Summary
As the world continues to urbanise, cities become more important. Perhaps Wellington E. Webb, former Mayor of Denver, put it best when he said ‘the 19th century was a century of empires, the 20th century was a century of nation states. The 21st century will be a century of cities.’
Anyone who has visited a wide range of overseas cities will quickly realise that Australian cities function relatively well. International city league tables tend to confirm this view, and our cities rank highly on a range of indices which measure ‘liveability’. However, this strong performance does not mean that Australian cities work well for everyone; that they couldn’t be better, or that they are as well prepared for change as they might be.
Put simply, rankings have shortcomings, and our ‘liveability’ is based on a very imperfect picture of what life in our cities is actually like.
This leaves us with an open question – how should we judge our cities? There are different ways of thinking about what matters in a city. This paper argues that the most important characteristic of a city is whether it meets the needs of its residents, both material and psychological. Despite the fact that these needs are central to our lives, they are often at the periphery of conversations about the future of Australian cities.
With these criteria in mind, it is clear that while our cities operate well, there is much room for improvement. To achieve meaningful change we have to acknowledge that cities are hugely complicated, and that many of their constituent parts are interdependent. Therefore it is useful to think about cities as systems: to think about how the challenges we face affect not only a particular aspect of a city, but how they affect the whole. While we have much expertise on these issues, it is not clear that the institutions which govern and manage our cities have sufficiently evolved to take the resultant trade-offs into account.
This kind of thinking is important because our cities are facing real challenges. Australian cities are vulnerable to climate change. Our population is ageing, with serious implications for the economy.
There is a shortage of investment in infrastructure and education. More and more of us are living alone, and further from the services we need. If we want to build cities that meet our needs, we have to prepare for these challenges with interdependencies in mind.
We also need to be clear about what it is we want. What would success – i.e. Australian cities that meet people’s needs and allow them to thrive – look like? We propose a series of criteria that a city should meet for it to be deemed successful.
The question then becomes: how do we ensure our cities will meet our needs both now and in the future? The answer to this will inevitably involve hard choices and trade-offs. We do not propose a set of solutions or prescriptions. Instead we lay out ten questions about our urban future that we must get serious about.
These fit into an overarching question: as we manage growth and change in our cities, how bold are we prepared to be to get the cities we really need?