There’s so much misinformation being put about lately regarding apartments and city centre living that I thought it would be timely to put some basic facts on the table. Fortuitously, I recently came across a paper by two academics from the School of Geography and Environmental Science at Monash University, Maryann Wullf and Michele Lobo, [...]

There are two things the new population strategy the Federal Government released on Friday gets right. First, it dismisses the concept of a specific population target and instead focusses on making Australia more resilient to change (I’ve discussed this before). Second, it points out that population size is not the sole cause of problems like [...]

Australia’s big cities can cope with large population but they will need massive investment in infrastructure

Older suburbs settled in the 1960s and 70s have lost population. But they’re not “empty” – older empty-nesters value where they live and want to age in place

I’ve previously discussed the argument advanced by the CEO of the Committee for Melbourne, Andrew Mcleod, that Melbourne can get better as it gets bigger. Mr Mcleod has another interesting contention – he argues that Melbourne is unambiguously better and more liveable today than it was in 1960. Back then Melbourne had a population of [...]

The name of the new Sustainable Population portfolio implies that growth and environmental sustainability have to be traded off. The real limit to growth however is the potential inability of the political system to make the right infrastructure and policy decisions.

A bigger Melbourne need not inevitably be a worse Melbourne. Many much larger cities are sought-after locations, suggesting scale and density have advantages. The key task is to manage growth well.

This 520 unit development in Coburg reaches up 13 stories to make good use of a rare, large inner suburban site. It is the kind of development we need to see more of.