Planning for a Continent of Cities (2025) is the new book by Julian Bolleter and Robert Freestone that explores various continental-scale settlement scenarios and how they each sustainably address rapid population growth across Australian cities.
In this interview, UWAP intern Jess Burns speaks with Julian on the importance of sustainable cities, why social opinion is just as crucial as expert opinion when city planning and the book’s function as an evidence base for federal government urban policy. They also discuss Julian’s other new book, Business as Unusual: Radical Ideas for Cities (2025), and its innovative and thought-provoking neighbourhood and city designs that have already and will continue to incite lively debate in the city planning community.
Jess Burns: The whole premise of Planning for a Continent of Cities is about envisioning future pathways to the grand challenge of planning sustainable cities. Can you speak on why sustainable cities are so important?
Julian Bolleter: Something like 70% of our greenhouse gas emissions come from cities. So, many of the contemporary problems that we experience, both in Australia and overseas, are experienced through the lens of urban living. If you think about things like greenhouse gas emissions, socioeconomic polarisation and lack of food security, all of these things are really expressed most clearly in our urban areas. So, it tends to be where our greatest problems are, but in some senses, cities being wonderful incubators of innovation, they are also likely to be where solutions emerge from. Cities are concomitantly our biggest problem but also our potential saviour. And that's why cities are so important.
Also, looking at the numbers globally, we've just moved to 50% of the global population being in cities, and that's likely to grow to about 75% by mid-century. So really, cities are and will need to be the lifeboats for humanity as we experience the climate crisis and all the other crises that are unfolding.
Jess: One of the aspects of the book that I really enjoyed was the inclusion of social opinion through the Plan My Australia survey. Why was it so important to include that perspective alongside the expert opinion?
Julian: I think because a lot of planning at the scale that we're doing – national scale planning, state scale planning and even at the metropolitan scale – often numbers are thrown around, and we can fall into the trap of abstraction in our thinking about the human citizens of our cities as being just data. And I think that part of the book is about doing that, and part of the book is quantitative in this thinking around population distribution. But you don't want to lose the human dimension of it, because humans, in planning terms, often will not follow the script. And if human beings are not following the script that your planning has laid out, then typically nothing will happen. For that reason, we tried to lean on the qualitative commentary that was coming out of the various surveys we ran as a way of counteracting the possibility of just slipping into a kind of numeric data of population distribution. We wanted to keep it real.
Honestly, though, it's also because the qualitative commentary is so wonderful, and I'm grateful to the people who responded to the surveys we did, and the amount of time they must have spent writing all this stuff down. So, it felt like the right thing to do, both from a conceptual point of view and also just ethically. People have made a big investment in our research, and we wanted to be able to feature that. Finally, it just makes the book more readable, because to be honest, a book written by two planners is likely to be a bit dry.
Fig 4.10: The satellite cities scenario generally locates population growth in highly suitable areas (from Planning for a Continent of Cities)
Jess: Speaking of the social opinion, while not agreeing on all of the sustainable city scenario options, both the experts and laypersons did agree that satellite cities were the number one avenue for tackling population growth. Would you agree with this, or do you lean more toward any of the other scenarios?
Julian: Yes, so there was a confluence of expert and layperson thinking, with both of them rating the satellite city scenario first. That scenario is smaller cities orbiting the state capital cities. In Western Australia, this could be Bunbury and Yanchep. In Melbourne, it could be Bendigo and Geelong, and in Sydney, it could be Wollongong and Newcastle. So that was regarded as being the most feasible and potentially the most liveable. It has the advantage of taking the pressure off the capital cities, which are becoming increasingly congested, unaffordable and problematic.
However, this scenario doesn't attempt to urbanise; it doesn't strike out into the wilderness. It basically builds these orbiting satellite cities that are able to access the economic opportunity of the capital city without potentially overburdening that capital city. It potentially opens up some cheaper land, and it opens up the ability to live in smaller cities, which can be more liveable and offer greater access to natural amenities, as opposed to a megacity of 5 or 6 or 8 million, which Sydney and Melbourne are heading towards.
I was broadly in agreement with that ranking, and it was interesting because our experts and our laypeople often disagreed significantly about what they thought was best. For instance, secondary capital cities, which is the idea of giving Melbourne a break and trying to boost population growth from the other state capitals, was loved by the experts. They rated that in second, whereas the community survey respondents put it in seventh. There’s a huge discrepancy there, which I think reflects the lack of the community's faith in the discipline of planning to deliver population growth in a manner that is liveable. Evidently, the planners think they can do that in secondary capital cities, but the laypeople were not convinced at all. The fact that they both ranked satellite cities first is telling, and certainly, I can see the advantage of that scenario and, yeah, I'm happy to go with their expert judgment.
Jess: The Australian Dream of home and land ownership has, for many of the younger generations, become just that: a dream. In the Business as (Un)usual competition featured in the book, you inspired emerging urban planning visionaries to imagine a future where this dream once again becomes a reality. Can you speak on the winning entries and why they won?
Julian: I think one of the more sensible of the student entries to the competition was the green rail. This was the idea of actually strengthening the regional rail connections and building new cities along the regional rail lines. It kind of riffs off the satellite city and rail city scenarios we proposed in the book. State governments are currently trying to do transit-oriented development in all of their state capital cities, which is densification around urban train stations. This proposal actually extended that to the regions and proposed to take the regional rail and build onto existing centres or build new centres along regional rail lines.
This model is not completely original. This is how it works in countries like the United Kingdom, where you have a really strong regional rail network, and essentially, you can add density to that. It's taking the idea of transit-oriented development and flinging it out to the regions. It's a simple idea, it was compellingly visualised, and I think it’s totally worthy.
In terms of the question that you had around housing affordability and people being locked out of the housing market, the potential with this is you're opening up a lot of new land for development in the regions, and if it's handled properly, there's a likelihood that you can open up more affordable land. Building apartments, if that can be done in a way that's cheap, should also address housing affordability. By having this cheaper land and by living at a sort of medium-density development level, there's potential here to bring the costs down.
The problem in the capital cities themselves is just that we have so much investment going on in real estate speculation. The basic right of someone to have a roof over their head has been overwhelmed by this view of property as financial gain, as opposed to a basic human right. And I think that there are some deeper issues here that go to neoliberalism and capitalism and how we approach housing these days as something that is not a universal right of shelter but more as an investment. Now, these solutions proposed by our students don't necessarily deal with that fundamental impediment of capitalism and neoliberalism, but, nonetheless, ignoring that for a moment, opening up cheaper land in the regions for housing, which is well connected back to the capital cities, potentially could address the issue to some degree.
The other student proposals are more speculative and relate to migrant cities, for instance, nomadic kinds of cities. A final and intriguing idea from one of our winners was actually the idea of subscriptions. We have subscriptions on our phones now; we have subscriptions from streaming applications like Prime, Apple TV+ and everything else. Why not just have housing subscriptions? They developed this idea of modules of housing, which would be in all kinds of locations across Australia, where you could actually subscribe and live in one of these modules for a few months and then move to another, working remotely. This is an idea of moving away from the 20th-century notion of having a mortgage for 30 years to buy a home that you never leave. It’s a much more nomadic and free-flowing idea of housing provision.
Jess: In your book Business as Unusual: Radical Ideas for Cities, you take sustainable city planning to another level, creating a whole range of unique alternatives to our current neighbourhood and city designs. However, you state that the book is not a manual for implementing sustainable cities and is more of a conversation starter. What conversations do you want this book to start?
Julian: The reason I said that, to be honest, is that some of the ideas are pretty out there, and I was trying to pre-empt the book reviewer who comes in and says, ‘Is this some kind of joke? There are so many reasons that this would never happen, and this wouldn't work.’ Maybe this is not a good way of writing a book, but I was trying to pre-empt the brutal criticism it was likely to receive.
But in answer to your question, I totally understand the appeal of the suburbs as they currently exist. When you look at your inner and middle ring suburbs, which are still leafy and green and offer access to natural amenities and the ability to be in privacy in your own garden, this is a wonderful model from a liveability perspective, and no wonder cities around the world are sprawling much faster than their populations are growing. As soon as people get the money, they march off to the suburbs, and this is happening all over the place. So, the suburban dream runs really deep, particularly in Australians' cultural consciousness. But when you look at our cities, this model is just replicated across vast swathes, and we see it washing up in new suburbs on the fringe, which are kind of suburbs, but they're not even really suburbs anymore because the houses are quite large, the lots are quite small and there's no tree canopy cover. The suburban dream starts running out of steam there.
A lot of the conversation in the book is about how you build suburbs that are denser but still have that access to green space amenity in a way that we're not really getting in our new suburbs. That's where you have ideas like kibbutz urbanism, where you have a communal garden that everyone shares, and it has housing arranged around it. Or the idea of upgrading parks, which are essentially currently just turfed deserts in many cases in Perth. How do you turn that into a wonderful multifunctional backyard and build at a high density around it?
These are the kind of ideas that are underpinning the book and that we could have a conversation around. Surely there have to be other ways of doing this than what we're currently doing, which is just building suburbs on the edge of the city that are tighter and meaner than the old ones. I just feel like there must be other alternatives. That's the question the book explores.
Jess: Back to Planning for a Continent of Cities, is there an impact that you hope the research in this book will have?
Julian: It’s really about the federal government. National settlement planning is in their wheelhouse, and I'm hoping to land a book on Albanese's desk if we can. We're currently trying to get different contacts in Canberra and hoping to head over there and present the book.
The Albanese government have delivered a national urban policy that has general aspirations for how we should think about our cities. But what we're trying to do is actually develop a national settlement plan that is more like a spatial plan. It's not just about intent, it's actually about urban structure at that national, continental scale, with some idea of numbers around it. Now, the Albanese government haven't gone that far and has been content with a national urban policy more about what we should aspire to in our cities in terms of sustainability and liveability. All that's well and good, but we feel like we need a national scale picture for how population distribution should look by the end of the century. So, what we're advocating for is something a bit different, and certainly, we hope to be having some meetings with the appropriate people in the next few months.
The forerunner to this book was Made in Australia: The Future of Australian Cities, which was probably a slightly less evidence-based version of this book, and we managed to land it on Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's desk in 2012. He said he was very excited about it, and then he promptly got voted out of office. So, the problem I think you confront with this type of planning is trying to reconcile it with a short-term electoral cycle. You need bipartisan support for this style of planning, not over years but over decades. Are we likely to get that, given how polarised and contested everything is at that level? I'd have to say it's unlikely. But nonetheless, we all do what we can do within the limits of our control, and this hopefully could be an evidence base for a government that really wants to deliver this scale of planning. Of course, the problem is, as soon as a politician or a government is seen to be calling for planning for this scale of growth, they're seen to be supporters of this scale of growth. And that doesn't necessarily fly well with some segments of the electorate. So that's a real problem and often one of the reasons we have a lack of planning of this kind, particularly at a national scale.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Julian Bolleter is the Director of the Australian Urban Design Research Centre (AUDRC) at the University of Western Australia, the Program Director of AUDRC’s Master of Urban Design course, and an author and public figure. Julian leads an ambitious climate adaptation project, ‘Future climate, future home: adaptive urban design strategies for WA’, with AUDRC partner organisations Development WA, the Department of Communities, the Western Australian Planning Commission, and multiple Local Governments. He has received a stream of awards for his research, including the UWA School of Design's Mid-Career Research Award in 2023.
Robert Freestone is Professor of Planning in the School of Built Environment at the University of New South Wales. His other books include Australian Urban Policy (2024), Iconic Planned Communities and the Challenges of Change (2019), Designing the Global City (2019), Place and Placelessness Revisited (2016), Urban Nation (2010), and Model Communities (1989). He is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, the Australian Academy of Humanities, the Planning Institute of Australia, and the Institute of Australian Geographers. He is a former president of the International Planning History Society and chair of the Editorial Board of Planning Perspectives.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Jess Burns is an upcoming graduate of Curtin University, completing a Bachelor of Arts double majoring in Professional Writing and Publishing, and English and Cultural Studies.