Monthly Archives: April 2022

April 13, 2022

The Valley Fever Collaborative, a University of Arizona Health Sciences-led partnership with Arizona State University and Northern Arizona University, was awarded $3.1 million in funding by the Arizona Board of Regents to start an integrated, statewide research project to identify, characterize and map hot spots and routes of exposure for Valley fever.

The funding is part of several Regents Grants announced April 8 by ABOR, foruniversities and state agencies to work together to unlock solutions to pressing challenges in Arizona.

Valley fever is an infectious disease that affects thousands of people in Arizona every year. It is caused by Coccidioides posadasii, a fungus that lives in the soil of areas with hot summers, mild winters and little rainfall, such as the Southwest. The fungal spores can be readily inhaled, which is how most Valley fever infections are believed to occur. Yet the amount of fungal burden in the soil and air, the degree to which these fungal spores travel, and the potential for new areas to be colonized with the organism are currently unknown.

We know Arizona is responsible for two-thirds of all U.S.Valleyfever infections, but just looking across the land we cant tell which places the fungus grows or are the source of so many infections, said John Galgiani, director of the Valley Fever Center for Excellence in the University of Arizona College of Medicine Tucson and a member of the BIO5 Institute. This study will try to connect the dots between strains that cause people to get sick, where in the land they come from, and what it is about those hot spots that makes the fungus thrive.With this new information, we might prevent infections at work sites or even for everyone who lives here.

Six individual projects will take place using funding provided through Arizonas Technology and Research Initiative Fund.

They are:

Detection of Coccidioides from air sampled at positive soil locations.Led by Bridget Barker, an associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at NAU, researchers will pair air-sampling devices with soil sampling at three sites to detect seasonal patterns of Valley fever risk. The goal is to develop risk-assessment models to guide land developers, agriculture and state planners.

Genome analysis directly from the environment.David Wagner and Paul Keim, professors in the Department of Biological Sciences at NAU, will establish a genomic database of environmental C. posadasii that can be used to better understand and predictively model the environmental sources of Valley fever in Arizonans.

Toward a predictive model of Coccidioides hot spots and hot moments on the Arizona landscape: characteristics and dynamics of soils harboring Valley fever.Led by Jon Chorover, professor and head of the Department of Environmental Science at the University of Arizona College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, researchers will combine soil sampling and laboratory geochemical, mineralogical and physical analyses with sensor array data from research sites. The goals are to identify soil characteristics most frequently associated with high prevalence of Coccidioides spores and determine the soil and ambient atmospheric conditions that promote the aerosolized suspension and movement of Coccidioides spores from those locations.

Identifying Valley fever hot spots from genetic clusters in patient specimens.Galgiani will lead a team of researchers seeking to determine to what degree Valley fever human infections are due to hot spots in the environment in Arizona by investigating genetically coccidioidal isolates from infected patients in relation to environmental sequences and identifying genetic clusters.

Environmental detection, modeling and genomics of Valley fever in Arizona.Matthew Fraser, a professor in the School of Sustainable Engineering and Built Environment at ASU, and Pierre Herckes, a professor in the School of Molecular Sciences at ASU, will lead a project to collect and analyze particles in the air at locations near Valley fever hot spots to determine the physical and biological characteristics of particles and understand the nature of airborne transmission.

Geospatial modeling and visualization of diverse Valley fever data.Jon Miller, director of the Decision Theater at ASU, and Sean Dudley, assistant vice president and chief research information officer at ASU, will develop a geospatial analysis platform to be used for predictive modeling and decision support.

The ABOR funding will accelerate the coordination of expertise at all three universities to understand and then attackValleyfevers public health impact, said Keim, Regents Professor of biology and executive director of the Pathogen and Microbiome Institute at Northern Arizona University. This is an amazing cross-disciplinary project that would be difficult to fund from other sources. Arizona can expect tangible benefits that improve the health and lives of our citizens.

The projects are funded for three years as part of the Valley Fever Collaborative, a statewide network designed to facilitate collaboration and solve what is an important public health and economic problem in the Southwest.

Our goal is to address the problem ofValleyfever at its source, in the soil and air we breathe, said Neal Woodbury, vice president for research and chief science and technology officer for ASUs Knowledge Enterprise. By understanding where the fungal pathogen grows and how it enters the air, we can pinpoint approaches to avoid human exposure to begin with.

On April 21, Woodbury and faculty from UArizona and NAU will speak about thecollaboration at theVenture Caf Phoenixat thePhoenix Bioscience Core in downtown Phoenix.

Top photo of a dust storm courtesy of Pixabay.com

Original post:

Valley Fever Collaborative awarded $3M in research funds - ASU News Now

What should we do about Russias invasion of Ukraine? For philanthropy, thats been both a very easy question to answer, and an incredibly hard one.

In the seven weeks since the crisis began, donors big and small have sent a flood of humanitarian aid to the embattled nation and its citizens. That decision was a no-brainer for most. Russia is a clear aggressor, an undemocratic one at that, attacking Ukraine, a democratic underdog forced to defend itself on its home turf. Its been right versus wrong, good guy versus bad guy. From the standpoint of relief fundraising, its a compelling narrative.

But what happens when we look past relief and even post-war rebuilding for a moment vital as they are to questions like: Could philanthropy have helped prevent this? Or what can grantmakers do to reduce the likelihood of wars like this breaking out in the future?

Judging from long-term downward trends in philanthropic funding for peace and security, you might get the impression that most funders answers to those two questions, if theyre being candid, would be no and nothing. Organizations engaged in international peacebuilding were once more prominent on philanthropys radar, but they have fallen on lean times. Its a trend that dates back to, and is partially attributable to, the end of the Cold War.

There has been a decrease, certainly. In the last 10 to 20 years, there have been fewer and fewer foundations that are interested in peace and security. And, you know, less urgency, less support. That was Stephen Del Rosso, a former diplomat and current program director for international peace and security at the Carnegie Corporation of New York one of only a handful of major funders still deeply invested in the field.

With Ukraine in the forefront, were led to wonder if thatll change. Will this invasion and its yet-unknown aftermath rekindle funders flagging enthusiasm for peacebuilding? And if it does, what might it look like for philanthropy to help build or rebuild some 21st-century iteration of the liberal international order, an order that many now see as crumbling away?

A U.S.-led international system

It was against the backdrop of the last land war in Europe, World War II, that American philanthropists like David Rockefeller and his peers came together to back an idealistic project. It also seemed an unlikely one at the time. Following total war, they looked toward a sustainable peace.

Using their wealth to build up organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations, the Brookings Institution and others, mid-century magnates and prominent foundations were one key to the establishment of what has come to be known as the liberal international order (also referred to as the rules-based, or, tellingly, U.S.-led international order).

Its a loose term, but it usually describes the broad set of institutions and mechanisms that have been front and center in international affairs for the past seven decades. That is, institutions like the United Nations (headquartered on a parcel of New York land donated by the Rockefellers), the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization as well as the ideological imperative to promote liberal democracy over authoritarian rule.

Historians and political scientists differ over whether this U.S.-led order truly helped avert massive world conflict over the past 75 years, or whether nuclear deterrence and mutually assured destruction played a bigger role. But according to Stephen Heintz, president and CEO at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund one of the late David Rockefellers major philanthropic legacies philanthropy was one part of the heady mix that produced the international order as it stands.

I think it was a contributing role, he told me. Philanthropy is a good source of support for research and the development of ideas. And coming out of the Second World War, there was a tremendous need for rethinking the world. It really led people to understand that if this wasnt going to happen again, there needed to be some serious conceptual work done. And there needed to be some institution-building done.

Fast forward 75 years, and the concepts and institutions developed at the time are no longer working effectively as guarantors of international peace and economic stability. Commentary, some of it breathless, has painted Putins invasion as a nail in the coffin of the old international order.

But even if the U.S.-led system isnt dead yet, a rogue Russia is only one challenge to its viability. In a multipolar world where the interests of Russia, China and a rising Global South interact with those of the U.S. and its allies, there is, once again, a need for some serious conceptual work, institution-building, and good old cross-border engagement and understanding on every level.

Philanthropy backs away

But where is philanthropy in that picture? Well, its not very prominent right now. While an annual tally by the Peace and Security Funders Group and Candid has placed total philanthropic support for international peacebuilding in the low hundreds of millions in recent years, that amounts to around just 1% of total philanthropic support, and thats based on what Del Rosso described as a broader conception of peace and security.

Moreover, major grantmakers in the space have been pulling out, with few new ones arriving to replace them. One of the most recent to pull up stakes is the MacArthur Foundation, which is winding down its nuclear security funding after 40 years in the field. An awkward decision to be sure, in light of Putins nuclear saber-rattling last month.

In a 2020 evaluation of its nuclear security work (which it had characterized as one of its big bets), MacArthur cited progress made, but concluded that there is not a clear line of sight to the existing theory of changes intermediate and long-term outcomes in the Big Bet timeframe. For our coverage this February, Valerie Chang, who led MacArthurs Nuclear Challenges team and will depart the foundation in June, confirmed that reasoning, telling us that data indicated no clear path to goals originally envisioned.

MacArthurs nuclear drawdown is one recent example of how global peace and security work often doesnt fit neatly within grantmaker conceptions of measurable impact and defined goals. Its a disconnect that has eaten into philanthropic support over the past 10 to 15 years.

Del Rosso and Heintz agreed, referring to the sector as a whole. The fact is, its very difficult to prove that youve had substantive success in areas where you cant solve the conflicts, but you can manage them. And conflict is going to be inherent in international relations, Del Rosso said.

Heintz invoked a quote often attributed to Albert Einstein: Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. But he also said that, broadly speaking, the tyranny of metrics has waned over the past several years, with grantmakers coming to appreciate qualitative as well as quantitative forms of evaluation.

More often, diminished philanthropic attention to peace and security is attributed to the end of the Cold War and the brief unipolar moment of unchallenged U.S. predominance on the world stage. Putins invasion of Ukraine and the inability of the U.S.-led system to stop it is only the latest indication that that moment has passed. In its place is a multipolar world in which the U.S. no longer enjoys the vantage point it held following both World War II and the Cold War.

Who will step up?

The pressing question right now is whether the Ukraine crisis will alert the philanthrosphere to that fact and prompt some sort of much-needed ramp-up in peace and security funding.

Theres a case for pessimism and a case for optimism. On the one hand, weve already seen how much philanthropic attention has gone, rightly, toward humanitarian relief in the region. Following the conflict, major support will likely continue to flow to support rebuilding. But after that, will U.S. funders have enough gas left in the tank to address the more fraught question of keeping the peace?

Heintz voiced some doubts. I worry a bit that there wont be bandwidth and resources available to step back from the crisis and say, What does this crisis reveal to us? And how do we need to challenge assumptions, redefine priorities, think about new systems, perhaps new institutions?

Part of the issue is a lack of modern-day David Rockefellers. Many of the top philanthropic funders of peace and security work are legacy grantmakers like the Carnegie Corporation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the MacArthur Foundation. Whats lacking is a new crop of major living donors willing to commit to this work over the long haul. That absence is a problem as the influence of super-rich living donors continues to grow and the relative heft of yesteryears powerhouse foundations declines.

Whether Ukraine will prompt some new David Rockefeller, or even some new George Soros, to enter the field is anybodys guess. But so far, no such figure has emerged.

There is, however, a case for cautious optimism that new philanthropic support for peacebuilding will materialize. That case has everything to do with the vast differences between the world of 1945 and the world of 2022.

Its a much more variegated, complicated set of challenges, Del Rosso said. And you cant, in my view, separate the Global South from great power competition, because theyre all inextricably connected. Climate change is a good example how its affecting everyone. As U.S.-centric and Eurocentric assumptions fade and the extent of global interconnectivity becomes clearer, he went on, the definition of what counts as peacebuilding is encompassing more things.

Grantmakers with little appetite for traditional peacebuilding and the old U.S.-led order may get on board if opportunities emerge to weave peacebuilding into efforts around global health and development (i.e., equitable COVID vaccination), climate and environment, female empowerment, and grassroots movement-building in the Global South.

I think there is much less consensus now on the proper role of, not only the United States, but of this liberal international order. And I think there will be some serious thought about what needs to be preserved, what needs to be no longer preserved, what needs to be reformed, Del Rosso said.

Its not only about Russia and China, its also about the rest of the Global South, its about Africa, Heintz said. Its about South Asia, its about Latin America, and how do we more fully integrate them into a global system that is inclusive and fair and transparent, and, you know, effective?

A multipolar world

Its still far too early to tell whether such a new global system will be workable, and in light of Ukraine, what role authoritarian powers like Russia and China might play in it.

But even at this early stage, the crisis is affecting grantmakers strategies. As facts on the ground change, we are evaluating our response to the war in Ukraine, said MacArthur Foundation President John Palfrey in a statement to Inside Philanthropy. MacArthur is a longstanding peace and security funder, he went on, citing potential funding avenues including humanitarian response, Ukrainian civil society, journalism, and migration and immigration efforts. And we are providing modest additional support for nuclear grantees that offer key policy research and analysis, and support critical dialogues, he said.

As funders consider their approaches, backing the bread-and-butter of peacebuilding things like research, institution-building, policy expertise, and, where possible, bottom-up peace activism will remain vital. So will efforts to fund cross-border dialogue that exists alongside and complementary to official diplomatic engagement.

But even though the U.S. harbors a lot of philanthropic horsepower, to be effective, such an outward stance may have to be humbler and a lot less U.S.-centric than it was in the 20th century.

Speaking about the post-Cold War unipolar moment, Heintz said, We in the West, in particular, we in the United States, did not proactively think about how the world was changing to a much more interdependent kind of reality. We should have used that unipolar moment of great American strength to create a multipolar global system that distributed power and managed power in constructive ways to solve global problems.

If we had done that, he went on, we might have been in a very different place today. But instead, we chose to try to manage the unipolar moment in a way that would extend American global dominance. I think that was the fundamental mistake.

See the rest here:

Where's David Rockefeller When We Need Him? Ukraine and the Case for Peacebuilding Inside Philanthropy - Inside Philanthropy

To foreign observers, this is surely one of the most confusing weeks in British politics. A Prime Minister is found to have broken his own laws laws which introduced the tightest restrictions on personal liberty ever enacted in the nations modern, peacetime history.

Within recent memory, citizens of this curious democracy have been fined for everything from organising funerals to drinking coffee in a public park. Notoriously, some even received fines for gathering to protest a womans murder for sexual gratification, an act committed by a policeman who arrested her under this same regime.

The man who approved these laws is found to have broken them himself. He himself joins the ranks of the fined. Yet he remains in the highest political office, thumping his chest with talk of military success in a foreign war. And here is the strangest aspect. A significant minority of this mans fellow citizens 30 per cent says a YouGov poll; 32 per cent says Opinium are satisfied with this outcome.

For those of us who are outraged, the outrage comes easy. Our social media timelines fill with anecdotes from friends who watched loved ones die over FaceTime. To those who interpreted lockdown rules strictly, the phrase taken for fools has never felt so apt. Did a ruling group really tell us to lock ourselves in total isolation, while they continued their lives as normal?

But if we are to understand what is going on in Westminster, we need to grapple with the perspective of people prepared to give Boris Johnson a pass. And why, irrespective of the problem of plausible challengers, the Tory party still thinks he can get away with it.

Part of the answer lies in the weeks other stories of political malaise. A tax-hiking Chancellor is found to benefit from the non-domiciled status of his wife, a tax-minimising status usually granted to those who do not live in the UK or visit for more than 90 days a year but in this case, claimed by a woman with a residence in Downing Street. They turn out to be making simultaneous claims for legal purposes of a fixed and settled intention to settle in India, and of a fixed and settled intention to live in the US. He stays in post.

A sitting MP is found guilty of sexually assaulting a minor. Another MP calls this a dreadful miscarriage of justice in which the true victim is a colleague who now faces a nightmare start to his parliamentary career. Later that night, he describes the sexual assault in question as minor on any scale. He eventually retracts and resigns from an All Party Parliamentary Group, but keeps the Tory whip.

Increasingly, it feels like we are living through the slow heat-death that categorises the end of any political hegemony. This could be the last days of New Labour, or even the final years of Henry Truman. (Had Enough?, was the successful Republican slogan when the party recaptured Congress in 1946, after 20 years of Democrat control.) But with political malaise comes voter cynicism. Or as one of Chancellor Rishi Sunaks constituents told the Guardian this week, questioned about local reaction to his wifes tax status: its what they do.

The conviction of Imran Ahmad Khan who may still appeal comes as the latest in a slew of allegations concerning sexual exploitation of power by Tory MPs. But nearly five years after #MeToo, the number of these revelations seem to inspire inertia rather than resistance. The second factor keeping Boris Johnson afloat is a reflexive resentment, in Westminster and without, of the outraged virtuousness of his critics.

Speak to those who excuse him, and youll hear mockery of critical journalists; suspicion of their motives; sceptical questions about whether his political opponents or indeed anyone stuck to lockdown regulations themselves.

One of the noxious effects of Partygate is that it has reopened raw divides in families and friendships over lockdown compliance. Now Johnson and his teams attempt to bog us down in the detail of exactly how serious his breach was or wasnt have again become the prism through which those mutual recriminations are filtered.

But those of us who are indeed angry should heed of populisms disdain for virtue. In Mike Bartletts engaging new play The 47th, a caricature of Donald Trump greets the liberal audience at Londons Old Vic by mocking their hate for him: Its special hate, it makes you pure. Political hate, especially by those who consider themselves superior, is always unappealing.

A third factor helping Johnson is the breakdown of national trust in the Met Police force itself.

A fourth is a question of simple partisanship. As Ive highlighted elsewhere, the authors of last years key read on political polarisation, Poles Apart, identify a factor they call affective polarisation in short, youre more likely to believe criminal allegations made against opponents than those made against politicians whose affiliation you share. They draw on data by the academics Samara Klar and Alexandra McCoy, who demonstrate this phenomenon with particular reference to allegations of sexual misconduct. (A charitable reading of Crispin Blunt, who defended Imran Ahmad Khan so loudly this week, is that he is suffering from an extreme case.)

But such polarisation is now entrenched in Britain, even when it comes to basic questions around rule of law. In September 2020, YouGov polled voters on Boris Johnsons plans to break international law in a very limited and specific way in order to renege on the EU Withdrawal agreement. Forty-seven per cent of the total sample found it unacceptable. But 52 per cent per cent of those who had voted Tory at the 2019 election were fine with it; only 25 per cent were opposed.

As a nation, when we cannot expect basic adherence by our government to the rule of law, we have a problem. This is true whether were talking about international treaties, or the PMs personal behaviour. This is why Crispin Blunts intervention on Monday also matters. When a politician declares that as a former justice minister he rejects a court verdict a moment which surely sent shivers up the spine of any other victim considering a complaint against an MP we get a glimpse of what the state might look like if we cease to apply the law of the land to our political representatives.

This political crisis started not with parties, but with Johnsons attempt to let his colleague Owen Patterson evade punishment for breaching lobbying regulations. We owe it to the country to remove a Prime Minister who undermines the law of the land and the codes of political conduct. Butour display ofhigh moral outrage, andofpublic disdain for his character, will only rally his defenders.

Read more from the original source:

Partygate is not just about politics we are watching the slow erosion of democracy in the UK - iNews

Were moving not just into the Anthropocene but into the Urbocene the era of city dominance. With so many of us now living as urban creatures, city-making is a question not only of economics and delight but of survival. Australia, heavily urbanised as we are, is a leader in this regard. More than 80 per cent of Australians live in cities, compared with about 55 per cent globally. Will our leadership be for better? Or for worse?

Australian cities, like others around the world, stand at a crossroads. Facing us are oppositional ogres of climate and pandemic. Our choice is clear. We can let our pandemic-generated terror lock us back into our cars, McMansions and solipsistic sprawl, in a way that would only worsen climate change, or we can be bold and inventive, sustaining and enhancing the proximity that is the essence of city life in ways that are enjoyable, equitable, prosperous and climate-friendly. This, surely, is the single most critical, bleeping-red job of planning.

And yet every time our governments look as if they might do some of that they get frightened or nobbled and back feebly away into the open arms of the developers. The latest slew of acts, tracts, reports and repealments tells just such a story.

Most recently, at a lunch hosted by development lobby group the Urban Taskforce on April 5, New South Wales Planning Minister Anthony Roberts revoked the newly minted Design and Place State Environmental Planning Policy (DP SEPP), which had been intended to foreground sustainability, resilience and quality of place. The SEPP, brainchild of previous minister Rob Stokes, collected urban design, apartment design, infrastructure and BASIX guidelines into a single overarching strategy. It was intended to combat urban heat, increase tree canopy, enhance walkability and mandate pale roofs.

The SEPP rescission followed an even more scandalous one, just two weeks earlier. Then, at the height of the flood crisis, as people clung like sodden fieldmice on their slippery, flood-bound rooftops, Roberts unilaterally scrapped Stokess ministerial directive on nine sustainability principles designed to enhance the states climate resilience.

These measures which would, inter alia, limit our rapacious tendency to build on flood plains had been in effect a mere matter of days. True, they were 20 years late. And true, they would not have helped people marooned on uninsurable roofs in Lismore. Properly applied, however, they would at least have stopped more Lismores being built.

In both instances the development lobby was cock-a-hoop. The Urban Taskforce of Australia, the Property Council of Australia and the Urban Development Institute of Australia had all been fiercely critical of the sustainability push enshrined in the two documents. Now, to their delight, the state government had listened. The summary rescissions derived directly from the development industrys relentless push for faster approvals, looser controls and cheaper construction.

At the same time, bookended by these two controversial repealments, a pair of potentially far more influential planning bills slipped quietly through NSW Parliament on the same day. One was the Greater Sydney Parklands Trust Bill 2022, which gathers all of Sydneys major parklands (Centennial Park and Moore Park, Callan Park, Parramatta Park, Fernhill Estate and Western Sydney Parklands) beneath a single administrative umbrella; the other was the still more surreptitious Greater Cities Commission Bill 2022, which expands the Three Cities model current under the Greater Sydney Commission Act (2015) to six cities, covering the entire sandstone mega-region from Newcastle to Wollongong.

Both bills look like and could become good opportunities for some much-needed large-scale, long-term strategic planning of the kind that has almost never happened in Sydney. In apparent contradiction to the neoliberal deregulation that drove the two repealments, these bills both gather and centralise power. There is, though, a common thread not neoliberalism but old-school cronyism, enabling commercial exploitation of the environment to benefit the few.

The Greater Sydney Parklands Trust Bill, for example, will enable leases of 99 years, a move seen by many as a specific enabler of Gerry Harveys longstanding Carsingha unsolicited bid to invest $1 billion and build up to 20 storeys on the so-called Entertainment Quarter, or the old Showgrounds, once part of Centennial Park. As Alex Greenwich said, after his bid to limit the lease-term to 50 years was reversed in the upper house, this essentially permits freehold ownership of public land [and] was done to facilitate the selloff of the former Showgrounds land for commercial profit.

As to the six cities model: in the hands of a decent government this should be a good thing. Strategic planning in any real sense has always been one of Sydneys glaring lacks. But good law should not depend on good people to apply it. Signs are that this government will merely use planning to cloak the parcelling out of windfall gains to developers like sweets to greedy toddlers.

Id love to be wrong about this. Id be delighted to discover even a sliver of authenticity amid the rhetoric. But consider the evidence. In 10 years, our market-obsessed neoliberal governments have accelerated rezonings, accelerated approvals, fostered land-clearing and expanded complying development. Covid-19, which should have tipped Sydney towards full-on community engagement, simply became a pretext for further rapacity guised as development-led recovery.

Consider, too, the wordage. The language in which this latest tranche of enactments and rescissions is wrapped is all very hydraulic. All flow and squeezing, pipeline and supply, as if housing were some kind of liquid fuel we could suck from the ground and burn with impunity.

The ministerial directive summarily revoked by Roberts last month wasnt just about flood. It would also have limited developers ability to build in places of extreme vulnerability to bushfire, earthquake, landslide, coastal erosion and tsunami. The governments own figures show disasters such as these cost NSW $3.6 billion every year, so avoiding them is mere common sense. Its what planning is for. But no: theyre gone.

Scrapped along with that principle were a further eight. These included: developing a competitive and resilient economy; delivering well-designed places that enhance the environment, the economy and quality of life; gradually transitioning to renewables; providing well-designed transport integrated with land use; and ensuring a supply of safe, diverse and affordable housing.

Roberts justified his rescission of these nine principles as exigency a need to focus on delivering a pipeline of housing supply. A spokesperson, echoing the phraseology, cited instruction from Premier Dominic Perrottet to deliver a pipeline of new housing supply.

This is designed to sound efficient, plausible and public spirited. We all need somewhere to live and, after climate change, housing affordability is the No.1 issue. The background to the new Greater Cities Commission Bill makes precisely this argument, that the mega-region (Sydney east, central, Sydney west, the Hunter, the Central Coast and the IllawarraShoalhaven) is expected to double in population from five to 10 million in 40 years. This is certainly something we should plan for. But how should it be done? And to whose benefit?

The danger of the primitive supply argument is that it neatly casts developers as the good guys, striving only to deliver homes for the people. All government needs to do, according to this argument, is take off the brakes remove red and green tape and everything will be hunky dory.

Unsurprisingly, developers agree. The Urban Taskforce commissioned a study whose name, Standing Tall, says it all. The findings seem to show that high-density and high-rise (about 58 storeys) is the best model in terms of land efficiency, embodied carbon and operational carbon emissions.

But is this the reality? With the built environment generating some 40 per cent of carbon emissions, the form and efficiency of it is critical. Conclusions are diverse. A recent paper from researchers at University of Colorado Boulder and Edinburgh Napier University, for example, contradicts the developer-beloved nostrum that high-rise is necessary to combat sprawl. Instead, it finds that high-density, low-rise environments such as those found in Paris are the optimal urban form when looking to reduce greenhouse gas emissions over their whole-life cycle because they optimise population levels without the concomitant rise in greenhouse emissions.

So thoroughly do developers see themselves as colonising the moral high ground here they even advocate a public subsidy for apartment towers, to generate a pipeline for this more affordable and sustainable housing type.

In truth, there is no evidence that increasing the supply of apartments by itself reduces cost. Indeed, over the years of the current residential building boom the biggest ever in this country prices have continued to skyrocket. This is because the market is not finite. If we were limited to one dwelling each, sure; but the current combination of low interest rates, no travel and negative gearing incentivises investors, meaning the market is essentially limitless.

The developer lobby groups are hugely supportive of a report from the Australian Productivity Commission, also dated March 2022, chaired by Liberal MP Jason Falinski. The Falinski report, which did not distinguish between high-density and high-rise, argued for less regulation and sustaining negative gearing as is. Of course, what is never revealed is just how many of the pro-negative gearing individuals including politicians own investment apartments. It seems a rather glaring conflict of interest.

Planning good cities is not that difficult. Sydney especially has such good bones not just in its natural gifts but also in its city of villages DNA that it should be a natural for a 30-year plan that takes us to zero carbon, full renewables, intense community engagement and tight, dense, exciting, walkable village centres linked by clean, fast and silent public transport.

Its a survival issue, with disaster one side and delight the other. Is that a difficult decision?

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper onApr 16, 2022 as "This is not a pipeline".

A free press is one you pay for. In the short term, the economic fallout from coronavirus has taken about a third of our revenue. We will survive this crisis, but we need the support of readers. Now is the time to subscribe.

Here is the original post:

NSW scraps flood laws to benefit developers - The Saturday Paper

John Krull| The Statehouse File

ON THE ROAD The state highway twists and turns like a piece of tangled string.

Im in eastern Illinois. Id come over to the small town in western Indiana where my late brother once worked to settle some of his affairs.

It also was a town where we lived with my grandfather for a summer when I was a boy, more than 50 years ago. I parked near the news stand/soda fountain Grandpa used to take me to when I was in elementary school.

I left the town haunted by memories of my brother, my grandfather and my own young self. I ambled the streets there thinking of moments good and bad Id shared with them when they both walked this earth and I strolled beside them.

Then I did what I so often have done when the past troubles me.

I hit the road and let the miles covered help me sort things out.

More from John Krull: A tribute to my little brother, a devoted uncle and fighter for the downtrodden

Im headed to St. Louis, a city where I passed a formative part of my young manhood. Im going to hang out with old friends and reconnect with an earlier life.

But theres no hurry in getting there. Instead of barreling toward the interstate, I seek out the old roads and point the car west. I drive over small state highways, past fields that were farms when my grandfather was a child. The heavy rains of the past few weeks have started to turn the grass to that deep green that occurs in the heart of spring.

Grief is a strange thing. It attunes one to loss to the things and people that depart, to the pieces of ones own life that come to live only in memory.

When my grandfather was a boy, land such as this was America. Ours was a rural, agrarian society then. All his ancestors had lived on farms and drawn their livings from the earth.

He was part of the generation that changed that.

He burned with an eagerness to learn. He worked his way through college, often walking more than 30 miles from his family home in the hills of southern Indiana to the small liberal arts school where he got his degree.

In the process, he charted a different course for those who followed him. His grandchildren went on to become CEOs, corporate executives, ministers, nurses, lawyers, teachers and, yes, writers.

The wheels roll. I cruise past a farm with an antique tractor parked near an ancient barn and a cell tower in a field adjacent to the house.

As the clich goes, the only constant in life is change.

My brother balanced himself uneasily between our birth familys rural past and urban and suburban present. He graduated from a major university and earned a law degree from the same August institution. When he was young, he sought out the challenges cities presented.

But small towns always spoke to him. He spent the bulk of his career as a reporter and editor for a series of small daily newspapers. The rhythms of life in old and tightly knit communities touched parts of him that nothing else could.

He and I took road trips together. I think of him now as my car glides through the Midwestern countryside. I recall his gift for wry asides and the joy he took in seeing something new or unexpected.

I also think about my grandfather and my apprentice road voyages in the back seat of his old Buick. He liked to talk as he drove. Some of the most fundamental truths I know I first heard as he wheeled us from place to place.

I still can hear his voice, higher pitched than mine with a slow southern Indiana accent.

As my car glides through a small town that seems asleep on this late afternoon, I wonder what my grandfather would make of the world we now inhabit. I ponder the paths that led him away from the farm and my brother back to small towns.

Thats the thing about journeys. No matter how much we plan, they always take us to places we couldnt entirely expect.

The road in front of me presents a sweeping turn through a small stand of trees.

I motor on, eager, as always, to see what lies around the bend and where the voyage will take me.

John Krull is director of Franklin College's Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher ofTheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.

Read more here:

Krull: Working through grief on the back roads of America - The Herald-Times