Peter Newman

Peter Newman is the Professor of Sustainability at Curtin University. Newman has served on the Board of Infrastructure Australia and as a Lead Author for Transport on the IPCC's 5th Assessment Report. In 2011, Newman was awarded the Sidney Luker medal by the Planning Institute of Australia (NSW) for his contribution to the science and practice of town planning in Australia, and in 2014 he was awarded an Order of Australia for his contributions to urban design and sustainable transport, particularly related to the saving and rebuilding of Perth's rail system. He is the author of numerous books including People Cities and The End of Automobile Dependence

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The Crash, Peak Oil and Resilient Cities

How did the crash happen? Over-inflating the economic balloon with debt that was vulnerable to rises in oil price. What do we do about it? Use non-oil-based projects and approaches to generate economic growth or else we are going to make things worse. In detail....
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Cities Must Adapt or Face Collapse

In my first blog post, I suggested that we need to respond to the present economic crash in ways that do not undermine the basic cause of our dysfunctional global urban economy. The issues of peak oil and climate change are exposing the weakness of building our cities with growing car dependence.
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Resiliant cities and the crash

The financial crash is developing a whole industry of responses that can tell us where we went wrong and what we must do to make our future more resilient, especially in our cities where so much of the crash is hurting. Finance and economics dominate this discussion. We believe that a better understanding of what makes cities work will help in this debate, especially how urban transport and energy are fundamental to how the urban economy works or doesn't. What caused the crash?