Green Cities 2014 coming to Melbourne

Wednesday, 12 March, 2014

Green Cities 2014, a conference on sustainability in the built environment, will be held from 18-19 March at the Grand Hyatt Melbourne. It will continue on 20 March with site tours of some of Melbourne’s most sustainable buildings.

Co-hosted by the Green Building Council of Australia and Property Council of Australia, the conference will bring together sustainability specialists and innovators for discussion and debate. The program will be distilled into three distinct yet complementary days:

Day 1: BLUEPRINT - World-leading sustainable thinkers contribute their experiences, thoughts and actions to the discourse on our sustainable future.
Day 2: IMPRINT - Industry comes together to share tools, tactics and techniques to construct a greener built environment.
Day 3: FOOTPRINT - Get up close and personal with the latest green building innovations during Green Star site tours and educational workshops.

Keynote speaker Kent Larson, director and principal research scientist, MIT Media Lab’s Changing Places group, will share his work on everything from stackable, electric cars to tiny, TARDIS-like apartments. This will be followed by ‘Sustainability: it’s all in the strategy’, in which four industry leaders will reveal the secrets to their companies’ success and examine how to shift sustainability from a technical to a strategic business decision.

During ‘People, profit and peak performance’, leaders from the UK, Singapore and South African green building councils, as well as the WorldGBC, will explore how we measure and monetise the previously unmeasurable - staff satisfaction, performance and health - and expand the business case for green building. ‘Talking ’bout regeneration’ will then uncover the massive opportunities for retrofitting existing buildings and attendees will hear outstanding case studies from around the globe.

These are just some of the sessions to be held over the course of the event. For full program details and to register, visit http://www.greencities.org.au/.