The primacy given to the car has shaped our cities, the roads that serve them and our very thinking about the place of driving in our lives. And it's a mindset that leaves cyclists highly vulnerable.
While state investment decreases on average with distance from the CBD, Melbourne’s neediest suburbs aren’t forgotten.
ymgerman from www.shutterstock.com
The neediest suburbs get a much poorer deal in Sydney than in Melbourne. A new study provides a suburb-by-suburb breakdown of state investment, including what facilities and services have been funded.
The BedZED eco-housing development in the UK challenged planning regulations.
Tom Chance/Flickr
Traditional urban planning is being stretched by the pace at which renewable energy systems are being installed. New codes and guidelines are needed to manage emerging conflicts over land use.
To improve on a building like the Don Dale centre, design that properly considers human behaviour needs to take priority for its replacement.
Neda Vanovac/AAP
Architecture can affect behaviour and the choices we make. The brief is out for a centre to replace the Don Dale facility, but word is, it's 'a disgrace'. We can do much better.
The value universities add to society.
shutterstock
The Martin Place camp and others like it should make us uncomfortable. We live in a system that creates and tolerates homelessness.
People gather around a truck to get food on Detroit’s east side in July 1967. The food was brought to the riot-stricken area by the Crisis Council, one of the many organizations aiding residents.
AP Photo
In the film 'Detroit,' the voices of women are largely absent.
Due to a fear of being harassed or assaulted, many women go out of their way to avoid travelling through parts of the city where sexual entertainment venues are concentrated.
Blemished Paradise/flickr
Despite the rise of feminism, strip clubs and other 'sexual entertainment' businesses have proliferated in our cities. And women are feeling the harmful impacts of the industry's presence.
Early intervention via education and training is a proven way to stop unemployed youth becoming unemployable adults.
Tom Sodoge/Unsplash
Early intervention via education and training will cost money straight up. But it makes no sense to watch young people drift through unemployment and disengagement and turn into unemployable adults.
Rail investments have brought Ballarat, Geelong and other regional centres closer in travel time to Melbourne than many outer suburbs.
Tony & Wayne/flickr
Victoria offers lessons in the benefits of integrating metropolitan and regional planning, using regional rail to shrink distance and ease the pressures of growth on our big capital cities.
New technology could make it practical to build skyscrapers far taller than even today's highest – and change how people live, work and play in tall buildings.
Children run through an open fire hydrant to cool off during the kickoff of the 2016 Summer Playstreets Program in the Harlem neighborhood of New York, July, 6, 2016.
AP Photo/Ezra Kaplan
Climate change is making heat waves more frequent and intense around the world. Cities are hotter than surrounding areas, so urban dwellers – especially minorities and the poor – are at greatest risk.
Melbourne’s ambitions to be a ‘20-minute city’ aren’t likely to be achieved by its recently updated planning strategy.
Nils Versemann / shutterstock.com
While many talk about 30-minute cities, some aim for residents to be able to get to most services within 20 minutes. But cities like Melbourne have an awful lot of work to do to achieve their goal.
A National Guardsman stands at a Detroit intersection during the summer riots of 1967.
AP Photo/David Stephenson
Fifty years ago, Jeffrey Horner watched news broadcasts of the riots that erupted just miles from his home. But he was worlds apart from the racial tensions that had been festering for decades.
Parts of the Great Barrier Reef’s outer reefs can form a natural barrier to coastal recession, thus protecting urban centres.
AAP
Coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef could lead to increased vulnerability of Queensland coastal cities and towns, and not only through its impacts on the tourism industry.
Cities and universities can overcome social divides and create better places, but only if they work together.
Forty years on, there is still resistance to mixing with the ‘sort of people’ who were segregated in social housing tower blocks.
David Jackmanson/flickr
Even where communities are mixed, many inner-city families go to extraordinary financial and geographic lengths to ensure their children do not go to school with children from 'the flats'.
Around one in seven Australia households either cannot get into housing at market rates or are struggling to pay the rent.
shutterstock
One in seven Australian households is in a state of housing need. A shortfall in social housing supply means some are locked out of the market and others pay much more for rent than they can afford.
The traditional backyard provides a retreat from the pressures of city life.
Australians are losing the backyards that once served as retreats from the stresses of city living. Our health is likely to suffer as cities become less green and much hotter.
