Rain falls on a suburb. It hits roofs, driveways and roads, and within minutes it is in the local creek, running high enough to flood the burrows where baby platypus are sheltering. They can swim, but they still need to breathe. A few dry weeks later the same creek is too shallow for an adult to move through safely. Tim Fletcher has spent his career in the space between those two extremes.

Tim is Professor of Urban Ecohydrology at the University of Melbourne and heads the Waterway Ecosystem Research Group. He was part of the team that built MUSIC, the model now used across Australia to demonstrate stormwater compliance, and he is lead author of the most-cited paper in urban water, the one that sorted out SUDS, LID, BMPs, WSUD and the rest of the alphabet soup. Its conclusion still surprises people. There is no correct term, and there should not be one.

We trace three eras. The Monash years, where six people, a dunce's hat and a very good mentor turned a research idea into software the industry now runs on. Little Stringybark Creek, a world-first attempt to retrofit an entire catchment to save the stream running through it, funded partly by asking residents to bid for tanks and rain gardens in a reverse auction. And Tanks for Platypus, where networked smart tanks release water seven days ahead of a storm and top the creek up when it runs low, working the way a solar battery works for the grid.

Along the way: why he calls himself a permeable engineer, why he cried in the bathroom on his first day in stormwater, and the meeting called to decide who to make redundant that instead lasted ten minutes.

Recorded in person in Lausanne, eighteen years after we met on a dark bike path with a puncture and no repair kit.

Chapters:
0:00 Intro
1:59 Guest Intro & Remembering our first encounter
6:42 Reminiscing about undergraduate times and education
10:39 How would Tim describe himself?
13:10 The WSUD Terminology Debate
21:28 The key barrier to scaling up WSUD
27:09 Tim's Monash Era
31:33 The MUSIC Model
40:40 A 101 on Ecohydrology & the Urban Stream Syndrome
43:32 The Little Stringybark Ck Living Lab
1:03:57 Tim's Tanks for Platypus Project & Real-time Control
1:22:21 What is Tim's biggest lessons learnt so far?
1:25:04 Q&A Start
1:25:12 What does innovation mean to you?
1:28:02 Key moment, book, person, event
1:31:52 If you had a magic wand?
1:33:34 Time Management
1:36:10 Favourite childhood memory
1:38:13 Biggest challenge to date?
1:43:04 Advice for young professionals
1:46:34 What is something you'll regret not doing?
1:47:50 What would you most like to be remembered for?
1:49:57 Where can people find you?
1:52:48 Final Message
1:53:23 Outro

Detailed shownotes over at: petermbach.com/podcast for more in-depth information about each episode.
Join the community over at: linkedin.com/company/tgcpodcast and let's connect across the world!

Subscribe and listen to the podcast (and do please leave a review/rating) on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts from.
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Hosted by Peter Marcus Bach (www.petermbach.com), follow me on:

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Ask ten people what a "sponge city" is and you will get ten different answers. Silvia Oppliger knows this better than most, because asking that question is how she opens almost every conversation she has. It is a good word for catching attention, she says, and a really spongy one for everything after that.

Silvia is an environmental engineer and the coordinator of the Swiss Water Association's National Sponge City Network. Over three years she has pulled federal offices, cantons, municipalities, universities, engineering and architecture associations, spatial planners, landscape architects and even the insurance sector into the same rooms. More than 800 experts across exchange events, six webinars, 80 presentations, a national information platform and a professional certification course.

We get into the parts that rarely make the conference slides. Why Article 7 of the Swiss Water Protection Act arrives too late in a project to change much. Why 26 cantons means 26 water regulations, and what happened when a working group tried to agree on one table. Why some cantonal street laws make it questionable to send rainwater from your own garden onto the road. Why the municipalities moving fastest are not the big cities.

Silvia also tells the story underneath the job. Three mother tongues before she started school. A suit bought at 27 out of nerves, and a room with 70 men in it. And the idea she keeps returning to now, which is that water professionals have to learn "architect" as a language if they want to be heard at all.

Her definition of innovation is worth the listen on its own. Ninety-five per cent of it, she argues, is not technology.

Chapters:
0:00 Intro
1:59 Guest Intro & The Polyglot
8:19 An environmental engineer who connects people
13:54 Regulations and unifying 26 Cantons in Switzerland
15:50 The road to National Sponge Cities Coordinator
21:03 Terminology Discussion and Swiss Sponge City History
26:05 The Swiss Sponge Cities Network
33:46 Swiss Public and Private Water Management
37:16 National differences in priorities and silos
45:38 Communication and Knowledge Exchange Strategies
50:57 Reflecting on the outputs of the first three years
1:00:32 Where the Sponge Cities Network is heading
1:06:35 Silvia's Future Plans
1:07:42 Q&A Start
1:08:05 What does innovation mean to you?
1:09:12 Key moment, event, person
1:12:31 Time Management
1:15:59 Favourite childhood memory
1:17:10 Biggest challenge to date
1:20:42 Advice for young professionals
1:22:27 What would you most like to be remembered for?
1:23:24 Where can people find you?
1:24:13 Final Message
1:24:37 Outro

Detailed shownotes over at: petermbach.com/podcast for more in-depth information about each episode.
Join the community over at: linkedin.com/company/tgcpodcast and let's connect across the world!

Subscribe and listen to the podcast (and do please leave a review/rating) on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts from.
Your subscription/follow will greatly help the show grow and reach a wider audience.

Hosted by Peter Marcus Bach (www.petermbach.com), follow me on:

• X (fomerly Twitter): @petermbach
• Instagram: @petermbach87
• Subscribe to my channel on YouTube: www.youtube.com/c/PeterMarcusBach/

Billions in international money poured into Sarajevo after the siege ended. What got built was a city with more shopping malls and less public green space than the one that had been destroyed. Money was never the constraint. Coordination was.

Haris Piplas is Director of Integrated Urban Solutions International at Drees & Sommer and a lecturer at ETH Zürich. He trained as a landscape architect in Sarajevo, an urban designer in Berlin, and took his doctorate in architecture in Zürich. His argument is that the way the built environment carved itself into separate professions last century has left none of them able to do the actual job. Transforming a place means understanding law, media, budgets, referenda and human psychology, and no architecture school teaches any of it.

We get into what urban regeneration should and should not be, why both neighbours in an argument about one parking space have a legitimate case, how the Commit to Green project is bringing blue-green infrastructure back into a contaminated former landfill in Milan and a landslide-prone site on the edge of Barcelona, and why the recovery of Ukrainian cities cannot wait for a perfect moment that may never arrive.

Haris also talks about the two cities that raised him. Sarajevo, which lost almost everything when the Cold War ended, and Berlin, which gained almost everything. He explains why the "smart city" buzzword is more useful than its critics allow, why architectural competitions bin most of the knowledge they generate, and why the single-name genius architect is a marketing fiction worth retiring. Plus central midfield as a theory of project management, moustaches as a theory of fashion cycles, and a childhood memory from a refugee camp that he still describes as beautiful.

Chapters:
0:00 Intro
1:59 Guest Intro and The Urban Forum
4:23 Drees & Sommer & a little bit of Zurich history
9:44 The fallacy of 20th century hyperspecialization
14:37 Growing up in Sarajevo shaped Haris' drive
18:48 Urban Regeneration: what it should and shouldn't be
25:56 Geopolitics, stakeholders and scaling up urban regeneration
35:10 Baukultur, Inclusivity and the Blue-Green Infrastructure
43:15 Co-op-e-tition and horizontalizing authorship
49:54 AI and the Smart Cities Movement
54:59 A collage of Haris' project work and "bridges”
1:06:23 Heading in the right direction?
1:08:34 What excites Haris about the future?
1:10:40 Q&A Start
1:10:50 What does innovation mean to you?
1:12:45 Key Moment, Book, Person
1:17:08 Time Management
1:20:52 Favourite childhood memory
1:24:31 What would you most like to be remembered for?
1:28:17 Where can people find you?
1:29:54 Final Message
1:31:33 Outro

Detailed shownotes over at: petermbach.com/podcast for more in-depth information about each episode.
Join the community over at: linkedin.com/company/tgcpodcast and let's connect across the world!

Subscribe and listen to the podcast (and do please leave a review/rating) on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts from.
Your subscription/follow will greatly help the show grow and reach a wider audience.

Hosted by Peter Marcus Bach (www.petermbach.com), follow me on:

• X (fomerly Twitter): @petermbach
• Instagram: @petermbach87
• Subscribe to my channel on YouTube: www.youtube.com/c/PeterMarcusBach/