#100: Create Sustainable Change through your Work - Advice from 3 Experts

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the 100th episode of the Green Urbanist podcast. I want to do something special for the 100th episode. So we're here doing a live stream with three special guests who are all past podcast guests. Really nice to have you guys and thanks so much for being here. I'll introduce you sort of one at a time as we go through.

[00:00:19] The topic of this episode is about driving sustainable change through our work as built environment professionals. I think that's really what motivates us to sort of do the work we do is to actually see positive change happening in the world. So I'm really excited to sort of pick your brains on that and I think it would be some really useful takeaways for listeners as well.

[00:00:38] So we'll hear from each of the guests in turn. We'll have a bit of a chat. It's kind of a talk show style. We'll see how it goes and then we'll have a bit of a group chat and we'll be answering questions from the audience at the end. So anyone who's joining in live, you can pop your questions in the chat as we go. And yeah, without further ado, I'll introduce our first guest or rather I'll let you introduce yourself.

[00:01:05] So first up, we have Laura Barron. So tell us a bit about yourself and also tell us a bit about some of the work you've done in the past year that you're sort of most proud of. Sure. Thank you very much for having me, Ross. It's great to be back. So hi, I'm Laura Barron. I'm head of sustainability at Purcell. And for those who don't know Purcell, we're a multidisciplinary team of architects, heritage consultants and building surveyors.

[00:01:29] And we specialise in the adaptive reuse and retrofit of existing buildings. Most often those buildings are in really sensitive heritage settings. So my job involves visiting some really incredible old and ancient places, which is very cool. So we've got 14 offices and my role spans across all of them in the UK and in Asia Pacific.

[00:01:50] And a lot of what I do is about upskilling our staff and working really closely with project teams to ensure that we both understand and are continuously improving our environmental and social impact across operations and our projects. I'm a qualified architect, although I don't do that much architecting anymore in the traditional sense. And I suppose prior to this role, I was focused more heavily on delivering new build housing in my previous practice.

[00:02:20] And I kind of made the deliberate move to look and more focus on the reuse of existing buildings, which I'm very passionate about the circular economy. And it's very it's essential to how we might reduce the impact of the construction sector going forward. So whilst my background isn't in heritage necessarily, I've learned quite a lot working in heritage.

[00:02:44] And I think one of the things that I find most interesting and I've learned from working with so many people that are really passionate about conserving buildings is that there's loads of amazing lessons that we can learn in how we take care of preserve and adapt our built heritage, how we value it more than just like a pound per square metre cost. And I think that there's some really interesting approaches that we should apply to all existing buildings, regardless of whether or not they're listed.

[00:03:15] And I guess last year I had a really it was very productive, very like fast paced year. I feel like I was sprinting towards the end of it. It's Christmas. I think a lot of people felt like that. But one of the things that I was really heavily involved in was the launch of the Heritage Building Retrofit Toolkit, which was with the City of London Corporation.

[00:03:37] And we helped develop an open source guidance document that sets out a methodology for reducing carbon emissions and building climate resilience in heritage buildings. That involved a lot of really interesting stakeholder engagement to try and find out what the barriers to action were and things like that. So in quite like a challenging subject where you kind of think of conservation and sustainability as being these kind of incompatible things. So it's quite hopefully a helpful toolkit and guidance document.

[00:04:08] And I guess on a personal note, I became a member of the Architects to Clare Steering Group, which I'm really excited about. And I'm not going to take any credit for the initiatives that they were developing prior to my appointment to that role. But I will do a cheeky plug because I think there's some really useful things that people should maybe have a look at. So we launched a building blocks manifesto setting out key policies for national action on the built environment,

[00:04:32] which we held an event at the Houses of Parliament for to discuss in detail with key people prior to the general election. And we've got a really good advocacy and policy plan set up for 2025, which I'm really excited about. So watch this space. And then we also collaborated with Architecture Today on the Regenerative Architecture Index, which if you've not heard of it, it's intended to be kind of antithesis of the usual architectural awards.

[00:05:00] So trying to bring together and celebrate examples of regenerative design thinking and action at both a practice level and a project level. We had a launch party in September, which Brian Eno came along to and did a kind of keynote speaking or kind of panel discussion on. We had a regenerative hat competition as well. And there was lots of really inspiring cause to action. So some really, really fun and interesting things, which hopefully will have kind of ongoing impact going forward, which I'm really excited about. That's lovely. Thank you, Laura.

[00:05:29] I actually did an episode on the Regenerative Architecture Index a couple of months ago with some of the people who were leading that. That was a really, really great conversation. So hopefully people can go and check that out if they want to learn more. Over to you, my next guest, special guest, Conrad Richardson, if you can introduce yourself and similarly tell us a bit about your work from the past year. Sure. Happy to. Thank you, Ross. So I work at a very different scale and geography to Laura and Scott.

[00:05:59] But funnily enough, I am involved in a conversation at the moment on the protection of heritage streets and buildings in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital. So Laura, I can or I would be happy to touch base with you to speak to this, to speak about this. But yeah, Ross, thanks for having me yet again. I featured in episode five. So back in August 2020, more than four years ago. And then again in episode 32 in October 2021.

[00:06:29] So over three years ago. And now here we are at episode 100. So congratulations. That's really remarkable. And I suppose thank you for creating this platform for us urbanists as an avid consumer of the many conversations that you've recorded. It's really broadened my understanding of what it is to be an urbanist. And so, yeah, for my introduction, I am Conrad Richardson.

[00:06:56] If you want my entire life story told through the lens of an urbanist from planning cities out of Lego to planning real cities all around the world in 24 countries last I checked, I can refer you to episode five. However, that's now somewhat outdated. A lot has happened in the last four years, which I can speak to throughout today's episode. But essentially, I'm a sustainable urban mobility specialist that specializes in emerging cities.

[00:07:26] And I'm currently speaking to you from Cambodia. And I've spent my last four years working across Southeast Asia on an ASEAN-German cooperation project. So ASEAN is sort of like the EU of Southeast Asia. For more information on that, I can then refer you to our 32nd episode, which is also now outdated. But I really go into depth about what I've been doing in the region.

[00:07:51] And this has been on a project called SMMR, SUMMER, which stands for Sustainable Mobility in Metropolitan Regions in ASEAN, which is currently over. It ended on the 31st of December. So as of very recently, I am, let's call it fun employed. I no longer have a full time job, but I'm working on lots of different fun contracts, which I'm happy to speak to today.

[00:08:17] But over the last four years or three years since the last podcast, a lot of my work has been centered around capacity building, doing all kinds of trainings, interactive trainings where we're supporting cities and also national governments develop foundational knowledge around the sustainable mobility topic. And within that, we touch on active mobility, walking, cycling, electric mobility, smart mobility, intelligent transport systems, etc.

[00:08:46] And a lot of the work we do is published online. Also, we have many video lectures on YouTube. And beyond just training, when we work with national governments and subnational governments, we do a lot of strategy and concept development. We find out what their problems are. We co-devise solutions. And we also do a lot of public consultations with any of the affected stakeholders. And we develop project concepts, which we then turn into pilot projects.

[00:09:15] And our successful pilot projects, we spin off or we scale into much bigger projects. So I'm gladly, I can gladly speak to that. And I mentioned I was fun employed. So right now, I'm currently working on an online course on transport data fundamentals for the Transformative Urban Mobility Initiative, which is led by the German international cooperation, so GIZ,

[00:09:41] but backed by the likes of ITDP, the Asian Development Bank, etc. I'm also working on a publication for GDCI, the Global Designing Cities Initiative, who produce very visually compelling guidelines on how we can better design our city streets. And the work I'm most proud of this year, maybe three things.

[00:10:10] At the ASEAN level, we support them through the development of guidelines. We very recently published a guideline on light electric mobility. Electric mobility is a very hot topic. And we really need to push for a pragmatic approach when it comes to this, because electric mobility is not necessarily sustainable if implemented in certain ways.

[00:10:37] And the best way forward, we feel, and we've backed this up with a lot of data, at least in the Cambodian, Vietnamese, Laotian context, which are very motorbike-dominated cities, which is great. These are very energy and space-efficient vehicle types, but they're also highly polluting. A lot of air and noise pollution comes from these small mopeds. They often lack catalytic converters. And so a small moped can sometimes be worse than a modern SUV, depending on the pollutants.

[00:11:06] And so it's very logical to electrify these vehicles first. For many reasons, they have lower and smaller battery requirements, which is great in the context of producing the batteries, but also recycling the batteries. They don't need fast charging. They have small motors. You can charge them at home. And you can also easily introduce battery-swapping models. So these are really the type of vehicles this region should be focusing all its policy and practice around,

[00:11:32] as opposed to, say, a fancy Tesla with a 460-kilogram battery pack, which, if you look at the full lifecycle, it's really not that sustainable. Then maybe at the city level, I've been doing a lot of work on redesigning school zones to make them safer for kids. And this is part of a broader effort to improve active mobility in cities in the Philippines.

[00:11:58] I've been doing this in the north of the Philippines in a city up in the mountains called Baguio. Beautiful place. And there, we worked with the mayor to improve walking in the city. It's desperately needed. And we wanted to explore this topic in the most gentle way possible. Sometimes, say, closing a street or redesigning footpaths along commercial corridors. It can be political suicide.

[00:12:27] And so we didn't want that. We wanted to approach the topic very gently. And we felt that approaching the topic around school zones and kids and framing it not as active mobility projects, but as road safety projects designed to make it safer for kids to get to school, would be a better way to approach this topic and show the public what can be done. And if there's time, I'd love to speak to this project,

[00:12:54] because it's now they're exploring how they can replicate it in more than 30 local government units or 30 other cities in the Philippines. And then lastly, I'm working on a new online course for the Transformative Urban Mobility Initiative, the TUMI Transformative Urban Mobility Initiative, which builds on the previous course they developed with University College London on transforming urban mobility.

[00:13:18] And in this course, I am leading the bulk of the course, and it covers all things related to data for sustainable mobility. And we have lots of really interesting case studies from many different cities where I've traveled to, Phnom Penh, Manila, Bangkok, Shenzhen, Barcelona, and many others. We've also interviewed many subject matter experts from around the world

[00:13:43] and featured many different tutorials on how you can manage the data that you've measured using, say, GIS tools, modeling tools, and simulation tools. But I'll leave it at that. And Ross or any of you, if you have any questions, I'd be happy to expand. That's excellent. Thank you so much, Conrad. I've written down a few points that I'm sure we can come back to later.

[00:14:08] Speaking of noise-polluting vehicles, there's someone with a leaf blower outside who's just making an absolute racket at the moment. So I'm hoping that's not getting picked up on my microphone, but apologies if it is. Over to you, Scott. Please tell us a bit about yourself and some of your projects. Yeah, so again, thank you very much for having me, Ross. It's been three to four years since I spoke on the Green Urbanist class. But first of all, thank you so much for inviting me back

[00:14:35] and for hosting all of us to mark what is a really special milestone, because Conrad's absolutely right that I've also been kind of avid and keen follower of the podcast. And in lots of the teaching and upscaling work I do, I always find myself recommending it, even back to early episodes. But to interest myself as well, I'm Scott McCauley. I'm a regenerative design and infrastructure specialist with Archetype. We're an architect of studios spread across Edinburgh, Hereford and London,

[00:15:02] who have been kind of pushing the curve of sustainability for about 40 years and trying to normalise and champion the kind of passive house standard as a way of delivering high-performing buildings. And lots of the work that I do is very, I have a wide repertoire of very niche sustainability skills from ecologically appropriate building materials to lifecycle analysis. I've spent lots of the past three years looking at the lifecycle impacts

[00:15:31] of retrofitting estates at scale. So looking at between kind of four to six local authority school buildings at one time and quantifying what the carbon savings are of going, taking those to different levels of retrofit. So the Interfit and Formed Retrofit Plan has had pilots from the City of Edinburgh Council, where over half a million square metres of buildings were looked at. So we've got this really huge growing data set that we're applying to more local authorities as we take on those projects.

[00:15:58] I'm currently helping to lead on the very first one we're looking at in Wales, where we're looking at one building which has been four blocks, which every single block has been built at a different stage of it in time. We've got traditional buildings, we've got mid-70s, we've got 80s, we've got 2006, and every single one of them is wildly different. And I think from that kind of work, in the moment that we're in, we're seeing the climate crisis intensify on a daily basis to be able to step back from your work and look at a graph and say,

[00:16:26] if we will take a client down this route, we can save this much carbon, this much energy, make that school that much more affordable, is deeply, deeply satisfying work. But the role that I take on has taken a very long time to kind of distill and crystallise. So I did work as a... I'm not a fully chartered architect, so like the kind of caveat, not an architect, need to say that for legal reasons. But I always worked on sustainability coordination, so I helped develop archetypes, climate action roadmap,

[00:16:55] which kind of builds and expands upon the architect's declare one with extra kind of caveats and things we want to be exploring. And it's our way of kind of disseminating it throughout the practice because we do not have one centralised sustainability team. Everyone has their own expertise they bring in different ways. Part of my role is that I've got to work so cross-office that I'm very good at identifying who's done what before and who should have a conversation with who about this particular project. But in the work that I've been doing kind of otherwise,

[00:17:23] I also founded the Anthropocene Architecture School about five years ago now, so I've taught for between 23 and 24 different universities. I was checking the spreadsheet last night to try and verify numbers before I came on, but I've got to this stage, I've done so many lectures, talks and workshops, I've sort of forgotten quite a few of them. No offence to anyone that I don't remember ever meeting, it happens quite often. But through that, I've done work from working with tenants union groups to talk about retrofit and what's possible.

[00:17:52] I've taken kind of architecture and retrofit to climate camps. I've literally done workshops on straw bales in the middle of campsites, in the middle of parks. I've also gone to European Sustainable Energy Week in 2023, where I was speaking about where architecture and design explicitly fits into a just transition for the construction sector and European Union. And very explicitly, just transitions do not stop at borders. They are justice-centred objects.

[00:18:19] And that was around about the European Building Performance Directive. So I was the Scottish person asked to come to Brussels to talk about just transitions for the European Union. And that was a fascinating thing I did for the Architect Council of Europe. And work that I've done this past year with Archetype has been fascinating. We did a project I'm really proud of because it's the first building that, because of the timescale of the funding, has to be complete within one year. So I'm going to see it from start to finish very soon.

[00:18:49] It was an eco-classroom for Furcroft College of Adult Education in Birmingham, where their ambition was to deliver a classroom that was replicable within a grant-funded budget that was a piece of infrastructure for teaching what sustainability was for local SMEs, for their learners, for their staff, for any other college wanting to learn. And this was the ambition. And they've been doing some fantastic things. We're working with WikiHouse on that project.

[00:19:18] So all of the high-performance kind of upgrades and developments on the system we develop, then become open source. So all of that work has been disseminated. But my favourite story of the year of creating regenerative jobs and opportunities was upon the week that we announced that I'd changed my role, I suddenly got a question from a passing colleague saying, I have a friend in another practice who's looking to relocate four stories worth of building materials from an office

[00:19:47] in central London. Is that now part of your job? What can you do with this? And it turns out that I can make that part of my job and I can help facilitate conversations between clients, contractors, demolition contractors. And we have now managed to get reused building materials that will, if it all comes together, most of this interior of the building that their students will see every single day, they'll be able to identify the street in London

[00:20:15] that it came from and to be able to trace it back to there. So that's one sort of story I'm really excited about because I'm always asked, with the circular economy, what is possible? What can we do? Can you give me an example? And as of 2024, I can say, yes, you can go to Farkerhoff College of Adult Education and you can see it and you can speak to this contractor who can give you a fantastic CPD, by the way, that are called KPH deconstruction. As a CPD, our co-owners absolutely loved as well.

[00:20:42] So another piece of work from the past year that's been very exciting for me is I've contributed chapters to books for the very first time. So I taught for the International School of Reconstruction in 2021. This was part of an EU interreg project looking at how do you double the amount of reused materials and construction in Europe by 2035. It's a big aim, lots of ambitions. But part of this was an international summer school

[00:21:09] and I wrote, I was asked to write a chapter that I was based on a lecture responding to the question, are we preparing students of the right information during a climate crisis to practice? And instead of just provocatively writing no and sending it back, I gave them a half an hour provocation and I got to write probably, I wrote a chapter as if I would never be allowed to write publicly again about the state of architecture and the construction sector.

[00:21:36] And it was also based, titled for two of my favourite, well, two of the quotes that have kind of haunted me the most from the past five years of teaching. One of which was an architecture school student who says that learning in a contemporary architectural education system during a climate crisis felt like they were being taught to design their own coffins. And that was the kind of the feeling in 2022. But there was also a really powerful quote from Rebecca Solnit, who's an incredible author, who said that now we know how to build lifeboats.

[00:22:05] This is what we should be doing. So I kind of fused those two into the title. It's called Build Lifeboats, Not Coffins, Reimagining Architectural Education for a Just Transition. And the response to that has been incredibly heartening for someone whose work often feels like screaming into voids. And I was invited to be the kind of guest offer for a book club for the Students Climate Action Network, which was something I never saw myself doing. Reading is one of my absolute favourite things. I literally started the library as part of the Improved and Architecture School.

[00:22:35] And that was just a really lovely moment of kind of convergence. And a last kind of incredibly exciting piece of work that I got to do last year, I'm very proud of, was archetype working with the Royal Agricultural University to look at a landscape-led, regenerative and circular economy exemplar campus for their new innovation village to expand. But they want to bring in things like agroecology testing. They want to be looking at, they really ambitiously want to grow most of the material to build these buildings.

[00:23:03] And we had a lovely moment where we was going through their sustainability brief. And the sustainability brief came back from what I'd initially said a year ago. And they had kicked it up a notch to a level that was incredibly exciting. And I got to spend this time developing the material strategy, talking with the client team, kind of teaching them, what is a circular economy? And going beyond the usual diagrams we show of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, like, look at all these flows, doesn't that make sense? Because nobody really gets them

[00:23:32] if they haven't read them at great length. So we took them through it really quite kind of gently and expansively. Here's what the circular economy means. So I used the metaphor of a farm, so inputs and outputs. So I brought it back to agriculture for them. And I often use the metaphor of a garden to explain a circular economy to people because every start of these kind of quite simple metaphors, we can expand them and we can bring in the more complex and technical side. And from the workshop, one hour of it was, we're going to teach you. And the second one was,

[00:24:01] here's an invitation, let's apply our learning right now to what more do you think we can do with the sustainability brief? And the hardest part about that afterwards was only actually deciphering what people had excitedly written all over the paper because everyone got so excited because I found that when you do the teaching side and you bring people along and you treat every, because we all kind of universally, we're all still learning about applying sustainability. And when we want to kick it up to regenerative and have outcomes that are doing more good than harm,

[00:24:31] that's a whole new kind of, that's a massive leveling up. So as we were taking the client team through this, we got incredibly excited and bringing this into kind of meetings and otherwise, people kept on bringing up that they'd really enjoy doing this. And there was partnerships within their own organization that they hadn't considered because they hadn't had the time to sit and weave them together in this way. So I've had a lovely time in the past year doing things at the scale of a classroom, one 60 square meter classroom up to a campus.

[00:25:00] And then to kind of finish, part of my work is on kind of regenerative infrastructures. And that's very, very intentional. That's an invitation as much of a provocation of my kind of workflow. So it's looking at the cultures and construction. It's looking at the social side of how we work with contractors, how we work with clients. And part of, there was a festival done by Built Environment Smarter Transformations that are based in Scotland, the Innovation Centre. And I got asked, what do you think we should do to, in terms of events?

[00:25:30] Like how many should we do? If we gave you three to do a few things, what would you do? So I've got three. I've got three scales I'd absolutely love to do. So scale one was we spoke with structural engineers that we'd collaborated with about embodied carbon, life cycle carbon from the perspective of an architect and the structural engineer and had this really incredible dialogue across this audience. Second of all, of mine was decarbonising civic infrastructure. So we had local authorities, we had institutes

[00:25:59] of higher education, community groups, and with Matthew Clubb, who's an incredible pass-through designer based up in Aberdeen, there's amazing things around retrofit and community work. We looked at applying interfit-informed retrofit plans to decarbonisation at large scale, small scale, and made about 100 people online and in person for that. And the third of the four that I did, so the fourth being we did a collaboration with Women in BIM, looking at kind of growing in the career and mental health, but the fourth and final one

[00:26:28] I got incredibly excited about because it fuses, everything I do at all scales was the first ever just transition town hall in Leif in Edinburgh. So we had local people came to the office and they got to get introduced to the work going on locally about enabling a just transition of our housing stock, of our construction industry. So there was no one who was practising as an architect taking up the floor. We stepped back and we did the hosting. We made sure everyone was comfortable, knew where we could grab a cup of tea, knew where everything was.

[00:26:58] But we had the Edinburgh City Council's adaptation team. We had two branches of the local tenants union, Living Rent. We had Changeworks or a charity looking at retrofit and we had a fantastic organisation called Eala Impacts and they look at kind of regenerative design and working with community groups from pre-demolition audits to collectivise retrofit. And we had this amazing conversation which just, we planned to try and break people out into groups

[00:27:27] so we left that as one big open town hall because it was fantastic but the richness of the conversation between the adaptation team and the tenants union conversations that had never been had before and just how excited people got afterwards and people felt energised about the work they were doing because we held up the infrastructure for people to imagine what a just transition could look like in their local area and I get to do that as part of my day job now. Isn't that amazing? I don't have to do it in my evenings.

[00:27:57] It was in an evening but it was part of my day job and it was so much interest and it was just such a lovely momentary event to hold and it's sort of, I've always spoke about reimagining architectural practice and looking for it because part of why I'm not an architect yet brackets maybe not never is when you're doing your part three you've got to be writing a kind of reflective view on your work you've been doing and I found that watching as the world changes so much in terms of

[00:28:27] kind of where we are in terms of climate change I don't know if traditional architecture is the right avenue for me or where I can bring my most where I can show up fully as myself and I've now found the role where I can be doing everything from large campuses for new build built from bio-based and recycled materials to small classrooms to having conversations between councils and local people and civil society all as one and one happy mix as well so yeah I think

[00:28:57] I could probably I could talk for hours and I won't because we'll have another episode of Number Point but I'll throw it back to you Ross but again thank you so much for having me this is an absolute joy Thank you Scott I'm starting to feel that I don't think there's anyone working in sustainability who isn't doing a million things at once and like loads of extra stuff outside of their day job etc so like thanks to all of you for just all the energy that you bring and yeah all the work is really inspiring and as you said Scott and for the listeners I'll happily have each of you back on for a full episode

[00:29:27] by yourselves to get really into the details of what you're doing for those that are joining us live thanks so much for joining really good to have you feel free to put in your questions for the guests into the chat and I'll see them and hopefully we'll have time to answer a few but if you just want to listen in as well that's absolutely fine so I think actually Scott you've transitioned us into the next part of the conversation really well which is I think people listening are built environment professionals

[00:29:56] they are convinced that they need to be maybe doing more in their work and delivering more sustainable work or regenerative work from your experience what sort of advice words of wisdom you know lessons learned can you share with them in terms of making that step that first step and that sort of continuous journey of trying to do better I don't know who I want to pick on to go first so maybe someone can volunteer

[00:30:26] go ahead Laura yeah it's a good it's a good question and I think I always like everybody has their own path don't they but I can at least share my own in the hopes that maybe it helps somebody but I would always just say talk about it just talk about it with everybody and it doesn't matter what your role is and what level you're at you have a voice and you have a right to talk about it whether you're kind of if you're in a senior position use that power and influence

[00:30:56] and if you're in a more junior position make sure you're shouting to the people that are in a senior position that can act on your behalf I would also say don't be an individual find people that share your passions and share your enthusiasms I certainly when I started out in this world I found ACAN Architects Climate Action Network like the most amazing powerful collection of people and you can find people whether you're interested in natural

[00:31:26] materials secular economy there's a lot like whatever whatever area of this very ever-growing vast topic you're interested in you'll find somebody there that's kind of shares those interests and a huge wealth of knowledge as well so I definitely say anybody who's not aware of their work I'm sure most of your listeners already are and I think as well the thing that keeps coming up from what everybody's said about energy I think you have to be able to sustain a level of energy in this area that you that is hard particularly

[00:31:55] like Scott what you mentioned when you're kind of finding that you're just talking into a void a lot you're you know things aren't moving at the speed that we all know that they should be moving so I think it helps to do to find the thing that you can do that is combined with the things that you love doing so if you love drawing can you use those skills to explain ideas and inspire people if you love walking in the woods can you get involved with groups that are helping advocate and protect nature

[00:32:24] if you're a big politics geek like me can you find others that are trying to lobby for government change and get the topic on the agenda it's just trying to pick something that you've got energy for and that you can sustain that energy for because it's a fast world of information and being able to do something that you're actually enjoying doing everything that Scott said really resonated and if someone can pay you to do it then that's brilliant so yeah it takes energy it takes patience

[00:32:54] and I think the one thing that I've learnt most recently it's taken me a long time to realise but not everybody sees the world through my eyes and so understanding that even though you're talking to people and I was finding that I was getting more and more frustrated when people weren't necessarily just agreeing with everything I was saying surprisingly but actually trying to think of ways to talk about the subject at a level where people can relate through their own eyes because not everybody

[00:33:23] experiences the world in the same way and not everybody has the kind of capacity and a headspace to worry about things that are on this quite global scary scale so I think it's just trying to be patient and kind to yourself is what I would say That's very wise words there Laura and I think the idea that there isn't one thing that everyone can do but that everyone has things that they can do that fit their skill set and their interests and their passions

[00:33:53] I think is such an important point so thank you for making that hand over to Scott you were jumping in I was just about to add to that from a very different angle but it does relate and it all comes down to our frameworks for

[00:34:24] officials and they see the topic of sustainability in a different light sometimes to us sometimes a favourable light sometimes not such a favourable light it can seem like a bit of a burden to them and for this I think it's really important to reiterate the three well four pillars of sustainability Ross last time we spoke you added an extra pillar that I never considered but you know the three pillars

[00:34:54] we have environmental sustainability economic sustainability social sustainability etc as well as cultural sustainability which touches on your world Laura and the fact of the matter is and this is something I have to make very clear to the different public entities I work with we can't have environmental sustainability at least not in the long term without economic sustainability especially in a context of growing wealth

[00:35:24] disparities if people have less disposable income if we say shrink the middle class then we have to work more and we'll have much less time to care about the environment and so we can't have one without the other and the same applies to say social sustainability if we can't design our cities to be nice livable human habitats then we live lifestyles where

[00:35:53] there isn't a strong incentive to want to have environmental sustainability because we're so divorced from the outdoors and from the natural environment which is a huge problem especially in the emerging cities the places where I work Europe has beautiful parks great green corridors you can immerse yourself in nature in most European cities but if you go to places like Manila I work

[00:36:23] a lot in the city of Manila in Phnom Penh where I'm currently speaking to you from it's impossible to access nature and that doesn't necessarily make young people want to sustain what we have but just circling back it's really important that when we think of sustainability we have to check all these boxes simultaneously I love that Conrad

[00:36:53] thanks and I think it's like you're pointing on to something there about the ripple effects of the work that we do in terms of there's the stuff around carbon and materials that is very easy to measure but then there's this whole other world of lifestyle and happiness and well-being and nature connection that is very difficult to measure but has ripple effects in terms

[00:37:32] backgrounds I got into sustainability from looking at mental health design and university which then led me down a materials rabbit hole which then led to going learning to build with hemp crete which then led to going to the French chalet which then I got very material focused and

[00:38:04] I

[00:38:33] I healthcare system every single year and they don't do anything about it that's it's so lots of the work I do shows that trajectory of my own learning so it went from climate literacy to agency and entanglement so looking at personal ability to affect change to apply learning but entanglement was entanglement within the political landscape and the politically possible that we currently reside within so late

[00:39:03] to end stage capitalism it then moved on to looking at spatial justice so the disparity and outcomes between people on a race and a class basis and looking at the reality of sacrifice zones that our economic system would not function without

[00:39:32] ever

[00:42:04] trofet reimagined and trofet reimagined across the UK asking what if the climate transition of our home streets and neighborhoods were designed owned and governed by the people that live there and the responses you got from people were incredible because this is something that most people are

[00:42:34] on a very quiet level we have a great deal of social license that we do not utilize to invite people to imagine the future differently enough and that's what when I have a part of my work when working with clients is we offer to teach offer to explain with was doing some consultation work on civic square public square demonstrator and archetype took them to the entopia building so we took them to an interfit level retrofit of a telephone exchange which is an

[00:43:04] exemplar in the circular economy raising materials but we took them to the enterprise center to see and touch and feel regenerative materials on a scale they had never seen before and we got lots of power through and I'll also cite reference for this in 2018 I hosted an event on materials and Sam Foster spoke about taking clients to buildings built from different materials so they could experience

[00:43:34] them and engage with them in a very personal way so thank you Sam you're getting credit six years later for me pushing for tours to buildings so people can experience this because we've got lots of agency and strategies and power I find lots of my work in moving things as much as fact driven if I do an embodied carbon study I give

[00:44:04] them their number but I show one of our buildings that outperforms it as an invitation to say what we've done is good we can do better and we know how to would you like to so that's my way of know everything there is to

[00:44:33] know and none of us have the correct answer to any of these questions and so I think I would love for people to come into sustainability with a bit of

[00:45:31] I that often times the technical engineering is the easy part of the project it's the social engineering that's extremely challenging and context specific and culture specific so similar sentiment I

[00:46:04] got a few from audience members who couldn't attend but wanted to send in some questions ahead of time I've got actually a question here about regenerative design which is what are the common objections to regenerative design that you typically receive and how do you deal with them Scott you have regenerative in your job title so I think a

[00:46:34] risk of regenerative becoming a bit of a green wash term but it's so to build straight away is that regenerative design outcomes approaches they're very place based so they have to be every single one is place specific as in it's impossible to have a circular economy without that being plural and it's scaling down as well but in terms of objections I've been quite fortunate that since this got put in my job title no one has kicked up any fuss people are very curious what exactly

[00:47:04] do you

[00:47:56] It wasn't being designed or marketed or asked for by that client as regenerative. So one example was a visitor centre for the Welsh Forestry Commission was the first use of Welsh rich apple, so mass timber. And again, that's an incredibly regenerative choice to decide we want to build an extension to a visitor centre from local low grade wood in such a way that it's being doubled together that we can use a incredibly low carbon way of building.

[00:48:23] That's regenerative. That's very thoughtful. It's place based. It was driving. It wasn't creating local jobs. But again, that wasn't in the lexicon. So it's lots of it as the we're now saying regenerative without describing what it actually is to people. And I'm not going to point fingers or cite book titles. But if we keep on talking about regenerative design and just very much specifying the same small examples,

[00:48:52] if we if we talk about donut economics without talking about how do we get there? What exactly is it? How do we relate it to people's lives at their scale? We need to. That's the educational piece. And again, it's not like not everyone's next. Not everyone's an expert in sustainability. As soon as you say regenerative, people don't quite know what it is. And everyone has their own imaginary of what that means. Regenerative to me is place based, compassionate and rooted in care.

[00:49:19] So that's why that's what it is. It does more good than it does harm. I can simplify it right down. But when I ask someone else, they might say high energy performance. It might be built from natural materials first and foremost, whereas it's all place specific. It's very, very much that. But I would say that it's the we're talking in a new literacy, a new language without giving people time to catch up.

[00:49:44] And if we're going to say we want to do regenerative outcomes, we need to speak with our clients about what that means, what that brings to them, what that means in terms of stewardship, what it's in terms of changing our time frames. So an embodied carbonist study looks at 60 years. We need to be looking at 200 years minimum on a new building. So we're in the middle of this huge shift in transition. And to enable these outcomes, we need to bring people with us in a way that's sharing that knowledge and understanding.

[00:50:13] So we need to be giving people a foundational knowledge of what that is. That's probably the blocker at the moment. Not for all of it. There's political problems I could go into for three to four hours. But it's that's a big gap. There's a big imagination gap of what is possible and what does this mean? Yeah, that makes sense to me. Laura Conrad, anything you want to add on to that? Yeah, I was just finding my unmute.

[00:50:41] Yeah, I can. I agree with everything Scott said there. I think there is a risk that it becomes more another form of greenwashing if we're not clear about how we're defining it. And I think there was another question in advance of this session about terminologies and definitions and things. And I think it is it's a really important thing to to address. But I think with the regenerative, I find like Scott used the word stewardship.

[00:51:07] And I think just being good ancestors, good custodians, that's how I see it and co-evolving with nature rather than using it, seeing just seeing it as a resource. And I think talking in that kind of language is it regardless of whether or not you use the word regenerative. I think people can get it. People get get being a good ancestor and thinking about future generations. And it is that long term thinking. And I think we're in a privileged position at Purcell that we deal with.

[00:51:35] We're constantly surrounded by buildings that are hundreds and hundreds, sometimes a thousand years old. So there's already a kind of mindset as to how you can think about buildings in a longer term. But I think that that's the biggest barrier, that default of 60 years for a design life is just wild when you think about it, because, you know, hopefully we all reach past 60 years. You want your building to outlive all of us, surely.

[00:52:01] But I think in terms of the common objections, going back to the original question, I think is probably worth touching on costs, because that is probably the biggest objection to any sort of sustainable measures or anything. And it is unfortunately still seen as quite a big barrier. And I think, again, it just comes back to how you frame the terms around cost and around value and not just defining capital costs,

[00:52:29] but looking at what the long term costs or the anyway kind of anyway cost of repair and maintenance of buildings would be. And just taking a view that is much more like holistic rather than just focusing on this cost of like pounds per square metre upfront capital costs, which seems to be the kind of unfortunately just what is stuck in everybody's head.

[00:52:54] So I think there's definitely language is key and how you describe things. But that long term thinking as well and the interlinking of those, I think, is really important. Thank you, Laura. I'm going to move on to our final question. And I think I'll start with you, Laura, with this one, which is what gives you hope that things will change at scale, presumably change towards a more sustainable way of life?

[00:53:21] Yeah, it's a good one, this one, isn't it? Because I think I like my instant reaction, and I'm sure you guys probably felt the same way, like hope's quite a passive action, isn't it? You're kind of putting your faith in external factors that you yourself have no control over. So it's it's kind of it's like hoping for a white Christmas. You can't really control it. So you but, you know, you're hopeful. And I don't I'm not saying I don't have that.

[00:53:49] I'm just saying there's so many global factors and things that are happening that are taking us in entirely the wrong direction. It's very difficult to put my faith in the people that are in charge around the world to kind of really do anything radically different. But and I appreciate that that sounds very pessimistic, which I think is necessary to kind of confront sometimes.

[00:54:11] But actually, what it what I try and do is turn that what that feeling is into something that I am able to positively action in my own life. And and it kind of in a way, it makes me even more determined to ensure that like I am kind of doing things within my own life to be to have kind of positive impact. And that's essentially what's driven my career for the last four years. So I think there are there are definitely having said that there's things that I'm quite optimistic about.

[00:54:41] I think that the you know, just the things that you guys have all talked about, the things that you're all doing, all the different initiatives that are happening all over. This isn't like this isn't a niche subject anymore. It's complicated and it's growing, but it's not a niche like add on thing. It's something that everybody has got an awareness of whether they're doing anything about it or not.

[00:55:01] But I think we're certainly finding lots of clients are coming to us with a desire to decarbonize, to use less energy, to be, you know, because they're getting pressures from either like changes in legislation, changes from the building users and they're kind of the people that they're trying to satisfy. So I'm seeing that change and it's happening really rapidly.

[00:55:25] And I think things like I don't know if this is a very UK focused example, but things like the Marks and Spencer's demolition, proposed demolition, which has now been well, it has approval to be demolished. Despite that being quite a sad time because, you know, it was I really wanted the building to remain.

[00:55:49] But I think just the fact that it was a conversation that was had in public, in mainstream media, like I had my family WhatsApp group going, oh, my God, this is a disgrace. And none of them are architects. None of them work in the built environment, but they kind of care about the subject. And so I think just people understanding the impact of the built environment on the climate is that that is growing and hopefully it's growing in the right direction. And that that is my reason to be optimistic.

[00:56:19] That is awesome. Thank you. I'm going to pass over to Conrad. Yeah, maybe I can zoom out with more of a global outlook on this. And yeah, we essentially have three choices. And I've probably said this before, but we can mitigate, we can adapt or we can suffer. And the more mitigation we do, the less we need to adapt.

[00:56:48] And thus the amount of suffering is reduced, which is certainly important. And mitigation for a long time was the primary focus of the United Nations and all their affiliates. But now it's increasingly becoming adaptation.

[00:57:11] Huge funds are now being mobilized more for adaptation than for mitigation for obvious reasons. And so in this context, it's hard to be hopeful. It really feels like we're slipping. But there are major trends and many interesting things happening, both in mature economies and emerging economies. I've been away from Europe for a long time, but you look at a city like Paris. It became very cycle friendly from 2020 onwards.

[00:57:40] And it's inspired a lot of work in cities in Southeast Asia. You look at cities in the emerging economies. You have Dakar in Senegal. They launched the first electric BRT. So many interesting things are happening. And there's several things that give me hope, although my thinking is not well formed around this. We spoke about growth and degrowth. But you look at many mature economies demographically.

[00:58:09] We are looking at population decline in many places. And that's equally problematic, especially in a growth-based system. But at the same time, this can also alleviate some of the more climatic related issues that we're facing.

[00:58:30] Then in the context of emerging cities, which is more the world I work in, where we have slightly over half the global population living. And in these economies, countries, cities, this is where much of the growth is going to happen. And as mentioned throughout our conversation, there's been huge technological advancements across the board,

[00:58:58] be it material sciences or how we manage and operate our cities. And I often say that having less today can mean having more tomorrow. It's not always bad for these emerging cities to not have all the technologies that have been used in the West. Because in the West or the mature economies, we're stuck with all this legacy infrastructure.

[00:59:24] Whereas here, we have more of a clean slate, a blank canvas to work with. And in a context of technological advancements, you can also apply, say, Moore's Law. So over time, processing power and capabilities is improving exponentially. And you also have Wright's Law. So the more we produce something, the cheaper it gets.

[00:59:49] So a lot of these emerging economies, they have access to really advanced technologies for a much lower cost. And that gives me a lot of hope. To take an example, let's take an unpopular example, road user charging, like the low emission zone in London, which is not popular for vehicle drivers, but it's a great way to curb congestion,

[01:00:13] to cross-finance good public transport, to promote more transit-oriented development, sustainable urban mobility. Very important things. This concept, road user charging, doing it in an automated way, like the low emission zone, began in Singapore. They have electronic road pricing. Same approach. You have gantries. Your vehicle drives over. It deducts money from an e-wallet. And creating a system like that requires a tremendous amount of hardware.

[01:00:42] Putting all the gantries with all the very sophisticated cameras, radars, sensors, etc., linking that back to a control system, costs in the hundreds of millions of euros, dollars, pounds, etc. But in this day and age, we can develop the same capabilities with a fraction of the hardware. And if we look at Singapore, who has pioneered this electronic road user charging,

[01:01:09] they are now migrating from this very hardware-heavy gantry-based approach to using floating car data. So all our vehicles are so much more than vehicles now. They're connected to infrastructure and satellites. They generate geolocation data. So now instead of when you drive through a gantry, a satellite already knows where you are and you can develop new pricing models and still have the same capabilities without all the hardware and instead focusing more on software.

[01:01:38] And oftentimes lines of code can be much cheaper than installing all of this hardware. And I really see the emerging economies embracing all of these new solutions, not investing heavily in all this very expensive hardware-heavy type of technologies. And that gives me a lot of hope. And then also just working in this space, I see a lot of young governments emerging,

[01:02:04] a lot of very young talent who do and have been exposed to these sustainability concepts and strategies that we speak of, which gives me a tremendous amount of hope. And I also see huge funds being made available by the different institutions, be it the UN, the multilateral development banks.

[01:02:26] And anyone can develop proposals, sustainability proposals, to gain access to these funds. And a lot of people are doing that. There's so much money available. It's just... And these institutions, they don't always know how to best spend this money. They need cities to come to them and explain, we want this and we need this amount of money. And there's a gap there that needs to be filled.

[01:02:52] But there's a lot of projects, programs and individuals who are learning how to fill these gaps, how to develop these proposals to access these funds. And give it a few years and I really think we can accelerate the pace at which we adapt and hopefully mitigate. That's awesome. Thanks, Conrad. I think one of the fascinating things of having a conversation like this from UK, Europe through to Southeast Asia

[01:03:22] is just the contexts are so different and the kind of things that we're working on and the kind of, we'll say, solutions or responses end up being so different. But yeah, it's just absolutely fascinating. Scott, I'll hand over to you for the last word on this tough question. I think to kind of open this one, there's a really beautiful quote of Rebecca Solnitz that hope isn't actually break down doors with an emergency. It's not a kind of passive, we sit on it and we hope... It's not a verb, but it's a we hope that people do something.

[01:03:52] It's we actively practice and practicing with others and cultivating hope. Because personally, the reason I founded Impropercent Architecture School was I graduated in the wake of 2018's IPCC report. So I was watching an industry be told, you have 12 years to have half global carbon emissions. And my course continues as if that hadn't happened. And the industry continued as if that hadn't happened.

[01:04:17] So for me, lots of the work I started came from this place of outrage and disbelief, but also compassion, because I care a lot. I care loudly and openly. It's part of my job now. But it's very much the... Where we are is such a moment of flux geopolitically, climate-wise. We're seeing wildfires in Los Angeles that are eerily coinciding with the Parable of the Soar's predictions of 2024, Octavia Butler's piece of speculative fiction.

[01:04:48] But I'm going to give stories at different scales for hope, because I think those might help a little bit. There is what we're seeing possible at the grassroots. So outside of the built environment, there are groups and organisations. There was the people's... The Tory Assembly in Aberdeen. Amazing initiative. Entirely grassroots-led. They had a people's assembly on what do they want their future to look like? How would they like their homes to be retrofitted? What are the spaces they want to leave to the next generations?

[01:05:17] And when they read their declaration at Retrofit Reimagined in Glasgow, there was not a dry eye in the room. I'm really gutted we didn't recall it. It was incredibly powerful. But that was entirely grassroots-led, and they arrived at our built environment as a space of opportunity to realise a better future. So that's very grassroots. There's also the work of We Can Make in Bristol. There's Civic Square. There are three degrees neighbourhoods work with Dark Matter Labs.

[01:05:43] Looking at the kind of things we need to be doing today to repair neighbourhoods for our future, at the worst case, at the level of climate change we are currently looking at. But what really gives me hope are these ready grassroots, outside of your traditional built environment. There's an incredible organisation in Glasgow called the Galgail Trust. And Scottish Histories of Resistance organised a traditional Scots landsmoot.

[01:06:07] So we had a gathering of individuals and organisations who were passionate about land, about our histories, about community-owned assets and buildings and futures. And it was two incredible days of the most energy I've felt in six years. And it was just everyone was bringing their own piece of, this is what I'm doing and what I'm interested in. But we began in our history. So we looked at the past of what's happened in Scotland over the past hundreds of years.

[01:06:36] And things like rent controls were being pretty much organised for by crofters in the 1700s. So we're told rent controls are an impossibility in our political imaginary. Scotland smashed it 300 years ago before we got the Highland Clearances. So there's like our histories have so much richness to learn from as well that we can be looking back to be looking forward. Like the Civic Square example of the neighbourhood GP. That started out incredibly small.

[01:07:04] It was in the form of kind of collectivised community-owned assets in Wales and then became the national health infrastructure we see today. And in terms of infrastructurally, in Scotland, we have the Scottish Futures Trust, which looks at infrastructural funding. And we've had transformational funding models on schools where they have an energy use intensity target they have to demonstrate to guarantee 25 years of funding. And through the development of that, which Archetype contributed some of the expertise to as well,

[01:07:34] it's radically changed the building performance of new school buildings. So Riverside Primary School is a building completed by Archetype. We've just looked at the first years of POE data, and it is mind-blowing what we are now capable of in terms of delivering high-performance buildings. If we built schools like this, we could be reducing the size of the substation infrastructure nationally. That's possible today. And it's incredible.

[01:08:01] The scale of what we can do today is so great, is so huge. But we haven't yet. If that was to be fully grasped by the public, that actually your children could be going to a school where so much more money can be spent on their education because we built it properly. That's a massive overnight shift. So that's an incredible one. Scottish Futures Trust, thoroughly encourage you to have a look at that. There's also the Scottish Passive House equivalent that's been pushed for and mobilised for, which would basically mean that for people who, instead of going into Passive House too heavily,

[01:08:31] I'll make it incredibly concise, in terms of heating demand, we'd be looking at increasing the heating demand, reducing it by between five and six times for every new built home in Scotland from that being implemented. That's what a Passive House equivalent would do to our energy demand at national scale for new housing. It would also, because of this sort of thing coming in, there's so much demand for training in Scotland for contractors. They want to be upscaling in Passive House. They want to be using new materials. They're realising retrofit's going to be a bigger thing.

[01:08:58] We are seeing a mobilisation in training and upskilling that's easily replicable across the UK. Just look up north. We're a real country. We're not just a region. And we are doing incredible things. And I'm incredibly proud to be from here as well. But to ground that hope in your working everyday life and working in a built environment, I don't like the concept of the carbon footprint because it was invented by BP to distract from the fact they trashed the planet along with our big oil. But if we look at the carbon footprint

[01:09:27] of your average UK citizen, according to the architects to declare, practice guy, it's about 12 tonnes of carbon. The average large projects that you work on in a built environment is about 2,500 tonnes. So you've got this massive possibility window of about 196 times greater. So you could reduce more carbon in one building than living for 196 years. And I open every presentation with clients about this, with architects, with students, and say the agency you have

[01:09:56] in working on a built environment, on the choices you make, they are so much bigger than anything that you've been told as the only contribution that you can make to reducing the impact of climate change. And that's an invitation to everybody who works in a built environment, whether you are installing windows, whether you're an airtightness champion on site, whether you're laying bricks, whether you're designing M&E systems, you have a hand

[01:10:23] in a 196 times bigger window than your life, every large project you work on. And that's huge. And that's amazing. And I am gutted that we weren't being taught this sort of thing when I was in uni, or I might have done something a bit differently along my haphazard trajectory of career-wise. But that's the scale of agency you have in the built environment every day you go to work. And that's the, by combining that with the having conversations, with things like unionization

[01:10:53] for better pay and better collective bargaining, with newer regulations coming in, and they aren't fast enough, but we might get there eventually, fingers crossed. But it's the capability of what we can do, the possible, is so great. It could be so compassionate. It could be delightful. It's not utopian for me to say to someone, we can design you a home with minimal energy bills that's healthy for your children, that has an,

[01:11:22] that you will not get mold in, and asthma, because we are going to detail it in such a way that it's going to be prepared for future rainstorms. And we can design it in such a way that you can have a connection with your neighbors, that your great-grandparents used to talk about the connections with their neighbors in tenement halls, in terrace streets. That's all possible. That's not utopian. That's me just saying, if you let me design this well, well, we can realize a better future. And that's possible in the built environment. We've got this,

[01:11:52] the infrastructure of what we have is so huge. And I think to kind of wrap it up as well with a bit of an impetus and a bit of an invitation and challenge, if you look at the design life of concrete, you're talking about 100 years maximum. This will make sense eventually, don't you know? So all of the post-war infrastructure we built in the 40s and 50s is hitting the end of its design life. Not design life, but its physical capability of standing up. In Glasgow, we were seeing motorways and expressways

[01:12:22] being held up with steel gantries as they decide hopefully what to do with them. We're at a time where a transition of that infrastructure is inevitable. It is going to happen. It has to happen. What type of transition do we imagine for it with what we are capable of doing, with the types of futures that we have the ability to create? So instead of looking at this as an, oh no, everything's falling down, it's the, what do we use it for next?

[01:12:51] What does that, what is the next life of that material and what do we replace it with? Because are the energy grids going to have to be upgraded at some point? And if we coincide better building performance with upgrading the energy grid, simple math tells you you don't have to rebuild the same size of infrastructure. And if we phase out fossil fuels about between a third and a half of all fossil fuels are used to move fossil fuels around the planet. If we phase them out,

[01:13:20] we don't have this massive demand. So it's the, it's combining what we are capable of in synergistic ways that take care of people, that give them agency, that give them governance over how they are deployed. Because a just transition is a consensual transition. It is not something that we decide from top down. Because in the UK, we've seen an unjust transition before. We've seen it in kind of mining, we've seen it in shipbuilding, we've seen it in steelworks very recently.

[01:13:50] But what also gives me huge, huge hope as well is looking at what's happening in regenerative agriculture and what's being done around land use and what's being done about kind of people-powered governance. We are capable of all these imaginative things that don't always need hardware. that can be changing in processes, changing in how we steward and living it and kind of throwing away that mythology that we are disconnected from nature because we are absolutely not. The mind is also not disconnected from the body.

[01:14:19] I'll bust that myth at the same time. But we are capable of realising a future that's beyond irresistible to any client you speak with if you understand where they're coming from and how you align those outcomes with their own visions and goals. But yeah, that's for me. That's the yes, I have climate anxiety. Yes, I have spells of despair and dread. But when I step back and think about what we are capable of

[01:14:47] if we initiate just transitions that are place-based and local that put taking care of people at the centre what we could be giving to people today and to generation after generation after generation could be sensational. Could be amazing. Beyond any sci-fi you've ever imagined and I'll leave it there because again I could go on for a while it's one of my favourite topics. Thank you Scott and thank you all for those responses. I would love to just keep talking about this

[01:15:17] but I want to be respectful of your time we've gone over an hour here so I will wrap things up. Thanks to Conrad, Laura, Scott for joining for those really insightful perspectives. I'm going to look forward to listening back to this at some point. I think I'm going to have to think about my own what gives me hope and I might do a separate episode on that because I have a couple of things in mind that I think is worth sharing and it's worth sort of not only talking

[01:15:46] about problems but also talking about what's going right and focusing on that as well as much for our mental health as for anything else. Great. For those of you listening if you have enjoyed the past 100 episodes of the Green Urbanist podcast and you'd like to see it keep going the best thing you can do really is share it with a friend or a colleague who you think will enjoy it that really helps just to like spread the word get more people listening it really really helps and feel free

[01:16:16] to send me a message there's a link on my website contact form that you can fill out and email me I love to hear from listeners and hear what you're working on what you'd like to learn more about in the future and yeah good luck for 2025 and I'll see you next time thanks everyone I hope you enjoyed that episode and you've been learning a lot from the Green Urbanist podcast if you're at the start of your sustainability journey and you want to kickstart your learning

[01:16:45] and figure out how to take climate action in your work I definitely recommend checking out my online course which is called Sustainability Essentials for Built Environment Professionals it's a self-paced online course with video lessons and advice for integrating sustainability into your work the link to the course is in the episode description do check it out and consider enrolling