Business as Unusual

When planning thinking collapses into prescriptive dogma, it becomes challenging to imagine alternatives to business as usual and possible innovations wither on the vine. Our reaction to out-of-control climate change, mass species extinction and the fracturing of a once egalitarian society is that we build new suburbs like before, just tighter and meaner. This hostile fabric is stranded in the gulf between being leafy and suburban and truly urban and lively. Instead, it is neither and, as such, it is the worst of all worlds.

Is that the best we can offer?

What about new urban dreams, not a hatchet job on the existing dream?

That's where this book steps in. This irreverent, easily digestible and highly visual book trawls through the archives for long-forgotten, sometimes dangerous, ideas and draws upon unfashionable or emerging theories and techniques for innovation to penetrate beyond business-as-usual approaches. Rather than a weighty tome beyond our ever-constricting attention spans, this cheerful and consumable field guide to alternative urbanisms is for informed laypeople, planners, designers, policymakers and politicians alike. It opens a conversation through a series of hand-drawn diagrams of alternative ways of dwelling in Australian cities, which have applications in sprawling cities worldwide. These diagrams have already been trialled on social media, eliciting a storm of noisy commentary. This unique book will appeal to the many frustrated people constricted by or excluded from business-as-usual approaches to urban development.

True to form, Julian Bolleter has delivered the perfect combination of provocation, insight, creativity and entertainment. A 'must read' for those who need cheering up from the realities of BAU urbanism.

Professor Josh Byrne, Dean of Sustainable Futures, Faculty of Humanities,

Curtin University

About the Author

Julian Bolleter is the Director of the Australian Urban Design Research Centre (AUDRC) at the University of Western Australia, the Program Director of AUDRC’s Master of Urban Design course, and an author and public figure.

Julian leads an ambitious climate adaptation project, ‘Future climate, future home: adaptive urban design strategies for WA’ with AUDRC partner organisations Development WA, the Department of Communities, the Western Australian Planning Commission, and multiple Local Governments.

He has received a stream of awards for his research, including the UWA School of Design's Mid-Career Research Award,’ in 2023.