Che Biggs

Words@Bldg50 November Edition

Che’s talk will focus on system design principles for transformation and resilience in infrastructure and urban form. It will argue that much of our built environment and critical infrastructure has been (and still is) designed, built and managed under outdated assumptions of environmental and resource stability. This dominant ‘centralised’ model is not only unsustainable, it exacerbates society’s vulnerability to climate change, peak oil and resource scarcity. With these global scale contextual disruptions ‘in the pipeline’, we urgently need new design models for the built environment that are adapted to greater contextual uncertainty, volatility and disruption – models that are more resilient.

The talk will explore results from on-going research at the Victorian Eco-Innovation Lab that has identified the ‘distributed systems’ model as having considerable promise. Che will draw on examples from the natural and built environment to explore what this model looks like and how a distributed approach can benefit society in four critical areas, by:

• Reducing society’s base load environmental footprint
• Increasing the resilience of critical infrastructure to shocks and disturbances
• Supporting and fostering behavior change, community capacity and adaptive governance
• Undermining the viability of existing production and consumption systems

Join us for an evening of talk and conversation, followed by light refreshments.