Urban dreaming: Australian cities for the future

Australia's three-tiered system of government raises unique challenges, not to mention the planning impacts of partisan politics and staggered, multilevel electoral cycles. The reality is that urban development cannot happen across the disjunct of three or four year time horizons; and our urban needs transcend the neat division of local, state and federal.

Given that integrated and meaningful structural urban change often takes decades to come to fruition, a critical element of desirable city growth must be an embedded culture of urban strategy that embraces the interests of all stakeholders and constituents in a predictable fashion over time.

One important ingredient of this is institutional: being able to engage with stakeholders in an ongoing dialogue, and making proposals for urban change: but this need not be a centralised decision-making authority.

Inclusive governance – and decentralised urban functionality more generally – is a crucial aspect of the long-term development of our cities, and will be a good test for the spirit of our democracy. Collaboration goes beyond simple consultation, and by involving more stakeholders – not only for comment on individual planning projects or issues, but as legitimate voices in the direction their urban environment will take – suboptimal outcomes can be avoided. Additionally, this urban strategy process has the potential to mitigate and transcend the vagaries of partisan politics.

We would do well to remember that "urban" is a transcendent concept that pertains to rural and regional areas as much as major cities. Embracing this will be a step in the right direction of being more inclusive and neutralising the divide between cities and regions. And we would do well to better consider how we might optimise the urban-agricultural-forest balance in the context of broader settlement policy.

Just imagine a network of city nodes, each a few hundred thousand people connected by advanced communications technology and transport access, where people don't need to travel too far from home to find meaningful work, where the society is economically productive and competitive, socially and ecologically resilient, surrounded by lush forests (perhaps geoengineered in large scale reforestation programmes to bring increased rainfall), and subsisting on "vertical agriculture" (where, without any derogation of the value of traditional farming, food produce is grown in multistory glasshouses); and while people would live in closer proximity, the quality and quantity of their public spaces, parks and gardens would be much greater too.

As the urban boundaries of major cities continue to expand and both deforestation and food security become recognised as long-term concerns, open space – both within and between cities – will become increasingly valued for both its scarcity and potential. This does not have to be utopia. Perhaps, in the future, sea levels will be much higher than they once were, that some of our cities or parts of them might have gone the way of Atlantis. If we thought that this might happen, how would it change our broader urban strategy today? We need to be rigorous about our visions, and we need to be bold in our policy. We need to remember the long time horizons of urban development.

It can reasonably be argued by most state governments that these policy directions are generally supported and are in place. However, such evidence as declining liveability rankings, high and rising congestion costs, overcrowded public transport, high and rising greenhouse gas emissions and a growing supply shortfall in housing (especially for affordable housing) suggests that change is not happening with sufficient speed.

If our cities are to remain great cities, transformational changes will be needed, rather than a continuation of the incrementalism of the past.