Category Archives: Research

Overcrowded housing looms as a challenge for our cities

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Shanaka Herath, SMART Infrastructure Facility at University of Wollongong and Rebecca Bentley, University of Melbourne

Overcrowding is an inevitable and often overlooked result of the affordable housing shortage in our cities.

When a dwelling requires four or more extra bedrooms to reasonably accommodate occupants, the standard commonly used in Australia defines that as severe overcrowding. In 2011, 41,390 Australians lived in severely overcrowded dwellings, an increase of one-third from 2006. This increase occurred mostly in cities where house prices had risen sharply.

Our recent research, to be published soon, examined where overcrowded housing is located in our capital cities. We found:

  • Sydney and Melbourne are most affected by concentrated overcrowding
  • levels of overcrowding are highest in middle-city areas (except in Adelaide)
  • overcrowding overlaps strongly with socioeconomic disadvantage. Continue reading →

No more cars! – The Post-car Ile-de-France project

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By Arnaud Banos

The Post-car Ile-de-France project (funded by Mobile Lives Forum, SNCF) investigates the hypothesis of an abrupt transition towards lifestyles that depend less on the use of personal vehicles. Its main goal is to explore with people the possible impacts of this scenario on their lifestyles and on the way we should design cities and territories. In such perspective, a serious game prototype has been developed, allowing gamers to interact with a virtual simplified urban environment, in order to explore the possible impacts of a drastic limitation of the use of personal vehicles on urban life. That first step has a very precise purpose: opening up people’s mind by letting them face – in a friendly and intuitive way led by personal experimentation – the multiple constraints they would face as urban actors in such situation. Building this shared common baseline is crucial in the perspective of engaging public participation of citizens, planners and deciders.

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On gardens and gardening

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By Graham HarrisGraham Harris v3

“We must take care of our garden” Voltaire in “Candide” (1759)

While gardening has become incredibly popular in many countries in recent years; and everything from garden centres to visiting and restoring historical gardens have become big business [1], gardeners are not it seems a deeply reflective and philosophical lot. There are many excellent texts on garden design and the way it has changed over time on various continents [2], and while the literature on gardening and garden design is vast, the literature on the philosophy of gardens is rather small. Do we think deeply enough about what we are doing? Some do [3], but not that many.
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Complementarity, flat Earths and alternative facts

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By Graham HarrisGraham Harris v3

Just a week after I wrote my last blog about unsupervised learning, cognitive science and Andy Clark’s “predictive processing” an article appears in the New Scientist magazine entitled “Reality? It’s what you make it” [i].

This piece, by Philip Ball, discusses some very new ideas in quantum theory that go under the general title of participatory realism [ii]. This new concept, championed by Christopher Fuchs, Markus Müller and others, argues that the world, as we experience it from a first person perspective, is the emergent property arising from something much deeper, more complex and mysterious than we can imagine. On his web site Müller asks “Can we have a fully information-theoretic approach to physics in which not a notion of “external world”, but of “observation” is the fundamental starting point?” [iii]. It seems we can.

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An unsupervised life

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By Graham HarrisGraham Harris v3

In this blog I want to pull some threads together that I have written about previously and I will to try to make some bigger-picture connections. I am going to link cybernetics to embodiment and unsupervised learning in living systems.

Once we make the philosophical step of moving from 1st order cybernetics (rationalist and naïve realist science) to 2nd order cybernetics (with the observer in the loop) then we start down a path with significant consequences. Not, I might add, a complete move away from science (to head off the immediate scientific criticisms of subjectivity and muddled thinking).
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The challenge of embodiment

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By Graham HarrisGraham Harris v3

Regular readers of this blog will remember that I have long argued for a middle way – too often in the history of ideas we end up in polarising debates around extreme positions. One pertinent debate is that between philosophical realists (who believe that reality exists independently of observers) and idealists (who think that reality is mentally constructed). So is there a middle way here also – an “entre deux” between the Scylla of realism and the Charybdis of idealism? Well, yes there is, and it arises out of ideas developed around the problem of complexity, reflexivity and 2nd order cybernetics.
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Thinking Systems Redux

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By Graham HarrisGraham Harris v3

After an enforced layoff from writing, the Thinking Systems blog series is about to be reborn. What was once an attempt to understand complexity from a rationalist perspective has now become part of a much larger initiative. The previous focus on trying to make complexity “manageable” is understandable; I was a scientist once after all. My enforced layoff has caused me to reflect more deeply and broadly on what makes us human and on just how “unmanageable” many aspects of life really are. Too great a focus on prediction and strategy can leave us unprepared for the unexpected; too great a reliance on reason leaves us emotionally bereft and unwilling to accept change in the face of crisis.
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Blue-Green vs. Grey-Black Infrastructure – Which is best for C21st survival?

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By Peter Bridgewater, McKinnon-Walker Fellow

As we moved towards the end of the second decade of the C21st it is clear we are in the era of the Anthropocene –even if geologists are still undecided when – or even if – there is such a thing.  Irrespective of the geologists we are certainly in a different era from even 50 years ago, and this necessitates a different way of thinking and viewing our environments, from the wild to the urban…

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What is the nature of nature: and why does this matter?

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By GrahGraham Harris v3am Harris

My OED defines nature as the “physical power causing the phenomena of the material world, these phenomena as a whole”; and also as a “thing’s essential qualities”. So this blog is about how we go about understanding the essential qualities of the material world. This might seem like a pretty arcane subject for a series of blogs about “thinking systems” but, as it turns out, the question goes to the heart of our relationship with the natural world. If we are getting it wrong, this has fundamental consequences. Of course, I am going to argue that in some important respects we are getting it wrong!

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