Here's How to Design Cities Where People and Nature Can Both Flourish

by Georgia Garrard, RMIT University; Nicholas Williams, University of Melbourne, and Sarah Bekessy, RMIT University, The Conversation: https://theconversation.com/heres-how-to-design-cities-where-people-and-nature-can-both-flourish-102849

An impression of biodiversity sensitive urban design (BSUD) developed by the authors in collaboration with Mauro Baracco, Jonathan Ware and Catherine Horwill of RMIT’s School of Architecture and Design. Author provided

Urban nature has a critical role to play in the future liveability of cities. An emerging body of research reveals that bringing nature back into our cities can deliver a truly impressive array of benefits, ranging from health and well-being to climate change adaptation and mitigation. Aside from benefits for people, cities are often hotspots for threatened species and are justifiable locations for serious investment in nature conservation for its own sake.

Australian cities are home to, on average, three times as many threatened species per unit area as rural environments. Yet this also means urbanisation remains one of the most destructive processes for biodiversity.

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Read more: Higher-density cities need greening to stay healthy and liveable

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Despite government commitments to green urban areas, vegetation cover in cities continues to decline. A recent report found that greening efforts of most of our metropolitan local governments are actually going backwards.

Current urban planning approaches typically consider biodiversity a constraint – a “problem” to be dealt with. At best, biodiversity in urban areas is “offset”, often far from the site of impact.

This is a poor solution because it fails to provide nature in the places where people can benefit most from interacting with it. It also delivers questionable ecological outcomes.

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Read more: EcoCheck: Victoria's flower-strewn western plains could be swamped by development

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Building nature into the urban fabric

A new approach to urban design is needed. This would treat biodiversity as an opportunity and a valued resource to be preserved and maximised at all stages of planning and design.

In contrast to traditional approaches to conserving urban biodiversity, biodiversity-sensitive urban design (BSUD) aims to create urban environments that make a positive onsite contribution to biodiversity. This involves careful planning and innovative design and architecture. BSUD seeks to build nature into the urban fabric by linking urban planning and design to the basic needs and survival of native plants and animals.

Figure 1. Steps in the biodiversity sensitive urban design (BSUD) approach (click to enlarge). Author provided

BSUD draws on ecological theory and understanding to apply five simple principles to urban design:

1. protect and create habitat
2. help species disperse
3. minimise anthropogenic threats
4. promote ecological processes
5. encourage positive human-nature interactions.

These principles are designed to address the biggest impacts of urbanisation on biodiversity. They can be applied at any scale, from individual houses (see Figure 2) to precinct-scale developments.

Figure 2. BUSD principles applied at the scale of an individual house. Author provided

BSUD progresses in a series of steps (see Figure 1), that urban planners and developers can use to achieve a net positive outcome for biodiversity from any development.

BSUD encourages biodiversity goals to be set early in the planning process, alongside social and economic targets, before stepping users through a transparent process for achieving those goals. By explicitly stating biodiversity goals (eg. enhancing the survival of species X) and how they will be measured (eg. probability of persistence), BSUD enables decision makers to make transparent decisions about alternative, testable urban designs, justified by sound science.

A striped legless lizard. John Wombey, CSIRO/Wikimedia, CC BY

For example, in a hypothetical development example in western Melbourne, we were able to demonstrate that cat containment regulations were irreplaceable when designing an urban environment that would ensure the persistence of the nationally threatened striped legless lizard (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Keeping cats indoors greatly enhances other measures to protect and increase populations of the striped legless lizard. Author provided

What does a BSUD city look, feel and sound like?

Biodiversity sensitive urban design represents a fundamentally different approach to conserving urban biodiversity. This is because it seeks to incorporate biodiversity into the built form, rather than restricting it to fragmented remnant habitats. In this way, it can deliver biodiversity benefits in environments not traditionally considered to be of ecological value.

It will also deliver significant co-benefits for cities and their residents. Two-thirds of Australians now live in our capital cities. BSUD can add value to the remarkable range of benefits urban greening provides and help to deliver greener, cleaner and cooler cities, in which residents live longer and are less stressed and more productive.

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Read more: Why a walk in the woods really does help your body and your soul

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BSUD promotes human-nature interactions and nature stewardship among city residents. It does this through human-scale urban design such as mid-rise, courtyard-focused buildings and wide boulevard streetscapes. When compared to high-rise apartments or urban sprawl, this scale of development has been shown to deliver better liveability outcomes such as active, walkable streetscapes.

Mid-rise, courtyard-focused buildings and wide boulevard streetscapes created through a biodiversity sensitive urban design approach. Graphical representation developed by authors in collaboration with M. Baracco, C. Horwill and J. Ware, RMIT School of Architecture and Design, Author provided

By recognising and enhancing Australia’s unique biodiversity and enriching residents’ experiences with nature, we think BSUD will be important for creating a sense of place and care for Australia’s cities. BSUD can also connect urban residents with Indigenous history and culture by engaging Indigenous Australians in the planning, design, implementation and governance of urban renaturing.

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Read more: Why ‘green cities’ need to become a deeply lived experience

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What needs to change to achieve this vision?

While the motivations for embracing this approach are compelling, the pathways to achieving this vision are not always straightforward.

Without careful protection of remaining natural assets, from remnant patches of vegetation to single trees, vegetation in cities can easily suffer “death by 1,000 cuts”. Planning reform is required to move away from offsetting and remove obstacles to innovation in onsite biodiversity protection and enhancement.

In addition, real or perceived conflicts between biodiversity and other socio-ecological concerns, such as bushfire and safety, must be carefully managed. Industry-based schemes such as the Green Building Council of Australia’s Green Star system could add incentive for developers through BSUD certification.

Importantly, while BSUD is generating much interest, working examples are urgently required to build an evidence base for the benefits of this new approach.

Georgia Garrard, Senior Research Fellow, Interdisciplinary Conservation Science Research Group, RMIT University; Nicholas Williams, Associate Professor in Urban Ecology and Urban Horticulture, University of Melbourne, and Sarah Bekessy, Professor, RMIT University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

How Shareholder Profits Conquered Capitalism: And How Workers Can Win Back its Benefits for Themselves

by Louis Brennan, Trinity College Dublin, The Conversation: https://theconversation.com/how-shareholder-profits-conquered-capitalism-and-how-workers-can-win-back-its-benefits-for-themselves-103781

Wolves on Wall Street, but perhaps the time of shareholders’ rule is drawing to an end. robert cicchetti/Shutterstock

In the early days of industrial capitalism there were no protections for workers, and industrialists took their profits with little heed to anyone else. 

Following the growth of the labour movement, the establishment of trade unions and the founding of the welfare state in the first half of the 20th century, corporations in decades after World War II embraced a more open, stakeholder capitalism, where profits were shared between employees, managers and shareholders. This led to a flourishing middle class as workers and communities benefited from the success of the corporations of which they were part.

But since the 1970s the pendulum has swung back towards a system where profits are shared less widely, causing major upheavals in society and the fortunes of labour and the middle classes.

In the US, labour’s share of income had been close to 70% until the 1970s, but had shrunk by the beginning of the 1980s even as profits increased. In the 21st century this accelerated: in 2000, labour’s share of income in the US accounted for some 66%, whereas corporate profits accounted for a little over 8%. 

Today, labour’s share has fallen to 62% while profits have risen to 12%. The same trend is repeated in the UK, where labour’s share of income has reduced from almost 70% in the 1970s to around 55% percent today.

Where has the money gone? For decades, real incomes for workers have largely stagnated while those of top executives have skyrocketed. In 2017, the top executives of America’s largest companies enjoyed an average pay increase of 17.6%, while workers’ pay in those companies rose barely 0.3%. In 1965, the chief executives of the top 350 US companies earned salaries 20 times that of their workers. By 1989 that had risen to 58 times, and in 2017 the ratio was 312 times that of workers.

Not surprisingly, compared to the middle-class prosperity that followed 1945, recent decades have seen widening inequality in society. The status quo overturned, capitalism has been hijacked by a profiteering elite. The question is whether society can find an alternative approach that shares the wealth more widely.

Shareholders uber alles

This trend coincided with the emergence of shareholder value as the overwhelming corporate ethos, as the interests of shareholders take primacy over those of other stakeholders in the business. With executives incentivised to maximise profits, meet quarterly share price targets and ensure profits are returned to shareholders, they have been able to game the system to ensure they receive excessive remuneration, while at the same time cutting costs and squeezing wage growth in search of higher profits. British housebuilder Persimmon this year paid its chief executive a £110m bonus, decried by critics as “corporate looting”.

Outsourcing and offshoring have been examples of such cost-cutting, profit-driving initiatives: outsourcing low-skilled work is thought to account for one-third of the increase in wage inequality since the 1980s in the US. The percentage of US workers associated with temporary help agencies, on-call workers, or contractors increased from 10.7% in 2005 to 15.8% by 2015.

Pressure to maintain share prices and ensure profits return to shareholders have shrunk the share of company profits received by labour. Alf Ribeiro/Shutterstock

Economists have been puzzled by stagnant wages and increased inequality. But as I highlighted as far back as 2007 and repeatedly since, the emphasis on shareholder value has contributed enormously. Management and leadership consultant and writer Steve Denning wrote this year that “shareholder value is the root cause of workers’ stagnant salaries”, with a corrosive effect on societal cohesion and stability – he believes the current rise of populism is one example of the fallout.

Demands for greater profits continue, as companies are pressured by share portfolio managers and activist investors to increase their profitability and share price. Private equity firms, which invest in companies in order to maximise returns, have expanded into many sectors of the economy. Most recently, this has seen the doctrine of maximising profits enter the residential property and home mortgages market.

The pendulum swings back?

Despite the stranglehold of shareholder value on corporate thinking, events suggest the pendulum may once more swing back to favour workers and other stakeholders.

In the US, the government’s Committee on Foreign Investment warned that in its attempt to take over telecoms giant Qualcomm, Broadcomm’s private equity approach could compromise its target’s technological leading position in pursuit of value for Broadcomm shareholders.

In the UK, there was opposition to the takeover of engineering conglomerate GKN by turnaround firm Melrose. Airbus, one of GKN’s major customers, argued that Melrose’s focus on shareholder value and short-term returns meant it might not be committed to long-term investment.

A chorus of voices has emerged advocating alternatives to the short-termist and shareholder-focused model of capitalism. The chief executives of investment and asset managers Blackrock (the world’s largest) and Vanguard, global engineering firm Siemens, and consumer goods giant Unilever have pursued a more stakeholder-centric model of capitalism. 

For example, Unilever by measuring its progress against environmental and social as well as financial targets, and Blackrock by investing in businesses that favour long-term investment over short-term profits. Organisations such as the Coalition for Inclusive Capitalism and the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, have emerged, seeking to ensure that all stakeholders in the business and their interests are included.

Prominent US senator Elizabeth Warren recently introduced the Accountable Capitalism Act to Congress. This would require company directors to consider the interests of all major corporate stakeholders, not just shareholders, in company decisions. It requires that workers are given a stronger voice in decision-making at large companies, such as electing 40% of company directors. As a way of addressing self-serving incentives, executives would have to retain company shares for at least five years after receiving them, or three years in the case of stock buybacks.

Finally, we cannot ignore that business schools played a critical role in how shareholder value emerged as the overwhelming corporate ethos – and they continue to indoctrinate new generations of students with the dogma of shareholder value today. Business school deans and faculty members should urgently revisit their curricula to ensure graduates understand the damaging impact of shareholder value on society and to emphasise alternative approaches.

Almost ten years ago, Jack Welch, who for many years championed shareholder value while at the helm of General Electric, pronounced that:

Shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy … your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products.

It is past the time that business schools should smarten up, jettison this “dumb” shareholder dogma, and start teaching a version of capitalism less damaging to the interests of society.

Louis Brennan, Professor of Business Studies, Trinity College Dublin

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

How City Squares Can Be Public Places of Protest or Centres of State Control

by Majdi Faleh, University of Melbourne, The Conversation: https://theconversation.com/how-city-squares-can-be-public-places-of-protest-or-centres-of-state-control-102275

Seven years after Tahrir Square became the focal point of the Egyptian Revolution, towering metal gates now control access. Ahmed Abd El-Fatah/Wikimedia, CC BY

Today’s urban public spaces tend to represent governments and cities rather than people and citizens. In the past seven years, disturbing scenes of protests in city squares have been seen across the Arab world and Europe, but these public protests existed long before the 21st century. So how can city squares support or inhibit protests through their spatial characteristics and settings?

Public squares have been considered as places of encounter and exchange since the time of the Greek Agora and the Roman Forum. While often the sites of protest, these spaces also can reflect the idea of power and constrain revolutions and social uprisings.

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Read more: Neighbourhood living rooms – we can learn a lot from European town squares

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Design and scenography can be used to intensify agoraphobia, or a fear of public spaces. Thus these spaces of expression can, at times, be silenced, putting at risk the geography of freedom of speech.

Reminders of the power of the state

Public spaces around the world have been not only places for people to gather and interact but also to demonstrate and, at times, to face their death.

In 2014, Maidan Nezalezhnosti in Kiev was at the centre of the Ukrainian Euromaidan Revolution. It was a deadly revolution of dignity. Yet the consequences of other protests largely attest to how the design of these spaces can intimidate protesters.

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Read more: Four years after the Euromaidan revolution in Ukraine: key gains and losses

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In 1989, students demonstrated in Beijing during the so-called Tiananmen Square protests, which ended in a massacre. This immense city square of the capital is now known for its “strange emptiness”, as Evan Osnos described it. Benches and shade trees have been removed to discourage public gatherings.

The monumentality created by the forbidden city and the government buildings, including the Great Hall of People, adds to the feeling of emptiness and intimidation. The 44-hectare public square is now considered “the opposite of a public space”:

Its totalitarian scale dwarfs the individual and forces people to feel subservient to the power of the state.

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Read more: Tiananmen 25 years on: CCP now fears the masses gathering online

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One can see striking similarities, in terms of scale and setting, with Red Square in Moscow. Red Square had been the scene of the 1968 demonstration against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, a landmark moment in the Soviet dissident movement.

Red Square, Moscow, has been the scene of both public demonstrations and state parades.

In Egypt, seven years after the revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak, people tend to be cautious about expressing their views in public. Tahrir Square, the birthplace of the protests, is at risk. Towering metal gates have been erected around the square to avoid protests. These stand as a reminder of the powerful state control that the regime of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has reasserted over public spaces.

Protest in the Arab world: the case of Tunisia

Tunisia’s Habib Bourguiba Avenue was the main stage of the 2011 Tunisian Revolution. This public space, considered the historical, political and economic heart of the city, is broad and lined with trees and government buildings, hotels and street cafes. The two paved and heavily trafficked roads on either side of the median strip isolate the pedestrian “island”.

Habib Bourguiba Avenue. Majdi Faleh

This staging of the avenue reflects the power, control and prohibition of protests during 23 years of dictatorship. Other intimidating landscaping elements add to the obstacles for demonstrators who might wish to use the public space for political debates.

Despite intimidation through design, Tunis’s layout made L'Avenue, as Tunisians like to call it, the perfect place to stage the Arab Spring.

Police and protesters clash in the popular uprising that forced Tunisia’s longtime dictator to flee in 2011.

This avenue, planned in the time of French colonisation (1881-1956) for the city’s elite, resembles the Parisian Avenue of Champs-Élysées. Interestingly, even Haussmann’s celebrated Parisian boulevards, built under Napoleon III in the 1860s, were designed to help quell the city’s rebellious populace.

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Read more: Australians don't loiter in public space – the legacy of colonial control by design

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Strategically located near the end of Habib Bourguiba Avenue is the Interior Ministry, an icon of dictatorship and control. The “austere” grey facade and black wrought iron windows and gates create a sense of control. Its brutalist architecture, which has architectural similarities with the FBI headquarters in Washington DC, participates in shaping the public space. Razor barbed wire fences have surrounded the avenue during the time of protests. Landscaping around the ministry played a role in blocking protesters from getting closer to the monument of control.

Habib Bourguiba Avenue is named after the first president of Tunisia, a tradition for main avenues in Tunisian cities. A simple Google search produces a list of major and small Tunisian cities forced into this autocratic system of political nomenclature as an instrument of control.

The image of power and control starts with the name of the place. It continues at the end of the avenue intersecting with the previously known Place 7 Novembre, named after the date of former dictator Ben Ali’s ascension to power in a coup d’état.

Ibn Khaldun Fenced Garden with a banner of the dictator Ben Ali in the background (2009). In Arabic, it reads ‘In deed, all my ambition is for Tunisia’. Majdi Faleh

During the time of dictatorship, architects did not play an active role in shaping social, cultural and political encounters in public spaces. Contemporary public spaces in Tunisia were designed timidly or marginally, creating conflicts between architecture, the local people and the oppressive state. Even green spaces were planned but never designed, as per the planning policies. Many were replaced by commercial centres.

Metal fences are noticeable landscaping features around the Ibn Khaldun Statue, small gardens and public parks. The fences turned these spaces into enclosed and sometimes marginal parks. Large propaganda banners of the former dictator added an element of fear to these public spaces and helped deter protesters. The government gated property creates a sense of intimidation and constraint.

Designing for protests: an architect’s perspective

In designing public squares and avenues, architects should learn from these past dilemmas. The public square should not be represented as the city’s gated property or as a walled garden. It should be a space that provides citizens with opportunities to engage in political and social debates.

In the wake of the Arab Spring, rethinking spatial qualities of public spaces is crucial to provide “liberated” citizens with adequate places to communicate their political views and free cultural expression. In Tunisia’s post-revolutionary era, public spaces have increasingly become places for expression and social engagement.

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Read more: Why Tunisia's latest protests are about more than a hike in taxes

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Governments, not only in Tunisia but across all countries, should plan the streets for artists and protesters to create stages for their events and to communicate their ideas. Tunisia still has a long way to go.

Majdi Faleh, Teaching Assistant, University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Ten Lessons From Cities That Have Risen to the Affordable Housing Challenge

by Carolyn Whitzman, University of Melbourne; Katrina Raynor, University of Melbourne, and Matthew Palm, University of Melbourne, The Conversation: https://theconversation.com/ten-lessons-from-cities-that-have-risen-to-the-affordable-housing-challenge-102852

Vancouver (Shutterstock)

Imagine planning a public transport system for a large city by providing one bus at a time on one route that might serve a few dozen people (but nobody knows how many). That is what planning for housing affordability looks like in most Australian capital cities: innovative projects take years to develop and never get scaled up into a system.

Who can we learn from? In July, the lead author returned to three cities comparable to Melbourne that she visited in 2015 – Vancouver, Portland and Toronto – to re-interview key housing actors and review investment and policy changes over the past three years. All have big housing affordability problems, caused by a strong economy and 30 years of largely unregulated speculative housing. A lack of federal government involvement has exacerbated these problems.

But these four cities have recently developed very different approaches to housing systems planning, with increasingly divergent results. Toronto has gone backwards. Vancouver and Portland, though, are reaping the rewards of good metropolitan policy, from which we have drawn ten lessons for Melbourne.

Before we discuss these, let’s take stock of the affordable housing challenge in Melbourne.

Who needs affordable housing, and how much of it?

The Victorian state government has recently defined affordable housing incomes and price points for both Greater Melbourne and regional Victoria for households on very low (0-50% of median income), low (50-80%) and moderate (80-120%) incomes. It has enshrined “affordable housing” as an explicit aim in the Planning and Environment Act. Better protection for renters has also been developed.

These are great steps, but we need to go further in the next term of government.

The Australian government estimated that 142,685 lower-income renter households in Victoria were in housing stress in 2015-16. Over 30% and in many cases over 50% of their income was going to rent or mortgage payments.

Our research team at Transforming Housing has more recently calculated a deficit of 164,000 affordable housing dwellings. Over 90% of the deficit is in Greater Melbourne.

A simplified version of the price points necessary for households to avoid housing stress (one that leaves out household size and additional costs and risks of poorly located housing on the city fringe) looks like this:

Palm, Raynor & Whitzman (2018), Author provided

Affordable home ownership bears no resemblance to the current market in which the median unit price is well over $700,000. Median rents are affordable to many moderate-income households, at about $420 a week. Whether such housing is available, with a vacancy rate of less than 1%, is another issue, particularly for very low-income households.

The Victorian government has a metropolitan planning strategy that states the need for 1.6 million new dwellings between 2017 and 2050. That’s almost 50,000 new homes a year. Using the new definitions, we can calculate ideal ten-year new housing supply targets to meet the needs of all residents of Greater Melbourne.

Author provided

The biggest problem is not overall supply. In the six months from February to July 2018, there were 28,602 dwelling unit approvals in Greater Melbourne. At that rate there would be 572,040 new units by 2028, which is more than the total need projected by Plan Melbourne.

The problem is that the price points of these dwellings are beyond the means of 64% of households – 456,295 would need to be affordable, appropriately sized and located to meet most people’s needs. All too many will be bought as investments and remain vacant.

Plan Melbourne doesn’t provide targets for affordability, size or location. This is left to six sub-regions, each with four to eight local governments, which have not produced these reports in the 18 months since the plan was released.

Affordable housing targets that exist in state documents are woefully inadequate. Homes for Victorians has an overall target of 4,700 new or renovated social housing units over the five-year period 2017-22.

An inclusionary zoning pilot on government-owned land might yield “as many as” 100 social housing units in five years. Public housing renewal on nine sites is expected to yield at least a 10% uplift, or 110 extra social housing units, in return for sale of government land to private developers. This is certainly not maximizing social benefit.

What can we learn from Vancouver and Portland?

Although Vancouver has huge housing affordability issues, it has been able to scale up housing delivery for very low-income households – about 15 times as much social and affordable housing as Melbourne over the past three years. Both Vancouver and Portland have ambitious private sector build-to-rent programs, with thousands of new affordable rental dwellings near transport lines.

Both cities have influenced senior governments. Canada is investing C$40 billion (A$42.6b) over the next ten years in its National Housing Strategy.

In contrast, Toronto has had a net loss of hundreds of units of social housing. This is due to disastrous lack of leadership at local and state (provincial) levels.

Our new report highlights 10 lessons for the Victorian government:

1. Establish a clear and shared definition of “affordable housing”. Enabling its provision should be stated as a goal of planning. This has been done.
2. Calculate housing need. We have up-to-date calculations, broken down by singles, couples and other households, as well as income groups, in this report
3. Set housing targets. Ideally, you would want a target of 456,295 new units affordable to households on very low, low and moderate incomes. Both Infrastructure Victoria and the Everybody’s Home campaign have suggested a more attainable ten-year target: 30,000 affordable homes for very low and low-income people over the next decade. This would allow systems and partnerships between state and local government, investors and non-profit and private housing developers to begin to scale up to meet need.
4. Set local targets. The state government, which is responsible for metropolitan planning, should be setting local government housing targets, based on infrastructure capacity, and then helping to meet these targets (and improve infrastructure in areas where homes increase). We have developed a simple tool we call HART: Housing Access Rating Tool. It scores every land parcel in Greater Melbourne according to access to services: public transport, schools, bulk-billing health centres, etc.
5. Identify available sites. We have mapped over 250 government-owned sites, not including public housing estates, that could accommodate well over 30,000 well-located affordable homes, with a goal of at least 40% available to very low-income households. Aside from leasing government land for a peppercorn rent, which could cut construction costs by up to 30%, a number of other mechanisms could quickly release affordable housing. Launch Housing, the state government and Maribyrnong council recently developed 57 units of modular housing on vacant government land, linked to services for homeless people. The City of Vancouver and the British Columbia provincial government recently scaled up a similar pilot project to 600 dwellings built over six months.
6. Create more market rental housing. Vancouver has enabled over 7,000 well-located moderately affordable private rental apartments near transport lines in the past five years, using revenue-neutral mechanisms. Portland developers have almost entirely moved from speculative condominium development to more affordable build-to-rent in recent years.
7. Mandate inclusionary zoning. This approach, presently being piloted, could be scaled up to cover all well-located new developments. Portland recently introduced mandatory provision of 20% of new housing developments affordable to low-income households or 10% to very low-income households. If applied in Melbourne, this measure alone could meet the 30,000 target (but not the current 164,000 deficit or 456,295 projected need).
8. Dampen speculation at the high end of the market. This would help deal with the oversupply of luxury housing. Taxes on luxury homes, vacant properties and foreign ownership could help fund affordable housing.
9. Have one agency to drive these changes. The impact of an agency like the Vancouver Affordable Housing Agency is perhaps the most important lesson. The Victorian government has over a dozen departments and agencies engaged in some aspect of affordable housing delivery. We suggest repurposing the Victorian Planning Authority with an explicit mandate to develop and deliver housing affordability, size diversity and locational targets set by the next state government.
10. A systems approach is essential to build capacity. It will take time, coordination and political will for local governments to meet targets, non-profit housing providers to scale up delivery and management of social housing, private developers and investors to take advantage of affordability opportunities, and state government to plan for affordable housing. Eradicating homelessness and delivering affordable housing for all Victorians is possible. But it needs a systems approach.

Carolyn Whitzman, Professor of Urban Planning, University of Melbourne; Katrina Raynor, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Transforming Housing Project, University of Melbourne, and Matthew Palm, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Transforming Housing Research Network, University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

One is the Loneliest Number: The History of a Western Problem

by Fay Bound Alberti, Aeon Magazine: https://aeon.co/ideas/one-is-the-loneliest-number-the-history-of-a-western-problem

Photo by Esther Bubley/Library of Congress

‘God, but life is loneliness,’ declared the writer Sylvia Plath in her private journals. Despite all the grins and smiles we exchange, she says, despite all the opiates we take: 

when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter – they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.

By the 21st century, loneliness has become ubiquitous.

Commentators call it ‘an epidemic’, a condition akin to ‘leprosy’, and a ‘silent plague’ of civilisation. In 2018, the United Kingdom went so far as to appoint a Minister for Loneliness. Yet loneliness is not a universal condition; nor is it a purely visceral, internal experience. It is less a single emotion and more a complex cluster of feelings, composed of anger, grief, fear, anxiety, sadness and shame. It also has social and political dimensions, shifting through time according ideas about the self, God and the natural world. Loneliness, in other words, has a history.

The term ‘loneliness’ first crops up in English around 1800. Before then, the closest word was ‘oneliness’, simply the state of being alone. As with solitude – from the Latin ‘solus’ which meant ‘alone’ – ‘oneliness’ was not coloured by any suggestion of emotional lack. Solitude or oneliness was not unhealthy or undesirable, but rather a necessary space for reflection with God, or with one’s deepest thoughts. Since God was always nearby, a person was never truly alone. Skip forward a century or two, however, and the use of ‘loneliness’ – burdened with associations of emptiness and the absence of social connection – has well and truly surpassed oneliness. What happened?

The contemporary notion of loneliness stems from cultural and economic transformations that have taken place in the modern West. Industrialisation, the growth of the consumer economy, the declining influence of religion and the popularity of evolutionary biology all served to emphasise that the individual was what mattered – not traditional, paternalistic visions of a society in which everyone had a place.

In the 19th century, political philosophers used Charles Darwin’s theories about the ‘survival of the fittest’ to justify the pursuit of individual wealth to Victorians. Scientific medicine, with its emphasis on brain-centred emotions and experiences, and the classification of the body into ‘normal’ and abnormal states, underlined this shift. The four humours (phlegmatic, sanguine, choleric, melancholic) that had dominated Western medicine for 2,000 years and made people into ‘types’, fell away in favour of a new model of health dependent on the physical, individual body.

In the 20th century, the new sciences of the mind – especially psychiatry and psychology – took centre-stage in defining the healthy and unhealthy emotions an individual should experience. Carl Jung was the first to identify ‘introvert’ and ‘extravert’ personalities (to use the original spelling) in his Psychological Types (1921). Introversion became associated with neuroticism and loneliness, while extroversion was linked to sociability, gregariousness and self-reliance. In the US, these ideas took on special significance as they were linked to individual qualities associated with self-improvement, independence and the go-getting American dream.

The negative associations of introversion help to explain why loneliness now carries such social stigma. Lonely people seldom want to admit they are lonely. While loneliness can create empathy, lonely people have also been subjects of contempt; those with strong social networks often avoid the lonely. It is almost as though loneliness were contagious, like the diseases with which it is now compared. When we use the language of a modern epidemic, we contribute to a moral panic about loneliness that can aggravate the underlying problem. Presuming that loneliness is a widespread but fundamentally individual affliction will make it nearly impossible to address.

For centuries, writers have recognised the relationship between mental health and belonging to a community. Serving society was another way to serve the individual – because, as the poet Alexander Pope put it in his poem An Essay on Man (1734): ‘True self-love and social are the same’. It’s not surprising, then, to find that loneliness serves a physiological and social function, as the late neuroscientist John Cacioppo argued: like hunger, it signals a threat to our wellbeing, born of exclusion from our group or tribe.

‘No man is an island,’ wrote the poet John Donne in a similar spirit, in Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624) – nor woman either, for each one formed ‘a piece of the continent, a part of the main.’ If a ‘clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less … any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind’ . For some of us, Donne’s remarks take on special poignancy in light of the UK’s departure from Europe, or the narcissism of Donald Trump’s US presidency. They also return us to medical metaphors: Donne’s references to the body politic being destroyed is reminiscent of modern loneliness as a physical affliction, a plague of modernity.

We urgently need a more nuanced appraisal of who is lonely, when and why. Loneliness is lamented by politicians because it is expensive, especially for an ageing population. People who are lonely are more likely to develop illnesses such as cancer, heart disease and depression, and 50 per cent more likely to die prematurely than non-lonely counterparts. But there is nothing inevitable about being old and alone – even in the UK and the US where, unlike much of Europe, there isn’t a history of inter-familial care of the aged. Loneliness and economic individualism are connected.

Until the 1830s in the UK, elderly people were cared for by neighbours, friends and family, as well as by the parish. But then Parliament passed the New Poor Law, a reform that abolished financial aid for people except the aged and infirm, restricting that help to those in workhouses, and considered poverty relief to be loans that were administered via a bureaucratic, impersonal process. The rise of city living and the breakdown of local communities, as well as the grouping of the needy together in purpose-built buildings, produced more isolated, elderly people. It is likely, given their histories, that individualistic countries (including the UK, South Africa, the US, Germany and Australia) might experience loneliness differently to collectivist countries (such as Japan, China, Korea, Guatemala, Argentina and Brazil). Loneliness, then, is experienced differently across place as well as time.

None of this is meant to sentimentalise communal living or suggest that there was no social isolation prior to the Victorian period. Rather, my claim is that human emotions are inseparable from their social, economic and ideological contexts. The righteous anger of the morally affronted, for instance, would be impossible without a belief in right and wrong, and personal accountability. Likewise, loneliness can exist only in a world where the individual is conceived as separate from, rather than part of, the social fabric. It’s clear that the rise of individualism corroded social and communal ties, and led to a language of loneliness that didn’t exist prior to around 1800.

Where once philosophers asked what it took to live a meaningful life, the cultural focus has shifted to questions about individual choice, desire and accomplishment. It is no coincidence that the term ‘individualism’ was first used (and was a pejorative term) in the 1830s, at the same time that loneliness was in the ascendant. If loneliness is a modern epidemic, then its causes are also modern – and an awareness of its history just might be what saves us.

Fay Bound Alberti

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.

Top Tips for Inclusive Community Engagement

by Leslie Wright, Community Heart and Soul: https://www.orton.org/top-tips-for-inclusive-community-engagement/

#1 There is no such thing as the “general public”.
Know who your community is (demographics, stakeholders, networks) and how they get their information - this knowledge is the foundation for how you will design community engagement activities and communicate about your project.

#2 Keep your “promise” to community members. 
Be clear about how resident input will be used and show how that information shaped project results.

#3 Go to the people.
Change up how you gather community input. Go to where people hang out whether it is a physical gathering space, like a coffee shop or community center, as well as online spaces.

#4 Spread the word.
Create a communications strategy that includes project branding, messaging and tactics for talking about your project effectively.

#5 Ask for people’s personal story.
Encourage people to express their experiences and opinions in their own words first. Don’t expect them to understand "plannerese" or technical jargon.

#6 Understand local power dynamics.
Design project activities in a way that provides dignity to everyone and where people feel safe talking about their concerns.

#7 Engage around interests.
Sometimes you have to participate in community issues that matter to others before making a connection to your own project.

#8 Think about the details.
When you hold a community event think through how you can make it more inclusive (e.g. time, location, child care, transportation, food, translators, facilitators, etc.).

#9 Use technology … if it’s a fit.
There are many great high tech and low tech ways to engage people so pick strategies that are a fit with who you are trying to reach.

#10 Make it fun!
When you bring people together for a project discussion think about how you can make it a social opportunity too.