The carbon devil in the detail on urban density

This means viewing density as just one instrument among many in our urban toolkit. We should use it carefully and selectively, not as a universal prescription that is forced unthinkingly upon our cities.

It similarly requires us to understand the form of our cities as the effect of urban social, economic and institutional processes, not the determinant. People congregate and interact in cities because of social and economic logics, not because they were made to by urban form.

Refreshingly, the draft Australian national urban design guidelines shy away from installing density as a driver of urban outcomes and instead propose methods that could operate at any scale of urban form, albeit rather innocent of the social and economic processes shaping cities and their appearance.

We could be very dense in the way we plan our cities. But we can be much cleverer than that.