| Redrawing the Circular Economy: Organic Waste and Peri-Urban Futures This paper examines the circular economy’s application in addressing sustainability challenges, focusing on organic waste and peri-urban futures. Critically reflecting on the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s definition of circularity, we explore how waste minimization and ecosystem regeneration align with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) like climate action and responsible production. Realising this more ambitious and transformational version of circularity involves us in a process of redrawing the “circle” and in the process reimagining economies. We explored this possibility through a case focused on redirecting organic waste, in particular spent coffee grounds, from urban centres to peri-urban farms. Using co-design and action research methods, we established a reverse logistics supply chain, highlighting collaborative efforts among social enterprises, family farms, and academic institutions like the University of Technology Sydney. Drawing on Diverse Economies scholarship and George DeMartino’s insights, we advocate for involving diverse economic actors and minimising risks through iterative development. This approach underscores the potential of regenerative practices, including hemp cultivation, to mitigate climate impact and foster sustainable economic linkages. |
| Supply Chain Commons: Organic Waste, Climate Change and Regenerative Farming This chapter proposes to recast the “supply chain” as a commons via an extended description of the shared social, intellectual, and regulatory resources currently producing an experiment in a circular economy for organic waste in Sydney, Australia. Organic waste, once composted, finds its way into high value-added crops like heirloom garlic which are then sold back to consumers in Sydney. By foregrounding the practices of social learning and information sharing that is making this “circularity” possible, our chapter illustrates how creating a material commons often depends upon creating a knowledge commons to make it cohere, as well as upon creating commoner-subjects who will do the work of caring for both. |
| On weathering and “climate-readiness”: A strengths-based approach to adaptive practice in Western Sydney For nearly a century, Western Sydney has grown as a suburban frontier, now accommodating one in ten Australians. However, the region faces imminent threats from anthropogenic climate change, with heat, drought, fire, and flood poised to render parts uninhabitable within decades. Despite city-wide discussions on climate preparedness, the input of everyday residents, particularly migrant and low-income communities, is often overlooked. Our research highlights the valuable insights these residents offer on coping with environmental extremes both inside and outside their homes. Yet, these insights are side-lined by a focus on technical solutions, neglecting more socially oriented approaches. Through interdisciplinary research, we have identified “cool commons” – patterns worldwide where local practices and social dynamics mitigate extreme climate effects. Conversely, we’ve documented development trends that exacerbate climate vulnerability. Using these findings, we are collaborating with social housing providers and residents in Western Sydney to implement “cool commons” initiatives across three sites. By reframing climate-readiness as community expertise, resourcefulness, and creative leadership, we aim to foster equitable and collective adaptation to urban heat. This chapter reflects on the social and practical capacities necessary for such adaptation. |
| 7. Community This article is an interview with four researchers about the role of community and community-based initiatives in climate adaptation in urban contexts |
| Postcapitalist composting: reverse logistics and organic waste, designing for diverse livelihoods This commentary is part of a series initially presented at the Waste/Economy/Ecology hybrid international symposium at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, Australia in February 2023. The symposium was part of the research project ‘Investigating Innovative Waste Economies: Redrawing the Circular Economy’funded by the Australian Research Council. The symposium brought together academics and artists from around the world who are thinking with waste to enable novel responses to its ethical and political challenges. We thank all our contributors to this special commentary section for their participation and thinking. |
| 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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| Cultivating the Habits of Coolth This chapter extends upon the book's discussions of habit to the process of adapting to anthropogenically induced global warming. We reveal the role of designed practices, products and infrastructures in habituating urban populations to a changing climate. Our central concern is the ‘world within the world’ design has helped to create. In the rapidly densifying city, atmospheric commons are shaped and reshaped by human design; climate change is lived and felt in hostile heat islands and polluted, particulate-laden city air. Design offers a critical perspective on the dynamics that have shaped the city and organised the civic practices of its inhabitants. This ontological capacity is a second order agency rarely considered in the contexts in which design is most powerfully deployed to shape the materiality of the city. We apply ‘defuturing’ (Fry, 1999) as a critical deconstructive mode of reading to point to the designing relations shaping city atmospheres, infrastructures and modes of habituation. Our focus is the constellation of designing relations inaugurated by cooling technologies. At the same time as answering a primal need, cooling technologies also dehabituate us to the increasingly volatile conditions of our common world. In response, we seek to resuscitate the concept of ‘coolth’ as a critical term describing the experience and sensation of feeling (temperature) cool. We claim that designing for coolth cultivates habits of practice far better attuned to a warming world, recognising that climate-aware modes of dwelling must be both cultivated and habituated by design. 
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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’.  |
| 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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