Empowering Lessons for Livable Places

Thanks to the Australian-American Fulbright Commission and UN-Habitat’s World Urban Campaign, fundamental relationships at the heart of urban public health and livability are under scrutiny in tropical Australia.

Cairns, Queensland, Australia — avoiding humidity using active transport. Photo by Chuck Wolfe

This article was co-authored with Silvia Tavares and David Sellars of James Cook University, Cairns, Campus.

In The City in History, Lewis Mumford once properly characterized the essence of cities as a dynamic that unfolds between two poles of human life: “movement and settlement.” Between these poles, we see the intersection of the built and natural environments, and the ongoing interaction and evolution of transportation nodes and land uses. The roles of walking, shelter, and movement between places, and the impacts of the urban form on public health, are ripe for observation in cities across the world.

Fast forward to modern cities, where leaders, municipal staff, design professionals, and other stakeholders often discuss walkable, transit oriented, and mixed-use communities as the inevitable next steps for evolving urban areas. However laudable these ideas might be, our recent work in tropical Australian cities (under the auspices of the Australian-American Fulbright…