Why The Fifth Estate is experimenting with a gig at UTS

 

The Fifth Estate is experimenting. We’re inspired by the many interesting, brave and creative people we speak to on a daily basis, who are doing their best work – quietly, calmly, aware of the enormity of the challenges before us.

We need to try to match their courage and innovation wherever we can. So about six months ago we decided to step outside our comfort zone and move for a while to the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), in the Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building.

The plan was to get a sense of where a cross-section of the brain trust of our society and culture is taking us. 

To discover what our higher places of learning are teaching the future generation that, in just a few years, will be making decisions for all of us. 

And what our nation’s best thinkers and researchers are coming up with to solve the intractable problems we’ve created, the legacy of our “extractive” nature, as Indigenous academic author Tyson Yunkaporta told us in no uncertain terms in an episode in our podcast, How to Build a Better World, with him earlier this year (ouch…).

Because we’ve got so many things wrong. We’ve been so extractive. 

Connecting the dots

The challenging bit of our move to UTS was whether we could do the experiment justice.

Would we be able to accurately and usefully connect the dots between the work and insights of the academics, PhD candidates and students to the outside world? A world that needs to underpin its actions with evidence and deep thought going on inside universities and other places of higher learning?

There’s a deep structural disconnect between industry, government and academia. One is too busy focused on mainly short term performance measures, another is primarily attuned to and responsive to public opinion (good or bad) and the third is highly involved in its area of specialisation that could be misleading or dangerous to try to communicate in 240 Twitter characters or an Instagram post.

The people in our circle who hear about our UTS gig are pleasantly surprised and encouraging.

They tell us the university has a great reputation of collaboration with industry and that this makes it exciting because there is the promise of innovation that will be directly useful to their work. 

Last year (it seems like five years ago) we embarked on the Printed City project to report on a breakthrough collaboration between BVN and UTS for a sustainable ducting system. That’s just one example of this collaboration.

A new interview series

Contacts enthusiastically told us of one academic or other we absolutely must interview for their exciting work.

We’ve now embarked on a series of interviews to deliver on that opportunity.

Our interview on Tuesday this week was our first in the series.  The interview, for a podcast coming soon, focused on the work of Jua Cilliers, who is head of the School of the Built Environment at UTS and a clear example of the focus on collaboration at the university. 

Cilliers has been integrating collaboration and practical application with the outside world in her teaching and research specialisations from the outset of her career.

She believes strongly in the power of individual action to “make a collective difference”. It’s key to her teaching approach through collaboration and practical application as a way of cementing and bringing to life the theory and exploratory work of her students.

A project she conducted with her students in her home country of South Africa was one such example. 

As part of her urban planning subject she mobilised students to collaborate with industry, local communities and local governments to support the regeneration of a small town.  She piled students onto a bus, collaborated with sponsors who donated buckets of paint and took the lot to a township, putting the students to work alongside local residents to paint the buildings and restore the public spaces.

There were grumbles from her students at first, she recalls.

“It’s not my job,” they said. But on the way home many had the dawning realisation that this might “not be their job but it is their responsibility to be agents of change”. The project also fostered agency among the community.

Cilliers has reason to believe in self-empowerment and action. In South Africa there is much “local ownership” of projects or amenities such as parks simply because of severe under-resourcing of local government; there is no alternative. 

Encouraging community engagement

This is becoming a global phenomenon, she says. Communities will play an increasing role in future to protect and enhance the local environment – and in Australia as well, she says; the power of community ownership or engagement can be just as powerful here.

At our Urban Greening summit in July we heard it’s not unusual for a local council to plant trees on kerbside verges only to see local residents pull them out. But a totally different scenario emerges if residents are consulted and choose their own trees. One of our speakers, WaterUps’ Eric Sturman, recalled how at a previous local government job he held, residents were strongly engaged in community gardens and plantings. This saved the public coffers huge amounts in maintenance.

At UTS Cilliers is also spearheading global outreach and collaboration that goes well beyond the local community, and looking for inspirations and solutions for urban planning, density, housing and range of other issues that will increasingly become front of mind as cities densify and climate change has greater impact.

She recently collaborated with the Swedish International Centre for Local Democracy that engages in ways to stimulate community agency and action change at the local level with projects in Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe, and collaborating on ways to bring these initiatives to the Australian landscape as well. 

Along with international colleagues Cilliers is also researching “density done well”. What exactly that means might vary from place to place but one thing is certain, she says, high density spaces need to maintain a connection to the earth and nature. Especially for children, which is another special focus of her research – considering child-friendly spaces and how nature and play-spaces can enhance the physical, emotional and cognitive development of children.

Her work is certain to have impact not only because these areas of engagement are so well aligned to the needs of our times but also because of the multi-disciplinary environment in which they work, and the size of the school she heads. 

There are more than 1100 students enrolled in courses for construction, property development, property economics, urban planning, real estate, and project management, she says. 

And there’s growing awareness in some of these fields of the need for sustainability, with students themselves now engaging in seeding influence through their peers. The teaching approach of the school is focused on bringing the sustainability agenda to the front, and is strongly supported by industry collaboration.

It’s “a really big part of our success, because we try and bring in as many experts to share knowledge and real life experiences with our students. And we take our students out into ‘the real world’, to make a difference. So that’s a really big focus of the way we deliver our teaching and what we offer to our students.”

As a publication we see that strong focus on collaboration as our job too!

Look out for the podcast on Cilliers and for our UTS series. 

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Originally published 9 December 2022 as 'On why we’re experimenting with our gig at UTS' in The Fifth Estate. Reproduced with permission.