9th Making Cities Liveable Conference
2016 July
Paul Barnett attended the Healthy Cities 9th Making Cities Liveable Conference as a speaker to talk about Living Pods and Natural Waterharvested Landscapes. Read the abstract for his session below.
About the 2016 Making Cities Liveable Conference
The 2016 Making Cities Liveable Conference will once again bring focus back on the quality of life in cities with an extensive conference program covering a wide range of topics from community development and health to transport, energy and waste management.
The 9th Making Cities Liveable Conference will discuss topics related to healthy, sustainable, resilient and liveable cities, and improving the quality of life in the country’s capitals and major regional cities.
Architecture and Design article
Paul Barnett Abstract: Living Pods and Natural Water-harvested Landscapes: A new paradigm for transforming residential areas into sustainable living environments.
Living Pods and Natural Waterharvested Landscapes enable a single house site to be converted to houses up to 3 or 4 diverse family types without changes to the leasing system and create an enhanced natural living environment that sustains people and nature as a microcosm of the city. They are flexible living habitats that combine to create a diversity of living environments. They also provide a diversity of environment for couples, mixed family units, several groups or single people at any stage of their lives.
Living pods are designed around the Solar Passive and Passiv Haus principles and create a 10-star sustainable living environment. Living Pods employ triple glazing, thermally wrapped building envelopes, thermal mass floors with lightweight flexible wall and roof systems, photovoltaic power, water storage, greywater re-use, heat exchangers, air filtration, glasshouse connection space between living pods and stable temperature ranges throughout the year.
Nature is brought into the Living Pod environment through an attached glasshouse foyer in each pod. An underground river bed system is created that appears in the landscape as small creek beds. Tested over 25 years it enhances the subsoil environment for trees, shrubs, ground covers and edible gardens fed by rainwater and greywater. There is no maintenance of the waterharvesting system as it is natural and utilises microorganisms to digest greywater particles. This system minimises evaporation for surface watering, enhances infiltration of water into the ground and captures all site water and greywater and returns it to the site.
