Sustainable Bristol

Sustainable Melbourne talk resilience with Bristol

Posted on 03 June 2011

A leading thinker on urban sustainability, Professor Chris Ryan, who is Director of the Eco-Innovation Lab at the University of Melbourne, is teaming up with Forum for the Future to give public talk on resilient cities in Bristol on Monday 6th June.

Chris also runs the ‘Sustainable Melbourne’ initiative which is twinned with Forum for the Future‘s Sustainable Bristol programme via the international Sustianable Cities Network. Prof Ryan’s recent work has focused on the resilience of cities in the face of the coming environmental challenges, and his Bristol talk will look at the practical steps which cities can take to survive – and thrive – in the future.

The discussion will be chaired by Peter Madden, Chief Executive, Forum for the Future on Monday 6th June 12.30 – 1.30pm on The Third Floor, Bush House, 72 Prince Street, Bristol.

The event, organised by Bristol’s Festival of Ideas, is open to the public and free, but pre-booking is essential via the Festival of Ideas booking form here.

The practical steps which cities will need to take to design resilient green infrastructure for a future of unprecedented resource scarcity and environmental change present a big challenge.

Unless we take radical steps to increase the resilience and sustainability of critical infrastructure, access to vital systems and services is at risk. Prof Chris Ryan‘s research suggests a distributed approach to system design offers many benefits over traditional infrastructure models.

Research and case studies strongly suggest such an approach can:
1. Increase the physical resilience of infrastructure
2. Foster social and institutional flexibility and innovation
3. Reduce the environmental footprint of production and consumption

A strong and renewed interest in distributed systems is being fuelled by access to sophisticated technologies – particularly information and communications technology. This is allowing people to invent and adopt new ways to produce, interact and consume, that are increasingly localised and networked.

Over the next few decades the way people obtain their food, water and energy will undergo a major (r)evolution.

One pathway sees people no longer relying on industrial production units hundreds or thousands of kilometres, or even continents, away. Instead they will source a greater proportion of essential resources, goods and services from within their ‘neighbourhood’.

Energy (principally electricity) is already showing signs of this transformation in most developed economies, with innovative arrangements of gas, solar, wind and biomass generators positioned throughout every region, backed up by new storage systems and some remaining large-scale centralised power stations.

Developments in the water and food sectors seem to be following the same path.

This evolution sees a significant switch in people’s role within the economy and in their identity as citizens; moving from one of passive consumption to a more active engagement in production and exchange of economic and social capital.

In this future, people will no longer depend on contractual arrangements between corporatised utilities and government to ensure quality and security of services. Everyone will identify in one way or another as a ‘prosumer’ – being involved (either individually or through community arrangements) in the production as well as the consumption of part of the resources, goods and services on which they depend.