Readings.com.au: Deakin Lecture 2008 - Cities and Nations of the Future

Griffith Review 20: Cities On The Edge

Most people now live in cities which are increasingly under stress. Making cities more liveable, more sustainable and more fun is the challenge of the next decade.

The lead essay is by the most outstanding young urban planner in Australia, Brendan Gleeson, winner of the inaugural John Ironmonger Award. In this important essay Brendan examines the points of stress, especially in areas of rapid growth and suggests solutions that will make our cities better places to live and work. His expansive essay will set the big picture agenda for a new generation of thinking about urban planning and touch the concerns of us all.

Getting the mix right in the supply of water, transport, jobs and housing, at the same time creating an inspiring place to live that allows creativity to blossom and provide the entertainment and nourishment of the best cities, is a challenge. It is also the key to a sustainability.

The drift to the cities is happening all around the world, and the implications of this are evoked in moving essays by some of the best writers in Australia, including Margaret Simons and Robyn Davidson.

Fluid City Transforming Melbourne

Fluid City traces the transformation of Melbourne’s urban waterfront during the period 1983 to 2004, as the city turned its face to the water and the world, re-inventing itself to attract new flows of global capital.

This is a story of a city becoming ‘unsettled’ as long-term experiences and practices were swept away in new flows of money, ideas, desires and designs. The image of the urban waterfront became increasingly important to economic strategy as comprehensive rational planning weakened and the boundaries dissolved between architecture and planning, culture and commerce, design and politics. Most important of all, a new set of relations emerged between public and private interests.

Fluid City is a story of opportunities and dangers, with lessons for Melbourne, as well as other cities in Australia and beyond. It portrays the fluid city in terms of intersecting flows of ‘desire’ – the desire for the amenities of place, for waterfront access and views, linked with desires for social identity, power and profit. And the book asks how we reconcile these ‘desires’ with public ‘interests’, in a context of flexible planning and political desires, to market a city in a global economy.

Fluid City is a story about Melbourne that is also a more general account of local struggles, global markets and the value of waterfront. Lavishly illustrated with black-and-white photos, Fluid City contains over 90 illustrations.

Concrete Dragon

China is the most rapidly urbanizing nation in the world, with an urban population that may well reach one billion within a generation. Over the past 25 years, surging economic growth has propelled a construction boom unlike anything the world has ever seen, radically transforming both city and countryside in its wake. The speed and scale of China's urban revolution challenges nearly all our expectations about architecture, urbanism and city planning. China's ambition to be a major player on the global stage is written on the skylines of every major city. This is a nation on the rise, and it is building for the record books.

China is now home to some of the world's tallest skyscrapers and biggest shopping malls; the longest bridges and largest airport; the most expansive theme parks and gated communities and even the world's largest skateboard park. And by 2020 China's national network of expressways will exceed in length even the American interstate highway system. China's construction industry, employing a workforce equal to the population of California, has been erecting billions of square feet of housing and office space every year. But such extensive development has also meant demolition on a scale unprecedented in the peacetime history of the world. Nearly all of Beijing's centuries-old cityscape has been bulldozed in recent years, and redevelopment in Shanghai has displaced more families than 30 years of urban renewal in the United States. China's cities are also rapidly sprawling across the landscape, churning precious farmland into a landscape of superblock housing estates and single-family subdivisions laced with highways and big-box malls. In a mere generation, China's cities have undergone a metamorphosis that took 150 years to complete in the United States.

The Concrete Dragon: China's Urban Revolution and What it Means for the World sheds light on this extraordinary chapter in world urban history. The book surveys the driving forces behind the great Chinese building boom, traces the historical precedents and global flows of ideas and information that are fusing to create a bold new Chinese cityscape, and considers the social and environmental impacts of China's urban future. The Concrete Dragon provides a critical overview of contemporary Chinese urbanization in light of both China's past as well as earlier episodes of rapid urban development elsewhere in the world–especially that of the United States, a nation that itself once set global records for the speed and scale of its urban ambitions.

Who's Your City? How The Creative Economy Is Making Where You Live The Most Important Decision In Your Life

It’s a mantra of the age of globalization that where we live doesn’t matter. We can innovate just as easily from a ski chalet in Aspen or a beachhouse in Provence as in the office of a Silicon Valley startup. According to Richard Florida, this is wrong. Globalization is not flattening the world; in fact, place is increasingly relevant to the global economy and our individual lives. Where we live determines the jobs and careers we have access to, the people we meet, and the “mating markets” in which we participate. And everything we think we know about cities and their economic roles is up for grabs.

Who’s Your City? offers the first available city rankings by life-stage, rating the best places for singles, families, and empty-nesters to reside. Florida’s insights and data provide an essential guide for the more than 40 million Americans who move each year, illuminating everything from what those choices mean for our everyday lives to how we should go about making them.

The End Of Charity

Nic Frances is a social entrepreneur. He once ran the Brotherhood of St Laurance. This is the story of how he came to understand that charity can never deliver a just and sustainable world. It is only through a value-centred market economy that we will ever see real social change.

Breaking new ground and drawing on his encounters with business and social leaders around the world as well as his own richly-lived experiences, Nic Frances leads us through his principles of social entrepreneurship. He introduces us to the powerful idea that the market can be a tool for delivering a range of values besides profit. He explains the growing recognition that corporate social responsibility benefits businesses as well as the community and that welfare organisations will only be really effective when they start exploring social enterprise and corporate partnerships.

The End of Charity is as hopeful and as it is inspiring. It heralds a breakthrough to lasting change to the seemingly intractable problems of poverty, injustice and environmental sustainability. It is a book for everybody who cares about the future.

Endless City

The late twentieth century was the age of economic globalization. The first part of the twenty-first century will be the age of the city, the urban age. For the first time in the history of humanity, more than half of the earth's population is living in urban areas. Questions regarding the shape, size, density and distribution of the city have become increasingly complex and politicized, and the impact of the built environment on social inclusion and quality of life are at the forefront of discussions about urban planning. These are the issues that have led to the creation of The Urban Age Project, a network of organizations, individuals and research projects that focus on sustainable development in the world's cities. The project gathered a group of internationally renowned professionals for six conferences held in six international cities - New York, Shanghai, London, Mexico City, Johannesburg and Berlin - to discuss the future of the contemporary urban environment. The conferences offered a platform from which to discuss how architects, urbanists and politicians should plan infrastructure and development without constraining growth and promote a better social and economic life. This book is the result of the discussions and extensive research produced for these conferences. The research is clearly presented alongside informative texts written by some of the greatest professionals in the field of architecture, urbanism, economics and politics, including Richard Sennett, Saskia Sassens, Rem Koolhaas, Deyan Sudjic and Ricky Burdett, and is richly illustrated with photographs, maps, diagrams and statistics. The book is produced in close collaboration with the London School of Economics to ensure that all the information presented is accurate and reliable, and the accessible design ensures that this book will become the essential reference tool for everyone involved in urban planning and development.

Common Wealth: Economics For A Crowded Planet

In this book Jeffrey Sachs, one of the world's leading economists and author of the bestselling The End of Poverty, analyses and addresses the great, and interconnected, global challenges of the twenty-first century. A series of cascading threats to global well-being - the most significant being environmental degradation and rapid population growth - bear down upon our increasingly crowded planet. All of them are solvable, Sachs argues, but potentially disastrous if left unattended. Our task is to achieve truly sustainable development, by which he means finding a global course which enables the world to benefit from the spread of prosperity while ensuring that we don't destroy the eco-systems which keep us alive and our place in nature which helps sustain our values. How do we move forward together, benefiting from our increasing technological mastery, avoiding the terrible dangers of climate change, mass famines, violent conflicts, population explosions in some parts of the world and collapses in others, and world-wide pandemic diseases? How do we steer global politics when there are now so many who believe they are entitled to a hand on the wheel? In answering these questions, Common Wealth examines, digests and judges vast quantities of information from many different fields of study in each of the interconnected areas of politics, economics and ecology. Sachs shows that there are different ways of managing the world's technologies, resources and politics from those currently being followed, and that it should be possible to adopt policies which reflect long-term and co-operative thinking instead of, as currently, disregard for others and ever-increasing barriers to solving the problems which we collectively face. The very idea of nations that scramble for global power, natural resources and international markets is passe, and must be replaced by a new era of global co-operation around shared goals. Common Wealth is a book that appeals equally to both head and heart, and one which no globally thinking person can ignore.

Futurecast 2020: A Global Blueprint

Rapid technological advances, globalisation, unparalleled demographic changes and the rise of China and India as superpowers mean that we are entering an unprecedented age. Rob Shapiro employs his immense experience in international politics to sketch a blueprint for the coming fifteen years, tracing the path combined global forces may lead us. This is neither hopelessly idealistic nor a tale of woe and Armageddon: Shapiro is persistently lucid, penetrating and even-handed in delineating the world as it stands and predicting the way it will walk.

Creating A World Without Poverty How Social Business Can Transform Our Lives

In the last two decades, free markets have swept the globe, bringing with them enormous potential for positive change. But traditional capitalism cannot solve problems like inequality and poverty, because it is hampered by a narrow view of human nature in which people are one-dimensional beings concerned only with profit.

In fact, human beings have many other drives and passions, including the spiritual, the social, and the altruistic. Welcome to the world of social business, where the creative vision of the entrepreneur is applied to today's most serious problems: feeding the poor, housing the homeless, healing the sick, and protecting the planet.

Creating a World Without Poverty tells the stories of some of the earliest examples of social businesses, including Yunus's own Grameen Bank. It reveals the next phase in a hopeful economic and social revolution that is already under way—and in the worldwide effort to eliminate poverty by unleashing the productive energy of every human being.

Dear Mr Rudd: Ideas For A Better Australia

With the election of the Rudd government, there is revived interest in the nation’s future – both the challenges and the opportunities. What kind of future can we imagine for Australia?

Dear Mr Rudd offers new essays by leading Australian thinkers on the key areas of interest: climate change, indigenous affairs, the economy, human rights, education, health, the republic and much more besides.

Each essay serves up in a readable and inspiring way a set of new ideas to consider. This is not an academic contribution or a set of policy statements. Rather, at this time of national renewal, it is an invitation to debate and discussion issued by many passionate and imaginative Australians.

Metropolitan World Atlas

Despite the burgeoning interest in metropolitan growth and globalisation there has been no way of directly comparing metropolises – until now, that is. This atlas offers a unique survey of global trade networks and their impact on metropolitan space. It documents a total of 101 metropolises, analysing them in easy-to-read ground plans. It also includes index numbers and tables regarding such aspects as population, density, pollution, travel time, data traffic, air and water travel and the size of Central Business Districts.