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 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.

Everybody Needs Good Neighbours: Melbourne moves into community-led housing

Members of Urban Coup (Image: Thomson Reuters Foundation/Handout/Urban Coup)

by Michael Taylor, This Is Place: http://www.thisisplace.org/i/?id=c27114d0-1598-4a0c-94be-be56fba3dbd3KUALA LUMPUR - In an ideal world, Alex Fearnside would cycle home from work, park his bike in the basement of his apartment complex in Melbourne city centre, then jog upstairs through a beautiful courtyard to his flat, stopping only for a quick chat with other residents in the shared dining area.Later, Fearnside and his wife would head down to the communal kitchen to eat a meal cooked by their neighbours.Fearnside's ten-year-old dream for life in the Australian city is nearing reality as it awaits planning approval. It is shared by 50 other Melbourne residents who belong to Urban Coup, a collective that wants to turn a disused button factory in an old industrial area into a co-housing community by 2020.

"What is driving us is we want to know our neighbours," said the 38-year-old environmental scientist. "We want to know that as we're growing old, we have people around us who have similar values to who we are and what we bring."

Urban Coup is one of five innovative housing initiatives that put community at their heart.

The projects are supported with expertise and networks mobilised by Resilient Melbourne, part of 100 Resilient Cities, a network backed by The Rockefeller Foundation to help cities deal with modern-day pressures.

This year, more than half of Asia-Pacific's population will be urban, and that figure will increase to two-thirds by 2050, the United Nations estimates.

But as the region's cities continue to expand, services and infrastructure are struggling to keep pace with rising populations and economic growth, while the effects of climate change have created additional challenges.

The Melbourne projects aim to help find solutions to the city's expanding urban sprawl, worsening traffic congestion and growing social isolation - all of which can contribute to problems like alcoholism and domestic violence.

And by building stronger community bonds, Melbourne should be better placed to recover from potential shocks and stresses, such as rising temperatures and droughts, infrastructure failures and potential pandemics, the schemes' proponents say.

"Many of the people who started Urban Coup remember growing up on streets where they knew everybody on that street," said Fearnside. "We wanted a building that would enable us to know our neighbours and allow us to support each other."

URBAN SPRAWL

In the past decade, Melbourne has topped various polls as the world's most liveable city, attracting new residents to Australia's second-biggest city.

Just under 5 million people live there, and the population is expected to double over the next 30 years, putting increased strain on infrastructure and housing.

As more estates have been built on greenfield sites outside the centre, the rise in urban sprawl has brought problems.

Housing developments have outpaced infrastructure, leading to dormitory suburbs, whose residents commute daily but enjoy few services, amenities and transport links.

That causes traffic congestion and longer commute times, as well as a lack of interaction between neighbours, experts say.

"We live in a really beautiful part of Melbourne but we don't really know our neighbours," said Fearnside, who currently lives with his wife in a townhouse 5 km (3 miles) north of the central business district.

In Melbourne's central areas, high-rise blocks have become more common in recent years. But as in many other Australian cities, first-time buyers and families have struggled to afford steeper prices stoked by overseas property investors.

And much new construction has been driven by developers, which tend to put profit before the provision of leisure or communal facilities.

On average, Melbourne property prices have doubled over the last decade, said Clinton Baxter, state director at Savills property agency in the city, and this trend is set to continue.

Central government efforts to help first-time buyers include a grant for deposits and stamp duty concessions, while state governments have sought to open up more land and fast-track approval processes for developments.

Despite this, the supply of new and affordable housing in Melbourne has struggled to keep up with demand. It is not uncommon to see would-be buyers camping out overnight ahead of a land sale to be front of the queue for their own building plot.

"The state government has struggled to keep up with the infrastructure requirements for such a rapidly growing city," Baxter said.

LIVING EXPERIMENT

The five projects supported by Resilient Melbourne will bring together developers, city and state government agencies, service providers and potential buyers and renters.

Each project is crafted around different community-focused models - some based on renewal of the inner-city and others starting from scratch on greenfield sites.

The projects will also be part of an academic study.

"We want this to be a genuine living experiment so that we can understand in deep ways what works and what doesn't work - and record it so the successes can be replicated in Melbourne but also internationally," said Toby Kent, the city's chief resilience officer.

The projects backed by Resilient Melbourne include a greenfield site for about 5,000 homes led by developer Mirvac.

It is working with local authorities to incorporate community aspects from an early stage.

Besides at least one new school, there will be a town centre with shops and a supermarket, and a hub to house programmes and events run by the council or residents, with a community-managed cafe and playground, said Anne Jolic, a director at Mirvac.

"Often people who move to some of these ... new housing (developments) will feel very isolated," she said.

Melbourne developer Assemble, meanwhile, plans to turn an old CD and DVD factory near the city centre into 73 flats.

The property will include communal spaces like a cafe, a co-working space, crèche and grocery store, and is consulting with potential residents and existing neighbours on the design.

When the final plans are drawn up, residents will pay a refundable 1 percent deposit to secure a place, said Kris Daff, managing director of Assemble.

Once built, they will move in and start a five-year lease with an option to buy at a pre-agreed price, or exit the lease and leave at any time.

Services and events on offer will include dry cleaning, apartment cleaning, dog walking, community dinners, walking groups and film nights in a communal room.

"There is a huge amount of research that shows that when acute shocks have struck in cities, communities where there are existing connections are better able to bounce back," said Kent, Melbourne's resilience chief.

Could Free Public Transport Inspire Sustainable Travel?

mronline.org

by Jeremy Williams, Make Wealth History: https://makewealthhistory.org/2018/06/18/could-free-public-transport-inspire-sustainable-travel/

All around the world cities are struggling with traffic congestion, and with the associated delays, carbon emissions and air pollution. Behind every traffic jam are thousands of personal decisions about how people are going to travel. The more people choose public transport, the fewer traffic jams and the less pollution there will be. But how do you get people to give up their cars?

A growing number of cities are turning to what looks like an obvious solution: make public transport free. It would entice people onto buses and trams, and it has the added benefit of democratizing public transport and making sure that nobody is excluded. Germany announced a trial run in several cities earlier this year, but dozens of places already have free transport in one form or another. Here's a small selection:

• Talinn is the one of the best known. The Estonian capital offers free public transport to local residents, paid for in part by the high number of paying visitors and tourists.
• Geneva does it the other way round, and offers tourists a free public transport card for the length of their stay. This encourages visitors to leave their cars behind.
• Melbourne has free tram transport in the city centre, a deliberate effort to discourage people from driving into the city. Kuala Lumpur also discourages driving in its downtown business district by laying on free wifi-enabled LPG powered buses.
• Singapore made bus travel on key commuter routes free before peak time. This encouraged more people to go to work earlier, and reduced pressure on the transport network during the rush hour.
• As my parents regularly remind me, over 60s get free bus travel in Britain. London offers free bus travel to children and teenagers.

Of course, there's no such thing as 'free' public transport. It's just not paid for through the traditional method of charging riders for a ticket. Most of these free schemes are subsidised by local government, and because of that they're quite precarious. Britain has had several examples of free bus services that have fallen foul of budget cuts and introduced fares - here's one in Huddersfield that used to serve students. Should we be relying on governments, national or local, to be paying for transport?

Before we jump too quickly to say no, it's worth remembering that car drivers don't pay the full cost of their transport choices either. The costs of congestion, pollution, accidents and climate change are all externalised. Governments often pay for roads and maintenance, parking and policing. Everybody's getting a subsidy one way or another. Why not price in more of the full cost of driving, and use it to encourage public transport?

Government doesn't have to be the only way to pay for it either. Hybrid funding models can draw on sponsorship and advertising. Business districts or universities might want to pay for transport that serves their areas. And funds can be tied directly to cars: Baltimore's 'Charm City Circulator' was designed as a low-emissions free bus service paid for by higher parking charges. In Hasselt, Belgium, plans for a bypass were scrapped and the money spent on making buses free instead. They ran free for 16 years before rising costs brought fares back in.

Does it work? Evidence is mixed. Talinn found that the people most likely to use the free bus were not car drivers but pedestrians. The number of bus riders rose, the number of walkers fell - but 10% of drivers did switch to the bus, which made enough of a difference for the scheme to be judged a success. In fact, Estonia is planning to follow Talinn's lead and make a nationwide free transport network. In other places, bus travel soared and there's no question that it worked. But since there are many models for funding and operating free travel, and many different goals - from reduced rush hour traffic to social inclusion to air pollution - there's no one way to assess success.

Since there are so many overlapping social and environmental benefits of free public transport though, I expect we will hear more about it in future.

How to Reinvent Your City, Burning Man Style

by Jessica Reeder, UTNE Reader: http://www.utne.com/arts/reinvent-your-city-burning-man-style

This post originally appeared at Shareable.net

Every August for one week, the Burning Man festival takes place in a temporary city of its own creation, called Black Rock City after Nevada’s Black Rock Desert where it is located. This year, Black Rock City’s population will be 60,000 — bigger than Carson City, the state capital of Nevada.

Our real-world cities, meanwhile, are struggling to provide the services citizens need, limited by declining tax income, record debt, and increasingly complex social issues. Cities have no choice but find ways to do more with less. Many seek to harness the creative energies of citizens to fill the gaps, asking them to take a more active role in governance, service provision, and even in creating new services.

It’s easy to write off Burning Man as a hippie love fest in the desert. It has its own problems like any city, but that's selling it short, especially in one regard - its remarkable ability to foster participation. The event -- which for 26 years has expected participants to practice sharing, gifting, and radical self-reliance -- is an effective proving ground for experiments in community self-organization. In fact, participants build most of the city without any direct oversight from organizers.

Given that cities need its citizens more than ever, can the lessons of Burning Man’s Black Rock City, which pushes citizen participation to the limit, be applied to modern cities? Of course they can. Here are a few ways you can support participation, sharing and community in your own town.

First, Adopt the Right Mindset: There are No Spectators 

Michel Bauwens, the founder of the Peer to Peer Foundation, believes that the proper role of government in our emerging networked society is that of partner in social production. This means that in a myriad ways government helps citizens help themselves. This turns the existing model of government as a top-down service provider on its head. Instead, government works in a bottom up fashion to empower citizens to provide for themselves.

Burning Man does exactly this. It fosters a culture of participation through its Ten Principles and provide basic infrastructure such as roads, sanitation, and safety, which, by the way, rely heavily on volunteer labor. Participants fill in the blanks beautifully with a seemingly unlimited number of options for care, connection, artistic expression, education, sustenance, and fun. At Burning Man, there are no spectators. Likewise, we increasingly need cities where every citizen is intimately involved in creating their city on a day to day basis.

Crowdsource The Budget 

Almost none of the hundreds of art projects exhibited at Burning Man are fully funded by the festival. Many of them are crowdfunded through Kickstarter or Indiegogo. This requires active community participation, and it also organically vets projects ensuring that the best ideas are likely to be funded.

The city of Vallejo, California is taking this idea for a spin, testing out participatory budgeting for 30 percent of its funds. Community members decide which projects to fund, and must work together to get the funding approved.

"If you live in northern Vallejo and you want a bus shelter, then you know what, you've got to partner with people in other parts of the city who want bus shelters too," Councilmember Marti Brown told The Atlantic Cities. "People are going to have to learn how to think like that. It encourages people to work with groups they've never worked with before."

Vallejo is the first to try participatory budgeting city-wide, though it’s now being considered in San Francisco. Want to see participatory budgeting in your city? Get involved.

Build Your Own Bank 

Burning Man famously bans all exchange of money, recommending that people share and “gift” their resources within the community. That’s not likely to happen in the rest of the world very soon — but with the recession, the housing boom-and-bust and the financial crisis all tightly linked to the banking industry, an ever-growing number of people are ditching their Wall Street banks for citizen owned banks like credit unions and public banks. A new report suggests that a public banking could reverse the effects of recent consolidation, bolster the treasuries of government banks, and put financial controls back in the hands of the people.

Though common in Germany and elsewhere, The Bank of North Dakota is currently the only state-run bank in the United States, and it’s been hailed as an “economic miracle.” Could each city or county set up a local bank to create its own community miracle? It certainly could.

Share Your Profits 

There’s another way to share your money and your values with your community: Join a local cooperative and encourage your city government to support the growth of the cooperative sector. Coops are owned and controlled by either workers or customers. They are more democratic, community-minded, and more stable job creators than most private businesses.

Did you know that 120 million Americans belong to at least one cooperative? That 25 percent of the nation’s electric grid is cooperatively owned? 2012 is the International Year of Cooperatives, and this proven, fast-growing business model is offers many advantages over conventional, tightly controlled private businesses.

Worker-owned businesses like The Evergreen Cooperatives are addressing poverty and unemployment, helping money stay in the community where previous charity initiatives have failed. National coops are booming too, including chains like ACE Hardware which help mom-and-pop shops stay open.

Hitch, Surf & Crash 

Want to live well on a budget at Burning Man? Pool your resources with a “camp” of anywhere from five to 500 people, who share kitchens, showers, shelters and even transportation so that everyone can afford access to these necessities.

Want to live well on a budget in your city? Use the same logic: join a car-sharing program, try out a coworking space, share your lodging and, if you’re traveling, rent somebody’s empty room instead of shelling out for a hotel.

Many cities are beginning to adopt community bike programs (of which Black Rock City also has one), but beyond that, there is plenty of room to expand. City-run sharing networks could generate income while saving residents money.

Think it’s a good idea? You might need to start your own. And encourage your city to adopt sharing-friendly policies.

Plug In to the Resource Grid 

Just a few months ago, Burning Man launched a tool called Spark. Designed to facilitate collaboration between attendees, the site allows anyone to create a free “ad” for services or resources needed or offered (on a gift basis). Today’s ads include a call for carpenters, an offer to “freeze anything” and several musicians looking for performance opportunities.

Resource sharing is complicated mostly because it can’t be done over longer distances. Sites like Craigslist, Freecycle and Taskrabbit are good places to start active collaboration on projects, and new platforms are being developed that will further facilitate getting things done without buying a bunch of supplies. One new platform-in-progress, Social Alchemy, is being developed by Burners Without Borders’ leader Carmen Mauk and hopes to be a collaborative project management tool — for example, helping relief workers in disaster areas find the equipment and labor they need to do their work more efficiently.

You might need to start your own local sharing network using a service like ShareTribe — but first, check Craigslist, Freecycle and your local tool lending library to find out what’s already going on.

Reprogram Your Government 

Burning Man organizers lay out the roads and some infrastructure, then allow the population to build its own city. In the rest of America, we don’t have as much creative control — but many of us are exercising much less control than we could, often because of the difficulties of dealing with bureaucratic government bodies.

Do you want transparent, efficient government? Participatory budgeting? Streamlined voting? Easy access to your representatives? It’s all made more possible with technology.Code for America is a group that works with city governments, helping them transform their information infrastructure to improve citizen engagement, efficiency and transparency. Can you help your city adopt new social technologies? Yes, you can.

“As our futures are increasingly becoming urban, cities need to start experimenting with citizen participatory process,” says James Hanusa, New Initiatives Consultant to Burning Man. He points to the Urban Prototyping project, which seeks citizen participation in redesigning San Francisco public spaces, and the Burning Man Project, which supports the application of Burning Man's Ten Principles in many communities.

These ideas just scratch the surface. Much more can be done to make cities as participatory as Burning Man. And while the above innovations increase citizen participation, they lack one thing Burning Man offers.

Black Rock City is manifested by thousands of people in the spirit of celebration. The passion of participants is unmistakable. They are drawn into the civic drama by the drama of their own self-actualization. They experience — sometimes for the first time — what it’s like to be accepted completely in public, and so are willing to give their best to the city that invites the best in them. This is the way the city is made, and how it makes people.

The true flowering of cities may not occur until the civic is married to the celebratory. This too is within reach.

  

Jessica Reeder is a member of the Black Rock City Department of Public Works, and occasionally writes for the Burning Blog.

Image by Christopher, licensed under Creative Commons.