Australians' need for smaller and more diverse dwellings is growing. The planning system is not providing enough of this housing, and self-serving opposition to it should be resisted.
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Articles on Urban density
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State and local governments can't do much about the rapid population growth in Melbourne, but they can take steps to reduce the costs of growing disparities between the outer suburbs and inner city.
Governments should stop offering false hopes and pandering to NIMBY pressures. As well as increased public and private housing supply, growing cities need well-designed higher-density development.
It's easy to over-estimate crowding and traffic in highly visible downtown cores and underestimate the vast growth happening in the suburban edges of our metropolitan regions.
The vitality that defines central Melbourne today did not emerge overnight. Rather than being born of one grand vision, it's the result of many astute, incremental changes that revitalised the city.
Self-driving, shared, electric vehicles and increasing urban density represent four disruptions that will transform city life. But a transport utopia isn't a guaranteed outcome of their interactions.
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.
Residents of established middle suburbs are slowly coming round to the idea, but governments and the property sector lack the capacity to deliver compact cities that are acceptable to the community.
Drains take up precious but inaccessible open space in our cities. Converting these to living streams running through the suburbs could make for healthier places in multiple ways.
Planners wish to correct past errors by increasing densities, discouraging car dependency and mixing land uses. But imposing imported strategies on Australian cities is producing unhappy results.
Being crowded into poor-quality high-density units harms residents' health, but design features that are known to promote wellbeing can make a big difference to the lives of low-income households.
The inexorable logic of the market will create suburban concentrations of lower-income households on a scale hitherto only experienced in the legacy inner-city high-rise public housing estates.
In the push for more compact cities, don't forget the ways apartment living is different. And often the downsides of these differences weigh heavily on low-income and disadvantaged households.
Even where communities are mixed, many inner-city families go to extraordinary financial and geographic lengths to ensure their children do not go to school with children from 'the flats'.
Australians are losing the backyards that once served as retreats from the stresses of city living. Our health is likely to suffer as cities become less green and much hotter.
Achieving the goal of sustainable cities depends on rolling back the market after decades of privatisation and deregulation.
Greening cities that are becoming denser is a major challenge. City-dwellers' health benefits from both well-designed green spaces and urban density, so we must manage the tensions between them.
Research suggests stakeholders' understandings of urban consolidation vary. And they often subvert policies to suit their own ends.
As increasing diversity and density come to characterise our cities, how can we build harmonious communities within apartment complexes?
The increasing global focus on essential services and public space as a key combination for successful city-making is relevant to fast-growing Australian cities too.
Top contributors
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Professor of Architecture and Urban Design, University of Melbourne
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Lecturer in Urban Planning and Urban Design, University of Melbourne
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Associate Professor, City Futures Research Centre, UNSW
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Senior Lecturer in Urban and Environmental Planning, Griffith University
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Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Transforming Housing Project, University of Melbourne
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Adjunct Senior Teaching Fellow in Urban Planning and Design, University of Western Australia
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Adjunct Professor, Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies, University of Sydney Business School, University of Sydney
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Principal Research Fellow – Urban Social Resilience, Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, University of Melbourne
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Professor of Population Health, University of Melbourne
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John Daley is a Friend of The Conversation.
Chief Executive Officer, Grattan Institute
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Research Professor in Sustainable Urbanism, Centre for Urban Transitions, Swinburne University of Technology
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Lecturer in Urbanism, University of Sydney
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Research Fellow, The University of Queensland
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Senior Lecturer, School of Design, University of Technology Sydney
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Director, Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, University of Melbourne
