Urban Planning

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GUEST OBSERVER
The ubiquitous cafes across Australian cities attract locals and tourists alike, but surely there's more to thriving neighbourhoods than a flat white.
Iconic architectural pieces may attract large numbers of tourists but are not the only things that live in the memories of visitors to Australian cities. Everyday experiences also endure. In fact, eating is one of the top tourist activities.
It’s also where the money is spent. According to Tourism Research Australia’s Tourism Satellite Account 2015-16 report, tourists spend the largest percentage of their money – about 21 cents in every dollar – on takeaways, restaurant meals and beverages.
It isn’t just international tourists searching for memorable cafe and dining experiences – leisure-seekers from nearby suburbs or towns are too. According to Food Industry Foresight’s Coffee &amp; Beverages In Australia annual tracking study, Australians drink about two coffees out per week. That equates to about 1.8 billion espresso-based coffees a year, costing A$7.3 billion.
So that cafes, restaurants and bars remain competitive, the architecture becomes part of the attraction. This has led to some ubiquitous design signifiers: white subway tiles, reclaimed timber, austere pendant lighting, white anodised SHS steel and exposed brick.
Additionally, cafe names often echo a civic rhetoric – see Common Ground, Public House, New School Canteen.
The replication of the cafe typology – each must have the right owner, the right coffee, and the right baristas, business name and interior designer – can be as tedious as the desire of city authorities to have a leisure landscape, a stadium, or an event to fill it.
Cities use these precincts and events as strategic tools to project an attractive image of themselves as they compete for tourist dollars, business investment, professional talent and the coveted high ranking in liveability indexes.
And Australia has many tourist leisurescapes under construction. There’s Darling Square, a A$3.4 billion neighbourhood near Sydney’s Darling Harbour; Perth’s Elizabeth Quay, a mixed-use development of office, entertainment and residential buildings around a 2.7-hectare artificial river inlet; and the Gold Coast’s expanded cultural precinct of 16.9 hectares, with Stage 1 to be delivered in time for the 2018 Commonwealth Games. And each comes with those ubiquitous cafes.
Leveraging the lure of the cafe
Property developers have recognised how to leverage the popularity of this “flat white tourism”. A nearby “cappuccino” strip can increase land values. It also helps with marketing apartment buildings: the promise of a cafe that anchors a new development is enticing for home buyers and investors.
Local councils also see cafes as desirable. To maintain street life, planning regulations often require active, public-facing street fronts, rather than blank walls, car parks, gardens or fences. The aim is to accommodate activity that encourages pedestrian interaction and casual surveillance.
Paired with changing consumer habits (such as online and mall shopping), the result is that many high streets are now dominated by the cafe, a sort of “high street lite”. The cafe appears to be a market-driven solution to achieve an active street front in Australian cities. This is flat white urbanism.
Consider the alternatives
Australians are not just consuming coffee. In fact, people are not just passively consuming cultural or leisure activities (such as going to bands or watching sport). Australians are making, doing and playing; active participation is on the rise around the country.
For example, the Australia Council study Arts in Daily Life: Australian Participation in the Arts highlighted that about one in three Australians is involved in creating visual art or craft. The Australian Bureau of Statistics’ General Social Survey, 2014 shows that 31% of Australians are also volunteering. This has put pressure on council services and raised questions about how councils can help enable community activity.
The availability of affordable and accessible space is a looming issue in major Australian cities. There is demand for more diverse uses at ground level – studios, live-work apartments, community rooms, kindergartens, ateliers, small-scale light industrial zones, education facilities.
But the desire among lessors for the maximum rental return means less profitable businesses or civic users can’t afford street-fronting leases.
A way to fund diverse activity
The concept of the developer contribution offers an opportunity to reimagine the ground plane of apartment buildings, to diversify away from look-alike cafes. The developer contribution is a percentage of a building budget that goes to community infrastructure (for the health, safety or wellbeing of the community).
At present, this money is generally channelled via council towards building libraries, multipurpose community centres, maternity health centres, sporting facilities or neighbourhood parks with play equipment. Cultural infrastructure seldom comes into the frame.
It is at the level of developer contribution that local councils can intervene. This could be through an ad-hoc process of negotiating more floors for the development in return for providing community space. Or it could be through rezoning, which is tied to developer contributions.
For example, developers could be granted a larger floor-area ratio through rezoning if they give a percentage of the building over to community use. This could include social housing.
A redefinition of what comprises community infrastructure could underpin this shift. This might extend to redefining public art contributions – developers are often required to provide a percentage of their project budget to public art. Would a subsidised artist studio be more valuable than a sculpture?
Urban policymakers have to be careful to maintain the uniqueness and distinctiveness of a place for both locals and tourists. Responding to the proliferation of cafes by creating incentives for, or regulating, other uses could be one way to diversify street life.
Then, cafes might not only give the appearance of a cultural scene, or of it being made somewhere nearby, or of it happening on the first floor. It is happening next door. This brings benefits to both the local and non-local coffee tourist.
Timothy Moore is PhD Candidate, Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne and author for The Conversation. He can be contacted <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/timothy-moore-292089" target="_blank">here</a>.
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jchancellor-FAypfDUnLy

Flat white urbanism: there must be better ways to foster a vibrant street life

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GUEST OBSERVER
Urban and regional planning, as an institutional practice, is increasingly criticised for failing to meet ordinary citizens' needs. Enter “hacktivism”.
Fusing hacking and activism, the term has previously referred to using information technology to achieve political goals. While “hacking” often entails malicious attacks on websites, it has another meaning. Hacking also means innovative problem-solving by combining new ideas with readily available materials.
Examples include taking an old DVD and using it as a drink coaster, bending a paperclip to reset a digital device, or twisting a coat hanger to unblock a drain. These are do-it-yourself “hacks” like those of the television character MacGyver.
Essentially, hacking is creative problem-solving. “Hackathons” are a case in point. Hackathons involve the “brainstorming, designing and testing of ideas with change-makers”.
Hacktivism in this sense refers to grassroots problem-solving by like-minded people who are willing to “go round the back” of established institutions to achieve social objectives. Hacktivism reflects a growing disenchantment with mainstream institutions, pervasive neoliberalism, and cultures of consumption.
Hacktivism is different to “place-hacking” by urban explorers. Recent examples of this include guerrilla gardens, pop-up libraries, repurposinginfrastructure and even disco traffic lights and street pong.
<h2>What’s driving hacktivism?</h2>
Hacktivism can challenge the trend among governing bodies to embrace neoliberal rhetoric about fast-tracking development. Cutting “red” and “green” tape disenfranchises residents.
Debates about urban consolidation are an example. Big developers seem to be able to bulldoze communities into accepting projects, which some residents feel will destroy the places they love, overshadow backyards, reduce privacy, increase congestion and noise, or even ruin neighbourhood character.
These concerns are often dismissed as “NIMBYism” and self-interest.
But streamlined development assessment processes and “consultation” typically limit citizen engagement. Who can blame residents for getting angry?
Citizen groups, civic-minded planners, environmentalists and others are beginning to resist the privatisation of public spaces and the erosion of public functions by offering alternatives. These range from interventions such as the parklets and pop-up venues of so-called “tactical urbanism” to more “activist”-oriented responses such as a Toronto group’s subversive use of advertising billboards.
<h2>Case studies in Australia</h2>
In Australia, a small but growing cadre of residents is experimenting with hacktivism in planning. Two recent examples are instructive:
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Gold Coast Hinterland and Environment Council’s (GECKO) initiative to “hack planning” by producing a community-led climate change action plan; and
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organised community resistance to the “West Village” development in West End, Brisbane, where residents have developed their own collaborative planning processes to create an alternative vision for the site.
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West End has a history of community-based resistance to evictions and inappropriate or undesirable development. It also has a history of challenging developers and governments to engage in a more sophisticated debate around best practice in planning and development.
The West Village development proposes seven 15-storey apartment towers and a large supermarket on an inner-city lot. This project highlights the ongoing struggle for social justice in inner Brisbane in the face of rapid development.
Stage 1 of West Village was deemed code-assessable, meaning no provision for public notification and no appeal rights. The full masterplan for the site is, however, impact-assessable.
Many residents saw the development proposal as flawed and creating many serious problems. Building on existing social ties and strengths, a group of residents and interested parties have begun to create an alternative vision (“Instead of West Village”) for the site. The aim is to pressure both the developer and government to engage with their concerns and aspirations.
Residents are using an open, collaborative, community-based planning process, similar to earlier grassroots engagements in the suburb. Community-led draft masterplans have been developed and discussed at various events. These plans are contrasted against community-generated models and images of the proposed development. Public meetings and workshops have enabled input from diverse quarters.
The alternative vision is still being finalised, but the collaboration and spirit of hacktivism underpinning it transcend the importance of the alternative master plan.
This hacktivism asserts a right to the city. It demands that planning be better: more just, more sustainable, more inclusive. In doing so, communities are beginning to “hack” planning itself.
GECKO’s recent Climate Change For Good Conference is a second example. This local non-profit organisation has partnered with the Queensland government to pioneer a new model of local climate-change adaptation.
The process began with a weekend of presentations by a range of experts and practitioners. These were accompanied by community-based problem-solving workshops. The forum closed with an innovative proposal to “hack planning”.
The intent is to devise a living document that crowdsources innovative adaptation ideas from the community to meet challenges such as health, food and water security, emergent business opportunities and place-making. This offers an alternative to Gold Coast City Council’s climate change adaptation plan, which has been shelved.
The community-led plan will enable engagement with diverse groups that are often marginalised in the planning process, such as Aboriginal groups, caravan park dwellers, migrants, youth and homeless citizens.
By giving a voice to real people living in everyday places, and by drawing on citizen knowledge and ingenuity, hacktivism promises action on issues beyond the remit of traditional planning. So, how could you “hack” your city?
Jason Byrne is associate professor of Environmental Planning, Griffith University and can be contacted <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/jason-byrne-6066" target="_blank">here</a>.
Natalie Osborne is lecturer, School of Environment, Griffith University and can be contacted <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/natalie-osborne-282804" target="_blank">here</a>.
Both are authors for The Conversation.
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Urban hacktivism: getting creative about involving citizens in city planning

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GUEST OBSERVER
Politicians, policymakers, urban planners, real-estate developers and corporate executives pay close attention to city liveability rankings. The global urban elite sees these as measures of the metropolitan “good”. Yet, as noted in The Conversation, “what makes a city liveable is complex and constantly evolving”.
In The Economist’s Global Liveability Ranking 2015, Dhaka moved up one spot: war-torn Damascus fell below it to become the world’s least liveable city.
This perhaps says more about the failings of simplistic global standards than about Dhaka itself. Far from being uninhabitable, it is one of the fastest-growing cities in the world. Bringing significant benefits to an emergent middle class, its cultural, economic, environmental and political landscapes are being rapidly but unevenly transformed.
At the same time, as Shahadat Hossain notes, this is placing extreme and conflicting pressures on Dhaka’s infrastructure and its residents. Displacement via land leasing, existing laws of inheritance, modernisation of agriculture and changing climate are driving rural-urban migration. Many migrants become the new urban poor, working in “low-paid peripheral economic activities”.
As in much of the global south, previous development policies in Bangladesh:
"have maintained a rural bias in policy and programs on poverty reduction, weakening the conceptual tools for imagining urban poverty reduction."
International media only occasionally highlight the difficulty of these conditions in fast-growing cities like Dhaka. The focus on the fatalities from the Rana Plaza factory blaze drew attention to the appalling working conditions, low wages, gender inequality, child-welfare issues and transnational corporate irresponsibility.
Dhaka is the centre of the ready-made garment industry in Bangladesh, the world’s second-largest manufacturer of textiles. It’s the nation’s largest export earner by far.
Yet the benefits of garment production are unevenly distributed. The highly active NGO industry in Dhaka speaks to the ongoing role for donors and agencies. They deliver essential services and humanitarian relief, as well as funding and producing urban innovations.
Shamsul Haque has described how the interrelationship between NGOs and the government originated in the late 1970s when “rudimentary forms of NGO at the grassroots level” responded to the conflict and instability of successive military regimes and elected governments. Today, the complexity of these relations stems from decreasing formal state power and NGOs’ increasing legitimacy, expansion and financial independence.
Marginalisation of government raises concerns “for the rights or entitlements of citizens to basic services”.
In place of state institutions, organisations like Bangladesh Rehabilitation Assistance Committee (BRAC) operate numerous critical service delivery programs. These include providing prenatal and postnatal care via text messaging, administering legal centres and training people for jobs and self-employed income generation.
<h2>Kolorob: connecting communities and services</h2>
Kolorob is a project run by Save the Children Bangladesh, in partnership with Save the Children Australia. It is developing a mobile app to help Dhaka’s low-income communities locate and provide feedback on local services, such as schools, clinics, legal firms and government offices.
The app, a localised variation of Yelp, features services submitted by community volunteers in the city’s Mirpur district, to the north of the CBD.
Since the project begun in mid-2015, we have provided remote technical and logistical support. We were fortunate to be in Dhaka when the app was launched in early 2016.
The app is an example of just how complex it can be to make cities more liveable. The name Kolorob (meaning “clamour” or “noise”) is provocative, and speaks to this complexity. “Clamour” can be a friendly or hostile public demand. It can move and influence – so to whose benefit?
The project has employed a co-designing, participatory process toward “inclusive urbanisation”. Low-income communities' voices, expertise and values become central – rather than peripheral – to such initiatives.
A number of those involved in Kolorob expressed hopes that such projects might eventually become autonomous social enterprises. For all the excitement about the potential of technological devicies and apps, genuine community enhancement also involves social innovation and skills. Improving the conditions of urban life requires multi-sectoral collaboration, capacity-building and awareness of the “political economy of urban poverty”.
<h2>New models for city-making?</h2>
Kolorob is one example of the many mapping projects that have become more popular in recent years as a way of giving voice and visibility to poor urban communities.
Since the 1970s, Slum Dwellers International has pioneered large-scale participatory slum mapping and enumeration. In the last ten years, its transition to more sophisticated databases and mapping systems has enabled more powerful analysis of this information.
Two other examples are the Ushahidi platform, developed to map post-election violence in Kenya in 2008, and the Mapping Kibera Project in the world’s largest slum in Nairobi.
Participatory mapping and open-source software hold great potential for collective ownership of intellectual property, low-cost access to information and democratised urban innovations. As a missing piece in the master plan to begin legitimising informal settlements, such tools can present powerful arguments to city planners.
Such mapping also fosters new modes of knowledge sharing:
"Over time, young boys and girls from local neighbourhoods have become the teams that enter and manage data, further demystifying the computer process and helping their elders feel comfortable about this data."
Yet this new visibility also raises concerns. Existing power structures and relationships can gain further, and sometimes problematic, legitimacy through a kind of digital imprimatur. Data can be of variable reliability.
While mapping Dhaka’s “highly pluralistic health system” can help to visualise the diversity of formal and informal health providers, for example, it also raises questions about quality of care, accountability and regulation.
Further, the market rhetoric of microfinancing, revenue-raising and entrepreneurial start-ups poses concerns that the relationship between the state, NGOs and low-income communities has standardised dependency and ingrained neoliberal agendas. As Devine notes:
"It is crucial that the endeavour to secure organisational sustainability be built more about the needs of the poor than the organisations themselves."
Drawing on lessons from the corporatisation of microfinance, Varottil has highlighted the need to understand the social as much as the financial aspects of project governance and outcomes.
Opening up participatory initiatives – like Kolorob – is a way to heed the needs, concerns and aspirations of marginalised communities. The urban poor need to be able to co-produce innovations that voice and support their preferred models for practice and interdependence.
NGOs continue to be vital in this regard, and for brokering dialogue between the state and urban poor. A preliminary analysis of commercial enterprise data by the World Bank makes recommendations for market entry and exit, and for how NGO businesses can make the transition toward community management and control – for example, by establishing registered autonomous trusts.
A more radical take would be to consider extending co-production of innovation to co-ownership. As Terranova has argued, innovation must involve not only new technological services, but “a better distribution of wealth” and “time and energy freed from work”.
<h2>Listening to the city</h2>
Kolorob may not increase Dhaka’s liveability ranking any time soon. Far more vital is the role such projects play in expanding our sense of what urban life might be.
“Innovation” here is not a proxy for a familiar story of “catch-up” to Western ideals. Instead, it is an opportunity to learn from an example of the “constant evolution” of cities.
Exploring “mobile entrepreneurial models” will help us understand how the interplay between innovation, technology and low-income communities is by no means a seamless or quiet solution. The associated challenges raise questions that go beyond market-based innovations:
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Do sustainable market-based social interventions – still requiring forms of capital and finance for participation – exclude the poorest in the city?
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Is the rhetoric of innovation painting over root causes of urban poverty and inequity?
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How might innovation extend beyond an obsession with technology to encompass new forms of organisation, distributions of social justice and practices of civic empowerment?
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What are the roles for institutional actors – governments, NGOs, companies – in developing and sustaining such innovation?
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We need to listen more closely to the “makeshift city”. The question of what constitutes the “good city" and an “urban ethic” is an ongoing call for attention to how the city is stitched and sounds.
These rhythms are a call for different patterns of property ownership and profit distribution of the artefacts that increasingly make up the digital city.
Teresa Swist is postdoctoral research fellow, Western Sydney University and can be contacted <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/teresa-swist-172271" target="_blank">here</a>.
David Sweeting is institute associate, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University and can be contacted <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/david-sweeting-265851" target="_blank">here</a>.
Liam Magee senior research fellow, Digital Media, Western Sydney University and can be contacted <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/liam-magee-227430" target="_blank">here</a>.
All are authors for The Conversation.
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Signals from the noise of urban innovation in the world’s ‘second-least-liveable’ city

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EXPERT OBSERVER
Urban bushland has health benefits beyond being a great place to go for a walk. Planners need to consider these when making decisions about the future of our cities.
It filters our air and water, helps cities avoid extremes in temperatures, and is linked to lower rates of chronic disease.
But these and other health benefits are virtually never accounted for in local and state land development processes.
Urban planners need to consider these health benefits when making decisions about the future of our cities.
What do we mean by urban bushland?
Urban bushland ranges from a bush park of native trees, to wetlands – in fact any native vegetation characteristic of the local region. With its undisturbed soils and associated wildlife, urban bushland is more diverse than other types of green spaces in our cities, like parks. So it adds significantly to neighbourhood biodiversity.
The more unfragmented the landscape, or unaltered the bushland, the more likely it will be to retain its biodiversity. Hills, watercourses and gullies, or a mixed forest, have greater biodiversity than flat land or a plantation of trees. Landscapes that change by the season add to that diversity.
The health benefits of green spaces (and urban bushland) partly comes from this biodiversity.
In cities, health benefits work at two levels. Not only do local residents receive health benefits when they use urban green spaces, the wider urban population also feels the health effects.
Healthy locals
The closer residents live to green space, particularly if it is accessible or usable, the better they report their health.
For an individual, access to green spaces contributes in multiple ways: it reduces stress, it helps us recover from illness or injury, and our thinking abilities improve when we are more contemplative and mindful of our green surroundings.
Our health improves when we use green spaces for physical exercise. And we benefit from the social engagement involved in caring for them.
The quality of green spaces plays a role in the health benefits for locals. For example, views of diverse vegetation more effectively lowers stress compared with less-diverse vegetation.
Exposure to biodiversity from the air, water, soils, vegetation, wildlife and landscape, and all the microbes associated with them (the sort retained in uncleared bushland and wetlands) enhances our immunity. This is thought to be the key to the health benefits of nature.
Wealth and health
The relationship between health benefits and living close to urban green spaces, including urban bushland, might be interpreted as being an effect of wealth. We know wealthier people tend to live in greener suburbs and wealthier people tend to be healthier.
But many studies take wealth into account, with the weight of evidence suggesting a direct health benefit from exposure to biodiversity.
So if the health benefits are due to the urban green spaces itself (and not related to wealth), they should be spread more evenly across the population.
Perhaps the health of poorer city dwellers will improve by living near to diverse green spaces, like bushland. Failing to provide access to nature entrenches health inequalities.
Healthy city
Urban bushland provides health benefits not just for local residents but for the whole city.
Forests and woodlands clean our urban air by removing particles and absorbing carbon dioxide. This reduces premature death, acute respiratory symptoms and asthma exacerbation across the city.
A recent review highlights the host of physical health problems that are reduced in urban areas with more nature, including less heart disease, obesity and diabetes. Mental health is also improved in urban areas where people are living with more green space.
Urban bushland improves city water. Wetlands and the vegetation around them clean our water by filtering, reducing exposure to pollutants carried in groundwater or surface water run-off.
Vegetation also moderates extremes of temperature providing shade when it is hot and less exposure when it’s cold and so reduces heat- or cold-related illnesses.
Shrinking urban bushland
Where new suburbs are developed on the outskirts of cities, the end result is usually near-complete clearing. Urban bushland is replaced with smaller, fragmented, more sanitised, open and neat spaces.
These are designed for a narrower (but still important) set of usable attributes, like a bike path, lawns and a playground. But the original values of the bushland are lost. This pattern is repeated in the expanding suburbs of cities across Australia.
If some urban bushland, wetlands or other landscape assets have been retained, the pressure on them from development is relentless, as seen recently in Western Australia where a highway is due to be extended through the Beeliar Wetlands.
Planning for better planning Planning processes need to use ways to assess what we might lose and what we might gain from clearing bushland.
This could involve asking what types of services existing bushland provide for local residents and the city in general. These will include their role in providing clean air and water, controlling floods, cycling nutrients, as well as their recreational or spiritual services.
These could be compared with services the proposed development offers. The comparison should make decision makers, and more importantly the public, better able to judge the true worth or cost of a development.
Such cost-benefit analyses are usually used somewhere in plannin<img src="https://counter.theconversation.edu.au/content/72876/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-advanced" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1">g processes but rarely, if ever, are the values of biodiversity and ecosystem services considered, or the cost savings from health benefits of bushland.
These sorts of cost-benefit analyses can also be used to account for the health effects associated with local bushland. Such health assessments (or health impact assessments) need to be more widely used. And where land subdivision, road building and suburban housing developments are planned, health assessments may need to be compulsory to better account for the contribution of urban bushland to health.
Pierre Horwitz is a professor in School of Science, Edith Cowan University and author for The Conversation. He can be contacted <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/pierre-horwitz-96660" target="_blank">here</a>.
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How urban bushland improves our health and why planners need to listen: Pierre Horwitz

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SPONSORED POST
It seems the urban renewal of middle ring suburbs has created a clique crystal ball holders within councils that every 50 unit tower that pops up on every street corner must have a retail component to “activate” the street front.
In a Truman Show style utopia of urban planning that would be ideal, however the economics of it can be a fool’s game.
Let’s have a look at the numbers of a typical residential project based on an actual example, to consider the value of the completed product and the relevant cost to deliver it:
The resultant feasibility shows that there is $5m profit to be made from a 65 unit project however, there is $5m of value tied up in the 800m2 retail / commercial component.
<a href="/images/2016/06/08/Screen%20Shot%202016-06-08%20at%209.32.03%20AM.png" target="_blank">Click to enlarge</a>
 <img src="/images/2016/06/08/Screen%20Shot%202016-06-08%20at%209.32.03%20AM.png" alt="">
Even assuming the developer gets it right in terms of the demand for his apartments and they are all sold prior to completion and that all the stars align for the construction process, our man takes on all this risk to deliver a $30M project only to be rewarded as the proud owner of a vacant shell of retail space.
This is a common occurrence and there is a very real risk he will find himself struggling to fill it and wind up dealing with mum and dad operators undertaking a start up a take-away shop/cafe selling $5 items to the “masses” of foot traffic passing their secondary street location.
Let’s also look at it from a capital invested vs capital return standpoint;
<a href="/images/2016/06/08/Screen%20Shot%202016-06-08%20at%209.36.46%20AM.png" target="_blank">Click to enlarge</a>
<img src="/images/2016/06/08/Screen%20Shot%202016-06-08%20at%209.36.46%20AM.png" alt="">
Based on a very healthy bank lend of $19.2m the developer needs to put in $5mil of cash together with any DA and preliminary costs which aren’t shown in the feasibility.
Now, let’s think about it from a developer point of view assessing their risk vs reward in terms of a timeline.
<a href="/images/2016/06/08/Screen%20Shot%202016-06-08%20at%209.37.51%20AM.png" target="_blank">Click to enlarge</a>
<img src="/images/2016/06/08/Screen%20Shot%202016-06-08%20at%209.37.51%20AM.png" alt="">
Some of these processes can be run in parallel or overlap, but it still demonstrates the amount of time effort and money a property developer will contribute to a 65 unit mixed use development.
So in summary, after 20-24 months of planning, negotiating sales, finance, supervision of a $20M construction program to completion and risking $5m of real capital, you end up being rewarded with a retail / commercial asset of somewhat dubious value relative to its original estimated “on completion” value.
And unless you can find a way to actually realise that value, you have effectively done it for all for practise!
So, before you commit to building a project of this nature, do your homework carefully because just because the town planners say it’s a requirement doesn’t mean it is a viable and profitable option.
This article was written by Dan Holden of HoldenCAPITAL, who are a bespoke construction finance firm, they arranged over $300 million of construction finance in 2015 across 52 projects. To discuss your project finance requirement please call (07) 3171 4200 or visit <a href="https://www.holdencapital.com.au/" target="_blank">www.holdencapital.com.au</a> 
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Don’t build it, they probably won’t come: HoldenCAPITAL

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GUEST OBSERVER
Urban planners have been blamed for a lot of things, including higher housing costs. But the solution is to refine the process, not sideline the good planning that makes cities safe and liveable.
Modern urban planning first came about to improve industrial cities that had become unsafe, unhealthy and essentially unliveable. However, new policies in Australia and New Zealand view planning as a cause of urban problems, not a solution. Both treat urban planning as a hindrance, which supposedly slows down economic growth and is the main reason for unaffordable housing.
Why did urban planning fall out of favour?
Several underlying factors explain this aversion to planning.
First, many urban areas developed under the current planning system haven’t produced a very liveable environment. It is difficult to make a case for the value of planning with few good examples. In some cases this isn’t bad planning; rather, traffic engineering has taken precedence.
But what might this approach mean for future development of Antipodean cities? While urban planning may have fallen short of its goals over recent decades, policy that marginalises urban planning exposes us to long-term social and environmental risks.
Cities in Australia and New Zealand do face particular challenges: both countries are highly urbanised, 89% and 86% respectively. A closer look at land use patterns and infrastructures show they are mostly suburban – closer to Houston than Hong Kong. Therefore, urban policy faces the challenge of governing suburbia.
Many areas of Auckland, for instance, are designed in such a way that residents have little choice but to drive everywhere. They are unsafe for children or seniors to navigate. And vast amounts of space are allocated to parking for private vehicles.
This is the cumulative result of decades of infrastructure decision-making that prioritises private vehicle movement over safer and more efficient public transport. Residents are living with the consequences of this, and current policy risks more of the same for future residents.
New shared spaces, cycle lanes and frequent transit services are a dramatic improvement. However, greater change is needed to make an impact on everyday life for those who live and work outside the city centre.
Second, delays in planning approvals are notorious for adding significant cost and uncertainty to property development. But inefficient delivery of planning services should not be confused with overly stringent planning rules.
Planning rules are intended to mitigate environmental damage and improve the quality of development. Rather than getting rid of planning, delays can be reduced through better resourcing, training and management of planning departments.
Also, approvals are only one step in delivering new housing. Fast-tracked consenting in Auckland’s special housing areas resulted in 30,000 consented dwellings, but only 1,300 new homes were built over almost three years.
This shows that other factors slow down the pace of development. These include capacity in the construction sector, local construction labour and delays due to land banking.
Putting affordability claims to the test
Poor urban planning is claimed to be the primary cause of unaffordable housing. It is said to be linked to higher house prices and lower economic performance.
Evidence to support these claims shows a correlation – but not a causal link – between the restrictiveness of planning regulations and housing affordability.
The simple correlation ignores other factors driving house prices: speculative investment behaviour, incentives for land banking, record-low mortgage rates and strong cultural biases toward home ownership.
Looking to land supply as the primary policy lever to fix this may do little to moderate house prices. It also overlooks more important causes.
Urban expansion also has implications for transport: it is expensive and inefficient to leave transport authorities playing catch-up to serve new growth areas.
The politics of growth further complicate expansion of land supply and tend to distribute new growth haphazardly. Most residents agree that cities need to allow for future growth, but deciding where this should go is contentious. Recent growth in New Zealand and Australian cities has been accommodated mostly in the city centre and at the urban fringe.
Only a small share of growth is in existing suburbs. Suburban residents (or at least a vocal contingent) often oppose new growth. This is unsurprising since intensification counters the very reason for living in the suburbs – more space and fewer people.
Regardless, urban policy needs to acknowledge the political tensions in accommodating growth.
Good planning involves citizens
National urban policy is important to manage land use and infrastructure differently in cities. Policies don’t have to be prescriptive. They can also enable local authorities to govern better with greater devolution of power and fundraising capabilities.
Scaling back urban planning is an understandable but disappointingly short-term response. In many cases planning hasn’t delivered what it promised. Measures to reduce delays and improve the quality of the built environment are needed. However, policy that simply reduces the role of planning may result in significant long-term costs.
Such an approach risks environmental damage, as well as uncoordinated land and transport development. The next generation living in our cities will pay for it.
Informed citizens are essential to support good planning and infrastructure decisions. For the general public, however, local regulations on urban planning, infrastructure and environmental quality are painfully dull. But they are also fundamental in shaping your everyday life: where you can afford to live, your daily commute, and the chance of air pollution shortening your lifespan.
For those without time to go through lengthy consultation documents and plans, local advocacy groups are leading the way to translate these concisely to the public. Auckland’s Generation Zero is a good example. This organisation is advocating for inter-generational equity and environmental sustainability in local planning and transport, with targeted campaigns on important projects and planning decisions.
Negotiating the trade-offs and politics of urban growth is always a challenge for policy, but quality public engagement is crucial to build cities that are liveable, affordable and environmentally sustainable over the long term.
Jenny McArthur is the Research Associate at University College London (UCL) and author for The Conversation. She can be contacted <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/jenny-mcarthur-206031" target="_blank">here</a>.
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Sidelining planners makes for poorer urban policy, and future generations will pay the price: Jenny McArthur

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GUEST OBSERVATION
Today’s urban public spaces tend to represent governments and cities rather than people and citizens. In the past seven years, disturbing scenes of protests in city squares have been seen across the Arab world and Europe, but these public protests existed long before the 21st century. So how can city squares support or inhibit protests through their spatial characteristics and settings?
Public squares have been considered as places of encounter and exchange since the time of the Greek Agora and the Roman Forum. While often the sites of protest, these spaces also can reflect the idea of power and constrain revolutions and social uprisings.
Design and scenography can be used to intensify agoraphobia, or a fear of public spaces. Thus these spaces of expression can, at times, be silenced, putting at risk the geography of freedom of speech.
Reminders of the power of the state
Public spaces around the world have been not only places for people to gather and interact but also to demonstrate and, at times, to face their death.
In 2014, Maidan Nezalezhnosti in Kiev was at the centre of the Ukrainian Euromaidan Revolution. It was a deadly revolution of dignity. Yet the consequences of other protests largely attest to how the design of these spaces can intimidate protesters.
In 1989, students demonstrated in Beijing during the so-called Tiananmen Square protests, which ended in a massacre. This immense city square of the capital is now known for its “strange emptiness”, as Evan Osnos described it. Benches and shade trees have been removed to discourage public gatherings.
The monumentality created by the forbidden city and the government buildings, including the Great Hall of People, adds to the feeling of emptiness and intimidation. The 44-hectare public square is now considered “the opposite of a public space”:
"Its totalitarian scale dwarfs the individual and forces people to feel subservient to the power of the state."
One can see striking similarities, in terms of scale and setting, with Red Square in Moscow. Red Square had been the scene of the 1968 demonstration against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, a landmark moment in the Soviet dissident movement.
<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Ybkzx57bs1k?wmode=transparent&amp;start=0" frameborder="0" width="440" height="260"></iframe>
Red Square, Moscow, has been the scene of both public demonstrations and state parades.
In Egypt, seven years after the revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak, people tend to be cautious about expressing their views in public. Tahrir Square, the birthplace of the protests, is at risk. Towering metal gates have been erected around the square to avoid protests. These stand as a reminder of the powerful state control that the regime of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has reasserted over public spaces.
Protest in the Arab world: the case of Tunisia
Tunisia’s Habib Bourguiba Avenue was the main stage of the 2011 Tunisian Revolution. This public space, considered the historical, political and economic heart of the city, is broad and lined with trees and government buildings, hotels and street cafes. The two paved and heavily trafficked roads on either side of the median strip isolate the pedestrian “island”.
<img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/234958/original/file-20180905-45158-l9o97y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;fit=clip" alt="">
Habib Bourguiba Avenue. Majdi Faleh
This staging of the avenue reflects the power, control and prohibition of protests during 23 years of dictatorship. Other intimidating landscaping elements add to the obstacles for demonstrators who might wish to use the public space for political debates.
Despite intimidation through design, Tunis’s layout made L'Avenue, as Tunisians like to call it, the perfect place to stage the Arab Spring.
<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/omWjoDlS0LE?wmode=transparent&amp;start=0" frameborder="0" width="440" height="260"></iframe>
Police and protesters clash in the popular uprising that forced Tunisia’s longtime dictator to flee in 2011.
This avenue, planned in the time of French colonisation (1881-1956) for the city’s elite, resembles the Parisian Avenue of Champs-Élysées. Interestingly, even Haussmann’s celebrated Parisian boulevards, built under Napoleon III in the 1860s, were designed to help quell the city’s rebellious populace.
Strategically located near the end of Habib Bourguiba Avenue is the Interior Ministry, an icon of dictatorship and control. The “austere” grey facade and black wrought iron windows and gates create a sense of control. Its brutalist architecture, which has architectural similarities with the FBI headquarters in Washington DC, participates in shaping the public space. Razor barbed wire fences have surrounded the avenue during the time of protests. Landscaping around the ministry played a role in blocking protesters from getting closer to the monument of control.
Habib Bourguiba Avenue is named after the first president of Tunisia, a tradition for main avenues in Tunisian cities. A simple Google search produces a list of major and small Tunisian cities forced into this autocratic system of political nomenclature as an instrument of control.
The image of power and control starts with the name of the place. It continues at the end of the avenue intersecting with the previously known Place 7 Novembre, named after the date of former dictator Ben Ali’s ascension to power in a coup d’état.
<img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/234959/original/file-20180905-45139-1y2opyq.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=237&amp;fit=clip" alt="">
Ibn Khaldun Fenced Garden with a banner of the dictator Ben Ali in the background (2009). In Arabic, it reads ‘In deed, all my ambition is for Tunisia’. Majdi Faleh
During the time of dictatorship, architects did not play an active role in shaping social, cultural and political encounters in public spaces. Contemporary public spaces in Tunisia were designed timidly or marginally, creating conflicts between architecture, the local people and the oppressive state. Even green spaces were planned but never designed, as per the planning policies. Many were replaced by commercial centres.
Metal fences are noticeable landscaping features around the Ibn Khaldun Statue, small gardens and public parks. The fences turned these spaces into enclosed and sometimes marginal parks. Large propaganda banners of the former dictator added an element of fear to these public spaces and helped deter protesters. The government gated property creates a sense of intimidation and constraint.
<h2>Designing for protests: an architect’s perspective</h2>
In designing public squares and avenues, architects should learn from these past dilemmas. The public square should not be represented as the city’s gated property or as a walled garden. It should be a space that provides citizens with opportunities to engage in political and social debates.
In the wake of the Arab Spring, rethinking spatial qualities of public spaces is crucial to provide “liberated” citizens with adequate places to communicate their political views and free cultural expression. In Tunisia’s post-revolutionary era, public spaces have increasingly become places for expression and social engagement.
Governments, not only in Tunisia but across all countries, should plan the streets for artists and protesters to create stages for their events and to communicate their ideas. Tunisia still has a long way to go.<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/102275/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" style="border: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; margin: 0 !important; max-height: 1px !important; max-width: 1px !important; min-height: 1px !important; min-width: 1px !important; opacity: 0 !important; outline: none !important; padding: 0 !important; text-shadow: none !important;">
Majdi Faleh, Teaching Assistant, University of Melbourne
This article is republished from <a href="http://theconversation.com" target="_blank">The Conversation</a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-city-squares-can-be-public-places-of-protest-or-centres-of-state-control-102275" target="_blank">original article</a>.
Main photo: Seven years after Tahrir Square became the focal point of the Egyptian Revolution, towering metal gates now control access. <a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tahrir_Square_on_July_29_2011.jpg" target="_blank">Ahmed Abd El-Fatah/Wikimedia</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" target="_blank">CC BY</a>. 
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j.ballantyne1990-6AQqhLzZaK

How city squares can be public places of protest or centres of state control

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EXPERT OBSERVER
The conflict within the NSW Coalition over the “Koala Environmental Planning Policy” may be just what the Berejiklian Government needs to adjust their policy settings and focus clearly on delivering a Post COVID-19 recovery.
Since becoming Planning Minister for the second time in March 2019, Rob Stokes, has talked the talk on planning reform and speeding up the system, but he is yet to deliver anything substantial. This new Koala Planning Policy is one of the first SEPPs he has delivered.  It was done with good intent – but like so many of his policies, the consultation was undertaken with blinkers on. 
The Koala SEPP was well motivated when it was made in late 2019 at the height of the tragic bushfires.  But the unintended consequences, the economic consequences, the devil in the detail, have all come back to bite.
Just as increased prescriptive regulation reduces feasibility and therefore housing supply – there are always unintended consequences of planning regulation. The National Party are making that abundantly clear today.
The NSW Productivity Commissioner (an independent arm of the Treasury) has been asked to examine the impact of planning on the economy in NSW and he has already delivered a damming assessment through the publication of his Green Paper.  But rather than learn from this assessment, planning in Sydney seems to be taking a “nanny-state” approach to housing.  Costs are being pushed up by even greater regulation. 
The Government talks about its desire to improve housing affordability, yet it drives prices up by constraining supply through the slowest planning system in the nation which is delivering lower and lower levels of new housing approvals.
The anti-development mantra was politically fashionable in the lead-up to the 2011 election when the public were rightly sick and tired of the lack of transport and social infrastructure to support population growth.  But we have seen investment in those areas and the economy is everything now.
The Premier is cautious about development and this reflects the views of her North Shore base.  But the last decade has seen a consistent under supply of housing when compared to population growth.  This has driven up housing prices.  There were only two years out of the last 15 when new housing matched the demand from population growth.  
Ironically the Koala SEPP, which the NSW Nationals are so upset about, is an example of the powers available to the Minister for Planning, to make SEPPs, should he wish to use them to stimulate the economy.
The is no-one in the NSW Opposition standing up for jobs and private sector investment – so the Government needs to have a fight with itself to correct policy settings which have drifted away from the primacy of the economic imperative. 
If this political stoush helps shift the NSW Cabinet’s mind-set towards a pragmatic approach which is focussed on economic growth, jobs growth, growth in housing supply and growth in new work-places – then that will be a stoush well worth having.
Tom Forrest is the CEO of Urban Taskforce. 
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jrobinson-rf4aSBido9

Koala stoush highlights planning policy with seriously unintended consequences

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In the next four weeks the NSW Government's Planning System Acceleration Program will have fast-tracked over 100 major projects and planning proposals since April.
They've determined 90 major projects and proposals in the last five months, and in the next four weeks another 11 will be determined as part of the sixth tranche. 
The PSAP have said they have already created 50,000 jobs and injected $25 million in to the economy since April.
If the latest sixth tranche is approved for the next 11 projects, these could result in a further $527 million worth of investment and the potential to create more than 1,400 jobs. 
Minister for planning and public spaces Rob Stokes said the planning system had been a key economic lever in the NSW Government’s immediate response to the pandemic, driving the state and the rest of the country to a strong economic recovery by accelerating a pipeline of projects.  
“COVID-19 has had a devastating impact on our lives and the economy and getting shovel-ready projects out the door to help NSW rebound from this crisis has been a critical priority,” Mr Stokes said. 
“Our short-term drive to create a steady supply of jobs and investment has been a great success, with work already starting on construction sites across the State.  
“Our focus now turns to a medium-term response, which will speed up and add greater certainty for more complex projects with longer timeframes of between six months and two years.  
“With our nation in a recession, boosting the economy and creating jobs is more important than ever.”
The projects selected for accelerated assessment in tranche six include:
- Upgrade of the Fort Street Primary School
- Rezoning in St Mary’s for 500 new homes that will have an economic benefit of $126 million and create 250 jobs
- Rezoning in Appin for low density housing and environmental management of a biodiversity corridor, including 39 hectares protected for conservation
- Construction of 18-storey mixed-use student accommodation near the University of Sydney for 488 students, contributing $62 million and creating 245 jobs 
- New Oran Park Town Centre in Camden, including dedicated public space, contributing $30 million and creating 60 jobs
“If approved, these 11 projects will mean that we’ve fast-tracked determinations of more than 100 projects since the accelerated program began in April,” Mr Stokes said.
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More than 100 planning decisions fast-tracked in six months

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GUEST OBSERVER
Governments at all levels invest a lot in greening Australian suburbs. Yet, in a <a href="https://202020vision.com.au/help-hub/the-research-hub/detail/?id=4059">recent report</a>, we show that the greening efforts of most of our metropolitan local governments are actually going backwards.
This is a puzzle, as greening has clear environmental and economic benefits. The environmental benefits are obvious and relatively easy to count. For private home owners, numerous studies have linked greening to a range of economic benefits from <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036013231400081X">energy savings</a> to <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800916303585">higher house prices</a>.
So how do we explain the loss of green cover?
How we tracked the changes
Our research aimed to assess urban greening efforts and what accounts for the gains and losses.
Based on <a href="https://canopy.itreetools.org/">i-Tree</a>, a well-known method for sampling urban vegetation distributions and associated land covers, we compared 2016-17 figures with an early assessment that ranged from <a href="https://202020vision.com.au/news/2014/08/where-are-all-the-trees/">2008 to 2013</a> to examine changes in vegetation cover by local government area.
The report shows that large variation exists nationally in the growth and loss of tree canopy. Losses and gains can often be explained, however, by the changing nature of urban vegetation as neighbourhoods are transformed over time.
For example, in the graph highlighting the extent of tree canopy cover change for metropolitan local governments, Glenorchy in Tasmania shows the greatest tree canopy loss between 2008 and 2015 (more than 15 percentage points). Yet a gain in shrub area of more than 12% largely offset this canopy loss.
Similarly, Armadale in Western Australia gained more than 12% of tree canopy cover between 2011 and 2015 but lost more than 15% of shrub cover.
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/187683/original/file-20170926-13681-19lexk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=1000&amp;fit=clip"><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/187683/original/file-20170926-13681-19lexk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;fit=clip" alt=""></a>
Loss of canopy from 2008-2013 to 2016 for all 139 metropolitan local government areas. (To see more detail in the report itself, go to <a href="https://202020vision.com.au/help-hub/the-research-hub/detail/?id=4059" target="_blank">Where should all the trees go?</a>)
Metropolitan local governments in Australia are very diverse in size and land use. The largest in our study, Cairns Regional Council in Queensland, is 1,500 times the area of the smallest, Peppermint Grove in inner-city Perth.
Some local government areas are dominated by non-urban land uses. This means natural processes such as bushfires, drought and forest regrowth are going to significantly affect greening efforts. Others are going to be affected by urban densification and housing growth.
Understanding greening efforts as a function of canopy loss alone is problematic for some local governments. Instead, a more appropriate measure may be the total change in urban greenery (canopy, shrubs and turf) between the two study periods. These results show that 54 out of the 139 local governments (39%) studied had suffered statistically significant losses in total green space.
Added up across Australia’s major metropolitan regions, this amounts to vegetation loss of 2.6% in our urban environments. This doesn’t like sound much, but it is equivalent to 1,586 square kilometres – a larger area than the City of Brisbane.
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/187688/original/file-20170926-10403-pow3qw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=1000&amp;fit=clip"><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/187688/original/file-20170926-10403-pow3qw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;fit=clip" alt=""></a>
Loss of total green space (canopy, shrubs and turf) from all 139 metropolitan local government areas. Red indicates a statistically significant loss to 95% certainty.
What explains this decline?
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/186122/original/file-20170915-8984-1xgw968.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=1000&amp;fit=clip"><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/186122/original/file-20170915-8984-1xgw968.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=237&amp;fit=clip" alt=""></a>
New developments across Perth show densification in selected locations. WA Land Information Authority (2016)/Alex Saunders (2017)
The location of many of the local government areas suffering more than 5% loss in green space provides clues to the types of processes driving this loss. For example, Newcastle in New South Wales lost 8.5% of its green space during our study period largely due to losses in grass cover as a result of greenfield development.
Yet, in inner-city Ashfield, the infill development of once-vegetated lands continues apace, with grass-to-hard-surface conversions accounting for most of its 7.3% loss of green space.
In some cases, local government areas are undergoing losses in a similar location. For example, the areas with the greatest losses in green space across Perth lie in a band that stretches from inland Melville to coastal East Fremantle. In these locations, the traditional Aussie backyard is losing ground to densification and infill.
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/185078/original/file-20170907-14552-1fj1m9h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=1000&amp;fit=clip"><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/185078/original/file-20170907-14552-1fj1m9h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;fit=clip" alt=""></a>
An example of changes in Melville, suburban Perth, between 2011 and 2017. Google Maps
How do our cities compare?
In recent years, interest in benchmarking exercises such as these has increased internationally. In the US in 2012, David Nowak and others examined the <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1618866711000999" target="_blank">growth and decline in vegetation cover</a> for 20 cities using the i-Tree methodology. US cities showed significant variability in combined tree and shrub canopy cover (54% for Atlanta to 10% in Denver).
The good news is that Greater Melbourne and Adelaide, both with 24% tree and shrub cover, perform better than the lowest values for the US cities. And Hobart’s shrub and tree cover of 57% is higher than Atlanta’s.
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/186124/original/file-20170915-8998-15aodkr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=1000&amp;fit=clip"><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/186124/original/file-20170915-8998-15aodkr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;fit=clip" alt=""></a>
Benchmarks for land cover in Australian capital cities 2016-17. Where should all the trees go?/Marco Amati
Yet within Australian cities the variability is pronounced. Canopy covers range from 77% (Yarra Ranges, Vic) to 3% (Wyndham, Vic).
The US urban forest is also subject to natural forces like Australia’s. New Orleans lost the largest amount of canopy cover (10%) as the study period included the damage inflicted by Hurricane Katrina.
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/185081/original/file-20170907-14552-ipwn2y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=1000&amp;fit=clip"><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/185081/original/file-20170907-14552-ipwn2y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=237&amp;fit=clip" alt=""></a>
 In the 1940s even cement companies were friends of the backyard. Source: The Australian Home Beautiful, October 1943
Yet, when considering the downward trend in greening, it is the historical comparison that is the most striking. The backyard was once an icon of the lifestyle enjoyed by generations of Australians growing up after the second world war.
<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/83354/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1">If the downward trend in green cover continues, should the Australian backyard be red-listed as a threatened species?
Marco Amati, Associate Professor of International Planning, Centre for Urban Research, RMIT University.
Alex Saunders, GIS Specialist, Centre for the Built Environment and Health, University of Western Australia.
Bryan Boruff, Senior Lecturer, School of Agriculture and Environment, University of Western Australia.
Drew Devereux, Research Scientist, Data 61, CSIRO.
Kath Phelan, Research Fellow, Centre for Urban Research, RMIT University.
Peter Caccetta, Research Scientist, CSIRO
This article was originally published on <a href="https://theconversation.com">The Conversation</a>. Read the <a href="https://theconversation.com/were-investing-heavily-in-urban-greening-so-how-are-our-cities-doing-83354">original article</a>.
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