Urban Life Enabled

The National League of Cities is an advocacy organisation that has been representing cities in the United States for almost 100 years. With more than 2,700 city members, Joshua Pine - NLC's Program Manager for City Innovation and Data - has his hands full. We checked in with Joshua to hear what's happening on the city innovation front post-pandemic.

In second part of a series exploring the face of our streets, Adam chats with Graham McCabe (Director, Transport Advisory, Urbis) about vehicles space and time. The discussion looked at the physical aspects of this important public space - trends in vehicle size, electrification and the opportunity with reshaping space allocation. And with an additional load mounting in the right-of-way in the form of 5G mmWave technology, the complexity of our streets continues to challenge us.

Please note: the quality of the audio in this episode was impacted by an unstable connection.

In this episode of the show we explore yet another PlanTech journey, this time from the New South Wales Government. We are joined by James Strutt from the Department of Planning and Environment, who shares the evolution of Land iQ - one of the governments core platforms enabling a range of capabilities that staff can leverage to optimise asset planning processes. James shares views as they related to the business case, use cases and potential scale-up opportunities of the tool.

In this episode Adam talks to Jace Tyrrell, Chief Executive of the New Sydney Waterfront Company. The discussion seeks to lay out the opportunities and additional benefits (above business as usual) of establishing collaborative governance models for city precincts, with the New Sydney Waterfront Company as the case study. Jace's experience from working in similar roles around the world highlights that for dynamic and growing precincts that have clear ambitions of physically growing and generating more opportunities for its stakeholders, improvement district models of governance could be a real opportunity. 

Continuing with the theme of digitally-enabled urban development, Adam sits down with Chris van der Pol (Senior Planner and Urban Designer, JFP Urban Consultants) to reflect on the property sector's evolution over the past few decades as it has aspired to build higher performing assets and more sustainable communities. And we ponder.... what happens now for those shaping urban development projects, with new digital tools and data insights at their fingertips?

In this episode Adam sits down with Julia Thomson, Head of PlanTech at FrontierSI, to discuss the role of digital and data enablers in helping the urban planning process evolve in our digital economy - what the marketplace is referring to as PlanTech. Julia brings to the conversation her deep learnings from her time with the Greater London Authority in helping build the Emerging Technology Charter for London, the London Data Store and the High Streets Data Service. These learnings helped in directing Adam and Julia's conversation around the future of planning (technology) for great places in Australia.

In this episode we unpack emerging desires for future precinct developments and explore in detail the intersections between sustainability and digital, and the conditions that need to be established to accelerate this opportunity. Accompanied by CBRE's Property Management Pacific Head of ESG, Natasha Mulcahy, and Sarah Kinsella who is Partner Climate and Sustainability at Deloitte, Adam leads a discussion on what comes next for the planning, design and delivery of precinct development in Australia that respects our climate ambitions while also acknowledging our needs to participate in the digital economy.

Digital trust is an important agenda, and a discussion we must have. We collectively must plan, design, procure and deploy innovative solutions that are shaped by purpose and meaning, deployed with transparency, and operated in an ethical way.

In this webinar audio recording we share information about the idea of digital trust and how we nurture it as an opportunity for shaping better places.

To help break down digital trust and build processes for embracing the opportunity, we assembled a panel of guests who shared their various perspectives, including:

• Tegan Kop – Director Smart City Incubator (Acting), City of Melbourne
• Michelle Teis – Managing Partner, GWI
• Nicole Stephensen – Partner and Privacy Lead, IIS Partners
• Susan Skoudas – Director Place Management, Sydney Olympic Park Authority

In this episode Adam brings together a panel of guests to discuss the why, what and how of measuring urban life in our public places and spaces. Jessica Christiansen-Franks from Neighbourlytics, Chris Pettit from the University of New South Wales and Georgia Vitale from Grimshaw share their respective views on why this is important, how we might go about measuring urban life and what the future holds for this idea of understanding the value, performance and contribution of urban life to our communities. 

In the first part of a series exploring the digital lifestyles of our streets, Adam chats with Shifani Sood (Senior Consultant at WSP in Australia) about our streets as places and how last mile freight is becoming a significant disruptor to our entrenched mindsets of what role our streets play in a digital economy. The conversation looks at digital lifestyles that are driving significant growth in e-commerce, and then drills down into the physical planning and design reponses from 'clicking' online.

In this episode Adam talks to Katie Earle, Associate Director at McGregor Coxall, and a national Director of the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects. Their conversation starts with a conversation around the role of landscape in great places, before touching on assessing, scoring and quantifying best practice places. Adam then asks about digital and data in our landscape, with Katie sharing her views on data inspired landscape architecture practices, and what she thinks about one of the most significant infrastructure deployments about to hit the public realm - 5G digital infrastructure.

Well, before we jump in and start releasing podcast episodes about connecting, activating and measuring urban life in our public places and spaces, we thought it would be prudent to explain who ENE.HUB is, what we do and what life_Enabled is. Adam Beck, Head of Digital Urbanism at ENE.HUB shares a short history of the company, and its mission in life.

Welcome to the Urban Life Enabled podcast, exploring what’s now, and what’s next on sustainably shaping our streets, parks, places and spaces, and how digital and data supports this. Episode by episode we will work to unravel some of the common, and more emerging digital and data enablers that are powering life in our communities and cities. We will cover themes relating to connecting, activating and measuring urban life. 

The Urban Life Enabled podcast is powered by ENE.HUB. More information is available at www.life-enabled.com