Cooling the Commons Pilot Study

This pilot study provides initial insights into how residents living in Western Sydney keep cool during the hottest parts of the year and how they would like to see their living environments, at home and out and about, modified to improve wellbeing in a climate changing world. The research responds to the lack of qualitative information about: day to day living practices in outer suburban Sydney; the constraints people experience when trying to keep cool; and, people’s aspirations for more comfortable living environments.

The study reviewed factors that combine to produce urban heating in Sydney’s rapidly developing urban fringe and the key social and environmental issues that researchers have identified as important. These include the health effects of periods of extreme heat and the loss of shading and cooling effects as the tree canopy is further degraded. Our research highlighted the dearth of information about how residents move around in space and interact with the physical environment and in turn how the changing built environment on the urban fringe is shaping new forms of individual and social behaviour.

The pilot research was designed to observe and listen for social and collective practices and adaptations to environmental stress, as well as individual ones. To this end we employed the concept of the ‘cool commons’ to identify those spaces that offer cooler temperatures than surrounding areas and that are used by, and are accessible to, a community of commoners who to some degree, care for, take responsibility for, and benefit from this coolness. Our working hypothesis was that if we can identify effective and environmentally resilient ways that communities are already keeping cool, urban design and public policy might be better placed to support this grassroots adaptation and experimentation.

Cooling the Commons conducted focus group discussions with a range of residents across hotspots in Western Sydney, in particular Penrith, Cranebrook and St Marys. Previous research commissioned by Penrith City Council had highlighted these hotspots where land surface temperatures often exceed 45 degrees Celsius in summer months and where low-income households are concentrated.

The report finds that older people employ a range of creative practices in their largely un-airconditioned homes to cool down, while younger people and those with disabilities resort to curtailing their physical activity. There is a high degree of appreciation of the residual cool commons, that is, those cool spaces that are a legacy of past actions of tree planting or restrictions on river shore occupation, or of past skills and practices of cooling that may or may not have been maintained by current generations.

A further finding is that people are drawn to the transgressive cool commons that have been produced by acts that are illegal, unconventional or not condoned, such as occupying ‘private’ air-conditioned spaces for extended periods of time (in shopping centres, fast-food outlets or community centres) or use of water features for play.

The most important finding, and the one that could guide future action research, is that there is a strong aspiration for cool commons, that is, for what people would like to see as constituting a cool commons in their environments. In our data, aspirational commons were linked to the provision of basic cooling amenities (shade, shelter, water) coupled with the provision of paths and walkways. They were also linked to improved access to water play, parks and pools.

Our findings show that shade, shelter and water commons are desired for a cool future city. Built and social interventions are needed to promote urban green space and encourage its use. However it is not a case of ‘build it and they will come’ or ‘regulate and they will behave’. Normative social practices that have grown up around current conditions, such as children playing indoors for large parts of the day, will be difficult to budge, and require action in relation to both the built and social environment on an ongoing basis. It is critical for the communities directly affected to design such interventions – such is the nature of a commons. We found participants were interested in volunteering ideas for a future cool city. There is potential to expand this in a meaningful way by taking a collaborative design approach to further research.

Climate Risk, Climate Ready!

Summer in Australia is getting hotter. Extreme heat events, with daytime temperatures over 35 degrees Celsius, are becoming more common and we are getting more of these days in a row.

We all need to prepare ourselves, our homes and our neighbourhoods for hot and very hot days. Since 2016, the Cooling the Commons research project has been working with people living in some of Sydney’s hottest neighbourhoods to learn how they cope with heat.

Discussion groups with residents across hotspots in Western Sydney, including Penrith, Cranebrook and St Marys, highlighted a wealth of things we can do to manage heat. We published some of the following tips in a recent brochure…

Cooling Common Spaces in Densifying Urban Environments

Landcom’s mission is to create more affordable and sustainable communities that demonstrate global standards of liveability, resilience, inclusion, affordability and environmental quality, including in Western Sydney, where the urban heat island effect is adversely affecting liveability. Funded by the Landcom Roundtable and aligned with Landcom’s Sustainable Places Strategy, this research aims to support Landcom and its stakeholders, as well as any developers, in making planning and design decisions that recognise this influence.

Planning and developing healthy and inclusive neighbourhoods to accommodate rapid population growth is critically important. However, new environmental and social conditions demand innovation in planning and design processes, and new sensitivities in relation to what people want and need from their neighbourhoods in the much warmer Sydney of the future. While climate-controlled environments are an important part of the picture, the challenge is to design shared urban environments that facilitate comfortable mobility and sociality. From our perspective, these qualities are what make living in a city worthwhile.

Learning from international examples of what has worked well in practice, we identify key design patterns that improve how communities can live in a hot city. Our context is the commons – those spaces, practices, resources and knowledges shared by a community, and that a community depends on for a sense of cohesiveness and well-being. It is on the quality of the commons that perceptions of liveability across environmental quality, social connectedness, accessibility and safety, often stand or fall.

Designing with an intergenerational mindset requires those with a shared stake in maintaining healthy and inclusive neighbourhoods to have a sense of extended responsibility for design decisions, which continue to resonate past the point of occupancy. Our research identifies patterns at the planning, delivery and post-occupancy (or lived in) stages of a development, which outline material and social strategies that are required for optimum liveability. These patterns expose and support aspects of community life that are compromised by increasing urban heat and the retreat into private air conditioned environments, which is rapidly becoming a design and social norm.

Patterns for cool commons are not discreet but are a result of interactions between the natural and built environment and rhythms of social life that recur over time. A wide, shaded walk-way furnished with seating and water stations and connecting residential environments to public transport networks or shops, affords walkability and sociality for diverse members of the community. However, since a pattern such as “Shaded Pedestrian Linkage” is distributed across space and time, as it is activated by pedestrians, it is not “owned” or cared for by a single entity. We claim the commons should be the focus of strategies for cooling the city but, as the historic commons economist Elinor Ostrom describes, they require protection and maintenance on an intergenerational basis.

This research takes up the challenge of promoting a new approach to thinking about urban liveability in warming cities, with two principles at its core. First, asking how open space can be planned for “coolth” defined as the experience of feeling manageably comfortable in a hot city; and second, how coolth can be connected with sociality.

This research has two outputs. The first, this Report, contains background material and an Appendix of the presentations and workshops held over the course of this project, which made up our methodology. This Report underpins and informs the second and key output, the Cooling the Commons Pattern Deck available on the Cooling the Commons website. The deck is conceived as a prototype decision-making resource for planners, developers, community liaison officers, council workers and the communities they serve. It is envisaged that the pattern deck will be “resonance tested” with stakeholder groups facilitated by the research team, with feedback from these groups incorporated into the patterns on an ongoing basis. While currently in a prototype form, we argue that the pattern deck represents the sorts of strategies and resources now needed to ensure liveability in new and renewing neighbourhoods in Greater Western Sydney, into the future.