Guest Author • Jun 17, 2021 •
Ella Henry, Auckland University of Technology While I am always happy to celebrate any accolades my country and city might garner on the international stage, seeing Auckland/Tāmaki Makaurau awarded the top ranking in a recent “most liveable cities” survey left me somewhat flummoxed. In particular, I would argue that many Māori whānau in Auckland do not enjoy … Read More
Guest Author • May 07, 2021 •
Mohammed Makki, University of Technology Sydney “Among all species, it is perhaps only humans who create habitats that are not fit to live in.” – Stephen Marshall It’s a damning statement but one that can be reasonably argued to be true. We don’t have the best track record in creating lasting and sustainable habitats, especially if one … Read More
Guest Author • Oct 17, 2019 •
Judy Kavanagh Over the last 40 years, New Zealanders – and people in other countries – have experienced big changes in the jobs they do and where they live and work. These changes include: a decline in manufacturing jobs an increase in jobs in ‘information-intensive’ industries (which are better paid and require a tertiary qualification) increasing participation of women in … Read More
Robert Hickson • Oct 06, 2017 •
Are we approaching “peak State”, where the power of diverse nation states starts to decline back toward greater power being held by large cities or culturally or religiously more homogeneous regions? Catalonians and Iraqi Kurds voted in independence referenda this last week. In contrast to Scotland’s and the UK’s Brexit referenda a few years … Read More
Guest Author • Aug 09, 2017 •
By Antony Wood, Illinois Institute of Technology and Dario Trabucco, Università Iuav di Venezia In the 160 or so years since the first skyscrapers were built, technological innovations of many kinds have allowed us to build them to reach astonishing heights. Today there is a 1,000-meter (167-story) building under construction in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Even … Read More
Guest Author • Jan 11, 2017 •
By Lizzy Lowe, University of Auckland and Margaret Stanley, University of Auckland As urban populations around the globe skyrocket and the demand for housing grows, space is increasingly at a premium in cities. Unfortunately, despite some notable efforts to include green space in cities, native wildlife is not often a priority for urban planners, despite research … Read More
Public Health Expert • Sep 04, 2016 •
Dr Caroline Shaw, Dr Marie Russell On-road cycle lane Wellington. Photo credit: Jenny Ombler. Active transport is important for health and sustainability. But no one has previously looked systematically at how NZ cities support cycling and walking. Therefore, a new study has been performed and is now published online. This blog reports its main findings. Walking and cycling for … Read More
Guest Author • Mar 01, 2016 •
Lucien Georgeson, UCL and Mark Maslin, UCL Cities across the world are increasingly at risk from climate change. People living in extreme poverty are especially vulnerable, both because global warming will tend to hit developing countries the hardest, and because they have less money to throw at the problem. We used newly-available data to investigate how … Read More
Eric Crampton • Nov 17, 2015 •
Robin Hanson wonders whether cities are places for high-status men and the women who seek them, with low-status men relegated to the hinterlands: I’ve heard that polygamous sects are often run this way today, with older men kicking out young men when they come of age. But re-reading Montaillou on rural 1300 France makes me realize that humanity has … Read More
Bryan Walker • Jul 28, 2014 •
Science journalist Gaia Vince left her desk at Nature and spent two years visiting places around the world, some of them very isolated, where people were grappling with the conditions of what is sometimes described as a new epoch, the Anthropocene. It dates from the industrial revolution and represents a different world from the relatively […] … Read More