Chrisna du Plessis was our guest on CIB in Conversation in November 2021 just one week after the end of COP26. This proved to be propitious timing! Chrisna is Head of Department of Architecture and Chair of the School for the Built Environment, University of Pretoria, South Africa, and was Chair of the CIB Programme Committee from 2016-19.
We started by talking about her early career and how she got involved with CIB, for which she described herself as “something of a poster child”. We discussed mentors, one of her most important influences having been Rodney Milford, former CIB President from 2004-2007, and she had some good advice on the role of mentors to help someone to discover their passon and identify doors to open for them. She also had advice for early career women based on her own positive experience: to be visible and audible rather than a wilting violet, and to look for opportunities to lead a task which can lead to profile, citing her own role in preparing the South African chapter of the Agenda 21 report. This brought us on to her specialist theme of environmental sustainability and adaptation in response to climate change. Chrisna gave an acclaimed keynote speech at World Building Congress 2019 in Hong Kong on the perils of smart cities and we discussed this theme again before coming round to her strong view that we cannot rely on politicians’ talkfest to make a difference, instead we need to focus on how cities and communities (of practice as well as neighbourhood grassroots) can help themselves. This was the subject of her final message to politicians under our heading of Top Opportunity: policy is fine but implementation is key, otherwise it’s just more of Greta Thunberg’s “blah blah blah”.
For more from Chrisna watch the latest episode of CIB in Conversation – and look out for her at the World Building Congress in June 2022.
