Advancing Cities: Bioclimatic and Sociotechnical Understanding for Healthy Places

This work critically reflects on the necessity for different understanding of the contemporary urban challenges prevalent in the urban design and planning discourse. We seek to canvas a divergent pathway to embrace complexity and in doing so advance and actualise an urban design and planning paradigm shift. We reject the piecemeal and reactive practices that follow the predict and provide for the market rhetoric while envisioning the critical role of higher education within our discipline. This essay is a call for a collective realisation that we need to mainstream different ways to overcome the prevailing dissonance between intent and outcome. To enable conditions for a new ontology of practice and pedagogy of understanding in which holistic policy making and design of new urban spaces benefits all. Our BASC Lab serves as a living case study to illustrate the possibilities for approaching complex societal issues by responding to the complexities of cities and their escalating environmental, sociological, and technological entanglements, and addressing impacts on people and place now and into the future. Reflections are presented on the role of higher education to achieve an intergenerational paradigm shift where justice is served in praise of a larger ecological and regenerative systems approach to the urban condition. Here we outline collaborative efforts on bioclimatic urbanism through climate-responsiveness for all, while impacting as little as possible on the natural environment. The understanding of sociotechnical urbanism reflects on complex systems thinking for holistic decision-making and the prioritisation of health and wellbeing for just cities beyond the human domain. We conclude with an open-ended call to realise the role of our discipline and higher education sector where deeper learning, research and advocacy meet. Let us rediscover the beauty of a complex, non-linear and relational ecological awareness embedded within our professional ontology.