Lisa-Law

lisa_law (540p)

 

 

[Music plays and a blue background with text appears: Designing tropical cities on a hotter earth, Presented by A/Prof Lisa Law, James Cook University]

 

[Image changes to show Associate Professor Lisa Law standing at a lectern talking to the camera, and text appears: A/Prof Lisa Law, Earth & Environmental Science James Cook University]

 

A/Prof Lisa Law: Hello, and thank you so much for inviting me here, Tim and Steve. I’m sure I’m going to learn a lot. I’m in a jumper because I’m from Cairns and our dry season hasn’t arrived yet. It’s pouring rain, so I’m finding it quite cold, especially with the fans on today.

 

[Image changes to show a map of Australia and dot painting style markings cover the ocean area, and the map is labelled with the names of Aboriginal lands, and text appears: https://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/article/do-you-know-what-aboriginal-land-youre-on-today/ytff85vi1, Acknowledgement of Country]

 

I also want to acknowledge the Traditional Owners here. It’s really nice to be in Larrakia country, but I also wanted to acknowledge the Traditional Owners where I’m from and where the lands I’m presenting from are, the Gimuy Walubara Yidinji.

 

[Image changes to show Lisa talking inset on the right, and photos can be seen on the left of a street, a housing area and wetland, women in an art gallery, and yachts, and text appears: Urban heat, Urban water, State of the Arts in Cairns SoARTS, Regional generation]

 

I am Associate Professor of Geography and Planning at James Cook University, but I am also the chair of our Tropical Urbanism and Design Lab, or the TUDLAB, because that’s just too big a mouthful to say. We work on lots of projects. The one I’m talking about today is urban heat, but we also do some work on stormwater, and we monitor the Cairns Regional Council’s Arts and Culture Strategy, and we do master planning projects in small towns that surround Cairns. In fact, it was nice to see Elysa because I’d done a masterplan for Innisfail when she, just after she left her job there. So, one of the important things about the TUDLAB is that we see the importance of working with industry, government and universities, so being here is amazing, because I think that’s what everybody here values. In university, it’s not always that way, and we see bringing as many people along the journey with us as being a vital part of what we do. And so, we always include a lot of students in our projects.

 

[Image changes to show a new slide on the left showing a photograph of a sunlit urban street and a thermometer, and Lisa can be seen inset talking on the right, and text appears: Urban Heat, TudLab]

 

And, so the Urban Heat Project, I’m getting my head back into that, because we’re working on it on a paper at the moment to look at some urban heat mapping in Cairns, and it’s a really depressing time to be thinking about urban heat, no matter how cold I am right now, just looking at what’s happening in the northern hemisphere is absolutely mind-boggling and I’m really worried about the next El Nino as it comes through Cairns and what it means for us there. But I didn’t want to go all doom and gloom. I was reading a paper in Nature Sustainability about, you know, the human climate niche, and will we be able to live in the tropics? And I guess, I also love living in Cairns, and I think, you know, the problem isn’t that it’s too hot. We’re just not designing very well.

 

[Image changes to show Lisa talking on the right, and a new slide appears on the left showing a side and top view image of the Oasia Hotel Downtown in Singapore, and a table of statistics, and text appears: Oasia Hotel Downtown, WOHA, Architects, Singapore (2016), 27 Stories integrated hotel-office development, Exploration of tropical design, Trees, gardens, sky terraces, 22 different types of creepers, space for animals and insects, Like a tree in the city, A good ‘neighbour’]

 

So, I thought I’d start with a story of another place I used to live in Singapore, and I hope everybody knows this building.

 

[Image changes to show the slide taking the whole screen]

 

I was lucky to recently visit again this year. I try and visit it every couple of years, because it’s one of those bits of architecture that has that extra dimension in it of time, and the vines grow more every year and the way the building engages the street is different, and I always feel like this is a, it’s like a tree in the city, and I love taking my students who I bring along with me to go to WOHA Architects and hear about their philosophy of design where you need to contribute back to the greenery of the city, you need to contribute back to the community and you, they have different ways of measuring the value of what they do, and their buildings need to be good neighbours in the, in the Singapore context.

 

[Image changes to show a new slide showing photos of the Oasia Hotel, a typical glass-front skyscraper, and thermal images of both, and text appears: Glass and steel skyscrapers reflect and amplify solar heat, Oasia’s façade is 20^o cooler than a typical skyscraper, Reduced solar heat gain = less air conditioning needed + intake is cooler, Instead of contributing to the urban heat island, it cools the air surrounding it]

 

But what we’re talking about here is heat, so I thought I would just talk about this building in relationship to heat, because one of the interesting things this time I visited is talking to them and now they’re keeping track of the birdlife that nests in the building, all the migratory birds and they’re keeping track of the lizards and the insects and it’s a wonderful, it’s a wonderful building, but in terms of urban heat, it’s a really important building that contributes back to the city because the skyscrapers, you know, we know that glass and steel is just not right for the tropics, but we keep doing it. We’re doing it in Cairns. I’m sure you’re doing it here. The thing about the Oasia building is that it doesn’t, it doesn’t do that. You know, its façade is 20 degrees colder than your standard skyscraper and it, it’s, and you know than the air that’s coming in doesn’t also need to be cooled down. So, it’s an amazing example of what’s possible. Of course, I’m sure you know this isn’t the perfect building, and you know, it’s not easy. Here, we don’t have a Malaysian labour force that can come in and do this kind of work, but to me, it’s about things we can aspire to, and I feel happy when I feel, when I think about this building, and the possibilities of living well in the tropics.

 

[Image changes to show a new slide showing an aerial view of Cairns city and the BMT, TUDLAB and Cairns Regional Council Logos appears on the right, and text appears: Understanding and measuring the urban heat island in Cairns, David Rissik and Fahim Tonmoy, Sophie Barrett]

 

What the title of my paper should have been is actually Understanding and Measuring the Urban Heat Island in Cairns. It’s a project I’ve been working on with BMT, David Rissik and Fahim Tonmoy, as well as Sophie Barret, at the Cairns Regional Council. There’s a draft of a heat management understanding plan with council now. I’m not sure why it’s not going through a bit faster. That kind of happens sometimes. I think it’s because they realise they need to do some more things.

 

[Image changes to show a new slide showing a climate classification map of Australia, a graph showing humidity, temperature and rainfall over the year, a satellite weather map of Australia, and a map of the world showing places with similar climates to Cairns and text appears: Tropical climate in Cairns, https://www.cairns.qld.gov.au/_data/assets/pdf_file/0017/65321/Technical-Report-Tropical-Design_Part1.pdf]

 

But we’re working on a paper that talks about the work that we’ve done. You probably know what Cairns is like. It’s kind of like Darwin. It’s a bit of a dry season, wet season. I always think Cairns is just a little bit wetter than Darwin, and Darwin’s just a little bit hotter than Cairns. So, it’s slightly different, and I love seeing the map of the arid zones, and one of the reasons I love talking to people in the tropics is that understanding of the variegated nature of the tropics. It isn’t just temperate versus tropics. There’s lots of kinds of tropics, and they all need different design responses.

 

[Image changes to show two satellite images of Cairns, and text appears: 1984 and 1994, Google Earth]

 

And so, but I’m talking about Cairns, and I’m not going to, I didn’t realise I wouldn’t have a, or do I have a laser pointer here? It doesn’t matter if I don’t. I’m talking about some work in the middle of the city in the CBD. I’m not talking about the suburbs. Shokhida Safarova, who will be talking about suburban heat islands later this afternoon.

 

[Image changes to Lisa inset talking on the right, the same slide can be seen on the left]

 

I just want to highlight that Cairns is really growing and we need to worry about our urban heat island. My mother-in-law, I think she went to Cairns in 1950 as part of a school trip and there were 15,000 people there. I think last month, we reached the 170,000 mark. So, we’re kind of similar to Darwin as well. I love the trips to Darwin. I like the idea of a trip, but I think Darwin, Townsville, Cairns are really interesting cities to compare and the way they deal with building the city.

 

So, we’ve got Cairns, the city centre in the middle. Up to the north, you’ve got the northern beaches that used to be just little hamlets and shacks where backpackers used to go. Down in the south, it was always sugarcane plantations, but we’re slowly losing those as they fall to another master-planned template estate, and the Redlynch Valley is slowly starting to urbanise.

 

[Image changes show two satellite images of Cairns from 2004 and 2014 on the left, and Lisa inset talking on the right, and text appears: 2004, 2014]

 

By 2004, you start to see that there’s this southern growth corridor in Cairns, that’s now, you could really drive through suburban lands for your 20, 30-minute commute now, in ways that you didn’t have to do that before. The beaches are now really suburbs, and the Redlynch Valley is growing.

 

[Images changes to show a satellite image of Cairns in 2020, an aerial view of Cairns city, and an aerial view of Cairns suburbs and coastline, and Lisa can be seen inset talking on the right, and text appears: 2020]

 

And now, I mean as a university, we’re really worried, because we’re up in the northern beaches, and the southern growth corridor is where all of our students are. So, we have a bit of a problem.

 

[Image changes to show a new slide on the left, and then the slide takes the whole screen showing a graph of day and night surface temperatures, and text appears: Key factors driving UHIs, Construction materials, Low reflectivity, High thermal mass, Evaporation and evapotranspiration, Fewer waterbodies, trees, Impervious built surface, Urban geometry, Reduced wind flow, Increased energy absorption, Reduced long-wave radiation to space]

 

So, we have a lot more people, a lot more cars, a lot less greenery, and urban heat is an issue that we are trying to deal with.

 

[Image changes to show a new slide showing a map of Australia, a chart showing effectiveness of different design features in a tropical climate, and a Guide to Urban Cooling Strategies document, and text appears: Understanding urban heat in (different parts of) tropical Australia requires nuanced understanding]

 

This is not the kind of place I need to talk about what the key factors are that are driving urban heat islands, but this is something we’re concerned about and how do we address the urban heat island? But especially, how do we do it from a wet, tropics perspective? I’m not sure if you’ve seen these guides, this guide to urban cooling strategies, but it was so nice to get it, because it’s not often you get a case study of Cairns in things about urban heat and how it’s different from Darwin and other places. But there’s actually a Cairns section. I really use it with my students, because you know, you realise, there’s certain sorts of strategies like evaporative cooling that just aren’t going to work in the middle of our wet season.

[Image changes to show a new slide showing an aerial view of houses in Cairns, a marina and bay and a section of houses outlined in blue, and text appears: Measuring the UHI in Cairns]

 

So, we’re wanting to understand the urban heat island in Cairns, map it and think about mitigation strategies that are fit for purpose.

 

[Image changes to show a new slide showing road map with marked traffic features, businesses and trees, the TUDLAB and JCU logos, and an Urban Heat Project brochure, and text appears: 2017, placed 86 sensors 2-3.5m off ground, Collected temperature and humidity data every 15 minutes, Only 26 providing reliable data]

 

So, this is a project like I said, I’ve been working on with council and BMT. The first stage for us was JCU actually had the first IOT, Internet of Things degree in Australia. Of course, everybody’s copied us and got one now, but in 2016, we were trying to figure out how to collaborate with our new colleagues at the university on how to use sensors. I’m not sure if you remember that time, when it became very popular to do that. And so, I applied for a grant, and we got a bunch of sensors to put in the city, and we got another bunch to put into one of our watersheds, and that went really well because everybody’s worried about the reef. This one we’re still, you know, cobbling pieces of money together, trying to figure out how to measure the heat island. But, anyway, we had these 86 sensors. We put them along and thinking about, well how are we going to measure the urban heat island, but also the microclimates and thinking about different places where you could have an impact, and yeah. There’s a couple of my Masters students, in fact, I should have invited her, she’s working now here as a planner in Darwin. They put a nice guide together to understand the sensors. But, of course, these are early days. It was a LoRaWAN network. The sensors were, you know, they weren’t actually collecting heat and humidity data, all of them. So, I think, only in the end, 26 of them worked all the time. I think you have sensors here in Darwin as well. I’m interested, is this always, you know, do you need to update them, or do we want ones with SIM cards now, rather than the LoRaWAN network? But anyway, sensors aren’t that easy to use and I, you know, I don’t know how to crunch big data, which is why I had to collaborate with others. I think urban heat is the need for such collaborative work, because we all don’t have the skills that we need. So, they were collecting this heat and humidity data every 15 minutes.

 

[Image changes to show a new slide showing a montage of 16 photos of installed sensors in various locations including attached to the side of buildings and on poles near trees]

 

And this was from the guide my students put together, and this is the kind of places that we put them up. It was hard to go out and talk to the shop owners, and then the council, they had to put, council had to put theirs on their assets, and so it was a big logistical exercise just to get these up and then you know, so many of them don’t work.

 

[Image changes to show a new slide showing the Cairns Regional Council and TUDLAB logo, a street map showing highest recorded temperatures, equipment at Cairns Aero, and a graph of a Cairns heatwave, and text appears: 2018 heatwave impacts: spectacled flying foxes, ecosystem impacts, human impacts, technology, assets]

 

I mean there’s so many things that make it so hard to do this kind of research, especially when you’re a skeleton crew like we are. So, the good thing about having those up and running was that there was a heatwave that came through in 2018. It was a massive heatwave, lots of days of 40 plus temperatures, and we had the data basically to show how hot it was in the city, not just using the data from the airport, right, which it doesn’t capture that urban heat island at all. You need those microclimates of what’s happening in the CBD and we, the Queensland Emergency Services were up and working with council and looking at the difference between our sensor data and the, the BOM data, and just thinking about how hot it had been for those days.

 

[Image changes to show a new slide showing the BMT and Cairns Regional Council logos, and map of temperatures in different suburbs of Cairns colour coded from blue to red, and text appears: Mapping Cairns land surface temperature using Landsat-8 imagery]

 

And I think that’s when council got quite interested in urban heat and wanted to work with, my capacity is very limited beyond putting in some sensors, and they worked with BMT to really start mapping the urban heat island and thinking about what sort of information we had, what we needed, and developing a bit of a management plan. And so they used Landsat-8 imagery to do this map which was from November 2020 to February 2021 and for me, what’s very interesting as somebody who knows the urban fabric very well, you see where all our tourists are along the esplanade, it’s actually quite cool, because we have a lot of greenery, that’s where our prevailing breezes come from, so we really don’t want to be a Gold Coast, and shut all of that off. But the really hot spots are interesting, because it’s our industrial lands and some of that commercial industrial land near the city centre, and it’s hard to convince businesses that are, you know, car repair shops, and that kind of, the importance of planting trees in their neighbourhood.

 

[Image changes to show a new slide showing a range of heat maps, and the BMT logo and text appears: BMT Opportunity analysis, Built vulnerability, old buildings, + community vulnerability, Over 65, Under 5, IRSD, + physical condition, LST, NDVI, RESULTS]

 

So, BMT has done some opportunity analysis around, around that map, and looked at where are the old buildings in Cairns, where are the young and old people, where are the land surface temperatures high, what’s the vegetation like, and they produce this bottom results,

 

[Image changes to show a new slide showing morning and afternoon pedestrian movement heatmaps and air temperature heat maps, and the BMT logo and text appears: Pedestrian data and opportunities]

 

the opportunities for council, for where they might want to spend more effort and energy thinking about mitigating the heat island. They also bought some pedestrian data from, of mobile phone usage to look at how people were walking around the city and then GISing that with hotspots in the city, which kind of led us to believe actually in the morning, it’s OK, because tourists are prone to heat stroke, right, we’re all used to being hot, but we have a lot of visitors, and they’re not. So, these diagrams are showing how, you know, pedestrians are moving and where we might think about putting some greenery in when it’s hot in the afternoon.

 

[Image changes to show a new slide showing four satellite images with coloured overlay to display temperature sensor data, and text appears: Sensor data: Nov 2018 vs 2020, Comparison of Sensor Data in November 2018 to November 2020]

 

So, the sensor data was quite interesting. I bet I’m running out of time, hey. I just realised. So… yeah. OK. So, they’ve mapped this on two different Novembers, two different years, and tried to look at where, what’s been happening over the past couple of years since the heatwave came through. And of course, it’s a bit cooler, over those, so from the difference between 2018 and 2020 in the afternoon and in the evening, they’ve corrected that for the heatwave, and taken 1.6%, 1.6 degrees off the heatwave, just to try and take that heatwave signal out of the data, and it’s interesting that some areas are cooler. Some are a little bit hotter, but some are cooler.

 

[Image changes to show a new slide showing three satellite images with coloured heatmap overlays to show sensor data and text appears: Temperature change, 26 Nov 2018 1 pm, 18 Nov 2020 1pm]

 

And so, what we’re doing is looking at the temperature change from the sensor data and trying to decide, why, why are those changes there, and what’s happening? Still not sure why that block of flats is so much hotter, but again we don’t have heaps of data, so I don’t know how much we can say, but there’s definitely a pattern, that some areas are cooler, and we were wondering why.

 

[Image changes to show a new slide showing a satellite image with a heatmap of sensor data, and a satellite image showing change in NDVI between November 2018 and 2020, and text appears: Vegetation change: Comparing NDVI between 2018 and 2020, Since 2014 CRC implementing urban greening]

 

And what we’ve done is matched those, looking at the vegetation that the council has been prioritising since 2014 and greening the city with landscaping and the provisions of tropical urbanism in the planning scheme, and it turns out that those places in the city that are a bit cooler are where council has been prioritising urban greenery.

 

[Image changes to show a new slide showing photos of an aerial view of urban streets planted with trees, trees and plants in a box on a street, a park with trees and buildings in the background, and a park with cement and picnic bench and some trees and text appears: https://www.cplusg.com.au/city-centre-alive-stages-1-2-cairns]

 

And the vegetation is growing up, so those values on that map are, there’s more vegetation and the health of that vegetation has been increasing and we’re taking out roundabouts

 

[Image changes to show a new slide showing photos of the Cairns Marlin Marina, Reef Casino Hotel and a document, and text appears: In Cairns, the relationship between built form, city planning, and landscape is expressed as tropical urbanism and is a defining factor of the identity of Cairns, Tropical urbanism is the integration of landscaping and tropical design elements into the built environment]

 

and doing different sorts of things. So, tropical urbanism is how do we integrate landscaping and tropical design in our city? It’s enshrined in our planning scheme under the provisions of tropical urbanism.

 

[Image changes to show a new slide showing photos of the Cairns Aquarium, and other Cairns buildings, and text appears: Landscaping, 25% area within the site to be landscaped, buffer & screen, deep, podium planting, specimen planting, Design principles: green and lush with emphasis on foliage, use of tropical species suitable for climate of Cairns and microclimates]

 

There’s lots of provisions around landscaping and what needs to happen in terms of you know, 25% has to be landscaped, different kinds of plantings. These are just some examples around the city, podium plantings and we’re thinking about all the different ways to green and what sort of design principles and what sort of plants need to go out there to make the city lush and green.

 

[Image changes to show a new slide showing two concept drawings with vertical landscaping, and two real life images of buildings with vertical landscaping including the Reef Casino Hotel, and text appears: Vertical landscaping]

 

We’re experimenting with vertical landscaping, but this is really challenging. It’s much easier in Singapore, different equatorial climate where there’s more rain.

 

[Image changes to show a new slide showing three concept drawings of buildings with street canopies and a photograph of a street canopy, and text appears: Street canopies]

 

Looking at experimenting with street canopies as well, that kind of architecture that shades the buildings, because in fact we need 50% of shading to our buildings between 9am and 3pm in the day.

 

[Image changes to show a new slide showing two side-view concept drawings illustrating separation between buildings, and an above-view showing view retention for buildings, and then a photo of tall buildings with green space, and text appears: Separation and view retention]

 

You need to demonstrate that your new development does that. And we are, in Cairns, I’m not sure you’ve been there, the views out to the mountains are really important to the people of Cairns. They help you orient yourself in the city, but actually they help keep the breezes blowing through the city and we’re really keen to maintain them.

 

[Image changes to show a new slide showing photos of the TUDLUB Team, a picture of the Cairns Masterplan, and a diagram showing temperature effects of various heat mitigation measures, and the BMT logo and text appears: BMT microclimate simulations]

 

And so, yeah. I think I’m running out of time, but, so we’ve run some design studios with my students, where they recommended this same thing as in the Cavanaugh Street and a Grafton green belt and we’re so lucky that BMT was working with my students and they modelled up some of their, they did some microclimate simulations and took my student ideas and ran them through their model, which was a really nice thing to do, and in fact one of the projects, the greening of Grafton, turned out to be the most effective way to cool the city. That’s that blue line through the map.

 

[Image changes to show a new slide showing an image of a palm-tree lined path along the water with the city behind it, and then the image shows the slide on the left, and Lisa talking on the right, and text appears on the slide: Take homes, Tropical design for heat mitigation needs place-based understanding, It is difficult to accurately measure the UHI and microclimates, Evidence-based urban planning helps mitigate urban heat and justifies infrastructure spends]

 

So, almost. So, I guess tropical design for heat-mitigation needs really nuanced place-based understanding, and I guess like I said, it’s amazing to come to these events because there’s that understanding that there’s not just one kind of tropics, and that microclimates are different. So, second is really difficult. I think what I learned about working with sensor data and big data is wow, I don’t know how to do a lot of stuff and I really need a team around me and we all need to share that information and work together and then finally that this evidence-based urban planning helps us mitigate urban heat so the council’s really happy to show that the investments that they’ve made in greening the city have actually cooled it down.

 

[Image changes to show Lisa standing at a lectern talking to the camera].

 

So, that’s me. Thank you.

 

[Applause can be heard and then music plays and the image changes to show the CSIRO logo, the Australian Government logo, the Northern Territory Government logo and the City of Darwin logo].