It was once thought the Aboriginal names for the Hawkesbury had been lost forever. But after a remarkable find in the Mitchell Library, almost 100 place names will be restored to Dyarubbin Country.
With COVID-19 spreading in Sydney's southwest, can New South Wales avoid a return to lockdown and a similar scenario to Victoria's second wave? The answer depends on whether there is community spread.
A new airport, aerotropolis and development of two of the 'three cities' in the metropolitan strategy all aim to create jobs in Western Sydney. But right now the only certainty is a huge jobs deficit.
Centrelink queues shocked Australians but long before COVID-19 Western Sydney had job-poor neighbourhoods with very high unemployment rates.
Loren Elliott/AAP
Western Sydney's growth-driven boom had ended before COVID-19 hit. Some neighbourhood unemployment rates were 2-3 times the metropolitan average, with female workforce participation as low as 43%.
Up early and home late: that’s the daily routine for hundreds of thousands of commuters out of Western Sydney.
Dean Lewins/AAP
Education fuelled extraordinary growth in Western Sydney's professional services workforce, but their jobs aren't local. More than 300,000 commute to work outside the region.
Sydney CBD is highly accessible and remains clearly the dominant centre in the metropolitan region.
Holli/Shutterstock
When a city gets to a certain size, it starts to make sense to have multiple centres of activity, and three are planned for Sydney. So what needs to be done to bring the city closer to this goal?
Significant investment in public transport is essential to ensure the Central City CBD can handle the predicted growth in commuting trips.
Dean Lewins/AAP
Central City 2048 proposes one new rail line, three metro lines and almost 300,000 extra jobs for the new CBD, one of three proposed for metropolitan Sydney. Clearly, the investment needed is massive.
Parramatta has been designated as the central CBD of three future city centres in the Greater Sydney region.
haireena/Shutterstock
The Greater Sydney metropolis is envisaged as having three CBDs by mid-century, but an assessment of the proposed Central City around Parramatta shows how much work is needed to make that a reality.
Sydney has grown rapidly since the safe injecting room was established in Kings Cross in 2001.
LAURA FRIEZER/AAP Image
Sydney's supervised injection room in Kings Cross has helped reduce harmful drug use. But many drug users who live in the outer suburbs find it difficult to get to the inner-city facility.
‘Soft fall’ surfaces are widely used in play areas where children might fall, but can also get very hot in the sun, which undermines this safety benefit.
Brisbane City Council/Flickr
Commonly used surfaces in play areas, such as "soft fall" materials and Astroturf, can heat up to 80-100°C in the sun. This makes them a hazardous design choice, especially as the climate gets hotter.
The term ‘Leb’ embodies hyper-masculinity on the street.
Generic image from Shutterstock.com
Michael Mohammed Ahmad's novel The Lebs is a realistic portrayal of teenage boys in Western Sydney.
The Sydney suburb of Liverpool, with its high concentration of ethnic migrants, has improved its levels of community trust since the Cronulla riots.
Wikimedia Commons
Trust has returned to areas with a higher concentration of ethnically diverse migrants significantly since 2005, but more must to be done if we want to avoid another Cronulla riot.
In the seat of Blaxland, held by Labor’s Jason Clare, 73.9% of respondents said ‘no’ to making same-sex marriage legal in Australia.
ABS
Early intervention via education and training will cost money straight up. But it makes no sense to watch young people drift through unemployment and disengagement and turn into unemployable adults.
Many people in culturally diverse populations in Western Sydney have lived in Australia for many years, if not several generations.
Shutterstock
Reasoned debates on sustainable migration intake levels are important. But transport and health infrastructure shortfalls in Western Sydney won't be solved by reactive anti-immigration attitudes.
Building the hotbox dream: another housing development in Western Sydney.
Katherine Gibson
Extreme heat divides people from the environment and from each other. So with the rapid densification of our cities, what kind of legacies are we building for future generations?
Increasing access to health data and more readily available analytical tools offer some opportunities to tackle the ever-growing rates of obesity.
AAP/Dave Hunt
Enshrining the need for planning healthy built environments in legislation will help ensure the fundamental role planners have to play in facilitating healthy lifestyles.
Central Queensland University and James Cook University are part of the Townsville City Deal signed by three tiers of government in December 2016.
Lukas Coch/AAP
Universities can lead the way in creating opportunities for the economic development of regional cities and outer metropolitan areas under new City Deals.
Principal Fellow (Hon), Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne
Senior Lecturer, School of Computing and Information Systems, University of Melbourne; Senior Research Fellow, Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, The University of Melbourne