THE THREE CRISES
Three crises face our cities, and most cities, each of them urgent and already destructive. It reminds me of Fluffy, the drooling three-headed monster-dog in Harry Potter – or maybe, less colourfully, the Venn diagram below.
We all want our kids to have somewhere decent and affordable to live, ideally within coo-ee. We all want clean air to breathe and a liveable climate. And we want a government we can trust to pursue these goals. These - housing, climate and democracy - are the three crises. Our dwellings are both too expensive and too carbon intensive to build and to run. Meanwhile our sprawling, car-addicted cities are undermining biodiversity and driving climate over a cliff. And our trust in democracy’s ability to generate a better future is at an all-time low.
City-making sits at the heart of all three problems. It also offers the solution. With more and more of us living in cities, and ever-increasing percentages of emissions deriving from these cities, it’s clear that the way we shape our cities will also shape our future. Quite likely, indeed, it will determine whether we have a future. So we must find ways to address all three crises at once, without making any of them worse.
This need to problem-solve in a holistic, interconnected, three-dimensional way makes it a design problem. The good news? It can be done.
Of the three crises, housing is the most immediate and compelling. Decent, affordable housing is a basic human right. Yet in NSW alone, 700,000 are currently at risk of homelessness. That’s huge. The temptation for governments is simply to let rip, removing all development constraints in the assumption that a building boom will reduce prices.
But there’s no evidence of this. For one thing, removing development constraints doesn’t necessarily increase “supply” (right now in NSW some 75,000 approved dwellings remain unbuilt). Plus increasing supply doesn’t necessarily reduce prices – mainly because of inflationary pressures (including negative gearing, capital gains tax exemptions, foreign investment and direct first-home assistance). We also need serious renter-protection legislation. So there’s a danger that we destroy our much-loved urban neighbourhoods for no net benefit.
While running from Filch, Harry, Ron, and Hermione find their escape blocked by Fluffy, the three-headed dog.
Climate change is a more familiar problem. It means we need to walk and cycle more, live more closely, drive less, sprawl less and consume less heating and cooling energy. Some density is good, therefore, but it doesn’t follow that hyper-dense cities are hyper-sustainable. Indeed, they are often hugely energy intensive and so hostile to inhabit that people are driven to travel more – to the natural wilderness and to far-off cities that offer the picturesque walkability that their own cities don’t offer. A better option is the ‘missing middle,’ which can be beautiful, walkable, tree-covered and engaging, re-enchanting us into voluntary localism.
This is why beauty matters. Because the best way to save nature from our depredations is to make our cities so beautiful we never want to leave.
As to democracy? George Washington said it in 1796, warning that the electoral system we have would “enable cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men…to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”1 Al Gore said it in 2006: “We have everything that we need to reduce carbon emissions, everything but political will.”2
There is less and less evidence that democracy, as we practice it, is capable of anything more purposeful than shallow populism; more and more evidence that the election system, encouraging voter self-concern and candidate narcissism delivers precisely the kinds of leaders we don’t wish to be led by.
Any one of these crises may seem blindingly complex. Together, they look almost insurmountable. But the comfort is that we all want a solution. Perhaps, then, what we need is a more accurate means of eliciting deep popular wisdom – of cultivating greater thoughtfulness rather than kneejerk opinion. The citizen assembly is just such a mechanism – thoughtful, educative, evolutionary, deliberative.
Just when the politics of city-making makes the task seem impossible, sitting down and talking deeply together could just take the politics out of it, leaving only the genuine questions of creating a better common future, together.