The Snowy Mountain Scheme is an iconic example of postwar nation-building infrastructure. By the decade after its completion, the sell-offs were in full swing.
Lukas Coch/AAP
Long-term privatisation contracts, most of them closed to scrutiny, lock urban infrastructure into 20th-century formats unsuited for a climate-threatened planet.
Politicised projects that steamroll proper process are giving transport planning a bad name.
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Politicised transport projects that flout proper process lead to hostility between residents and governments, and give planners a bad name.
Aspiring ‘smart cities’ like Barcelona have worked to build their profile – it recently hosted the Smart City Expo World Congress – but Australia may benefit from not having rushed in.
Ramon Costa/AAP
Not only has income inequality in Australia grown over the past two decades, rich and poor are also more segregated in terms of where they live in the big cities.
The biggest risk to cities during cyclones comes from storm surge and rainfall – all the water has to go somewhere.
Dan Peled/AAP
Cities would suffer much less damage and avoid the huge financial losses if we designed them to cope with the effects of cyclones.
Informed citizens are essential to support good planning and infrastructure decisions. Marginalising urban planning gets us nowhere.
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Urban planners have been blamed for a lot of things, including higher housing costs. But the solution is to refine the process, not sideline the good planning that makes cities safe and liveable.
The financialisation of housing has become central to wealth creation in Australian households.
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We now value the house as a wealth builder, not just a place to live in and raise a family. The result is a distorted investment market that makes home ownership and rental unaffordable.
Jonathan Bredin, a co-author of this article, at work.
Photo: Nathan Oxley
New rules offer the possibility of an inclusive Australian society that enables people with the highest disability-related support needs to have equal access to mainstream services including housing.
Interculturalism emphasises interaction between members of diverse communities, rather than ‘groupism’.
Wikimedia/DIAC Images
A relatively new approach to diversity prioritises active and equitable interaction between various groups within local communities.
People have camped in the long grass since colonisation. From this perspective, bans on the practice are a denial of Indigenous agency, culture and rights to country.
Photo: K. Pollard
In contrast to perceptions of other homeless people sleeping rough, Darwin’s “long-grassers” are applying a long cultural tradition to deal with the situation in which they find themselves.
Federal Urban Infrastructure Minister Paul Fletcher and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull are eyeing value capture as a way to fund projects, but how will they sell a new tax to voters?
Paul Miller/AAP
Consider these home truths: value capture is a tax, it would need to apply to the family home and deciding which areas it covers would be politically contentious. A broad-based land tax is simpler.
The original conflict between development and preservation of natural assets is broadening as the risks of climate change become ever more obvious.
Crystal Ja/AAP
Conflicts over coastal areas have largely been between development and preserving what makes these attractive places to live. Rising sea levels are now complicating our relationship with the coast.
Flash mobs are still appearing in Melbourne, more than a decade after the city’s first in 2003, the year in which the creator of the phenomenon said it was dead.
Julian Smith/AAP
Political street protests and even the more playful flash mobs have the power to not only disrupt flows of traffic but also assumptions about norms of behaviour in public spaces.
Early in the morning and late in the evening is when shorebirds escape disturbance on the beaches on which their survival depends.
Arnuchulo
We aren’t just jostling with each other for beach space. Scuttling, waddling, hopping or flying away from beachgoers all around Australia, wildlife struggles to survive the daily disturbances.
To meet the needs of lower-income households, housing should be both affordable and located near public transport and other services.
Graeme Bartlett/Wikimedia
Victoria has been lagging behind other states in developing an affordable housing strategy. Now that one has been released, how well does it meet the needs of households on lower incomes?
Gumtree Brutalism: the Eddie Koiki Mabo Library (1968), designed by Queensland architect James Birrell, on the James Cook University campus.
Academics are often in the vanguard of the fight to preserve heritage buildings but they are losing the battle on home turf as universities shed their 1960s and 1970s concrete skins.
How is apartment living changing the way we get to know our increasingly diverse neighbourhoods?
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Because Australian roads were built and designed with motorists in mind, it is easy for Australian motorists to feel cyclists are using ‘their’ roads and disrespecting the natural order.