Blog
Designing infrastructure for a better life
Infrastructure is what we call the stuff that powers and supports everyday life. Schools, hospitals, roads and rail, trams and buses, airports and sea ports. But it's also our 'green' infrastructure like our parks and waterways. Increasingly, the cables, routers and satellites that connects our digital world is also part of essential city infrastructure. Infrastructure is critical to connecting up our homes, businesses, shops, schools, our families and friends. And when it comes to funding city infrastructure, one of the key questions is; are we spending our money well, and how do we know if we get the right result?
Imagining a better future
Churchill said that failing to plan was about planning to fail. Adelaide's 30 Year Plan is about making sure we don't fail to plan for the right sort of growth in to the future. And if the 30 Year Plan is about the 'what' and 'where' or growth for Greater Adelaide, then the work of 5000+ and the Collaborative City exhibition is about how we might get there. Adelaide may have introduced town planning to Australia and we are certainly the only capital city working across levels of government in planning today.
But over the last 12 months we've been fortunate to work with like minded agencies from around the world, like New York's Department of City Planning. Deputy Chief Urban Designer, Jeff Schumaker joined the team for a while and draws on the parallels between New York and Adelaide.
Inform, engage, educate... by design
The Collaborative City exhibition has been open now for just over 48 hours and already there’s a buzz. One of the 5 principles driving the Integrated Design Commission from the start has been to Inform, Engage and Educate on how design can improve our lives.
It’s a philosophy shared by many of the partners in the Integrated Design Strategy that’s seeking to chart a new course in working better together. And at the heart of this challenge is the need to share and communicate.
Cities, design and people
5000+ is a project about city re-design and renewal for Adelaide. And while this is a unique way of thinking about Australia's urban centres, we're not the only ones with this idea.
Dublin's PIVOT program parallels our own objectives. So we asked Dublin City Architect and PIVOT Dublin, Ali Grehan to give us a global perspective on the role design plays in city shaping.
30 Rules for urban health
Debate about cities often lurches from the overly academic and hard to understand, to the overly simplistic which fails to appreciate that cities are complex social, economic and environmental organisms under constant change.
Launched in June 2010, Australia's Adelaide-based 5000+ is a design-led urban pilot; rethinking how we go about planning for the future of cities. Since then we've been working to understand our own complex organism better and chart a joint course it's future. Along the way we've developed some basic 'truths'. Lessons from studying the best from here and around the world. Some from observation. Much with evidence behind it. One source that needs some credit is the excellent Urban Code: 100 lessons for Understanding the city by Anne Mikoleit and Moritz Purckhauer. Get it if you can.
Of course it's over-simplifying but let's start with 30 basic rules for urban health.
