Home Archive by category "Infrastructure"

Category Archives: Infrastructure

Long Term Planning with Liveable Communities in Mind

Long-term community planning is vital for our liveable cities to prosper. Organisations involved in their community’s infrastructure must be able to look ahead and construct plans where anticipated. Change is not only considered but prepared for in advance. We cannot always know what the future holds, as we have recently discovered through unanticipated change and subsequent adaptation. However, the last few months have not deterred Australians from continuing to practice and strive for the future of the sustainable movement. New bike paths have already been put into future planning, due to increased demand. Transport Secretary Rodd Staples mentioned in an …

Read the full article

Bunch of Old Bananas or Building Materials of the Future?

Potatoes reborn as insulation, peanuts processed into partition boards and mushroom bricks that grow in five days – just some of the ways the building trade could change its wasteful ways and construct virtuous new cities. In a report released on Wednesday, international engineering firm Arup set out novel ways for an industry that devours raw materials to cut waste. “We need to move away from our ‘take, use, dispose’ mentality,” Guglielmo Carra, European lead for materials consulting at Arup, said in a statement. “What we need now is for the industry to come together to scale up this activity so that …

Read the full article

Design Competitions and the “Design Dividend” in Central Sydney

Good design delivers a variety of public benefits. The so-called “design dividend” links these benefits to positive financial uplift for property interests resulting from superior design. But what happens when competitive design processes enter the picture? An Australian Research Council-funded project led by researchers from UNSW Sydney and the University of Canberra is examining the City of Sydney Council’s Competitive Design Policy. This policy uniquely requires major private projects in Sydney’s CBD to undergo a design procurement process based on jury-based evaluation of alternative designs. A discretionary floor-space bonus becomes available for achieving “Design Excellence” via this route. With this …

Read the full article

Green Visions: Nature as infrastructure

Architecture AU A number of recent industry campaigns and major policy documents from both state and local government levels promote nature’s critical role in supporting economic prosperity, health and wellbeing. Although much has been written about a green infrastructure design-led approach for urban environments, it was not until recently that major policy documents have included measures that promote nature as a key driver for the built environment. On both state and local government levels, policy and planning directives increasingly reflect the acceptance of nature-as-infrastructure’s critical role in underpinning economic prosperity, health and wellbeing. The Sydney Green Grid project Sydney’s population is forecast …

Read the full article

Australian engineers need to smarten up, Bentley Systems says

Article published by Sydney Morning Herald by Jenny Wiggins, Infrastructure Reporter 7 April 2015 Australian construction companies need to start using global standards and technology on infrastructure projects to remain competitive internationally and cut costs, the chief executive of US software group Bentley Systems has warned. Gregory Bentley, one of five brothers who founded Bentley Systems in 1984, said British engineering groups had identified opportunities to win global projects by becoming “smarter” and adopting codes of practice that allowed them to work more closely with designers and builders. These include using common processes such as British Standard 1192, which helps designers prepare …

Read the full article

Sustainability in Business Association Education 2015

The Sustainability in Business Association will celebrate its 6th birthday this year with a change of focus and a wider business and sectoral agenda. Included in the new initiatives are; • An updated website with increased member content. This will include sustainability podcasts and papers from a number of conferences. • Members will have the opportunity to present at a selection of conferences and have their business papers published internationally with an ISBN number. Academic papers will also have the option of peer reviewing before publication. • Sustainability streams and access to member rates will be available at the following …

Read the full article

Urban Farming Is Growing a Green Future

With seven billion mouths to feed, human agriculture exerts a tremendous toll on the planet, from water draws to pollution, and from energy use to habitat loss. But there is also a growing set of solutions, from organic agriculture to integrated pest management. More people around the world are taking a look at urban farming, which offers to make our food as “local” as possible. By growing what we need near where we live, we decrease the “food miles” associated with long-distance transportation. We also get the freshest produce money can buy, and we are encouraged to eat in season…more here Urban Farming Is Growing …

Read the full article

Climate impacts– analysing infrastructure interconnectivity and flow-on effects for Australian cities

Manidis Roberts, KPMG and The Climate Institute (TCI) collaborated to undertake an exercise to credibly identify, quantify and cost, climate impacts on city infrastructure (Melbourne) as a result of extreme heat event. We modelled the impacts on infrastructure and their interdependencies under a specified climate event. This provided a case study of the flow-on impacts of the damage to infrastructure from future climate events. We explored the interdependencies that play out between businesses and infrastructure owners and operators under future climatic conditions, such as an extreme heat, sea level rise or extreme rainfall events. The exercise identified nodes of interconnectivity …

Read the full article