Green Fix
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Green Fix
Regenerative Cities in a Heating World, with Emma Bacon and Caroline Pidcock
Welcome to Episode 3 of the Positive Tipping Points Special! A 7-episode special series on the road to COP30 in Belem, with guest host Liz Courtney.
Heat shouldn’t make home feel unsafe. In this episode, we meet architect and regenerative design leader Caroline Pidcock and advocate Emma Bacon, CEO of Sweltering Cities, to map a practical pathway to cooler, fairer, low‑carbon urban life—one retrofit, street tree, and planning rule at a time. The core idea is refreshingly direct: build less and design better. That means using the buildings and streets we already have and upgrading them with smarter materials, shade, ventilation, and green cover rather than pouring more carbon into new construction.
We dig into the standards gap that leaves wealthier suburbs cooler while hotter, poorer areas get unsafe new builds. Emma explains why building codes must use future climate data, not historical averages, and how minimum requirements—light-coloured roofs, cross‑ventilation, deeper eaves, and shade—lift the floor for everyone. Caroline shows how good design and clear regulation spark creativity, from pocket parks and bikeways to vertical gardens and external skeletal frames that retrofit towers without displacing communities. Health is front and centre: heat waves are predictable disasters, so cities should treat nature as essential infrastructure, with “social green space” where people actually move and gather.
We also zoom out to systems. Faster, more frequent trains can relieve pressure on overheated cores, connect regional towns, and stitch biodiversity corridors along rights of way. Accounting for true social and environmental costs flips the economics toward efficient, cool, and equitable design. Throughout, our guests share hopeful signals: scaled social housing upgrades, community-led projects, and movements shifting mindsets inside the professions.
If you care about urban planning, climate resilience, social housing, or just sleeping better on hot nights, this conversation delivers clear steps and real optimism. Subscribe, share with a friend who sweats through summer, and leave a review with the one heat-fighting change you want your council to adopt next.
Your Hosts:
Dan Leverington
Loreto Gutierrez
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Welcome to the Green Fix, a positive tipping points special series with guest host Liz Courtney, an award-winning film director and science communicator. This seven episode weekly special is offering a fresh lance on the climate conversation. We'll explore the science of solutions, the many sparks of change already underway, and the moments when small shifts create big impact. Expect good news stories, evidence of real progress, insights on the urgency of acceleration, and above all, a huge dose of optimism about the world we can build together. Enjoy the show. Welcome to the Green Fix, Positive Tipping Points. I'm your host, Loretta Gutierrez.
SPEAKER_03:And I'm Liz Courtney. And in today's episode, we dive into regenerative cities, urban planning solutions, and the rising challenges of mounting heat loads. And we're joined by Carolyn Piddock and Emma Bacon. Let's dive into a little bit about our two guests today. Caroline is a renowned Sydney-based architect, recognized for her leadership in regenerative urban design. With a career-spanning innovative projects that reimagine the relationship between people, place, and planet, she is at the forefront of shaping cities that are resilient, inclusive, and sustainable. Caroline's work integrates architectural excellence with ecological principles, driving a vision for urban spaces that restore environment, nurture communities, and inspire future generations. Welcome, Caroline. Thanks a lot, Liz. Lovely to be here.
SPEAKER_01:And Emma is a passionate organizer, campaigner, and activist. She founded Soltering Cities in 2019. Swaltering Cities works with people affected by extreme heat to win more livable, sustainable, and equitable cities. She's committed to building a broad movement for climate action. Emma has worked across the Union, global justice, and environment movements for over 10 years. She has run successful political campaigns and has been a part of winning significant outcomes for progressive change at local to international levels. Huge welcome to Emma. Thank you. Delightful to have you both joining us today. So maybe Liz, why don't we kick off the conversation?
SPEAKER_03:Let's dive in. It's a very interesting fact that by 2050, a region across the Pacific will need to build more than 1.5 billion new habitats. Amazing. But when you combine that with the changing climate, dream weather events, and rising temperatures, especially here in the Far South and across Southeast Asia, we're going to look at how big that challenge really is for the building sector. So, Caroline, I have a first question for you. Around the world, we're seeing inspiring city initiatives like the Paris Greenscaping, converting roads into community gardens and creating cool zones and backyards. But both at a local level and a government level, but what can we really learn from these ideas?
SPEAKER_02:I think we need to challenge the idea that we need to build 1.2 billion new buildings. Because we actually don't have the carbon budget to do that if we're going to get anywhere close to our 1.5 degree ambition. What's really good, say the the gardens in the Paris schools and other things is people are starting to really appreciate and work with what is already and trying to make that better rather than saying, well, we've got to start afresh and because we can't. We I mean, well, we could, but it will just make the future even more difficult. Those ideas are saying, well, what are the real issues we need to deal with and how can we do it by improving what we already have? And how can we do it at a local level and in small stitching restorative and regenerative ways, which I think is really, really critical and and and working with local communities to do that.
SPEAKER_01:Um, I want to hear a little bit about what initiatives you have helped bring to life that could be models for other cities.
SPEAKER_02:I'm not necessarily the urban designer. I'm I'm probably more an inspirer of urban designers. Most recently, I'm really trying to help people realize the opportunity we have in making the most of what we have. And there's been a carbon reduction roadmap. Originally the Danish did it, and then it's been interpreted for Australia. And the importance of that is people keep saying, Oh, well, we'll just touch up what we're doing. I think we need radical change, and radical change starts with building a whole lot less and building a whole lot smarter and and making better with what we already have. I've been developing some embodied carbon curriculum with some with some enormously talented colleagues, uh Dominic Hess and Amanda Sturgeon for architects, because I think that at the center of these changes is good design. And it's not something to be added on later, it's actually the essence of what is required because good design allows us to do so much more with so much less, but delivers a much better outcome. You know, saying the city of Sydney, some great ideas that have been happening is just creating really great bikeways and pathways so that people can traverse the city and connect, but in much less impactful ways, and integrated into that is a whole landscaping genre so that we can stay cool and shaded as as we move about the cities. Also, pocket parks, which people use a lot or can use a lot if they're really nice, have been a real target of the city of Sydney to really bring those places to life and not only about increasing communication with neighbors and the ability to get together, but also biodiversity and other things. So it's about these small nodal interventions that can then help people be the best they are with the least amount of impact possible.
SPEAKER_03:Thank you on that, Caroline. You touched on a few things, which was good design and working with nature. Going across, Emma, to the work that you're doing, um, and I think the title says it all, Sweltering Cities. Do you think that we're building and designing within that climate resilience that now needs to be considered where we are having these extreme weather events? And do you think there's a gap still between that ambition and action, particularly around heat loads, which I know is something that uh you talk about a lot and we'd like to open that conversation with you?
SPEAKER_00:Unfortunately, there is still a real distance to go between matching that ambition to the action. One of the most important questions for us to ask is yes, there is ambition, yes, there is some action, but where is it happening? We are seeing that in some of the coolest and the wealthiest parts of our cities, in the newest developments, yes, you are seeing a much more climate-responsive, sustainable way of building. Unfortunately, we are still at the edges of our cities and in some of the poorer areas, the hottest areas, we're still building quite unsafe new developments that just aren't going to be appropriate for the future climate. Yes, we have this ambition. And to be honest, we have a better understanding of what needs to be done than ever before. We've got that combination of new technologies, of great design, of I think we're gonna talk a bit later about those green walls and planting and new fantastic ways, but that's not necessarily making it into the broad standards and regulations that mean that everyone can take advantage of it, not just the people who can pay for that as a luxury good. I interact all the time with brilliant people who are working on solutions, both in the public service, where we've got these great new guidelines to support better planting, to support better building. Unfortunately, these are guidelines for ambition, but they're not a regulation to lift the floor, lift the standard. We see in business, both in small and large businesses, people again doing great work to try and integrate that new technology, sustain planting, like think about climate resilience. But as long as we're, you know, not raising the standard for everyone, we're gonna see a bigger divide between, you know, where are there these sustainable, climate resilient new housing or retrofits even, and where is there gonna be dangerous parts of our cities where in summer you're not gonna be able to leave the house because it's treeless streets, it's concrete, you're gonna be going home at night to a really hot home that's extremely expensive to cool if you can get cooling at all. What's really clear to me doing this work with communities who are impacted by heat all across Australia is that small tweaks just aren't gonna cut it. It's one thing to stand next to a fantastic pilot project, and the mini ministers love that, right? Look at this new building, fantastic pilot project. It's another thing to say we are gonna tell all developers, that all local governments, that we are raising that floor of standards and integrating climate resilience into our codes. And one of the biggest questions on ambition is urgency, because we can all say that, yeah, by 2050 we want to get to net zero sort of thing. But the houses we build today are gonna really influence whether we get to those goals. And every unsustainable house we're building now has to be retrofitted in the future. We'll make it harder and harder and harder. And as Carolyn said, we just don't have the carbon budget for that. Something we'd like to see is the ambition to say this is a now problem, not a future problem.
SPEAKER_01:And Emma, can you walk us through how these climate extremes are actually changing the way that we design and retrofit buildings, as you mentioned earlier, but in particular in those heat-prone areas, what are those big changes that you're seeing?
SPEAKER_00:Look, I think there are good changes, not enough, but that's my job as an advocate to always say raise the ambition. The good things we're seeing is better public amenity and great case studies of that. Like Caroline mentioned, City of Sydney, but around the country, we've got good active transport and new installations, great new playgrounds that are safe in the heat, things like that. Um, so we've got some better public amenity. I think there's a more serious conversation about land management around flood and fire than ever before, driven by some of the big new climate data projects nationally and at a state level. People saying, where is it going to be safe to live? And that's an extremely hard conversation to have with communities. That's more serious than ever before. And it's really fantastic that around the country we've seen some really big investments in social housing upgrades. After decades of underinvestment in social housing, we've had the social housing energy upgrade program at a federal level putting hundreds of millions of dollars into those retrofits, which is access to renewable energy, that's energy efficiency upgrades, it's efficient appliances. Fantastic to see. So that's the good bit of it. I'd say the bad where we're not seeing it is sort of that same old development pattern of like lots of dark roofs, the houses are really close together, there's no trees, you might see more artificial grass and turf than you would, unfortunately, because that can get to up to over 80 degrees Celsius in the sun. One of the things holding us back is still thinking about housing and as one dwelling at a time problem, a one building at a time problem. And I'd love to see more ambition around how do we conceive of making whole streets sustainable, how whole community sustainable. That's what people are really interested in seeing. So there's good and bad, but I'm, you know, optimistic about where we can do more good.
SPEAKER_03:Thank you. I think that was really informative. What we've just been teasing at here is that link between heat banks in our cities, building design, but I also want to just have that connective line through to human health. And I remember a talk that I was at, there was a discussion about, particularly in the heat bank areas of cities, where there are new arrivals coming into Australia and sometimes they're afraid to actually have the front door open during these really hot days. And so they're keeping the doors closed. And the heat in that building where they are can be up to 40 Celsius, and they've usually got a portable fan in one room, yet they've got lots of young children. And that human health connection on heat and heat load in buildings, how might we or are we addressing it, or is it still another gap?
SPEAKER_00:It's just worth pausing for a sec to think about what that must feel like, right? To be someone in a new country, to have little kids, to feel like it's not safe to leave your window open at night and to be watching your kids wondering if they're okay in the heat, are they sleeping, they've got to go to school the next day? How's that gonna work? All the challenges on top of being a new migrant, and on top of that, you're in this hot house, just anxious about your health and just worth pausing and thinking, that should be unacceptable. And this is the sort of story that we hear from hundreds of people around the country, which means that thousands more are experiencing it. So there is that really clear relation, and heat has an impact not just on our physical health, but also on our mental health. All of us know what it's like to have a hot night where we don't get to sleep, right? And what's that like the next day? Imagining weeks and weeks and weeks of that over summer for your whole family. We can see where that happens. I'm quoting someone else here, but there's this um terrible thing that the way we build our homes or whether we retrofit our homes now will decide how many people die in the heat waves of the future, which is a really horrible thing to know, considering the lack of action that we're seeing. Heat waves are disasters where we know when and where they're going to happen. And yet still we're failing. Take the stories that you're mentioning and that we're talking about here, and saying this is a disaster that requires much more ambition to prevent, like we do think about fires and floods. And again, we need to shift towards thinking about those stories, but also being more responsible to our future, not just the political pressures of our present.
SPEAKER_03:Caroline, um, you you very much have been an advocate for what we can do at the local level and the community level. What thoughts do you have on this situation?
SPEAKER_02:There's currently a whole lot of discussions around productivity and removing requirements for building and red tape and green tape and all of that. I understand it is too complex, but removing the need to make houses sustainable is just such a false economy and it doesn't impact productivity, and it should be illegal to build houses that aren't really energy efficient and helpful, and because we're just creating worse problems, as as Emma was saying. And it's just incredible to think that that's okay in a country like Australia. It just isn't. And I know builders go on about, oh, it's so much more expensive to build. It isn't if you do it well and if you do it carefully. And the way to save, if you've got a budget, do a smaller building, which is helpful in a whole lot of ways anyway. But don't compromise on this on the quality because that is just not okay. The other thing is the integration of landscape. Build us a building block so that there's almost no room for landscape. And that's not okay either, because our disconnection from nature is one of the really big causes for why we are in the situation we are in. And that reconnection is really important. Often refugees or migrants who have escaped really terrible things and are now in Australia and find houses they can't live in comfortably. It's beyond comprehension, actually. A number of local governments are understanding that and trying to create places, heat refuges where they can go with their kids and and and get some relief. But at nighttime you've got to be at home. And that's why I think, you know, there's a couple of fabulous people in Canberra, Jenny Edwards, who has got some really great tricks on how to make houses much more efficient in very simple, cost-effective ways. And I think those sorts of things should be promoted by all councils everywhere to help fix the existing buildings for people.
SPEAKER_01:I really like what you mentioned about the importance of connection to nature. And there's a really interesting case study um in Singapore where they've led the way with vertical gardens and cooling canopies and projects like um 88 Market Street. Why do you think it's important to see nature in cities, not just in the horizontal plane, which is you know what we're used to, park's gardens, but also vertical plane.
SPEAKER_02:I just had a quote the other day from Robin Robin Wall Kemera, which says reconnecting with nature begins with seeing the natural world not as a collection of resources to exploit, but as a community of relatives to cherish. If you think about that, it's it's not just about a green wall here or a tree there. It's actually about creating an environment, a community of nature, where not just people but other species can also thrive. Nature isn't one-dimensional or even two-dimensional. She's completely everywhere. The requirement in Singapore to include a whole lot of nature on your block has has created the environment where people are getting really creative and doing some really wonderful things. So when people say regulations are um, you know, are terrible and just dissuade, just cut out good ideas. They don't actually. They create boundaries within which clever design can really come to the fore.
SPEAKER_00:I love that. The creativity, I think, is such a great way to think about our cities and you know what what a joy to walk around a creative city. Something I've recently thinking about on vertical gardens and vertical greening is how to shift it from being not just something that's project by project or um a luxury good. But, you know, we have these big opportunities, especially in Sydney and Melbourne at the moment. There are these politically fraught, the fact that they're gonna knock down some of the big public housing towers in the center of both Sydney and Melbourne with a commitment to densify the areas, to put more buildings in, some of which will be social housing, like public or community-run housing, some of which will be private housing. And these are gonna be built towards a seven-star standard, both places, these big towers, we're talking 20, 30 stories in each place. This is in the pretty close to the cities. And I was talking to someone the other day and saying, wouldn't it be great if there was also a mandate within these new projects to say, well, we're gonna have to make sure that like all this great social housing has vertical gardens, that we're thinking about the energy efficiency and sustainability again, not just unit by unit or the internal energy use of the building, but also what does it mean to have these acres and acres of housing being redeveloped to be a really great, creative, sustainable, visually interesting place to live. I was recently in the bush, uh, and what really struck me is how much detail and texture there is in nature. You walk around a city, there's so many flat planes of texture, but in nature, there's no flat planes, right? You've just this constant detail and texture, and the closer you get, the more beautiful it is. And what an opportunity to say that the social housing of our future in our major cities or anywhere is gonna have that visual detail and uh texture for people. I think that that would just be such a great opportunity for ambition. State governments will own and they will design these buildings. That's gonna be done in-house. That would be a great opportunity and something people should find a lot of inspiration from in Singapore as well.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I th I think there's some architects in France called Lacatan and Versailles who have made and have specialized in keeping existing social housing and making them fit for the future by adding on external skeletal frames, which do a number of things. Firstly, they provide external areas for the housing for the people to enjoy. They provide shading and protection from the weather. And they provide the opportunity for growing plants and giving them gardens right where they are. And most importantly, they actually enable the people to stay in place and those communities to not be disrupted by the building. And I'm not 100% convinced that all the housing in Victoria needs to be demolished. I think that is very much a developer-led initiative and they've got advice to say it can't be saved, whereas I know other people have got advice to say it can be, especially if you use some of those new skeletal frames to help give them more stability. You know, you can pay for advice and get what you want. I live in Miller's Point and the community there was turfed out when the Liberal government came in in 2014 because they felt that they didn't deserve to live in such an amazing place, which is a pretty horrifying thing. And in the end, the housing types that were there weren't really suitable for the rich people who bought them. So they've Airbnb'd the whole lot and destroyed the community. That sort of thing is insane. But I also think that when you are redeveloping brownfield or grey field sites in the cities, you've really got to factor in plenty of open space for those increased densities because people do need to get out into nature and they need to be able to get into a place where there is room for texture because it's not you haven't got a sort of 500 millimeter wide planter. You've actually got space for diverse communities of nature to develop.
SPEAKER_03:I really loved when you said before, Emma, let's just stop for a moment and think what that would feel like when we were talking about heat. And I just wanted to mention that I actually had the opportunity to sit in the vertical garden space in 88 Market Street in Singapore, which I found was amazing. I think there was a lot of um bravery and innovation when they were making that building, which you've both spoken about imagination and and having courage to speak up and and look at what it is that we really need to do, right? And when they were doing that building, I know that the team had to go to the US, they had to pitch it, and they wanted to have five floors that actually didn't have income on them. What was so interesting is they made this connection and said, we we haven't quite made the connection yet. But in the future, there'll be some connection of people in cities needing to have that connection with nature for their own sense of self and mental health. And there will be an acronym for it, but we don't know what that is yet. And I walked around, I think it's the 17th to the 21st floor, and I could sit in an egg chair and and just be in nature. I could sit and do some work at a table. There was a place for doing yoga, there was a place for doing exercise, there were places where you could just meet people and sit in nature. And this went across five floors. And what absolutely got me was when I got to the rooftop of the 52nd floor, they turned that into a whole urban farm. And bees had found their way up there naturally, and there were bees up there. This whole idea of thinking that nature is horizontal when we know it's vertical is really quite extraordinary. And I I just wanted to touch on that whole conversation about mental health and having more people in cityscapes in the future.
SPEAKER_02:I think it's already important. I mean, there's a whole movement called biophilic design, which has so much documented evidence on the on how important nature is to health, to productivity, to well-being, to everything. Our our traditional custodians in Australia know that really well. We've just got to learn to listen and remember that we need to connect.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. I really agree. And I think there are plentiful studies, like if you've got 30% um green cover in your local neighborhood, that can have a measurable beneficial impact on not just your mental health, but also your physical health. And it comes up a lot in our work around people who live in extremely hot suburbs and there's no trees on the street. And not just the lack of connection to country, what we might call it here in Australia, but also the daily stress it creates of leaving the house in summer. What is it like to send your kid off to school walking down a 40-degree street with no trees? What is it like to plan your errands or your medical appointments and that just additional stress that people have? We've been exploring the idea of advocating for more social green space, not just green space in general. And what that means for us is that the at city scale, it can get extremely technocratic. The idea of, well, we're going to do satellite imagery of where all the trees and greening is, and we're going to say percentages of where it's high and low. And we know it's low in poorer areas, and we know it's high in richer areas. This is just it. If we have not just goals for at least 30% green cover, you know, trees of different sizes across the board, but also saying this isn't just planting trees for the sake of it to reach those targets, but also saying where can people interact? Where are people going to experience green cover and trees? Is it a community garden? Is it a great local park? Is it thoroughfares where you're going to pass your neighbors on the street between your house and the school or the train station and things like that? And where can we actually create nature which is also social? That would be great to have more local councils and state government leadership in conceiving of targets around social green space beyond that technocratic measurements. That would be really interesting.
SPEAKER_03:I feel more excited and optimistic just hearing both of you talk because we already have the solutions, right? So, um, how can we get both of you engaged in helping us deliver those?
SPEAKER_01:Um I'd love to hear about what you solutions you're actually excited about that can be considered in future builds to adapt to rising temperatures. Are there any particular highly scalable solutions that come top of mind?
SPEAKER_00:Well, I think our biggest call to action is we shouldn't be building any more urban heat islands. That's probably something to start with, right? Like across the board, let's just stop doing it. Let's make sure that all of our new developments, whether it's building scale or it's redeveloping an existing area, or it's new areas of cities and towns, that we're making sure that there is room for trees, that there is cool design, light-colored roofs, and the materials we're using aren't heating up the area. One of the number one things we are looking for is a sense of like the future. How are we integrating the great climate science we have into our planning codes? Um, so one of the things that I would say doesn't pass the pub test. It's the fact that in Australia, our building codes, the National Construction Code uses historic climate data to set how we build our houses. So it's at the moment 1990 to 2015. In that time, we've had the hottest eight or 10 years in breathwater. We are hotter now, we're gonna be hotter in 2030, and we are gonna be getting further away from that standard. So underestimating how hot houses are gonna get, and we're underestimating how much energy is gonna need to cool them into the future. One of the most important things we can do that I'd love to see that I think be really impactful is to start putting future climate data into our planning codes and our building codes so that we are building for what we know is gonna happen instead of keeping our heads in the sand. You know, if I went down to my local cafe or pub and said, do you think we should be building houses for the past or the future? I think most people would say, look, we should build houses for the future. So that's something we'd love to see.
SPEAKER_03:And I'm just gonna jump in there and say, it's made such a brilliant point because I've been involved in a project with UNSW and they're looking at using AI to actually predict what future fires are going to be like. All their training was based on historical data of when we were at a world that was around 350 parts per million. But we know now we're at 428 and rising. So we need to be training people for those future worlds that are actually happening now and also predict where we're going to be by 2040 and 2050, particularly if we don't pull back. We know that by 2050 we will be in a different situation that we need to already be planning and building for. And we have the next five years to really get that change happening because the climate system is such a slow-moving system. Anything we do now won't really come into effect in the system until 2045. So we have this five-year window where we have to really put our foot on the pedal and accelerate, particularly the things that you're both bringing to the table. And I'm sorry that I jumped in, but I'm gonna go across to Caroline so you can finish up the question.
SPEAKER_02:Well, I'm gonna throw a little bomb in because I actually don't think we have to say all cities should and will grow bigger. In fact, I don't think it's a really healthy idea to jam every single person into already overcrowded cities. And I think we need to be strengthening the regional towns and connecting them with better transport to enable people to live here. And in fact, I'm doing that very thing myself. We've sold our apartment in the city and we're um going to be locating in Dungog, which is where I am right now. Part of it is if you think that is an idea, then you should try and do it yourself. But there's so many buildings that are underutilised in country towns that could be better utilized. There's more opportunity to integrate, to utilize them for housing and for for businesses. I'm doing this, I'm still connected with you guys, and I'm sitting here in Dungog. There's a much better opportunity to connect better with nature when you're not in jammed up cities. We've got to qu really question that fundamental assumption and not sort of necessarily race down that and say that's the only solution.
SPEAKER_03:No, I think that's a really good point. And I know I'm jumping in again, but I was in Castle Maine recently. The number of young people that have moved there for their families and they've put a train on that only stops at nine stations. You get on at Castle Main and you're in the city, and it just takes you about an hour and ten minutes. And some people are working three days in the city and two days from home. And I was like, we can do this. We have a fast train system to Gosford, Newcastle, Barrel, Canberra. I mean, come on, everyone.
SPEAKER_02:And that's the thing is I've I think we've got to stop thinking the answer is always a built solution. Sometimes it's a systems solution that connects things that are already and enriches them and takes the stress off the cities, enabling them to be better places, but enabling people to have like in here in Dungog, so much so many creative, talented people. It's great.
SPEAKER_03:You both raise very good points. I know across the Asia PAC region, there are so many people moving into bigger cities in Indonesia and Singapore and across Southeast Asia. And a lot a lot of that is to do with work and needs. But as you've said, Caroline, we have that opportunity here in Australia not just to look for it in a built, but in a systems. And so if you had a magic wand, would the transport system or the system be the one thing that you would take a step up to do?
SPEAKER_02:I would absolutely, if I had a magic wand, I'd do fast trains or moderately fast trains in many more places and use those train lines to connect. They could take the power into places and they can do a whole lot of other things. And transport corridors have got a lot of opportunity for planting because they've got really wide berths. So use them as connectors of biodiversity as well as people and just enable people a different way of being in this world that is still connected, that is still rich, but it's just different to what the current. Scenario of jamming everyone into cities looks like.
SPEAKER_03:And Emma, you've just been out walking on country. What are your thoughts on this point?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, to be honest, I do love being on country. I love living in a city. I love having great public transport. I love being close to cafes and friends and work. I'm a big fan of cities. So we might differ a bit in that. I think we can have great cities for everyone. What I want to see is that we start internalizing the costs of building and planning that have been externalized. At the moment, you've got people saying, well, here's our development, here's our new building, and it's profitable because of the sale value. But then you've got the people living there who are paying the costs in their health and their electricity bills for like low energy efficiency houses. We're paying as a community because of the costs on the planet of this high carbon way of living. If I could wave a magic wand and say that like every time we're making these calculations about what our future will look like through building, through retrofitting, through transport and infrastructure, what we're calculating is the true costs to the planet and the community and to each other as a way of sort of integrating that and actually internalizing these externalities that have resulted in a really distorted incentives for developers and builders and the state governments and the federal governments, to be honest. So that's what I'd love to see.
SPEAKER_01:As we're starting to close out, I have a couple of last questions I'd love to ask you. So one of them is around utilizing industry movements to help change what has been traditionally a very slow industry to change, right? In building. What role do these movements play in shifting this industry?
SPEAKER_02:Well, I think I think the Architects Declare movement came out of England when Michael Powan and Steve Tomlin read the 2018 IPCC report and thought, we're n we're going nowhere. We're not we're not doing anything. Sustainability just isn't working. It's not happening. And they reread Danella Meadows' work on how do you change systems. And the most important thing about changing systems is your mindset. So they created this whole architects declare a climate and biodiversity emergency movement to try and really shift the dial. And gave hope to a whole lot of people who are just going, no, enough is happening and it's not happening fast enough. But still the change isn't coming. I suspect it's been really disruptive and that it it it requires that kind of disruption before real change happens. And I think that a number of people are identifying that this is something that really has to be acted on. I think it is really important. Often the more ambitious you can be and the more outrageous you can be, the more change you can attract because it requires people to think differently. That whole mindset part is really important.
SPEAKER_01:What do you think, Emma?
SPEAKER_00:Well, we are a health charity that takes as our number one job at Sweltering Cities to lobby and advocate and campaign. And we are a small team, I hope, with a big impact. Um, and we only do that in collaboration. We are relying on our networks of friends to do that. And that's both, you know, through really deep community connection, like listening to people, working with people who are driving our campaigns, whether they live in social housing, whether they're in a hot sub in Western Sydney, whether in a hot workplace anywhere in the country. I was recently up in Townsville talking to people who work in the electrical trades about what it's like to work in the heat and learnt so much from them about what's that what that's like to live in the tropic in almost the tropics and to have to work with heavy PPE. So our credibility comes from those relationships and our power comes from those collaborations. The work that we do is at the intersection of climate change, health, and inequality. We look at every issue through those three lenses. Whilst I think that climate change is the biggest crisis of our time, this is the biggest problem to be solving. So many of the people we work with in the organizations, individuals, climate change is a multiplier and additional pressure on lives that are already unacceptable, on people who live in public housing and can't install an air conditioner or get a screen door, on people who live in hot homes and they're anxious about their kids, on the people who live in Townsville and getting home from work exhausted and dehydrated because they've got to wear heavy PPE to make sure the electricity grid works. We are also calling for dignified and safe work, for addressing inequality by increasing job seeker and the government support payments, for better rules for renters, including people in social housing to make sure they have a safe home and lots of other things, being able to see the whole scale of the problem, not just in terms of what's happening with climate change, but also to say our solutions have to be informed by those coalitions and that solidarity with people and have to look beyond the question of carbon emissions towards transformative change. That's what the coalitions drive for us is that view towards ambition, because the people we work with in communities and hot suburbs, you know, they say here's a huge problem, and you say here's a small solution, or here's an abstract solution to you, they're just gonna say, What has this got to do with me? So we've got to be really tangible and really intersectional in our work.
SPEAKER_02:What I think both Architects Declare and the Institute of Architects have done is also try and work out um what architects can do. Simple things and some of them big and some of them tiny, but it because people just want something to do. And I was chair of a group called One Million Women for five years. And the idea there was to help people understand the impact of their daily decisions and give them options to make changes that weren't too dramatic, but they they could start small and then get bigger, but at least find some hope in doing something that is actually effective. And I think that is a really big important thing for any of these groups is to help people understand what the problems are and what they can do to change it.
SPEAKER_03:As we come to the end, I I wanted to ask both of you, you're both long-standing advocates and movement leaders in sustainability. What signs can you give us of hope? Or what would be your dose of optimism that you would leave us with at the end of this as try and head into that positive transformation in Australia for sustainable living?
SPEAKER_02:I think that there are more people doing really great stuff than we hear about because it doesn't get reported in the news. One of the important things about some of these groups is to connect these people so that everyone knows that this is not a radical, weird thing. It's actually a really big movement, and together we are really powerful.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I love that. We've got to flip the script and hear much more positive and informative stories. We're just not hearing them. So anybody in the media listening to this, we need to hear more of these good stories. And across to you, Emma.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, we started sweltering cities almost six years ago now. And at first it was really a small group pushing really hard. I swear this is a thing. Try and tell decision makers in the media keeps a problem, you know, we've got to pay attention. And consistently in every community we've ever worked in, we've just got overwhelming of affirmation that, like, yes, this is a crisis, yes, people want to be involved, winning, you know, both climate action but also like really transformed communities. And the other day, one of my colleagues in Sydney helped run a climate fate, a drop-in day with lots of different activities and speakers in the suburb of Fairfield, which is in Sydney's southwest. And Fairfield is, according to state government data, the most heat vulnerable local government area in all of Sydney. You know, it has the highest vulnerability in terms of it is hot, the demographics lead people to be more vulnerable. And they had dozens of people drop in that day, including people who have never done any climate action before, to come to a climate fate at a hall in Fairfield and spend the day doing really practical, interesting, creative things together and connecting. And, you know, we did that in collaboration with Democracy in Color, which is a racial justice organization and the Australian Youth Climate Coalition, who are a great big activist group of young people. And that gives me so much hope. I get to work with people who are doing that work in places where the climate movement has said, oh, this is too hard. But actually, there's a huge demand for, you know, these conversations in these suburbs like Fairfield, which is a great place.
SPEAKER_01:I just wanted to say thank you and thank you for, in particular, bringing that lens of people, how many people are in the movement, whether it is through their professional work or their communities or their personal lives. And um, I extend my gratitude to all those people, but in particular to both of you, Caroline and Emma, because you are voices of change, of solutions, of science. And I'm really grateful that you shared your insights with us today. Thanks for having me. Thank you very much.
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