The halving of international student numbers living in Australia to 300,000 is a huge hit to universities’ revenue. But our cities and businesses will also feel the loss of so many residents.
The infamous Makoko slum in Lagos, Nigeria.
Stefan Magdalinski/Wikimedia Commons
In our urban world, turning the makeshift and the informal into the livable and sustainable is our greatest challenge.
The Morrison government’s population plan looks to reduce the concentration of growth in the big cities and to raise the benefit-cost ratio of population change more broadly.
Andrew Taylor/AAP
Population growth has pros and cons, and the Morrison government’s plan is less about a change in immigration numbers than about increasing the benefits and minimising the costs.
The big global cities might be engines of growth but are also where the deepest troughs of poverty and injustice are found.
Jorge CMS/Shutterstock
The largest cities in Australia and the US are both the richest and the most likely to push out low-income earners. Having cities of all sizes will increase people’s choices of where to live and work.
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.
Tokyo, seen here from the Skytree tower, is home to more people than any other city on Earth but has managed to remain highly liveable.
Brendan Barrett
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.
Melbourne is powered by the coal-fired stations of Gippsland, which illustrates the problems with any urban strategy that neglects regional roles and interests.
AAP/Julian Smith
City-centric thinking arguably obscures connections between ‘humans’ and ‘nature’, and ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ or ‘wild’. Growing evidence of the depths of these links is testing the concept of ‘urban’.
For one in three people who live in cities in the global south that means living in a slum.
AAP/Diego Azubel
At the Habitat III summit in October, governments will agree an agenda to guide sustainable global urban development over the next 20 years. The rise of the ethical city is a key element of this.