Tiny houses aren’t for everyone, but most people who live in them are positive about the experience. Yet planning laws still make this way of life harder and less secure than it could be.
Planning and design for healthy, liveable communities in the Australian tropics can involve quite different considerations from those that apply down south.
Silvia Tavares
There’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all plan for sustainable, healthy urban living. Urban diaries help identify what works – and doesn’t work – for tropical cities like Cairns or Townsville.
What does a green star rating – One Central Park apartments in Sydney received five stars, for instance – actually mean?
AAP
Buildings are central to creating more sustainable cities, and green ratings are often used to assess how well a building measures up against this goal. But the current system has serious flaws.
The old Pratt Street power plant in Baltimore in the US is now home to commercial uses. But the heritage preservation is compromised by advertising that is not sympathetic to the building style and design.
Wikimedia Commons
Adaptively re-using buildings can preserve heritage while enabling new uses that help make cities more liveable and sustainable.
We need to look behind the sharing economy’s apparently informal, casual intent to consider the impacts on people’s lives.
Montri Nipitvittaya/Shutterstock
In cities dominated by globalised market forces, how can we achieve social equity and justice? For any sharing economy idea, we need to ask what will it do to fix the big problems confronting us all.
Producing fresh fruit and vegetables year-round has a hidden cost.
Dean Hochman/Flickr
Would you be shocked by a supermarket without carrots, potatoes or broccoli, at any time of year? But harvesting in the off-season does serious damage to our soil.
An outstanding example of sustainable residential building, Breathe Architecture’s The Commons apartments in Melbourne won a 2014 National Architecture Award.
Image courtesy of Australian Institute of Architects
New South Wales is the only state that has made meaningful progress on legislation and enforcement of standards capable of creating a sustainable built environment.
A tiny house in the backyard appeals to some as a solution that offers both affordability and sustainability.
Think Out Loud/flick
New research has found a marked increase in people, particularly among women over 50, who are building or want to build a tiny house. However, inflexible planning rules often stand in their way.
Some local councils are more tolerant than others in allowing residents to grow food where they want.
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City dwellers are individually starting to do their bit to live sustainably. Now pioneering businesses are aiming to make ecological and social sustainability part of their bottom line.
Our national wellbeing probably peaked with Australia’s population at roughly 15 million in the 1970s, when this photo was taken in Hunters Hill, Sydney.
John Ward/flickr
Australia’s GPI, a broad measure of national wellbeing, has stalled since 1974. So what has been the point of huge population and GDP growth since then if we and our environment are no better off?
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
Could building small affordable dwellings be a part of the solution?
The public and finance sectors – but not the government, it seems – are questioning the wisdom of investing in infrastructure for projects like the Adani coal mine.
Lukas Coch/AAP
If infrastructure is to meet the needs and challenges of an uncertain future, we need to move beyond the AAA ratings mindset and aim for net-positive social and ecological outcomes as well.
With so many choices for coffee, it’s hard to know which is the environmentally healthy option.
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Smart cities are usually optimised like a business for speed and efficiency. Placemaking can slow down cities to improve health and wellbeing and promote more democratic engagement of citizens.