Cole Hendrigan passes on “the link below is to a well-presented documentary on the discussion – not be confused with action – on the scale of the urban question in Australia. This show got record audiences to hear Rob Adams’ Rhodesian-accented review of mid-rise and Julian Bolleter (a fellow LA also based in Perth) speak about megaregions.”
Here: Future Cities from ABC Australia’s “Catalyst” science program.
The media abounds with visions of gloomy, automated megacities or totally sustainable ecological utopias but how do these futuristic visions relate to the development of Australian cities over the next eighty years?
Video too slow? Go to the transcript here..
And if you’re looking for an upbeat view of Canadian prospects (depending on your generation’s self-interest), you can rely on Urban Futures:
Housing Projections for Canada and its Major Metropolitan Regions
Over the next three decades, housing occupancy demand in Canada will continue to grow faster than our population; an outlook that differs from the apocalyptic scenarios of a crash in Canada’s housing market that were predicted years ago.
Why the predictions of a market meltdown? The reasoning was largely demographic, based on the notion that the number of people exiting the housing market (the boomers) would exceed the number of new entrants (the busters) sometime in the mid-2000s.
Rather than crash and crumble, the past decade has seen many of Canada’s housing markets experience one of the most buoyant periods on record. Why did the market meltdown not occur? Simply put, the assumptions underpinning the apocalyptic scenario both over-simplified the forces that shape housing demand–there is more at work than just demographics–and they got the demographics wrong.
Today the baby bust generation (currently between the ages of 39 and 58) is actually larger than the baby boom generation (now 59 to 68) and, while the busters have fully entered the housing market, the boomers have not yet left it. In other words, the baby boomers have not yet had to be replaced in the housing market, and so additional housing was needed to accommodate the busters.
Click here to access the full report as well as the individual regional profiles.
