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.
Residents of high-density housing might value features such as balconies, but when roads get busy this increases exposure to pollution.
Adam J.W.C./Wikipedia
Many new housing developments are being built along busy roads and rail lines, but lack design features that would reduce occupants’ exposure to harmful traffic pollution.
Some local councils are more tolerant than others in allowing residents to grow food where they want.
dscribe
Urban residents are increasingly keen to farm verges, parks, rooftops and backyards, but planning rules sometimes stand in the way.
The Cross River Rail project offers a solution to a narrowly conceived problem while ignoring the bigger picture of metropolitan planning.
shutterstock
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.
Cities suffer the planning consequences of rapid population growth while the federal government reaps the revenue.
Gilad Rom/Flickr
Financial benefits are behind the development industry’s push for a continuous rapid population growth. But our poorly planned cities are ill-prepared and already struggling.
There are very few approaches that examine all aspects of the complexity of urban design and development. Ergonomics, human factors and sociotechnical systems methods offer a way forward.
Informed citizens are essential to support good planning and infrastructure decisions. Marginalising urban planning gets us nowhere.
from www.shutterstock.com
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 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.
A polarising election issue in Western Australia, the Roe 8 project illustrates the need for better and more democratic decision-making.
Gregory Roberts/AAP
One reason Perth’s Roe 8 project is the subject of passionate protests is that it’s a case of a government asserting power over people rather than exercising power with local communities.
The Turnbull government’s focus seems to be largely on infrastructure projects that drive economic growth.
AAP/Lukas Coch
One year on, the Turnbull government is touting the economic benefits of an infrastructure agenda that neglects the other important functions of transport projects.
A quirk in the planning rules enabled the Primaries Warehouse in Fremantle to be redeveloped as a model of progressive higher-density design.
Stuart Smith/Panoramio
Exceptional projects can emerge when regulations are sensibly relaxed due to context. A Fremantle project is a model of progressive higher-density possibilities resulting from flexible planning rules.
Delhi: in need of clean air and fresh water.
Shutterstock
A project in the Western Himalaya has highlighted some valuable lessons for the future.
Upper Coomera is one of those fast-growing fringe suburbs that are hotter because of tightly packed housing with less greenery.
Daryl Jones/www.ozaerial.com.au/
Recently published research has found that the concentration of poorer people in hotter places is a real problem for cities’ capacity to cope with climate change.
Place-making: a seasonal beach in Campus Martius Park, Detroit 2014.
Laura Crommelin
Big ideas and big dollars have been invested in making ‘memorable’ places. Paradoxically, as similar solutions are adapted in diverse settings worldwide, this can lead to an uneasy new placelessness.
The closure of the Myer store would once have been a crippling blow for Fremantle, but now it is a site of new activity and possibilities.
City of Fremantle
The rise in temporary use of urban space requires a looser planning vision that can draw on this new type of city-making to inform longer-term developments.
Melbourne is being transformed by high-rise apartments, with some even being purpose-built for the Airbnb market.
Jorge Láscar/flickr
If the sharing economy is here to stay, planners and designers must respond with imagination to spread the positive effects of the tourism economy for the benefit of residents as well as tourists.
Suburban expansion on Perth’s fringe pushes into the SouthWest Ecoregion.
Richard Weller/Donna Broun
If Perth can preserve the rich biodiversity of its setting, it will become a model for sustainable city development that fully connects with the value of natural ecosystem services.