Kate Meyrick is disappointed.
Or rather, she begins her slide presentation disappointed … but four slides later she’s concerned, and then very concerned.
Around slide six she is briefly “blown away” (but not in a good way) and eventually ends her eight-slide, 45-minute keynote address “shocked.”
Meyrick, a director at Urbis, is by her own admission a passionate urbanist and place-maker. The 450-plus delegates who gathered to hear her speak at Urbanity, The Urban Developer’s three-day annual conference held on the Gold Coast, would have to agree.
They heard that while Australia’s gross domestic product has risen in the past 50 years, the wellbeing and happiness of Australians, the fairness of our society—what she calls “urban equity”—has actually declined.
“This is not okay,” Meyrick says.
“It’s not okay, because there’s a really serious economic message that underlies this. Cities that are not fair, don’t prosper.
“And that may not happen today and may not happen tomorrow but, over a 10-year cycle, you can see that as fairness becomes more of an issue, economic growth and development actually work at a slower and slower rate.”
Urbis has taken Statistical Area (SA2) data—the smallest area of release of much of the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ analysis—from the 2021 census and measured the fairness and equity of six of Australia’s key cities.
It has done so across parameters including housing sufficiency, green space, health, education, transport, employment, digital inclusion and cultural exclusion.
In presenting the report’s findings for the first time, Meyrick has solicited the help of Australia’s 21st Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, from a speech he gave in 1972.
“…increasingly, a citizen’s real standard of living, the health of himself and his family, his children's opportunities for education and self-improvement, his access to employment … are determined not by his income, not by the hours he works, but where he lives,” Whitlam said almost 50 years ago.
And she’s channelled Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher (he actually believed that the city was there for the benefit of the community, she says.)
Then finally the Marxist-Leninist social scientist Doreen Massey (“…as soon as you become aware of something, you’re either part of the problem or you’re a part of the solution…”)
She’s still not happy.
“So, we’ve got a population that’s growing, and we’ve got equity that's declining,” Meyrick says.
“We’re all used to talking about wealth distribution, we’re used to talking about housing.
“But now we’re starting to see new forms of inequality arise. So, lack of access, not just to employment, but to education. Lack of access to green space, differentials in the way that we’re able to access cultural or recreational resources.
“In fact, we have some enormous disparities in the extent to which people are able to connect to transport systems, which means they can't move around the cities they’ve moved into.
“And they become more localised in these areas with entrenched levels of disadvantage, and unfairness.”
The research, Meyrick points out, is supported by the International Monetary Fund and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which in the past 12 months both show the sustainability of economic growth is directly related to the level of fairness in a city.
“This is a really big thing to understand, because it means that fairness actually is an economic development strategy.”
Meyrick says that is beginning to play out in other cities in the world, pointing to “chronic levels of disadvantage” that prevail in London, New York and Paris.
“It’s only when we see this that we can understand what happens when society starts to feel that life is not fair, that they do not have access to the resources they need to live a good life and to be their most productive.”
And her research? Which of Australia’s big cities is the fairest and most equitable?
Meyrick says “there isn't a great deal of difference in it,” although her hometown of Brisbane does not score well and again, she’s not happy. Gold Coast is, she says, a reason for concern.
Sydney is a mixed bag—some good, some not so good.
“And that concerns me. We don’t want to create this polarisation where we’ve got some forms of advantage working really well for us,” she says, “and other forms that we aren’t even aware are a problem.”
Her final slide shows Melbourne doesn’t do anything terribly but doesn’t do anything brilliantly, either. Just a whole bunch of average, she says. Adelaide shows what she calls “early-warning signs.”
It’s Perth that eventually comes out on top.
“That was fascinating to me because I didn’t rank Perth. I said Perth was standing still, it wasn’t actually living up to its opportunity. But it turns out from a fairness perspective, Perth is really doing pretty well.”
Take note, she tells her audience. She has data that says those cities that are the fairest, which are progressive economically and in a sustainable way, also attract the biggest share of investment.
“It’s a passport to play on the world stage.”
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