CSIRO response to The House of Representatives Standing Committee on Environment and Heritage Inquiry into Sustainable Cities 2025 / compiled by Peter W. Newton and Joslin Moore

CSIRO welcomes the Inquiry into Sustainable Cities 2025 as a mechanism by which it can provide input to the Inquiry in accordance with its general Terms of Reference, as well as consider possible new strategic directions for CSIRO's Research & Development in the urban systems arena. To this end, CSIRO convened a Sustainable Cities 2025 Workshop in Melbourne on 13 October of21 senior scientists from 7 Divisions across CSIRO together with several experts external to the organisation. The outcomes of the workshop are embodied in the material summarised in this submission. One of the major outcomes of the workshop was the recognition that urban systems are highly complex systems with many interrelated and interacting components. This complexity means that total system sustainability can only be achieved when we can conceptualise, plan and manage individual system components in the context of the total urban system. Because of our belief that progress towards sustainability may be hampered by the very human habit of wanting to break things down into units that subsequently never re-connect, we have made a conscious decision to emphasise the importance of complete system understanding through the structure of our submission.