Residents of the outer suburbs like the green spaces and sense of community, but lament the lack of access to transport and other services.
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Much of the growth in our cities is in the outer suburbs, now home to around 5 million people. And that creates problems like traffic that detract from the advantages residents see in living there.
Melbourne and Sydney have similar access to public transport overall, but this and other liveability indicators vary greatly across the cities.
Julian Smith/AAP
Every year, our big cities vie for global liveability honours. But as well as differences between the cities, liveability varies widely within them, leaving plenty of work to be done.
Vienna knocked Melbourne out of its seven-year-long top spot as the ‘world’s most liveable city’.
from shutterstock.com
The world’s “most liveable city” ranking is based on an index designed for companies sending their employees overseas. It’s not relevant to the average person.
The same things tend to make people happy - such as nature and colour. (Jardin des Curiosités, Lyon, France)
Léonard Cotte/Unsplash
We searched Instagram for city images people associated with happiness. And they consistently included similar features, such as water, nature and heritage buildings.
Badeschi on the Spree River in Berlin.
Nordicbird/Flickr
Community proposals for public swimming pools are popping up all over the country. But individuals need to work with governments to ensure these projects actually get off the ground.
Shepparton residents are clearly disadvantaged by having far fewer daily train services to Melbourne than other regional centres.
Alex1991/Wikimedia
Regional areas are expanding, and yet not enough attention is being paid to improving rail access to capital cities. This affects the liveability of the areas.
Planning and design for healthy, liveable communities in the Australian tropics can involve quite different considerations from those that apply down south.
Silvia Tavares
There’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all plan for sustainable, healthy urban living. Urban diaries help identify what works – and doesn’t work – for tropical cities like Cairns or Townsville.
Have Australian commuters really enjoyed gains in quality of life that would justify all those billions of dollars spent on transport infrastructure?
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Australian cities generally minimise negative attributes such as crime, segregation and violence, but developing positive attributes such as inclusivity appears more challenging.
The benefits of walking are widely promoted, but most Australian communities still aren’t walker-friendly. Young people, who rely heavily on walking to get around, are clear about what has to change.
The old Pratt Street power plant in Baltimore in the US is now home to commercial uses. But the heritage preservation is compromised by advertising that is not sympathetic to the building style and design.
Wikimedia Commons
Adaptively re-using buildings can preserve heritage while enabling new uses that help make cities more liveable and sustainable.
Connections between people and between people and places help create vibrant neighbourhoods with a sense of human identity and belonging.
Picture by Tommy Wong
The secret of creating attractive, liveable places sounds deceptively simple: connect people to places, people to transport and people to people.
Stony Creek drain: untidy and often slightly threatening, informal green space still has value for residents, which appropriate intervention can enhance.
Residents often have concerns about informal green space but some still use it. Work to enhance these areas should aim to resolve these concerns without destroying what residents do value.
For suburbs like fast-growing Tarneit in the Wyndham area, ‘hard’ infrastructure gets priority, leaving ‘soft’ social infrastructure to catch up later.
Chris Brown/flickr
Traditionally, new communities first get hard infrastructure – schools, hospitals, transport – and ‘soft’ social infrastructure comes later. Liveability and public health suffer as a result.
In Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney, just over a third of dwellings are within 400 metres of a public transport stop with services every 30 minutes, but the proportions are much lower in other cities.
Angela Brkic/AAP
Governments, developers and urban planners all aspire to create liveable cities. Yet when it comes to Australian cities, the rhetoric and reality don’t quite match.
While parts of Australian capital cities are highly liveable, access to the features that underpin liveability is highly unequal.
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The challenge of creating liveable communities across Australia’s capital cities comes down to seven key factors. And assessed on this basis, parts of our cities don’t fare so well.
A drain carries water but does little else, but imagine how different the neighbourhood would be if the drain could be transformed into a living stream.
Zoe Myers
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.
Melbourne’s ambitions to be a ‘20-minute city’ aren’t likely to be achieved by its recently updated planning strategy.
Nils Versemann / shutterstock.com
While many talk about 30-minute cities, some aim for residents to be able to get to most services within 20 minutes. But cities like Melbourne have an awful lot of work to do to achieve their goal.
The traditional backyard provides a retreat from the pressures of city life.
Australians are losing the backyards that once served as retreats from the stresses of city living. Our health is likely to suffer as cities become less green and much hotter.
Night-time lighting – seen here in Chongqing, China – is one of many aspects of city living that can make us more stressed.
Jason Byrne
Research shows planners and built environment professionals have surprisingly poor knowledge about how cities might harm mental health. The good news is that simple steps can make a big difference.