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The Daily Telegraph featured comments from Professor Nicole Gurran, who explained how western Sydney suburbs like Penrith, Blacktown and Parramatta face higher temperatures during heatwaves due to their inland location and lack of coastal breezes.
This article highlights key research on gender, cities, and planning. Despite some progress, recent research suggests that the ‘gender agenda’ remains incomplete, likely due to failures and inequalities in planning schools themselves.
Feminist researchers have long critiqued failures to consider gender in urban planning and design. Broadly speaking, this work highlights three concerns:
• How the spatial arrangement and design of cities, neighbourhoods and homes reflect and reinforce gender norms, impede women’s mobility, and limit economic opportunities;
• Physical safety / exposure to violence, particularly in public spaces; and
• Under-representation in political and leadership roles and or planning processes.
Although earlier writing focused on gender based differences, more recent work emphasises that gender intersects with other factors – such as race, class, age, ability – to mediate needs and experiences of the city.
The current housing crisis has renewed debates about how to regulate short-term rental platforms such as Airbnb. The international research on the impact of these rentals is clear: when landlords “host” tourists rather than residents, housing supply is depleted, rents rise and neighbourhoods change.
Given Australia’s dire shortage of rental housing, restricting short-term rentals seems like a no-brainer. New research published this week showed the share of rental properties under $400 per week has fallen to 15% in most capital cities – half of what it was a year ago.
We’ve long studied these issues, watching as major cities around the world – from New York to Berlin to Barcelona – have enacted strong laws designed to protect local housing supply and neighbourhoods.
But do they even work? And would controlling short-term rentals solve Australia’s long-term rental crisis?
The federal Labor government has promised to craft a national housing and homelessness plan and to fund new social housing, returning Canberra to a field it all but abandoned for a decade. A new Productivity Commission report is scathing about current arrangements and calls for far-reaching change.
Yet some of the report’s key recommendations rest on faulty assumptions and outdated economic thinking. It relies on a misplaced belief that the market will respond to low-income households’ need for affordable housing. Its faith in deregulation as a cure-all is misguided.
The experience of recent decades and a wealth of research evidence instead point to the need to increase government investment in public and community housing.
