Net Zero Precincts Stage 2: Agenda-setting
This report presents an overview of the visioning process undertaken for the Net Zero Precincts ARC Linkage project through a series of workshops held between July 2023 to March 2024 at Monash University Clayton Campus in the Monash Technology Precinct.
Through these workshops we explored how proposed net zero transitions are complicated by everyday life and how people imagine possible everyday net zero futures in the precinct in 2030.
This second report from the Net Zero Precincts ARC Linkage project presents an overview of the Stage 2 envisioning process through five workshops with over 50 participants connected to Monash University Clayton Campus and the Monash Technology Precinct from July 2023 to March 2024. The aim of the Stage 2 workshops was to co-create and envision collective pathways to net zero precinct futures. The engagement process was designed as a series of experiential encounters to surface how people might live, feel and imagine themselves and others within the Monash Precinct in 2030.
The Stage 2 workshops enabled research participants to reflect on the findings from Stage 1, experience transitions-in-the-making through embodied learning, understand transition dynamics and co-create diverse and inclusive future visions and pathways. Ethnographic methods including walking tours, Field Notes and organic materials were used to reflect on the complications and possibilities for visioning and reveal the complexities of future human and more-than-human life in the precinct.
During the visioning workshops, participants were invited to take part in two activities.
- The first activity was an ‘embodied learning’ process that involved organising participants into four groups and taking them on guided walking tours to experience the place-based dimensions of net zero transitions.
- The second activity involved reflecting on transition dynamics and using organic materials and other artefacts to hand-make ‘Living Worlds’ from soil, plants and various objects collected from the walking tours brought together in terrariums that became material representations of net zero precinct futures.
The visions imagined by participants during the visioning workshops emphasised a much stronger role for nature and ecology, going so far as seeing nature rising up to ‘reclaim’ its rightful place in the urban environment through a process of rewilding, and the at times uncontrollable and encroaching return of animal and plant-life to a regenerative precinct. Backcasting and pathways workshops were held to formulate specific, actionable steps for how to achieve the net zero visions. A range of pathways emerged that identified possible routes from the present towards net zero futures based on the following themes: mobility, circular economy, nature-based solutions, governance, energy efficiency and degrowth.
The backcasting and pathways workshops helped clarify the steps needed to realise the visions and enable the project team to consolidate and modify the transition pathways based on participant feedback. The knowledge, networks and activities to emerge from these experiences and insights will inform development of a portfolio of Living Lab experiments over 2024-2025.