously, cities are framed as sites that offer innovative solutions to climate change via transitions from carbon intensive to low carbon systems of energy, habitation, transport, food, water and waste. This paper explores how knowledge of global climate change is re-scaled to local levels through city making discourses and practices such as municipal carbon accounting, and conversely how local experiments in low carbon transitions are framed as mobile and replicable solutions to a suite of urban and climate related issues. Specifically, the author questions how carbon neutrality is being scaled, negotiated and contested in two concrete sites and situated practices of sustainable city making in the cities of Melbourne and Copenhagen. The CH2 office building in Melbourne, and the Nordhavn precinct in Copenhagen, are sustainable building projects aligned with wider municipal goals for community-wide carbon neutrality. Although not commensurate in terms of size, cost, duration and the like, these projects both embody wider visions of the carbon neutrality city held by the respective local governments. The analysis of these projects as ‘urban carbon assemblages’ draws attention to relations between people, ecologies, and technologies as spaces of disruption and innovation, rather than in technologies themselves. These relations are fundamental to how local experiments in low carbon transition play out, underlining the importance of fostering (rather than ignoring) local attachments in local climate governance.
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ItemEthics and transport planning in a time of urban extremes(Australian Cities Research Network, 2019)Studies of justice and equity in mobility rarely produce explicit conceptual or practical insights into an ethics of transport and its planning. Discussions focused on equitable outcomes and just process retreat from engaging critically with normative ethical aspirations among practitioners and academics. Thus, we ask, what ought an ethics of transport planning look like? In responding to this question, we focus on Australia, introduced by a brief historical take on socio-political changes over the last century, and the ethical questions these changes raise for scholars of contemporary transport planning. Australian cities, being almost entirely developed after the industrial revolution, benefited from innovations in mass transit that created dispersed urban forms planned and regulated by powerful centralised statutory authorities. Privatisation, government retrenchment and the increasing reliance upon private sector actors have produced modes of governance that are exclusive, managerial and largely shielded from public scrutiny, further entrenching car-based suburbanisation and under-funded, fragmented and privatised transit networks. Our aim is critically to engage with ethical questions for contemporary transport planning generated by worsening conditions of transport disadvantage, rapidly growing cities, high levels of car-dependency and increasingly privatised planning and delivery of infrastructure and services within a largely bipartisan neoliberal political consensus. Within this frame, there is a growing disconnect: evidence from national and international experience and research sits increasingly in tension with the kinds of transport planning and infrastructure projects favoured by Australian governments. In this paper we assert that this tension presents a complex ethical conundrum for transport scholars, and we consider the possibilities and potentials for opening arenas for research, practice and politics in transport planning.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableRethink: Interdisciplinary evaluation of academic workspaces(Architectural Science Association (ANZAScA), 2019)Academic workspace remains an emotive topic. It is bound tightly with each academic’s identity, purpose and status. As universities increasingly focus on cross-disciplinary collaboration to producenew knowledge, the sanctuary of the individual office is under challenge. Inspired by precedents in the commercial world, universities are experimenting with more open workspace environments with a desire topromote collaborationand increasespace utilisation.However,there is resistance withintheacademic community. Given this context, there is a surprising paucity of research into the design and occupation of academic workspaces. This research beginsto fill that gap through a scoping literature review specific to the academic workspaceand anew approach toacademic workspace evaluation (AWE). The AWE approach focuses on the alignment of people, purpose and place, differentiating itself from the predominant post-occupancy evaluation fociofbudget, time, environmental performance and user satisfaction. A key finding of the research has been that change management – as an integral aspect of the project design process –is as importantto the success of future-focused academic workspace projects as theirspatial design.
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ItemEmbodied emissions analysis of emerging construction technologies for mass housing in India(The University of Melbourne, 2019)The construction and use of buildings is responsible for a significant proportion of global greenhouse gas emissions. With global population growth continuing unabated, alongside increasing living standards in developing regions, this is predicted to continue. While global efforts to reduce the emissions associated with buildings have achieved significant operational efficiencies and emissions savings, buildings still represent a considerable opportunity for achieving the deep cuts in emissions that are needed to avoid the predicted catastrophic consequences of climate change. With the embodied emissions of buildings accounting for an increasingly significant proportion of a building’s life cycle emissions, and this being of little focus to date, this is one area in which some of these emissions cuts could be achieved. The Building Materials and Technology Promotion Council (BMTPC) of India have developed a list of potential building construction technologies aimed at improving the performance of housing in India. While these are assessed across a number of parameters, their embodied emissions are often not considered. This study assesses the embodied emissions of these technologies with the aim of determining whether they offer a potential solution for reducing building embodied emissions compared to more traditional housing construction. It was found that the proposed emerging technologies may increase the embodied emissions associated with housing by up to 400% when compared to more conventional forms of construction.
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ItemTowards a design framework for the structural systems of tall buildings that considers embodied greenhouse gas emissions(CRC Press, 2019-07-29)During the 1960s, the Bangladeshi-American structural engineer and architect Fazlur Rahman Khan proposed an influential design framework for the structural systems of tall buildings titled premium-for-height. Khan argued that the challenge of a structural engineer is to design structural systems that minimise the increase in structural material weight per gross floor area with increasing building height. However, in meeting the challenges of climate change and urbanisation, minimising the embodied environmental flows of tall buildings must also be a priority in structural design frameworks. This paper proposes to expand the premium-for-height framework for tall buildings by considering the embodied greenhouse gas emissions of structural systems using a hybrid life cycle inventory analysis method. Advanced structural analysis and a comprehensive consideration of building parameters are also proposed. To demonstrate the use and potential of the framework, embodied greenhouse gas emissions of six case study tall buildings are analysed. The results arediscussed and recommendations are made to improve the reliability of the more comprehensive framework.