Cole Hendrigan - A Future of Polycentric Cities: How Urban Life, Land Supply, Smart Technologies and Sustainable Transport Are Reshaping Cities

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Delightful, clean, equitable, economically diverse and safe cities are the objective. Yet, despite the promise of walkable, transit-rich compact cities, there are gaps in knowledge and models. For example, the interactions of local land-use plans with public transportation provision to transform automobile-dependent metropolitan regions are largely unknown or opaque to decision makers. The book aims to uncover the capacity for redevelopment, both possible and necessary, to achieve a long-ranged transformation from an Automobile-Dependent City to a Transit-Oriented Region. It will prepare a replicable method based on available data to more clearly see the pay-offs and trade-offs of policy levers of sustainable transport and land-use planning. The results show that depending on the building heights, mixes of land use, transportation mode capacity and other factors, it is possible to build the next generations requirements of parks, housing, commercial and retail spaces along high-capacity rail public transit corridors. The results demonstrate that this may be accomplished while managing road congestion, housing the expected growth in population, improving social equity and ecological function and positively underwriting the fiscal position of governments. The results reveal a method to understand metropolitan growth as a science, to better inform the art of human-scaled urban design.

I would like to thank my academic supervisors, Peter Newman and Jeff Kenworthy for their immense patience. I am very honoured to have worked with both at Curtin University.

I am grateful for the generous support of the Curtin University International Post-Graduate Research Scholarship (CIPRS) funded through the Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery grants and the Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information (CRCSI) for their substantial Top-Up Scholarship.

I am pleased to work with Pascal Perez and the University of Wollongong. The team has pushed me to new frontiers.

Last, my strong-willed wife and our perfect daughter deserve credit as the reasons for this book. I want to actively promote better cities so they can live better.