The
New City aims to foster critical thinking and debate on
the future of our cities
and the disproportionate influence of inner-city thinking on
urban planning and economic, social and environmental policy. Editors: John Muscat,
Jeremy Gilling
Urban
Diary: Jan
Gehl's pedestrian ideas for Sydney ...
[enter]
[37]
14 March 2010 / Ruining our cities to save them
Green urban planners and
politicians are ramping up their campaign for more
compact cities, but if they succeed the outcome will be
less affordable housing, fewer jobs and horrendous
traffic congestion ...
[more]Republished by New
Geography
The
Not-So-Lucky Country:
Writing in
Forbes.com, Joel Kotkin backs The New City while
nailing
Kevin Rudd as a
darling of tertiary educated progressives ...
[more]
For home buyers, no dream in
Disneyland
We
take aim at the welfare lobby's dangerous thinking on housing
affordability ...
[more]
[36] 12
March 2010 / Sydney: choking in its own density
Wendell
Cox explains how Sydney's air quality is deteriorating
due to flawed urban consolidation policies ...
[more]
The
trouble with George Street: While Sydney's Lord Mayor indulges her
green fantasies, the CBD's main street shows worsening signs of blight,
writes Miranda Devine ...
Dreams
into nightmares: the housing affordability time bomb
Wendell Cox
exposes some flawed
thinking about the housing affordability crisis.
[35] 12
January 2010 / Copenhagen: the fall of Green Statism
Now we
have the Copenhagen deniers. These are people who won't
accept that the UN's climate change process has been
derailed ...
[more]Republished
by New Geography
The
suburbs are sexy: Wendell Cox demolishes the flawed thinking behind
the Obama administration's anti-suburban agenda ...
[more]
Workers
flee Sydney's unaffordable housing
Flawed land
supply policies are squeezing workers out of Sydney's
housing market ... [more]
[34]
4 October 2009 / Toward the Great Australian Nightmare: a
quarter floor in a high-rise block?
Wendell Cox demonstrates how home
ownership is slipping away from essential workers like nurses,
teachers and police and ambulance officers ...
[more]
It's
time for the burbs to be heard: We must listen to the silent
majority who live in the suburban heartland, argues Bernard Salt ...
[more]
Housing
affordability: NZ and UK Labour show the ALP the way
[33] 10
September 2009 / The crisis of academic urban planning
A wide
gulf has opened up between mainstream Australian values
and the prescriptions of our urban planning academics
...
[more]
Forcing density in Australia's suburbs: Tony Recsei explains why
there should be little support for higher density Smart Growth
ideologies in the Australian context ...
[more]
Is
environmental sustainability socially unsustainable?
Misuse of the
term 'sustainability' is threatening living standards ...
[more]
So Australian cities are
environmental hell holes?
Planning Never Never Land?: Trying to contain future sprawl in South
East Queensland is a physical impossibility: the numbers don't add up,
writes Ross Eliott ...
[more]
The
Herald campaigns for Sydney as East Berlin
The Sydney Morning Herald's
'campaign for Sydney' was for no one but its narrow band of inner-city readers ...
[more]
How elite environmentalists are
impoverishing blue-collar Americans: Joel Kotkin delivers a timely
warning on how green agendas can hurt workers ...
[more]
The Chinese Century
A series of commentaries on
the implications for Sydney of China's rise ...
[enter]
[32]
25 June 2009 / Bulldozing the 'burbs or bulldozing the truth?
The
green school of journalism plays fast and loose with the
evidence in its rush to report the decline and fall of suburbia
... [more]
Sydney: from
world city to 'sick man' of Australia: The 'Great
Australian Dream' of home ownership is being extinguished, says Wendell Cox,
especially in Sydney ...
[more]
[31]
30 March 2009 / Suburbs and climate change: a homegrown brawl
A war of words has erupted
over research suggesting that low-density suburbs may not be as bad
for climate change as environmentalists and planners so often insist
... [more]
Humanity can't power progress
with green faith: Environmentalists who oppose
everything but renewable energy are condemning billions to poverty, writes
Martin Ferguson ...
[more]
[29] 28 September 2008 / Surging Greens peddle hypocrisy
Presenting
themselves as high-minded crusaders, the Greens appeal to
the narrowest of narrow self-interest ...
[more]
Replacing
Fatropolis with Fit Towns: Plans to redesign
our towns as 'fit towns' are turning into something very repressive, writes Tim
Black ... [more]
[28] 14 August 2008 / On the Australian housing
shortage
Wendell Cox delivers the
plain truth that housing shortages are the product of
deliberate policy ...
[more]
The housing bubble: the
planner's role and lessons learned:
Restrictions on expansion into
urban peripheries have fed the global housing bubble, says Hugh
Pavletich ... [more]
[25] January 2008 /
Green Labor or blue-collar betrayal?
That Labor’s
return to office would be framed in grandiose terms, as
a watershed shift from social conservatism to
progressivism, was easy to predict ...
[continue]
From gays to
Nerdistan:
Bernard Salt explains how urban vitality may owe more to
hi-tech nerds than hip creative types ...
[more]
Unlike
many commentators, ranging from
Alan Ramsey to Imre
Saluszinsky, we don’t think Saturday’s election result is a foregone
conclusion ...
[continue]
Dark green
barbarians:
Green superstition and mysticism are prevailing over
rational thinking, argues Craig Emerson ...
[more]
[23] Sep-Oct 2007 / Skills and collaboration, not WorkChoices, deliver
economic success
In our March 2007 editorial, we said that compared
to the prime years of economic reform and responsibility
under Bob Hawke and Paul Keating in the 1980s and early
1990s, the Howard Government’s economic record has been
patchy at best ...
[continue]
Orbital is the
way to go:
In a city
where jobs are scattered, Sydney's tollways are doing a good
job, writes Michael Duffy. We need more of them ...
[more]
[20] May 2007 / Coal mining will outlast green hysterics
‘Not all jobs are good’, says former Liberal Party
leader John Hewson ... [continue]
We'll never get to Kyoto by transit:
Proposals to
replace cars with public transport will fail, argues Wendell
Cox. They will never be an answer to greenhouse-gas emissions.
[18] March 2007 / Labor can relive its economic glory days
With Labor under Kevin
Rudd currently enjoying a stratospheric lead in the opinion polls, there
are no doubt many who think the election is done and dusted ...
[continue]
In praise of chain stores:
Chain stores
aren't destroying local flavour, says Virginia Postrel,
they're providing variety and comfort.
[16]
Dec 06- Jan 07 / Green judiciary a looming menace to workers
If you believe judges should decide every case on
its merits, if you believe this is an essential feature of the judicial
function, be concerned ... [continue]
ABC's
Counterpoint tackles urban consolidation: ABC Radio National's
Counterpoint program presents
Michael Warby
and
Wendell Cox
on the negative consequences of land rationing and urban
consolidation.
[15] November 2006 /
Don't sacrifice workers on altar of climate change
According to a recent Climate Institute survey, 54
per cent of rural Australians believe the government should do more to reduce
climate change ... [continue]
Why Perth is booming:
Joel Kotkin
explains that the culturally savvy, 'hip' cities of the dot
com era such as Sydney are losing ground to the new
boomtowns fueled by high energy prices, like Perth.
[14] October
2006 / Progressivism
now a preserve of the privileged
There are two more books
on a familiar theme: growing numbers of the upper
middle-class are turning progressive ...
[continue]
How the suburbs made us
rich: Without the
suburbs, our parents and grandparents would have paid rent
most of their lives, and the equity that so many aspirations
depend on would not have developed, suggests Wendell Cox.
[13] September 2006 / Labor’s presidency hijacked by activists
‘The road to hell is
paved with good intentions’. That proverb readily came
to mind when Senator John Faulkner announced his
intention to stand for Labor’s national presidency ...
[continue]
The dead-weight of
planning restraints: In Australia
and elsewhere, urban planning has ceased to respond to
individual needs and preferences but follows a central plan
instead, writes Alan Moran.
[12] August 2006 / Blogosphere has little to offer Labor
It took a while – going on a year – but The New
City is finally being noticed by the ’blogs ...
[continue]
How sprawl got a bad name: Robert
Bruegmann believes that worries about sprawl have become so
vivid not because conditions are so
good. Soaring expectations are the real cause.
[11] July 2006 / Farewell to the tree-hugging premiers: state Labor’s new course
Interviewed recently about a book on his term as premier
of New South Wales from 1976 to 1986, Neville Wran was
asked to nominate his greatest achievement ... [continue]
[10] June 2006 / The suburban economy and its
enemies
Treasury Secretary Ken Henry’s recent address to
business economists was an apt prism through which to
survey Sydney’s immediate past and distant future
...
[continue]
The
curse of the creative class:
Richard Florida's book
The Rise of theCreative Class made him the darling of
inner-city progressives. Steven Malanga begs to differ.
[9] May 2006 / Exposing the left’s strange economic
hyper-rationalism
‘Bourgeois bohemians’ is how American writer David
Brooks describes the new elite “of highly educated folk
who have one foot in the bohemian world of creativity
and another in the bourgeois realm of ambition and
worldly success”... [continue]
Nimbies, Yobs and Lebs:
Quadrant magazine argues that Nimbyism is now one of
the most obnoxious features of modern communities. It is the
triumph of localism and parish pump politics over wider concerns.
Prices and planning: the state of the
housing industry:
Alan Moran finds that the high cost of Sydney housing relates to the scarcity
value created by urban planning and the imposts on developers of government
regulations
“Indeed a better question for
tonight's discussion might have been ‘would Ben Chifley be a
train driver today?’" ... [continue]
Sydney isn't full, so let's stop the rot:
Michael Duffy argues the indiscriminate push for urban consolidation, though
based on flawed assumptions, is turning Sydney into an unaffordable rat's nest
[4] August
2005 / Nuclear energy power for the people?
[3]
June 2005 /
Labor
and refugees - clear vision in the eye of the
storm
The shadow
Minister for Immigration, Laurie Ferguson,
deserves great credit for his efforts to
find the space to honour Australia’s, and Labor’s, international legal and moral
obligations ...
[continue]
[2] March
2005 /
Tax dollars keep the inner city dream alive
Our last editorial
pointed out that a crucial difference between Labor
and the conservative parties is that the ALP’s
policies and pronouncements are out of kilter with
(well to the left of) the views of Labor voters
...
[continue]
[1]
January 2005 /
Winning back the disenchanted
Labor has now
lost four Federal elections in a row – its
worst run since the Menzies era ...[continue]