Cities are the engines of the global economy, but as rapid urbanisation continues, we need to think differently and act in new ways to create healthy, sustainable cities.
Key to this is looking beyond the immediate short-term market system of urban land production and consumption.
There are two main reasons we need to do this. Take housing: first, land and property markets are not ‘perfect’. They are riven with split incentives, asymmetric information, and numerous monopolistic tendencies. Urban land is severely limited and its use contested. Moreover, consumers are often working on restricted or biased information, and have many reasons to be conservative. For example, housing is not only shelter; it increasingly serves as a nest-egg. It is for most of us an enormous strain on our resources and a major gamble. We tend to bet safe on the standard offering that is closest to being affordable. This does not maximise innovation and nor does it drive cities that are future proofed for climate change, demographic change, or rapid economic/mobility change.
Second, the dominance of the short-term property market in our thinking about urban production and consumption masks other things that are going on. The dominance of private ownership and land speculation acts against the public value of urban space. While we take for granted the value of things like galleries or botanic gardens, they can increasingly only be justified in terms of ROI – cash return on investment. Some things defy easy monetisation; whether the smell of fresh cut grass in the city, the view of a tree from a window, or the momentary peacefulness afforded by cutting through the said botanic gardens between work tasks. We have yet to establish ‘Treasury-proof’ cash values that can be used to justify the design and investment that will deliver the healthy sustainable city.
Fortunately, planners, developers, builders, investors, community groups, and architects collectively ‘do the right thing’ quite often. Hence, we do have private buildings with public facades, that speak to the public good and emanate value in myriad ways. The many successes are a product of professionalism and a tacit acceptance that the market and cash value can only help with a part of the picture, and the rest needs to be filled in to produce a healthy sustainable city.
The market has been less successful in delivering higher density housing. Market-driven urban development ‘logic’ is rarely questioned, but the evidence mounts of widespread market failure.
For example, the apartment boom in Melbourne, has so far delivered hundreds of bedrooms lacking natural light, and kitchens lacking basic storage. Far from being healthy living spaces future-proofed for climate change, they underperform on environmental efficiency. Communal facilities are minimal and given that this is the new normal for city dwellers, future liveability in cities such as Melbourne is in jeopardy.
Much of the commentary is about size and density. An urgent discussion is also needed about quality and the market. Much of our high density, high-rise apartment stock caters to the local and overseas investor market, enticed by favourable taxation and regulatory regimes. Apartments can be great homes – so why are so many mismatched with families and affordability concerns? A recent report by 2014 Churchill Fellow Leanne Hodyl makes a case for urgent reforms to link development to public benefit, including open spaces, affordable housing and community facilities. It also argues that Melbourne would benefit from apartment standards. Perhaps surprisingly, there is widespread support for regulations and standards – a level playing field for building healthy cities. Moreover ‘good design’ is a reasonably uncontroversial concept for building industry practitioners in Australia.
Healthy cities will be those which successfully anticipate the future needs of citizens, the changing climate and energy scarcity, the changing economy and attendant changes in quality and space needs. The cities that succeed will be those which attract the future mobile post-industrial global workforce; that facilitate increasingly circular local and global economies; that promote efficient buildings and renewable energy systems, enable good mental and physical health, and that create a sense of well-being.
Living in an era when the gap between rich and poor is increasingly dividing the nation, talk of healthy cities begs the question “for whom?” The easy part is “for the few”. But successful future cities will be equitable, and will be ethical. The debate on ethical cities is now on, with the new urban agenda set by the Sustainable Development Goals and the upcoming Habitat III in Quito in October 2016. This agenda demands that we continue to peer “beyond the market”, and use the tools of cross-sectoral engagement, co-management and co-design at our disposal to inject ingenuity into our cities, future-proofing them, and in the process making them healthy and sustainable for all of us – irrespective of our postcode or paypacket.
Ralph is deputy pro vice chancellor of Research for the College of Design and Social Context at RMIT University, and Director, UN Global Compact - Cities Programme. RMIT is a partner in ADC Forum’s Creating Healthy Cities Summit, taking place in Melbourne 30 November-1 December.