Rail investments have brought Ballarat, Geelong and other regional centres closer in travel time to Melbourne than many outer suburbs.
Tony & Wayne/flickr
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.
Forty years on, there is still resistance to mixing with the ‘sort of people’ who were segregated in social housing tower blocks.
David Jackmanson/flickr
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'.
Many Americans need reliable public transit to get to school or work.
Frank Hank
Many Americans live in transit deserts – areas where demand for transit exceeds the supply. To fix these gaps, we need to find and map them so agencies can add transit options in the right places.
When public investment in a development like Sydney’s Northern Beaches Hospital boosts land values, who should reap those gains: the community or individual owners?
NSW Premier's Office/AAP
Who is entitled to the increase in value created by planning approvals, new infrastructure, population growth or urban development? For John Stuart Mill, the answer would have been the community.
Must we become passive observers to the destruction of one of Melbourne’s most culturally diverse and socially rich suburbs?
About 84% of cranes in Australia are used on residential sites, with commercial projects making up 5% of crane activity. Health, education, infrastructure and recreation projects make up the rest.
Brisbane cycle path signage: Slow!
Michael Coghlan
Marcus Foth, Queensland University of Technology et Mirko Guaralda, Queensland University of Technology
Smart cities are usually optimised like a business for speed and efficiency. Placemaking can slow down cities to improve health and wellbeing and promote more democratic engagement of citizens.
The Snowy Mountain Scheme is an iconic example of postwar nation-building infrastructure. By the decade after its completion, the sell-offs were in full swing.
Lukas Coch/AAP
Long-term privatisation contracts, most of them closed to scrutiny, lock urban infrastructure into 20th-century formats unsuited for a climate-threatened planet.
To meet the needs of lower-income households, housing should be both affordable and located near public transport and other services.
Graeme Bartlett/Wikimedia
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?
Empty field north of downtown Detroit, photographed nine months before the city declared bankruptcy in 2013.
AP Photo/Carlos Osorio, File
Less than four years after Detroit filed for bankruptcy, boosters say a revival is underway in the Motor City. But two scholars say new growth has not spread yet to neighborhoods that need it.
China's hukou system is a relic of the Mao era – and it's holding the nation's rural population back.
The draft regional plan, ShapingSEQ, released by Queensland Deputy Premier Jackie Trad, has been influenced by ‘stakeholders’ rather than representative community input.
Twitter
The draft plan for Southeast Queensland largely takes a 'provide land for the predicted demand' approach, which assumes regional planning is a type of technical process best left to the experts.
Some intangible elements of a city, such as people’s attachments to the ‘vibe’ of a place, are critical to understanding that city.
Kristina Kl./flickr
Melbourne ranks as the World's Most Liveable City. But does that tell us what people really love? Lovability is a new approach to city metrics.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio signs legislation lowering the default speed limit from 30 to 25 miles per hour, Oct. 27, 2014.
NYC Department of Transportation/Flickr
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have painted starkly different views of U.S. cities during the campaign. Will the next president deliver the funding and political support mayors are seeking?
Connecting cities should serve all citizens, not just a few.
Illustration via shutterstock.com
Design will make the difference between smart city projects offering great promise or actually reinforcing or even widening the existing gaps in unequal ways their cities serve residents.
Brazil’s favelas are famous, but so are its ambitious efforts to bring roads, water, electricity, and land rights to its informal urban settlements.
eflon/flickr
For decades, Brazil has worked to improve conditions in its poorest neighbourhoods: building roads, drainage, lighting, and safer housing. Will budget cuts end its ambitious slum-upgrading efforts?
This global conference will set out how cities should develop over the next 20 years, tackling some of humankind's toughest issues.
The Tent Embassy in Canberra has for decades been symbolic of the tensions in Australian cities about recognition, reconciliation and land justice.
Dylan Wood/AAP
Like a 5D movie on speed, the city today defies conventional boundaries. This raises new questions about what we imagine to be 'the city' – and how we as a democratic community can shape it.
