WHEN it rains, Australia’s big cities break. The traffic banks up. The air thickens. The stormwater drains, built decades ago and hardly thought of since, cease to drain. The work–life balance skews towards a space and time that is neither public nor private, a kind of nowhere time spent in traffic, on a railway platform or in a bus shelter. Sometimes it seems that any extra stress – a sharp downpour, a heatwave, a sporting fixture or a car accident – takes the city past the point where it works. For a few hours, sometimes as long as a day or a week, we glimpse a future in which living in an Australian city is no longer consistent with having a good life…