Inverting the City/Country Dynamic

At a recent session with the Gen Y group working on the ‘Future Melbourne’ project for the City of Melbourne I suggested that the group consider what the result might be if they could ‘invert’ the way the State of Victoria operates. What would you be likely to see if more of the functions of the city occured outside of the CBD and more of the functions of the country occured in the City?

In pushing them to think further than they originally did, I suggested that there is no reason why these monolithic edifices called office buildings would be used for temporary storage of workers. After all, I reasoned, the function of the CBD would be conducted elsewhere which means workers would begin to gain benefits from the broadband access now denied to them and the required management techniques that fostered remote working. One element of the CBD inverted to the country.

But what to do with the existing infrastructure? That of course is a no brainer – the city office blocks would become our farms. More predictable and controllable weather patterns and water use, we’d have Wheat growing on floors 3-9; Corn on 10-16 and Rice on 17-20. In the underground carpark right to the ground floor we’d run cattle and other stock. The methane captured would be used to power the 24 hours a day hydroponic lamps that grow the crops. There’d be a reduction in transport costs as local farm sites began popping up right where they are need – next to the actual population that needs to be fed. In Austraia with our relatively poor soils and ever increasing periods of drought we have a real boon in food production.

And think of what all that new city space could lead to in terms of community engagement projects. That’s not to mention the drop in stress levels as hundreds of thousands of work hours lost in traffic crawls to and from the city get converted into usable and highly productive time. And just think of the air quality in town! A case of the rural activity inverted to occur in the city.

It’s no pipe dream. Just one that requires some serious thinking.

The Quick Low-Down of Corporate Visions and why they Fail

Jul 2, 2015

I’ve just read an article about Corporate Visions and getting employees on the same page. And as happens so often, I shook my head because it offered the same flawed advice about what a leader needs to do to get their employees to buy into the Vision. And therein lays the fatal flaw You CANNOT…

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How California can Learn from the Australian Experience of Drought

Jun 3, 2015

As the drought in California continues to bite hard on the lives of millions, a recent article on Triple Pundit suggested that many people want to help save water, they just don’t know what else to do. Which is why California needs to look beyond its borders to the driest inhabited continent on the planet…

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Will a Change in Greens Leadership make the Nationals Redundant?

May 5, 2015

With the moderately surprising news that Christine Milne had decided to step out of her current political life, Dr Richard Di Natale moved into the driver’s seat for the Greens. And I flag that this spells trouble for the National Party because this shift, this change in voice and style, connected to similar passions, will…

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Why most Strategic Plans are little more than wish-lists

Apr 21, 2015

In fact I’ll go one step further and say that many Strategic Plans are DELIBERATE methods for NOT Progressing. In far too many organisations, the process of Strategic Planning is about compliance to a process of ‘having a plan’ and typically it has nothing to do with achievement of the outcomes listed in the Strategic…

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Why Battery Technology will force Power Companies to embrace domestic supply

Mar 11, 2015

Around Australia and parts of the world like the USA, some governments and especially many large scale power utilities, are pursuing a campaign to prevent domestic solar from being fed back into (sold to) the grid. I’m assuming that the (fundamentally flawed) thinking is that by denying additional energy production points, they’ll prop up or…

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Men, What Will Your Legacy Be?

Feb 23, 2015

I’m male. You may like to take that into consideration with the rest of what you read as, a) I’m part of the problem b) Whatever I say cannot, no matter how well intentioned, be in anyway able to represent women     I’m prompted to write this particular piece following on from the ABC’s…

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The Future of Energy

Feb 19, 2015

  On a day when The Age front page ran a story of mass disconnections of householders struggling to pay their domestic electricity bill, Futurist Marcus Barber and ABC Goulburn Murray’s Joseph Thomsen discuss the future of energy – what’s happening now, what are we going to see in the future and what can consumers…

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Eat OR Extract? You CANNOT do Both

Feb 5, 2015

With Farmland across NSW, Queensland, & the Northern Territory under pressure from the mining sector, the quality of discussion as to which land use is of best outcome or most suitable seems to go astray. I’ve been flagging the ‘Eat’ OR ‘Extract’ challenge for a few years now and this radio interview is one example…

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2015 will be the International Year of Battery Technology

Dec 30, 2014

For the past few years I’ve decided to declare each year to be something I think the world needs or is likely to see. It’s not so much about the prediction but more about the likely focus that will benefit the world. So I’m declaring this year to be the International Year of Battery Technology…

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Why Uber is not part of the Sharing Economy

Dec 17, 2014

I keep reading posts that Uber is an example of the ‘sharing economy’, the one in which people freely share what they have with others. But it’s NOT – it is instead part of what I call the ‘Utilisation Economy’ which is about use of spare capacity. About 15 years ago I began writing about…

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