Zero Carbon Precinct is concerned with the re-forming and re-organisation of the architecture of cities in response to shifting energy paradigms – from fossil fuels to renewable energy, focussing on the intersection with the automobile, and its imminent electrification as an alibi to interrogate the states of entanglement of the car, urban design, architecture, and a staged liberation from carbon. Metropolitan culture – from dense urban aggregates to suburban sprawl is saturated by collective imagery and pervasiveness of the motorcar. No single entity, arguably, and certainly no other form of mobility has shaped the way we organise cities, infrastructures, economies, labour pools or even carve up a housing block, more voraciously than the car. The transition to renewable energy and the electrification of the car is a critical juncture that transforms its agency within the city. The paper will describe and reflect on a design-research project that intervenes within an urban city block. The project explores the capacity of new energy paradigms to destabilise the matrix of rules and relationships that underpin the contemporary city, as well as the potential for new economies of localised energy production, energy distribution, living, working etc., with a focus on sites of scalable potential that become an immediate and perhaps exaggerated register for change. How do we embrace the latent potential of a new energy architecture and its material realities? How to we reorganise the relationships within the built environment around an ecosystem of renewables? How does architecture escape the technology and of its extraction?
Ian Nazareth is an architect, researcher and educator. Ian is the director of TRAFFIC – a design and research practice working across architecture, urbanism and computation, co-director of the Urban Futures Office (UFO) and an academic at the School of Architecture and Urban Design, RMIT University Melbourne. He also contributes extensively to architectural media and critical design discourse internationally and is the editor of the forthcoming volume of The Practice of Spatial Thinking (ACTAR, 2023). Ian was previously the Program Director and Head of Urban Design at RMIT.