Green Knowledge and Public Buildings 2023

8-9 March 2023 10:00–15:00 AEST | Kensington Campus, UNSW Sydney

Background

Each building process can be an opportunity to advance and test innovation in sustainability. Given the resources necessary to improve environmental solutions in the built environment, publicly funded large-scale buildings present significant opportunities to generate and apply new sustainable products and practices.

Furthermore, the value of a green building funded by the tax-payers is not only the structure itself, but also lies in the knowledge created over its design and construction processes. This knowledge, generated and shared by architects, engineers, contractors and suppliers, and manifesting in new learning, patents, design and manufacturing methods, represents a public asset. This based-in-practice innovation should, therefore, be recognised, stored, and openly shared.

Doing that means, for instance, being able to recognise the actual return on investment to the Australian public by tracing how publicly-funded green knowledge moves and keeps innovating the private sector after a project completion.

But how can we openly disseminate green knowledge and innovation generated in building projects without any policy or significant examples of open access practices in publicly funded construction?

This symposium is the opportunity to start answering this question by reflecting on the prospects and challenges of open transferability of implicit and tacit knowledge in sustainable architecture supported by public investment.