Long-term privatisation contracts, most of them closed to scrutiny, lock urban infrastructure into 20th-century formats unsuited for a climate-threatened planet.
Not only has income inequality in Australia grown over the past two decades, rich and poor are also more segregated in terms of where they live in the big cities.
Urban planners have been blamed for a lot of things, including higher housing costs. But the solution is to refine the process, not sideline the good planning that makes cities safe and liveable.
We now value the house as a wealth builder, not just a place to live in and raise a family. The result is a distorted investment market that makes home ownership and rental unaffordable.
New rules offer the possibility of an inclusive Australian society that enables people with the highest disability-related support needs to have equal access to mainstream services including housing.
In contrast to perceptions of other homeless people sleeping rough, Darwin’s “long-grassers” are applying a long cultural tradition to deal with the situation in which they find themselves.
Consider these home truths: value capture is a tax, it would need to apply to the family home and deciding which areas it covers would be politically contentious. A broad-based land tax is simpler.
Conflicts over coastal areas have largely been between development and preserving what makes these attractive places to live. Rising sea levels are now complicating our relationship with the coast.
Political street protests and even the more playful flash mobs have the power to not only disrupt flows of traffic but also assumptions about norms of behaviour in public spaces.
We aren’t just jostling with each other for beach space. Scuttling, waddling, hopping or flying away from beachgoers all around Australia, wildlife struggles to survive the daily disturbances.
Victoria has been lagging behind other states in developing an affordable housing strategy. Now that one has been released, how well does it meet the needs of households on lower incomes?
Academics are often in the vanguard of the fight to preserve heritage buildings but they are losing the battle on home turf as universities shed their 1960s and 1970s concrete skins.
Because Australian roads were built and designed with motorists in mind, it is easy for Australian motorists to feel cyclists are using ‘their’ roads and disrespecting the natural order.