Guardian Cities asks its readers

A couple of years ago, Guardian Cities posed a series of questions to its readers. I wrote a response, but never submitted. Here are my responses, written while I was still living in Sydney.

Is there a particular city, or city story, we should be covering in greater depth? If so, please say which and why

Smaller regional towns and cities need support and a resurgence - to assist in long-term sustainable growth, and help them thrive in a way which preserves livelihoods, character and history, surrounding land uses and the broader landscape.

There is a symbiotic relationship between metropolitan and regional areas, which if guided in a gentle way can be positive and beneficial to both.

What urban issue do you think will prove the most significant over the coming decade?

The three crucial elements are people, place and time. At the heart of it, urban living is all about people. It is then about people in a place. And finally it is about people in a place over time.

How people live is at the crux of urban development - both in their internal private lives and their external public lives, in the home and the street respectively.  At the crux of this is how urban development can foster a sense of inherent well-being and joy in our everyday.

How do people want to live their private and public lives? Are they in living in smaller apartment style with a tiny balcony on the doorstep of an enormous park, or are they in townhouses with a a 50m2 garden? Are there new hybrid models to combine both? How does the street as our public platform and the home as the private platform perform to allow us to live a quality of life that we should expect and deserve?

Through this is engagement of the community and contribution to the design and outcomes of our new urban development projects.

In your city, what’s the biggest urban issue, good or bad, that affects you? Please share your story

There is a huge discussion about urban residential density of cities like Sydney. Key to this is balancing all the competing factors is one of the key urban issues affecting a city like Sydney. This includes increasing density within cities to relieve pressure on surrounding areas; retaining a sense of character when undertaking urban renewal projects, ensuring viability to allow projects to actually happen.

Density does not necessarily have to be solely restricted to apartment living. There are a number of other dwelling typologies which are able to support a reasonably high level of density. A lot of this has emerged out of the work undertaken in the study of the Missing Middle. This was the phrase which was introduced in 2010 by Daniel Parolek of Opticos Design. It refers to the range of housing which sits between the polar extremes of higher density apartment living and lower density detached housing of suburbia. The ‘Missing Middle’ is the term which responds to the extremities of Greenfield suburbs and apartment blocks.

Name one person, project or innovation you’d like to see profiled for the impact they are having on urban life. Please briefly explain why

Urban Splash is one of my all time current favourite regenerators of places. Transforming the once forgotten edges of a city or a town, they are working with good architects to challenge ways of thinking about housing, through a variety of types which respond to different human needs, innovation, and conditions.

https://www.urbansplash.co.uk/

Who is your favourite writer, photographer or film-maker on urban issues?

Elizabeth Farrelly, not shy to tell it how it is and what could be done.

What one thing would most improve the Guardian Cities website?

Nothing, just more of the same!