Earthquake drills, advance warning systems and higher building standards all help to save lives.
Academic rigour, journalistic flair
Cities – Analysis and Comment
Big Issue sellers get social contact and dignity out of their work, but it’s not a secure pathway out of poverty and homelessness. Social enterprises enable small steps; governments can do much more.
Innovation is focused on regional centres that have research and development institutions, but more than 150 regional areas have potential to match this innovation, research finds.
New South Wales is the only state that has made meaningful progress on legislation and enforcement of standards capable of creating a sustainable built environment.
New research has found a marked increase in people, particularly among women over 50, who are building or want to build a tiny house. However, inflexible planning rules often stand in their way.
Research shows that technology disrupts economies of scale, turning megacities’ huge populations from strength to liability. To survive, megacities, like companies, must adapt.
About 10% of empty dwellings on census night – 1.2% of all housing – were available for rental and vacancy rates have changed little in 35 years. Could governments be overreacting?
There is more to bike-share schemes than first meets the eye. As they grow in global popularity, the economic models behind them become increasingly diversified.
Drains take up precious but inaccessible open space in our cities. Converting these to living streams running through the suburbs could make for healthier places in multiple ways.
With cities becoming more dense and housing more crowded, people rely more than ever on well-designed public spaces, so why hasn’t the furniture changed with the times?
The strategy’s focus on rotten apples seems destined to fail.
The benefits of hosting the Olympics are so slim, or nonexistent, that fewer cities are bidding to host the games. That’s a sign of serious trouble.
By putting the users of buildings – people – at the centre of the process of designing buildings and infrastructure, we can create healthier, more human-centred spaces.
The egalitarian myth behind the great Australian dream of home ownership is at odds with the first rules of land granting in the colonies. Even then, property ownership depended on wealth and status.
Not everyone can afford to pay for solar panels up front, but local planners can help disadvantaged households overcome energy poverty in several ways.
The NDIS has the resources and mandate to develop a mature market that delivers suitable housing for people with high disability needs, including the more than 6,200 young people now in aged care.
Wall Street landlords are living the American Dream – but what about their tenants?
The evidence suggests a small investment in cycling infrastructure, combined with less punitive policing, would enable more Australians to escape daily traffic congestion.
Residents of two high-rise public housing blocks are being given ‘mood lights’ to express how they feel based on their experience of the process of redeveloping their neighbourhood.
Engineering solutions are popular interventions, but cities cannot simply pipe away flood risk. Chinese sponge cities offer a way forward.
Knowing a city’s professional network ratio helps to understand how connected its inhabitants are to other markets, customers and ideas. All support innovation, adaptation and city growth.
Planners wish to correct past errors by increasing densities, discouraging car dependency and mixing land uses. But imposing imported strategies on Australian cities is producing unhappy results.
It’s a good thing that cities aspire to lead the way in acting on climate change in the absence of stronger national action. But a closer look reveals the limitations of current city-based efforts.
Flooding in India’s main financial hub is a reminder that urban growth has to work with nature.
There’s a science to understanding the ways that trust is formed, broken and rebuilt.