Exordium Apartments at Zetland, built by City West Housing, provide affordable, high-quality housing to key workers within the City of Sydney.
Alan Morris
If local government is to deliver affordable housing, state and federal governments must assist. Even councils as powerful and well resourced as the City of Sydney cannot do it by themselves.
The ‘Bicycle Snake’ in Copenhagen separates pedestrians and cyclists, allowing both to navigate the city more safely.
Cycling Embassy of Denmark/DISSING+WEITLING
New analysis reveals just how little is spent on cycling and walking projects around Australia. No state's spending on cycling is more than 1.5% of its road funding.
Ai Weiwei, Law of the Journey, 2017, reinforced PVC with aluminium frame, 3 x 60 x 6m.
Courtesy the artist. Photograph: Ai Weiwei Studio
The 21st Sydney Biennale is the first to be directed by a curator of non-Western heritage. While the number of artists is modest, lost quantity is made up by quality.
In both Indian and Australian cities, cyclists who deliver goods and services have to take it slow.
Malini Sur
Cycling is a low-cost and non-polluting way to make deliveries in congested cities. Slow cyclists should be recognised as good for the economy and environment, not treated like second-class citizens.
The Hawkesbury’s waters look beautifully natural but treated sewage makes up to 20% of the river flow where the North Richmond Filtration Plant draws its water.
Karl Baron/flickr
Perth is looking at recycling all its sewage in the city's future water supply. But many Australians' drinking water already contains indirectly recycled treated sewage.
The plantings of New York’s High Line Park were inspired by plants that had naturally colonised the disused railway viaduct.
Beyond my Ken/Wikipedia
If the nature we desire is, in fact, its expression as untamed wildness, then we should turn to the creativity of artists as well as urban designers when building our cities.
Within a little more than a decade following the 1978 riot, the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival and Parade nourished the emergence of a budding gay and lesbian tourism industry.
CrowdSpark.com/AAP
If intelligently managed, festivals attract substantial numbers of LGBT tourists to regional and rural destinations, injecting additional income into the local economies.
People on moderate incomes, including police and emergency workers, have been forced to seek housing on the city fringes, far from their places of work. But there are ways to reverse this trend.
Much of the traffic using Sydney’s Anzac Bridge and, in the distance, Harbour Bridge is travelling through the city centre, not to it or from it.
Rob Roggema
One potential benefit of WestConnex, which remains untouched, is that it could relieve Sydney's city centre from cars and make it more pedestrian-friendly.
With water storages running low, residents of Cape Town get drinking water in the early morning from a mountain spring collection point.
Nic Bothma/EPA
The situation in Perth in particular has some parallels to that of Cape Town, but Australian cities responded to the last big drought by investing in much bigger water supply and storage capacity.
Transport Minister Andrew Constance and the Coalition government are under pressure to fix long-standing problems with Sydney’s train system which have now come to a head.
Daniel Munoz/AAP
The real challenge is finding appropriate ways to invest in public transport that will not only take pressure off the system but also support improved travel on all modes, including cars.
The Sydney suburb of Liverpool, with its high concentration of ethnic migrants, has improved its levels of community trust since the Cronulla riots.
Wikimedia Commons
Trust has returned to areas with a higher concentration of ethnically diverse migrants significantly since 2005, but more must to be done if we want to avoid another Cronulla riot.
Fish iceblocks return slowly to Sydney Harbour in Four Thousand Fish at Sydney Festival.
Jamie Williams
The future of Sydney is under constant scrutiny. But before we consider creating a 'third city' in Sydney's west, we should ensure we get the current infrastructure up to international standards.
The potential clean energy sources are all around Sydney, just waiting to be harnessed.
Collage by Rocco Furfaro
Sun, wind, waste biomass, geothermal, tides and waves: all these energy sources in Sydney's backyard add up to a zero-carbon energy solution for the city.
NSW Sports Minister Stuart Ayres claims Sydney is falling behind other Australian cities in its big sporting event infrastructure.
AAP/Joel Carrett
The New South Wales government has come in for heavy criticism over its $2 billion plan to knock down and rebuild two of Sydney's largest sports stadiums.
Cars are submerged on a flooded road in the Sydney suburb of Marrickville in 2012.
Alex Holver/NixPages
A massive residential development in a flood-prone inner-city suburb sounds like a recipe for disaster. But good urban design can deliver higher density and reduce the flood risk.
Maya Demetriou, 90, pictured after the court ruling that the minister did not properly consider a heritage listing recommendation, will be the last tenant left in the Sirius building.
Perry Duffin/AAP
All but a handful of the former public housing tenants are gone. But despite the government again rejecting the recommended heritage listing of the Sirius building, the fight to save it isn't over.
“Looking for one girl to share a master room with another 3 girls.”
Screenshot from Gumtree ad, August 19 2017, 11:58
City living costs are driving people to organise themselves to share a room with strangers. These precarious living arrangements hardly qualify as a home.
PhD Candidate, School of Social Sciences, University of Tasmania, and Senior Research Consultant, Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology Sydney