The Foreground five: our most-read stories for April
Transport, technology and cultivated nature mix it up in April’s most-read list. Let’s rethink roads for better public transport! Smart tech won’t improve urban access – that’s a political choice – but it could help urban plantings. And we find cultures are rich with trees and richer with gardening.
1. It’s time to move beyond the false binary of roads vs public transport
Governments in Australia are spending big on road infrastructure, but that doesn’t have to lead to less public transport.
2. It’s okay to garden if you listen to the landscape
With indigenous environments under threat globally, how might more experience of nature be included within increasingly dense urban development? A cross-disciplinary symposium at the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne saw gardening and listening as crucial tools.
3. It’s the (political) economy, stupid: when it comes to urban transport, we’re doing it wrong
Political choices, not technological innovations, shape our urban transport systems. As long as governments continue to prize mobility over accessibility, those systems will remain unhealthy and ineffectual.
4. Smart streets, smart phones, smart watches… why not smart trees?
Augmented reality and artificial intelligence, smart sensors and real-time monitoring are helping to relieve pressures on overburdened city infrastructure. Urban trees are increasingly important multi-functional assets. Why aren’t they benefiting more from the same technologies?
5. Into the woods: an Easter meditation on trees
Trees connect cultures to landscapes, rooting traditions to place. In an age of unprecedented deforestation, we should remember that trees are more than the sum of their utilitarian value as timber, food, fuel or otherwise.
