Every year, more Australians - particularly in cities - are riding to work. More cyclists means fewer cars on the road, less congestion, less pollution and fewer health problems. But every year more people…
Academic rigour, journalistic flair
Cities – Analysis and Comment
Australia’s future population is again under the spotlight. The Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) has just released a new report on Australian population futures. And focus has sharpened…
2012 is the Australian Year of the Farmer. This initiative aims to increase knowledge and understanding of the role Australian agribusiness plays in food security, technological innovation and the nation’s…
Perhaps it is a pity that so many Australians think of our parks, gardens, streetscapes and urban landscapes only in terms of their aesthetics. While green spaces are beautiful and decorative, these attributes…
Recent patterns of residential development in Australian cities are threatening to overwhelm green space in our urban cores. Policies of urban consolidation have concentrated medium to high density residential…
In 1947 the Sydney Basin produced “three quarters of the State’s lettuces, half of the spinach, a third of the cabbages and a quarter of the beans; seventy percent of the State’s poultry farms were in…
The vast majority of Australians live in coastal cities. This means most of us have sharks as neighbours. Living alongside sharks in metropolitan cities in Australia requires urban resilience. Unlike birds…
Welcome to Safe as Houses, a series delving into a topic close to the heart of many Australians – property. This is not a series on where the market might be heading. Instead we aim to explore how we view…
Welcome to In Conversation; an ongoing series in which leading academics interview prominent public figures. In today’s instalment, Dr Peter Newman, Professor of Sustainability at Curtin University, sits…
How dense could we be? Very, if you follow much of the commentary in Australian debates about the way we should plan our cities. High-rise residential developments have been springing up in all Australia’s…
Despite the emphasis in Australia on the “compact city” foreshadowed in every major strategic metropolitan plan such as the South East Queensland Regional Plan; there is a growing trend towards “colliding…
The ABC documentary Wide Open Road is a totally fascinating history of the car in Australia. The characters who pioneered the car in the Australian bush 100 years ago are remarkable. The images of Australian…
In August, Liberal MP Peter Phelps delivered a passionate rant in the NSW Upper House in which he called traffic lights a “Bolshevist menace”. He argued that traffic lights are on par with state repression…
Cycling for transport in Australia is characterised by several “missing” population groups: women, children, adolescents and older adults. Women comprise about one-fifth of commuter cyclists in Australia…
The “future” is something which manifests nowhere more potently than in our cities. Yet a substantial transformation over the past twenty years in the way cities are being made – both in terms of their…
Transport accounts for 14% of Australia’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and has one of the fastest emission growth rates. Cutting our national emissions might, therefore, be expected to shine a blowtorch…
In recent weeks, two major federal government strategy papers have been released: Our Cities, Our Future: A National Urban Policy for a Productive, Sustainable and Liveable Future and Sustainable Australia…
Food. It is the great unifier of place and race, the common ground sustaining our very existence. Why then, does food production feature so minimally in public space and urban design? Under the weight…
In the degreasing after the 2011 New South Wales election a lot was made of the supposed influence of western Sydney voters, their electoral motivations and allegiances. Western Sydney surely has its problems…
This will be the century of urbanisation, when seven billion of almost 10 billion people will live in urban settlements. In Australia our urban sprawl is consuming land at a per capita rate that few countries…
Australia has long prided itself on being an equal society, and for most of the 20th century our housing was a mirror of that value or belief. Almost all houses were single-storey detached and, with the…
The national debate about Australia’s population has been hijacked. It has been dominated by fears that we don’t have the infrastructure to cope with an influx of people, and differing views about migrants…
In cities all over the industrial world, people are driving less. Changes to society and the structures of our cities have made jumping in the car less popular. But what does this mean for people who have…
After 25 years, one of the craziest taxation rules in Australia is about to be fixed. The federal government is expected to announce a revamp of fringe benefits tax rules for company cars in Tuesday’s…
As we worry about where we will put Australia’s ever-increasing population, urban trees are becoming collateral damage. So how much are our trees worth to us? According to Melbourne City Council, they…