A distinctive feature of the New Urban Agenda is that it redefines informal settlements, such as Dharavi in Mumbai, India, as an asset based on their potential to promote economic growth.
YGLvoices/flickr
Hayley Henderson, The University of Melbourne; Alexei Trundle, The University of Melbourne; André Stephan, The University of Melbourne; Hesam Kamalipour, The University of Melbourne, and Melanie Lowe, The University of Melbourne
More than 25,000 delegates will meet in Quito in October to set out a New Urban Agenda for the UN, to be implemented over the next 20 years. But Australia is yet to play a major role in the process.
Johannesburg skyline: the challenge is to create a city that is liveable, safe and resource efficient.
Reuters/Siphiwe Sibeko
Businesses have traded on graffiti and the air of edginess that draws visitors to Melbourne’s laneways. But they draw the line at sharing space with the homeless, whose right to the city is denied.
Scotland’s new deprivation figures confirm a wider trend towards suburbanising poverty.
Chinese are starting to question government control of the terms of public debate, as conveyed by this propoganda banner in Hangzhou in 2010.
Philip Roeland
Hangzhou is hosting the G20 summit and China is anxious to present a positive picture of the country to the world, but the official attitude to non-compliant citizens isn’t helping.
The rear of 30-32 Oxford Street, an area of Sydney affected by an outbreak of bubonic plague in 1900.
Wikimedia/NSW State Archives
New research finds almost a million Australians are living in poor or very poor-quality housing, with more than 100,000 in dwellings regarded as very poor or derelict.
Nne-star-rated ‘Catalyst’ houses built to maximise passive solar principles were evaluated against seven control houses built to DHHS standards.
Trivess Moore
Emerging research challenges the idea that sustainable housing is unaffordable. It shows sustainability and good design can be affordable when analyses include social, health and wellbeing benefits.
Eye-tracking technology helps us understand how people interact with their environment. This can improve policy and design, but can also be a tool for surveillance and control.
Non-stop public transport might suit the 24-hour party people, but it could have rougher consequences for others.
City policymakers are realising creative workers don’t have to be permanently clustered together if they can collaborate as needed.
Steve Purkiss/flickr
Cities seeking to attract creative industries have relied heavily on the cluster concept. New research suggests a technology-driven transformation of how the sector works calls for a new approach.
Landlords and property agents often apply ‘no pets’ rules even though many households see them as part of the family. Their difficulty in finding rental housing then becomes a source of great stress.
Urban planning was once an Olympic event, although the first gold medal – awarded to Germany’s Alfred Hensel for the Nuremberg stadium – turned out to be an unfortunate choice.
Imagine cities competed to eliminate hunger, poverty, unemployment, crime and greenhouse emissions, and to offer housing and transport for all. Don’t scoff – urban planning was once an Olympic event.
A self-driving bus completes a demonstration drive in Tokyo in July.
Toru Hanai/Reuters
New technologies do not exist in a vacuum. To succeed, new transport technology needs to match the ways we want to move around cities and be accommodated by laws and regulations.
Worldwide real estate makes up 60% of the value of all global assets. But it’s being concentrated into the hands of a wealthy few.
Renaissance master Andrea Palladio designed Villa La Rotonda with rooms of various characters, which at night served as viewing boxes for fireworks displays in the surrounding landscape.
Bogna/Wikimedia Commons
Might we enjoy our homes more if their rooms were characterised by their sense of loftiness or intimacy or cheerfulness or melancholy rather than lifeless labels such as ‘media room’ or ‘home office’?