A Q&A WITH BETTER CITIES’ FOUNDER ELIZABETH FARRELLY

In this interview, Elizabeth discusses her passion for connecting the world of ideas with our physical environment, how she defines a healthy democracy, and the inspiration behind founding The Better Cities Initiative.

Your extensive career spans various roles—critic, broadcaster, columnist, author, and teacher—but has always focused on architecture and ethics. Could you share a brief overview of your journey?
In fact, my career, if that’s the word, is even more dog-leg than that, since my first love was biology: I began life as a medical student, before moving to philosophy and finally landing on architecture. I did practice in architecture for a few years, before my interest in ideas drew me into writing. Plus I’ve stood for election three times – at Council level and at state (both upper and lower house). Throughout all this, my yearning has been to link the world of ideas to the real world, bringing imagination and principle into the way we make our world. To me, bridging that gap is where the thrill lies.

Elizabeth with Paul Keating as PM in 1993 when he launched her first book, a monograph on Glenn Murcutt AO (also pictured).

Why did you start The Better Cities Initiative?
The Better Cities Initiative really grew out of my most recent election campaign (2023). It was an upper house campaign, which meant we were able to canvas many important issues that link city planning both to the micro-scale of local neighbourhood design and to the macro-patterns of deforestation, sprawl, soil death and coal seam gas. It became clear that there is a communal hunger to improve the way we create our habitat and a stratum of the community that is thoughtful, good-hearted and unvoiced. I found the idea of empowering this deep community wisdom exhilarating – and that drove The Better Cities Initiative into being; to have these conversations without getting bogged in politics.

What do you hope to achieve with Better Cities in the next 12 months?
We are focused right now on working with the New Democracy Foundation to hold a number of Citizens’ Assemblies across different local government areas in NSW. Each will generate a Citizens’ Charter to encapsulate community values and sit at the front end of the planning process. Subsequently, we propose – by allying ourselves with like-minded organisations and individuals - to pursue other projects including an Urban Simulation Lab, where people can envisage future neighbourhoods; a statewide universally-accessible planning map; city-making classes in primary schools; urban design courses for developers and councillors and rewriting the Planning Act to put people at front and centre.

Elizabeth electioneering with Alex Greenwich and architect Caroline Pidcock in 2023

How would you define a better city?
Almost all cities, right now, face dual crises of climate and housing affordability. Both are urgent and both are critical to civilised life. So we need to shape our cities in a way that solves both, simultaneously. In Australia, since our population is 90% urbanised, the future of the city is very clearly the future of the species. To solve both crises in parallel we must end sprawl, enhance tree canopy, build mass public housing and generate high-quality medium-rise neighbourhoods (“the missing middle”) whose beautiful streets encourage more journeys to be made on foot than by car. This improves physical health, mental health, climate change, urban heat, affordability, civic engagement and a sense of human dignity. In the end, very simply, a better city is a walkable city, where people can and do mostly choose to walk.

How do you envision the future of urban spaces in terms of community involvement?
We should all feel far more empowered in both the design and shaping of our neighbourhoods and the delivery of housing. It’s time we stopped relying on ‘the market’ the act like some kind of deity and magically deliver benefits for all. We know now that this is one of the great neoliberal lies. Governments have an important role in providing public housing (Paris now has 40%, just in order to keep the city alive) but also in assisting via legislation and other means the development of community, cooperative and co-housing models of all kinds. We need more variety but also, simply, the joy of agency. Our streets should feel like part of our living space; welcoming, textured, shaded and humanly scaled.

“Paris, with eight-storey streets, 40% public housing and mandatory green/solar roofs, offers a fine model of a people-enhancing city.”

How would you define a healthy democracy?
A healthy democracy is one that knows, articulates and lives by its values. To my mind, they should be the Platonic virtues: truth, beauty and justice.

The City of Truth is one where government does not treat the public as the enemy and secrete almost all information behind a veil of “commercial in confidence” but engages, rather, in radical openness.

The City of Beauty is one that offers its citizens a sense of meaning and engagement in something purposeful, incentivising them to live locally rather than constantly driving to wilderness escapes.

The City of Justice is one that does not burden half of its populace with chronic disease, extreme urban heat, disproportionate pollution, lack of transport and services and unfair road tolls as well as socio-economic disadvantage and does not load even worse conditions onto future generations but instead strives to spread the benefits of good city-making equally across the cityscape and to leave our children and grandchildren with a world as lovely and accessible as the one we ourselves inherited.

Elizabeth with her book ‘Killing Sydney’ at Better Read than Dead bookshop in Newtown