Adapting cities for a sustainable future, with Rob Adams
Rob Adams is an architect and urban designer. He is the current City Architect for the City of Melbourne and has won multiple awards as the leader of the revitalization of the Melbourne City Centre and surrounds. Rob helped to write, and to put in place, the first comprehensive urban design strategy for the City of Melbourne, based on the idea of creating a vibrant and well-populated street-scape profiting from the city's multi-mode transport system. His urban revitalisation work in the urban core has assisted Melbourne to become one of the world's most liveable cities.
What do you love about cities?
I think cities are the solution to the biggest problems we face on the planet today. We've got over 50% of the population in cities. Moving to 75% by 2050. They are the economic generators of wealth in our nations, and they also pump out the most greenhouse gases. People move to cities, they lower the size of family, so they affect population growth. I think if we're going to get a solution it's going to come from cities.
What changes have you seen in cities over the past 20 years that matter the most to you?
I think one of the things that matters most to me is the ability of cities to adapt. One thing is certain, we're not going to have the time to rebuild our cities in a new form to meet the future, so the only option we've got is we've got to adapt them, and our band of cities are very adaptable. Back in the 1980s when I started, the centre of Melbourne was dead. Everybody had moved to suburbia. And then you look at Melbourne just pre-Covid and it's a vibrant, thriving city and it's one of the most liveable cities in the world. The fact that it was able to change itself over that period is exciting because we're going to have to change our cities to meet the consequences of climate change.
Tell us about a project you’ve worked on that has been most important to you?
I think, if you talk about what's been important over that career, you could talk about individual projects and they are important. The most important program was the urban design plan that was started in 1985, and guiding that through because, within about 10, 12 years, most of the people who had worked on that were no longer in the city and I almost felt this responsibility to just keep that plan alive, and the vision of that plan alive and just bring it through the 38 years. And I look back on it and I say, to a certain extent, we've done that.
To be a great ancestor for future generations, what does our sector need to focus on today?
I think every project needs to contextualize the problem it’s trying to solve. I'm lucky enough to go to the World Economic Forum and I've been going there for over a decade. I went there and they said: ‘Climate change is a problem.’ And they've got all these Councils that discuss it. In my mind, there was never a constructive conversation about it because they hadn't contextualized the problem. If you say climate change is a problem, it's a mind numbing concept. If you say climate change is a problem, how do you deal with it in cities? Suddenly all your solutions start to fall out. Let’s plant more trees, let’s use our cars less, let’s make the city walkable. And suddenly, what is a really complex organism, a city, becomes attainable because you can find the way in to solving those problems.
But these actions are all incremental. All it takes are small actions over a long period of time. But adaptability is the key to me. We are in a real race at the moment and when I look at all the capital cities in Australia they need to now adapt. The one thing they need to do, if they did nothing else - if they just said, "We're not going to expand our footprint by another hectare and we're going to come back into ourselves," they would start to get better densities, better mixed-use, greater connectivity, better quality public realm. They could build on their local character and what they would be doing is adapting themselves for a sustainable future.
“…we’re not going to have the time to rebuild our cities in a new form to meet the future, so the only option we’ve got is to adapt them, and our band of cities are very adaptable.”
What's one piece of advice you would give to emerging urban leaders?
I think if I had one piece of advice, it's advice I've given to both of my children, you need to get out of bed in the morning and want to do what you're going to do for that day. The beauty of working in the city, is there are so many aspects to the urban environment. You can find anything you want. If you want to be a designer, you can be a designer. If you want to impact work on the social side, you can work on the social side. But you don't want to get out of bed in the morning and hate going to work and start to count the years down to your retirement. Find the thing you want and if you can find the thing you want, concentrate on it and you'll be good at it because you love it.
