The 21 Century is the urban century with humans the dominant force shaping the planet’s future. This paper outlines why the era’s pressing imperatives need transformations in our production and habitation systems. These transformations require ecological design and technical and social innovations for adaptation. These adaptations need new visions of the city as nature and...

Melbourne group Boom Crash Opera’s 1987 single ‘City Flat’ is a musically exuberant (though according to at least one critic, lyrically ‘fairly bleak’) single celebrating a sparse inner-Melbourne lifestyle in which limited means enhance and highlight minor pleasures: coffee, kitchens, hanging out. Now just thirty years old, the song celebrates a cheap, recycled, ad hoc...

The roles of planning and planners were remade in Australia in the 1930s. In Sydney, frustration at governmental inaction on practical progress and recognition that the longstanding Town Planning Association had fallen out of touch with best practice led to moves to establish a technical body. There were comparable stories in other states. In NSW...

When Melbourne’s two ‘dry zones’ had compulsory ballots for restaurant and café liquor licences removed in 2015, news accounts surmised that “a hangover from the anti-alcohol movement of the 1920s had finally been relegated to the history books”. Yet the dry zones are chapters in a longer, ongoing story. The 1920 poll that created these...

The urban design theorist and historian Alexander D’Hooghe has argued that Josep Luis Sert’s idea of the core is a key to understanding the “abandoned foundations of the late modern project” in architecture and urbanism. “The Core”, D’Hooghe argues, “is a series of precisely circumscribed figures of publicness in the background of a (dis)urbanizing, privatized...