Old mine sites suffer many fates, which range from simply being abandoned to being incorporated into towns or turned into an open-air museum in the case of Gwalia, Western Australia.
The industrial patterns of mining shaped many Australian towns, which found varied uses for disused mine sites. The mining boom ensures the challenges these sites present will be with us a long time.
Australia’s sprawling cities present many challenges to sustainability, but planning innovations can help achieve at least half of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Nils Versemann/Shutterstock
Planning innovations around the world offer inspiration, but ultimately the innovations needed to make Australia’s sprawling cities more sustainable must be shaped by local conditions.
A kangaroo finds refuge in a small patch of vegetation surrounded by a new housing estate.
Georgia Garrard
Expanding cities and farmland have created many small, often isolated patches of vegetation. Long seen as having limited ecological value, a new study shows these are vital for endangered species.
Children are not being considered when it comes to urban planning.
Shutterstock
Urbanisation is the main reason for rising temperatures and water pollution, but receives little attention in discussions about the health of water streams, reefs and oceans.
Grey nomads are champions of a radical type of portable urbanism as they travel to far-flung places like Lake Ballard in Western Australia.
Image courtesy of Tourism Western Australia
Grey nomads travel Australia because they have the desire and the means to do so. Could future generations end up following in their footsteps because they can no longer work and stay in one place?
Demonstrators march down Paris’ Champs-Elysees Dec. 8.
AP Photo/Michel Euler
A populist movement that threatened to topple a French government more than 60 years ago has important lessons for today’s protests and why they represent a reckoning.
Cities are the laboratories where the tech giants are exploring urban innovations.
ShutterOK/Shutterstock
Companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Airbnb and Tesla are redefining key aspects of daily life such as work, mobility and leisure, using our cities as laboratories for their innovations.
Port of Long Beach, California.
USCBP/Charles Csavossy/Wikimedia
As the expected costs of climate change grow, cities are on the frontlines of adapting to sea level rise and more intense storms – and finding ways to pay for it.
CRRC’s version of the optically guided bus, now operating in Zhuzhou, is more like light rail than its predecessors.
CRRC
The autonomous rail rapid transit (ART) system developed in China might make buses sexy, but the technology alone won’t resolve the issues of road space and right of way in Australia.
Flooding in Sydney last week was the latest example of Australian cities’ lack of resilience to a more extreme climate.
Dean Lewins/AAP
Australia’s coastal settlements are highly exposed to the impacts of climate change. Climate-resilient urban landscapes that can cope with large amounts of water need to become the new normal.
Australians have a phobia of sitting in traffic and not finding a car park.
Shutterstock
The arrival of autonomous vehicles would ideally reduce the number of cars on our roads. But this is a pipe dream without a robust public transport system and willingness to share.
Much of the public opposition to the WestConnex project is related to concerns about the impacts on health.
No WestConnex
The health concerns that dominate public submissions to the parliamentary inquiry into WestConnex are a reminder that papering over such issues comes back to haunt governments.
Brisbane’s South Bank parkland isn’t exactly getting out in the wild, but experiences of urban nature are important for building people’s connection to all living things.
Anne Cleary
Moves to connect people with nature for both the conservation and health benefits point to the need for people to experience nature as they find it in the city, rather than only out in natural areas.
You can’t build housing without land, and developers typically control the rate of which it’s released to stop prices falling.
Lukas Coch/AAP
The thing about new housing is you need land to build it on. Developers are able to control its release at a rate that doesn’t put downward pressure on prices.
A Townsville City Deal was signed two years ago and the city is now one of Queensland’s ten leaders on smart city performance.
Lukas Coch/AAP
How smart are our cities now? In Queensland, a study of all 78 local government areas reveals major gaps between the ten leading the way in becoming smart cities and the rest of the state.
A race to dominate the emerging tech-driven mobility sector is happening in cities around the world.
Jakub Kaminski/EPA
To cut emissions within the 12 years or so we have left to avoid disastrous global warming, we will need to change our old transport habits, using a combination of strategies to achieve this.
Loneliness has become a global epidemic, and urban design can be either part of the problem or the solution.
Melbourne School of Design
The cities we build in turn shape our society. So when so many of us feel lonely, we should aim to apply what we know about the social impacts of design to help people connect with each other.