A friendly wave from a neighbour is one of life’s incidental but invaluable interactions. Porches, balconies, front yards and footpaths have proven their importance as cogs of neighbourhood life.
Distancing rules will make life very difficult for smaller bars, cafes and restaurants. Our streets can be modified quickly to help save an important part of the life of cities and their economies.
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.
Re-imagining cities after COVID-19 is both a practical and philosophical task. People’s perceptions of places are changing. It is a time for planners and policymakers to plan with, not for, people.
Flood waters surround Keyano College and Fort McMurray Composite High School in late April 2020.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Greg Halinda
Blaming flooding on an act of God wrongly absolves government and developers of their liability for poor decisions that unfairly burden taxpayers.
New York City has closed some streets to traffic to give residents more room to roam during the coronavirus pandemic, Queens, May 13, 2020.
Johannes Eisele/AFP via Getty Images
For centuries, disease outbreaks have forced cities to transform physically and operationally in ways that ultimately benefited all residents going forward.
Many are speculating about the pandemic changing how we plan and use our cities. What they overlook is how many people live in unplanned settlements where it’s more likely to be business as usual.
Public spaces must now meet our need to be ‘together but apart’.
Silvia Tavares
When urban spaces work well they are highly social spaces. How do we safely manage them and people’s fears about mingling when ‘being together but apart’ is the norm?
After the ‘world’s biggest work-from-home experiment’, many people (and their employers) might decide they needn’t commute every day. If even a fraction do that, infrastructure needs will change.
Temporary use of land and buildings plays a role in the aftermath of crisis.
A crew works on building a 68-bed emergency field hospital specially equipped with a respiratory unit in New York’s Central Park on March 29, 2020.
AP Photo/Mary Altaffer
The impacts of coronavirus on cities are extraordinarily difficult. Yet around the world, cities are responding rapidly and decisively to the crisis and its implications for urban life.
Parc-Extension in Montreal is a neighbourhood in transition with dire consequences for low-income families.
Andrés Salas
Gentrification often leads to the eviction of poor and largely racialized populations. When a university campus drives the change, they can choose to do something about it.
The Ohio City Farm in Cleveland provides low-cost land, shared facilities and technical assistance to support entrepreneurial farmers.
Horticulture Group/Flickr
Four out of 5 Americans live in cities, so urban planning can make a big difference in our lifestyles – especially if it promotes healthy diets and physical activity.
Only the inner suburbs of Melbourne and other capital cities meet the 20-minute neighbourhood test. But we could transform the other suburbs for much less than the cost of current transport projects.
In a warming world, trees can play a major role in keeping cities and your home cool. If you plan it right, they can even save you money and protect your home from bushfires.
The neighbourhoods of Paris, Barcelona and Amsterdam with densities 3-5 times those of Melbourne and Sydney offer an insight into how we could transform our cities for the better.
States across Australia are increasingly using market-led proposals to build infrastructure. The emerging problems reflect the inherent risks of projects that bypass proper public planning processes.