For the first time in Australia, more higher-density housing than detached housing was being built last year. Compact cities have pros and cons, but the downsides fall more heavily on the poor.
In the push for more compact cities, don’t forget the ways apartment living is different. And often the downsides of these differences weigh heavily on low-income and disadvantaged households.
Pop-up parks and tiny houses are just a few of the innovative solutions that can help post-industrial cities across Europe and North America adapt to the future.
Dallas Rogers speaks with Nicole Gurran about the rise of AirBnb and what the limited data publicly available can tell us about how it's blurring the line between residential property and tourism.
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.
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.
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.
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’.
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.
Research shows planners and built environment professionals have surprisingly poor knowledge about how cities might harm mental health. The good news is that simple steps can make a big difference.
Shifting to plug-in cars wouldn’t be enough to max out global oil consumption by 2040. But it could help make that happen if cities pitch in and ride-sharing doesn’t crowd out public transportation.
Many new housing developments are being built along busy roads and rail lines, but lack design features that would reduce occupants’ exposure to harmful traffic pollution.
Fabrice Rousselot, The Conversation; Stephan Schmidt, The Conversation; Clea Chakraverty, The Conversation, and Catesby Holmes, The Conversation
Cities have always been more than a dense collection of people. They are labs of innovation, hotbeds of crime and inequality, architectural stunners, decaying ruins and everything in between.
Extreme heat divides people from the environment and from each other. So with the rapid densification of our cities, what kind of legacies are we building for future generations?
The rail project may well help get more commuters into the CBD, but offers few benefits for the parts of the broader metro area where most population growth is occurring.
Financial benefits are behind the development industry’s push for a continuous rapid population growth. But our poorly planned cities are ill-prepared and already struggling.