Dear Colleagues

It's with great sadness that I report the death of Mark Pascoe, Professor of Practice in Integrated Water Management at Griffith University and CEO of the International Water Centre. Others are better placed to write in more detail of Mark’s substantial achievements in this field over a forty-year career, but I can say that he was a great supporter of the Cities Research Institute and its predecessors. He was always happy to share his wisdom and experience with me as the Institute was being established and he has been a valuable and valued member of our Advisory Board since its inception. Mark was always keen to work across disciplinary and professional boundaries, recognising that complex systems like catchments and cities can only be understood and perhaps managed by bringing together different people and perspectives. Mark also supported many people in their career development, and I know many of my colleagues in the CRI and elsewhere at Griffith are immensely grateful for that support, generously and quietly given. Mark will be greatly missed and we send our condolences to his family, friends and colleagues.

My last message was drafted just before the Federal election, and we have now had a few months to see some significant differences in approach to various policy fields by the new Albanese government. There are welcome signs of a less hostile attitude to universities and practical steps toward establishing a Voice to Parliament signalling a genuine commitment to reconciliation. In March 2021, Mr Albanese addressed an AFR Business Summit and spoke of ‘cities policy’ as one of the abiding passions of his time in public life. He set out some ambitious plans to transform City Deals into genuine City Partnerships; to renew the independent role of Infrastructure Australia in urban planning and to deliver a new National Urban Policy framework. I hope this marks another of those somewhat rare periods in Australian political history when the Commonwealth government recognises that cities are a fundamental part of Australian life, for good or ill, and that there are important opportunities for genuinely collaborative work between all levels of government to tip the balance in favour of cities as good places.


And of course, in working together productively for the good of cities, we need to better understand how they work as complex systems and what happens when we intervene, as planners, policy makers and citizens, even with the best of intentions. Engaging with this complexity, from positions of disciplinary excellence but with a willingness to cross and transcend these boundaries when necessary, remains a hallmark of the research undertaken in the Cities Research Institute and I hope the rest of this newsletter gives you some further insight on the range and quality of this research and some of our recent achievements.

CRI members have won some major research grants recently, including: 

Improving heat resilience in Queensland schools: A pilot project harnessing citizen science and a cross-curricula sustainability approach.
$99,864 from the Queensland Department of Environment & Science and led by Shannon Rutherford, Tony Matthews, Fan Zhang, Aaron Bach, and Harry Kanasa.

$35,999 from the Griffith Climate Action Beacon for a project on Establishing a Heat and Health Community of Practice, led by Shannon Rutherford and Tony Matthews.

Four Chief Investigators for the CRI are part of a team led by the University of Queensland that has been awarded $2,959,803 from the ARC Industrial Transformation Research Hubs program for work on the use of new timber products in Australia’s future built environment.

The full team includes, Crews K, Dargusch P, Kitipornchai S, Mendis P, Ximenes F, Guan H, Maluk C, Dewsbury M, Leardini P, Mangan J, Meath C, Gattas J, Ottenhaus L, Yerman L, Steffens N, Wiesner F, Parker S, Baber K, Hidalgo J, Luo D, Baumeister J, Gilbert B, Karampour H, Crawford R, Gunawardena T, Baduge K, Liu D, Schork T, Morrell J, Lindsay G, Brambilla A, Gasparri E, Ashraf M, Valipour H, Shimohammadi M, McGavin R, Kumar C, Leggate W, Griffiths T, Butler T, Geitz W, Kamke F, Robertson S, Bailleres H, Gover D, Belperio R, Smith M,, Hodsdon T, Thornton P, Cowie A, Hellens R, Stocchero A, Elustondo D, Li MH, Lim H, Lam F, Crocetti R, Loss C, Logan N, Zecevic A, Lam T, Rowlinson D, Stephens M, Brooke H, Malekmohammadi S.

Winning Publication

Professor Hong Guan'sco-authored book has been shortlisted and won the China New Development Awards, announced at the awards ceremony at Springer Nature’s Beijing office. The shortlisted books showcase the most impactful sustainable development research from China published by Springer Nature in 2021.

Lu XZ, Guan H (2021), Earthquake Disaster Simulation of Civil Infrastructures: From Tall Buildings to Urban Areas, Science Press Beijing, Springer, 934p. ISBN: 978-981-15-9531-8 (Print) 978-981-15-9532-5 (eBook).

Tweed Shire Council

Transport research leading to good outcomes for Griffith

Professor Matthew Burke reports that the Nathan - Mt Gravatt Intercampus Bus (the "Red Bus") is now fully integrated with Translink's datafeeds for journey planning apps. This means you can now use Google Maps, Apple Maps, Waze, and Translink's own journey planning app to plan your travels to/from Nathan and include the red bus in that decision-making.

With funding support from the Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads and Translink this research project will help us understand how they deal with all such third party operations in future. This won't just be of benefit to Griffith, it will help many other operators who run similar services. Thanks also to the university's Getting To-and-From Campus Committee for assisting us and including this in their work program. 

The changes will help all staff members, students and visitors make better transport decisions and could also show prospective Griffith students along the busway corridor how easy it is to get to and from the Nathan campus. That includes high school leavers planning where they want to go to uni, and international students planning where to live, helping reduce the proportion of students driving to campus. 

This and other work carried out by Professor Burke and Dr Abraham Leung is helping Griffith improve its sustainable transport policies and practices, including a doubling the frequency and reducing the cost of red buses coming to our Nathan campus, the successful deployment of Jump Bikes at our Gold Coast campus and helping facilitate the arrival of Beam's e-scooters at our Logan campus.

We offer a number of high quality Short Courses designed to upgrade the skills and competencies of policy makers and practitioners. These include:

The Griffith University Systems Modelling Group is piloting a new professional development course. This aims to demonstrate the techniques and methodologies used in the modelling of complex systems over different spatial and temporal scales. These systems, such as cities and metropolitan regions, contain high levels of uncertainty and therefore are difficult to understand. The course provides different modelling strategies and presents applications from the field of complex systems modelling.  Find out more here.


 

Paul Burton and Heather Shearer have just completed an audit of ‘cultural infrastructure’ in the city as part of team led by Professor Andy Bennett of Griffith’s School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science.  This is intended to feed into a review of the City’s cultural strategy.

Paul and Heather are also working on the Gold Coast City Transport Strategy 2041 review, including some innovative workshops with school children on how they see the future of mobility in their neighbourhoods and the city as a whole.

Construction innovation

Transport

Members of the institute have won a major competitive Australia Awards grant to provide a two-week short course on public transport planning and management for 25 Indonesian officials. Dr Kelly Bertolaccini is helping lead this initiative with the former Queensland transport minister Paul Lucas. Transport research team members include Bruce James, Abraham Leung, and Stuart Donovan with Matthew Burke providing support. Kelly and Paul will shortly fly to Jakarta for preparatory activities and the Indonesian delegation will visit Brisbane in late August for the short course at the Nathan Campus. The delegates will enjoy visits to projects, operators and regulators in Brisbane, Gold Coast and Sydney. 

The transport research team welcomed its first international visitor in three years. Mr Tiziano Pavanini spent three months with Prof Matthew Burke, Dr Abraham Leung and our many transport PhD students to further his own PhD studies at the CIELI Institute at the University of Genoa. Tiziano is collaborating on projects on Mobility-as-a-Service and with transport surveys, as he also learns about transport innovations such as our busways, e-scooters and ferry systems. Tiziano (pictured centre) was joined in Australia by his partner Claudia (left). They were recently photographed with Prof Burke enjoying the road closures, food trucks and music of the Stones Corner street festival.

Congratulations to Adjunct Dr Barbara Yen who was recently awarded Taiwan's National Prize for the Best Researcher Under 40 in the Civil Engineering category.

And also to Yiping Yan, CRI PhD candidate who won the Australian Institute of Traffic Planning and Management (AITPM) QLD Young Professional Award for 2022. This one of the most prestigious awards a young transport professional can get in this country, so well done Yiping!

CRI members are often in the news...

NSW Trial of E-scooters

2022 3MT winner and transport PhD student, Madison Bland, spoke to ABC radio on the e-scooter trial running in NSW and the councils who are not taking part in the trial. Read more here.

Placemaking- Public art in regional cities


Dr Tony Matthews has been studying the impact of public art and its use as a place-making device to drive urban regeneration and boost social capital.

“The study examines Townsville, Gold Coast and Toowoomba and how each city uses public art to showcase its unique identity as a thriving creative urban precinct,” Dr Matthews said.

“Each city uses a different approach when it comes to integrating public art and they all have different end goals". Read more on Tony's research in the Griffith media page.

Public art in Toowoomba

How public art can reinvigorate Australia's landscape
Read more on Tony Matthews work on this Griffith blog post. 

Can Tiny Houses help solve the current housing crisis?
 
Tiny and alternate houses can help ease Australia’s rental affordability crisis, says Dr Heather Shearer.  “Rental housing in Australia is less affordable than ever before and it is no exaggeration to call the situation a crisis, with vacancy rates at record lows”.

But there are some relatively simple, easy-to-implement and cost-effective things that can be done to ease rental affordability pressures.

These include relaxing planning restrictions on small and non-traditional houses, allowing granny flats to be rented to anyone, permitting property owners to let space to tiny house dwellers, and possibly even subsidising the building of granny flats or modification of houses for dual occupancy. Read more about this in The Conversation article written by Dr Shearer and Professor Paul Burton.

Reaching out beyond the academy

Dr Edoardo Bertone, President of the International Association for Hydro-Environment Engineering and Research (IAHR) Queensland Young Professionals Network, reports that the group was recently awarded the most active YPN in 2021 in the Asia and Pacific region at the IAHR World Congress in Granada. This Queenland group is co-sponsored by CRI, which helped with the organisation of a number of events, including the first IAHR QLD YPN conference in December 2021. The group is dedicated to providing networking and training opportunities to young Queensland water professionals to improve their early career opportunities in the water sector in our region.

EBE/CRI PhD student Yiping Yan won the Australian Institute of Traffic Planning and Management (AITPM) QLD Young Professional Award for 2022.  Matt Burke says this is about the best award a young transport professional can get in this country – well done Yiping!

New Book - Recent Advances in Structural Health Monitoring Research in Australia

Hong Guan (Editor), Tommy H. T. Chan (Editor), Jianchun Li (Editor) 

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM), is a process that uses on-structure or remote sensing systems and/or imaging techniques to monitor the performance of structures and evaluate their health conditions. It has grown rapidly worldwide in research and industrial practices in recent years. Disastrous bridge failures, such as the collapses of the Nanfang’ao tied-arch bridge in Taiwan, the Wuxi National Highway 312 overpass in China, and the Pont de Mirepoix suspension bridge in France, all in the year 2019, and the Mexico City Metro overpass collapse in 2021, have further reminded us of the importance of structural health monitoring for civil infrastructure. During the last three decades, SHM has attracted enormous research efforts around the world because it monitors structural conditions and can help prevent catastrophic failure, and to provide quantitative data for engineers and infrastructure owners to design reliable and economical asset management plans.

This book showcases the recent advancement in SHM research, especially for civil engineering applications in Australia, covering the state-of-the-art SHM technologies together with its latest developments and successful applications. The book shows how high quality and focused research conducted by experts in Australian universities canhelp make our built environments safer and more fit for purpose. 

Our members have also been active in publishing papers in journals. Here is a selection of recent papers:

Mapping the Complex Journey of Swimming Pool Contaminants: A Multi-Method Systems Approach. (https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4441/14/13/2062) by Simone Heilgeist, Oz Sahin, Ryo Sekine and Rodney A. Stewart

Johnson, C., Jones, D., Matthews, T. and Burke, M. (2022) ‘Advancing Avian Road Ecology Research Through Systematic Review.’ Transportation Research Part D. 103375. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trd.2022.103375

Matthews, T. and Gadaloff, S. (2022) ‘Public Art for Placemaking and Urban Renewal: Insights from Three Regional Australian Cities.’ Cities. 103747. doi: 10.1016/j.cities.2022.103747

Etemad-Shahidi, A., Koosheh, A., and van Gent, M. (2022) On the mean overtopping of rubble mound structures, Coastal Engineering, ps://doi.org/10.1016/j.coastaleng.2022.104150
POWER, H. E., KINSELA, M. A., MURRAY, T. P. & POMEROY, A. W. M. 2022. Life on the Edge: Adapting Coastal Management in a Changing Climate. AQ: Australian Quarterly, 93, 12-20.

Sacha Reid, Judy Kraatz, Savindi Caldera and Geoff Woolcock. Creating Liveable and Accessible Social and Affordable Higher Density Housing: the case of Green Square, Brisbane
Pereira, B. A., Lohmann, G., & Houghton, L. (2022). Technology trajectory in aviation: innovations leading to value creation (2000-2019). International Journal of Innovation Studies, 6(3), 128–141. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijis.2022.05.001

Boulton, C., A. Dedekorkut-Howes, M. Holden, J. Byrne. 2022. How Leadership Influences Urban Greenspace Provision: The Case of Surrey, Canada. Urban Affairs Review. DOI: /10.1177/10780874221101393

Boulton, C., A. Dedekorkut-Howes, J. Byrne. 2022. A ‘tug of war’ between More Parks or Better Greenspace: The Dilemma of Meeting ‘Community Expectations’ with Limited Resources. Cities. 126:103665. DOI: 10.1016/j.cities.2022.103665

McNaught, R., Kalara McGregor, Kensen, M., Hales, R., & Nalau, J. (2022). Visualising the invisible: collaborative approaches to local-level resilient development in the Pacific Islands region. Commonwealth Journal of Local Governance, (26), 28-52. https://doi.org/10.5130/cjlg.vi26.8189 

Congratulations to Katharina Nieberler-Walker who is the 2022 recipient of the inaugural Australian Health Design Council Scholarship! Katharina was also successful in our 3MT competition, see below article.

Associate Professor Cara Beal reports that this year saw nine entries for the CRI 3MT competition. As usual in our wonderfully diverse Institute, we had a breadth of speakers talking about research ranging from therapeutic hospital gardens to foot bridges, and the sustainability of large stadiums to sustainable food systems.

Congratulations goes to winner, Madison Bland for his presentation on Planning for Active Transport: The planning and funding of walking and cycling infrastructure

The runner-up was Katharina Nieberler-Walker for her presentation on Therapeutic hospital gardens

We would also like to acknowledge a Highly Commended for Majed Abu Seif's presentation Trees on Buildings, Investigating opportunities and challenges for implementation

Both Madison and Katharina will compete next in the Sciences Group finals for the chance to progress to the university wide finals and beyond.

If you are considering enrolling for a PhD under the supervision of a member of the Institute, please visit our website for more details on how best to find out who has relevant interests and experience and how best to apply.

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