Future Proof: Urban Fractals - Shaping the Future a Neighbourhood at a Time 
(Lectures)
23 October 2012
12 pm - 1 pm
Venue: Design Theatre, Building 423, 22 Symonds Street
Host: School of Architecture and Planning
Cost: Free
Contact email: n.guy@auckland.ac.nz
Website: Future Proof
PAUL DOWNTON
Paul Downton is a prize-winning architect, writer, international speaker, green building pioneer and early advocate for action on climate change. His projects include a keynote green building for the Australian National University and the internationally awarded Christie Walk development. Founder of Urban Ecology Australia, his ecocity vision is supported by years of working with communities. With a doctorate in Environmental Studies and 30 years experience teaching architecture, Paul is an acknowledged world leader in sustainable city theory.
A major contributor to the Australian government’s ‘Your Home Technical Manual’, his Ecopolis: Architecture and Cities for a Changing Climate was published in 2009. The first ebook in Paul’s new Ecocity series will be published this year.
Architects conceive of their buildings as pure objects, unsullied by occupation. Ideal cities are imagined as static, finite, finished. But real buildings get mucked up. Real cities explode and sprawl, constantly growing, constantly falling apart. In the real world nothing stands still – even the climate is changing. The future is more than a little uncertain.
Yet driven by a need we barely understand, we stumble into a mess of making streets and buildings and call them home. Somewhere between constipated design and the favelas there lies a way to pattern a future that works. The proof of that future pulses in the life of every neighbourhood, and the means to get there is by making urban fractals.
