June was a very (very!) busy month but lots of great things happened, including my son’s 4th birthday.
I also commited to presenting in an upcoming seminar in September, met one of my PhD students who recently managed to move to Australia after COVID delays, and travelled and met old friends and colleagues in beautiful Tropical North Queensland. I also received an invitation to present in an exciting Urban Heat Seminar in Cairns.
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I am very honoured to be a speaker in this week’s Urban Heat Seminar in Cairns. The seminar will take place this Friday 8th July 2022 from 12pm to 4:30pm at the Civic Reception Rooms in the Cairns Regional Council Chambers.
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Along with Professor Karine Dupre from Griffith University, and in collaboration with Townsville City Council, we are undertaking a research project investigating urban microclimates in Townsville (Queensland, Australia).
Read more…The city is built on weak links; it is these moments of human contact that act like electricity for the city. As a result, the city as a whole becomes more powerful than the sum of its parts and this strange phenomenon – which complexity theorists call emergence – means that the complex city offers a unique dynamism. It is also the energy behind the Ballet of Hudson Street and is the raw material from which are developed trust and community despite the strains of urban life.
In 2018 David Sellars and I, along with Planz Town Planning, Milford Planning, Cairns Regional Council, Townsville City Council, Richard Briggs, and Chuck Wolfe, as our Fulbright expert, organised and hosted an Urban Thinkers Campus, a UN-Habitat World Urban Campaign initiative (I wrote about it here and here).
We recently reported our engagement method in a publication in the Journal of Urbanism, as per abstract below.
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A recent USC media release featured one of my PhD students’ work. Ryan McNeilly Smith has been working in the BASC Lab for just over one semester. He is investigating what urban planning and design policy for heat and urban climates may look like in Queensland.
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As part of a project led by Professor Claudia Baldwin which is analysing ways of planning and integrating green infrastructure to mitigate heat stress in aged care facilities located in the Sunshine Coast, we have published a short commentary paper in the Interface section of Planning Theory and Practice.
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I started to write this post to realise the last time I wrote a month in review was exactly one year ago – in January 2021. As I’ve written many times, it is great to look back and realise that yes, the time goes fast, but we do manage to pack lots of great things in it. These monthly reviews are my version of the ‘done list’, and they do indeed help to keep motivation and focus. Here is what happened in the first month of 2022.
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Even though we have had already a few publications out of our Urban Design and Town Planning in response to COVID-19 project, I realised I failed to publish here about this one. This paper came out a while ago in the Special Issue 2020: A Year without Public Space under the COVID-19 Pandemic.
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USC has recently published a media release about the Bioclimatic and Sociotechnical Cities (BASC) Lab which is led by Dr Nicholas Stevens and myself, and is part of the university’s School of Law and Society and the Centre for Human Factors and Sociotechnical Systems.
The BASC Lab is focused both on teaching and research, and will help us to enhance a human-centred approach to urban design and town planning by considering the many factors of the physical environment that impact on people.
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SILVIA TAVARES 