For the first time, both major parties have a cities portfolio in their front bench team. With a few more changes, the government could create a structure that will really get to grips with urban issues.
The country lost two utterly different, and utterly compelling interpreters of India’s urban world this month. They left a legacy rich with beauty and meaning.
The humble sparrow represents a conduit to nature for many, and its wellbeing is connected to ours. That’s reason enough to celebrate World Sparrow Day.
Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore gives car-sharing a try. By 2016, one in ten of the city’s households will have joined a car-share scheme.
AAP Image/Paul Miller
Owning a car can be a hassle, especially if you live somewhere where driving is an occasional, rather than daily, necessity. This might help to explain why car-sharing schemes are going from strength to…
Bright lights, big city - in the 1950s lighting for productivity and security was overtaken by lighting for spectacle, mood and advertising.
Lighting the Sails - 59 Productions Vivid LIVE 2014.
If you’re in Melbourne or Sydney over the next couple of weeks, you can enjoy the nightly transformation of some familiar urban landmarks. How should we understand this growing global enthusiasm for spectacular…
Our cities are growing; we must rise to the challenge.
Erwin Soo
Ten themes shape the dilemmas, challenges and opportunities for the 21st-century city. Each relates to how we live and shape our places. The tradition of urban living, of urbanity, focuses both on the…
Growing a solution to the growing problem of urban warming.
Alison Hancock/Shutterstock
It’s getting hot in the city, and our overheated cities are only going to get hotter still as more people pile in and development and energy use intensifies. But planting away the problem could be a surprisingly…
Masdar City in Abu Dhabi. Not everyone’s cup of tea.
準建築人手札網站 Forgemind ArchiMedia
Future cities, where infrastructure adapts to our needs, offer are an enticing prospect. But who is in the driving seat as these urban developments crop up around the world? We need to make sure that the…
A pair of lesser flamingos in Mumbai’s busy port area.
Madhusudan Katti
Mention the word biodiversity to a city dweller and images of remote natural beauty will probably come to mind – not an empty car park around the corner. Wildlife, we think, should be found in wild places…
Clean up your act, Shanghai. Just add some more trees at the right places.
Corinna A. Carlson
There is something of a sensory dissonance in modern cities. Glamorous as they are, the breath of contemporary cities stinks. A recent study published in the journal Environmental Research Letters found…
Take the offer: sharing cuts waste and builds communities but we have our reasons for not always being comfortable with it.
Flickr/Zervas
Sharing is a good thing right? We are told it is good for the environment by cutting waste and needless consumption; we encourage it in our children for their moral growth; we see it used in advertising…
A White Shark feeds on a whale carcass off a Perth metropolitan beach in 2009. This was happening before Homo Sapiens existed.
AAP/Channel10
The vast majority of Australians live in coastal cities. This means most of us have sharks as neighbours. Living alongside sharks in metropolitan cities in Australia requires urban resilience. Unlike birds…
Is Australia going down the East Asian high-rise route?
eugenewei
How dense could we be? Very, if you follow much of the commentary in Australian debates about the way we should plan our cities. High-rise residential developments have been springing up in all Australia’s…
South-east Queensland now has a 200km long city.
dazza17-DJ
Despite the emphasis in Australia on the “compact city” foreshadowed in every major strategic metropolitan plan such as the South East Queensland Regional Plan; there is a growing trend towards “colliding…
Sex shops are venturing out into the High Street.
Paul Maginn
Cities are fizzing with opportunities to experience sex and sexuality. While sex usually takes place in private spaces, it is never really out of our minds. Unconsciously we “know” that it is taking place…
The “future” is something which manifests nowhere more potently than in our cities. Yet a substantial transformation over the past twenty years in the way cities are being made – both in terms of their…