Abstract Body

Today climate action, adaptation, and mitigation are everyone's responsibility. Whether you are an entrepreneur, engineer, planner, landscape architect, community worker, teacher, parent, student, non-profit or government employee or just a member of the public, how can we come together and better serve our environment and communities now and into the future as our urban cities continue to expand? Ideally, we need ways to discuss and share compelling thoughts and ideas. And that is why we all need to understand the place of design thinking and the visual arts to facilitate action addressing biodiversity and climatic resilient cities.

This presentation and discussion with Climate Design Strategist, Sylvia Grace Borda based in Vancouver (Canada), Dr Ann Borda, Associate Professor in the Centre of Digital Transformation of Health, University of Melbourne (Australia), and John Gray, Planner, City of Dundee, (Scotland) invites participants to consider design thinking, visual arts processes, and citizen science, along with other opportunities in applications of creative problem-solving and community engagement in order to co-create community climate change solutions.

Indeed for a resilient, durable and sustainable future we need to repurpose, reinvent, remake and rethink how our human-made world can transform with responsible action in cities across the globe. Nature and art can sustain, surround, support and encourage people and communities to think more critically about becoming engaged actors in the sustainable growth of their own cities. In this discussion, the speakers will offer insights into a series of active arts-design thinking projects that they are leading. They will describe how integrated arts-climate strategies can create agency by becoming effective means to open up community learning, support healthy living and align with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

In particular the talk provides actionable insights of how our civic spaces can become examples of climate adaptive and eco-cultural spaces for climate adaptation, public awareness and custodianship. This presentation is relevant to anyone who is interested in the wider discussion about design thinking and arts as tools that can help us build and achieve more sustainable eco-cities.