Publications
| Cooling the Commons pattern deck The Cooling the Commons pattern deck is a website comprising 41 illustrated patterns of ‘cool commons’. Cool commons are publicly accessible cool urban environments that offer an alternative to airconditioned private spaces in cities where heat is compromising liveability. The website is designed as an open resource to facilitate design decisions that defend, protect, and enhance the presence of cool commons. The pattern deck builds upon the research report Cooling Common Spaces in Densifying Urban Environments which explored cool commons of relevance to Landcom’s urban renewal sites and included 5 prototype patterns. The Cooling the Commons pattern deck expands upon that study to offer 5 revised and 36 new patterns for cool commons. As a work of commons-based design it offers an alternative to and makes an intervention into the technical approach to design that dominates urban heat adaptation via for example air-conditioning, green infrastructure and ‘cool roads’. Funded by both UTS and Western Sydney University, the deck demonstrates the importance of collegial, collaboratively partnered research. 
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| A Conversation about the Weather Increasingly, other-than-scientific questions and creative expressions of climate change are gaining ground as legitimate forms of new knowledge in the fields of feminism, environmental humanities, environmental cultural studies and design studies, of which this piece of work is a part. The work offers a novel contribution to this interdisciplinary scholarship by creatively interpreting the perspectives, experiences and practices of people living with urban heat in Penrith NSW as an imagined conversation between a mother and child. The conversation, which was originally performed as part of the Hacking the Anthropocene II: Weathering Symposium held at University of Sydney in May 2017, connects spoken experiences, memories and aspirations drawn from the Cooling the Commons pilot study with images of the designed environments that shape, powerfully but often tacitly, people's everyday social practices. 
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| Cooling Common Spaces in Densifying Urban Environments: A Review of Best Practice and Guide for Western Sydney Renewal In answering the following research question: What design features allow for both comfort and mobility in the hot city, and what design features detract from this? What climate-resilient social practices are these features enabling and disabling? this report develops a new approach to understanding and designing cool cities: cool commons. The report sets out the new conceptual approach of Cool Commons. It moves beyond current technocentric approaches to cool urban futures, recognising that a combination of material, social and institutional strategies are required to support climate adaptation, including community-led adaptive practices. ‘Cool commons’ view the city not as a collection of private spaces, but as an environment for convivial social life. The design challenge is thus to integrate opportunities for respite or coolth across the city, for example, in public spaces that are accessible to all. The report also sets out a methodology for analysing and reporting on the extent of Cool Commons, drawing on the pattern language of architect and mathematician Chris Alexander. It provides a series of sample patterns for Cool Commons that are the foundation for the ‘Cool Commons Pattern Deck’.  |
| Infrastructures of care: opening up ‘home’ as commons in a hot city What does it mean to be at home in a hot city? One response is to shut our doors |
| Infrastructures of Care: Opening up “Home” as Commons in a Hot City What does it mean to be at home in a hot city? One response is to shut our doors and close ourselves in a cocoon of air-conditioned thermal comfort. As the climate warms, indoor environments facilitated by technical infrastructures of cooling are fast becoming the condition around which urban life is shaped. The price we pay for this response is high: our bodies have become sedentary, patterns of consumption individualized, and spaces of comfortable mobility and sociality in the city, termed in this paper as “infrastructures of care,” have declined. Drawing on the findings of a transdisciplinary pilot study titled Cooling the Commons, this paper proposes that the production of the home as an enclosed and private space needs to be rethought as an infrastructure that potentially undermines more social, convivial, and environmentally sensitive responses to a warming world. The paper asks, what role might design now play in developing alternative infrastructures of care that start with the idea of “home” as a distributed proposition? 
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| Cooling the Commons Pilot Research Study This pilot study provides initial insights into how residents living in Western Sydney keep cool during the hottest parts of the year and how they would like to see their living environments, at home and out and about, modified to improve wellbeing in a climate changing world. The research responds to the lack of qualitative information about: day to day living practices in outer suburban Sydney; the constraints people experience when trying to keep cool; and, people’s aspirations for more comfortable living environments. The pilot study introduces the concept of the ‘cool commons’ to identify those spaces that offer cooler temperatures than surrounding areas and that are used by, and are accessible to, a community of commoners who to some degree, care for, take responsibility for, and benefit from this coolness. 
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