Creating a National Urban Research and Development Platform for Advancing Urban Experimentation

Abstract

Transformative changes are required for a 21st century sustainable urban development transition involving multiple interconnected domains of energy, water, transport, waste, and housing. This will necessitate a step change in performance goals and tangible solutions. Regenerative urban development has emerged as a major pathway, together with decarbonisation, climate adaptation involving new blue-green infrastructures, and transition to a new green, circular economy. These grand challenges are all unlikely to be realised with current urban planning and governance systems within a time frame that can mitigate environmental, economic, and social disruption. A new national platform for urban innovation has been envisaged and implemented in Australia that is capable of enabling engagement of multiple stakeholders across government, industry, and community as well as real time synchronous collaboration, visioning, research synthesis, experimentation, and decision-making. It targets large strategic metropolitan, mission-scale transition challenges as well as more tactical neighbourhood-scale projects. This paper introduces the iHUB: National Urban Research and Development Platform, its underlying concepts, and multiple layers of technical (IT/AV), software/analytical, data, and engagement, as envisioned and implemented in Australia’s four largest capital cities and five collaborating foundation universities.

Towards a Virtual Planning Support Theatre for City Planning and Design

“…The hub project focusses on the interconnectedness of energy, water, transport, waste, and housing domains to assist in regenerative urban development, decarbonisation and climate adaptation initiatives working from strategic National/metropolitan scales to tactical neighbourhood-scale projects. A key operation of the system is in enabling structured interaction between multiple urban stakeholders by "real-time synchronous collaboration, visioning, research synthesis, experimentation and decision-making techniques" (Newton and Frantzeskaki, 2021). This engagement layer includes a reconfigurable laboratory space fitting 30 people with four pods acting as break-out spaces to facilitate real-time visualisation of urban analytic scenarios, interactive presentations and facilitated peer-peer communication.…”

“…This engagement layer includes a reconfigurable laboratory space fitting 30 people with four pods acting as break-out spaces to facilitate real-time visualisation of urban analytic scenarios, interactive presentations and facilitated peer-peer communication. Newton and Frantzeskaki (2021) state that "[t]he engagement layer is where the major benefits of the hub network are delivered: imagine politicians, planners, developers, architects, engineers, social scientists, and citizens being able to gather in a room to make collective decisions based on real-time data analytics".…”

Community Preferences for Urban Systems Transformation in Australia

“…Several priority issues and desired solution spaces were identified, including areas for relevant knowledge development and use (83)-including climate change and/or energy (16); environmental issues (15); circular economy (8); population and/or urban/regional growth (10); social and cultural place-based character and liveability including public spaces (13); housing, transport and jobs (18); water capture and retention (1); food security (1); health/education services (1).…”

“…Complementing this is the utility of transdisciplinary networked urban innovation hubs-that are open to civil society and sectors beyond research, development and government. These warrant closer consideration and appreciation by the academic community [4,13]. This paper offers a unique study of citizen perspectives to inform urban systems transformation in and through networked hubs in Australia.…”

Integrating Transition Processes for Regenerating the Greyfields

“…Nextgeneration versions of these tools will be integrated within a Precinct Information Modelling framework now emerging (Fig. 8.3;Newton et al, 2018), capable of being employed on national digital collaboration platforms to drive the acceleration and mainstreaming of precinct-scale planning and design (Newton & Frantzeskaki, 2021).…”