Participants agreed that the aim of the program would be spread the adoption of sustainability behaviour by developing the capacity of communities to engage in sustainability actions. Part of this would be to optimise the use of the energy and water education trails and the Permaculture Interpretive Garden at the Sustainability Hub and to use the Hub as a base. The idea of making the Hub a ‘third place’ where people can come each month and where community organisations can self-organise events was well received (third place is a term used to describe places that are easy of access and cheap to visit and where people can gather to socialise and to hatch good ideas. The concept of third place is based on time spent at a place, with the ‘first place’ being the household and the ‘second place’ the workplace).

Other ideas were to use the Hub as a base for the Living Smarties, the graduates of Randwick Council’s Living Smart course, for training facilitators and for ‘recharge’ activities for both Living Smarties and others working in collaborative change for sustainability in the Eastern Suburbs.

Participants who attended last year’s community leaders’ course at the Sustainability Hub spoke highly of the event and were in favour of a re-run. The course, which Fiona organised, was led by the professional facilitation consultants, Unfolding Futures. It introduced participants to group facilitation and direction-setting techniques and ideas.

Graeme described the outreach program as making use of the pebble-in-water effect, an analogy to the act of throwing a pebble thrown into a pond and watching the ripples expand outward as surges of energy. In the same way, the influence of participants in the outreach program would ripple out into society.

According to Greame, the outreach program would be best implemenrted as two complementary prongs—the delivery of activities such as events, resources, site tours and more—and a capacity building prong that built the knowledge and skills of participants. Peer-to-peer education would make a large part of this, with participants teaching others the skills they possess as part of a ‘sustainability skilling up’ process.

Through a content identification, sorting and calendaring process, a timeline was mapped out. This will form the focus of a meeting in a couple weeks.

In Randwick, a humble and environmentally inefficient community centre has been turned into an innovative sustainability hub—a learning and demonstration centre imagined around the sustainable use of our water, energy and food.

The wind turbine sells energy to the grid and forms part of the Sustainability Education Hub's Energy Trail

You know when you are approaching the Randwick Sustainability Hub-the tall wind turbine spinning in the breeze is seen well before the buildings of the Hub. But it’s not until you go inside that you notice the simple innovations designed for householders to copy to make their homes more energy and water efficient.

That’s the idea of the Hub-to demonstrate simple technologies, most available commercially, that householders can employ rather than costly, hi-tech solutions that need lots of maintenance and lots of money to buy. It answers the question you sometimes hear about why going sustainable at home involves buying so much new stuff and spending so much money. It’s really an updated addition of the idea of appropriate technology that EF Schumacher (look him up in Wikipedia) developed way back in the 1960s… technology intermediate between traditional technology and hi-tech and that is cheaper to acquire, easy to maintain and operate.

As you approach the buildings of the Randwick Community Centre-the Hub is what Randwick Council have named their sustainability makeover of the Community Centre-notice the moveable louvres on the outside of the west-facing windows. These block summer’s hot afternoon sun. Putting the shading device on the outside of the windows is far more effective than putting blinds on the inside in an attempt to block hot afternoon light that has already come into the room.

Inside, what were a dark hallway and dark kitchen are now flooded with diffuse light thanks to the installation of skylights. Nature’s bright light now replaces the flicker of flourescents.

The doors of the kitchenette feature educational displays for use by adults and visiting school groups. This one demonstrates the volume of 'virtual' water embodied in the production of different foods.

What has been a cavernous and cold hall in winter is now warmed by a gas heater, reducing the Centre’s use of coal fired energy. Above, reversible ceiling fans push down the warm air during winter and cool summer days with their downdraft. Ceiling fans are a less energy intensive solution to cooling than air conditioning.

Tucked onto the far wall of the hall is a new kitchen hidden behind the warm glow of stained plywood doors. Open the doors to reveal a workbench of recycled hardwood, an energy efficient dishwasher and low-VOC (volatile organic compound) emission E-board. This efficient, modern kitchenette was designed by Terry Bail from the architecture practice Archology, that specializes in energy efficient design using sustainable materials.

Even the toilets in the building have had a makeover, you notice this in the combined hand basin/toilet cisterns that are filled from the big rainwater tank outside.

Water is the other resource that has received water consultant, John Caley’s attention. The sustainability makeover installed a range of rainwater tanks in a range of sizes and materials to demonstrate the different types to the visiting public. One large tank stores rainwater for toilet flushing, another stores water that irrigates the adjacent PIG-the Permaculture Interpretive Garden.

A 5000 litre water tank equipped with a tap raised so as to et a watering can below provides water for Sustainable Gardening course practical activities.

The PIG is an experiment in a new type of public open space. It combines public park, complete with BBQ, with educational facility. The raised gardens beds that currently have salad rocket going to seed spilling from them will be used as a learning facility by participants in Randwick Council’s Sustainable Gardening course and for peer-to-peer learning by people who have completed the course and wish to learn more as Council volunteers.

But the PIG is more than vegie garden. Designed and installed by Steve Batley’s Sydney Organic Gardens, there’s an orchard in the process of being planted out, a shelter designed to illustrate a common pattern in nature called the Fibonacci Series, almond trees, espaliered fruit trees to be planted soon, a soon-to-be compost demonstration system and a balcony garden illustrating what visitors can do on their apartment balcony or courtyard. A sustainability educator is presently designing a school visit learning program around the Sustainability Hub.

Surrounding the site on two sides is a remnant patch, 13 hectares in size, of Eastern Suburbs Banksia Scrub, the type of vegetation that covered the Eastern Suburbs prior to European settlement. There is little of this vegetation system remaining.

For a local government the Randwick Sustainability Hub is pretty adventurous stuff. Sure, there’s still work to do and planting out to be finished, however the gentle hum of the wind turbine reminds us that challenges can be met and that design thinking, innovation and taking a systems approach always beat the piecemeal and the disconnected.

Project manager for the Randwick Sustainability Hub is Randwick Council’s Sustainability Education Officer, Fiona Campbell.

More on the Randwick Sustainability Education Hub

Clarification: The author was a member of the steering committee for the Water Wise Trail section of the project.

The Sustainability Education Hub demonstrates simple energy technologies that householders can have installed. Skylights were installed in the dark corridor and kitchen.

Reversible ceiling fans were installed to improve the thermal performance of the Hub. The fans produce evaporative cooling in summer and in winter are reversed to push warm air back into the room.

Bathrooms are fitted with hand basin cisterns from which used hand washing water drain into the cistern for flushing.

Louvres on the building's western side are adjustable to all in sun in winter and exclude it in summer. Beside the louvres is a 5000 litre water storage that surge fills the large water tank that flushed the toilets.

The kitchenette is made of Australian hoop pine ply, recycled hardwood working surfaces and zero-VOC (volatile organic compound) melamine. A water efficient tap and dishwasher complements the sustainable materials.

A University of Technology Sydney, Institute of Sustainable Futures film crew produced a training film for plumbers during the water efficiency retrofit of the building.

Some of the design and construction crew - from left: Peter Maganov, council's sustainability manager; electrician, John Coulston; landscape architect Steve Batley (Sydney Organic Gardens); council's project manager Fiona Campbell; Matt, builder; Archology architect, Terry Bail.

You find Pedipods parked at Circular Quay where they are often hired by tourists. You might think of them as a hybrid between a bicycle and a compact car. In essence, the Pedapod is modeled on the recumbent bicycles with a double rear tandem seat and a light weight pod attached.

Given the snail’s pace of traffic through the city centre, being pedaled through the city streets is not such a slow proposition.

This is human-powerered transportation with a modern touch that meets the needs of short-distance, slow travel in a city of congested streets. Fritz Schumacher, the father of the appropriate technology idea, would have been proud of this innovative addition to the city’s streets.

Rating

INNOVATION/DESIGN THINKING: High.

An innovative solution to traffic congestion and carbon emissions from traffic.

SCALABILITY POTENTIAL: High.

REPLICABILITY: High. Technology exists. Needs entrepreneurial business approach and cooperative government.

For Manly Council, the answer was to seek corporate sponsorship and start its own mini-bus service ‚ the Hop Skip & Jump buses.

Supported by property developer Stockland, Council operates a number of small buses to a regular timetable to link Manly CBD with other local centres such as the Balgowlah and Seaforth shops and the swimming pool. The service has created employment for drivers, and best of all for Manly locals, it’s free to travel.

Manly Council's Hop Skip & Jump bus provides free services around the municipality.

Bicycling, too

It’s not unusual for Manly locals to cycle from home to catch the ferry to city workplaces and to do the return journey of evenings. But what to do with bicycles left all day in Manly?

Council responded to the need for secure, sheltered parking when it removed a number of car parking spaces in its Whistler Street carpark, which is near the ferry wharf, and built a caged, enclosed amd lockable bicycle part — Cycle Central.

It’s not a free service. Users pay a one-time $50 fee and receive a magnetic keycard that allows 24 hour use of the parking facility. Inside, bicycles can be locked to racks.

Cycle Central — Manly Council's secure bicycle parking facility in the Whistler Street carpark. A simple, effective solution to a community need.

Simple often effective

Simple initiative like the Hop Skip & Jump buses and Cycle Central are often the most effective of services that help people change their travel behaviour so that it contributes more to sustainability solutions.

Rating

INNOVATION/DESIGN THINKING: Medium.

A partial solution to carbon emission reduction, reducing traffic congestion and the need for personal movement around the local area.

SCALABILITY POTENTIAL: High.

REPLICABILITY: High. Existing technology. Just add imagination and motivation.

The unexpected takes the form of car parking reserved for cars owned by the car share scheme or for hybrid vehicles.

The idea is that of the local council. It wanted to do something proactive to encourage use of the car share and to encourage new car buyers to invest in a fuel,efficient hybrid vehicle.

Sure, it’s a small gesture but it is one that can easily be taken by councils.

Randwick City Council has set aside parking reserved for car co-op and hybrid vehicles at locations throughout tits area.

Other councils encourage car share schemes by setting aside reserved parking whene members can pick up and leave the vehicles.

Co-op cars parked in a local government parking station in Sydney.

Rating

INNOVATION/DESIGN THINKING: High.

A partial solution to traffic congestion, carbon emission and personal mobility.

SCALABILITY POTENTIAL: High.

REPLICABILITY: High.

The booklet carries the rather intriguing title of A Good Home Forever. It proposes that we respond to economic downturn and the crisis in sustainability by taking control of our lives and by examining what it is that we want in a home.

Rosemary describes conventional homes as ‘consumer junkies’ gulping down resources and producing only wastes. Yet, Rosemary’s solution isn’t to go out and commission an architect to design a state of the art energy efficient house such as we see in those ‘green’ magazines aimed at the well-off. Not all that many can afford to do that.

Rosemary suggests converting — retrofitting, in the jargon — an existing house to make it energy, water and materials efficient. It is the reality that it is the retrofitting of existing housing stock that will make our cities energy and resource efficient.

Rosemary Morrow

A book based on personal experience

This is the theme of her booklet — the retrofitting of a brick veneer, suburban house. Brick (and alumimium window frames and galvanised iron roof), because it is a low-maintenance material. Brick veneer so that Rosemary could easily remove interior walls to open up the place and so that her slow combustion wood stove could warm the interior during Katoomba’s chilly (let’s be honest here and say freezing) winters. Reading this, I was reminded of something that Jude Fanton from the Seed Savers Network said about buying a house in Byron Bay. Brick veneer, she told me, is the best buy because such houses work well in the subtropical climate. This leads to the question as to whether the much-derided brick veneer is the housing style for all climates.

Rosemary’s booklet is not simply about a retrofit to adapt her home to the seasonal variability of climate in Katoomba, high in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. Embedded in it is a philosophy of life, such as assessing whether you move to more affordable premises or stay where you are, and making choices and setting criteria.

Not all that many years ago, Rosemary moved from a larger property at Blackheath, further up the mountains, to her present home in nearby Katoomba. In doing so she made the choices about the criteria for sustainable urban living that her book focuses on:

• solar access (the house faces the north, to sunward, affording access to solar energy)
• energy autonomy
• water sustainability
• proximity to services — Rosemary can walk to the train station, and she is close to amenities.

There was also the criteria of financial sustainability because she didn’t want her money tied up in a mortgage. As Rosemary says, by moving to a lower priced home you might be able to free yourself from financial anxiety in these economically troubled times, or at least set yourself on the path to doing that.

There’s a lot to learn about site analysis in her booklet and there are several site design plans. She covers the permaculture concept of designing by zones according to the frequency of access needed, energy principles derived from the permaculture design system and harvesting and storing rainwater. She even lists costs and offers a checklist to think about your home.

May I suggest that this would be useful reading for people reconsidering how they live?

It is, in essence, an ideas book and it carries that critical, analytical and self-assessing attitude that is embedded in the permaculture design system, of which Rosemary is a noted educator and exponent.

A site design plans showing the zoning of landuse areas.

CD useful to educators

The book has an accompanying CD with a 20 minute or so video of Rosemary’s retrofit, produced by the local Lysis Films in Katoomba. It also has segments, potentially of use to educators, about particular elements of the retrofit. These run only a few minutes each and are sufficiently short to be of use by sustainability educators in workshops and courses.

The full 20 minute video would provide an informative case study as a leader to start a conversation on home energy and water efficiency. Educators would show it, then use the content as the basis for an ORID format (objective, reflective, interpretive, decisional) or other guided conversation.

In this way, the video works in the same way as Morag Gamble and Evan Raymond’s 15 minute production on local foods does as a leader for discussions about food systems. We have a number of longer video programs, but too few of this length that is suited to public events and sustainability education workshops and courses and that are also available on DVD for public showing.

Having said good things about the video, do I have any suggestions for improvement? Well. yes I do. I found that the video had too much footage of talking heads. You do need some of this, however more video of the works Rosemary has carried out and footage of some of them in action would have been useful.

Really a book outline

Putting on my editor’s hat, my impression after reading A Good Home Forever was that this is the outline of a more detailed book. The bulleted points in it — and Rosemary makes extensive use of these — could in many cases be expanded. Although she might have covered what a more ambitious book might contain in her The Earth Users Guide to Permaculture, an expanded A Good Home Forever would apply that to the specifics of her Katoomba retrofit.

But would there be a market for such a book? I think so, and the reissuing by David Holmgren of his case study, The Flywire House, is evidence for this. Looking at the environmental/sustainability shelves of good bookshops, I see a variety of personal experience titles about people trying a 100-mile diet, moving the Mullumbimby to avoid a peak oil crisis or moving to the countryside. And while there are also plenty of titles dealing with resource efficient home design, there are too few case studies.

The difference with Rosemary is that she moved into a small city rather than escape to the countryside, in doing so emphasising the reality that urban living can be the catalyst for sustainable living.

The book, which is printed on recycled paper, is illustrated by Rob Allsop, who did the drawings in The Earth Users Guide to Permaculture. To reduce paper wastage, Rosemary made use of the inside of the cover for acknowledgements and some text. These are usually blank pages in publishing and I like it that way. There’s something odd about reading text on the insides of the cover and I don’t think it works well.

Rosemary sells the book alone for around $5, but for a mere $20 you get book + video CD. This is a complementary, useful package. And if you think that’s a lot for a CD and a 24 page booklet, think of its value this way — the cost is equivalent to only six cappuccinos, and its effects are likely to last a great deal longer.

Order from: www.RetrofittingYourHome.com

Morrow R, 2009; A Good Home Forever: Mountain Wildfire Press, Katoomba NSW.

Postscript: Following the launch of Rosemary’s book, Transition Blue Mountains held a seminar of home retrofitting for resource efficiency in Katoomba, attracting more then 100 people. Rosemary’s CD was shown at the event.