The Necessary Interlinking of Culture and Climate Change

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• The Necessary Interlinking of Culture and Climate Change
• Hector Abrahams (bio)

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Dixon Street drawing—Elevational collage highlighting Kwong War Chong’s cultural significance. By Maddie Gallagher and John Suh.

Contrary to public perception, Sydney’s population is composed mainly of immigrants: more than 35 percent of current Sydneysiders were born outside Australia. This diverse migrant majority has been increasing for at least five decades. Previously, Sydney was dominated by European migrants and, before that, British migrants for fifteen decades. Prior to the invasion, Sydney remained the place of indigenous culture for the last 47,000 years. The climate of Sydney is benignly coastal temperate. Since both climate and culture are changing, in what ways are they relevant to each other? Is it better to try to respond to climate by also responding to culture, rather than as a standalone imperative? This commentary attempts to address this through a close reading of student projects that generated responses to climate change in places of accepted cultural significance.

In 2022, Jennifer Ferng devised a Master of Architecture studio brief called Critical Carbon, focusing on carbon and energy with the premise that an effective response to climate change is interlinked with culture. This approach is not normal in Australia, where response to climate is a practical problem of environmental engineering, which has not led to the uptake of solutions that are to hand. As an architect specializing in the cultural approach to the environment, I led the students through two of my completed projects at the start of the semester and returned for final reviews to offer commentary on their design propositions and thinking.

Seven schemes are discussed in three sections, each representing diverse cultural response strategies. They offer creative solutions for heritage places located close to the most dense and populous part of this landscape dominated city environment. The studio brief directed postgraduate students to choose their own sites from any of the buildings listed on the New South Wales (NSW) State Heritage Register—these structures ranged anywhere from local neighborhood landmarks in areas like Chinatown, industrial sites, maritime dockyards, and cultural artifacts such as dams and fortresses that exceed the scale of a single building. All of these sites are under special protection, preventing demolition on the basis of the cultural importance attributed to them. The 1979 Planning Legislation terms them “Items of Environmental Heritage.”¹ At the same time as this planning protection, a specific language and set of [End Page 93] principles for guiding change (known as the Burra Charter) was developed as well.² The students were asked to investigate the terminology of the Burra Charter and highlight which concepts in the charter could be revised for contemporary practice.

This part of the design brief was of particular interest because it suggests that codified in the Burra Charter language is an attitude to change for special places that is somehow obstructive or not relevant. Do we have certain solutions in mind? Is it not the case that language is used so differently now? Today, we are much more informal, more vague, more emotive, and architects do not use precise language for the process of building or the parts of a building.

Students were required to account for the presence of carbon and embodied/operational energy in each of the heritage buildings—skills not common in Australia but taught thoroughly in this course. Unlike the United States, where the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system accounts for embodied carbon, Australian carbon accounting is yet to be acknowledged as embodied energy within heritage protected or any other types of buildings.³ Heritage buildings, which are obliged by their preservation status to retain or detain lots of carbon, are likely early candidates for achieving carbon goals when full accounting is done.

This brings us to the point about culture. Since heritage sites are important to culture, and have an advantage in responding to climate, what moves matter and is the result valuable?

Maddie Gallagher and John Suh presented a scheme for Dixon Street (Figure 1), a late nineteenth-century location in the historic Chinese district. About twenty years ago, it...