The Drivers of Change have been issued twice now. They are collated and published by the Foresight and Innovation team and consist of a series of cards grouped by theme around the STEEP principles covering Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental, or Political drivers.

The cards are often used as a tool for discussion or prompts for workshop events such as the 2009 TED Global workshop in Oxford.

More recently Duncan Wilson has created an interactive tag cloud so the drivers of change most pertinent to any particular group or workshop can be recorded at that event. We’re working with Duncan at the moment to develop a similar tool for the SlimCity workshops we will be conducting in Australia over the next few months. You can see the tag clouds for Melbourne and play with the voting while they are being developed.

SlimCity is a World Economic Forum initiative for which we co-developed three sets of cards (cousins to the Drivers of Change). They can be downloaded here.

Vegas2015: The Brisbane Retrofit Project is a series of explorations by Arup to understand the depth and breadth of the challenge resulting from a convergence of these issues in Brisbane.  Developing a range of pilot projects that adopt a suite of climate smart strategies for a city-wide retrofit of Brisbane is our vision.

Our cities are places of opportunity.  We rely on them to shelter and entertain us, provide us with employment and mobility.  The city is also a place under much stress as most of the world’s population seek out their ideal future in these urban centres.

But our built environment presents a challenge to our future growth, enhancement and prosperity as we start to realise the significant dependence on fossil fuel fixes we have introduced to solve many of our problems.  Our vehicles and buildings generate carbon pollution, along with our water and waste treatment and management systems.  Ninety-five percent of our food is currently oil dependent.

The city-wide retrofit idea comes from Arup’s Drivers of Change global research initiative, which has been continually exploring the issues most likely to have a major impact on society and the built environment.

Arup is running a global call to action and an invitation to urban dwellers to describe through photography the places and things they love about their cities, and those that they could do without.

The brief is to capture through photography what you really like in a city, what makes it tick, and what you would like to see more of in the future. They can be spaces or services, aspects of everyday life or temporary events. Alternatively, describe something that should be removed from the city, a building you could do without, a service that just doesn’t work. These are a CUT. Things you like are a PASTE.

The project will culminate with an exhibition of curated insights, stories and speculations based on the images.

To get started all you need is a photo you have taken with a few keywords that highlight what is special about that place or aspect of the city, along with a description of what you would CUT or PASTE.

How do I submit a photo?

If you are a Flickr user add them to the cut’n'pastecities group. Or if email is easier then just send them to photo@cutnpastecities.com with the following information:

• is it a CUT or a PASTE?;
• what you like or dislike, specifically;
• add some tags that describe the content of the photo;
• describe the location (address or city or geocode, adding to the map).

Any rules?

The photo must be one that you have taken, and one that we can use with your permission. The photo remains your intellectual property; cutnpaste cities will credit you as you wish. Any size and resolution is accepted.