I am always driven by data and focus on cities, the workforce, demographics and megatrends in my writing. I will also write about my favourite books on these topics.
Our obsession with having a meaningful job is a mental health crisis in the making. We will never run an economy solely on meaningful jobs and we must change our attitude towards work.
Lifelong learning means lifelong reading. These three books helped to shape my thinking about the future of work. Rereading these in the light of a post-corona world of work was very insightful.
Australian cities can learn important urban planning lesson by looking to cities near and far. We focus too often on futuristic innovations in urban planning. It might be more cost-effective to select the best tried and proven ideas from abroad and import them to Australia. The German fahrradstrasse and the Spanish superblocks might be such ideas.
Australia’s biggest cities grew massively over the last decade. The speed of this population growth meant we needed a lot of housing fast. Only big developers could provide housing at that scale in such a short period of time. As a consequence housing was mostly built in the city centers and on the fringes. Also, much of the housing stock ended up being sub-standard.
Once a city reaches a certain size it must spread its jobs across the urban fabric rather than concentrating them in a single CBD (central business district).
