About
The Climate for TRANSFORMATIVE Change
The transformation of cities to deal with climate change is urgent. Cities house more than 50% of the global population. Urban life generates about 70% of greenhouse gas, from excessive and wasteful use of fossil fuels. Climate change requires a global transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, at the same time as reducing total energy consumption.
But the climate is already changing. Seasonal weather patterns are shifting. Extreme weather events are increasing. Essential services for the city are increasingly disrupted.
Transforming cities to deal with climate change is a complex task. There are technology and infrastructural issues. Energy, food, water, transport, shelter and waste-disposal involve systems that are physically embedded in the city. A city is shaped by human needs for social connection and the expression of cultural identity, including connection to nature. Social, cultural and behavioural patterns are also embedded in the structures of urban living, giving rise to particular life-styles and patterns of consumption.
Cities can be a source of enduring creative energy, of innovation and sustainable prosperity – a significant force for global transformation. They can be great spaces for experimentation, for re-inventing and redesigning the future.
Design can guide citizens in the act of re-invention. New designed spaces, services and systems can create a cultural and physical legacy to inspire people with a sense that change is possible. That inspiration can start a process of transformation, shaping the city’s future economy, increasing it resilience and creating pattens of urban life for a thriving community.
A Process of Distributed Transformation.
Eco-Acupuncture is a program developed in Australia to assist urban communities respond to the challenges of climate change and environmental degradation. It brings together researchers, designers, entrepreneurs, communities and councils.
Using a new set of tools, Eco-Acupuncture facilitates the co-design of new urban futures, that are resilient and just, socially, culturally and physically, in the face of rapidly changing environmental conditions.
Eco-Acupuncture began as an action-research program of the Victorian Eco-Innovation Lab (VEIL) in Melbourne Australia, working with the design schools of several Australian universities. In 2012 the program expanded from Australia to cities in Europe.
Eco-Acupuncture has worked in thirteen urban projects in Australia and Europe since 2008.
THE ECO-ACUPUNCTURE FOUR STEPS:
The process of Eco-Acupuncture, catalysing distributed transformation within a city, town or urban community, is conceptually simple and can be described in four steps:
Examining the impact of emerging environmental problems (particularly those related to climate change) for the resilience of a specific place (a city or town), across economic, cultural, physical and technological dimensions.
Engaging with citizens to visualise alternative possibilities for resilient low-carbon future conditions .
Co-designing many small interventions within the existing urban environment that can act as starting points to change the direction of development (towards the alternative futures visualised in the previous step).
Bringing those interventions into being, as prototypes or experiments, to act as living laboratories, implemented in ways that they can be seen and encountered by all citizens.
See ‘Process’ for more information on the tools and methods developed over the 10 years of the Eco-Acupuncture program.