Infrastructure leader calls for investment in resilience, not resistance

Sustainable Communities & Infrastructure, a gathering of Australia’s infrastructure leaders held in Sydney yesterday, explored some of the issues surrounding the creation of successful and sustainable urban communities for Australia’s future.

David Singleton, global planning leader for Arup and chairman of the Infrastructure Sustainability Council of Australia, stated at the event that these communities can only be created if the building and infrastructure sectors invest in resilience, not resistance.

“Historically, we have designed for resistance,” Singleton said. “As engineers we have applied factors of safety to achieve resistant designs. We can no longer be sure that an investment in resistance will fulfil its purpose, and there is a chance an investment in resistance may make matters worse.”

Singleton claimed that we can “no longer design to resist the full impacts of climate change or natural disaster” and that a systemic approach to resilience would allow cities to “fail ‘gently’, rather than catastrophically”.

“A solution based around ‘gentle’ failure is considered a success when the city is able to function after disaster by using alternative resources and systems and through the initiatives of the local community,” he noted.

Additionally, in the discussion ‘What makes a community?’, Singleton advised how we should be better planning to cater for our ageing population.

“We tend to assume a homogeneous design population, whether in terms of pedestrians, cyclists or vehicle drivers,” he said. “But clearly there are widely varying capabilities and these will diverge further over time. Furthermore, these populations will vary by location; clearly, this is easier to predict and therefore to allow for.”