It’s not the first time Australia has grappled with concerns about affordable housing. History offers insights that can help inform contemporary debates and policies.
Planning for the future of our cities can no longer ignore growing social, economic and environmental issues that are all exacerbated by wealth and income inequalities.
Over the past 15 years, community groups in a rundown inner-city district have created public murals as part of a successful process of reversing decades of stagnation.
Ambience is a result of a whole range of processes and physical objects. We can use a systems approach to examine and describe what needs to be done to achieve such a subjective quality in a street.
In the second part of our review of what The Conversation experts have to say about housing, we focus on affordability, social housing and what government can do about a growing crisis.
Housing experts writing for The Conversation largely agree on the government policies that are causing negative distortions in the market and the wider economy. And supply is not the key concern.
Melbourne is Australia’s most rapidly growing city, a title it wrested from Perth around 2013-14. Several of Australia’s big cities are growing well above the national average population growth rate.
The trillions of dollars spent on infrastructure demands democratic transparency and accountability. This applies to both the investment and to the effects on cities, societies and the environment.
Suburban areas feel infrastructure stress most acutely. Having to deal with severe inadequacies, suburbs offer fertile ground for infrastructure experimentation and innovation.
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.