Architecture, Building and Planning - Research Publications
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ItemSaving heritage policy: The past and future of conservation in the Australian city(ANU Press, 2024)In 2021, the NSW Government initiated a review of the Heritage Act 1977 (NSW). The framing of the review expressed confusion about the purpose of heritage policy and administration. The accompanying discussion paper identified no fewer than 19 questions (Standing Committee on Social Issues 2021a). These questions were not based on a depth of knowledge of the challenges facing the governance and management of heritage places. Rather, tensions between traditional and evolving outlooks on heritage appeared throughout the paper and in the subsequent parliamentary review report (Standing Committee on Social Issues 2021b). Conservation has long privileged the retention of traditional heritage values: historic, aesthetic, and scientific significance. Emerging viewpoints equally foreground the social, economic, and environmental capacities of conservation. Similar challenges appear in policy initiatives and decision-making conducted across national, state, and local jurisdictions. This is evidence of duplication and fragmentation in urban heritage policymaking, while broader philosophical and strategic issues remain unresolved. Australian urban heritage is at a major juncture. Since the early 2000s, the capacity for authorities to pursue innovative heritage policy and to facilitate sophisticated conservation outcomes has been eroded. Heritage governance has not been responsive to evolving professional and community expectations for the historic environment. After the closure of the Australian Heritage Commission (1975–2004), the nation has had no effective national leadership in urban heritage. This devolution agenda, making state and local authorities exclusively responsible for urban heritage, while professional and voluntary bodies uphold conservation standards, has generated issues. The authorities and bodies are disparate and under-resourced. Traditional outlooks and approaches have become entrenched (Sullivan 2015). For instance, the capacity for urban heritage to advance social, economic, and environmental sustainability has not been substantively recognised in the Australian context, raising questions about the continuing relevance of heritage conservation. As background, this chapter first maps the national policy environment for urban heritage that has formed since the mid-2000s. The body of the chapter then provides three areas for augmenting federal government leadership related to national coordination, review frameworks, and sustainability transitions. A theme throughout is the longstanding policy precedents established by the former Australian Heritage Commission, which continue to be adopted within national, state, and local heritage policy. Many of these precedents now act as barriers to advancing heritage governance and management. Comparative examples are drawn from across Australia’s cities, from overseas jurisdictions, and from intragovernmental and nongovernmental bodies: the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS). Opportunities exist for renewed national (and state) leadership, revised policy frameworks, and broader sustainability transitions, aligned with evolving political, social, and economic imperatives.
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ItemDesigning for the Future in Australia: A Retrospective on the ALIA Library Design Awards(Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA), 2023)Library designs shape people's expectations and experiences of what libraries can be. Their physical spaces house collections, provide safe spaces for people to meet and engage, and enable access to services and activities designed to meet community needs. Libraries' digital spaces extend these services and supports beyond the physical walls, enabling after-hours access to the world's knowledge. When library buildings are designed well, they serve as beacons in their communities. Their interiors inspire people to learn, to create, to think, and to engage with digital and physical platforms to satisfy information needs.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableDataset for: Present day and future urban cooling enabled by integrated water management( 2023)Dataset for the publication Present day and future urban cooling enabled by integrated water management. Includes modelling setup files and output.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableImpacts of irrigation scheduling on urban green space cooling( 2023)This record contains the microclimate and soil moisture data from a field experiment that investigated the impacts of irrigation scheduling on urban green space irrigation in Melbourne, Australia.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableDataset for: Sky pixel detection in outdoor imagery using an adaptive algorithm and machine learning( 2019)The data presented in this article is related to the research article entitled ``Sky pixel detection in outdoor imagery using an adaptive algorithm and machine learning." \citep{Nice2019UC}. The dataset consists of a trained Inception V3 neural network model as well as the configuration files to train the neural network and run the inferences. The dataset also contains two sets of outdoor imagery (from Skyfinder and Google Street View) used to train the neural network and validate the sky pixel detection system in the linked article. The original images are included as well as rescaled imagery used to train the neural network, and sky masks used for validation.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableMelbourne Google Street View imagery dataset( 2018)The data presented in this article is related to the research article entitled "Urban design using generative adversarial networks: optimising citizen health and wellbeing" (Wijnands et al 2018). The data consists of Google Street View (Google Maps, 2017) imagery (4,473,991 images, 8-bit JPEG at 256x256 resolution) from four headings (0, 90, 180, and 270 degrees) at 1,118,534 locations in the greater metropolitan area of Melbourne, Australia. Locations were determined using the nodes of the vector lines in the PSMA Street Network dataset (PSMA 2018) and data was post-processed by removing indoor images. Please cite this paper if you use the dataset. The data is broken up into four archives, 000.zip, 090.zip, 180.zip, and 270.zip, containing the imagery from each compass heading. A csv file (contained in MelbourneStreetViewImagesData.zip) provides a mapping between the filenames, location names, direction, latitude, and longitude.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableWater sensitive outcomes for infill development: final report(Cooperative Research Centre for Water Sensitive Cities, 2021)Australian cities have experienced significant growth recently, a trend that is expected to continue. One response from governments has been to promote ‘infill development’, which increases urban density, but also has significant adverse effects on urban water cycles, resource use efficiency, and the amenity and liveability of urban areas.
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ItemBarriers to implementation of sustainable construction in India(The University of Melbourne, 2023)Abstract: The Indian construction industry was estimated to be worth three trillion INR in 2022 and is expected to be the third largest construction market by 2025. The industry is responsible for a large amount of energy consumption, which not only contributes to the emission of greenhouse gases, but also adversely impacts resources like land, waterbodies, minerals, and other naturally sourced materials. Hence, implementing sustainable construction practices across the project life cycle is essential to reducing the detrimental impacts of the industry. Despite having 3 green building rating systems (GRIHA, IGBC, and LEED) and adopting certain national level initiatives, there is an absence of a systematic regulatory framework for the incorporation of sustainability principles in the Indian construction industry. It is critical to determine the existing issues that prevail in the industry to address the barriers in a timely manner. This paper determines the critical barriers to incorporating sustainable construction in India by reviewing the academic literature, Environmental Performance Index (EPI), and Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) 2022 reports. Unskilled workforce, low productivity, lack of monitoring schemes, inadequate technology, poor team integration and collaboration are the key barriers that are deduced from the systematic literature review. The ongoing national level initiatives and schemes promoting multiple goals of SDGs are also identified. The administrative framework of the Indian construction industry includes ministries, state departments, local authorities, and regulatory councils. Every state in India has building bye laws that differ from those of other states and this has also been identified as a barrier. One of the solutions determined by experts and researchers is for the Indian construction industry to comply with the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development. In order to accomplish that, policy makers, sustainable construction practitioners, and industry professionals must develop specific grassroot level mitigation factors to counter the key barriers.
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ItemTerrestrial Lidar Reveals New Information About Habitats Provided by Large Old Trees(Elsevier, 2024)Large old trees have been described as keystone habitats for several species. However, current research does not fully explain why these species show a preference for such trees. In this study, we combined field observations of birds with terrestrial lidar scans and computational feature-recognition to describe habitats provided by trees at an unprecedented level of detail. We conducted field observations of birds at 62 trees and used parameters including branch angle, branch diameter, branch state (living or dead), and trunk diameter at breast height (DBH) to develop a generalised linear mixed model (GLMM) that could predict which types of branch birds are more likely to visit. We then quantified angles, diameters, and states of 78,006 branch objects representing the complete canopies of 16 trees. By combining these two models we predicted that large trees (>80 cm DBH) contained, on average, 383 m of branches that were highly suitable for birds (i.e., the predicted probability of observing a bird was ≥0.5), which was more than seven times the average length of highly suitable branches provided by medium trees (51–80 cm DBH). Only one of the sampled medium trees contained highly suitable branches. Small trees (<50 cm DBH) contained none. Our analysis provides new knowledge about characteristics that make large old trees disproportionately attractive to birds and presents a novel method of assessment that can apply to other complex habitat structures.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableLand surface and air temperature dynamics: The role of urban form and seasonality(ELSEVIER, 2023-12-20)Due to the scarcity of air temperature (Ta) observations, urban heat studies often rely on satellite-derived Land Surface Temperature (LST) to characterise the near-surface thermal environment. However, there remains a lack of a quantitative understanding on how LST differs from Ta within urban areas and what are the controlling factors of their interaction. We use crowdsourced air temperature measurements in Sydney, Australia, combined with urban landscape data, Local Climate Zones (LCZ), high-resolution satellite imagery, and machine learning to explore the influence of urban form and fabric on the interaction between Ta and LST. Results show that LST and Ta have distinct spatiotemporal characteristics, and their relationship differs by season, ecological infrastructure, and building morphology. We found greater seasonal variability in LST compared to Ta, along with more pronounced intra-urban spatial variability in LST, particularly in warmer seasons. We also observed a greater temperature difference between LST and Ta in the built environment compared to the natural LCZs, especially during warm days. Natural LCZs (areas with mostly dense and scattered trees) showed stronger LST-Ta relationships compared to built areas. In particular, we observe that built areas with higher building density (where the heat vulnerability is likely more pronounced) show insignificant or negative relationships between LST- Ta in summer. Our results also indicate that surface cover, distance from the ocean, and seasonality significantly influence the distribution of hot and cold spots for LST and Ta. The spatial distribution for Ta hot spots does not always overlap with LST. We find that relying solely on LST as a direct proxy for the urban thermal environment is inappropriate, particularly in densely built-up areas and during warm seasons. These findings provide new perspectives on the relationship between surface and canopy temperatures and how these relate to urban form and fabric.