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Eco-Acupuncture: Designing and facilitating pathways for urban

transformation, for a resilient low-carbon futures

Article  in  Journal of Cleaner Production · July 2013

DOI: 10.1016/j.jclepro.2012.11.029

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Eco-Acupuncture: designing and facilitating pathways for urban
transformation, for a resilient low-carbon future1.

Chris Ryan. Professor and Director, Victorian Eco-Innovation Lab, Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning
University of Melbourne.

Abstract
The implications of climate change and the end of the fossil fuel era suggest that we are entering a period of
major, transformative, change requiring the restructure of the most fundamental systems for urban living. But
rapid structural change is hard to negotiate within existing communities. In Melbourne Australia, a research
unit known as the Victorian Eco-Innovation Lab (VEIL) has developed a unique process to co-create visions
for a 25 year horizon for specific urban communities in response to climate change. The need to bring that
process from vision to intervention, to catalyse rapid transformation of an existing urban environment, has
produced a new program - Eco-Acupuncture - for work with local precincts in metropolitan Melbourne and
regional communities. Eco-Acupuncture focuses on multiple small interventions in an existing urban precinct
that can shift the community’s ideas of what is permissible, desirable and possible and provide
transformation points for a new trajectory of development to a resilient low-carbon future. The paper
describes the context and evolution of the program and the framework developed to deliver new locally
specific starting points for urban transformation, a process involving academic researchers and designers, a
shifting network of professional designers, many hundreds of design masters students, representatives of
local government, business and the wider community.

Introduction: Cities and negotiating the post-carbonaceous revolution.

Over the coming decades, as we navigate the end of the fossil fuel era, probably less ambiguously
described as the carbonaceous period of human development2, we can predict with some
certainty that cities will be the locus for action for whatever emerges to replace it. This is not just a
recognition that more than half the worlds population now reside in cities and therefore that all
actions in response to the threatening global conditions will reflect the interests of city-based
citizens; it is much more. The very nature and form of cities - their physical and cultural dimensions -
will amplify their place in the coming ‘post-carbonaceous’ revolution - a revolution to transform the
energy basis of the economy and to deliver resilience in the face of changed global climatic
conditions. This will be a revolution as significant as any in human history and it will be first and
foremost an urban revolution (even if it does also have the dimensions of an industrial, economic,
‘metabolic’, social and even ethical, revolution).

This paper reviews a program of intervention and post-carbonaceous transformation focused on

urban-city communities in Melbourne, Australia (and now extending to some cities and towns in
Europe) that has emerged from an unusual structuring of university research-teaching-community-
engagement, developed since 2006 by the Victorian Eco-Innovation Lab (VEIL) at the University of
Melbourne3. A key program of VEIL, known as Eco-Acupuncture (EcoA), has been evolving over
the last three years as a collaborative ‘precinct’ response to the cumulative effects of centuries of
development based on fossil fuels (effects that now threaten future prosperity) and the need for a
Ryan. C.: EcoAcupuncture: Designing Future Transitions for Urban Communities for a Resilient Low-carbon Future 2

fundamental transformation of the existing fabric of most cities. As the name implies, Eco-
Acupuncture approaches urban transformation through a process of designing many small
interventions in the existing urban fabric with the aim of re-aligning existing socio-technical-cultural
systems and resource provision, to accelerate the post-carbonaceous transition.

The critical question addressed by the EcoA program and considered in this paper is: How can we
effectively initiate and support rapid structural and cultural change within existing urban
environments and communities, to reconfigure urban form and life in anticipation of the projected
impacts of climate change and peak oil? This is not a theoretical question; the policy challenges
for governments in dealing with the rapid transition from a carbonaceous economy are significant.
For local and city governments, where the connection with the concerns and fears of urban
citizens can be most direct, where land-use planning decisions often intersect with projected
climatic changes, and where vulnerability to energy pricing is already part of some community
strategies, developing a coherent set of policies and programs for this transition has become a new
priority. However, negotiating a process of transition in a democratic society quickly confronts what
Beck [2010] identifies as the “urgent and somehow tabooed question” in the huge project of the
“greening of society”: how to develop “everyday support from below, the backing of everyday
people of different classes, different nations, different political ideologies…support which in many
cases would undermine [current] lifestyles… consumption habits… social status and life conditions”
[255]. This question has taken on particular criticality in the unfolding failure of the international
efforts for a coordinated global response to climate change following the collapse of the COP 15
in Copenhagen 2009, where, with few exceptions, nations looked to their own domestic political
situations, rather than some possibility of acting on behalf of the global community.

The VEIL Eco-Acupuncture program derived from a recognition that a transition beyond the
carbonaceous era requires the reconfiguration of existing systems of provision4 that are physically,
energetically and culturally embedded in the structure of urban-city life, making ‘support from
below’ more difficult to secure. The program proposes a way forward through the agency of
design, with a form of engaged future visioning and backcasting5 and, as the name implies, the
translation of those visions into sets of targeted ‘niche’ interventions in the urban fabric that can act
as tangible demonstrations of new trajectories for development for infrastructure and service
systems.

Cities and urban life as a crucible for transformation.

Cities currently account for around 75% of global energy demand and 75% of greenhouse gas
production [Satterthwaite and Dodman 2009; UNEP 2011]; they are now the structural engines of
the growth characteristics of the economy that threaten to so deplete our natural capital [Hawkin,
Lovins et al 1999] that the basis for future human prosperity and security is uncertain and the
Ryan. C.: EcoAcupuncture: Designing Future Transitions for Urban Communities for a Resilient Low-carbon Future 3

collapse of some societies is a projected possibility [Diamond 2005; Lovelock 2010]. With a rapid rise
in the price of fossil fuels, particularly oil6,⁠ with a shift to a renewable, low-consumption energy
system, with new climate conditions and extreme weather events beyond the historical range of
variability, there is an evident danger that the existing fabric of a city could become inhospitable,
maladapted for the bio-physical needs of its inhabitants. The deeply connected morphology and
metabolism of a city – the architecture of its material and living systems – will substantially
determine its ability to function into the ensuing future. As Newman [2010: 134] has expressed it,
“the design of [a] city is totally enmeshed in its infrastructure priorities”. New energy and climate
conditions may see the inhabitants of a city enmeshed in a designed urban infrastructure that
cannot easily accommodate new, radically different, priorities, occasioned by shifts in climate and
energy costs. A city designed around private oil-based vehicular transport may prove very socially
and economically destabilising for its citizens with a rapid rise in the cost of fuel; similarly a city
constructed with buildings designed for temperate climatic conditions may provide inadequate
shelter for its inhabitants with an increase in very high (or very low) temperatures7. This is the nature
of the city as a (bio)physical crucible - a constructed physical ‘socio-ecosystem’ that could soon
be stretched beyond the range of its equilibrium conditions.

But there is a critical and complementary attribute of cities: The nature of the urban as a creative-
cultural crucible. Here, dwelling in that very human dimension of urban life, there are divergent and
conflicting forces that will be every bit as critical in shaping the response to future challenges. The
physical form of cities is not merely constructed, it is more meaningfully ‘designed’; it results from
purposeful and envisaged human agency, so that much that is reflective of cultural, social or
political history is embedded in ‘the material’. Our designed urban environment is rich with semiotic
content, signifying and reproducing ideas of survival and progress, of human history and social
order, of the power of capital and of our technological relationship to natural capital and
ecosystem services that we have apparently been able to ‘mould to human ends’. To put it simply,
the lived experience of our constructed urban condition mediates our understanding of nature
and our place in it. Yes, this includes a disconnection from the unmediated experience of natural
systems - of ‘raw nature’ - a facet of life that Hamilton [2010], along with others (e.g. Hume 2009),
see as one of the reasons that it is so difficult to develop community understanding of climate
change; (we will return to this issue shortly). However, it is more than this; in the city, ‘nature’ is not
just ‘hidden’ from view, it is refracted and re-formed, projected as a conquered territory serving our
economic, social and political ends. We read, from everyday life in the physical fabric of our
advanced, environmentally-conditioned city, a “triumphant record of the success of the
technological project of the mastery of nature, confirming what is it to be human” [Ryan 1986: 247].
Our deeply embedded dependence on a fossil fuel existence is cultural as well as physical.

However, paradoxically, when it comes to social and technological innovation and to

revolutionary ideas and movements, the urban crucible is what Glaeser [2011] has aptly coined as
Ryan. C.: EcoAcupuncture: Designing Future Transitions for Urban Communities for a Resilient Low-carbon Future 4

“our species greatest invention”, because it amplifies the vital, dynamic and creative potential of
human interaction and ‘collaborative brilliance’ - for art, for knowledge and for prosperity, both
material and social. It is this ‘nourishing and flourishing’ nature of urbanity to which one can
attribute its continuing global success.

Cities and urban life have the ability to nourish the very social characteristics that will help its citizen-
species to evolve, to adapt, to innovate, to transform the conditions for life and well-being. The
capacity of humans to anticipate change, to envisage alternative conditions, to act to structure a
different future in the expectation of better outcomes, is evident throughout history. At a time when
the global community and international institutions (and many national governments) seem unable
to act for the common good in relation to climate change, cities and urban communities offer
hope that they are - and will continue to be - the cohesive and creative social entities able to take
up the challenge; but this will depend on policies, programs and creative movements, that can the
negotiate the many conflicting facets of urban and city life. This negotiation defines a critical
dimension of the EcoA program and it is the reason that it is based in, and reaches out from, a
university faculty concerned with understanding the nature of urban existence.

VEIL: Sustainable trajectories for urban life.

The Victorian Eco-Innovation Lab is a design-research laboratory established “to change
expectations of the future in response to environmental challenges and to identify innovative
pathways that could realise those changed expectations”8. The most succinct formulation of its
purpose, as stated at its foundation, is that “in times of significant change the only way to predict
the future is to design it” 9. From its outset the program proposed an approach that could be
labelled as ‘designing transitions’ [Ryan 2008a], sitting within a small but growing field of design as a
‘mechanism for social and technical transformation’ [Walker 2011] and ’social innovation’ [Manzini
2010].

Fig. 1: VEIL Structure and process.

Ryan. C.: EcoAcupuncture: Designing Future Transitions for Urban Communities for a Resilient Low-carbon Future 5

VEIL operates ‘looking outwards’ from the university environment; in its first four years that
environment involved a partnership between four universities10 centred on Melbourne, the capital
of the Australian state of Victoria (hence its name). The ‘Lab’ explicitly straddles the research and
teaching areas of the university and the various publics (government, business, the professions and
the general public) that universities are expected to serve (see Fig. 1). With future sustainability as it
primary focus, VEIL brings multi-disciplinary researchers into an evolving ‘think-tank’ of academics
and professionals who: review existing research; critically evaluate scenarios for the future; explore
new design directions and possibilities, for environments, systems, products and services; initiate
new research projects to test concepts and scenarios, and communicate all that work as it
progresses. All this takes place within an active program of public engagement, that can be
considered as the co-creation of desirable futures – ‘the futures we would like to get’ [Vergragt
and Quist 2011]. The process for the co-creation of these designed futures is schematically shown in
Fig.2; with the Eco-Acupuncture process this engagement takes some specific forms that we will
return to shortly.

Fig. 2: The VEIL Process – analysis, engagement, design, feedback.

Ryan. C.: EcoAcupuncture: Designing Future Transitions for Urban Communities for a Resilient Low-carbon Future 6

The VEIL ‘open innovation’ structure has built a substantial fluid network of researchers, academic
and professional designers, government officers, members of community organisations and post-
graduate and final-year design students (over 1200 since its program began). The body of work to
emerge from this process includes future concepts and prototypes for sustainable goods and
services, for new built infrastructures and residential developments, new systems of provision of
energy, water, food and transport, and concepts for new patterns of low carbon, low consumption,
living11.

Fig. 3 sets out a ‘design framework’ developed by VEIL that has evolved from praxis, but essentially
captures the way the program was initially designed, to deal with what research suggested to be
the critical barriers to negotiating socio-technical transitions. The focus on ‘the urban’ (cities) has
been canvassed at the outset of this paper. The other overarching design and program elements
in Fig 3 (the twenty-five year horizon; the use of optimistic visual projections or ‘glimpses’ of futures
[Moy and Ryan 2011] as a central element in the process of engagement; a focus on systems
change and resilience), all developed from research on the limits of incremental design for the
environment (‘eco-design) and what the author identified as a shift in the market towards
competition focused on future potential concepts – the ‘conceptual market’. [Ryan, C. 2002a;
2002 b). More pressingly, the particular challenges that underpin Beck’s ‘support from below’
question, when the ‘greening of society” focus is climate change, have had a significant affect on
the development of the VEIL design framework and the Eco-Acupuncture program. These
Ryan. C.: EcoAcupuncture: Designing Future Transitions for Urban Communities for a Resilient Low-carbon Future 7

formative issues are discussed below, as an elaboration of some of the critical points in the
framework of Fig 3 , before the concept and praxis of Eco-Acupuncture is expanded.

Fig. 3: The VEIL Design Framework

Climate change, diabolical problems and empowering action.

The program of the Victorian Eco-Innovation lab (and the evolving praxis of EcoA) has been
shaped by the realisation that Climate Change (CC), unlike any other environmental (or
sustainability) issue, presents democratic institutions with ‘diabolical’ policy challenges (to use the
terminology of Garnaut 2008). Asking institutions and citizens to respond to climate change is asking
for action now, to deal with an issue that cannot be observed directly, in order to avoid future
events which cannot be forecast with certainty, either in their scale of impact, or in terms of when
and where they will occur, even though the general trajectory is clear. By the time the ‘reality’ of
climate change is unambiguously observable to a sufficient majority of people that it can motivate
responsive action, it is likely to be too late to avoid its more catastrophic effects. In fact, Stern
[2007], Garnaut [2008] and others have argued that the longer we wait to take action the more
costly it will be to deal with the effects (and the greater the risk that the situation will be, essentially,
Ryan. C.: EcoAcupuncture: Designing Future Transitions for Urban Communities for a Resilient Low-carbon Future 8

irreversible). Whatever the pace of global action, the amounts of greenhouse gases already in the
system mean that significant programs of adaptation to a changed climate will be required. This
creates a an overarching policy challenge: Mitigation and adaptation have to be developed in a
coherent and mutually reinforcing way.

It is now clear that the increasing certainty of the evidence for the human forcing of climate
change (and the mounting empirical evidence that warming effects are running significantly
ahead of IPCC predictions [Garnaut 2011]) has not translated into building pubic support for action.
As Hume [2011] expresses it in an editorial in Nature Climate Change: “Crafting increasingly
consensual reports of scientific knowledge, or levering more engineering and technology, will
alone never open up pathways… to the public imagination or the execution of policy”[178]. Many
researchers have sought to understand the roots of the all too apparent difficulty of building
political support for action on CC, pointing to the need for much deeper analysis of what it is that
makes this particular environmental challenge different from others [see for example, Hamilton
2010, Szerszynski, and Urry 2010; Bhaskar et al 2010; Hume 2009; Giddens 2009]. Wynne [2010]
expresses this issue as a challenge for the social sciences: “It becomes important to ask what kind
of knowledge we understand ourselves to have, about our climate and [the] human activities and
relations which may affect it” [291]. The search for answers to such a question has quickly moved
beyond simple analysis of the public understanding of science.

The ‘kind of knowledge’ that grounds the public response to CC requires consideration of (for
example): our deep, historically constituted, cultural and social relationships to the weather
[Szerszynski 2010]; conflicts between lived, local, ‘realities’ and global ‘abstractions’ [Jasanoff 2010;
Swyngedouw 2010]; conflicting understandings of the nature and credibility of science and
certainty [Hume, M. 2009; Wynne 2010; Rommetveit, et al 2010]; the social constitution of
conceptions of present and future risk [Hume 2009]; an ignorance of the fundamentals of natural
systems, evolution and symbiosis [Hamilton 2010; McCright and Dunlap 2010]; the constitution of the
climate problem within a scientific-technological heuristic [Szerszynski and Urry 2010]; an addiction
to material values and consumption and the fetishisation of growth and energy consumption
[Romm 2002, Hamilton 2010; Hume 2010]; the deeply embedded oil-based structures of economic
and political power and the control of the media [Hamilton 2010; Oreskes and Conway 2010; Yusoff
2010]. Recent literature [Nordhaus and Shellenberger 2007; Compton and Kasser 2009; APA 2010]
has also questioned the language used to articulate the threat of CC, particularly the limitations of
relying on projections of impending dangers, and the near brutal conditions of a four- to six degree
warmer world [e.g Lynas 2008], to galvanise action. There is a clear danger of a form of
psychological disempowerment and collective passivity when CC is only projected as a looming
catastrophe. The barely suppressed panic of the climate science community, that the dangers
have been significantly under-estimated [Hamilton op cit; Wynne op-cit], just heightens the
problematic of a conflict between the ‘transmission of knowledge’ and the ‘transmission of an
Ryan. C.: EcoAcupuncture: Designing Future Transitions for Urban Communities for a Resilient Low-carbon Future 9

overwhelming sense of powerlessness’: That it is too late to act and too difficult to redirect
established power [Beck 2010; Frank 2010]. It was to overcome this barrier of engendering
powerlessness that, from the outset, VEIL focused its programs of design engagement and future
visioning on the development of optimistic, desirable twenty-five year futures.

Focusing on the urban response to climate change.

Given that the political response to climate change in Australia (as in many countries) depends on
gaining support from urban citizens, it is strange that largely absent from the literature on the
diabolical nature of CC and post-carbonaceous transitions is consideration of cities and built
environments as complex socio-cultural-technical-material systems, as introduced at the beginning
of this paper. It is true that most programs of mitigation (or post-carbon planning) have to address
the built environment, acknowledging its contribution to overall energy consumption, but this is
often instrumentally focused on reducing the imbedded and recurrent demands of the building
stock. There is a research literature on urban metabolism (e.g: Kennedy, et al, 2007) that more
appropriately addresses the interconnections of material and technical systems of cities, including
factors such as transport and residential density and so on that are a function of urban morphology.
However, the wider dimensions of the urban experience that mediate the political response to CC
certainly needs greater attention12. Generally, the built environment is treated more as an inert
backdrop against which the real play of social and cultural and economic institutions takes place
and it is these institutions “shape people’s sense of what is permissible, desirable and possible”
[Szerszynski and Urry 2010:3 italics added]. When it comes to actively addressing issues of CC
(mitigation and adaptation) in planning and design within existing urban conurbations (in a way
that might gain ‘support from below’) it is exactly the perceptions of the community about what is
permissible, desirable and possible that becomes a barrier to action and those perceptions are
substantively affected by daily experience and ‘reading’ of the urban condition.

From greening of elements to radical systems change.

VEIL sits within this complex and contested terrain of ‘the response to climate change’ (even if its
remit is wider in environmental terms) and its praxis has evolved over time as community attitudes
and conflicting views have become more apparent. The design focus of VEIL derived, more or less
directly, from the field of ‘eco-design’ (or design for sustainability) that has developed over the last
two to three decades, a field initially focused on re-designing consumer products to reduce their
life-cycle13 environmental impacts [Gertsakis, Lewis and Ryan 1996; Brezet and van Hemel 1997;
Tischner et al 2000; Ryan 2003; 2004; Crul, Diehl and Ryan 2009; Ryan 2012]. Product eco-design
quickly developed to sophisticated methodologies⁠ to reconfigure and reshape existing goods (or
develop new ones). This required holistic attention to their material construction as well as their use-
function, user behaviour, their end-of-life value, and so on. Most importantly, all those design
considerations had to fit the overarching strategic goal of out-competing more environmentally
deleterious products in the market; their successes depended on a coherent resolution of both
Ryan. C.: EcoAcupuncture: Designing Future Transitions for Urban Communities for a Resilient Low-carbon Future 10

functionality and aesthetics, technology and semiotics, to generate consumer desire for their new
environmental and technical capacities.

The contribution of the eco-design of products to the overall reductions of environmental impacts
at a societal level was quickly perceived as problematic. Was it possible to ‘grow’ an
environmentally benign economy through a process of continuous reduction in the environmental
load of goods within the market? The win-win14 idea that the economy can continue to grow
provided there is significant and on-going reductions in the impacts of all goods and services, rests
on assumptions about the relative rate of growth of the economy (overall consumption) compared
to the rate of reduction of the impact of the ‘units’ (goods and services) consumed. This was open
to critique from three perspectives:
• large product impact reductions are often ‘one-off’, as past (environmental and resource)
inefficiencies in design are addressed, with further iterations of eco-design showing only
marginal improvements;
• growth in consumption of many products in many markets is easily outpacing unit efficiency
improvements so that the net result is an overall deterioration in conditions [Ryan 2002c;
2003] and,
• there are ‘rebound’ effects in which improvements in the efficiency of products provide an
economic stimulus for increased consumption in another area (an example of the Jevons
paradox; Jevons 1866) [Greening and Difiglio 2000].⁠
With hindsight we can now say that eco-design research and practice demonstrates a need for
radical change to systems of production, distribution and consumption [Brezet and van Hemel
1997; Tukker and Tischner 2006; Tischner and Verkuijl 2008; Ryan 2008; Crul, Diehl and Ryan 2009].
This conclusion seems broadly consistent with developments in the field of innovations research [e.g.
Varian 2000; Weaver, Jansen et al1999, Freeman and Perez 1988] and in the broader field of
sustainable business strategies [e.g. Hawkin et al 1999; McDonough and Braungart 2001;
WBCSD2002; Svendsen and Laberge 2006; van Bakel et al 2007]. It is also clear that the ‘systems’
that need to change are fundamentally socio-technical in nature; environmental problems cannot
be tackled though innovation in technology alone, without associated changes in systems of
provision, in user behaviour, in lifestyle and culture (social innovation). The World Business Council
for Sustainable Development put that point very succinctly in 2001 when it concluded, from many
case studies, that innovation for a sustainable future requires “finding new ways to do old things as
well as new ways to do new things” [WBCSD 2001:7].

The conceptual marketplace and disruptive socio-technical transitions

VEIL can be considered a laboratory to ‘find new ways of doing’ - ways of transforming human
practices - for a sustainable future. From its outset VEIL was explicitly committed to idea generation
in the service of action-research and action-engagement, working via the agency of design, using
scenarios and positive and optimistic visions, to bring about change. Visually communicated ideas
Ryan. C.: EcoAcupuncture: Designing Future Transitions for Urban Communities for a Resilient Low-carbon Future 11

are its tools to catalyse social action; the communication of representations of new ‘ways of doing’
is intended as a disruptive intervention in what can be considered as the conceptual marketplace
[Ryan 2002a; 2002b]. Preliminary research for VEIL [Ryan 2005] identified a shift in the market place
towards the projection of future concepts for products services and built environment, ‘designed’
for possible release to the market in the future. This shift seemed closely aligned to the global
growth of the production of immaterial goods, or more specifically goods with an increasing
component of value vested in their immaterial content (ideas, brands, information, languages,
images and so on) as proposed by Castells (2000), Hardt and Negri (2009), and others15. Even in
markets where the material value of products is still dominant, the potential form and capacities of
future products can be turned into an experience, an immaterial projection of emerging material
possibilities. This conceptual marketplace - “exhibiting the future in the present” [Ryan 2002b:7] -
has become a critical arena for business, where consumer responses can be evaluated and
product trajectories refined before the high capital investment in ‘bringing-to-the-market’ is
required. The VEIL preliminary research suggested that the future-concept market is very pervasive,
stimulating consumer expectations and desires by enveloping them in a ‘conceptual landscape of
future consumption possibilities’.

Active investment in the conceptual market forms a (relatively) new mechanism by which existing
socio-technical regimes16 [see for example Geels and Schot 2007] maintain stable trajectories of
innovation and development. Of course, as history demonstrates, socio-technical regimes are not
stable; disruptive transitions from one stable regime to another do (regularly) take place [Geels
2002]. In the normal dynamic of innovation, new novel practices or technologies (ways of doing)
most often emerge from organisational niches within society - from entrepreneurial workshops, small
businesses or cooperatives and even from grassroots activist communities, cultural groups, towns
and neighbourhoods [Seyfang and Smith 2007]. These novelty incubation spaces will often start
with relatively “unstable socio-technical configurations with low performance……carried and
developed by small networks of dedicated actors, often outsiders or fringe actors” [Geels and
Schot 2007:400].
VEIL began as an experiment⁠ to test the value of competing as a disruptive force in the
conceptual landscape, structured like a design led-company in the public realm, driven not by
profit and the security of stable innovation trajectories but by the advancement and amplification
of disruptive possibilities of new socio-technical systems (towards a sustainable future). With a
research and design ‘department’ comprised of academics and post-graduate design students
(as part of their ‘education’) VEIL aimed to effect a realignment of current relationships between
consumers, business, professions, policy and innovation processes, to tip the balance towards more
radical (and more rapid) socio-technical regime change.

A distributed architecture for resilient systems of provision

Ryan. C.: EcoAcupuncture: Designing Future Transitions for Urban Communities for a Resilient Low-carbon Future 12

The diabolical challenges of CC, the embedded cultural and physical dependencies of a
carbonaceous built environment, the need for radical systems change, the structuring of
expectations from a pervasive conceptual market, and the potential to amplify disruptive niche
innovations, have all defined the VEIL approach to design research and design action. Two
aspects of the design framework (Fig 3) in particular - resilience and distributed systems - have
grown in importance since the program commenced. There are dimensions of post-carbonaceous
urban transformation that will arise from changes in weather patterns and extreme climate events,
because they expose the vulnerability of urban infrastructure built around historical weather
patterns, with the expectation that those patterns will hold into the future. When the past ‘envelope’
of climate variability is exceeded, critical systems of provision (housing, water, food, transport,
health) can prove brittle and collapse, putting living conditions at risk. In the last decade Australian
cities (particularly Melbourne) have confronted the risks of brittle infrastructure exposed, for
example, by rainfall (that has swung from prolonged drought to catastrophic floods), or by
extreme summer temperatures (with wild-fires, the buckling of rail lines and much of the population
suffering from inadequately designed residential and commercial buildings). Awareness of these
emerging climate vulnerabilities is not limited to Australia, being the motivation for the introduction
of VEIL’s Eco-Acupuncture program into European cities.

The transition from our carbonaceous existence will require the development of resilience (most
simply the ability to cope with changed climate conditions without loosing essential function) at the
same time as transforming the energy base of the economy. The design task for VEIL was to project
futures that would be resilient based on the exploration of new architectures for the infrastructure
used to provide energy, water, food, transport, information – those critical systems of provision that
are interconnected and interdependent in complex ways in different contexts. The re-
conceptualisation of future resilient systems of provision – the core ‘what-if’ of the VEIL design
visioning – is posited as a paradigm shift in infrastructure systems, from a centralised model, with
long, linear delivery systems and increasing uniformity in supply and distribution technologies (the
dominant paradigm of the carbonaceous era), to a ‘distributed’ model, with more localised,
systems with increasing diversity of supply and patterns of consumption [Biggs et al 2010].

Plausible futures, trajectories and the extant world.

Socio-technical regimes, the conceptual market and the lived experience of urban life, shape
individual, collective and institutional perceptions of what is permissible, desirable and possible
(henceforth referred to as ‘PDP’). In early VEIL work with different communities of interest it became
clear that the process of co-envisaging (or co-designing) new resilient futures required only that
those futures were exposed to enough critical discussion and feedback that they could finally be
accepted as possible or plausible; it wasn't necessary to provide a grounded and tested (or
‘modelled’) potential future to motivate interest in new innovation trajectories. However it also
became clear that the plausibility of the projected futures was perceived to be significantly greater
Ryan. C.: EcoAcupuncture: Designing Future Transitions for Urban Communities for a Resilient Low-carbon Future 13

if existing niche developments (novelty incubation spaces) could be identified that could form a
possible starting point for a trajectory of development towards the envisaged future. It was found in
practice that such niche social or technical innovations could indeed be ‘outside’, or novel, with
respect to current regimes, and might appear as marginal or ‘counter-cultural’ with respect to
mainstream developments (confirming the observation of Geels and Schot op cit). Overall, this
trajectory-value accords with processes in ‘back-casting’ (e.g Vergraght op-cit) where the
identified niche development can be considered as a step towards the specified future; if that first
step can be shown to be ‘in place’, even, if it has characteristics of outside or fringe, then the
dynamics of engagement with the projected future appear to be increased.

The importance of identifying existing niche developments first became apparent in an early VEIL
project for urban transformation involving the design of a new ‘eco-city’ in the centre of Melbourne
(adjacent to the CBD) on an existing ‘brown field’ development site. Eight design academics, 200
design students and around 60 volunteer professionals worked on a vision that represented a
radical shift in thinking away from the previous ‘business as usual’ (government) plans for the site
[VEIL 2009]. The eco-city was proposed as an Ecological Business District (EBD) for Melbourne - a
permanent ‘expo’ of sustainable living and business providing 10,000 people with a resilient and
productive neighbourhood with ‘super-low’ consumption patterns and a net production of energy,
water and food. Not all the VEIL vision for that site is likely to be realised (as a new state
government considers its coherence with their much a more conservative and laissez faire
development ideology). However, the detailed research underpinning each aspect of its plan and
the identification of existing niche innovations coherent with the future visions for the site17, gave
the proposals a sense of ‘grounded blue-sky’ thinking that government could not ignore in its final
investment for master-planning to bring the development to market [VEIL 2010].

Work on the EBD project exposed two critical, issues that led to the development of the EcoA
program:
• New, or extant, as a ‘target’ for intervention? The stark reality of the post fossil-fuel transition
for a city such as Melbourne is that new urban development can make only a small
contribution to the overall goal of reducing energy consumption and greenhouse gases
and increasing resilience. Whatever path the carbon-transition process takes over the
coming decades, much of the economy will be directed to re-shaping, and re-fitting the
extant urban environment (buildings, transport and provision of water, energy and food).
This brings to the fore Beck’s critical barrier of support for transformative change ‘from
below’, when the direction of transformation can seem to undermine the embedded life
conditions and investments that define the peoples’ sense of the PDP.

• Is it essential that ‘niche’ innovations (pre)exist in a particular place, to define a trajectory?

This question arose from practice: what if existing niche innovation cannot be identified -
Ryan. C.: EcoAcupuncture: Designing Future Transitions for Urban Communities for a Resilient Low-carbon Future 14

revealed - within a selected urban territory? Is it possible to propose or envision - and

ultimately to prototype - niche innovations based on extrapolation or adaptation of novel
developments that have been identified in other contexts? Can innovative niches be
designed and implanted?

During and following the EBD project, extensive consultations with local councils across
Melbourne 18 were conducted to discuss the perceived relevance of the EBD project to local
programs for sustainable development. VEIL’s long-term visions for Melbourne, including EBD,
(collectively known as Melbourne 2032: The City of Short Distances) were received with enthusiasm
and exhibitions of all that work continue to appear regularly at local events across Melbourne19
[VEIL 3023 Visions]. The ‘challenge of retrofit’ became a recurring theme in the consultations;
councils reported so many cases where the development and implementations of strategies for
urban ‘retrofitting’ aimed at addressing CC challenges - reducing energy consumption and
carbon emissions, shifting transport away from the car to walking and bicycling, increasing
residential density, recycling sources of water, introducing solar hot water heating, supporting
urban food production, and so on – encountered significant push-back from particular residents
and institutions. The term ‘commitments’ was frequently used in this context: Proposals were
unsupported or actively opposed because they were perceived as threatening existing
commitments – personal, social, cultural, economic, buildings, and so on (Beck’s “life conditions”).
Whilst the 2032 visions could be accepted by the community as intriguing future possibilities (even
referred to as ‘compelling’) council representatives feared that programs aimed at actively
progressing towards them would be met with resistance because they threatened current ideas of
‘the PDP’. It was from those consultations that the EcoA program was conceived.

Eco-Acupuncture: small distributed interventions to shift perceptions of ‘pdp’.

Eco-A is now a three year exploration of ways to initiate a transformation of a community’s sense of
what is PDP, linking future optimistic visions of transformed urban life to purposeful, designed, niche
interventions that can be implanted (or supported and amplified, if found to be existing), with the
intension that they will grow towards a trajectory of development for a zero-carbon resilient future.
The EcoA locus is a selected urban domain, spatially defined as a ‘precinct’ (typically a few square
kilometres),large enough to involve the complex interactions between built infrastructure and
systems of energy, water, food, transport. . Multiple niche interventions are the ‘acupuncture
points’, designed to ‘re-direct’ the forces that currently define the normal ‘meridian lines’ of
development.

In the first EcoA project with the City of Hume on the north-western edge of metropolitan
Melbourne20 (within its suburbs of Broadmeadows and Dallas [VEIL 2010]) a ‘mapping’ exercise
(undertaking by VEIL with a Melbourne University design studio21 and the staff of the City Council)
reviewed sustainability, climate and resilience challenges for the precinct and, using the EBD visions
Ryan. C.: EcoAcupuncture: Designing Future Transitions for Urban Communities for a Resilient Low-carbon Future 15

as a guide, sought to envisage twenty-five year transformations that could address the issues found.
Some of these ideas were of the kind that had previously been considered by the Council but were
not well received by the community. In a series of workshops and think-tank investigations,
conducted publicly within the Hume precinct in the local public library and tertiary training college
the specific nature of potential resistance was reviewed and representatives of local organisations
were able to respond and re-shape’ ideas, leading to the first of many public exhibitions of visions
of a transformed urban environment in 2032. In terms of consultation, or community co-creation of
desirable futures, this process as shown in Fig 2 had some distinct feature that have continued, with
only minor refinements, through the Eco-A program.

For Eco-A, the process is repeated after the 25 year future concepts have been developed and
exhibited and community feedback considered. In this ‘second round’ of work, the precinct was
again mapped to look for sites of possible intervention for new small scale niche innovation projects
inspired by the twenty-five year visions. The intervention sites (many were found) can be thought of
as small spatial niches that have little or no ‘attached’ commitments (capital, cultural, social)
because of their specific local history: Abandoned buildings, parks, waterways and other open
spaces, informal thoroughfares, unused crown land, surplus infrastructure space, and so on. These
intervention spaces were considered as potentially open to novel, innovative ‘disruptive’ design
interventions, as places to demonstrate the potential value of realigning current systems of
provision towards more resilient low consumption urban services. Wherever possible, these
intervention sites were chosen to re-value currently de-valued local potentialities: Resource
streams (storm and waste water, unproductive land, renewable energy, organic waste, vacant
public and private buildings, and so on); social and organisational alignments (transport corridors,
training and employment ‘incubators’, food festivals and cultures, recreational) and so on. These
sites now became the focus for many small design projects – Eco-Acupuncture projects - again
(following a process closely aligned to Fig 2) as part of graduate student education programs
(design studio work in architecture, landscape, urban, industrial design) and ‘ateliers’ with
contributions from volunteer professionals and academic design staff.

From VEIL’s experience in that first project and subsequent work in other urban areas of Melbourne
and now in other cities in Europe22, the designed (disruptive) interventions should:
• Be physically observable innovations that can be disruptive with respect to the dominant
regime, because they demonstrate tangible alternatives suited to a ‘climate proof’ future’
that can be evaluated for its desirability.
• Constitute, together, a distributed network of influence, so that niche changes in any one
site connect (conceptually or physically) with another.
• Be of low-cost that they can be implemented within the means of the community and their
local government, in the near future.
Ryan. C.: EcoAcupuncture: Designing Future Transitions for Urban Communities for a Resilient Low-carbon Future 16

Within the ‘resilience’ framework of distributed systems of provision, Eco-A interventions take energy,
water, food, transport, information and shelter as the focus for innovation. Being intentionally
innovative also means the potential for failure; these are small low costs experimental interventions
that are acknowledged as such, as a contribution to knowledge about what will work in the
realignment of technical, physical and cultural-social systems, from many small-scale experimental
projects that can be considered living laboratories, where the cost of any failure would be small
but success could be great if the results are widely diffused. As the aim of these niche interventions
is to maximise their (individual and collective) systemic influence, a set of Eco-A approaches to
designing has been developed (see Fig. 4) that will be used to map different types of interventions
for future evaluation.

Fig. 4: Eco-A design thinking (and proposal mapping)

CONCLUSION
Eco-A has demonstrated the potential for intervention at a local level aimed at societal
transformation, developing a series of proposals for existing urban precincts. Examples that have
had most attention to date include:
• the diversion of rain-water from the roofs of factories abutting a large open park along a
creek escarpment (hot and sun-baked in summer), so that a series of wetlands can be
created in the park (with excess water being available for other niche developments);
Ryan. C.: EcoAcupuncture: Designing Future Transitions for Urban Communities for a Resilient Low-carbon Future 17

• a ‘food corridor’ linking two ethnic communities with community gardens, food markets
and community cooking facilities;
• the re-development of an abandoned school to create an aquaculture (fish and vegeon)
production facility;
• the re-use of an abandoned (ex Ericsson) factory as an eco-innovation training centre
(linked to an existing and important training college), a “men’s shed” and new business
incubator;
• a new set of bike paths to join the above interventions; expansion of school-based and
community based vegetable gardens.
In the Hume City project, these concepts and others were exhibited for a week in the empty
Ericsson factory (once employing 6000 people) where the council and VEIL staff conducted a
series of guided tours for a range of community groups (residents, ethnic communities, TAFE
education staff, small businesses, and so on), gathering feedback in the process.

Exhibition and tours such as the Hume one have been well received by local councils as a new
(and rewarding) approach to community consultation about future development possibilities;
different because it provided long term visions of future urban changes, as well as possible small,
short-term developments and because the visions/proposals came from a process and a ‘trusted’
agency that was clearly seen as independent of the Council, commercial developers or
government. Climate change, extreme weather, rising costs of oil – as the emerging context for the
proposals - was explicit and appeared not to provoke any antagonism (in a context where
national debates about those issues are currently very polarised).

The impact of the Hume- Broadmeadows process is being evaluated in a new research project23. It
is in the nature of the process and the community engagement that the Eco-A concepts work on
two levels – as explicit small development proposals for the Council and as idea generators for the
community, influencing the direction and form of other development processes. The process of
monitoring and evaluation involves tracking the trajectory and progress of ideas, through interviews
with key personnel in the council and the community.

The outcomes of the Eco-A approach and process have been widely communicated and
attention has led to an expanding set of projects including cities and towns in other countries.
Perhaps the most critical aspect of this form of engagement is that it has lead directly to a series of
‘vision-driven’ research projects within the university research domain of the VEIL program. A series
of large research projects have commended on modelling future scenarios for food production
and distribution in Australia, where the scenarios chosen have been shaped from the Eco-A
engagement process [see for preliminary results in Turner, G et al 2012; Larsen et al 2011). There is
new research into the design of local food systems integrating peri-urban production; research into
designing for resilience to extreme (outlier) weather events for a number of rural towns in the State
Ryan. C.: EcoAcupuncture: Designing Future Transitions for Urban Communities for a Resilient Low-carbon Future 18

of Victoria ; modelling of distributed urban infrastructure and desktop review of the potential
impact of bottom up approaches to post-carbonaceous transformations.

With the evaluation of the project underway some critical reflection on the potential contribution
of the Eco-A approach should be available early in 2013. For the city of Hume, within the first year
after the work was exhibited, there are six new community gardens in place, new bike paths and
an investigation of the commercial potential of aquaculture. The storm-water re-use proposals
should soon become a detailed investigation by the Council and the relevant water authorities.
The program evaluation will allow greater investigation of the influence of the process - developing
twenty five year visions and Eco-A propositions, involving design masters students, consulting the
community through the use of design/vision propositions – particularly in terms of building support
for rapid urban transformation and overcoming the barriers depicted by Beck (op it).
-------------------------------------
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1
An earlier and much abridged version of this paper was given at the State of Australian Cities conference in Melbourne 2011.
2 Using ‘carbonaceous’ rather than the more common ‘carbon’ (as in ‘carbon based economies) resolves an ambiguity that arises when
‘carbon’ is used to define an economy (or to define the ‘carbon’ footprint of a process), as in ‘reducing the carbon impact’, when actually
it is the oxidation of carbon (e.g. through burning) and its contribution to greenhouse gases that are of concern, This ambiguity is most
clearly evident when there is a need to talk about an economy based on the use and retention of carbon-based materials (plant-based)
in order to sequester (or draw-down) carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
3 Now formally a research unit of the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning; the title ‘Victorian’ refers to the Australian State in
which the University sits and reflects the fact that VEIL was funded as a new initiative with a substantial four year grant from the (then)
state government of Victoria.
4 Systems of provision refers to “all those processes and infrastructures through which goods and services are made available for
consumption.…. It is used to describe the combination of established industry processes and business practices, the accumulated
physical production and delivery infrastructure and the corresponding social and cultural practices, which together define the ways in
which life-styles and particular sets of products and services become mutually supporting structures. This includes … the design,
production, distribution and disposal of products and services … [and] the shared set of expectations and established practices of
consumption that affirm particular categories of products and services as ‘necessary’ for daily lifestyles to function.” Ryan C 2002c [41]
5 For a recent review of backcasting methodologies related to sustainability, see: Vergragt, P. J. and J. Quist, 2011
6 As most authorities predict, even allowing for concomitant reductions in global economic growth from the oscillations of the financial
crisis. See IEA WEO 11
7 At least without significant increases in the expenditure of energy – as is already evident in the new summer peaks in demand for
electricity from the use of air-conditioners, in cities such as Melbourne where residential building stock is not designed to cope with the
new patterns of summer temperatures.
8 VEIL developed from research on the creation of a ‘cluster network model’ for eco-innovation first proposed in 2002, [Ryan 2002a;
2002b] and developed further in 2004, to provide ‘advanced high-risk research into the future’ with a creative network ‘amplified by a
structured connection to design programs within universities’ [Ryan 2004:180]. It was funded in its first four years by a grant from the
government.
9 A statement variously attributed to Alan Curtis Kay; Peter Drucker; Dennis Gabor; Ezio Manzini.
10 The common feature of those universities - Melbourne University (host), RMIT, Monash and Swinburne universities - was their strong
design faculties.
11
See www.ecoinnovationlab.com
12
Shove [2010] raises this as a ‘question not being addressed’ within social science research on the meaning and response to CC.
13 For a short summary of ‘life-cycle’ thinking see: Ryan C 2004 b; or Crul, Diehl and Ryan 2009.
14 Categorised under various labels, this underlying orientation to the problematic of sustainability was most commonly expressed as: it
is possible to find pathways for the future that avoid an oppositional relationship between the environment and the economy, pathways
that would (ultimately) bring natural and financial capital into alignment [Hawkin at al 1999 Schmidheiny 1992; Henderson 1996;].
15
It aligns closely to what has since become identified as the development of ‘experience design’ [see for example: Van Boven and
Gilovich, 2003].
16 The term socio-technical (ST) regime is used to describe sets of artefacts, production systems and distribution infrastructure,
institutional and professional structures, cultures and practices, (including corporate structures, finance systems, governance,
regulations, planning, and so on), that provide a mechanism for stable trajectories of innovation and development.
17
For VEIL the way that existing niche (fringe) social and technical developments are ‘revealed’ (within the current cultural and
economic landscape) is through a moderated blog – SustainableMelbourne.com – established and supported by the Lab as part of its
research-teaching-engagement program. This blog has become the pre-eminent communication channel for announcements, events,
lectures, case studies, reports, discussion for small localised activities and experimentation within the city. Over time this blog has been
carefully moderated to bring the content into alignment with the elements of the envisaged futures – increasing its functional role in the
provision of ‘starting points’ for new trajectories of change.
18 With the collaboration of ICLEI Local Governments for Sustainability and the Victorian Local Sustainability Accord
19
Including as animated films – either of the ‘unfolding’ of changes to Melbourne (in systems of housing, food, water, energy, transport )
over time, or simply as future visions. These films, produced by students a part of their work, are made to show on large public video
screens or within local environments on networks of video communication devices installed for public or local council advertisements.
20
Metropolitan Melbourne is not a single city in its governance but is comprised of thirty local government areas, each usually referred
to as a ‘city’. The city of Hume covers an extensive territory of approximates 500 square kilometers with a population of over 150,000.
21 Led by Dr Sigh Sitsusinga from Landscape Architecture, University of Melbourne.
22
Within Melbourne a project in a western suburb of Sunshine has completed eighteen months of work and a food focused project in an
eastern boundary suburb of Casey has commenced. A large project is planned to start in September 2012 in the city of Florence, Italy
supported by many local partners and the city administration. An ongoing project on the Island of Lesvos is focused on Eco-A and
sustainable tourism for a small town; short demonstration projects have taken place in the Netherlands and in New Zealand.
23
This project (as part of a series of research projects on ‘societal transformation’ at Melbourne University) is to provide a preliminary
evaluation early in 2013.

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