Zoë Myers’s research while affiliated with The University of Western Australia and other places

Despite the long-term application of Transit Oriented Development (TOD) policy in Australian cities full implementation has proven a challenge. Indeed, in the Western Australian state capital of Perth, residential densities across most train station precincts remain typically low. Moreover, the use of public transport has declined over the last decade despite repeated attempts to boost patronage. In response to this situation, this paper reports on a suite of semi-structured interviews conducted with relevant experts to elicit knowledge concerning (1) the barriers to delivering successful TOD; and (2) potential strategies government planners can employ to mitigate these barriers to create successful TODs. The paper concludes that the success of station precincts must prioritise diverse, creative, and genuinely appealing places and travel options over transport planning standardisation and fixed practices.

Australian cities rarely meet their targets for infill development and experience a ‘missing middle’ in terms of urban density. This paper surveys the barriers to medium-density projects on infill sites in the Western Australian city of Perth and subsequently ventures strategies to alleviate these impediments. The findings indicate that the principal barriers to medium-density infill derive from poor quality low-density infill development, which alienates communities and dissipates the impetus developers require to deliver medium-density projects. The paper concludes that spatial planners should improve strategies for promoting the benefits of density, as well as set minimum residential densities, and site areas, for infill development.

Cities have limit on the space available for nature, so creative ways to improve human wellbeing through the provision of local opportunities to interact with natural elements are vital. This chapter offers five key design principles, and their associated pragmatic strategies, which are low cost, low maintenance, ‘safe to fail’ design interventions that increase opportunities for experiences with nature, without requiring additional land or planning, and potentially decreasing costs of maintenance of local greenspaces, as well as health expenditure in general.

This chapter explores the current epidemiological and population-level studies on the benefits of nature with regard to distance, proportion, and time spent. It highlights some of the existing issues with ideas of ‘greenspace’, both as a definition and as a typology for maximizing ecological and mental health outcomes, as well as addressing how romantic ideas of ‘unfettered’ or uninhabited wilderness are exclusionary. The concept of wild urban natures is then explored as a way to enhance spatial, ecological, and health outcomes.

This chapter explores diverse, relational, and embodied ways in which nature interactions are experienced, and how these interactions enable opportunities beneficial for mental health and wellbeing. In doing so, this includes briefly charting the stress responses in the body, before exploring the overlapping, multisensory interactions, current research findings, and neurobiological theories offering insights into how and why these interactions can occur. This chapter organizes and explores the findings from these studies in such a way that they could reliably inform spatial and sensory outcomes.

This chapter presents the rationale for needing to urgently turn our attention to how urban stressors, ecological degradation and climate change can be detrimental for our mental health and wellbeing, and the potential for embodied and relational interactions with urban ecologies to counter this. This chapter introduces the applicability of neuroscience to design, and how it contributes to a complementary perspective. Here it is argued that combining a land use approach focusing on leftover, in-between land, with allowing wild urban natures, will be most equitable, accessible, and accumulative for providing opportunities for nature interactions that can foster mental health and wellbeing.