Cultivating Care: Notes from the Living Cities Forum

It was a pleasure to attend the Living Cities Forum on Tuesday. The line-up of speakers was considered and inspiring in equal measure.

This year's theme was ‘Cities made with Care’. It might just as well have been called ‘Homes Made with Care,’ as housing dominated nearly every session, a timely focus given where the housing conversation is right now. However, this phrase gave us pause. Because shouldn't care be the baseline? 

Dan Hill (Melbourne School of Design) and Shannon Peach (Milieu) offered one answer. When housing is built for investment, the result tends toward one of two extremes: generic, mass-produced homes that cut costs to protect margins, or high-end luxury dressed up in gold and marble. Either way, something is missing.

Anupama Kundoo (architect and academic) showed what that something is. Through her approach to materiality, she made the case for using local materials, local trades, and place-specific methods to build homes embedded in the story of place. Money stays in the local economy, and the community builds something they are proud of. This is what gets lost when housing is built for investment rather than place.

Finn Williams, City Architect of Malmö, Sweden, presented an example of what that belief looks like in practice. He described BO01, a co-designed housing development completed in 2001 that was decades ahead of its time. It combined complementary planning policies with participatory design processes, all grounded in site-specific environmental consideration. Architects and urban planning professionals still travel to Malmö today to study the project, understand how it was achieved, and explore how those learnings might apply to their own cities.

So why does any of this matter for housing in Australia?

We think most of us would agree there's a better way to build homes that are embedded in place, that feel special, that mean something to the people who live in them and the communities around them. But somewhere along the way, we have lost belief that change to our cities and our systems is even possible.

We believe we need to challenge that, because change is the only constant. Place is always evolving. When we start treating our systems as adaptive rather than fixed (there’s plenty of examples to borrow from here in Australia and elsewhere in the world), we create space to imagine a different future for our cities, and for ourselves.

And where to from here?

First, we must believe that change is possible and commit to it, knowing the path will be harder than business-as-usual. Then, we need the right people in the right room, people willing to be brave, to challenge convention, to build the shared belief that eventually becomes systemic change. From there, we build a shared vision for the future we want.

Of course, we don't all hold the same power or influence, so we each need to lead from wherever we stand.

At Village Well, we don't shy away from difficult conversations. Forums like this remind us why that work matters: our job is to smooth the winding path to change, and to hold space where people feel safe to speak up and to believe in themselves and in their communities that a different future is possible.