What if the most important infrastructure in any building is the people inside it?

Jennifer Koster has spent more than 25 years building companies across tech, construction and regenerative development. Along the way she reached a conclusion most engineers never get to: humans are a system too, and we need our own infrastructure to function properly. In this episode we explore both sides of that coin, the built infrastructure and the human one.

For practitioners, Jennifer explains why circularity is still what the built environment gets most wrong. Moving a light fixture into another building is not circularity. Designing a building so that none of it ends up in landfill is. She describes how WerkWell grew from an independent construction management firm (on her figures, projects run 30% over budget and schedule on average) into a building performance consultancy and an innovations group that brings market-proven European solutions into US projects. We cover low-carbon concrete, a particle board made from seaweed, power purchase agreements, aquifer recharge credits, and the (re)Building with Resilience symposium she co-organised after the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, where resilience started to look like the new definition of luxury.

Underneath runs a very human story. A dot-com crash that wiped out everything overnight and sent her back to her teenage bedroom in Calgary. A chance conversation with contractors that became a construction career in Los Angeles. A growing unease at building enormous homes nobody lived in. And a family road trip through Europe that ended in a move to the Netherlands. Jennifer shares LivWell, her plan for regenerative communities inspired by blue zones, and her forthcoming book The Truth About Baggage, a journey from awareness to agency.

Chapters:
0:00 Intro
1:59 Guest Intro & the predictable unpredictability of life's journey
5:36 How would Jennifer describe herself?
13:46 Jennifer's journey into construction
23:37 Decarbonization in construction
26:36 WerkWell - A new path in construction and the pivot
42:44 Resilience, a new definition of luxury
54:03 Human Infrastructure
1:09:59 The "Truth about Baggage”
1:22:28 Jennifer's Future Plans
1:23:55 What does the built environment miss?
1:25:41 Q&A Start
1:26:03 What does innovation mean to you?
1:27:38 Key moment, book, event, person
1:33:55 Time Management
1:36:44 Favourite childhood memory
1:37:30 Advice for young professioanls
1:37:56 What would you most like to be remembered for?
1:38:11 Where can people find you?
1:39:09 Final Message
1:40:15 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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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.
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/

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/