Bright light does not necessarily make a space feel safer, as seen here where there’s a sharp drop-off into dark shadows at the edge of the path.
grafxart/Shutterstock
Bright lighting alone does not make a space feel safe. It can blind and disorientate and create dark shadows at the edges. Tellingly, ‘unsafe’ places had much higher illuminance than ‘safe’ places.
Towering canyons of concrete and glass are an increasingly dominant feature of fast-growing cities like Melbourne.
ymgerman/Shutterstock
Planning controls in Melbourne were eased 20 years ago, with mixed results, and new limits are now in place. Will other cities that have eased height limits, like Adelaide, avoid the same mistakes?
New housing estates on the city fringes might be soulless, cookie-cutter developments, but communities can invest them with layers of meaning that create a sense of place.
Lukas Coch/AAP
A sense of place matters for people and communities. When a suburb is created from scratch, close attention needs to be paid to the cues from the landscape and meanings people attach to the area.
Artificial intelligence can help manage floods effectively, but decisions about which communities are protected require a human touch.
In an urban setting like central Footscray, where only 1% of the area is public space, the value of the humble footpath needs to be recognised.
Yvonne Meng
Footpaths are a valuable space for everyday social activity, but their role is often overlooked. In increasingly dense urban areas such as Footscray, footpaths are essential public spaces.
Ferrara, Italy bears some resemblance to da Vinci’s design.
hectorlo/Flickr.
Leonardo da Vinci’s ideal city contained design features and engineering works not realised until hundreds of years after he died.
Marine Drive in Mumbai, viewed here from across Chowpatty Beach, is an ‘accidental’ planning legacy that’s now one of the most popular places in the city.
Dirk Ott/Shutterstock
Karine Dupré, Griffith University; Jane Coulon, École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture Montpellier (ENSAM), and Silvia Tavares, James Cook University
When we plan a better future for an increasingly urbanised world, we need to be aware that more than half of all children now live in the tropics. That calls for solutions with a tropical character.
‘The Golden Orange Solar City’, a depiction of the Turkish city of Antalya in the future (as inspired by Solar Punk literature such as the ‘Glass and Gardens’ anthology edited by Sarena Ulabarri).
Alan Marshall
Amid fears that parts of Townsville and other Australian cities might become “uninsurable”, making urban areas more resilient and adaptable to flooding is becoming more urgent.
Under 10 percent of new Citi Bike and Divvy bike docks are sited where residents suggested using interactive online maps, a new study shows. But that doesn’t mean city officials weren’t listening.
Buildings built for writing and reading the news altered the urban fabric.
Uninviting, car-dominated streets, like this one in Melbourne, reduce our experience menu by discouraging beneficial activities like walking and sharing places with other people.
Daniel Bowen/Flickr
If the menu of potential activities that do us good is made to look uninviting or challenging, we are more likely to choose the easier but less healthy option.
Canberra’s Civic is home to a high concentration of knowledge workers.
Mick Tsikas/AAP
Canberra is growing as fast as anywhere in Australia. It’s driven by a knowledge economy that is transforming the city centre but is also displacing poorer residents.
Cairns has lots of hard grey infrastructure but much less green infrastructure that would reduce the impacts of the city’s growth.
Karine Dupré
Urbanisation is the main reason for rising temperatures and water pollution, but receives little attention in discussions about the health of water streams, reefs and oceans.
Loneliness has become a global epidemic, and urban design can be either part of the problem or the solution.
Melbourne School of Design
The cities we build in turn shape our society. So when so many of us feel lonely, we should aim to apply what we know about the social impacts of design to help people connect with each other.
A vine shade structure being installed in Cavenagh Street will help cool the hottest street in Darwin city centre.
Darwin’s climate is getting even hotter and it’s one of the main reasons people leave the city. A lot more can be done, though, to make our tropical cities safe, cool and enjoyable.
Wittelsbacherplatz, June 2018, Munich, Germany.
Image: Christian Tietz