A Vision for Sustainable Cities And The Need for Change

It’s remarkable how quickly notions of sustainability have gone mainstream in a few short years. From the rapid uptake of renewable power sources to the growth of the circular economy, there’s now a widespread acceptance that the earth’s resources are finite and will require more sophisticated management strategies if we wish to continue to enjoy a high quality of life.

For our built environment, sustainability in Australia has begun to move beyond the actions of individual motivated homeowners to discussions about how entire cities can and should perform to better support not just the people who live there but the entire ecosystem.

Earlier this year, Adrian McGregor, co-founder of globally recognised multi-disciplinary landscape architecture firm McGregor Coxall, released a new book, Biourbanism, a magnum opus dedicated to creating better cities for a sustainable future. McGregor says the problems we’re having now are of our own making.

“The environmental crisis is a design crisis,” he says. “We’re making a lot of poor decisions about the design of cities. Fundamentally cities are our creation and we’re not getting them right. In developed countries, there’s no reason why we should be getting these things so badly wrong.”

In his book, he argues that for too long, we have worked on the assumption that cities are somehow separate from the rest of the environment instead of being an integral part of it. Indeed, their impact is felt well beyond city fringes, with 75 percent of greenhouse gas emissions derived from cities. As countries around the world begin to feel the impact of extreme weather events, he says we need to shift to a decarbonised city model as quickly as possible.

“Those that move the fastest will be the most resilient to increasingly extreme weather events,” he says.

Along with planning for office blocks and high and low density residential releases, he says it’s crucial that ‘green’ and ‘blue’ infrastructure (landscape and water) are considered as an inherent element in design.

Shannon Foster is a D’harawal Eora Knowledge Keeper, founder of Bangawarra and lecturer at the School of Architecture at UTS. She says the balance in cities needs to fundamentally shift if they are to be sustainable places to live.

“We don’t like to talk about ‘green corridors’ because there should be ‘grey corridors’ — predominantly green space that humans can move through as well,” she says. “Not that we are going for the ‘I Am Legend’ look, but we are looking for ways we can allow for spaces to thrive.”

She points to water management in urban areas, particularly storm water, which is often considered a problem to be solved.

“It’s all about how to get it off site,” she says. “But water gives us life so how is it a problem?”

In recent years the notion of ‘sponge cities’ has gained traction among urban planners around the world as a way to mitigate flooding. It relies on sufficient green spaces, including floodable parks and wetlands within cities to manage the water onsite. The payoff is to reduce dependence on pipeline infrastructure used to redirect high volumes of water which is costly to repair and maintain.

It’s not a new concept to Indigenous knowledge keepers.

“Everything begins from country,” Foster says. “We overlap beautifully with sustainability because we are looking at country, plants and water Author of Biourbanism Adrian McGregor (above) and Indigenous knowledge keeper Shannon Foster (below).

and air are protected and sustainably managed.”

NSW chapter president, Australian Institute of Architects, Adam Haddow, says while sustainability will look different for each of the thousands of cities around the world, they all need to work harder than they do now.

“We don’t want lazy cities,” Haddow says.

“Sustainability is different for every city because every city has a different measure of what might be sustainable for site.

“Regional Victoria might be different to NSW or the NT in their ability to engage with and capture water or solar or wind. The thing that is consistent across all the cities is the question: how do we make better use of what we have?”

That includes the existing built environment, he says.

“We should consider every building as heritage,” he says. “We have made a lot of mistakes in the history of our cities and it’s about ensuring we don’t make them again by demolishing to rebuild.”

Demolishing and starting again would add to the carbon load and negative environmental impact. Haddow says there’s a better, less invasive way to approach it.

“If you think about it in medical terms, we should be focusing on urban acupuncture rather than urban surgery,” he says.

Haddow is part of a growing movement in planning and architecture circles in support of the 15-minute city, a concept where everything residents need on a daily basis, such as the office, school and shops is within a 15-minute walk or bike ride. Critics says it confines residents to Hunger Games-style districts that embed inequalities rather than eliminating them. Regardless, it relies on a higher density living and working model than currently exists in most Australian cities.

“We are still one of the least dense places in the world, and we have forgotten about the middle type of living environment — lower density projects up to six storeys,” he says.

For Fred Holt at Danish firm 3XN and lead architect on the award-winning Quay Quarter Tower, it’s about diminishing the reliance and role of motor vehicles to move about the city.

“There is always opportunity to go to other parts of the city but the idea of a sustainable city is to limit the dependence on vehicles, especially those that produce pollution,” he says. “So having a connected city is about connected precincts that are self sustaining but also having ease of transportation between various precincts.”

It’s also getting more out of the space you’re in, he says, so that they stay activated for longer.

“In the Quay Quarter Tower and Quay Quarter Laneways precinct, the idea was to create an 18-hour precinct where you could play and work within the same proximity or neighbourhood as a sustainable model for urban planning.”

His colleague, architect Dan Cruddace, led the Quay Quarter Tower project for the Australian firm, BVN. Now at 3XN, he says there’s one city he thinks of as a good model for sustainable living.

“When I was in Copenhagen, everyone cycles there, from the children to people in their 90s,” he says. “It’s a way of life. The air is clean, the streets are safe, the infrastructure is in place.

“Everything is set up correctly.”

For McGregor, there are cities around the world that have elements of sustainable living about them that we could learn from.

“I love London because of how hard it has worked over the past 20 years to enhance walkability and to increase pedestrian space which underpins that tremendous public transport system,” he says. “Singapore is really progressive in terms of urban greening. Even cities like Hong Kong are really interesting for their walkability and their density and the way they manage vertical urban activity.”

Inevitably, the commitment to sustainable cities comes down to cost. That, says McGregor, depends on where value is placed.

“Economics is the lever behind all change, it has to be,” he says.

“What sits behind all of it is giving natural capital value. When I met David Suzuki years ago, he said modern economics doesn’t give a value to natural capital. You can use your resources for free — it will cost you nothing.

“Until that is given a value in any manufacturing process or construction process, then the model is completely flawed.”

Ultimately, cities are habitat for humans, which is where their success or failure rests, says Holt.

“There is a movement towards understanding that we have a finite amount of resources and the most sustainable building or city is the one that already exists,” he says. “It’s important to not only look at a sustainable city as one focused on reducing carbon but places that are sustainable socially.

“The most sustainable place is one where people want to be and they want to be there for a long period of time, over generations.”

The future is already here.

There has been a substantial increase in the number of Australians earning high incomes who are renting their homes instead of owning them, and this may be another element contributing to higher market demand and continually rising rents, according to new research.

The portion of households with an annual income of $140,000 per year (in 2021 dollars), went from 8 percent of the private rental market in 1996 to 24 percent in 2021, according to research by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI). The AHURI study highlights that longer-term declines in the rate of home ownership in Australia are likely the cause of this trend.

The biggest challenge this creates is the flow-on effect on lower-income households because they may face stronger competition for a limited supply of rental stock, and they also have less capacity to cope with rising rents that look likely to keep going up due to the entrenched undersupply.

The 2024 ANZ CoreLogic Housing Affordability Report notes that weekly rents have been rising strongly since the pandemic and are currently re-accelerating. “Nationally, annual rent growth has lifted from a recent low of 8.1 percent year-on-year in October 2023, to 8.6 percent year-on-year in March 2024,” according to the report. “The re-acceleration was particularly evident in house rents, where annual growth bottomed out at 6.8 percent in the year to September, and rose to 8.4 percent in the year to March 2024.”

Rents are also rising in markets that have experienced recent declines. “In Hobart, rent values saw a downturn of -6 percent between March and October 2023. Since bottoming out in October, rents have now moved 5 percent higher to the end of March, and are just 1 percent off the record highs in March 2023. The Canberra rental market was the only other capital city to see a decline in rents in recent years, where rent values fell -3.8 percent between June 2022 and September 2023. Since then, Canberra rents have risen 3.5 percent, and are 1 percent from the record high.”

The Productivity Commission’s review of the National Housing and Homelessness Agreement points out that high-income earners also have more capacity to relocate to cheaper markets when rents rise, which creates more competition for lower-income households competing for homes in those same areas.

ANZ CoreLogic notes that rents in lower-cost markets have risen the most in recent years, so much so that the portion of earnings that lower-income households have to dedicate to rent has reached a record high 54.3 percent. For middle-income households, it’s 32.2 percent and for high-income households, it’s just 22.9 percent. ‘Housing stress’ has long been defined as requiring more than 30 percent of income to put a roof over your head.

While some high-income households may aspire to own their own homes, rising property values have made that a difficult and long process given the years it takes to save a deposit. ANZ CoreLogic data shows it now takes a median 10.1 years in the capital cities and 9.9 years in regional areas to save a 20 percent deposit to buy a property.

It also takes 48.3 percent of income in the cities and 47.1 percent in the regions to cover mortgage repayments at today’s home loan interest rates, which is far greater than the portion of income required to service rents at a median 30.4 percent in cities and 33.3 percent in the regions.

A Vision for Sustainable Cities And The Need for Change

They are where most of us reside but our cities will have to get greener to meet future needs

This may be contributing to continually rising weekly rents