Workshops and Tours
A half day of workshops and study tours are being held on Wednesday 9th July 2014 and are available at an additional charge to both delegates and non-delegates. Book early to avoid disappointment as places are limited.
Workshops
Price: $90 (includes 2 workshops)
Workshop 1
The Future of Kingscliff - Enquiry by Design
Mr John Lynch, Urban Designer, Tweed Shire Council
For more than a decade the Tweed Coast, focused around Kingscliff, has seen exponential growth elevating it from a coastal village (>3000 residents), to coastal town (3000-20,000 residents) and when combined with surrounding future residential release areas and infill development potential, could surpass the population threshold usually associated with a small coastal city (>20,000 residents, Coastal Design Guidelines for NSW).
The relatively new settlements of Salt and Casuarina, along with the more recent Seaside City, Miramar and future Kings Forest estates will result in a significant population catchment asserting Kingscliff as the sub-regional centre servicing Tweeds' network of coastal villages.
Combined with these predominantly residential release areas are large tracts of land to the north south and west of Kingscliff representing significant residential, tourist and employment development opportunity along with important environmental protection areas. It is this opportunity which needs to be tempered and balanced to ensure that the population increases are in step with community expectation, appropriate infrastructure provision and protection of sensitive environmental areas whilst strengthening the character and identity of Kingscliff.
Working off prepared site and contextual analysis material, and an introduction to the key development sites through a 'virtual' site inspection, the aim of the workshop will be to stimulate creative dialogue and sketch ideas (using 2d and physical building blocks over large aerial photos) in response to a set of probing questions and propositions which have a broader contextual and urban design application.
Workshop participants will be divided into 3 groups: The developers, the protagonists and the built environment professional. The deliverables will be a range of development scenarios photographed from the building block exercise and a set of guiding ideas centred on density, identity, connectivity, sustainability and economic prosperity which will directly inform the Kingscliff Locality Plan process.
Workshop 2
Securing Our Food Future - Community-driven action
Ms Claire McGarry, Business Development Manager, Regional Development Australia - Northern Rivers
The food we eat and the way in which it’s produced has a significant impact on our economy, our health, our environment and our communities. In the coming decade our food system will face significant challenges arising out of population growth; climate change; an aging population of farmers; and increasing export demand for Australian produce. All levels of government, industry and community need to work collaboratively to develop a food system that is resilient, equitable and healthy.
Between 2009 and 2012, a number of programs were completed which focused on empowering communities to create a more localised food system. Out of these projects, many resources were developed and lessons were learnt around the challenges and opportunities inherent in our existing food system. As a result, in 2013 the NSW Environmental Trust funded Regional Development Australia Northern Rivers to manage the Securing Our Food Future Information Dissemination Project. This project collated the existing resources and information into one Food Futures Resource Kit (http://rdanorthernrivers.org.au/food-futures-council-resources/). The kit has six key focus areas: farmers' markets; community gardens; waste reduction; sustainable catering; verge gardening; and roadside stalls; along with an additional 20 projects focused on industry development. The kit was distributed state-wide and supported by 6 workshops around NSW intended to provide local governments and their stakeholders with information that would enable them to support or develop a more secure, localised food system.
The Securing Our Food Future workshop at the 2014 Making Cities Liveable conference will share the resources, process and lessons from four years of state-wide local food projects. It will give participants the practical tools needed to be a driver of action within their organisation or community and outline how to identify potential collaborative partners and funding streams for food security projects.
Workshop 3
AURIN Urban Research Workshop
Dr John Barton, Urban Data and e-Research Facilitator, Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network
The Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network (AURIN) is bringing urban researchers together from across Australia.
The AURIN Urban Research Workshop will introduce you to extensive repositories of Australian data about human settlement, and guide you through different methods of retrieving, processing and visualising information about the built environment. Until now, much data has remained disconnected and behind closed doors. AURIN enables securitised access to this data for built environment professionals across all disciplines.
The AURIN Portal allows users to intuitively access over 600 Australian urban research datasets and a suite of open source e-tools. Participants are able to explore different states and cities across Australia, zoom into suburbs to discover information on an area’s demographic and socio-economics metrics, politics, health and many other indicators. The workshop includes a number of hands-on exercises where participants can shop for data, run spatial analysis and statistics, visualise outputs, and explore the advanced urban modelling and simulation tools the system has to offer. This suite of analytical tools allows users to interactively chart complex information, generate detailed maps and perform detailed testing of urban areas for issues such as neighbourhood walkability analysis and scenario testing. Knowledge of these issues is essential to understanding patterns of urban development and to form and model urban growth for a sustainable future.
If you are a researcher, policy maker, or decision maker interested in urban environments, this workshop will introduce a National e-Infrastructure designed to support and better inform decision making in urban environments. Dr Jack Barton, the Urban Data and eResearch Facilitator for AURIN, will lead this session.
Workshop 4
Unpalatable: Building Sustainably is not palatable to Australians
Mr Alvyn Williams, Architect, Soft Loud House Architects
Building sustainably is unpalatable to Australians. And not just Australians but to many in the ""western"" or ""northern"" world depending upon your viewpoint. There is either an unexamined assumption that in designing and building sustainably, we have more than one planets worth of resources at our disposal, or it is a more sinister unexamined assumption that the limited resources of the world do not need to be shared equally.
This workshop aims to provoke, through exploring simple but challenging questions about the sort of world we would like to inhabit...
...as ‘green’ designers, we work from traditions and conventions towards sustainable solutions, but how close can we get using that approach?
...does anywhere live and build within the resources of one planet?
...what does design, settlement, materials and construction look like in those places?
...why don’t Australians work from a basis of having just one planet for each building project we undertake?
...how could we design and build from a ‘one planet’ basis?
...who actually would want those products and services?
And in a climatically, socially and economically fast-changing world, how could the answers to these questions create a climate for resilience, creativity and thrive-ability to the challenges that face us...?
Study Tours
Hosted By Tweed Shire Council
Price: $45 each
Study Tour 1 - Sustainable Tweed Urban Tour
Wednesday the 9th July - 1:00pm – 3:00pm
The Tweed Valley nestles urban development into a region of very high biodiversity and coastal environments. This tour will examine the challenges of creating liveable urban communities within this fragile coastal zone. We will also provide an insight into Tweed Shire Council's management of peri-urban bushland, coastal development pressures and waste, energy and community capacity building initiatives.
Study Tour 2 - Sustainable Tweed Rural Tour
Wednesday the 9th July - 3:00pm – 5:00pm
Tweed Shire Council is a leader in encouraging sustainable agricultural practices with project partners of community, research organisations and landholders. This tour will look at the major impacts on the natural values of the Tweed Valley from Acid Sulfate Soil and soil runoff and how research, partnerships and on-ground works have vastly improved management practices. Rural settlements have their own challenges in developing resilient and sustainable communities, some of the initiatives to help our communities become more sustainable will be examined.
