Meredith Frances Dobbie

Transition to a water-cycle city: risk perceptions and receptivity of Australian urban water practitioners

Transition to a water-cycle city, a sustainable urban water management future, requires the implementation of centralised and decentralised systems to augment potable water supply, protect waterways and enhance urban liveability. Risk is simultaneously driving and impeding this transition. However, risk perceptions of water practitioners and how they affect practitioner receptivity to future modes of urban water supply are poorly understood. This study characterises risk perceptions and attitudes of Australian urban water practitioners towards alternative water systems and uses a receptivity framework to suggest how receptive practitioners are to these systems. Differences between cities are identified, suggesting how familiarity might influence receptivity. These results can inform strategies to enhance receptivity, including improved communication within the water industry and beyond with its various stakeholders, improved cost-projection frameworks to provide a quantitative metric of the benefits of sustainable water options, and a shift from ‘learning to manage’ to ‘managing to learn’.

Insights and future directions of transdisciplinary practice in the urban water sector

Bringing together stakeholders with different backgrounds and interests to create new understandings and relationships is essential to advance the sustainable management of urban water. This is a transdisciplinary challenge, with multiple benefits but also obstacles and uncertainties in its applicability. Although transdisciplinary practice is believed to be desirable to enable sustainable urban water management, its role is not clear. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to provide insights into transdisciplinary practice in the urban water sector, highlighting advances and research gaps. This analysis draws upon a scoping process from 1970 until now. It concludes that little research explores transdisciplinary practice in the urban water sector. Future research is necessary into organizational processes, disciplinary dynamics, and strategies applied by water practitioners to bring stakeholders together and achieve transdisciplinary practice in the design and implementation of urban water projects. These future directions of research are relevant to water practitioners dealing with urban water management and could lead to the development of practical guidelines to facilitate transdisciplinary practice.

Overcoming Abundance: Social Capital and Managing Floods in Inner Melbourne during the Nineteenth Century

Before effective drainage and flood protection systems were built in the early twentieth century, areas of inner Melbourne close to the Yarra River were prone to flooding. An overabundance of water and a need to limit its impact on lives, livelihoods, and the built environment drove changes in the engineered structure of a rapidly growing city. Through a case study of a working-class district, we consider how private citizens, drawing on stocks of social capital, responded to major floods in 1863 and 1891. In addition to the process of “top-down” governing, as revealed in public documents, less visible “bottom-up” pressure from local communities played an important role in influencing improvements in water-related infrastructure, such as flood mitigation works. By the turn of the twentieth century, this local pressure increasingly manifested in a centralist approach to water management, whereby metropolitan-wide public authorities took greater charge of local environmental problems.

A multifunctional Sydney laneway: what’s transdisciplinarity got to do with it?

Abstract Academia and industry increasingly recognise the need for multifunctional urban spaces. But how do we meet this need? Emerging responses point to the promise of transdisciplinarity. We critically reflect on this claim by analysing the role of transdisciplinary practice in the successful conversion of a Sydney laneway into a multifunctional urban space. We trace the co-existence of different disciplinary practices throughout the project stages, to better understand how much transdisciplinarity contributed to its success. A tentative explanatory framework emerges from our analysis and is offered to map the enabling conditions, disciplinary dynamics and strategies that allowed this laneway’s transformation into a multifunctional space. Enabling conditions were the municipality had institutionalised a concern for the environment; an organisational change programme ensured the project’s independence from the capital budget; and an environmentally aware community group played a core role. The disciplinary dynamics observed were diverse. Planning and design were transdisciplinary, but implementation and maintenance were not. Finally, practitioners used various strategies to bring actors together: they understood the political nature of the organisation; they recognised the different types of actors involved in the project, and then used appropriate language to communicate ideas and to manage risks and expectations.