Making a city more bicycle-friendly is not simply a matter of painting a few lines and installing parking spaces. It requires cities to work with cyclists as participants in redesigning the city. Ensuring…
Rail has been a part of Federal “knitting” since, well, Federation.
Annie Mole
Tony Abbott has created a new phrase that wonderfully describes a political tradition or paradigm: “not in our knitting”.
“We have no history of funding urban rail and I think it’s important that we stick…
Many apartment dwellers would like to know how to make their home more sustainable. But where to start?
Chris Kreussling
By Rebecca Leshinsky, Swinburne University of Technology and Judy Rex, Swinburne University of Technology
Apartment owners beware – your asset could be under threat!
If we don’t improve the sustainability of our city apartment blocks their value will fall.
Australian cities are increasingly embracing apartment…
Apartment living has increased slightly in the past 20 years, but we’re not letting go of our houses just yet.
Alan Levine
AUSTRALIA BY NUMBERS: The Australian Bureau of Statistics has released the first batch of its census data. We’ve asked some of the country’s top demographers and statisticians to crunch the numbers on…
More people live in cities than ever before. We can’t solve problems of sustainability and health without fixing them.
Bill Hertha
The secretary-general of the United Nations’ (first) Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Maurice Strong, famously declared that if our planet is to remain a hospitable and sustainable home for the human species…
We know where to head next to build more sustainable cities.
Anders Hoff
Over the weekend, local leaders from around the world gathered together in Belo Horizonte, an hour’s flight from Rio de Janeiro at the ICLEI World Congress. The aim was to galvanise their case for a decade…
Care and consideration make the road safer for everyone. Enforcing the law helps too.
Fernando de Sousa
Every year, more Australians – particularly in cities – are riding to work. More cyclists means fewer cars on the road, less congestion, less pollution and fewer health problems. But every year more people…
Sydney needs sustainable solutions to keep its growing population happy and healthy.
Franklin Heijnen
Australia’s future population is again under the spotlight. The Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) has just released a new report on Australian population futures.
And focus has sharpened…
2012 is the Australian Year of the Farmer. This initiative aims to increase knowledge and understanding of the role Australian agribusiness plays in food security, technological innovation and the nation…
Sure, it looks nice, but this tree is also saving you money.
UncanonicalAaron/Flickr
Perhaps it is a pity that so many Australians think of our parks, gardens, streetscapes and urban landscapes only in terms of their aesthetics. While green spaces are beautiful and decorative, these attributes…
Recent patterns of residential development in Australian cities are threatening to overwhelm green space in our urban cores. Policies of urban consolidation have concentrated medium to high density residential…
We need to think about the benefits of locally grown food before signing off on suburban sprawl.
avlxyz/Flickr
In 1947 the Sydney Basin produced “three quarters of the State’s lettuces, half of the spinach, a third of the cabbages and a quarter of the beans; seventy percent of the State’s poultry farms were in…
A White Shark feeds on a whale carcass off a Perth metropolitan beach in 2009. This was happening before Homo Sapiens existed.
AAP/Channel10
The vast majority of Australians live in coastal cities. This means most of us have sharks as neighbours.
Living alongside sharks in metropolitan cities in Australia requires urban resilience. Unlike…
Bigger houses (on the left) – not smaller lots – are killing the Aussie backyard.
Tony Hall
Welcome to Safe as Houses, a series delving into a topic close to the heart of many Australians – property. This is not a series on where the market might be heading. Instead we aim to explore how we view…
Sir Rod Eddington: unless the rail networks are right, Australia’s cities won’t work properly.
Supplied
Welcome to In Conversation; an ongoing series in which leading academics interview prominent public figures.
In today’s instalment, Dr Peter Newman, Professor of Sustainability at Curtin University, sits…
Is Australia going down the East Asian high-rise route?
eugene
How dense could we be? Very, if you follow much of the commentary in Australian debates about the way we should plan our cities.
High-rise residential developments have been springing up in all Australia…
South-east Queensland now has a 200km long city.
dazza17-DJ
Despite the emphasis in Australia on the “compact city” foreshadowed in every major strategic metropolitan plan such as the South East Queensland Regional Plan; there is a growing trend towards “colliding…
Before the motorcar “owned” the road, cyclists weren’t seen as space-taking nuisance.
The ABC documentary Wide Open Road is a totally fascinating history of the car in Australia.
The characters who pioneered the car in the Australian bush 100 years ago are remarkable. The images of Australian…
How do you improve road safety? Simple: make it riskier.
La Citta Vita
In August, Liberal MP Peter Phelps delivered a passionate rant in the NSW Upper House in which he called traffic lights a “Bolshevist menace”. He argued that traffic lights are on par with state repression…
European women love to get on their bikes.
kamshots/Flickr
Cycling for transport in Australia is characterised by several “missing” population groups: women, children, adolescents and older adults.
Women comprise about one-fifth of commuter cyclists in Australia…
A new generation of architects is needed to build our cities.
Flickr/MorBCN
The “future” is something which manifests nowhere more potently than in our cities.
Yet a substantial transformation over the past twenty years in the way cities are being made – both in terms of their…
Counterintuitively, the carbon tax may make it harder to get a bus.
Dale Gillard/Flickr
Transport accounts for 14% of Australia’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and has one of the fastest emission growth rates. Cutting our national emissions might, therefore, be expected to shine a blowtorch…
Australians over-consume water, energy and space.
AAP
By Peter Newton, Swinburne University of Technology
In recent weeks, two major federal government strategy papers have been released:
Our Cities, Our Future: A National Urban Policy for a Productive, Sustainable and Liveable Future and
Sustainable Australia…
Why shouldn’t our public spaces be productive?
KayVee.INC/flickr
Food. It is the great unifier of place and race, the common ground sustaining our very existence. Why then, does food production feature so minimally in public space and urban design?
Under the weight…
Any solutions for Australia can’t ignore the suburbs.
mugley/Flickr
In the degreasing after the 2011 New South Wales election a lot was made of the supposed influence of western Sydney voters, their electoral motivations and allegiances.
Western Sydney surely has its…
Australian cities have a long history of living up close.
nicksarebi/Flickr
This will be the century of urbanisation, when seven billion of almost 10 billion people will live in urban settlements.
In Australia our urban sprawl is consuming land at a per capita rate that few countries…
Living large down under – Australians love big houses.
travelskerrick/flickr
By Terry Burke, Swinburne University of Technology
Australia has long prided itself on being an equal society, and for most of the 20th century our housing was a mirror of that value or belief.
Almost all houses were single-storey detached and, with the…
Melbourne and Sydney are set to become mega-cities, but there hasn’t been a coherent discussion about our population.
AAP/Torsten Blackwood
The national debate about Australia’s population has been hijacked. It has been dominated by fears that we don’t have the infrastructure to cope with an influx of people, and differing views about migrants…
Getting out of the car: easy for some.
Hunter Desportes/Flickr
In cities all over the industrial world, people are driving less. Changes to society and the structures of our cities have made jumping in the car less popular. But what does this mean for people who have…
Being paid to drive is becoming a thing of the past.
Daniel Dionne/flickr
After 25 years, one of the craziest taxation rules in Australia is about to be fixed.
The federal government is expected to announce a revamp of fringe benefits tax rules for company cars in Tuesday’s…
Trees provide services to cities that far outstrip their cost.
Tim Parkinson/flickr
As we worry about where we will put Australia’s ever-increasing population, urban trees are becoming collateral damage.
So how much are our trees worth to us? According to Melbourne City Council, they…
Choked: Lagos crumbles under the weight of its population.
AAP/Pius Utomi Ekpei
We are entering an era of massive population transfer – a rural exodus of unprecedented proportions. In Asia and Africa farmers and peasants are being lured to mega-cities. This brings myriad benefits…
I don’t care what it is, I just want it to be on time.
Drown/Flickr
News of a new bus route will most likely be greeted with indifferent silence, but lobbying for a new train line can keep thousands of potential commuters busy for years on end. It seems that everyone loves…
Building away from our cities could ease congestion in urban areas.
AAP
Bashing planning has become a national sport, and in NSW, we’re the best at it. Stuck in traffic? Blame the planners. Housing stress? Planners are too slow and too stingy with land release.
In the perception…
Congestion charging will reduce Australian traffic loads.
Burning image/Flickr
As you sit in your usual morning traffic jam, increasingly agitated, blood pressure flying, do you continually wonder “Why can’t they fix this mess?” Widen some roads. Build some new links. Improve the…
