Possibly the best urban design policy speech I've seen. Concise, pragmatic, achievable and actually looks like it could be sort of fun to be part of. Entertaining too with his dry sense of humor, and nice video where we can see the slides. Thanks SFU.

Excellent policy speech - thank you. In the process of change, we must also consider housing affordability to allow more people access to urban growth transport corridors, not just investors.

This is great. Loved how my city was mentioned.

I'm starting my university studies soon and I wasn't sure if I wanted to study urban planning or something different related to social sciences or languages... I'm glad I found this video 😄 it was very interesting and helped me make up my mind. Thank you for uploading it!

Great lecture, and ideas presented. Thank you for the recording.

The great irony, of course, is that Australian cities long had adopted the key public policy to create cities where people can safely live, work and play; namely, a land-only property tax base. Writers on economics going back to Adam Smith understood (far better than our planning experts and civic leaders today) that public collection of the rent of land is key to highest, best use of land and to elimination of land speculation and hoarding. (continued)

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The speech was fascinating. Thanks for sharing!

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nice video. Loved the conference

How do you, as a citizen of a city of only a 66000 people, get the city to invest in removing a highway that cuts the city right in two? I think that a lot of the problems in my city come from the fact that downtown is separated from where most people live by the highway on one side, a 4 lane road on one and a railroad on the other two sides.

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Good point.

The original design of the capital city, Canberra, incorporated this concept by having land held by the government and leased to private individuals and users. The great mistake then made was to fail to adjust annual rental charges based on current market rental values. This gave to lessees an imputed, unearned income stream capitalized in a price for the leasehold interest. Absent the full taxation or collection of land rent, the result is sprawl and more vacant land.

"This is Aarhus right outside of Copenhagen" - What? I know Denmark is small, but they are considered to be on opposite sides of Denmark, each being their regional "capital", (CPH of course being the national capital as well).

Melbourne CBD for which Rob Adams has jurisdiction is no longer a livable place in my opinion. I was living in the CBD before Rob Adams came on the scene. I was part of the gentrification process that led his council to take an interest in the CBD outside of a 9-5 business and retail hub. Visiting the CBD these days reminds one more of Hong Kong New Territories area than the CBD of Melbourne. City of Melbourne encouraged the conversion of everything to retail plazas and apartments, all the artists, artisans, architects and other creatives I knew in the CBD moved out since ~2000. There's poor amenity, over-crowding and always the removal or building on top of more historically significant buildings. Growth is hard to be creative about, a Australian urban planning is decades behind European cities, where planners do not find aesthetic decisions over-challenging. The city still has loads of amazing things happening, especially the cultural arts that can afford to survive in a high rent environment (mainstream theater, commercial galleries etc) but to me it's lost a lot, almost the classic nouveau riche trade off of more stuff for less quality of experience, bad taste.

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