Nawarddeken Academy’s self-built school is an example of reinvesting funds from payment for ecosystem services to meet critical community needs in innovative ways.
Image: Bjorn Everts/Nawarddeken Academy
Planning controls in Melbourne were eased 20 years ago, with mixed results, and new limits are now in place. Will other cities that have eased height limits, like Adelaide, avoid the same mistakes?
Doing it locally: workers in the Gumatj timber workshop, Gunyangara.
Hannah Robertson
Centralised policies are not meeting the needs of remote Indigenous settlements. Increasing their decision-making input and the role of local industry can overcome the challenges of building remotely.
Old mine sites suffer many fates, which range from simply being abandoned to being incorporated into towns or turned into an open-air museum in the case of Gwalia, Western Australia.
The industrial patterns of mining shaped many Australian towns, which found varied uses for disused mine sites. The mining boom ensures the challenges these sites present will be with us a long time.
Grey nomads are champions of a radical type of portable urbanism as they travel to far-flung places like Lake Ballard in Western Australia.
Image courtesy of Tourism Western Australia
Grey nomads travel Australia because they have the desire and the means to do so. Could future generations end up following in their footsteps because they can no longer work and stay in one place?
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.
Telstra and the City of Joondalup have joined forces in a trial of ‘smart park’ applications at Tom Simpson Park.
Public spaces have become more, not less, important to our experience of cities in the digital era. These technologies can be used to confound and enlarge our experiences of and connections to place.
RMIT University transformed the look and function of its city campus as part of its New Academic Street project.
Tess Kelly
European ideas of the campus as a place apart shaped Australia’s “sandstone” universities. Now universities are adopting urban regeneration strategies, bringing the city to the campus and vice versa.
The Wray Avenue Solar Parklet by Seedesign Studio is in Fremantle.
Jean-Paul Horré
Changes in how we live and work call into question current planning regulations relating to mixed-use development.
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.
The Collective Old Oak co-living block in London has more than 500 apartments with bedrooms and bathrooms. All other spaces are shared.
David Hawgood/Geograph
While some forms of co-living seek to match modern lifestyles and a desire to downsize, other profit-driven models simply exploit a lack of affordable housing alternatives.
Apartment layouts at Ritter Strasse 50, initiated by ifau and Jesko Fezer with Heide and Von Beckerath, are highly individualised.
Andrea Kroth
The front yards, footpaths and verges of Australian suburbs are spaces overdue for reinvention.
At Tolhuistuin, the government provides the land, old building stock and a maintenance budget for a fixed period while the creatives develop the precinct themselves.
Maurice Mikkers/flickr
When municipal or state governments join forces with smaller creative communities to shape urban regeneration the results can be far-reaching.
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.
The continued preference for detached housing in new suburbs is driving Perth’s urban sprawl and means two-thirds of dwellings built over the next 15 years need to be on infill sites to meet the state’s target.
perthhdproductions/flickr
Government and industry need to demonstrate the benefits of well-designed higher-density housing. Rich residential display projects may be the ideal catalyst for creating smarter cities.
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.