Cheryl Batagol: i'm cheryl badagal chair of the crc for water sensitive cities and a member of the fisherman's bend development board water has always played a significant role in fishermen spend history from creation stories as a rich food source for aboriginal people through to the effects of flooding in low-lying areas affecting residents and businesses as in many parts of australia and globally fisherman's bend faces significant challenges in the years ahead from climate change there are other urban design considerations that will need to be embraced for fisherman's bend to be a vibrant and livable precinct of the 21st century the adoption of a water sensitive cities approach brings together a vast combination of water sensitive urban design initiatives that create the urban ecology in fisherman's bend that will underpin its sustainability resilience and livability the water sensitive city strategy builds on three overarching pillars flood management climate resilient water system and urban ecology underpinned by water sensitive priorities to create a healthy green environment that offers social environmental and economic benefits we have assembled a panel of experienced practitioners policy makers and scientists today to hear more about the challenges that global cities face and the types of water sensitive cities initiatives that can be adopted in overcoming them.
Tony Wong: hello i'm tony wong professor at monash university the former ceo of the crc for water sensitive cities and now i chair is think tank water sensitive urban design water sensitivity that's a passion of mine it's been my career for the last 20 years in research and practice what we see at fisherman's band is a culmination of all of those years of experience coming together in the one place
Claire Ferris-Miles: Hello i'm Claire Ferris-Miles the ceo of sustainability victoria at sustainability victoria we are a partner with all victorians as together we transition to a circular climate resilient economy i've had the joy and the challenge of being involved with the fisherman's ben urban renewal precincts over the past eight years working both at the city of port phillip and the city of melbourne and has been fantastic to see the evolution of thinking as we have had bold ambition to deliver an exemplar urban renewal precinct.
Charlie Littlefair: i'm Charlie Littlefair general manager of livable water solutions at southeast water i've been involved in the fishman's bend project inside southeast water since we had to plan for a revitalization that had challenges in increasing watesupply needs and wastewater management fortunately over the last eight years we've come up with some innovative solutions that meet these challenges
Craig Dixon: I'm craig dixon acting executive general manager for service delivery at melbourne water at melbourne water we've been really excited about the opportunity to participate as a key player in this exciting whole of government project the fisherman's bend development represents an amazing opportunity for us to completely rethink the way we design the communities within which we live and the way we interact with the natural environment around us we're dialing
Cheryl Batagol: We're dialling in Kim Markwell an environmental scientist at e2 design lab.
Cheryl Batagol: Kim, you've spoken about the evolution of water sensitive cities tell us what the community should expect from what are the benefits of water sensitive cities to
Kim Markwell: I guess first I'll just describe the three main components of the water sensitive city there's water there's plants and there's people, so water it's looking at all those sources of water looking at rainwater wastewater stormwater and seeing where they can be used it's bringing plants and vegetation back into the city so that water can soak back into the ground but also creating nice green and cool and attractive places for people to live and work and the last one is the people and really to get those integrated outcomes you need to bring people together to work to bring innovative and new ways of thinking and it's also about creating a community that understand what their impacts are on the environment around them and the benefits of having all three of these components together in a water sensitivity like i said there's many but some key ones that spring to mind is you'll get reduced flooding potentially you'll get improved waterway health and bay water quality you'll get those really attractive green cool streets that are really beneficial for people's physical health their mental health as well as property value they can also provide some urban habitat at ecosystem services and you'll also have some resilience in your water supply so that if you do get into times of drought you can still support those lush environments and make sure that you still have water going forward
Cheryl Batagol: And Charlie, when i when i hear what kim's saying it seems to me that the role of the water utility like southeast water is really changing so to you know to be involved in providing all of those services uh or some or all of those services how what sort of technological advances have you had to make to do that
Charlie Littlefair: yeah cheryl actually the whole role of a water retailer and service provider is changing we're shifting from being providing products like water supply and some recycled water but it has been to the gate i think the technologies that are appearing at the moment particularly around sensors and digital metering and the ability for us to manage and provide information both for ourselves and the customer means that we're much more intimate to achieve those outcomes that kim talked about and that means we're going to be inside buildings we're inside properties already in places like aquarivo but the move is to being much more intimate with the customer about providing an outcome not just a product and that's enabled by a safe in the first digital and then i think as kim pointed out that the whole idea of i think we're going back to being more local solving local challenges with local solutions so the fact that we're going to put a sewer mining plant and therefore local recycling plant into fisherman's bend is pretty consistent with the things that we've been doing for the last four or five years and it is about bringing resilience just relying on hoping that you know dare I say Thompson Dam fills up over the next couple of years is probably not the thing for us to do and certainly an expense of desalination isn't the answer either so so that more local response to bringing resilience to our water supply and our wastewater discharges is really important
Cheryl Batagol: I might ask Craig, Melbourne Water obviously provides drinking water for the whole of melbourne but also the bulk syringe services as well but critically for fishermen then it's about flooding what is the role you know of melbourne water towards fisherman's bend and clearly um we've heard about the the water utility but melbourne water is a critical part of that and more
Craig Dixon: Melbourne Water's role within the flood remit principally begins with the uh design and delivery of the port phillip and western port flood management strategy as well as provision of drainage infrastructure and services in conjunction with with other state and local government agencies melbourne water can't prevent flooding flooding will occur from time to time as we all understand so another significant part of our remit is to work with a range of other uh agencies and and organizations to ensure that we build uh communities that are resilient to flood uh that are prepared for flood and able to respond appropriately when flood does occur we additionally in times of when floods do occur we have a critical role in monitoring flood levels and we provide that information into the collective pool of agencies and organizations that all form part of flood preparation and response we manage the drainage infrastructure ,which we have a large portion of the drainage infrastructure we manage we also invest heavily in continuing to augment and add additional capability to that infrastructure where it makes sense and finally as the referral authority melbourne water set the the minimum standards against which uh development needs to be uh built against to ensure that we protect uh the communities and property in future flood type events
Cheryl Batagol: What you and charlie have talked about really speaks of changing infrastructure, and Tony we know the fisherman's band has flooded in the past we know that once you increase density in urban development more floods occur can you talk us through hybrid infrastructure and what that means what does it look like
Tony Wong: So Kim's description of a water-sensitive urban design really uh brings it in two parts the the importance of looking at water management and the delivery of his services in in a way that is sensitive to the needs of the environment sensitive to the needs of community but how that comes together is really through the urban design process and that's why we have water sensitive and urban design and how that comes together is really the beginning of the merging of different needs and different solutions into a place place solution hybrid infrastructure is really simply an extension of that how do you think about the public realm and public infrastructure such as the road the playing fields how do they become part of delivering water management delivering recycling that we need into into that precinct so uh hybrid infrastructure is is really just a fancy word for what we've been doing for the past 20 years in how we sweat our assets how we can get the most out of our assets how for instance in 20 years ago we designed our road such that it will occasionally be flooded and used as a flood carrier in this situation we do that all the time how we design our road and the nature strips in our road to now introduce corridors of greening tools all we're doing now is bringing them closer together in an urban design context in a flood prone situation such as fisherman's bin uh we we know from my analysis for instance that it was okay then during an intel being an industrial precinct for it to be more frequently flooded one in five years one changes in a residential area of such density and such a commercial district with so many people coming into the place to work that is no longer acceptable and you have two options you can either dig up all the pipes and put in bigger pipes or you can start to think about how you can overlay under those pipes parks and gardens and greenway to buffer such that you can temporarily hold the excess water and still utilize the capacity of the existing infrastructure system so now you see the introduction of a concept of hybrid infrastructure that looks at the layering what happens above what happen below the ground and the buffering to extend the useful life of our existing infrastructure the cost implication is immense the level of reduced disruption to the transformation of fishermen span into this commercial district is immense and of course the creation of that as a utility functional asset that adds value to the livability and the quality of the space is just an extra level but it's hybrid in a number of ways that fishermen been also exemplified it brings together two local governments the city of melbourne and city of port phillip they are responsible for land use planning they are responsible for drainage it brings together a water utility that's responsible for water supply and sewerage and then melbourne water the flood agents flood agency in that and how they do come together within an urban design context of putting all the bits and pieces together is in itself a hybrid solution
Cheryl Batagol: And Claire, Kate wrote Rayworth's book really a seminal text donut economies asks us to design and build completely differently so let's think about the communities that are going to live there and how would uh the donut economy be applied particularly to water in fisherman's bend
Claire Ferris-Miles: yeah and i think that's what we've been describing today is the interesting thing is in kate rayworth's book which is about economics sort of policy and economic thinking is for centuries as a society we've adopted a linear degenerative model whereby i would say we have had a finite mindset about how we think about designing for cities so what that looks like is we've got incredibly talented drainage engineers that have become even more talented about how to get water away from cities as fast as possible with bigger pipes and and bigger drainage networks to sort of respond to that flooding we have assumed that we've had infinite resources as a planet and so we've had this sort of uh the same thinking that we can go on forever climate change tells us that that is not the future and we can't continue with that sort of thinking and so the donut idea of a doughnut city is that we have finite resources that we have to live within the the constraints of the planet and what i would say and what i'm hearing on this panel today is that we need an infinite mindset we need to think completely differently about how we work what we're designing for and we need that at all levels and so what that means in terms of the community is for people that are living and working in fisherman's bend they need to think about for water how they consume water differently they need to understand that the goal here is we're actually designing a city that lives with flooding that flooding will occur it's been designed for flooding and that's part of normal life that flooding like in ellwood or neighbouring communities is an emergency event whereas in fisherman's bend it is part of of the community it's been designed for it and and i think the really exciting thing when you start thinking of circular regenerative thinking of of how we design cities it means like what tony said is that hybrid infrastructure is doing multiple things so a rainwater tank at someone's house or someone's business is connecting is collecting water for for the garden perhaps but then if a flood event occurs the water that tank is cleared and so it becomes a flood mitigation strategy to collect water a park is more than a park a street is more than a street and so it's thinking really differently but the really exciting bit is that we all of our institutions and agencies are comingtogether to to also be different entities and to really test ourselves about we no longer can work in isolation we really need to work with the smartest minds in the room about how we can build cities differently for the benefit of all
Cheryl Batagol: Is it a challenge for local government to you know to who has a very defined role in terms of planning and provision of services um to actually think about fisherman's bend the area that's fisherman's bend and think differently about it
Claire Ferris-Miles: yeah absolutely and i think uh as as we've mentioned uh fisherman's band has the city of port phillip and the city of melbourne so it's got two council areas and it's it's really this idea of building one set of infrastructure for the community and to to uncouple our thinking around um you know city of port phillip onwards one street and has to be responsible for the drains and the pipes in that street um melbourne water or southeast water are responsible for another bit it's designing the precinct as one there's a significant role for the private sector here so it's the private and the public sector coming together and it's been really brave and courageous in thinking so it's thinking about you know the city of port phillip possibly paying for infrastructure that's technically in the city of melbourne it's it's thinking of you know south east water testing itself about how it works with melbourne water and so it's really um coming back to that sort of infinite mindset about actually why do we do things the way we've always done think is there another way of us working together and really putting that community lens on is what's the benefit for all victorians about how we do this rather than focusing on our institutions as a silo and i think that's incredibly exciting incredibly challenging but i feel really energized about in terms of fisherman's been is at scale and it presents that opportunity
Cheryl Batagol: it feels like though we've talked about hybrid infrastructure hybrid administrative arrangements but how are we going to engage the community in understanding that things not only if you live in fisherman's bend if you work in fisherman's band actually we need the community to understand uh the journey that we're taking and it feels like that that's going to be quite a journey so kim can i ask you first is there a different way of engaging the community in these conversations
Kim Markwell: it's interesting when you're kind of thinking about that i think that some things will just happen without the community even realizing they're being educated i guess i get taken back to some of the commentary around just exposure to information now that people have that just makes them more aware and educated and the same with the flooding um i guess i lived in a very fun prone area up here in brisbane it's amazing what sort of community that creates just through that experience and knowledge that we've got some rainfall happening we've got a high tide you know it's going to flood the community come out together they share experience there's actually a real sense of knowing your neighbours and kind of just knowing what's going to happen and having your own experiences in that directly in terms of giving them the information beforehand on making the broader melbourne community um aware of what's happening at fishermen spend yeah i guess social media is a big way that we can now engage broader community so it could be brands aware across melbourne of the really exciting things that are happening in fishermen spend and i think it should be shown as a showcase sitting here listening to the really exciting hybrid technology that's going to be delivered here and sitting in this water industry but in a different geographic region hearing that sit there and go oh that's great but typically it's so complicated to deliver that just getting those stakeholders together to talk or share funding um is just a really difficult hurdle to get over so i think Fishermans Bend should be celebrated i think people in melbourne should be aware of what's going on here in the water space and be excited about it and be knowledgeable about it and actually advocating for it
Cheryl Batagol: you at south east water have a significant experience in developing a really innovative water solutions for a part of a suburb in the southeast of melbourne called aquarivo so i imagine by now their building and residents are moving in how did residents then react to what is a which is completely different to what they might have been used to
Charlie Littlefair: yeah you're right cheryl i was while kim was taught and you read my mind i was going to raise the aqua event maybe i'll use it as a little bit of an example so we've got about 150 of the customers have moved in built their homes and started using the app that we have given them that tells them not only their water usage all three of their water usage which is a rainwater to hot water and the tank and the way claire talked about it you know able to drop down with a storm coming but also the recycled water and drinking water and it was an interesting little example that i'd used when one customer said i thought we were going to see a lot of reduction in our drinking water and why am i not using much recycled water and interestingly we did a bit of analysis and and one of the team went and visited the customer and chatted to them and the simple question was oh have you hooked up your washing machine to the recycled water and the customer said i don't know and so what we did is the staff member of southeast water went and had a look and sure enough it hadn't it had been hooked up to the normal drinking water system washing machines and dishwashers use a lot of of water and one of the benefits of recycled water is you can actually use it in your washing machine interestingly enough what came out was oh well why didn't you hook it up to that oh i didn't hook it up harvey norman delivered it and they hooked it up so we the penny dropped for us it's beyond that it's the people that deliver those water use appliances particularly that we need to engage with as well and maybe we need to be training the bunnings the harvey norman's the good guys about when you get there hook it up to that purple pipe not the drinking water partner and where did that come from one of our customers reading their app interpreting it and honestly our biggest challenge in southeast water is we do a particularly complex job behind the scenes and we're a real cinderella type service and as a consequence of that the customer doesn't understand it but giving them the tools with that information is so valuable that they engage with it look at that example i've given you engagement to the point that particular household went from virtually no recycled water use to about 40 just by making a simple decision.
Cheryl Batagol: that's fantastic tony you've had experience let's make some comments
Tony Wong: first of all it's not often anywhere in the world where you have a water utility that goes in partnership with the developer to create the type of communities we're looking at and that is a hybrid that's an emerging hybrid institution that i was referring to and that's a really fine example one of world's innovation in how the changing role of the water utility in that sense but i want to sort of add to what kim was saying in that there is also an emerging field in urban design which is incredibly human-centric and and and through that urban design it actually starts to introduce signals and demonstrations on how the world's changing uh i have seen designs whereby wetlands are particularly used to celebrate when it rains and the community gets to understand then the relationship of those wetlands what happens when it rains i have seen architects design new buildings whereby their rain water tanks are transparent and people know how it operates some of them are equipped with likes such that when it does rain and when it's purging it gives a light show but it creates a signal for the community to understand their infrastructure and therefore understand about how they could live in a really cohesive way with all of these elements that are trying to buffer the effect of climate change but at the same time trying to improve the quality of the environment that it is not all about technology technology needs to be embedded into the infrastructure in a hybrid way perhaps through some biomimicry that creates all of these signals that brings the community much closer to how they actually live within the environment so the the urban design field is also really emerging into a very human-centric and you only need to go to aqua river to see you you heard about the technology side but you need to walk around and look at the place setting and you understand that it is always informing and inviting residents in to become much more aware of their environment.
Cheryl Batagol: And Craig this community's new community of by 2050 of 80 000 residents in fisherman's bend will be on the banks of the Yarra and so you know the and i've seen many examples of melbourne water changing the way communities feel about their little water part of the waterway you know where you've been daylighting for instance taking away pipes and recreating a creek that was there a hundred years ago but the Yarra which is our iconic river for melbourne and fisherman's been so very important presents both the threat but also the beauty of living beside water so how how do you think you melbourne water will go about engaging the community around that sort of dual thing threat but also pleasure a
Craig Dixon: Fantastic question Cheryl and it's something that at melbourne water we've done a lot of and increasingly so is how do we engage communities to actually connect with those sort of natural elements or those elements of nature around them including waterways um to actually value those how do we actually help them uh interact with those to become not something that's out of sight out of mind but something that they interact with and they really value and we see um sort of further up in the sort of mid to upper Yarra we see increasing examples of where communities not only sort of start interact and appreciate they start to take ownership and become very actively involved in in in the the whole sort of management and uh and upkeep of the waterway um things like you know some of our community grants programs for example where uh members of the community actually start to take on responsibility themselves uh with funding from us to to to manage some of these natural resources so i think it's helping the community connect engage appreciate understand and they'll take they'll take it uh by the horn so to speak
Cheryl Batagol: we have global responsibilities in particular i think about the un's sustainable development goals um and claire i was going to ask you how do you think fisherman's band can deliver on the sustainable development goal 11 which is the sustainable cities and communities
Claire Ferris-Miles: sdg's or the sustainable development goals number 11 is very much around designing sustainable communities that are designed to be ready for shocks and stresses and and so we all know with climate change that we are going to have more frequent extreme weather events and so i think what we've been talking on this panel today is not about needing to manage the water but to celebrate it and i think it's a completely different type of thinking and and also like i said before it's not about sort of having to react to it but knowing that we are designing a community that's ready for it that we've engaged the community about flooding events that we've thought about both at the precinct level which is as sdg 11 talks a lot about designing buildings that have a whole lot of sustainable features about them very much about water it's about energy it's about waste so thinking about sort of the whole spectrum of sustainability but but what i would say and i love this concept that the danish have which is about hedonistic sustainability which is about you can do all of these things and you actually can have a better quality of life so sustain sometimes people think that sustainable communities you are taking things away you are asking people to to do less or have less and it's not that hedonistic sustainability is about how do we be smarter how do we be smarter about how we use our resources but you do that within the finite constraints and resources of the planet and so it's thinking about our streets our parklands and our buildings and our planning controls so that we trust have trust in government and trust in our institutions particularly with flooding that we are designing a community that um at the paramount has the safety of human life that you know so the safety of human life is as we've seen with covert is um you know every life is important so they there is a trust in government that we are designing a precinct with that premise but then there is a role for everyone that lives in that precinct um to to think about living in a way that is within the finite constraints and resources of our planet and it's not about no water no energy no waste it's about thinking about a lower type of consumption but still has a very high quality of life
Cheryl Batagol: And so if i think about the quality of life tony you've been deeply involved in developing the water sensitive city strategy for fisherman's bend can you just give us your vision of what it would be like to live in fisherman's bend picking up all of the things like hybrid infrastructure inside the house and outside the house
Tony Wong: so the the one thing that i would like to see is future is the residents and people that work in fisherman's men are house proud they're proud to be associated with the precinct because of what it stands for because of all the functionalities that you see that you can perhaps explain and point out to visitors as you as you go along the address of the future not because of just its location but because of what it stands for it being a a vision of what future cities could look like
Cheryl Batagol: so tony as i walk along one of the newly created streets and fishermen's bend what will i see that's different to where i've come from well
Tony Wong: depends on what day it is if it was a hot day you would you immediately sense the cooling of it because of the fact that the streets are cool uh the soil is moist and therefore it has a lot of evaporative cooling potential that you can feel on a wet day you might see a totally different street whereby the middle of the street is actually protecting you from flooding and drainage you could see water running down and with good urban design they are running down not like a drain but it could be like a cascading stream in the middle of your road you could see that and where it finishes up in a local park in the wetland is now suddenly vibrant and a few days after it rained it may have a totally different ecology so that changing climate of melbourne is completely captured in the landscape so as a resident uh it's not for the engineers among them will be pretty excited about its drainage function but for a resident to just get the sense of being so close to nature but understanding that that nature is actually functioning and servicing that city and that's a different you you go out to a park and you might look at nature almost in in a fairly one-dimensional way you go to fisherman's bend and you know that you can have it all you can have the functionality that the cost effectiveness in terms of infrastructure but still that quality of the environment that people flock to talk to those places for so yep i'll be i'll be looking for an apartment at fisherman's bend if they build it right they will
Cheryl Batagol: in wrapping up i see my vision of for the community who is going to live in fisherman's bend it's a community that is connected it's a community that is serviced well by their local government by their infrastructure partners but mostly it's a community who just lives with the knowledge that they are absolutely the front runners in in creating livable cities and that we have in the background and worked really hard to create that for them and that for them and charlie's described it it might be through an app or something else they are satisfied in the knowledge that they are at the really leading edge of sustainability livability and resilience i would like to thank my panel members today not only are they leaders in their fields across many fields but it is going to take leadership itself to deliver fisherman's bend and it is people like charlie tony claire craig and kim who will do that for us and so i have the utmost confidence that we will be able to do it thank you very much fisherman's bend works at multiple scales to achieve multiple outcomes green roofs green walls and rainwater tanks in the private realm work with rain gardens and tree pits at the street scale which work with a water recycling plant and traditional civil engineering infrastructure of pipes pumps and levees to deliver on water security flood protection urban cooling and greening outcomes.
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