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Articles on Urban planning

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An increasing number of apartments being built in Australia’s cities are failing to meet basic requirements. Image sourced from Shutterstock.com

Life in a windowless box: the vertical slums of Melbourne

Standards for apartments are desperately needed in Melbourne where planning laws allow things banned in cities including New York, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Vancouver.
Intergenerational home: the residents (particularly children and dogs!) move through the gaps in the dividing garden wall. Katherine Lu

How co-housing could make homes cheaper and greener

With a few tweaks to planning or land title laws, co-housing could help to reduce the costs of buying, owning and renting a home.
Tunnel vision: the claim that more roads equals less congestion fails to see the wider picture. AAP Image/Dean Lewins

Do more roads really mean less congestion for commuters?

A new road may provide motorists with some level of respite from congestion in the short term. But almost all of the benefit from the road will be lost in the longer term.
With car manufacturing gone and the submarine business looking shaky, South Australia is a state in need of an industrial transfusion. HASSELL

Adelaide is spending big on arts infrastructure – but who benefits?

Last week the South Australian premier announced major refurbishment of the Adelaide Festival Centre. The question is, what will these major works say about the kind of city Adelaide wants to be?
Community protests ensure urban planners pay attention to the politics of their work, while research evidence can more easily be neglected. AAP/Courtney Biggs

‘Not a lot of people read the stuff’: how planning defies good theory

Urban planners tend to be attuned to council and community politics. They are less well informed when it comes to applying the findings of research to improve the quality of their work.
Development is underway all around Sydney harbour – but has the public interest been well served? AAP Image/Dean Lewins

Sydney risks becoming a dumb, disposable city for the rich

The major political parties seem captive to an ideologically driven obsession to privatise public spaces – including the Powerhouse Museum site in Ultimo and other harbour-front sites.
Scarborough, Queensland: no longer allowed to factor in sea-level rise in its planning laws. Seo75/Wikimedia Commons

Complacency rules as Queensland makes risky edict on sea-level rise

Queensland Deputy Premier Jeff Seeney’s decision, revealed this week, to order a Brisbane council to remove future sea-level rise from its planning regulations seems a rather short-sighted thing to do…
Victoria’s voters have spoken – and they have said no to Melbourne’s new freeway tunnel. AAP Image/Julian Smith

The East-West Link is dead – a victory for 21st-century thinking

Labor’s state election victory in Victoria has fatally undermined Melbourne’s most controversial tunnel, the now-doomed East-West Link, with new Premier Daniel Andrews pledging to rip up the contracts…
The inner suburbs of Melbourne are surprisingly more leafy than the outer suburbs. Andrew

Fewer trees leave the outer suburbs out in the heat

When you look out of your window in the morning, how many trees do you see? Your answer might depend on what suburb you live in. As you go further from the city centre, the amount of tree cover in a suburb…
Denmark’s capital, Copenhagen, offers an idea of how pleasant and practical the Velotopian dream of a bike-friendly city might be. AAP/Visit Denmark

Utopia: seriously, good urban planning should aspire to it

The Australian television satire Utopia invited the public along for a laugh that architects and planners have been sharing for decades. We laugh at the idea of utopia to disassociate ourselves from the…
Detroit, a thriving manufacturing city 50 years ago, is now bankrupt. ifmuth/Flickr

Speaking with: George Galster on revitalising Detroit

Speaking with: George Galster CC BY-ND18.9 MB (download)
Detroit is in turmoil, officially bankrupt and home to some of America’s poorest citizens. But 50 years ago it was thriving, boasting a booming manufacturing sector and a steadily growing educated middle-class…
Damien Hirst’s statue of a naked, pregnant woman towers over Ilfracombe. Ben Birchall/PA

Damien Hirst’s new town adds a cultural twist to planned utopias

A development of 750 new homes in the small town of Ilfracombe on England’s north Devon coast has been approved by the local council. The news would be unremarkable if it weren’t for the identity of the…

Computer model to help build better cities

Researchers have developed a computer model that allows them to reconstruct cities to see if they can find smarter and more…

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