This is an interesting article at Michael West Media about the risks to government spending that arise with falling home ownership. “Falling home ownership: the elephant in the superannuation retirement room” by Harry Chemay is a review of The Australian Government’s 2023 Intergenerational report. The article notes that “while universal compulsory superannuation has been a feature of the Australian economy for over three decades now, some two in every three retirees of pension age still rely on the Age Pension as a key source of their retirement income…”

While the Age Pension is under no great pressure, the fall in home ownership over time is of significant concern. Two-plus decades of strongly rising property prices relative to real income growth has resulted in fewer Australians owning their home debt free at retirement.

“At the heart of Australia’s retirement income system (albeit more whispered in policy circles than shouted) is the presumption of home ownership, unencumbered by debt. The rate of the Age Pension reflects this assumption. As do many of the ‘retirement budgets’ that purport to inform retirees of retirement income adequacy.”

Read the full article here http://tinyurl.com/retirementandhousing

Professor Barbara Norman, one of Australia’s leading town planners, an expert in climate change adaptation and resettlement, and Chair of the Federal Government’s Urban Policy Forum, co-authored a powerful paper after the 2019-2020 Australian Bushfires. Published in Nature (npj) it was titled: ‘Apocalypse now: Australian bushfires and the future of urban settlements’. Here is a key extract, envisioning her desired future:

“the need for resilience to be built into all town planning and the consciousness of rural communities post the apocalypse makes it easier to replace the scattered approach to housing in vulnerable areas around the big cities and along coastlines, rivers and into forests. The focus is now on compact housing where Eco Villages are facilitated and other services can be better provided. New Towns along major train lines are built using the Eco Village model with strong resilience features and possible wider lessons for larger urban centres. Australians begin to see a better future is possible to rise out of the ashes of the apocalypse.”

Read the full paper at npj - urban sustainability.

Imagine a tech-enabled village lifestyle where all your basic needs – food, shelter, water, energy and mobility – are met affordably and without waste, allowing you to pursue what matters most to you.

This is the bold vision of husband and wife team Steven Liaros and Nilmini de Silva – a new paradigm for land development that they say is sustainable, affordable and attractive to a mainstream audience.

Read the full interview of Steven and Nilmini by Poppy Johnston at The Fifth Estate.

The circular economy is said to offer the “world of opportunity to re-think and re-design the way we make stuff”. Could this concept be used to re-design the way we build our cities and neighbourhoods? How might we design places with circular infrastructure—pathways that enable the circulation of products and resources around a neighbourhood?

There’s lots of innovation happening in the planning of cities. This example, called ‘The Line’ in Saudi Arabia, is probably the exact antithesis of our proposal for a Network of Circular Economy Villages. It’s proposed to be just 200 metres wide but 100 miles long and house 9million people. It’s a mirrored skyscraper megacity. Managed by Artificial Intelligence, the city will be “a car-free, carbon neutral bubble that will boast near total sustainability and a temperate, regulated microclimate.”

Yet these claims of sustainability demonstrate a complete lack of understanding that long-term environmental sustainability requires alignment with the natural ecosystems of the place in which we build the human habitat. Like our current mega-cities, The Line is an example of building ON the land as a if it is a blank slate, a lifeless entity. We should build the human habitat IN the landscape and begin to live within environmental systems.

The plan also includes a “high-speed rail with end-to-end transit of 20-minutes”. Should we be planning for a life that is lived ever-faster, with more and more economic activity to support endless economic growth? Or could we instead consider slowing down, relaxing and allow some time to smell the roses?

‘Baugruppe‘ is German for ‘building group or building collective. It is a housing concept with the primary intention of lowering environmental impact and fostering community living. Essentially the building cooperative is the owner and developer. This is a key part of the ownership and development model for Circular Economy Villages.

Read this article in Architecture AU. (Note: Despite the claim, this is not the first Baugruppe in Australia).

“Where do our new models of housing come from? Multiple residential housing, with its limited typology, tends to be constrained by regulation, economy and delivery method, which is typically developer-led and yield-driven. Innovation does occur within these constraints, but conventional methods of delivery have limited capacity to provide the diversity and quality of medium-density housing needed to meet infill targets, regenerate our suburbs and encourage community acceptance. A project currently being developed in White Gum Valley, Perth, Western Australia, designed by architectural practice Spaceagency, shifts accepted logic about how we could, should or want to live together and, in doing so, creates a new model for medium-density housing with an altered economic, social and spatial logic.”

DESIGNING A LEGACY - ABC TV - Episode 2 Community

Duration: 58 minutes

Tim Ross looks at how architecture can help bring us together in a world where we increasingly seem divided. He uncovers a number of fascinating stories of Australians forming communities around good design.

I particularly like the scene where he is flying over yet another new subdivision, sprawling out from the edge of the city, and he says “Far too many suburbs still go up with the profits of the developer foremost in mind. Hermetically sealed houses, dependent on cars, sprawling further and further out from our city centres; but this was never the only template for designing how we live together.”

Circular Economy Villages are a new template for how we live together.

How might we design Garden Cities in the 21st century to support economic growth in regional areas? How will new technologies, particularly the internet and renewable energy, influence future settlement patterns? Can circular economy principles enable economic activity that has a positive impact on the land and on people?

Great article by Dr Sarah Barns during the COVID lockdown in 2020 when our city centres became ghost-towns. Barns offers a brief history of the modern city, from Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City, to innovations in suburban planning, to more recent flexible and healthy office spaces, epitomised by Atlassian’s new headquarters in Sydney. She asks what are the possible long-term implications of empty city centres? Are we entering an Age of Dispersion as people leave the mega-cities?

“Like the radical suburban experiments of a bygone era, this public health crisis may yet allow for renewed kinds of making and connecting in previously dormant suburbs and neglected peripheral spaces. It may not be a “flight to the suburbs” in a retrograde sense, but a casting off of rigid modes of separation between home and work, industry and nature, as expressed in city forms. Australia’s suburbs may yet be well-suited to a coming era of biophilic urbanism, one that embraces “green infrastructure,” regenerative agriculture and productive allotments of either low or high-density urban farms.

Images courtesy of SHoP Architects and BVN.

ARCHITECT - VALENTINO GARERI (creator of the CEV concept images on this website)

Born in Italy, Valentino graduated with honors in at IUAV - University of Venice, studying Sustainable Architecture.

The United Nations awarded him with the Sustainable Cities and Human Settlements Award 2022.

He is Founder of Valentino Gareri Atelier, architectural practice currently involved in projects all around the world, and the promoter of the mindset approach 'DREAMING IS MORE'.

’'DREAMING IS MORE is an encouragement to every person to find their inner talent, and use it to change the world.’’ (Valentino Gareri)

The word “Indigenous” means “originating or occurring naturally in a particular place; a native”. An Indigenous person is someone who is connected to their place, someone who understands and feels part of the natural environment around them. Yet the air-conditioned comfort of urban life necessarily inhibits our ability to fully connect with our place; while for migrants and their descendants, like myself, there is the tension between assimilating with the Australian culture and the maintaining traditional culture.

Prior to European settlement this was a multicultural and multilingual continent. To become Indigenous is to assimilate with the land, rather than into the dominant culture, which has not, as yet, assimilated itself with this country.

At its most basic level, economics is about how we organise ourselves to satisfy our needs and wants. This is not an abstract concept. It relates to the structure and arrangement of our cities; the spatial relationship between living spaces, work spaces and their connection to food, water, energy and other resources needed for surviving and thriving.

This article describes the inter-relationship between the organisation of human settlements and the organisation of economic activities, exploring how numerous economic disruptions may converge to create a zero marginal cost society. This ideal is only possible is we re-organise from highly centralised cities to a distributed network of village-scale settlements, and from an extracti9ve to a regenerative mindset.