One Answer

In my previous editorial (September 2008) I posed a single question – ‘what role can architects play in improving the lives of the poor?’ I wrote the editorial as I was preparing to coordinate groups of postgraduate architecture working on two community development projects – the first in rural Thailand and the second in Australia’s ‘top-end’.

I stated in my editorial that many architects have worked in the community development field and spoke of their hopes, their shortcomings and of their varying states between. I spoke of cases where communities were reluctant to be involved, where local politics intervened, where architects failed to understand their clients, and of the effects when collective spirit is destroyed. I mentioned that in projects such as these there was much to go wrong. I spoke of the need to look for (and embrace) small victories and have modest aims. What did I do with my two projects and what were the outcomes?

In the last year I have coordinated two projects with Melbourne School of Design students from the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne. The first project was in rural Thailand and the second in one of Darwin’s ‘town camps’. In both cases our team consulted with a variety of stakeholders, designed and then built shelters at full-scale alongside local workers. Working with partner organizations we addressed ‘real-world’ problems and engaged with issues of sustainability in their many complex forms – cultural, environmental, economic and technical.

We knew that in projects like this excellent preparation was the key. A series of preliminary exercises had the students conducting research, convening seminars, designing prototypes, documenting the construction process and scheduling and sourcing construction materials. This enabled them to confidently begin prefabricating some building elements in the Faculty workshop. Once the prefabricated components were complete the teams moved to the University’s rural campus at Creswick for on-site construction. Here the students gained confidence, their familiarity with the tools and materials grew and their problem solving skills were put to the test over a three-day period.

Students learning to use construction tools in the workshop

Prototypes under construction at the University's rural campus

These preliminary exercises led towards the main component of each project – students forming partnerships to work outside the university on outreach projects. In both projects the subject coordinators have worked alongside students and community representatives building structures of significant size and complexity.

In 2008 a group of sixteen Melbourne School of Design students worked with students from Bangkok’s Thammasat University, Population and Community Development Association (a Thai NGO) and the Ban Nong Thong Lim community to build a sala (pavilion) for patients waiting at the government health clinic. Community representatives requested that the sala work in the traditional way and be open air and welcoming to the people using the clinic. A wise choice of construction technologies was a key consideration. After so much regional deforestation most contemporary construction in Thailand now uses concrete – but this creates all sorts of environmental problems.

The sala under construction by the health clinic.

The sala nearing completion

Our sala, built with steel framing and composite materials, tested possibilities to link traditional lightweight construction techniques with contemporary construction materials. In a broader sense this was testing possibilities that new housing could be built with traditional ideologies – reducing the need for air-conditioning and maintaining the open-air spaces that enhance community cohesion – as well as using new materials with lower environmental costs. The project will continue with an ongoing research project investigating links between construction technologies, environmental costs and the cultural behaviours that accompany various uses of space. In 2010 a new team of students from both universities will again collaborate with the NGO and Ban Nong Thong Lim community to investigate housing types using lightweight materials.

The second of our on-going projects is located in Australia’s ‘top-end’. Although the climate and need for housing is similar to Thailand there are vastly different cultural contexts. The federal government’s Strategic Indigenous Housing and Infrastructure Program (SIHIP) and well-publicised ‘intervention’ program have brought indigenous housing to the attention of mainstream Australia. Whereas the agencies once responsible for indigenous housing in the Northern Territory were criticised for too little consultation the claim today is that there is too much consultation with too little housing being built. Today’s media provides many commentaries speaking of the vast sums allocated by the federal government but with little (or no) housing having been recently built. Paradoxically there are reports from the communities themselves that the consultation process is inadequate. How much consultation with indigenous communities is the ‘right’ amount? How should this consultation process be managed and with what outcomes in mind?

With these questions in mind two groups of Melbourne School of Design student have been involved in subjects that work with two indigenous communities in Darwin’s ‘town camps’. At the community’s request early projects looked at providing design ideas for housing ‘long-grassers’ – generally itinerant young men who have been held responsible for many of the problems facing indigenous communities. However after consultation students were invited to recycle one of the derelict houses in the Gudorrka Community. The steel framed houses (nicknamed ‘chicken coops’ by all concerned) were in appalling condition with no bathroom or cooking facilities and no outdoor shaded areas.

The 'chicken coop' house before renovation

The interior of the 'chicken coop'

With $50,000 funding from a variety of sources the sixteen students, two staff and help from local men and children we ‘blitzed’ the house over a ten day period and recycled it into a respectable house. The new residents – one of whom had been born in the house three decades ago – were eager participants in the process and are delighted with the outcome.

A verandah was added to provide much needed 'indoor/outdoor' space

The new interior

We reclad the interior, enclosed two more bedrooms, built an internal bathroom, tiled the wet areas, installed a new stainless steel kitchen and added louvres to the windows.

The renovated house has significantly less environmental impact than a new house, cost one-tenth as much and was completed in a vastly shorter time-span. It also linked the indoors with outdoors to provide greater levels of comfort and a closer connection with the land. This project did not end there – the students then used their experience to design some further facilities for this community and the neighbouring ‘Knuckies Lagoon’ mob. Their designs are being reviewed by both mobs, and local government funding agencies, before another group of students comes to continue the project in 2010.

The new verandah becomes an ‘oasis’ for people to gather

Have I learned something useful?

These projects revealed their small victories and there was much for us to learn. It seemed – to use the words of one of the local agencies providing the funding – that we worked with the community rather than for it. This is an interesting distinction. The students, and I give them heaps of credit for this, really engaged with the local people of all ages. Unlike building contractors – who are on wages and predetermined schedules – we made the time to consult, get to know the people and involve them in the process. In the indigenous community the kids were really drawn to us and we should make an effort to further include them in the future (alongside their parents). We were also flexible enough to be able to change our plans as we went through the construction phase – buildings were rotated minutes prior to earthworks beginning, additional items were added or deleted as we went along and so on. The construction processes were fluid and dynamic.

These structures, in both Thailand and Darwin, are only parts of a larger process. The intent has been to use the construction processes and outcomes as a way to stimulate further discussions with the community groups involved. Marginalised communities are not well used to making decisions about their environments and their shelter. Traditionally they have had little or no choice. The process of talking, designing and then building together opens up many opportunities for a more useful dialogue which then enriches the ideas, processes and outcomes for the next project and so on.

The bottom line is that I am convinced that there is a need for architects in community development projects such as these. Traditionally projects might have the involvement of bureaucrats, aid workers, engineers, accountants, builders, anthropologists and the like, who do have great skills but remain narrow in focus. Not many can balance the complex and interlinked variety of needs and at the same time produce a tangible outcome. At the same time we are fortunate that we work within the university structure that enables these projects to develop in a ‘laboratory’ (to use a popular word at this time) setting free (or relatively free) from commercial obligations.

David O'Brien
Architects for Peace, October 2009

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Yellow Urban Alternatives for a Green and Orange Context—Belfast, Northern Ireland

Belfast, the home of the Titanic, is a city evolving out of a history of conflict and distress. It is witnessing continuous civil and urban transformations; a transition from a troubled urban entity to a lively vibrant city. When I went to the city about 7 years ago for a short visit, the city was starting to get out of its sleepy, scary, and dark image—from what I felt and was told. Since March 2008 however, I was attracted by Belfast’s new image as a tourist destination with historic depth, unparalleled in many cities. I was also ensnared by the idea that a city I have seen a few years ago has changed beyond recognition and keeps changing for the better.

The Urban Reality of Belfast
Despite the fact that Northern Ireland’s peace process began in the mid 1990’s, the city is still essentially divided between the two dominant communities, Catholic and Protestant. While the east and south of the city are diverse enough, these single-identity communities continue to exist in many parts of the north and west. They are partially separated by ‘peace walls’. Records indicate that the number of these walls has increased since the beginning of the peace process. At the last count there were 41walls or similar such constructions. Here I relate to my earlier editorial of February 2008(1) and insert Robert Frost’s famous Poem: Mending Wall. Frost reminds us of offensive building acts when he says: Before I built a wall I'd ask to know... What I was walling in or walling out... And to whom I was like to give offence. Introducing diversity is thus a critical challenge to Belfast’s urban designers and architects, which keeps posing itself on any urban discourse about the city’s future.

Looking at the urban reality of Belfast, one can argue that the city still suffers the impact of thirty years of civil conflict. Such an impact continues to be felt as much in the current urban growth of the city as it was during periods of contention. Notably, the structure of governance remains centralized—yet locally unaccountable to a great extent —while the development of civil society, especially in the center, north and west of the city, is typically hindered by importunate sectarianism. As well, the economic life of the region continues to be distracted and misrepresented by state financial backing and also by the very recent paramilitary intrusion(2). In parallel to these realities, corporate and business actors dominate the development process, yet security and protection mindsets keep producing urban fragments and in some cases intentional community segregation, admitting and fostering the presence of “single-identity communities.”

The Building Initiative and the Yellow Space Metaphor
In response to these urban and institutional realities, an advocacy group of committed architects and urban designers from the University of Ulster formed the Building Initiative (BI)(2). It is a project by Antje Buchholz, Miriam de Burca, Gregor Harbusch, Orla McKeever, Deirdre McMenamin, Conor Moloney, Jürgen Patzak-Poor and Dougal Sheridan. The BI is supported by the University of Ulster and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s Special Initiative for Architecture and the Built Environment.

The BI produced a traveling installation that was first shown in Belfast and was recently packaged in a publication titled “Yellow Space” to explore possibilities for city living as a neutral reality. The BI and its underlying Yellow Space event and activities suggest a critique of current urban design and development strategies by paving the road for introducing a series of ‘Civil Enterprise” sub-initiatives amenable to the creation of accessible, integrated places. The team proposes a balanced approach that integrates both top down instruments and bottom up strategies together with capacity building(3). Remarkably, the BI opposes practices characterized by heavy discourse on identity politics and attempts to introduce the politics of place.

Figure 1:

The Yellow metaphor as an active neutrality

Figure 2:

A traveling installation – a catalyst for yellow urban alternatives

Yellow is utilized as a metaphor for the types of desired spaces the BI calls for. The team argues that Yellow is often used as a sign for shared objects such as the yellow book, the city cabs, and the post-it notes. It represents an active neutrality – a common ground – a common language created through usefulness. It imbibes the qualities of diversity, access, utility, positive dialogue, and consensus—qualities that are under risk in most contemporary cities, not just Belfast.

Color is loaded with meaning…. So was the BI team successful in identifying Yellow for their responsive initiative? One would conceive more qualities of Yellow as a striking color based on research on color and color therapy. As infants, children have a natural preference for Yellow as a luminous color, they start liking it but they grow less fond of it as they mature. Also, Yellow comes as the sixth preferred color in international ranking(4). Yellow was described as a color that demands attention. For Van Gogh, Yellow was an obsession, and he often wrote about seeking the "high yellow note," a quest to paint life in scenes of both health and disease, which indicates ultimate neutrality by utilizing Yellow to express polar qualities.

While the BI team envisioned the multifaceted nature and impact of ‘Yellow,’ I should refer to the Yellow Arches of Belfast, which express another historical depth to the predilections of Yellow. While most cities worldwide have their landmarks in building forms, Belfast has its own and unique landmarks; Samson and Goliath cranes that were built for the construction of battleships and cruise liners. Samson and Goliath are monstrous Yellow arches that stand in the old Harland and Wolff shipyards on the banks of River Lagan. Each crane has a span of 140 meters (459 ft) and can lift loads to a height of 70 meters (230 ft), with a combined lifting capacity of over 1,600 tonnes, one of the largest in the world(5) .

The Yellow Space as one of the important outcomes of the Building Initiative asks two simple yet striking questions: How Yellow is Belfast and how can it become more Yellow? Simply, if cities had a color – would that color be Yellow! While my discussion with many Northern Irish friends tells me that there is no preference for stereotyping, there is a tremendous degree of success in selecting Yellow as an in-between color and a metaphor for urban neutrality, where Orange typically represents the Protestant community and the Green represents the Catholic community.

Initiatives within the BI
A series of events were conducted as part of the overall BI. The installation included a series of photographs that represent urban alternatives from cities such as Amsterdam, Berlin, Budapest, San Diego, and Zurich. Images from these cities were displayed to show how people are taking initiatives through socio-economic and socio-cultural activities that cross the boundaries of identity, income, social class, and ethnicity. The argument is that initiatives in those cities share the idea of creating yellow places. The intention of the BI team is thus to expand possibilities rather than impose ideals, and concomitantly, attempt to apply lessons learned from those cities. Two modes of actions were conceived as the backbone of the initiative; instrumental actions through yellow initiatives including thematic workshops, actions plans among other activities, and communicative actions through constructing yellow objects where the purpose is to demonstrate possible ways in which people can take initiatives. The object was a yellow news stand which distributes free copies of the yellow press, a newspaper that outlines the activities and reports on the projects, workshops, and other related events.

Figure 3:

Yellow is portrayed as urban neutrality that could promote dialogue and engagement, identity within diversity, access and usefulness.

The Yellow Space publication also outlines a number of thematic workshops addressing potential projects and critically analyzes them in terms of challenges, context, opportunities and objectives. Among these projects are a proposal for a new type of public space—a bonfire recycling center, a preservation proposal of the Castle-Court Shopping mall area in the city center, a proposal for the creation of a pathfinder scheme to develop a model for future mixed use developments, and investigating contested spaces without challenging territorial boundaries of different communities. An important outcome is also a website that outlines the thesis of the BI project and how it could be applied to other cities such as Manchester(6).

Figure 4:

Dialogical integration and initiatives across the boundaries of identity

Figure 5:

The Yellow Press: April and Sept 2008 issue covers

The Woodvale Hub—a Park for Everyone and a Community Shared Space
Woodvale Park is an important contribution of the BI. Located in the north west of the city, the park is over 120 years old. As a typical Victorian park, it has a bandstand, flowerbeds, and large trees. A road was proposed through the park involving destruction of many features and demolition of many trees. The ‘Friends of Woodvale Park’ was formed to resist the implementation of the proposal, which was rejected. The group then approached the BI team to engage in discussions on social issues and potentials the park could offer. A series of workshops and exploratory events were carried out in local schools and in the park. They involved gaming techniques, discussions with youth about the values and qualities of the park, then with architecture students at the University of Ulster for generating ideas. These resulted in a design brief and a proposal that accommodated needs and concerns of different parties.

As a citizen-led enterprise (7), the proposed project includes a HUB (Hybrid Use Building), which would be made up of indoor and outdoor spaces for a wide range of events and activities relating to both the park and the wider communities. These could include a new path and gate between the park and the adjacent shopping centre, community gardens, a sheltered outdoor seating space for events like cinema or concerts, an indoor multi-use space, a multi-purpose sports pitch and café or kiosk. Notably, a strategy has been developed so that different parts of the proposal can be added over time based on funding.

Figure 6:

Deirdre McMenamin and Dougal Sheridan of the BI leading a design workshop and a group discussion on the future of Woodvale park.

The “Plug-in Path” is a central design component introduced to provide a short cut and direct connection between the park and the nearby shopping centre. This is to increase the movement of people so that the feeling of safety is enhanced. The Plug-in Path is a programmed surface - i.e. it contains lighting, seating, play equipment, etc as well as an electricity and water supply which can be tapped into as required. It contains everything needed to allow different events to take place including a food market and outdoor concerts. The Plug-in Path connects all the HUB facilities; it is the shared surface that is used by everyone from all age-groups.

“Community Gardens” are an important component of the design concept; plots of land gardened essentially by the local community. They were introduced to imbibe the attitude of sharing, the sense of ownership and partnership. The intention is to grow them collectively, with everyone working together. The BI team, together with different parties involved, conceive these gardens as providing a leisure activity for families, children and adolescents, a place to communicate and to learn about nature and growing food. By offering a self-fulfilling, relaxing, and engaging environment, these community gardens have the capacity to address different types of people including the working class, the unemployed, minority groups, the disabled, children, seniors and the under-represented.

The Future Yellow Culture of Engagement in Belfast
Instilling the culture of collaboration and engagement seems to be one of the important drivers for the activities of the building initiative, the Yellow space events and activities, and other Yellow efforts. In this respect, I argue that techniques of participation and collaboration including gaming simulations, workshops, and public discussions are not new and have emerged since post World War II in many parts of Europe and since the civil rights era in the United States. What is new here is that such efforts are unique to the context of Belfast. Ranging from awareness and public responsiveness, to democratizing planning and design decisions, the BI and its underlying activities address all segments of Belfast society including lay people, school children, youth, architecture students, politicians, and decision makers, photographers, artists, architects-urban designers, and journalists. Through several sub-initiatives, specific events were tailored to these segments.

Figure 7:

Different stages of developing the proposed design scheme for the new Woodvale Park

Simply, the BI manifests the need for new roles that architects, urban designers, and planners can play. It clearly articulates the shift from the ‘Egoist-Architect’ and the ‘I-give-the-people-what-I-want’ syndrome to the enabler-facilitator-advocate-Architect/Planner whose role is not to clearly solve people’s problems, but to create a process that enables people to solve their own problems. I would end by saying that the BI is not about ‘design activism’; it is a conscious endeavor that needs to be celebrated for its mission, scope, and process. Currently, the Woodvale project has been taken over by the city council, which is moving forward with the project in consultation with a committee of community representatives. Still, the outcomes and the impact on the decision making process, and uniting the single identity communities remain a challenge. With these and other similar efforts, the culture of engagement, collaboration, and urban and housing diversity, that continued to be a taboo for three decades, could be rediscovered. Belfast could be more Yellow. Other towns and cities including Armagh, Derry, Portadown could also be Yellow when similar initiatives take place.

Credits
Images presented in this editorial are property of the Building Initiative team, and reproduced from the Yellow Space publication. Thanks are due to Deirdre McMenamin for providing the initial visual and textual material for this editorial.

Bibliography
(1) Salama, A. M. (2008). "What's War/Peace - Construction/Destruction got to do with Architecture?" Editorial: Architects for Peace, February 13, 2008, Melbourne, Australia
(2) Building Initiative, Yellow Space--Belfast: Negotiations for an Open City. School of Art and Design, University of Ulster, Belfast, United Kingdom.
(3) For more discussion on these approaches, please see: Salama, A. M. (2009). Sustainability / Trans-disciplinarity: A concern for people and environments between confusing terminology and outdated approaches http://www.intbau.org/essay20.htm
(4) Barett, J. (-------). The Color of Learning: http://www.excellence.dgs.ca.gov/MaxStPerformance/S4_4-2.htm accessed July 31, 2009.
(5) Bishop, E. (2008). Belfast: Troubles Seem So Far Away http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/citybreaks/3483579/Belfast-Troubles-seem-so-far-away.html Telegraph, 19 Nov 2008
(6) The Building Initiative Website http://www.buildinginitiative.org/
(7) Jennifer Cornell is the main community leader who has driven the project and was a catalyst for attracting attention to the project.

Ashraf M Salama
Architects for Peace, September 2009

Dr. Ashraf M. Salama is member of the editorial board of Architects for Peace. He is an architect, scholar, and professor of architecture, currently holds a reader in architecture position at Queen’s University Belfast, United Kingdom, the chief editor of Archnet-IJAR: International Journal of Architectural Research, collaborating editor of Open House International-OHI, editorial board member of Time-Based Architecture International, and International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.

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Public Mourning

Public mourning recently manifest itself in two curious forms in the state of Victoria, Australia. The first was a national day of mourning following the recent bushfires, known as Black Saturday, which killed 173 people. The second was a road side memorial commemorating the death of four teenagers that allegedly caused the death of another person at the same site two weeks later.

Commemorative events and spontaneous memorials gain resonance in the manner in which they appropriate public space. Sites that are used for one function are transformed for a period of time into a place of ceremony. Urban infrastructure becomes a prop for personal shrines. The form which these ceremonies and shrines assume demands respect regardless of the site’s former purpose or the manner in which the memorial is made. However, the location only partially assumes the status of a collective site of memory. Public space remains contested most clearly in matters of death and who can be commemorated, how, where and by whom.

The Premier of Victoria announced that the Federation Bells would be rung at 11 am on Sunday 22 February 2009 to commence the national day of mourning. He invited the ringing of church and town hall bells to join this moment of reflection.

I was unsure how to express my feelings at such a tragic loss of life and decided to be present. I imagined the air filled with the sounds of bells radiating out from the city centre to the suburbs. No words would be needed.

Federation Bells were commissioned as part of an earlier commemoration marking the centenary of the Federation of Australia. Designed by Neil McLachlan and Anton Hassell, the idea behind Federation bells is the question of whether secular society can have meaningful ceremony. In proposing a response to this question, the designer and artist team trace the spatial and sonic history of bell ringing from church spire to clock tower as the signifier of the city's collective ritual – the sound of religious ceremony is surrogated by mechanistic time in architecture and acoustic form that would be the medium of this work of art. Federation Bells is essentially a public artwork as instrument for which compositions are written and it was planned that these would be played daily at specific times or on specific occasions. It is an instrument consisting of 39 inverted bronze bells of various sizes standing at varying heights in Birrurung Marr. Birrarung Marr, the first park to be constructed in Melbourne in 100 years, means 'river of mists' and 'river bank' in the Woiwurrung language of the Wurundjeri people, and is a symbolic gesture of reconciliation with the original custodians of the land.

On the National Day of Mourning, in this location of historic symbolism, I was the only other person to join a television crew waiting at Federation Bells as 11.00am came and went with not a single bell tolled in the whole of the City of Melbourne. A dirge rose from the nearby Rod Laver arena, possibly the national anthem, marking the commencement of our national day of mourning. The bells to be rung turned out to be another set of much smaller, hand ringing bells and the televised ceremony was held inside the artificially lit and climate controlled sports facility. That the national day of mourning should happen inside a sports stadium and through the televised tears and speeches transmitted into the living rooms and towns across Australia is perhaps understandable from a practical point of view. But public mourning is unmediated and its impacts on the vicariously involved is through sound (or silence) and physical presence in a city or town. However, the capital city of Black Saturday could not be interrupted by even a sound, a moment of pause and involuntary collective reflection. The mourners could not be seen in public except exiting the sports stadium, caught, edited and telecast by the waiting television crew as they made their way into the car park and back home.

The public artwork in the public park, imagined as a place of public ceremony, ringing out through the entire city a mournful toll marking a national day of mourning could not be realized and was never even considered.

The only toll to permeate this car dependent city for its 70 kilometre radius is the road toll. Like the national day of mourning it is telecast into our homes and towns. The nightly news reports the aftermath of mangled vehicles and an endless, escalating and shocking series of advertisements graphically depict full impact, multi car collisions and dramatised reenactments of human tragedy. Bumper stickers feature a white line crucifix under the slogan of “Touched by the Toll” and spontaneous memorials sprout along the extensive and ever expansive road networks of Metropolitan Melbourne.

On the 27 June 2009 four young people were killed in a two car collision in the outer suburb of Lynbrook in metropolitan Melbourne. A memorial was erected by friends of the deceased which grew, scaling a pole to over three metres and strewing over the pavement at an intersection which was the site of the accident. Just two weeks later, a fatality occurred at exactly the same spot with a driver collided with a truck. It was suggested that the shrine either obscured the view or distracted the driver and caused the accident. The shrine was subsequently removed by the authorities to the protests of friends of the first fatalities.

People do not chose where they die. For young people in Victoria between 15 -29 this place is most likely to be on a road, in or hit by a car. Unlike the Lynbrook memorial, most shrines are modest and personal in scale, made as if to be visited and tendered by individuals while signifying a place of mourning to the general public. Made with tremendous care from everyday items, the spontaneous memorials demand acknowledgement for this very reason – they universalize the personal and personalize the collective tragedy of the road toll in a material and present manner. These shrines are defiant in a way that is inspiring and poignant, countering the speed with a shrine to the victim of this very velocity and marking a place in an urban form often described as a non place. These memorials are beginning to feature on freeways where, paradoxically, it is illegal to stop except for an emergency and where pedestrians are banned. I have yet to see one of these memorials on the privately managed tollway where there is no advertising, litter, life or presumably death.

Unlike the public day of mourning without a presence in a public place, the roadside memorial takes possession of space and forces the uninvolved to consider death in the course of our daily life. It cannot be ignored like the enclosed ceremony, shrugged off or generate repulsion like the graphic television advertisements and it is most certainly a citizen initiated action about the one thing we all share - mortality.

Post Script: In the Brazilian city of Puerto Alegre one metre wide, white stencilled butterflies on the black bitumen road mark the site of road fatalities and television advertisements for mental health are based on happiness.

Anthony McInneny
Architects for Peace, August 2009

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Climate Change: Building a different future

When the topic of climate change comes up in conversations with friends, acquaintances and—more and more frequently—with complete strangers, I sometimes find myself making a comment on East Timor. Perhaps all too casually, I like to suggest that Timorese households living in remote rural communities are likely to deal better with climate change than will my family in urban Melbourne. Timorese communities have generations of experience at coping with adversity in a country where crop failure might mean starvation, where a serious injury can lead to a lifetime of penury and where illness all too often results in death. The resilience and joy found in Timorese communities is remarkable to behold. Clearly, no society would aspire to the hardships found in East Timor simply to foster the resilience that it engenders. Nevertheless, I think it is true that if climate change wreaks havoc on the global economy, the difficult life of a rural household in a remote part of East Timor would go on much as it does now. Not so life in Australia and in other over-developed nations of the world. For once, I think to myself, something is going to affect ‘us’ much worse than it will affect those in the developing parts of the globe.

The likelihood that those in the over-developed world may suffer tends to concentrate our collective attention in a dramatic way. The saturation media coverage of the recent swine flu pandemic illustrates this well. Swine flu has proven deadly and the WHO reports that more than 300 have died as a result of catching the disease since the first death was recorded in May. Millions of poor people die every year from preventable diseases but if rich people start to die too, it’s big news amongst the rich people.

Given that, one might expect some cause for optimism when it comes to global warming. The world’s best scientific and economic advisers have confirmed that climate change will indeed wreak havoc on our over-developed economies. Agencies as diverse as Oxfam and the World Bank agree that disastrous impacts also await those in the developing world. Surely, concern for such an outcome would be sufficient cause for us to take action.

Tragically, I don’t believe that the human species—and more specifically, those of us with the power to do so—will cut greenhouse gas emissions enough to avoid catastrophic climate change. I think our current ecosystems are doomed. I believe that we could avoid catastrophic climate change— that point needs to be made very clearly—it’s just that I don’t think we will. It feels dreadful to put that comment in print. Whilst I have become accustomed to thinking that way putting it in writing makes me feel as if I am complicit in a terrible crime.

There are myriad reasons that lead me to this conclusion. Rather than confront these, however, I regularly delude myself by focusing on the potential for change. In Australia we have a government that was elected on a promise to combat climate change; in the state where I live (Victoria), a member of parliament has resigned his position to head a large-scale program to install electric vehicles in Melbourne; China is installing a new wind turbine every two hours and is fast becoming a leader in renewable energy; Germany has a huge solar PV program with millions of systems installed; under Barak Obama a US President has finally acknowledged the severity of global warming and committed the United States to reducing GHG emissions.

The climate change problem, however, appears much bigger than our timid, lagging responses. Aside from the fact that global emissions have swelled since the Kyoto protocol was signed and that we now face an even tougher path to prevent catastrophic climate change, here are three of the reasons why I’m pessimistic about our chances of dealing with global warming—climate change indicators are worse than expected; high profile sceptics continue to press their case; and people like me continue business-as-usual. Firstly, climate change indicators. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides an estimate of trends in climate change indicators with an upper and lower boundary to indicate the band of uncertainty in future years. As climate change modellers have looked back on recent data and compared it to the predictions reported by the IPCC we might expect to see the results spread throughout the range of uncertainty. Contrary to this, however, a synthesis report by leading climate change scientists at the recent Copenhagen Climate Change conference states:

Recent observations show that greenhouse gas emissions and many aspects of the climate are changing near the upper boundary of the IPCC range of projections. Many key climate indicators are already moving beyond the patterns of natural variability within which contemporary society and economy have developed and thrived. These indicators include global mean surface temperature, sea-level rise, global ocean temperature, Arctic sea ice extent, ocean acidification, and extreme climatic events. With unabated emissions, many trends in climate will likely accelerate, leading to an increasing risk of abrupt or irreversible climatic shifts.

In other words, our best scientific modelling has tended to underestimate the rate at which climate change is developing. The situation is deteriorating more quickly than we thought. Tim Flannery reports that James Lovelock, the pre-eminent earth systems scientist, believes that ‘the causes of the climatic shift are now so entrenched that they are in all likelihoods irreversible’. For Lovelock, we have already passed the ‘tipping point’ at which climate change moves beyond our ability to control.

Nevertheless, there remain sufficient high-profile sceptics in our societies to create just enough doubt about the problem to dilute the political will to take serious action. In Australia this mantle of high-profile sceptic has passed from our previous Prime Minister, John Howard, to Senator Steve Fielding (a member in the upper house of our Federal Parliament). Senator Fielding was elected ‘accidentally’ with just 0.08% of votes through a preference deal with the Australian Labor Party. Senator Fielding, who now holds the balance of power in the upper house of the Australian parliament, is a climate change sceptic. In an ironic twist, at the same time Barak Obama was committing the United States to dealing with climate change, Senator Fielding was undertaking a ‘fact finding’ tour of the US asking prominent politicians and scientists whether global warming is real or imagined. In his quest to take a ‘balance view’, Senator Fielding has somehow sided with the fringe of society who think that global warming remains an unproven theory and that taking action to reduce GHG emissions will make us all worse off. As a consequence, this person will now vote against legislation that proposes a modest cut in Australian emissions. If the sea level rose by a metre tomorrow no one would be in a position to deny what had happened. Whilst prominent persons such as Senator Fielding, however, publicly deny the signs of climate change too many others will continue to overlook the fact that sea levels are rising by a few millimetres a year.

Perhaps the most compelling cause for my pessimism, however, is my own behaviour. I accept the IPCC’s advice that the climate system is unequivocally warming and that human activity is very likely the cause. I wholeheartedly support local, national and international action to reduce GHG emissions and combat climate change. I would also be quite happy to pay more than my share of the cost to make that happen. Yet, I live in a society addicted to cheap energy and I remain part of the problem. I know that I will take another international plane flight for work (and even for leisure); I will continue to drive my fossil-fuelled car; I will use more fossil fuel to heat my house; I will buy cheese flown in from France, wine shipped in from New Zealand, and bananas trucked down from Queensland; I will buy cheap manufactured goods imported from China, exporting my GHG emissions to the developing world; I will buy a newspaper and so contribute to the pollution associated with printing, transporting and recycling the newsprint; and in a thousand other ways I will continue to stamp my oversized carbon footprint on the planet’s ecology.

And it won’t just be me that continues to pollute. I’ll keep doing these things because 20 million other Australians will join in with me, as will hundreds of millions of other people from the over-developed world. Between us (and our antecedents), we have been responsible for three quarters of GHG emissions. If we haven’t yet changed our ways, how can we possibly expect those in developing nations to take action? As pointed out in a recent Oxfam briefing paper on climate change, ‘the average Australian emits nearly 5 times as much as an average Chinese, and the average Canadian emits 13 times as much as the average Indian’. Those of us in over-developed countries would have to go ‘backwards’ (as many in our society would see it) quickly and significantly if we are to allow developing nations to improve their living conditions and at the same time reduce GHG emissions globally. It’s very hard to see that happening.

Climate change is often discussed at Architects for Peace meetings and our members are regularly involved in rallies and conferences promoting responses to global warming. I have no doubt that as an organisation we will continue such efforts. I hope that they are successful. I also hope that our response to climate change will recognise the right of developing countries to emit carbon pollution as they continue their development and promote responses that are equitable at a national level. If James Lovelock is right—and it is already too late to avoid catastrophic climate change—then in addition to calling on our communities to fight climate change we also need to be planning and building for a very different future.

Matthew Bond
Architects for Peace, July 2009

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