Blue Sky Dreaming
the right place
2072 sounds like a far distant future yet as we celebrate Mirvac’s 50th anniversary, 50 years seems a mere blink of the eye. Since Mirvac’s founding year in 1972 we have created thousands of homes that bring comfort, joy and a beautiful living environment that enables our customers to live their best lives. We will continue to do so for the next 50 years. While our cities, homes and lifestyles might change, our purpose, to reimagine urban life, will not waver. The teams who lead Mirvac Residential have an eye firmly focused on a future where the pillars upon which the Mirvac Difference is founded, remain as relevant as ever.
“Technology has moved at lightning speed throughout the first two decades of the 21st century, influencing how we live and indeed where we live. In the years ahead we expect it to play an even greater role as homes become more automated and regulated by smart systems attuned to our daily habits and health needs.”
Planning ahead is something we do every day. Whether it’s 10, 20 or 50 years in the future, the homes we design and build are expected to endure well past our own lifetime. So, a little bit of crystal ball gazing into future design and construction methodology is required but also a willingness to examine the past and look critically at the influences that shape behaviours, lifestyles and the formation of cities.
There are three compelling factors that we need to take into account to create resilient and enduring communities that are fit for purpose in 2022 and beyond – population, climate change and technology. Demographers and planners seldom forecast beyond 30 years given the difficulty in accurately predicting population growth. The United Nations, in its latest update, forecast world population to peak at 10.4 billion in 2080, lower and sooner than their 2017 prediction. Other researchers have suggested world population will peak earlier in 2064 at 10 billion.
What is even more relevant is the age distribution. Australia’s current population is around 26 million, with approximately 18 per cent falling into the young category, 65 per cent working age and 17 per cent elderly. By 2056 the working age population is expected to have fallen to around 60 per cent and by 2070 the elderly population to be twice that of the young population. Even by 2050, well within our planning horizon, the elderly population will have risen to 23.65 per cent of Australia’s population. These numbers have implications for the types of homes we build and where we build. You can see already that our projects are taking into account a shift in demographics, offering lifestyle living in apartments with high levels of amenity within well-serviced walkable communities offering good access to public transport. It’s something that younger buyers are also demanding, and with the inevitable march of time, they will be our older customers of the future. The perception of age itself is being reappraised. Generally, we are healthier, more active and expected to live and work longer than ever before. We might not hold the secret to eternal youth but today’s over 60s expect to be fully engaged in work, family, community and leisure activities, and our future homes will reflect this, as they do today.
Climate change is ever-present in our planning for the future and has been a matter of urgency for Mirvac for close to a decade, reflected in our This Changes Everything sustainability strategy. We approach sustainability from several perspectives, beginning with our own operations. Last year Mirvac became the first Australian property group to be net positive carbon for activities within our control, well ahead of our 2030 target.
Operationally, consideration for our environment impacts our design and development activities as we seek innovative ways to eliminate carbon emissions and enable our customers to live sustainably. Moving away from fossil fuels means that we must assume our homes will be all electric and the power used to generate them will come from renewable sources, either through the grid or rooftop solar PV. These increasingly efficient homes will generate a large proportion of renewable energy within the building boundary and store energy via batteries, while also offering greater connectivity between our homes, our transport and the grid. These changes will most likely occur long before 2072 and we are already future proofing homes by giving our customers the opportunity to customise with sustainability packages. In time, these features will be standard with technology integrated seamlessly to optimise environmental performance.
The location of urban centres will be determined as much by climate as it will by councils and governments, as we navigate changing weather patterns. Our capital cities are likely to become more densely populated heightening the need to provide amenity in urban renewal growth areas, as we are doing in locations such as Green Square in Sydney, Yarra’s Edge in Melbourne, Waterfront Newstead in Brisbane and Peninsula Burswood in Perth. These projects exemplify our approach to urban regeneration and have been designed and built with an eye firmly on the future.
Technology has moved at lightning speed throughout the first two decades of the 21st century, influencing how we live and indeed where we live. In the years ahead we expect it to play an even greater role as homes become more automated and regulated by smart systems attuned to our daily habits and health needs. This signifies a shift in thinking on sustainability towards regenerative development that improves local outcomes rather than merely sustaining them. We are a long way from reaching this point but the north star that we follow is growing in clarity every day.
One thing we don’t see changing in 2072 is the desire of every human for social engagement and interaction. In this respect the communities we are creating today and the ones we will build in 2072, have been designed to bring people together. The social infrastructure and shared spaces, the gardens and rooftops, form the backdrop to a life well lived, today and long into the future.
*Source: United Nations World Population Prospects 2022
"The future holds many mysteries and as architects, designers and masterplanners we have a responsibility to design a future that serves the needs of people and communities.”
The purpose of a home, to provide shelter, nurture and bring people together, is not about to radically change, not now nor in the distant future. The composition of households may be different and the home embedded with intelligent systems that regulate things like lighting, heating and air quality, but the fundamental design will still spell home.
Technology has brought about many changes to the way we live and we are becoming more adept at harnessing its potential to improve our quality of life. It opens up many exciting possibilities for home life in 2072 and we will continue to explore ways to integrate it seamlessly into our living environments. As technology becomes more present in our lives, we expect an even greater desire to reconnect with the natural world. Biophilic design is the practice of connecting people and the natural world in the built environment and is entwined in many of our current projects and likely to feature more prominently in the years ahead.
What we will see more frequently is landscaping beyond the ground plane, woven into the architecture of high rise apartments, serving the dual purpose of cooling the building and contributing to the health and wellbeing of occupants. It’s not too far-fetched to imagine that this type of urban greening could also become the new urban farm, a balcony garden taken to the next level. Smart home technology already enables a high degree of automation and the next evolution is likely to be ‘intelligent homes’ with connected systems that act like a diagnostic tool to optimise performance and alert you if an appliance, electrical or water system requires attention. Solar systems with technology platforms that link individual apartments to rooftop generation are already being used on a number of Mirvac projects including Tullamore and Peninsula Burswood, through our partnership with Allume.
Concern for health and wellbeing is unlikely to abate and by 2072 we could well be relying on our homes to turn their diagnostic ability to our health. While much of what is in development sounds a little gimmicky, so did smart watches once upon a time. Materiality is likely to be influenced by biophilic design principles which will see greater use of nature-based building products which can be readily recycled or reformed. There is increasing emphasis on building materials with recycled content, something that is happening already as we embrace zero waste and find innovative ways to reduce demand for finite resources. Flexible design to accommodate changing lifestyles and family composition will be an important feature of future homes, as it is now in homes designed with multipurpose spaces that can be bedrooms, living rooms or work spaces. Balancing increased population with a finite supply of land means that homes may well be smaller with more emphasis placed on shared common space and amenity that enables the social connection we all crave.
The future holds many mysteries and as architects, designers and masterplanners we have a responsibility to design a future that serves the needs of people and communities. Our Mirvac Design Ethos is founded on four pillars – people, place, quality and legacy. These are values that will hold as true in 2072 as they do today.
“The buildings of the future will also need to be 100 per cent recyclable, with the end of life considered from the very start of the design and construction process."
For those not familiar with modern construction little appears to have changed in the construction industry for decades. Concrete and steel are still the dominant materials used to build structures, cranes dot the skylines of our major cities and construction sites remain highly labour intensive. But look more closely and Mirvac Construction has quietly undergone a huge transformation over recent times, driven by three imperatives – to build safer, build smarter and build faster - and by our overarching pursuit of excellence in both planning and delivery execution.
By planning our projects in great detail and delivering with proven expertise we can ensure certainty of outcome for our customers, who have come to rely on Mirvac for industry leading design and incredible build quality. That hasn’t changed in the 50 years past and it won’t change in the next 50 years either. There are sound reasons for striving to build safer, smarter and faster. We want everyone in our workforce to go home safely every day and not be exposed to harm. Building faster lessens the overall project duration and therefore the impact we have on the communities in which we operate, and building smarter allows us to deliver higher quality projects with greatly improved sustainability outcomes.
2072 sits well beyond our planning horizon but the groundwork for that distant future is being laid today, both in Mirvac’s 2030 sustainability targets and our ambition to digitise our construction business. Both of these endeavours require us to rethink how we design and construct buildings, the materials we select to build with, and the data that we need to capture and think about every day. In sustainability, achieving zero waste is not just about achieving 100 per cent waste recycling (today we achieve around 95 per cent recycling) but also reducing the overall tonnage of waste we produce. We are already addressing this in our push towards increased prefabrication across the diverse portfolio of apartment buildings, office towers and houses that we build. More and more we are adopting a ‘design for manufacture’ (or DFMA) approach to drive how we design and build.
Over the past five years Mirvac Construction has been a leader in this field, particularly in our housing business where we can manufacture up to 50 per cent of a house in an offsite manufacturing facility and crane it into position on site. In doing so we are achieving higher build quality, reducing scheduling risks and build durations, producing less waste and greatly reducing the potential for safety incidents to happen on our sites. Increasing the use of prefabrication apartment and office construction where we will soon achieve up to 25 per cent prefabrication of our high rise towers.
The next big frontier for the construction industry will be to tackle the carbon embodied in the materials used to construct our buildings. Reinforced concrete, steel and glass have been incredibly efficient and cost-effective materials in the construction industry for more than 100 years. Today and into the future, our industry will need to rapidly embrace new technologies and modern materials that drive down embodied carbon in our buildings. This will require close and collaborative partnerships with engineers, materials scientists and industry associations to deliver the necessary carbon reduction outcomes. As carbon elimination becomes the imperative, the buildings of the future will also need to be 100 per cent recyclable, with the end of life considered from the very start of the design and construction process.
The other great frontier for construction is how we embrace digital technologies. Data will be crucial to the next 50 years in construction. How we capture, analyse and learn from data will be essential to how we operate our construction sites in the future and the business outcomes that we achieve. And whilst we don’t aspire to be at the cutting edge of digital technology, we are at the forefront of the industry with our use of Building Information Modelling (BIM) and the holistic digital construction operating platform that we are currently developing. Both our use of BIM and our digital operations will be essential capabilities that will enhance our ability to build safer, smarter and faster for decades to come.
The benefits of Mirvac’s integrated model came to the fore 20 years ago when Mirvac Design transitioned from 2D to 3D design and visualisation, becoming one of the first architectural studios in the country to do so. Today, Mirvac with our integrated model spanning design, construction and building operations, is now modelling buildings in 3D, 4D (time and scheduling), 5D (cost), 6D (building operations) and reaping the benefit of an early transition to digitisation.
Increasingly artificial intelligence (AI) is playing a role in how we deliver our construction projects, informing us about how we can make better decisions as the building progresses, and where we can increase productivity or streamline our operations. Drones are being deployed to capture data through high res photography allowing us to see in real time progress of works across the structure, services and finishes phases of a project, and then compare this progress with the BIM model and our project schedules. The use of digital technologies will explode in decades to come and result in unprecedented levels of precision, detail and quality in the buildings that Mirvac Construction builds.
Mirvac acknowledges Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the Traditional Owners of the lands and waters of Australia, and we offer our respect to their Elders past and present.
Artwork: ‘Reimagining Country’, created by Riki Salam (Mualgal, Kaurareg, Kuku Yalanji) of We are 27 Creative.