For the first time in Australia, more higher-density housing than detached housing was being built last year. Compact cities have pros and cons, but the downsides fall more heavily on the poor.
When dog owners meet, it helps build a safe and connected community.
Wrote/flickr
At society's margins, people without access to the mainstream job economy are able to carve out lives rich in other resources and community.
The village bell was once a powerful symbol of sonic identity. Living in the noise of today’s global cities, what sounds exist that express our communal identity?
Eric Fidler/flickr
Sound, as a still relatively unexplored medium of urban design, provides an obvious starting point in the search for new relationships and identities in the contemporary city.
Noise transformation and community-led design projects are reclaiming unwanted spaces that lay adjacent to motorways.
rogiro/flickr
Communities have an increasing desire to be informed and included in local art, design and infrastructure projects. This has inspired new ways of dealing with noise-afflicted areas.
Must we become passive observers to the destruction of one of Melbourne’s most culturally diverse and socially rich suburbs?
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.
In an age of data-driven urban science, we need to remember how Jane Jacobs gave voice to the multiple languages, meanings, experiences and knowledge systems of a vibrant city.
Essential reading for green-fingered urbanites and guerrilla gardeners.
Mandurah is an example of built density without intensity: five-to-ten-storey buildings with generous public space but a population density less than your average suburb.
Kim Dovey
Curbing negative gearing will help get empty housing onto the market. This could go some way to bringing life back to relatively dense urban centres that are oddly lacking intensity of public life.
Congested roads and overcrowded public transport services are common problems in many of our cities.
Dam Himbeechts/AAP
Australia's transport infrastructure needs urgent upgrades. But with governments willing to fund only one or two major projects, how do we decide which infrastructure project to prioritise?
Negative stereotypes hamper the success of black males in STEM fields.
Student image via www.shutterstock.com
Black male kids who start out by excelling in STEM gradually lose interest due to low teacher expectations and racial stereotyping. The result? Blacks hold only 6% of all STEM jobs.
