December, 2010

The end of the year is always a great time for lists. As I’m not in a position this week to write anything more thoughtful than a drinks order, I’m just linking to interesting material. And there’s nothing more interesting than this great list, My blogs of the year, by the esteemed Sam Roggeveen, editor [...]

Swedish international health researcher, Professor Hans Rosling, is famous for presenting data “with the drama and urgency of a sportcaster”. His reputation is built on extraordinary presentations like this one. Now the BBC has produced a hologram version of one of his renowned presentations. It plots how life expectancy has improved in 200 countries over [...]

They know a bit about city branding in Portland, Oregon, one of the darlings of new urbanism and one of my favourite places. This video is for a new TV comedy series, Portlandia, starting in January 2011 (in the US). It takes the mickey out of Portland and takes its name from a sculpture at [...]

Melbourne almost rivalled Sydney circa 1890 – click to insert your own search terms. More on Ngram here.

There’s an interesting discussion going on in the blogosphere right now about how Wall St made and lost so much money in the noughties. It started yesterday our time when George Mason University economist and ‘the world’s most read economics blogger’, Tyler Cowen, announced that he’d written an essay on inequality in The American Interest. [...]

It’s time for The Melbourne Urbanist to start winding down for the holiday season. After this week, posts will flow to a trickle or even peter out while I take a holiday. The Melbourne Urbanist has now been going for over nine months so it’s timely to pause for a moment and take stock. The [...]

The Minister for Planning, Matthew Guy, is reported as saying that rather than “sprinkle high density housing across Melbourne”, the new Government will give priority to strategic developments on specific sites close to the CBD. Mr Guy has already moved to water down the former government’s planning laws encouraging higher density residential developments (i.e. over [...]

It’s commonly taken for granted that a disproportionately large number of fast food stores in an area is a key reason why the local population often has high rates of obesity. The California Centre for Public Health Advocacy, for example, argues that “there is growing scientific evidence that what people eat—and their likelihood of being [...]

Sooner rather than later, the Baillieu Government is going to have to prove its credibility on public transport by making substantial progress on one of the rail lines it has promised. And I have an idea for where it should start. The easiest candidate is the promised Avalon rail line because its cost is estimated [...]

The stereotype of people travelling long distances in Australian cities is wrong but persistent. The reality is that most trips are relatively close to home. For example, the accompanying chart and map show that 52% of all weekday trips (all purposes, all modes) by residents of the middle suburban municipality of Brimbank in Melbourne’s west [...]