Three crises face our cities, each of them urgent and already destructive.

A reluctant response to FOKE from Founder and CEO Elizabeth Farrelly.

In recent months the Minns government has handed down 39 Transport Oriented Development (TOD) rezonings across NSW, four of which (Gordon, Killara, Roseville, Lindfield) are within the Ku-ring-gai LGA, with heights up to 20 storeys.

Language. Language is everything, right? Language connects and empowers us, thrills and delights us, makes us laugh, cry, celebrate or sweat. Words can make us fall in love, fall out of love, take the bait, leave the room, fall happily asleep.

“In the future, will we all be stuck in tiny apartments with no outside space?” This was the opening question to me in a recent interview with a group of primary school children. No, I said, slightly taken aback. Grim apartments aren’t the only option. We have a choice. Carefully I painted a picture of the middle way - delightful apartments with rooms and corridors, big windows and balconies, fresh air, sunshine and courtyards.

Philosopher John Rawls argues that all citizens should make decisions without knowing where their own self-interest lies. This he calls the “Veil of Ignorance.” It’s a form of empathy-training, in a way - a bit like the relationship-counselling technique where you switch roles, taking the other person’s side and articulating their point of view, not your own. The Citizen Jury similarly encourages people to see the bigger, more collective and longer-term picture. In a legal arena we might call this “natural justice.” Here, we simply call it common sense.

Common, perhaps, but also radically different…

The time has come for powerful citizen leadership. When governments aren’t delivering what we want, it’s time for citizens to get up and get cracking!

Australia’s cities are our home to almost 90% of us but city-planning has come to a stalemate, with the emphasis on ‘stale.’ Witnessing as we do the daily warfare of contemporary political life – from actual wars to the so-called culture wars to the unthinking hostilities of social media – you might easily form the view that humans are irredeemably combative. We are trapped in a NIMBY-YIMBY war that oversimplifies the problem and makes solving it impossible.

On pub trivia nights, as everyone knows, the winning team won’t be you and your best mates. You’ll be too similar. The winning team will be a diverse range of people with vastly different backgrounds, experiences, knowledge and skillsets. The same applies to civic decision-making. It’s not only fairer to include people in the decisions that shape their lives and futures. It also produces a better result.  The best cities – more intricate, more subtle, greener an more interesting - will arise from…

Traditionally, cities have been the founts of human creativity. Think Damascus, Athens, Florence, Venice, London. But as modern city life becomes more demanding, as more and more of us become oppressed by the drudgery of economic survival, our capacity for creativity is depleted. Our lives, and our cities, get harder. What can be done? How can we make our cities more humane, more vibrant, more creative and more fun?

It all begins with an idea.

Housing and cities are so much the topic du jour. It seems bizarre that wealthy cities like ours can no longer afford to house their young, their workers, their old, their poor or their creative classes. But as someone said to me this morning, when governments fail, it’s time for the non-profit sector to get cracking! Why? Because not-for-profits involve real, ordinary people taking the lead, stepping in where governments fear to tread, making change. It’s time. Time for citizen-led city making.