GREEN CITIES CONFERENCE 2016
Davenport Campbell designer, Suzanne Lind currently completing her Green Star Accredited Professional (GSAP) qualification. Part of this includes undertaking a three day event, co-hosted by Green Building Council of Australia (GBCA) and Property Council of Australia.
This event included practical site tours, hands-on masterclasses, fun networking events and inspiring speakers to help everyone really understand the major environmental issues facing us as a community. Here are the top themes of the conference Suzanne found to be the most insightful –
‘Disruptive’ ideas marked the major theme for the conference which bought together a variety of industry experts and innovators from across government, business and research sectors, who presented their ideas and initiatives for the future of our built environments. Disruption suggests the need for radical change where we uproot the way we uproot how we think, behave, do business, learn and go about our day-to-day within the built environment.
As the keynote speak for the Green Cities Conference, the author of Do Disrupt Mark Shayler suggests that in order to achieve this we must disrupt the concept of sustainability itself. At the core of the discussion was the idea that sustainability and the health and well-being of humanity are one and the same. Natural and built environments both have a physiological effect on the human being and therefore the future of our cities and built environments are one in which sustainability, creativity and well being become intertwined.
The International WELL Building Institute as presented by Paul Scialle from Delos Living LCC U.S.A, has set the benchmark for combining medical research and architectural design. The institute has created a standard that looks beyond just the physical environment, incorporating the idea of well-being in the workplace. Speakers from the technology sector also posed new ideas about how we interact and communicate within the physical environment with developments in robotics and virtual reality technologies.
The Green Cities Conference 2016 has provided an exciting forum for insights into how we might live and work in our future built environments. A future in which we must look to other industries for innovative ideas, look to other countries for inspiring benchmarks and come together as various sectors in order to be truly disruptive.