Australia Sounds The Alarm On Cities And Public Health

"The results are nearly in. Half a century of postwar growth - driven by escalating production, and flavoured by hard-core consumption and mass migration to cities - is yielding a consistent global pattern."

Living in cities can be deadly.

"Cities are hymns to hyper-consumption, and from this year, for the first time, more than half the world's population will live in one. But Australia is well ahead of that trend. Three-quarters of us live in cities, says the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and the urban population is gaining four times as many people annually as regional Australia. Sydney alone gains 30,000 residents a year."

"Cities are only there because they're supposed to be useful to people. When they start to have more negatives to people than positives you have to stop and think," says Pieta Laut, the executive director of the Public Health Association of Australia. "We can sustain human life in some of the cruddiest environments, and always have. We need to get beyond what we can survive in, but what's good for a community...cities will not become untenable but they'll get nastier and nastier."