Carolyn Whitzman is an Associate Professor in Urban Planning at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of Suburb, Slum, Urban Village: Transformations in Toronto’s Parkdale Neighbourhood and the co-author of Safe Cities: guidelines for planning, design, and management.

She has previously worked for the City of Toronto on healthy city initiatives and is the chair of State of Australian Cities.

Architecture & Design spoke to Whitzman about Australia’s design challenges and lessons to be learnt from Toronto.

What is the aim of State Of Australian Cities SOAC)?

SOAC is the peak conference for urban research in Australia. It is a biennial conference that was held in Sydney in 2003, Brisbane in 2005, Adelaide in 2007, Perth in 2009 and Melbourne in 2011. In each conference researchers come together from a range of disciplines — urban planning, geography, sociology, design, public health, history, etc. — to tackle issues of social inclusion, environmental sustainability, economic resilience, governance and infrastructure.

At the most recent conference, there were 330 registrants, 175 papers from 200 researchers in over 20 universities, as well as research centres, government and the private sector.

What do you think are the top three challenges facing the design industry at the moment?

I would see these as the challenges facing Australian cities (from my opening remarks at the conference):

“On the one hand, international business surveys regularly rate Australian cities — or at least the small parts of those cities inhabited by corporate executives — to be the most livable in the world. They are relatively safe, clean and green.

“On the other hand, Australian cities have been calculated to be amongst the least sustainable in the world — relatively car-dependent, both contributing to and poorly suited to climate change.

“On the one hand, we have sailed relatively unscathed thus far through the global financial crisis of the past several years. On the other hand, there is a growing gulf between rich and poor in our cities and regions, seen in the spatial gap between good and bad access to educational and employment opportunities, social and health services and public open space.”

Which city in Australia is tackling its challenges the best?

All cities are different and I cannot make such a simplistic comparison — it depends on the particular issue. Also, keep in mind that local governance in Australia is very weak, so city success is largely determined by state planning policy.

The Planning Institute of Australia released report cards in 2006-2008. Unfortunately, they were abandoned, I think because the states were looking so bad! Also, the federal government has begun benchmarking cities in their State of Australian Cities reports (which aren’t formally linked to the SOAC conferences).

It would appear that rail line expansion is best in Perth at the moment and that regional planning is working better in Brisbane and the Gold Coast (ie., the Southeast) than in other metropolitan areas. That’s about as far as I’d go in speculation.

You have worked for the City of Toronto — what could Australian cities learn from Toronto?

I think something that both Australian cities and Toronto used to do well and have ‘unlearnt’ is good integrated planning for positive affordability and health equity outcomes. Toronto’s St. Lawrence Neighbourhood, built on abandoned industrial land just east of downtown (so the equivalent of Southbank or Docklands) in the 1970s had great social infrastructure (two primary schools, a community centre, shops and services) at the ground floor level of 6-storey to 8-storey buildings. Almost half of the housing was social housing — state-subsidised affordable housing for low income families.

It was a tremendous success, as were some smaller scale public housing projects built at the time in cities like Melbourne (I’m not talking here about the huge Housing Commission flats — more like the small scale projects off Nicholson Street in North Fitzroy) — close to public transport, schools and jobs; good housing quality; user satisfaction, etc. We need to rediscover how to build affordable family housing near social and public transport infrastructure instead of the sprawl now being offered as a panacea to housing affordability.