The reality of going to most conferences is that you listen for 80 percent of the time to things that you are already aware of (which might be interesting, but aren’t necessarily teaching you anything), 10 percent of the time feeling really bored and/or irritated by someone who just has it wrong, and the remaining 10 percent of the time feeling properly inspired and excited.

And so it might have been at the 7th International Urban Design Conference earlier this month in Adelaide. Something that felt different during these two days of talks, however, was a confluence of both new material and consistent themes. This gave me a stronger sense of progress (or at least the recognised need for change) than I’ve felt in the urban planning/design arena in Australia over at least the last few years.

It’s not that the material was always mind-bogglingly new or innovative. It was more that the thematic consistency – supported by some genuinely engaging use of real data and hard facts – gave a strong impression of something that can’t be ignored forever.

So what were these engaging themes, looming challenges and progressive ideas? Here are a few.

Our health as humans is being more defined and influenced by urban planning and design than by the health system. As we pour inordinate quantities of money into hospitals, cures, treatments and drugs, we completely ignore this fact. Scary, yes, but also exciting in that we have at hand a largely untouched set of opportunities to improve health through environmental design. We just have to enact them.

We keep planning for the past, and it’s doing us no favours. Humans have an awful trait that pervades almost everything we do – when seeking to understand what the future holds, we tend to look at the immediate past and then extrapolate it out. So if house prices have risen rapidly for the last ten years, we assume they will continue to rise rapidly for the next ten. If cars have been the dominant mode of transport for the last 30 years, we assume they will remain so for the next 30. One speaker described our assumption that net migration would continue to grow rapidly in the future as deeply flawed. If jobs in the resources sector evaporate further, and university education costs a lot more, the motivators for migration to Australia are likely to shrink dramatically. The tendency to look backwards for insights into the future is remarkably dumb, but we do it all the time. There is hope, however; smart people can do increasingly amazing things with data to understand more accurately what is likely to happen in the future. Given we can also define the future by our actions now, leadership and long-term thinking can go a long way.

Our aging population means more than the need for more nursing homes. It’s also going to leave our workforce severely depleted. An extraordinary proportion of our workforce is 40 years or older, and isn’t being replaced fast enough. This will have impacts across the economy, and not least in how we manage and develop our urban environment. We spend a disproportionate amount of time worrying about where to house ‘young families’, but the real challenge may come in where the growing population of empty nesters, single older people and the elderly will live.

The funding for the infrastructure we need won’t all come from the same sources it has in the past (government). The capacity and commitment of both federal and state government to fund key infrastructure items, particularly those that don’t make for a high-profile ‘announceable’, is diminished. But the need for critical infrastructure to support the ongoing evolution and progress of our cities is not. As ArchTam’s Joe Langley presented, there are mechanisms that allow the tangible private sector value created by new public infrastructure (such as higher land values) to be captured and used to fund that infrastructure.

So while the above points paint a picture of drastic changes, ‘wicked problems’ and generational shifts, the conference also highlighted some pretty exciting evolutions in practice. From genuine community-led planning (yes, consultation that actually influences outcomes!), sustainability and health planning working in partnership, planning practice that allows discretion to produce values-driven outcomes rather than checklist planning, and demographers actually being listened to, there’s a lot of good stuff going on.

The location of the conference in Adelaide, too, is a good sign. Adelaide has continued to blossom despite some long-held prejudices and misconceptions. The CBD has a spring in its step – new cafes, shops, bars and restaurants are supported by strategic public realm interventions. The Adelaide Oval redevelopment has injected new life north of the city and the award-winning South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute building on North Terrace promises to be the lynchpin of a newly enlivened health and knowledge precinct.

The 80-10-10 rule of conferences might continue to be the norm, but the 7th International Urban Design Conference in Adelaide demonstrated that there’s a lot to be excited about in urban design and the built environment in general. But ideas are one thing – putting them into practice to make every project as good as it can be is real the challenge that we all need to get to work on.

Peter Steele is a senior consultant, sustainability and climate change, based in ArchTam’s Melbourne office, and presented ‘Precinct Planning for Sustainability: The Armstrong Creek Experience’ at this month’s International Urban Design Conference.

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Last week Jamie Oliver launched his latest campaign: better, healthier and affordable fresh food for everyday Australians in a bid to tackle Australia’s obesity epidemic. “We’ve got more opportunities to affect change than any Government,” said Jamie, and he’s right.

This guy reaches 300 million people on social media – that’s about 1 in every 20 people on earth. We love Jamie. He’s a bit like us. He went to a state school, grew up in a pub and his mum and dad are down-to–earth, working-class folk.

As I write this hundreds of people from across the globe have gathered in Adelaide – Australia’s ‘city of churches’ – for the Velo City Global Conference. Velo City, the world’s premier cycling conference with high-profile speakers from every continent, celebrates what’s great about bike riding and focuses on three key themes:

–          how to design our cities to make it easy for people to choose cycling;

–          how to motivate people to ride a bicycle;

–          how to create cultural change.

So to add to the debate, I’m asking, “should private companies and celebrities like, for example, Jamie Oliver, create change in cycling?”

Yes, I think they should.

I say let’s consider creating change in 3 very different ways.

1. Let’s focus on action

“Most cities in the world were bicycle friendly in the beginning” tweets @bicyclesa.

The problem is, now they are not.

“We need to stop taking baby steps to getting people on bikes” tweets @wheelwomenride “and get on with it!”

The problem is, in the western world, we fear failure.

Imagine we understand one real problem affecting everyday people in one real city. Imagine we take the real problem – perhaps a lack of safe off-road bike paths to school – in one self-contained city in Australia that’s somewhere like Rockhampton or Toowoomba. Then we put the best people with the best resources onto solving that problem. We could make one city really bicycle-friendly again.

2. Let’s identify new investment vehicles

The problem is “Less than 1/2 of 1 percent of the South Australian transport budget goes to cycling…” tweets @MarkParnellMLC.

The solution is that we need to put great-quality technical expertise into identifying new investment vehicles to leverage more money. Imagine we find partners who can provide capital or investors who provide seed capital. In London, Boris Johnson secured private investment to secure a cable car across the River Thames.

3. Let’s try a new design and delivery model

“Everything we need to make cycle-friendly cities was invented 100 years ago” tweets @FunOnTheUpfield.

We have the solution; the problem is, we don’t always have the best mechanism to deliver the solution.

Imagine if a private-sector entity were to deliver a fully integrated solution. They would design, build, finance, operate and maintain the bikeways, the education, promotion and enforcement – yes they’d operate the cycle proficiency training and they could even go out and book the car parked illegally on the bike path. If they succeeded and met their targets, they’d get paid. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t. Many Councils in the UK privatised traffic enforcement many years ago.

If we really want riding a bicycle to be a viable and normal way to travel then let’s focus on action, identifying new money and using a new delivery model. Because like Jamie Oliver says, its people like him who really do have more opportunities to affect the change that we all want to see.

Who are you looking to for guidance, hope and inspiration?

What are people doing that’s excellent?

Where do these ideas fit in with what you are doing?

Rachel Smith (rachel.smith@archtam.com) is an internationally-recognized urban planner and commentator, and principal transport planner with ArchTam’s Brisbane office. Connect with her on LinkedIn or Twitter, or follow her blog here.

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I gave my best friend, Sarah, the book The Power for Christmas. Yesterday she emailed me saying that “if it only does one thing – to make me grateful with my lot – then that’s enough for me.”

If you’ve read The Power, you know it says that “like attracts like” and that “what you give out you receive back.” Some would say it’s about being grateful, and I agree. It’s why I write in my gratitude diary every night.

Last week was a terrible week for cycling in Australia. Last Sunday, a car collided with a bunch of cyclists in Sydney, and an Adelaide woman died from injuries sustained after a collision with a car.

The next day, video footage was released in which a cyclist in Brisbane was hit from behind by a car. On Tuesday, a Melbourne taxi passenger opened a door in the path of a cyclist.

The list goes on, but I’ll stop the negative stories right here and simply ask, is Australia cycling against the Law of Attraction?

I think both cyclist and car drivers are.

I’ve had it with this car driver vs. cyclist war. The more I see, the less I like. It leaves my head spinning and my heart screaming and it’s undoing all the good work that many of us are doing to encourage riding a bicycle as just one step to help cut the Aussie obesity epidemic. As Jamie Oliver says, Australia is now fourth in the list of the unhealthiest places on planet earth.

Right now Australia has two problems.

Firstly, too much negativity. As The Power says, negativity creates negativity, which creates a vicious cycle of anger and resentment. Take my Facebook friend John. He likes to tell Council exactly what he thinks. But what it really means is that Council is diverted into solving John’s endless dissatisfaction and grievances.

As a nation we’re so angry that we never stop and think about how to solve the actual problems. If we really want things to change – for cyclists and for car drivers – we have to do the slow and difficult work to identify the real problems. Wouldn’t it be great if people like John were part of the solution rather than just shouting about the problems?

Secondly, like it or not, Australia will never be like Copenhagen or Amsterdam. Our land use planning is completely wrong for cycling. The Australian Dream was – and maybe still is – space: a big house, a big backyard, and space for lots of cars. Everyone copied everyone else and so now Australia is full of big houses. Normal is driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for to get to the job you need to pay for the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it. As Brisbane Lord Mayor Graham Quirk said at my Australian Citizenship ceremony last week, “We need to respect each other and we need to leave the hatred behind.”

Now, he wasn’t talking directly about cycling, but he’s right. Cyclists need to respect car drivers and car drivers need to accept that cycling is a valid mode of transport.

So let’s start cycling towards the Law of Attraction.

• Let’s celebrate the positive achievements, however big or small. As Bicycle Network tweeted last Friday, “Despite this week’s media storm, let’s not forget that Kirsty, a year 12 student, rode to school for the first time.”
• Let’s work on the things that we can influence and control, and ignore the ones we can’t. How about cyclists stop jumping red lights and swearing at car drivers and car drivers stop driving whilst talking on their mobile phones, driving too close, and beeping their horns?
• Let’s be grateful for what we have. Australia has some world-class cycling infrastructure; Brisbane’s Bicentennial Bikeway, and Bourke Street Bikeway in Sydney to name but two. Rottnest Island has the largest cycle hire in the southern hemisphere while my mate Jonathan Giles attracts more than 100 people to his “Cycle Chic” bike rides with just a couple of Facebook posts.

We create our reality with our thoughts. Australia may never be a cycling utopia, but different road users can respect each other, and we can leave the hatred behind. And if we all only do one thing, let’s cycle towards the Law of Attraction, not against it. Like my friend Sarah says, “we can start with being grateful with our lot.”

Rachel Smith (rachel.smith@archtam.com) is an internationally-recognized urban planner and commentator, and principal transport planner with ArchTam’s Brisbane office. Connect with her on LinkedIn or Twitter, or follow her blog here.

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