The risks of combustible cladding on high-rise buildings have long been known. And audits have identified hundreds of Australian buildings with this cladding. Delay in replacing it is inexcusable.
Academic rigour, journalistic flair
Cities – Analysis and Comment
As more and more Australians live and work in high-rise buildings, their responsibilities and roles in ensuring all occupants’ safety must not be neglected.
Targeted health campaigns can actually leave local people with a greater sense of shame – without helping them kick unhealthy habits.
Asylums were once designed to aid mental recovery – perhaps modern prisons should take note.
If we recognised social housing as infrastructure as essential as transport links, schools and hospitals, not properly investing in it could become unthinkable.
Fortunately, no lives were lost in the latest cladding fire in Melbourne, but it’s a stark reminder of the urgent need to track and verify that building materials comply with safety standards.
While Opal Tower residents are more badly affected than most, up to 80% of multi-unit buildings have serious defects. Here’s what government can do right now to fix the industry.
Selfies document women’s struggles and accomplishments, as they step out from their traditional roles in the home, into the male-dominated public realm of the city.
Affordability is a problem across Sydney for prospective home buyers. But if they are able to become owners, new research shows affordability becomes much less of a problem over five to ten years.
City decline is neither a fatality nor an urban nightmare. It can even be the background to a resilience strategy.
It’s easy to scorn the gentrifying hipster stereotype, but many inner-city neighbourhoods benefit from the distinctive mix of businesses and activities they pursue. So why should the suburbs miss out?
Regional deprivation is causing thousands of northerners – especially men – to die young each year.
Air conditioning changed both building design and people’s active management of home temperatures. A return to houses designed for our climate can keep us comfortable and cut energy use and emissions.
The government has had to rethink its roll-out of Universal Credit – but small tweaks to the system won’t prevent people on housing benefit from being evicted.
Tiny houses aren’t for everyone, but most people who live in them are positive about the experience. Yet planning laws still make this way of life harder and less secure than it could be.
To encourage citizens to drive electric vehicles, governments must develop bold new strategies that bring charging stations home.
In 1910, along one 45-block stretch of New York City’s Fifth Avenue, there were only 13 trees.
For the first time a state government housing agency has effectively contracted out all its operations in some regions, but will this improve and add to the total social housing stock?
Bus Rapid Transit has powerful supporters around the world – but shouldn’t public transport be designed in the public interest?
Think moving won’t change you? You might want to rethink that. To feel ‘at home’ you need to accept the new place where you live as part of your changing identity.
Urban planning should be long-term and visionary, but the public must have a say, too – that’s where urban rooms come in.
By adapting the charter city model to create a new city on the northern coast, Australia could be the world’s great 21st-century refuge.
This attention grabbing policy has less to do with solving public transport problems, and more to do with the government’s nation-branding campaign.
Evidence-based advice from experts on how to make your garden a friendly environment for pollinators.
Under 10 percent of new Citi Bike and Divvy bike docks are sited where residents suggested using interactive online maps, a new study shows. But that doesn’t mean city officials weren’t listening.