Events

Stay informed at The Retrofit Forum...

The Retrofit Forum, co-hosted by The Retrofit Lab (The University of Melbourne) and the University of Technology Sydney, serves as an open platform to discuss the opportunities and challenges of retrofit in Australia. Held on the first Tuesday of each month beginning in May, this forum brings together industry, government, academia, and the public to share knowledge and stay updated about retrofitting practice and research.

These forums aim to drive the sector forward by fostering a collaborative community dedicated to sharing best practices and insights. Each session will feature presentations by retrofit academics and industry professionals. By facilitating connections, these sessions will address key retrofit challenges and opportunities such as;

• Commercial Buildings: How do we engage with developers, building owners and other stakeholders to make retrofit ‘business as usual’ for commercial entities?
• Housing: The majority of Australian housing is ill-equipped to deal with unfolding climate, health and affordability challenges. What role does retrofit play in improving the existing housing stock in an equitable and sustainable way?
• Landscapes: How does landscape retrofitting contribute to the development of more resilient, low-carbon cities by enhancing various ecosystem services?
• Skills: What steps are necessary to equip the Australian workforce with the skills required for retrofitting?
• Digital: How can digital technology contribute to promoting the retrofit agenda, including the use of technologies like digital twins?

Date: Tuesday 7th of May
Location: University of Melbourne + Online
Time: 4:00 – 5:00pm
Theme: Commercial Buildings

• Walter van der Linde, Associate, Buildings Mechanical, Aurecon
• Dr Dominique Hes, Chair of the Board of Greenfleet, M.AIRAH, M.AICD, GIA(A
• Maria Panagiotidou, Zero Carbon Buildings Lead, The City of Melbourne

Chair: Professor Brendon McNiven, Enterprise Professor, Architectural Engineering, The University of Melbourne

In a context in which economic coercion is becoming ever-more central to geopolitical conflict, there is a pressing need to examine the long-suppressed question of economic power. In the wake of the Cold War, economic power was disavowed under the hegemony of a neoliberal ideology that treated the world market as a site of mutually beneficial, voluntary relations. At the same time, a proliferation of economic sanctions reshaped economic relations and stifled the supposed independence and economic development of much of the post-colonial world.

Economic and financial sanction are both enabled by and exacerbate the deeply unequal integration of the post-colonial world economy that is the legacy of colonialism and neoliberalism. They leverage the indebtedness and dependence of countries of the Global South and the global centrality of the US dollar to coerce states and societies. The results of such economic coercion can be devastating, but the abstract mechanisms through which it operates have made it difficult to identify causation or even adequately conceptualise the form of power that is wielded in sanctions strategies.

At a time when human rights NGOs rigorously count civilian deaths in armed conflicts, no equivalent accounting is available to victims of a war waged via exchange rates, inflation, and interest rates. What, then, is economic coercion? How is economic power mobilised in international relations and in warfare? How can we best understand a form of power that deliberately degrades the infrastructure that sustains biological life? In this public lecture, Dr Jessica Whyte will situate economic sanctions on a continuum that stretches from the overt use of military force to the everyday capitalist coercion that Karl Marx called the “mute compulsion of economic relations.

This public lecture will be delivered as part of the inaugural Melbourne Critical Theory Winter School, presented by the Critical Research Association Melbourne (CRAM).