Seminar Information

Chris Ryan is fully dedicated to global sustainable development and has travelled and educated the world on his quest to create a new vision of sustainable systems, processes and products and built environments. In that respect he has been part of some of the earliest sustainability approaches and projects in his home country, Australia, particularly in Melbourne, where today sustainability is high on everyone’s agenda. Ryan is an avid presenter and teacher by nature having worked in the corporate, community and academic research environments. He currently resides in Europe, where he is an Erasmus Mundus Fellow researching and writing around the transformation to systems of production and consumption and urban resilience and the idea of "Cities of Short Distances" - all resulting from the anticipation of climate change.
We seize the opportunity to invite him to Brussels for the Realty Sustainability Lecture which he gives the daring title:

“Now for the BIG shift in the built environment: buildings as restorative elements (beyond zero carbon to designing for resilience)”

More info about the author Chris Ryan (pdf, 486 KB)

Dedicated project

Chris Ryan,
Director Victorian Eco-Innovation Lab of University of Melbourne

The Victorian Eco-Innovation Lab (VEIL) is a government funded design-led think tank to build new visions of Melbourne in 25 years in response to climate change. Through a unique process VEIL has a substantial range of projects that explore a paradigm change in infrastructure and systems of production and consumption –to networked localised ‘distributed’ systems, in energy, water, food and transport. The ‘City of Short Distances’ describes scenarios and visions or a transformed urban realm where the distance between production and consumption is reduced to increase resilience and energy efficiency and reduce green-house gas production. Some of this work has redirected a $600m AUD project for a central urban development. Plans for a radical Eco-City have been ‘vision-driven’ from outside of government. This work has been transferred to a pilot ‘retrofit’ project in an existing urban area through an approach of ‘acupuncture intervention’.

The specialist panel members are:
Mr Antoine Crahay, Assistant Director of the Cabinet, Department of City Redevelopment Brussels
Mr Renaud Chevalier, Director-partner Assar architects
Mr Peter Garré, Managing director Bopro
Mr Hans Degraeuwe, Managing director Degraeuwe Consulting.
Mr Jos Teunissen, Director of EMEA real estate and facilities Sybase. Boardmember CoreNet Global
Mr Kim Verdonck, Head of research, Head of Marketing CBRE will moderate

Seminar coordinated by Real Estate Publishers.