Western Sydney can be up to 10℃ hotter than the coast. Poorly constructed housing can’t handle the heat.
Academic rigour, journalistic flair
Articles on Western Sydney
Displaying 1 - 20 of 47 articles
Councils are trying to balance competing priorities in urban development, with limited resources and stretched budgets.
The rain isn’t letting up for Australia’s east. Remarkably, the low-pressure band that drenched Brisbane is now spawning not one but two east coast lows for Sydney – more typically seen in winter.
The lives of queer Arab-Australian boys and men are vividly inhabited in award-winning poet Omar Sakr’s darkly comic debut novel, set in Western Sydney.
Such a dramatic rise in extreme heat days is not inevitable. If global warming is limited to 1.5℃ this century, Western Sydney will have fewer than 17 days of 35℃ per year.
Here Out West aims to shift the perception about what it means to tell contemporary Australian tales to a broad audience while staying true to the suburbs and communities of Western Sydney.
In order to support people effectively, craft appropriate messages and predict virus spread, it is crucial to use the languages and local networks that bind multicultural communities together.
Public health information for migrant communities needs to cover off the basics but it also needs to provide nuanced messaging to counter myths and misinformation about COVID-19.
The experience of upward social mobility through education can have unexpected emotional costs – particularly for graduates from the working class.
It was once thought the Aboriginal names for the Hawkesbury had been lost forever. But after a remarkable find in the Mitchell Library, almost 100 place names will be restored to Dyarubbin Country.
With COVID-19 spreading in Sydney’s southwest, can New South Wales avoid a return to lockdown and a similar scenario to Victoria’s second wave? The answer depends on whether there is community spread.
A new airport, aerotropolis and development of two of the ‘three cities’ in the metropolitan strategy all aim to create jobs in Western Sydney. But right now the only certainty is a huge jobs deficit.
Western Sydney’s growth-driven boom had ended before COVID-19 hit. Some neighbourhood unemployment rates were 2-3 times the metropolitan average, with female workforce participation as low as 43%.
Education fuelled extraordinary growth in Western Sydney’s professional services workforce, but their jobs aren’t local. More than 300,000 commute to work outside the region.
When a city gets to a certain size, it starts to make sense to have multiple centres of activity, and three are planned for Sydney. So what needs to be done to bring the city closer to this goal?
Central City 2048 proposes one new rail line, three metro lines and almost 300,000 extra jobs for the new CBD, one of three proposed for metropolitan Sydney. Clearly, the investment needed is massive.
The Greater Sydney metropolis is envisaged as having three CBDs by mid-century, but an assessment of the proposed Central City around Parramatta shows how much work is needed to make that a reality.
Sydney’s supervised injection room in Kings Cross has helped reduce harmful drug use. But many drug users who live in the outer suburbs find it difficult to get to the inner-city facility.
Commonly used surfaces in play areas, such as “soft fall” materials and Astroturf, can heat up to 80-100°C in the sun. This makes them a hazardous design choice, especially as the climate gets hotter.
Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s novel The Lebs is a realistic portrayal of teenage boys in Western Sydney.
Top contributors
-
Director, Centre for Western Sydney, Western Sydney University
-
Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of Technology Sydney
-
Professor in Cultural and Social Analysis, Western Sydney University
-
Associate Professor, Design Studies, Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building, University of Technology Sydney
-
Associate Professor in Urbanism and Telecommunication Planning, Sydney Research Accelerator (SOAR) Fellow, University of Sydney
-
Senior Lecturer, Sociology and Social Policy, University of New England
-
Program director, Cities, Grattan Institute
-
Senior Lecturer, School of Political and Social Inquiry, Monash University
-
Principal Fellow (Hon), Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne
-
Senior Lecturer, School of Computing and Information Systems, University of Melbourne; Senior Research Fellow, Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, The University of Melbourne
-
Professor, School of Humanities and Social Inquiry, University of Wollongong
-
Senior Research Fellow, Western Sydney University
-
Professor of Criminology, Western Sydney University
-
Architecture Faculty Industry Advisory Group member, University of Newcastle
-
Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra
