The Grattan Institute released a new report earlier this month, Building tomorrow’s suburbs, on how to make fringe suburbs more adaptable to future change.
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INNER CITY
Are homes with swimming pools energy guzzlers?
In the US, homes with a swimming pool use a whopping 49% more electricity and 19% more gas than homes without one. Yet it’s not the pool itself that’s the main problem. Energy efficiency company, Opower, examined the energy consumption over four seasons of 2 million homes located in a region with a moderate climate. [...]
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Are inner city residents bad for the environment?
I’ve written before (e.g. here and here) about understanding the importance of selection bias before attributing significant behavioural influences to the physical environment. More often than not, it’s the characteristics of the people that explain more about their behaviour than the type of neighbourhood or housing they live in. The Australian Conservation Foundation’s (ACF) well [...]
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Where are cities growing?
There’re some interesting takeaways from the latest ABS estimates of population growth released last week. You can get a broad overview from demographer Bernard Salt’s analysis, but I think there’re a few other points pertinent to cities that warrant examination. For a start, I expect many will be surprised at how small a proportion of each [...]
READ MOREHas spare infrastructure capacity in the inner city disappeared?
The received wisdom is it costs much less to provide infrastructure for an inner suburban dwelling than for one in the outer suburbs. However, as I noted last time, we don’t know how big the difference is or even, for that matter, if it’s positive or negative – we simply lack reliable evidence. There are [...]
READ MOREAre infrastructure costs higher on the fringe?
The exhibit above purports to show that the cost of infrastructure associated with building a new dwelling within 10 km of the CBD of a city like Melbourne is, on average, $50,503. In contrast, it costs $136,401 to provide infrastructure for an outer suburban dwelling i.e. located more than 40 km from the CBD. That’s [...]
READ MOREIs inner city living the solution to obesity?
It’s often pointed out that residents of the inner city, on average, are less obese than residents of the outer suburbs. Since the inner city is denser, more walkable and has much better public transport access than any other part of the metropolitan area, the conclusion seems obvious to many – a key strategy to [...]
READ MOREWho lives in the city centre?
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, [...]
READ MOREWhere is Melbourne's ‘centre of gravity’ ?
We’re familiar enough with the idea of the ‘centre of gravity’ of population in Melbourne. But where is the centre of gravity of employment? Is it the city centre? No, for one thing the CBD’s only got around 15% of all metropolitan jobs. For another, the combination of Melbourne’s distinctly lop-sided growth south of the [...]
READ MOREWill redevelopment of Fishermans Bend really be 'revolutionary'?
The Age breathlessly headlines the Government’s proposals for the redevelopment of Fishermans Bend as Premier Ted Baillieu’s “inner city housing revolution”. Planning Minister Matthew Guy says the area will evolve as ”Australia’s first inner-city growth corridor”. Whoa there! I think it might be time for a relaxing cup of tea and a lie down. Let’s [...]
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