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Articles on Urban policy

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Many things go into making a healthy community, so the earlier services and infrastructure become available, the better. Cecily Maller

Build in good services from day one for healthier communities: lessons from Selandra Rise

Early residents in new communities are known as ‘pioneers’ – they arrive before many services are in place. A five-year study points to the many benefits of putting in good services early on.
The budget doesn’t provide either the infrastructure investment or financing details needed to flesh out the Smart Cities Plan. AAP/Mal Fairclough

City Deals still no more than a pamphlet after Budget 2016

The budget paints a picture of higher debt, little relief for growing cities crying out for infrastructure investment, and no detail of how City Deals might work to fix this.
As machinery demolishes houses behind them, Jakarta police evict residents from the settlement of Luar Batang in April. Reuters/Beawiharta Beawiharta

Will Habitat III defend the human right to the city?

The world’s informal settlements are growing at an unprecedented rate, with about one in four urban dwellers living in slums. We need to rethink how we view and deal with these people and places.
The EVA Lanxmeer development in the Netherlands provides a model for how to incorporate green infrastructure in all aspects of the planning process. Tony Matthews

Here’s how green infrastructure can easily be added to the urban planning toolkit

Green infrastructure can be delivered relatively easily using existing planning processes. The main obstacle could be psychological: planners are wary of disruption to embedded practices.
Some materials and surfaces radiate much more heat (red areas) than others, as can be seen in this thermal image of Arncliffe Street in Wolli Creek, Sydney.

Building cool cities for a hot future

Hot spots occur at the scale of where people live – the building, the street, the block – which means urban design and building materials have profound implications for our health and well-being.
When public housing like the properties in Sydney’s Millers Point is privatised, it profoundly changes the social mix of the inner city to something much more homogenous. AAP/Newzulu/Peter Boyle

Suburbanising the centre: the Baird government’s anti-urban agenda for Sydney

The NSW government agenda would deny the ‘right to the city’, that network of diverse communities, practices and places which give rise to the convivial and inclusive potential of cities.
Malcolm Turnbull is known to favour public transport, but he also sees the need to twin the development of higher-density activity centres with rail infrastructure. AAP/Dan Himbrechts

‘The 30-minute city’: how do we put the political rhetoric into practice?

The ‘30-minute city’ goal is about more than urban rail and other transit projects. It means transforming our cities into centres of activity where work, study and services are all close by.
The new assistant minister for cities, Angus Taylor, has expressed a ‘deep belief that consultation and proper public debate gets to wise outcomes’. flickr/Crawford Forum

Memo to our latest cities minister: here’s what needs to be done

Effective development planning must anticipate where growth might occur and its wider impacts. So, if the federal government is serious about cities policy, it needs a proper settlements plan.
The shimmer of a heat mirage shows how a hard road surface increases urban temperatures by radiating heat into the air. Wikimedia Commons/Brocken Inaglory

If planners understand it’s cool to green cities, what’s stopping them?

It seems like a ‘no brainer’ to use urban greening to help cities adapt to increasing heat, but the uptake of green infrastructure, such as trees and vegetated roofs, surfaces and walls, is slow. Why?
Mandurah is an example of built density without intensity: five-to-ten-storey buildings with generous public space but a population density less than your average suburb. Kim Dovey

How negative-gearing changes can bring life back to eerily quiet suburbs

Curbing negative gearing will help get empty housing onto the market. This could go some way to bringing life back to relatively dense urban centres that are oddly lacking intensity of public life.
There are always tensions, and sometimes outright hostility, between urban planners, the public and private sector developers. AAP/Newzulu/Peter Boyle

An uneasy marriage: planners, public and the market struggle to work well together

Tensions are mounting between the professional practices of government planners, processes of public participation and the private sector’s increasing role in shaping Australian cities.
The cover that trees provide transforms cities into much more hospitable places, especially in hot weather. AAP/Joe Castro

In a heatwave, the leafy suburbs are even more advantaged

Six years after Black Saturday, it’s worth remembering that heatwaves kill more people than bushfires do, so shade can be a life-saver. But tree cover and shade are not evenly distributed in cities.

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