The LivingCampus got off to a great start with a prominent article by Brenda Harwood in the Star. Phil Ker endorsed the project, as did student representatives Meagan Cloughley and Ryan Ward.
Leigh has been writing about the project too:
We’re aiming to be developing sustainable production systems and living/working spaces with community education value. There will be produce gardens for medicinal purposes, fibers pigments and other materials, eatables, natives, functional.. all designed with sustainability and educational value in mind, hopefully following permaculture design principles as closely as possible.
it’s great to see our Living Campus project getting big bold committing statements behind it. That’s what we need.
Leigh has recently visited several sustainability projects in Melbourne and is concerned that with statements such as “first in Australasia” we are failing to learn from our neighbours. He points to the CERES project (see his great flickr stream from CERES).
Leigh’s comments sparked a considerable debate on the Otago Sustainability group.
The short story is that we’re sticking by the belief that we are breaking new ground (so to speak). The key to the LivingCampus is that it does all three of productive garden, interactive experience and integrated into an active campus.
This project will involve the complete renovation of the Polytechnic’s existing city campus, re-inventing the current, unsustainable outdoors environment as an open-air interactive museum, vibrant community garden and visionary hub for sustainability-oriented community education services.
We are extremely keen to hear of people’s experiences in similar areas. Please leave a comment here or a link in del.icio.us with tag livingcampus.
Here’s an updated background document. More to come before forum on Friday.
Computing for Sustainability 
leighblackall
March 6, 2008
Nice post Sam, and well handled. I’m really relieved that my criticisms (if you can call them that) have not been received as necessarily negative and that your post does not have a hint of defensiveness. That’s good project management modeling right there IMO and a sign or a healthy project. Looking forward to the forum.