Cities expert UK based Professor Greg Clark doesn’t think competition between our major cities is a very good idea. He thinks co-operation and team work are much better ways to go.
We humbly seek to disagree. When we do a “tale of two cities” story in our pages the hits go through the roof!
Last time (just a few weeks ago) was when we ran the story of how Adelaide had beaten Melbourne as home of a new high tech timber facility that would put our most quaint/quirky Aussie city on the map for the most popular building material ever to appear on the green building landscape.
OK, the title was a bit provocative South Australia beats Melbourne to new timber facility.
But that’s because we have loads of evidence that Aussies love a good cities-based David and Goliath sh.
When it comes to Melbourne versus Sydney it’s game on. Big time.
But Clarke’s invocations at the Property Council of Australia’s Future Cities Summit make sense. City clusters around the world are starting to spring up – Spain teaming with Portugal for instance and in China too. There’s even a smart citycluster website that we discovered which produces a kind of road map for how cities can cluster to reap global advantages. The Spain based website (also in English) covers 200 companies involved in 77 projects with participating cities and says it covers “the entire value chain of the city of the future”, from its most technological to the most social aspect.
The Smart City Journal runs through China’s plans for 19 “super regions” and the OECD iLibrary has some good reading material on more, this links to what’s happening in Africa with city clusters.
But in Australia could we ever imagine Melbourne willingly ceding ground to Sydney on big sporting events or culture, or anything actually? Or the other way around? No.
Can you hear the gnashing of teeth in Sydney as the Australian Grand Prix hit the headlines with reportedly record crowds of nearly half a million people.
Australia’s major cities are competing fiercely for talent, as destinations and centres of excellence. They come up with creative campaigns designed to change their brand’s DNA. Brisbane latest (or first?) spotted on Sydney streets was the sassy “Brisbane favours the bold”. Possibly riffing on the very bold advances on the national cities psyche made by that “out there” Hobart couple, Kirsha Kaechele who was star of our Tomorrowland Soiree in 2022 with her take on invasive species and wild food and hubby David Walsh, man who single headedly reinvented the southern isle and made it cool, not just cold.
But cooperation and teamwork with “the other side”? That just doesn’t sound very Aussie. In this country we like to fight it out like an Aussie Rules Grand Final: give no quarter; victory or ignominy.
According to Greg Clark though thinking in a team based sharing approach makes a lot of sense if we are to tackle the challenges ahead for our cities.
By 2080 most of the world’s population will be living in cities and the changes are enormous.
Clark showed a chart that forecasts a dramatic rise in urban populations. From 1980 to 2080 Greater China shoots from 20 per cent of the population to 90 per cent. In ASEAN countries from 25 per cent to 85 per cent and in North America from 74 per cent to 95 per cent.
Australia will have 10 cities of 1 million or more people he told the audience.
So, a magnetic pull to bigger cities. But what if they don’t work well?
In Australia people have been leaving big cities (Sydney in particular) because they’re too expensive (or too intense) and moving to smaller regional cities. Clark says the pandemic wasn’t so much a cause of this trend, it was an accelerant.
Over the past five years Australian cities have slipped on global metrics, not so much because they’ve deteriorated but because other cities around the world have improved at a faster rate, he says.
Australia’s CBDs are also recovering more slowly than in other countries too. The reason? European and Asian cities have great public transport.
In Australia many people face a big and uncomfortable and often expensive commutes, so it makes sense for them to want to minimise “wasted” time and expense on funding their attendance at the office. You could say it’s the victory of car based transport and our obsession with highways coming back to bite us.
The McMansion and urban sprawl industries would say they’re giving people what they want. But how can we know what people really want when they’re given just two choices – giant four or five bedroom houses?
We can’t wait to bring you Elena Bondareva’s piece next week, the second instalment of her series on how to be a changemaker. If you want to bring change, she says, don’t waste time on winning hearts and minds. And then wait for people to demand that thing you want them to want such as LED light bulbs…or low carbon buildings. Just bring on what you want and see their eyes light up.
Imagine if electricity waited for huge demand to arise from the candle-lit world before it was rolled out. Or if Steve Jobs and Apple waited for millions of people to want a single-button phone, Bondareva says.
“Instead, electrification swept the globe after key New York buildings lit up. The iPhone was so intuitive and mind-opening that we lined up for it.”
Cities doing well – habitat, innovation and experience are key
Clark also says the cities doing well on the global stage are those that are “moving away increasingly, from simply trying to be an efficient location for corporates, and commuters and consumption, which, if you like, was their core rationale before the pandemic”.
Those things remain important, he says, but “there’s more of an emphasis now on the things that you have to do face to face or face to place, so much more of a focus on the unique things that can only be done in cities.
“I would summarise these very simply as habitat, innovation and experience.”
A quick commute to work is just the start.
And there’s the increasingly deadly climate to contend with where you’d think people will seek a place that offers them resilience, “shelter from the storm”.
Clarke points to 500 cities that will soon be vulnerable to a half metre of sea level rises if we exceed 1.5 degrees of warming (a budget we’ve already blown.)
Climate is a navigational tool to good urbanisation
Clark says tackling climate change or the biodiversity crisis isn’t just “an environmental agenda, it produces all sorts of other co benefits … actually as a kind of navigational tool towards that idea of good urbanisation.”
Climate ambition needs to be a critical ingredient that Australian cities need to embrace, alongside a “very big focus on enabling the innovation economy, diversifying trade links, and also activating all of that soft power of agility, hybridity, resequencing and resizing the city, particularly that metropolitan agenda.
“It’s about new orientation, certainly about climate. It’s about a new social contract and…tackling inequality, but it’s also about that DNA and uniqueness.”