Australia: Liveability vs sustainability
While Melbourne may be a liveable city, it’s got a way to go to become sustainable in the face of challenges like climate change
CHRIS HATZIS
Eavesdrop on Experts, a podcast about stories of inspiration and insights. It’s where expert types obsess, confess and profess. I’m Chris Hatzis, let’s eavesdrop on experts changing the world - one lecture, one experiment, one interview at a time.
[Melbourne city sound effects, tram bell, traffic, people walking]
Melbourne. It's been voted the world's most liveable city on numerous occasions, but is it the world's most resilient? Urban scholars - like Lars Coenen - argue that a city's resilience comes from its innovation. Professor Lars Coenen is the inaugural ‘City of Melbourne Chair of Resilient Cities’, an initiative between the City of Melbourne and University of Melbourne aimed at improving the city’s resilience to sustainability challenges.
Lars is an interdisciplinary scholar cross-cutting the fields of innovation studies, economic geography, and science and technology studies. His research interests converge around the geography of innovation, addressing questions such as: how can regions and cities improve their capacity to innovate? In particular, he's interested in addressing questions on innovations related to pressing societal challenges, like climate change.
Our reporter Steve Grimwade chatted to Lars Coenen about his work and whether
it’s possible that we Melburnians have become so complacent with 'most liveable' that it's holding us back from adapting to the changing world.
STEVE GRIMWADE
Lars, welcome to Eavesdrop on Experts.
LARS COENEN
Thank you very much.
STEVE GRIMWADE
Now let's say you're at a barbecue with that uncle who you haven't seen since he gave you a pocket calculator in 1985.
LARS COENEN
Ah-ha.
STEVE GRIMWADE
Imagining that?
LARS COENEN
Yep.
STEVE GRIMWADE
He asks you what you're doing now. And you're not sure he's fully going to understand what a scholar crosscutting the fields of innovation studies in economic geography actually does. What do you tell him?
LARS COENEN
I'd actually sort of go back to that pocket calculator that he gave me in the '80s and say, you know at that time that was a typical example of an innovation and it was probably also something that was characteristic of the '80s because we had a lot of new technology being thrown at us, especially in the field of TV and IT and stuff like that. So you know, I'm studying innovation and a lot of people would immediately think about new technologies. Nowadays we would think about apps and stuff like that.
But what my research really tries to sort of poke at, is to understand the process of how innovation comes about. It's partly about the outcomes of new products and new processes and it often kind of has something to do with technology, but I'm really interested in the process of how did these sort of novelties come about, how do they spread and I'm a geographer, so I'm then interested in where does innovation happen, where does the process of innovation happen and why there? Are there specific characteristics tied to a city, a region, a country that can help me explain why that innovation happened just there.
STEVE GRIMWADE
So perhaps I'm going to ask the 101 question. How do we explain what innovation is and what it's not?
LARS COENEN
What it's not is - it's not an invention, it's more than that. A lot of people I think conflate innovation for invention and also think that innovators are inventors. I would say invention is an important part of an innovation, but an innovation is more than that. There are many inventions and you can think about the stereotype of the crazy inventor, just go to the movies “Back to the Future” and they're novelty, they're technological novelties, crazy inventions, but they never really made it big. So an innovation is really when that invention has become adopted by society, by the market and it's more than just a prototype or a funny gadget, it is really something that what we say in innovation jargon, has diffused.
STEVE GRIMWADE
So it is the end result?
LARS COENEN
Yeah, but I wouldn't say it's just, you know, it's not necessarily the end result, because even if it's sort of starting to diffuse and like apps, they - once they've been, say, adopted and commercialised, that doesn't mean that they reach an endpoint. There's still development, so you could get app version 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, so it's an endpoint, but also that endpoint is constantly shifting, it's constantly in development and that's the same with technologies. There's never really sort of the perfect endpoint of a technology or of a new product, it keeps on developing.
STEVE GRIMWADE
I hear a lot of talk about the culture of innovations. I'm interested in and what it - what we need to surround us to make a cultural innovation.
LARS COENEN
Yeah, that's great, a really interesting question and really something that speaks to a geographer, because as soon as you go to different countries and regions, you would note cultural differences. I'm born in the Netherlands, I've spent a lot of my career in Sweden and now I find myself in wonderful Melbourne. So I've experienced also a fair bit of changing cultures and I could really sort of sense there was a different culture around innovation if I start to compare Sweden and Scandinavia with Australia. So my experience in Sweden, there's a lot of effort, a lot of focus on collaboration between organisations and individuals and that it's really sort of in collaboration that innovation happens. Whereas the culture of innovation in Australia I would describe as much more individualistic. It is really more leaning towards that heroic entrepreneur, heroic inventor and has a stroke of genius and comes up with, you know, the bionic ear.
I'd probably say that that actually doesn't really play into the advantage of Australia as an innovation nation. I think it is, in a sense, punching much below its weight, because we've got a very individualistic mindset about how innovation comes about here.
STEVE GRIMWADE
Is it a measure or a reflection of our cultural values and maybe libertarianism versus socialism and sorry to go very broad on this, or is it less than that?
LARS COENEN
Yeah, I wouldn't go so far as to start describing Sweden as the last resort of socialism, but I do think it has something to do with individualistic values, yes. So, I also don't want to say that this is sort of an endpoint and it's always going to be like this. I sort of noticed that as also Australian politicians, policy makers and businesses are becoming increasingly aware of the need for innovation, they also start to better understand and appreciate that you don't just go about it alone when innovating, you need to coordinate and collaborate. So I wouldn't say that this is just doomed to be forever like this, but yeah, I think there is a fair observation to say that Australia is a more individualistic country, the political system is more towards a liberal market economy, political economy and yeah, that obviously has an impact on the way that the country goes about in terms of innovation.
STEVE GRIMWADE
It's interesting, because I think you wrote or spoke about the fact that as an OECD measure, Australia is at the bottom of the table with regards to that word collaboration and I think it's more specific than that, but I'll leave it at that. That seems to be against the grain for me because I would have thought we are very much community minded, but I'm not sure why that happens.
LARS COENEN
Yeah, so I mean I use that statistic often to make the point about we need to think more about collaboration and innovation. But I'm also mindful that often statistics are a bit - you use them for your own purposes, so that OECD statistic that you're referring to is also quite a narrow measure of innovation. It rather actually measures commercialisation of research, which is a way of going about with innovation, but it's not all of it. I think what it really does point to is that we've got a poor track record in collaboration between our universities and industry in the business sector. That's what it really is saying.
But I have seen very promising examples of innovation and of collaborative innovation, but where innovation takes a different form. So just looking at, for example, the way that the City of Melbourne and other local governments in metropolitan Melbourne are experimenting with an urban forest is, to me, a great example of an innovation, but it would be the kind of innovation that's perhaps not captured in such OECD statistics.
STEVE GRIMWADE
It seems to be that probably falls into the measure of public good, rather than driving productivity and I guess that brings us to the idea of what is the purpose of innovation and have we got an outdated model of what it should be?
LARS COENEN
Yeah, I mean it depends on who's we. I think a lot of the political discourse around really innovation is outdated, I think. I think Malcolm Turnbull had a good point a couple of years back when he released his innovation statement and said, we need to think about how the Australian economy is going to transition from a resource-based economy to a knowledge economy. But then very quickly it just turned again into just understanding innovation as commercialising research and commercialising technologies. So it's sort of a bit disappointing to see that that's also reflected in the way that government tries to support innovation at the federal level, because that's the only thing, the only instrument that they consider, is using R&D rebates and that's a very - that's a policy instrument that treats innovators as individual organisations or as individuals. Again, completely counter to how actually innovation goes about; it does not support organisations, firms to collaborate.
So, it's also part of that sort of the feel-good, the bravado that surrounds around innovation, about we're a country of technological leadership and we're cutting edge and we really provide the new products and technologies in the 21st century economy. I think innovation can be much more mundane, like illustrated with the example of an urban forest or illustrated with examples from as mundane practises as bicycling. It's maybe not something that captures your imagination as a bionic ear or a bionic eye does, but it is the kind of innovation that I think is really required to much more think about and emphasise when we start to think about innovation in the face of sustainability challenges.
STEVE GRIMWADE
So I mean you've spoken about the Australian Government's inability to have, well, reluctance to develop more levers or the fact that we don’t have many levers to pull with regards to innovation from a federal level, are there federal governments elsewhere that are doing more?
LARS COENEN
Yeah. So Europe I think has really been very progressive in that respect and I mean if in Europe you want to get funding for your research or for your innovation, you would always have to come with a consortium, you would always have to collaborate. You couldn't just get public funding for research or public funding for innovation if you just say, well we are going to develop this great, new thing. Equally, they're really tying funding for innovation to grand societal challenges, saying we really need to engage with climate change, really need to engage with ageing societies or refugee crises. They're also, for example, using public procurement as a way to try and stimulate innovation and incentivise companies to come up with solutions.
So they're deploying a much broader spectrum of policy tools, but they're also engaging in much more in a conversation and in a mode of coordination with business to hear about what are your bottlenecks, what are your barriers to innovation and what can we, as a public sector, as a government, do in order to help you become better innovators. I find that conversation not really happening in Australia and often is sort of conceived as that is something very risky, that is not something the government should do, it's commercial in confidence. So there is much more of a distance between government and government policy to foster innovation and the sectors that are supposed to be targeted. There is no real sort of interaction and coordination happening, compared to Europe. But equally I think parts of the US are recognising that.
STEVE GRIMWADE
I'm guessing, am I right to say that you probably believe less in a top-down approach to innovation than a bottom-up approach?
LARS COENEN
Well it's a tricky one. I don't think it's either/or; it's top down and bottom up, are sort of two sides of the same coin. So I believe that you can't just plan innovation, like say we're going to solve climate change in the next five years and we're going to throw a lot of money at it and these are the technologies that we need to develop and off we go.
STEVE GRIMWADE
You've just ruined the only way I saw us out of this problem.
LARS COENEN
Yeah, sorry.
STEVE GRIMWADE
I feel terrible now.
LARS COENEN
No, but - because it would quench a lot of creativity, right, so by just sort of saying picking the winners, you'd also exclude a lot of others who might become the winners, so it's about opening up for a variety creation, in a bottom-up way, let a thousand flowers bloom, but also then acknowledging that not all those thousand flowers will solve climate change. So, at some point you need to also, in a top-down way, be selective and say, listen, this innovation here, it's not really going anywhere, we need to cut the funding for that. Whereas others, we really see some promising developments and we really need to increase funding and increase support for that. That's, again, with reference to Europe, that's what they're doing really well over there.
STEVE GRIMWADE
It's a really, I guess, it's a mature culture as well, because all of a sudden it goes beyond developing an innovation culture, it goes to accepting failure and it goes to celebrating failure and it goes to having those - and you've talked about those hard conversations you have to actually say, well actually you're going to be one of the 90 percent of projects that fail and trying to cut it off before you go too far.
LARS COENEN
Yeah, sort of, you know, fail fast and share the lessons that are learnt from failure. My research on the geography of innovation, what I often heard from successful innovators and entrepreneurs was that they are in places like Silicon Valley or innovation clusters not just to hear about all the successful innovations and the successful research that is happening, but really also to find out about what went wrong in an experiment and what went wrong with the development with certain technologies and so on. It's that kind of knowledge which is as important as the success cases.
STEVE GRIMWADE
What areas, what regions, have turned around their approach to innovation well and reasonably quickly and what have they done?
LARS COENEN
That's a really interesting question. A region that I have a lot of respect for is the Ruhr area in Germany, which used to be sort of the heartland of the coal and steel industry in Europe 50 years back. But they realised that coal and steel were declining industries; a lot of jobs were being lost there. It took them 50 years, but they really managed to turn around that dependence on coal and steel and now it's a region that's thriving with renewable energy companies, but also a region that is thriving in terms of cultural industries. So they've really managed, from being an old industrial region locked into dependence on industries that are dying, that are shedding jobs, that are becoming increasingly less competitive, to transforming into something which, you know, again has a promising development trajectory.
But again, the hard message here is also that that took a lot of time, that took five decades and that's often something that decision makers, politicians, don't really want to hear. Like okay, for example, if we take the example, take the case of the Latrobe Valley in Australia, it is also a region that is undergoing a lot of transformation and that is not just going to happen within the next few years; that's going to take decades.
STEVE GRIMWADE
To that point, I mean I get the sense that the general public doesn't really warm to the idea of change in general, however real it is, but also with that in mind then, what do you think the public feels about innovation?
LARS COENEN
There's a wonderful slide I once found on social media, which says, which exactly captures that image, like “innovation, yes, change, no”. Innovation is sort of, I guess in that sort of picture, seen as change is already there, it's sort of that new iPhone or that new app, it's the glitzy novelty. Whereas change is more about behavioural change, it is about political change, which are equally part of those changes that come with new technologies, but it's the dimensions of change that we find much more difficult to talk about and to address. So we're all about, it's what you said about climate change, yeah we just find the new technologies, we just replace all our energy with renewable energy and the problem's fixed. Probably yes.
But it's not just a technological change, it's also a change in the way that we organise our energy markets and it's a political change, it's a change of how we, as individuals, engage with energy, cultural change, our norms and values are changing and it's these kinds of parts of the change process which I guess we feel less excited and enthusiastic about, because they go outside our safety zones, outside our comfort zones. If we start talking about, yeah, you also need to change your behaviour, people go like, oh, really? Then you kind of fall back into more conservative behaviour, I guess.
STEVE GRIMWADE
Does innovation find itself more city or country based? I ask that because I think I know the answer, however, small farmers in Australia, I always think of my mates on small farms and they are incredibly innovative. I mean their approach to their work, that's at the base of it and yet I think that probably innovation probably centres in cities.
LARS COENEN
Yeah. Again it depends on what you understand is innovation. So if you think of innovation as new technology and if you think of innovation as commercialising high-level research, yes, it would be concentrated in big cities, it would be concentrated in places where you've got leading universities and a lot of venture capital and so on, the Silicon Valleys and the Hyderabads in the world. But my point would be, well innovation comes in different forms and sizes and every city and every region has potential to be innovative because it is about being creative, it is about trying out new things. As you said, with your example from farming, there's a lot of novelty happening within farming, a lot has to do with technologies, drones, and so on and so on, but also just changing practises, how farmers are engaging differently with the natural environment and how they're engaging with drought. I mean lots of crises also coming at us that requires us to be innovative.
So I don’t see it as sort of necessarily something happening in rural or in urban areas, it happens in both and it just comes in different ways. I think again that's something to also pick up in the way we think about how can we support innovation from a policy perspective. There is no one size fits all. A region that is having a lot of universities and a lot of talented people like Melbourne requires different innovation support than a region like Latrobe Valley. But they can be innovative, both places can be innovative in their own right.
STEVE GRIMWADE
Sounds like you should respect innovation with perhaps a Minister for Innovation and keep that going forward. Anyway, sorry, for those who aren't aware, we did used to have one of those, but we don't anymore in Australia. Anyway, you're the inaugural City of Melbourne Chair of Resilient Cities, which is an initiative between the City of Melbourne and The University of Melbourne aimed at improving the city's resilience to sustainability challenges. I guess the next question is obvious, what are our key sustainability challenges, especially for cities?
LARS COENEN
Again, that's very place specific and let's take the example of Melbourne, because I'm City of Melbourne Chair of Resilient Cities, so a lot of my work is really engaging with the sustainability challenges in this place. I see that we've got some real issues with our transport system. Coming from overseas, I find Melbourne extremely car-centric and it doesn't really seem to be engaging with that challenge very much either. I mean there's still sort of the way that we seem to want to solve the congestion is by just building more roads and also just the way that the neighbourhoods are being planned, it's all from a mindset of people are going to drive around in cars. So compare that to, again, places in Asia and Europe which have much more public transport and also much more active transport. So I think that's sort of a real sustainability challenge for Melbourne. But equally there are issues with housing affordability which is a tricky one, because of course it makes - building and owning property in Melbourne is very lucrative, it's a great development, it's a great investment object, but it also increasingly drives out people and makes it a less liveable, less creative place.
The thing I want to emphasise with sustainability challenges is also that they're wicked problems. So we can't really solve them, I might have just said how do we solve them, it's not about solving them, it's more about how would we tame them. Because as soon as we start addressing the transport challenge in Melbourne, we're going to run into other problems of land use, of health and safety on roads. When we get more bicyclists, we get also more potential for accidents and so on. So it's not like you just identified a problem and then you try and solve it, the problem and the framing of the problem is going to change as you start addressing it and may create different problems and problems for other people and that tends also to become very much a political issue.
STEVE GRIMWADE
Do you think it's possible for politicians to be forward-looking and to actually imagine the future that we've got in 50, 100 years, especially with regards to rail infrastructure and public transport?
LARS COENEN
It's partly a question of can and capacity, but it's also just a question of they've got a responsibility. As rulers, governors of our cities, they have a responsibility to make sure that we are future-proofing our cities which means that thinking really about how do we want Melbourne to look like and to function, not just in the next four or 10 years, but in the next 50 years. I mean it's their primary responsibility, this is not the responsibility of business, of universities or citizens, even though they obviously are a part of this story. But it's our elected governors, leaders of our cities and regions, that should think about how do we make sure that these places are as thriving, as liveable, as great places as they are now also in the long-term future.
STEVE GRIMWADE
What do you think the key attributes are of a resilient city?
LARS COENEN
A resilient city is a city that constantly is mindful of its changing environment. It's a city that doesn't become complacent and that's an interesting one, because Melbourne, I was partly attracted to coming to Melbourne because it's the world's most liveable city.
STEVE GRIMWADE
Ha, ha, oh sorry, tricked you.
LARS COENEN
Yeah. It is in many ways a very liveable city, but that status can also create complacency about, well, we made it. Similarly like we've got so many universities, we've got so many talented people, we're an innovative city, we made it, well you know, that creates really the issue of, well the world is changing, the economy is changing, if you just think you made it, then you're absolutely not being resilient.
STEVE GRIMWADE
I also love thinking about our approach to cycling and I don't cycle, I catch public transport, however, I know that from your own experience and having brought a family over here and deciding not to buy a car and then wondering how in heck you're going to get around and the frustration probably with the aggressive nature of driving in Melbourne and the aggressive culture around cyclists, I mean we are so far off being a cycling city.
LARS COENEN
But I wouldn't like to blame - turn it into a blame game.
STEVE GRIMWADE
You take all the fun out of this.
LARS COENEN
Sorry, but equally I could see that cyclists can be extremely aggressive and hostile towards car drivers or not hostile perhaps, but disrespectful, disrespectful of understanding how cars are using the roads and what rules they need to follow. So it's more about learning to share the road, rather than having a privileged position for bicyclists or car drivers. Of course it would be impossible, I guess, to live in Melbourne with a family of two, three children and not drive around with a car. I mean we're using car sharing to - because occasionally we really need a car. But using, at the same time, the bike a lot, at least makes me sort of conscious and aware of that I really should pay attention to bicyclists and pay attention to how I'm using the road and that I shouldn't just sort of squeeze my car in front of a bicycle lane and things like that. So I think by more people getting in bikes also creates a more friendly, a more respectful, a more collaborative road-sharing culture.
STEVE GRIMWADE
So you moved to Melbourne from across the world to pursue your work, so I guess because of that, I'm interested to know what does success look like for you? When you leave in five years, if you leave or however, what does it look like for you?
LARS COENEN
It would - I mean on a personal level, I want to constantly learn. To me, that's what development is about, it's about learning about new places and by learning about new places and how they innovate and how they address sustainability, you also learn a lot about yourself. So it was for me really interesting to come to Melbourne because I felt like I'd been working in Scandinavia for 15 years and I've become kind of a bit myopic about that. So to me it's very much - of course I want to be successful in the sense of writing papers that are being accepted in key journals and getting research grants and all that.
But these are just means to an end and the end being to get a better understanding how we can foster innovation in a purposeful way that contributes to making our societies or cities and our regions more sustainable. But I'm not seeing that there's a definite end goal along the way. It's more like, okay, we're just going to be learning more about the phenomenon and having a better understanding will hopefully also help us to better manage and address those challenges.
STEVE GRIMWADE
I suspect you may have answered this, but you started your academic life, I believe, as a chemical engineer. I might have got that wrong, but you seemed to have morphed a lot since then and so I'm interested in what's driven your own innovation.
LARS COENEN
So I mean I've always been very interested in technology, initially then as an engineer, but because I was sort of witnessing how you produce technology, I became challenged and triggered to start studying it from different perspectives. So I guess that interest in technology will always be there, but I really would like to understand it from a technological, from a cultural, social, economic, political perspective. I guess the same sort of is the story around sustainable development. There's an economic, social, environmental component to that. I would like to take different perspective and dimensions on a phenomenon or on a project, not just reducing it to, oh this is just an economic challenge, or this is just a political challenge. This is a bit of a challenge I find sometimes in Australia and in the Australian academic landscape because it kind of brings me back to being a multidisciplinary scholar. There's a tendency to reduce problems and research to, oh this is a clear political challenge, this is a clear economic challenge, without really seeing that it is - it transcends just that one discipline or that one perspective or that one dimension.
STEVE GRIMWADE
I was interested, I was going to ask a question about the ego of the researcher and whether the - how does the solitary expert deal with collaboration, however, maybe it's actually the fact that we don't sponsor or reward those who do cross- or who do collaborate, who are interdisciplinary.
LARS COENEN
Yeah. you're absolutely right. I mean being a multidisciplinary scholar always makes you a generalist and the way that you achieve prestige and excellence and respect in the academic system is often by being a dedicated specialist expert. So, every time I go into a meeting with other scholars, I find that I know a little bit about what they're doing, but also a lot about other stuff. But I always feel like I'm a bit of an amateur in economics, I'm a bit of an amateur in social science, I'm an amateur in political science, but yeah, I guess I have to live with that, because I want to see the big picture, the helicopter view.
STEVE GRIMWADE
Probably makes you far better at translation though.
LARS COENEN
Yeah, I mean inter-disciplinarity is not just about crossing, cutting across disciplines, it's also about cutting across academic and other types of knowledge. So, in the example of the collaboration with the City of Melbourne, what I really enjoy there is not just - my chair is not just an academic position, it's also really working with non-academic stakeholders and to learn from the knowledge and the learnings that they generate in their practice. Again, I think we'd be better off not just putting academic research and knowledge on a pedestal, but acknowledging a lot of important knowledge in learning happens outside universities.
STEVE GRIMWADE
So I've just become the VC of Melbourne University, I'm wondering what's your bit of advice for me to better foster innovation? You've got a couple of minutes to convince me and maybe you've got one or two bullet points.
LARS COENEN
Yeah. So I mean at the moment Melbourne Uni sort of puts innovation in between research and commercialisation and at the same time it's doing really great stuff in the area of engagement. I mean the University of Melbourne is an active player also in the City of Melbourne. I'd like to see all these strands coming together and calling that innovation. Not just the stuff that's between research and commercialisation, but equally the work that University of Melbourne is doing in terms of engagement, is an example of how this university can be innovative. So it's really just sort of opening up how we understand innovation.
STEVE GRIMWADE
What's the best piece of advice that you've been given as a researcher and what's something you'd like to pass on?
LARS COENEN
Being a researcher, I have to sometimes deal with quite some scepticism. You have to have sort of a tough skin, because you're being constantly challenged and criticised and there's a good point to that, because that sort of improves your work. So you'd have to be really passionate about what you're doing and even though this is a very rational world, also follow your heart and follow your intuition and allow yourself to make mistakes. So talking about the piece of advice, it's probably that one, is acknowledging that research is a human endeavour and humans are fallible creatures, we make mistakes all the time.
But the way we talk about research and the way we talk about the universities as a place of close to god, the ivory tower, they have very high status in society as the conveyors of truth and how we understand the world. But to get there, we are making so many mistakes, but that's always - that's sort of forgotten in the storytelling about universities and about academia. I think that's what some of my mentors have conveyed to me, is like just allow yourself to make mistakes, because you'll learn from those and also try to convey that to your colleagues who are just doing a human endeavour, nothing more, nothing less.
STEVE GRIMWADE
That's so different from my schooling, I can almost see the calluses from where my teachers rapped me over the knuckles for getting things wrong. Yeah, anyway, look finally, when I'm walking down the street or when any of our listeners are walking down the street and we think we've got the idea for a great new innovation, what would you like us to do next?
LARS COENEN
Test it. Try and find out for who is this innovation purposeful, who's going to use it, try and find those users and bring them along in your journey. Tell them, like I want to work with you, I want to see whether you think this makes sense. Give it a go, because it's really the proof of the pudding is in the eating, right? So if you just kind of have a great idea and it just stays in your head or in your laboratory, no-one's going to find out about it and it'll probably be less good than if you just trial it early, fail fast, but also there's so much you would learn from just bringing it in to use and having your users and your stakeholders tell you about why is your idea, your concept or your product great or why is it just an absolute failure.
STEVE GRIMWADE
Professor Lars Coenen, thank you so much for joining us.
LARS COENEN
Thank you very much.
STEVE GRIMWADE
Cheers.
LARS COENEN
Cheers.
CHRIS HATZIS
Thank you to Professor Lars Coenen, City of Melbourne Chair of Resilient Cities at the University of Melbourne. And thanks to our reporter Steve Grimwade.
Eavesdrop on Experts - stories of inspiration and insights - was made possible by the University of Melbourne. This episode was recorded on November 29, 2018. You’ll find a full transcript on the Pursuit website. Audio engineering by me, Chris Hatzis. Co-production - Dr Andi Horvath and Silvi Vann-Wall. Eavesdrop on Experts is licensed under Creative Commons, Copyright 2019, The University of Melbourne. Don’t forget to drop us a review on iTunes, and check out the rest of the Eavesdrop episodes in our archive. I’m Chris Hatzis, producer and editor. Join us again next time for another Eavesdrop on Experts.
The Australian city of Melbourne has been voted the world’s most liveable city numerous times – but does that status make those of us who live here complacent about the city’s long-term future?
Professor Lars Coenen is the inaugural City of Melbourne Chair of Resilient Cities, an initiative between the City of Melbourne and University of Melbourne. The aim is to strengthen the city’s resilience in the face of sustainability challenges like global warming.
But key to creating a sustainable city is innovation, done in a purposeful way that contributes to our societies, cities and our regions. And that, says Professor Coenen, is where Australia needs to raise its game.
Episode recorded: November 29, 2018
Interviewer: Steve Grimwade
Producer and editor: Chris Hatzis
Co-producers: Dr Andi Horvath and Silvi Vann-Wall
Banner image: Shutterstock