The Ontario government has, under Doug Ford, revised policies and approaches in favour of developers. Policy reform is essential to address the growing problem of unaffordable housing.
Buying off the plan comes with risks and challenges — but there are six key steps consumers can do to help protect themselves. Systemic and policy change is also urgently needed.
Apartments house one in ten Australians, including a higher share of low-income households than other housing types. A new study identifies why some high-density neighbourhoods work better than others.
The internal density and layout of buildings are key factors in COVID-19 transmission risk. This is not an argument against high-density cities, some of which have successfully contained the virus.
Access to natural, green space makes a huge difference to the lives of children living in high-rise apartments.
Inna Ska/Shutterstock
Nearly half of apartment residents are now families with children whose quality of life suffers if their neighbourhoods don’t provide the spaces and activities they need to thrive.
The lure of suburbia clearly remains strong. To deal with sprawl, planners need to increase urban density in a way that resonates with the leafy green qualities of suburbia that residents value.
Julian Bolleter
Residents of the ‘leafy suburbs’ will continue to fear what they might lose to increasing urban density without an explicit planning approach that enhances green space in affected neighbourhoods.
The Ori ‘Cloud Bed’ is lifted and lowered from a ceiling recess to create space that doubles as bedroom and living room.
Ori/YouTube (screengrab)
With space at a premium, robotic furniture can transform a room in seconds. How will this affect our sense of belonging and feeling at home, when everything can change with a voice command?
More families are living in high-rise apartments.
from shutterstock.com
Urban policies are based on assumptions of a “normal household” and what buildings for it should look like. So this research project explored how people feel about children in high-density housing.
A For Sale sign is shown outside a house under construction in a new subdivision in Beckwith, Ont., in January 2018.
Conventional wisdom suggests urban-dwelling millennials don’t want to live in the suburbs and don’t want to raise children in a two-bedroom downtown condo. Is it really true?
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick
So you’re having to room share to live in the city. What if you need more than a place to sleep? Well, now you can rent a living room by the minute. Welcome to the world of distributed living.
Cars are submerged on a flooded road in the Sydney suburb of Marrickville in 2012.
Alex Holver/NixPages
A massive residential development in a flood-prone inner-city suburb sounds like a recipe for disaster. But good urban design can deliver higher density and reduce the flood risk.
Cities and their residents’ needs in public space have changed, but the type and function of the furniture are stuck in the past.
Carlos Neto/shutterstock.com
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?
So much for context – authorities are allowing large out-of-place buildings in the higher-density retrofitting push.
Linley Lutton
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.
At first glance, old industrial sites, like this one in Carrington Street, don’t look like much. But they provide vital spaces for creative precincts to flourish.
Paul Jones
A new project documents who uses urban industrial lands slated for redevelopment. It reveals a vibrant but largely hidden sector at the interface between creative industries and small manufacturing.
Green space, easily accessible to everyone no matter what their income, should be a priority in designing high-density residential areas.
Marcus Jaaske from www.shutterstock.com
Being crowded into poor-quality high-density units harms residents’ health, but design features that are known to promote wellbeing can make a big difference to the lives of low-income households.
Much of what is being built is straightforward ‘investor grade product’ – flats built to attract the burgeoning investment market.
Bill Randolph
The inexorable logic of the market will create suburban concentrations of lower-income households on a scale hitherto only experienced in the legacy inner-city high-rise public housing estates.
Higher-density developments change neighbourhoods, often in ways that further disadvantage low-income households.
Laura Crommelin
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 disputes and other problems of apartment living arise, low-income households’ options are often limited.
Hazel Easthope
In the push for more compact cities, don’t forget the ways apartment living is different. And often the downsides of these differences weigh heavily on low-income and disadvantaged households.
Part of Mumbai’s character is in its chawls, which could soon become history with the state government’s push to replace them with high-rise towers.
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