Can Ross Harding turn the city of Melbourne into a circular system that never runs out of what it needs?
Ross Harding has an audacious vision: to make Melbourne, Australia the world’s first completely self-sustaining city.
He thinks he can do it by the year 2030.
The plan takes the best case studies and policy ideas from cities around the world and brings them all to Australia to create one city with unlimited clean water, 100% renewable energy and zero waste.
“We like to think of it as a city that never runs out, where the only thing that enters or leaves is the people,” said Harding.
Ross Harding has always dreamed big. The moustachioed rebel-with-a-cause founded the consultancy Finding Infinity with a mission of inspiring the planet to run on infinite resources such as wind, solar and hydroelectric power.
Partnering with Will Young, a music producing DJ with an engineering degree, Harding continuously proved that low-impact, sustainable design made environmental and financial sense.
Ross Harding wants to make Melbourne the city that never runs out of what it needs. Photo courtesy of Finding Infinity
Ross traveled for half a decade through Europe and Mexico creating environmental plans for self-sufficient houses, offices, beach and ski resorts, and even urban communities.
After working on successful projects for years, Harding – whose surname implies that he doesn’t like taking the easy road – had a wild idea. If he could prove it was economically viable to create low impact self-sustaining buildings, what about an entire city?
Here’s the plan
For years Harding and Young had an itch they couldn’t scratch. They wanted to research the financial viability of a self-sustaining city, but the requests to fund their research kept getting rejected.
“It was a dumb move professionally. But it worked out in the end”
Ross Harding
In 2020 Australia came out of a bushfire that saw 19 million hectares burnt, only to be thrown into one of the longest Covid lockdowns in the world. It was time to ‘build back better’.
Partly through belief in their vision and partly through frustration, they decided to take a leap of faith.
“We said, screw it, we’ll have a crack ourselves,” said Harding, “I just thought, I’m tired of talking about it. It feels to me like my life’s purpose. Let’s find a way and who cares about the money. The money will work itself out. At the time we were just a two-person team and we spent 50 per cent of our working hours on the project unpaid. It was a dumb move professionally, but it did work out in the end.”
With its 31 local councils and five million inhabitants, Melbourne was already recognised as the second most livable city, but every year it burns enough coal to fill its tallest building, the 300-metre-high Eureka Tower, 100 times, and burns enough gas to fill it 30 times. Harding and Young wanted to change that, and make it the most sustainable city in the world.
After two years crunching the numbers and building a 400MB Excel sheet, Finding Infinity came up with a AUD $100-billion plan (€57 billion) that proved it was possible to create a fully self-sustaining city. Better yet, it could pay for itself completely within eight years and create 80,000 jobs, and more than 40,000 ongoing in the process. The best part, everything in the report relies on existing technology that is ‘scalable, tested and ready to be implemented’.
The team outlined a roadmap with ten initiatives, or streams, which included things like electrifying the entire public and private transport sector, turning the city’s car parks and houses into batteries, retrofitting all of Melbourne’s one million buildings, putting solar panels on half of the city, ‘recycling’ sewer water, and turning the entire metropolitan area into a zero waste, ‘circular city’. They dubbed it A New Normal.
Bringing people on board
The research proved that there are no insurmountable technological or financial barriers to a self-sustaining city. The only thing holding it back is policy… and people.
Early on, Ross pitched his vision to a representative of the state government of Victoria, who swiftly rejected it.
“She thought I was crazy,” said Harding. “Then she said something that stuck with me. She flipped it around and asked what could we do to help try and remove the risk for the government?”
“She told me to go and build projects and make them profitable, prove to business and the community that it works, and get public support.”
That advice sparked an epiphany that would crystalise while Ross was in Mexico visiting friends. He sums it up in one word: empathy.
“I realized that rather than thinking I’m right and other people are wrong and blaming everyone, or trying to convince them with brute force, I needed to find ways to make things work for where people are at.”
“It then became about removing all the barriers and bringing the public and private sectors together to have shared ownership.”
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The power of culture
Harding is no stranger to meeting people where they’re at. A decade ago he held a solar-powered dance party in his house to try and convince his friends to switch to renewable energy. He went on to host ‘fiestas’ with fashion icon Vivienne Westwood to help her kickstart a series of renewable energy crowdfunding projects. When he returned to Australia in 2015 he ran three annual music and eco-talk fiestas for more than a thousand people.
“The parties played a pivotal role in the design of A New Normal”’ says Ross. “It was always the solar-powered fiestas that everyone was interested in… but then we realized it wasn’t solar and music, it was technology and culture, and so we played with that.”
“It became our ethos to work out how we could integrate the physical infrastructure that is required to transform our cities with the cultural infrastructure that enables us all to thrive.”
Putting that ethos into practice, Harding invited 15 of Melbourne’s leading architects to his house for dinner, shared his research, and gave them all an unusual brief.
“We asked them to find a poetic connection between technology and the people.”
The architects dreamed up 15 projects that aligned with one of the 10 initiatives outlined in the New Normal report, including a cultural event space in a car park, powered by EV batteries, a ‘Cathedral of Circularity’ that teaches repair and reuse, a ‘water tank club and treatment gallery’ under the Melbourne Cricket Ground, and an anaerobic digester that uses food waste from Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Market to power a moonlight cinema on site, with the by-product of nutrient-rich fertilizer given to shoppers to take home for their gardens.
An open air cinema, powered by organic waste from the market next door. Image courtesy of Six Degrees Architects
In order to warm up the public, empower businesses, and embolden politicians, A New Normal developed a five-step process: “We workshop it, we communicate it, we prototype it, we build it, and we replicate it,” said Harding.
The prototype stage was launched in an immersive exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria’s Melbourne Design Week. One exhibit was a tea room where participants could enjoy a chat and a cuppa that was boiled on an induction cooktop, another was a video art installation of people around the world drinking recycled water. Kennedy Nolan Architects created a dining table from zero-waste materials to promote their idea for a self-sufficient hotel. They had a meal on that table with some developers and walked away with a deal to build.
The launch was a smash, and eight of the 15 projects – worth over $200 million (€114 million) – were funded.
“That gave the project substance and suddenly it went from a wild idea to poetry in motion,” said Harding.
Boring can be radical
Of the eight projects funded, two have already been completed.
Finding Infinity worked with architects and developers on a $2 million (€1.1 million) apartment block upgrade that included a $400,000 (€228,000) energy and waste fit out. The Wilam Ngarrang Apartments, which translates to ‘place of reflection’, is Australia’s first-ever energy-plus retrofit – producing more energy than it uses.
“A whole bunch of boring projects can add up to something radical”
Ross Harding
The second project funded was the retrofit of an office building that Finding Infinity now calls home.
The two projects might not be as creative as the others in development, but they are Harding’s favourites because they prove how easy, simple and financially viable it is to be low-impact.
“A whole bunch of boring projects can add up to something radical,” said Harding. “If every building in Melbourne underwent the same retrofits, we could instantly slash our carbon emissions by 40 per cent.”
The two projects are already playing a catalytic role in policy, with members of Home’s Victoria and other government representatives being inspired by their walk-through tours. They also sparked an unlikely collaboration with one of Melbourne’s largest building unions, the 30,000 strong CFMEU: plans are already underway to retrofit the union’s buildings. They’re even taking the plumbers and gas fitters’ building off gas.
Everybody’s invited
Inspired by the success with Melbourne, A New Normal launched last year in Sydney and Perth, and they have their eyes on global expansion.
With the majority of the world’s population living in cities, these hubs of population and activity could hold the key to beating climate change and achieving sustainability. Or as Harding puts it: “It doesn’t matter if you’re an individual, a business or a politician, there’s a party going on in every city around the world and you’re all invited.”
