If the nature we desire is, in fact, its expression as untamed wildness, then we should turn to the creativity of artists as well as urban designers when building our cities.
Within a little more than a decade following the 1978 riot, the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival and Parade nourished the emergence of a budding gay and lesbian tourism industry.
CrowdSpark.com/AAP
If intelligently managed, festivals attract substantial numbers of LGBT tourists to regional and rural destinations, injecting additional income into the local economies.
People on moderate incomes, including police and emergency workers, have been forced to seek housing on the city fringes, far from their places of work. But there are ways to reverse this trend.
Much of the traffic using Sydney’s Anzac Bridge and, in the distance, Harbour Bridge is travelling through the city centre, not to it or from it.
Rob Roggema
One potential benefit of WestConnex, which remains untouched, is that it could relieve Sydney’s city centre from cars and make it more pedestrian-friendly.
With water storages running low, residents of Cape Town get drinking water in the early morning from a mountain spring collection point.
Nic Bothma/EPA
The situation in Perth in particular has some parallels to that of Cape Town, but Australian cities responded to the last big drought by investing in much bigger water supply and storage capacity.
Transport Minister Andrew Constance and the Coalition government are under pressure to fix long-standing problems with Sydney’s train system which have now come to a head.
Daniel Munoz/AAP
The real challenge is finding appropriate ways to invest in public transport that will not only take pressure off the system but also support improved travel on all modes, including cars.
The Sydney suburb of Liverpool, with its high concentration of ethnic migrants, has improved its levels of community trust since the Cronulla riots.
Wikimedia Commons
Trust has returned to areas with a higher concentration of ethnically diverse migrants significantly since 2005, but more must to be done if we want to avoid another Cronulla riot.
Fish iceblocks return slowly to Sydney Harbour in Four Thousand Fish at Sydney Festival.
Jamie Williams
The future of Sydney is under constant scrutiny. But before we consider creating a ‘third city’ in Sydney’s west, we should ensure we get the current infrastructure up to international standards.
The potential clean energy sources are all around Sydney, just waiting to be harnessed.
Collage by Rocco Furfaro
Sun, wind, waste biomass, geothermal, tides and waves: all these energy sources in Sydney’s backyard add up to a zero-carbon energy solution for the city.
NSW Sports Minister Stuart Ayres claims Sydney is falling behind other Australian cities in its big sporting event infrastructure.
AAP/Joel Carrett
The New South Wales government has come in for heavy criticism over its $2 billion plan to knock down and rebuild two of Sydney’s largest sports stadiums.
Cars are submerged on a flooded road in the Sydney suburb of Marrickville in 2012.
Alex Holver/NixPages
A massive residential development in a flood-prone inner-city suburb sounds like a recipe for disaster. But good urban design can deliver higher density and reduce the flood risk.
Maya Demetriou, 90, pictured after the court ruling that the minister did not properly consider a heritage listing recommendation, will be the last tenant left in the Sirius building.
Perry Duffin/AAP
All but a handful of the former public housing tenants are gone. But despite the government again rejecting the recommended heritage listing of the Sirius building, the fight to save it isn’t over.
“Looking for one girl to share a master room with another 3 girls.”
Screenshot from Gumtree ad, August 19 2017, 11:58
City living costs are driving people to organise themselves to share a room with strangers. These precarious living arrangements hardly qualify as a home.
Cyclists on Melbourne’s Obikes next to Federation square
AAP
There is more to bike-share schemes than first meets the eye. As they grow in global popularity, the economic models behind them become increasingly diversified.
The Netherlands’ cycleways are popular for commuting, because the infrastructure is safe, accessible and convenient.
The Alternative Department for Transport
The evidence suggests a small investment in cycling infrastructure, combined with less punitive policing, would enable more Australians to escape daily traffic congestion.
#WeLiveHere2017 aims to turn inanimate buildings into metaphorical sentient structures, with ‘mood lights’ expressing the feelings of Matavai and Turanga Tower residents about their neighbourhood’s redevelopment.
Nic Walker courtesy of #WeLiveHere2017
Residents of two high-rise public housing blocks are being given ‘mood lights’ to express how they feel based on their experience of the process of redeveloping their neighbourhood.
At first glance, old industrial sites, like this one in Carrington Street, don’t look like much. But they provide vital spaces for creative precincts to flourish.
Paul Jones
A new project documents who uses urban industrial lands slated for redevelopment. It reveals a vibrant but largely hidden sector at the interface between creative industries and small manufacturing.
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.
PhD Candidate, School of Social Sciences, University of Tasmania, and Senior Research Consultant, Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology Sydney