Affordable housing and planning in Australia Urban 45

U rb an 4 5 For an urban country we do a pretty good job of ignoring those places that are home for around 80% of the population, our cities. These challenges are evident to residents, particularly of our larger cities—profound difficulties accessing affordable accommodation, congestion and pollution, sprawling nowhere belts lacking key services, to say nothing of growing levels of urban polarisation, indigenous disadvantage and the challenges presented by a rapidly ageing population. These are spatial problems; they have a particular distribution across our urban areas and increasingly disadvantage those on the lowest incomes. Nevertheless problems such as pollution and congestion affect us regardless of the car we drive or the job we do. The Urban AS, an initiative that we have led over the past few months, was set-up in order to promote national thinking and the prioritising of strategic approaches that understand our cities as places of economic growth and opportunity. The initiative promotes evidence gathering and analysis that help us to address urban equity and efficiency issues that would benefit from a national overview. Poverty and housing stress are part of such concerns, yet equally we might consider climate change and public transport as similarly in need of a holistic new blueprint. The resulting 'manifesto' covered 15 theme areas (climate change, indigenous affairs, transport, education, health and so on) and provided three ideas on each for policy makers in the run-up to the Federal election, but also beyond (hence the '45' of the manifesto). As the group of academics in the Urban 45 note, potentially unpopular decisions will need to be made at some point about growth, urban density, and how high quality urban design and public transport systems can be integrated to address concerns about congestion, housing affordability and other symptoms of urban failure. On the other hand it is increasingly clear that the Federal government has done little to acknowledge the centrality of cities to the economy, or to work with the states in ways that might enhance the role of planning and futureproofing our cities.