The more people come to a city, the more demand for buildings is amplified.This demand creates pressure from which a range of agencies, motivations and causes arise.
Domino’s Paving for Pizza campaign shrewdly combines promotion of its product with meeting a public need to have potholes repaired.
Domino's Pizza
Companies have an opportunity to reframe brand communications from the promotion of conspicuous consumption to becoming a regenerative force in urban economies.
As one of the fastest-growing cities in the developed world, Melbourne’s suburban sprawl has many costs.
Nils Versemann/Shutterstock
John Stanley, University of Sydney; Janet Stanley, The University of Melbourne e Peter Brain, National Institute of Economic and Industry Research
State and local governments can’t do much about the rapid population growth in Melbourne, but they can take steps to reduce the costs of growing disparities between the outer suburbs and inner city.
When political leaders swap suits for hi-viz vests the costs of the promises they make are high, and often not well justified.
Lukas Coch/AAP
The major parties are promising tens of billions of dollars in transport spending, but only a handful of projects are on Infrastructure Australia’s national priority list with approved business cases.
Commuters at Epping train station board replacement buses during work on the line for the Sydney Metro, the biggest of all the promised projects.
Mick Tsikas/AAP
The major parties are promising projects costing tens of billions of dollars, with a surprisingly large overlap between them. Yet only two have been endorsed by infrastructure authorities.
A cake made to farewell the last tenant to leave the Sirius building, which was built in Sydney at a time when governments saw the need to invest directly in public housing.
Ben Rushton/AAP
If we recognised social housing as infrastructure as essential as transport links, schools and hospitals, not properly investing in it could become unthinkable.
An increase in the use of self-driving cars will change parking requirements in the city.
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An increase in the use of self-driving cars will change parking infrastructure in cities, and hopefully result in more colourful character neighbourhoods.
Cairns has lots of hard grey infrastructure but much less green infrastructure that would reduce the impacts of the city’s growth.
Karine Dupré
Urbanisation is the main reason for rising temperatures and water pollution, but receives little attention in discussions about the health of water streams, reefs and oceans.
Another election, another infrastructure promise – in the Andrews government’s case, a $50 billion suburban rail loop.
Penny Stephens/AAP
In the election bidding wars, parties commit billions to transport projects, often before all the work needed to justify these has been done. More cost-effective alternatives hardly get a look-in.
Federal and state governments have put their hands up to fund airport rail links before we have even seen business cases.
David Crosling/AAP
Billions of taxpayer dollars are committed before all the evidence for, and against, infrastructure projects is in. As well as missing business cases, basic rules of economic modelling are broken.
The risk of urban flooding is rising. Overall, residents and municipalities are ill prepared, but there are steps homeowners can take to protect themselves.
Victorians who opposed the East West Link before the November 2014 election would have felt not much had changed when the new government announced the West Gate Tunnel in March 2015.
Courtney Biggs/AAP
Transport infrastructure has such an impact on what kind of city we become that more democratic planning is long overdue. But public consultation is typically limited and focused on design issues.
Australia’s big cities, like Sydney, have outgrown the historical patchwork governance structure of local councils.
SF photo/Shutterstock
Scholars and planners have long pointed out the need in Australia’s big cities for democratic governance structures that operate at a citywide scale. Now Infrastructure Australia has weighed in.
Parts of the world are grappling with the urbanisation problem but some other parts experience the opposite: their cities are shrinking.
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Urbanisation has been a well-established trend and for some countries will continue to be. But some others experience the opposite, resulting in underused and abandoned infrastructure.
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.
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.
The Cross River Rail project offers a solution to a narrowly conceived problem while ignoring the bigger picture of metropolitan planning.
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The rail project may well help get more commuters into the CBD, but offers few benefits for the parts of the broader metro area where most population growth is occurring.
Interest rate adjustments are crude and fail to target the problems within the housing market.
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A variable special rate on new residential housing developments in selected centres could be used to create a local incentive to supply more affordable dwellings at higher density.
A fully loaded semitrailer can cause 10,000 times more damage to roads than a family car.
AAP Image/Dan Himbrechts
Australia should follow the lead of other nations like New Zealand and Switzerland and increase the charges for heavy vehicles on roads, proportionate to the amount of wear and tear they cause.