COVID has disrupted our big cities, and regional planning has to catch up fast

Posted on June 29, 2021 by particularkev

Jason Byrne, University of TasmaniaSince the 1950s, the world has experienced a sixfold increase in the number of people living in cities. City dwellers now outnumber rural residents globally and in many individual countries. But the COVID-19 pandemic has begun to disrupt the trajectory, scale and form of urbanisation.

Cities, by virtue of their size, have recorded more deaths than surrounding rural areas, though this may not be linked to density. In the USA, small cities and towns have been hit hard. And social and economic disruption appears worse in cities in the developing world.

The pandemic is refocusing planners’ attention on the vulnerability of cities to natural hazards and other threats. Securing food, water and energy, sustaining health services and maintaining critical supply chains are seen as more important than ever. Planners are also concerned about rising social inequality.

The pandemic has fast-tracked some trends

In developed nations like Australia, more city dwellers are moving to the suburbs and beyond, believing they offer better security and quality of life. Australian Bureau of Statistics data from 2020 show our capital cities experienced a net loss of 11,200 people from outward migration. This is also happening in less developed countries, where rural-urban migration patterns have in some cases reversed.

It’s too early, though, to tell if these shifts are permanent.

The impacts of COVID-19 have heightened de-growth and counter-urbanisation trends. Reduced public transport use (down by as much as 52% nationally in 2020) and lower demand for commercial space (occupancy rates fell to as low as 24% in some cities), are changing the look and feel of many central business districts. Business profits and government revenue have been reduced.

The opposite is occurring in some suburbs and towns. These areas are experiencing a squeeze on rental availability, rising property prices and more traffic congestion.

Some commentators are suggesting the future of cities will be radically different. So what does this mean for urban planning?

Cities require co-ordination to function properly

Cities are complex entities. They require a high degree of co-ordination in providing services (such as water supply, waste management), housing and infrastructure (for example, energy generation and distribution). Regional planning often performs that role.

Regional planning was developed following the second world war to co-ordinate decision-making across jurisdictions within metropolitan areas. To achieve desired city planning objectives, planners needed a way to better manage rapid population growth and the many interactions of landowners, property developers, businesses and local governments.

Regional plans developed by Australian states from the 1940s to 1970s, for example, sought to contain and focus urban growth pressures. This was done by managing land use, designating urban growth corridors and boundaries, and protecting key resources (forests, water catchments, farmland) from incompatible development. Most regional plans were based on a central core surrounded by suburbs, with radiating transport lines (railways and freeways) connecting the two.

1948 poster promoting the Cumberland County Plan for Sydney — The cover of a public information booklet about the Cumberland County Planning Scheme for Sydney (1948)
City of Sydney Archives

Beware quick fixes that ignore new trends

As countries recover from the pandemic’s impacts, the temptation is to use quick fixes to stimulate economic activity — such as unlocking large areas of land for housing. But planning urban areas to meet the needs of present and future generations requires strategic decision-making. Will we need all those new houses or large infrastructure projects if our urban populations grow more slowly than expected?

The forces currently driving people away from cities and the impacts this is having on built environments and urban populations cannot be ignored. We need to ask if they are temporary, or if they signal a long-term change to our cities.

We also need to recognise that huge investments in urban infrastructure have been made since the 1950s. It is unlikely we will simply abandon our cities.

Even with larger numbers of people moving to suburbs and the countryside, we will still need to supply infrastructure such as new roads, powerlines, water pipes, sewers and waste management facilities. But regional planning must adapt to the “new normal”, as the current approaches might no longer be fit for purpose.

What does the future hold?

Trends in working from home, online shopping, peer-to-peer transport such as Uber, distributed energy generation (from rooftop solar and other local sources), waste recycling (such as circular metabolism) and new models of finance and funding (such as modern monetary theory) are all affecting the complex systems needed to keep urban areas functioning.

Although vaccines may help life return to some level of normality in the coming years, many of the drivers of counter-urbanisation will continue. Some people will want to keep working from home. Other will want more opportunities to interact with nature. Many will want to live in what planners are calling 20-minute neighbourhoods.

Changing supply chains may result in a rise in new types of local manufacturing. Hydrogen-based energy could make new modes of transport viable — such as smaller, on-demand buses for suburban public transport. We may see the rise of more polycentric cities, like Los Angeles, where suburban centres of employment include local manufacturing.

Regional planning must adjust to these trends. Some large-scale infrastructure projects might need to be rethought. Transit systems will likely need to include autonomous vehicles. Large-scale greening of cities will be necessary to reduce higher temperatures accompanying climate change, if we are to prevent avoidable deaths among older populations.

Elderly couple sit on a bench in shade under street trees — Climate change means urban greening needs to be part of strategic urban planning to counter extreme heat.
Shutterstock

We will probably also experience new ways of involving citizens in decision-making, such as co-design.

Regional planning has the capacity to stimulate innovation in housing provision, alternative forms of employment and co-ordinating new systems of transport and energy distribution. But planners must catch up fast if they are to play a role in shaping the future of our cities.

Jason Byrne, Professor of Human Geography and Planning, University of Tasmania

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

COVID impacts demand a change of plan: funding a shift from commuting to living locally

Posted on October 12, 2020 by particularkev

Conventional transport infrastructure planning has been based on wholesale commuting to and from the city centre.
Taras Vyshnya/Shutterstock

Benjamin Kaufman, Griffith University

Long-term planning has delivered mass transit systems to cater for high-patronage, hub-and-spoke transport systems. Unfortunately, this has left many city residents without basic access to public transport services. And we could never have planned for the impacts of COVID-19.

Our previous plans were based on the best available data at the time. Today, these plans must be critically reviewed using new data that properly represent the world and our transport needs as they are now.

Important facts to keep in mind

1: Fewer people commute to work.

The work-from-home transition is well under way. Our current transport networks (except for roads, which have rebounded to traffic equal to or above pre-pandemic levels in some cities) are operating far below previous levels, even allowing for social distancing. This may not be the best time to break ground on major infrastructure projects planned under previous assumptions of population and demand growth.

2: Disadvantaged populations lack access to opportunities.

Public transport is key to enabling everyone in a population to be a productive member of society. Many disadvantaged groups cannot drive or afford car ownership. However, they also lack access to public transport, particularly in the outer suburbs.

Unfortunately, coronavirus impacts will hit the disadvantaged the hardest. If we want everyone to be able to participate in the economic recovery, we need to promote basic levels of access regardless of an individual’s circumstance.

3: Population growth will not meet projections.

Migration bans will greatly reduce short-term growth. Current projections show a population up to 4% smaller in 2040 than it would have been in a non-COVID world. This will further decrease demand for urban transit services as well as demand across many sectors of our society. These trends are important because much of our planning is based around these population growth metrics.

However, our suburbs still lack basic public transport services. If we want to increase patronage, we need to bring services to more people by improving coverage of our sprawling, low-density cities.

Over 80% of the population of our biggest cities live in the outer and middle suburbs, yet this massive majority have limited to no basic public transport service. Across our five largest cities, Infrastructure Australia reports, “public transport disadvantage in outer suburbs is significant”.

Populations living in inner, middle and outer suburbs of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide — Estimated resident population by suburban classification, as count and proportion of city population.
Infrastructure Australia: Outer Urban Public Transport: Improving accessibility in lower-density areas

Households’ access to jobs and services gets much worse with increasing distance from the city centre. Development of suburban and regional mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) offerings could promote better access in these “harder to serve” areas.

Moving the country forward

Job creation will be an important aspect of economic recovery. Yet too often we look to large construction projects as the answer. There is plenty of other job-creating work to be done in our communities.

We could, for example, increase the miserly funding for our piecemeal walking and cycling networks.

We could also expand on-demand services to suburban and rural residents who lack basic public transport access. On-demand transit does not follow fixed routes or timetables. Riders book a trip for a cost similar to a bus fare.

Passenger waiting to board a Bridj on-demand bus service. — Bridj is one of the operators that is expanding on-demand services in Sydney and other cities.
Bridj Transit Systems/Facebook

These options will encourage local spending to support small businesses. These are an important piece of our social fabric and improve livability in our communities.

We need to look locally

A focus on localised investment in the many neglected communities across the country will deliver major benefits. Money already committed to large projects that are under way represents sunk costs that may be too deep to renegotiate. However, future plans using public funds must be re-examined.

Investments should target disadvantaged groups and broaden access to transport networks, encouraging new potential users. For many, assistance in gaining access to the necessities of life will be invaluable during the coming economic recovery. Guaranteed access to groceries, medical services, work opportunities and recreational activities must not be reserved for the elite.

We need better localised public transport and we need it for the majority of citizens, not just those who live in the inner suburbs of our capital cities. Most regional populations lack even rudimentary public transport coverage at reasonable frequency.

Increasing services in these areas will create valuable jobs that will stick around, unlike large one-off construction projects. The money will stay local, going into the pockets of operators who live and work in their own community.

While our long-term planning is not to blame for our current situation, we need to develop for the future, not the past. The financial costs of building and maintaining our current infrastructure are not going away. However, we can no longer refuse to invest in many of our underserved communities.

It is time to ensure everyone, regardless of their income or where they grow up, has the basic services they need to be a productive member of society.

Benjamin Kaufman, PhD Candidate, Cities Research Institute, Griffith University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Why coronavirus must not stop Australia creating denser cities

Posted on May 17, 2020 by particularkev

Max Holleran, University of Melbourne

Stay-at-home orders have meant many people are happy to live in dispersed suburbs with free-standing, single-family homes. Quarantine feels less daunting with a backyard, plenty of storage space to stockpile supplies, and a big living room for morning stretches. Before the crisis, though, Australia was slowly moving toward urban density.

More apartments with communal amenities, rather than privatised space, were being built, creating less dependence on driving. It is easy to think these urbanites are now glumly looking out their windows towards the more spacious suburbs, wishing they had made different choices. Yet, despite the impacts of restrictions, Australia’s future is in urban density and not the suburban sprawl of the past.

The benefits of density done well

Before the world changed and Australians were ushered inside en masse, the country was making great strides toward creating more compact, walkable cities. Denser neighbourhoods provided multiple benefits:

better access to transport alternatives to cars
the creation of vibrant commercial districts
increased ability to house more people during affordability and homelessness crises.

Nationally, we were building almost as many apartment units as single family homes. In cities like Melbourne and Sydney, apartment construction even surpassed stand-alone houses despite lax quality regulations and design and construction flaws.

Density was achieved not just through towers for Asian investors in CBDs, but more subtle alterations such as townhouses and small blocks of flats. Residents moving into these neighbourhoods affirmed a sense of environmental consciousness, based on driving less, but also the belief in tight-knit communities with small businesses, parks and thriving street life.

Townhouses, like these in Hobart, increase urban density more unobtrusively than high-rise apartment blocks.
David Lade/Shutterstock

Beware the siren call of suburbia

With the onset of COVID-19, it seems Australia’s new-found love of city living might be over, reverting to the suburban norm. The suburbs always offered a sense of safety, now more than ever.

Yet much of this is illusory. People still have to go shopping and, in many cases, to work, where they could be exposed to the virus. People have just as much control over their physical space in an apartment as in a house. (The exception is the lifts, but distancing measures and gloves can easily reduce risk.)

Australians may be tempted to re-embrace suburbia out of nostalgia for pre-virus safety, but they should remember what brought them to cities in the first place. As the architect Robin Boyd bemoaned way back in his 1960 critique of suburbanisation, The Australian Ugliness:

… the suburbs’ stealthy crawl like dry rot eating into the forest edge.

With 60 years of government policy propping up sprawl through freeway construction and tax breaks like negative gearing, it continues to be its own kind of infection scarring the landscape.

Don’t blame public health failures on density

Despite re-animated fears of living closer together, many countries that have successfully contained the coronavirus have some of the most densely populated cities in the world. These cities include Seoul, Hong Kong and Taipei. They have done this not by separating people but by increasing testing and contact tracing.

What is needed during a pandemic is not panic but effective public health. Prosperous, well-managed city governments are often best placed to offer these services to the community.

Negative examples like the United States, where the Trump administration has devolved responsibilities to states and cities, provide even more proof of why cities have to be at the forefront of public health campaigns, whether or not they choose that role voluntarily. The same could be said of Australia, where state governments in Victoria and New South Wales took the lead on restricting gatherings as the national government dithered.

Now, more than ever, we are appreciating urban life from afar: making lists of our favourite restaurants, changing our Zoom background during “virtual happy hour” to the interior of our local pub, and yearning for social connections that have migrated online.

We should listen to our desires and use this moment to double down on urban density when the crisis subsides, by funding mass transit and providing incentives to construct apartments rather than free-standing suburban homes.

Low-density living is less sustainable, less affordable and less fun. We should all remember that, despite currently having to keep our distance from one another.

Max Holleran, Lecturer in Sociology, University of Melbourne, University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

If more of us work from home after coronavirus we’ll need to rethink city planning

Posted on May 4, 2020 by particularkev

John L Hopkins, Swinburne University of Technology

We have seen an unprecedented rise in the number of people working from home as directed by governments and employers around the world to help stop the spread of COVID-19.

If, as some expect, people are likely to work from home more often after the pandemic, what will this mean for infrastructure planning? Will cities still need all the multibillion-dollar road, public transport, telecommunications and energy projects, including some already in the pipeline?

World’s largest work-from-home experiment

Remote working was steadily on the rise well before COVID-19. But the pandemic suddenly escalated the trend into the “world’s largest work-from-home experiment”. Many people who have had to embrace remote working during the pandemic might not want to return to the office every day once restrictions are lifted.

They might have found some work tasks are actually easier to do at home. Or they (and their employers) might have discovered things that weren’t thought possible to do from home are possible. They might then question why they had to go into the workplace so often in the first place.

But what impact will this have on our cities? After all, many aspects of our cities were designed with commuting, not working from home, in mind.

Stress test for NBN and energy networks

From a telecommunications perspective, the huge increase in people working from home challenges the ways in which our existing networks were designed.

Data from Aussie Broadband show evening peak broadband use has increased 25% during the shutdown. Additional daytime increases are expected due to home schooling with term 2 starting.

Research by the then federal Department of Communications in 2018 estimated the average Australian household would need a maximum download speed of 49Mbps during peak-use times by 2026. If more people work from home after COVID-19, the size and times of peak use might need to be recalculated.

Another factor not modelled by the government research was the potential impact of an increase in uploads. This is a typical requirement for people working from home, as they now send large files via their suburban home networks, rather than their office networks in the city.

Recent research by Octopus Energy in the UK has found domestic energy use patterns have also changed since COVID-19. With more people working from home, domestic energy use in the middle of the day is noticeably higher. Some 30% of customers use an average of 1.5kWh more electricity between 9am and 5pm.

Conversely, data from the US show electricity use in city centres and industrial areas has declined over the same period.

Less commuting means less congestion

Closer to home, new data from HERE Technologies illustrate just how much traffic congestion has eased.

Thursday afternoons from 5-5.15pm are normally the worst time of the week for traffic congestion in Melbourne. Last week the city’s roads recorded the sort of free-flowing traffic usually seen at 9.30am on a Sunday. Just 1.8% of Melbourne’s major roads were congested, a fraction of the usual 19.8% at that time.

All of Australia’s major cities are experiencing similar reductions. Transurban has reported traffic is down 43% on the Melbourne airport toll road, 29% on its Sydney roads and 27% in Queensland.

Passengers are also staying away from public transport in droves. For example, South Australian government statistics for Adelaide show passenger numbers have slumped by 69% for buses, by 74% for trains and by 77% for trams, compared with this time last year.

What does this mean for infrastructure planning?

With these trends in mind, future investment in roads, public transport, energy and telecommunications will need to consider the likelihood of more people working from home.

Prior to COVID-19, Melbourne research found 64% of city workers regularly worked from home, but usually only one day a week, even though 50% of their work could be done anywhere. While the changes we are now seeing are a result of extreme circumstances, it is not inconceivable that, on average, everybody could continue to work from home one extra day per week after the pandemic. Even this would have significant implications for long-term urban planning.

The most recent Australian Census data show 9.2 million people typically commute to work each day. If people worked from home an average of one extra day per week, this would take 1.8 million commuters off the roads and public transport each day.

Many road and public transport projects will be based on forecasts of continuing increases in commuter numbers. If, instead, people work from home more often, this could call into question the need for those projects.

Areas outside city centres would also require more attention, as working from home creates a need for more evenly distributed networks of services for the likes of energy and telecommunications. Interestingly, such a trend could support long-term decentralisation plans, like those outlined in Melbourne’s Metropolitan Planning Strategy. And if such change encourages more people to live away from the big cities, it also could help to make housing more affordable.

John L Hopkins, Innovation Fellow, Swinburne University of Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Before we rush to rebuild after fires, we need to think about where and how

Posted on January 22, 2020 by particularkev

Mark Maund, University of Newcastle; Kim Maund, University of Newcastle, and Thayaparan Gajendran, University of Newcastle

A primary school in East Gippsland was burnt down in the current bushfire crisis. While Premier Daniel Andrews immediately committed to rebuilding the school as it was, media reported the local CFA captain didn’t want it rebuilt.

Screen Shot from abc.net.au.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-15/bushfire-destroys-clifton-creek-primary-school-gippsland/11860490

Public support for rebuilding in the same disaster affected places is often high. But as fire-fighting agencies are aware, our bushfires are increasing in size, intensity and duration, and a warming climate will continue to worsen these factors. We need to start being more strategic about where we rebuild homes and facilities lost to fire, and how.

Rush now, regret later

As there are sadly many people without homes and many businesses that have suffered lost income from reduced tourism and other activities, urgency in such a response seems reasonable.

But there’s a risk that rebuilding the same buildings in the same areas may not mitigate the current risks or any future risks under new climate scenarios – existing and new communities will be vulnerable. Planning can assist with managing future bushfire risks by helping decide where homes, buildings and infrastructure should be located.

Importantly, we must not rush to rebuild the same buildings in the same location. We need to consider risks from natural hazards in these bushfire prone areas such as ember attack, radiant heat, flammable building materials and safe evacuation routes.

If homes and some community buildings, such as schools, are located in areas that are too risky and likely to be lost in future bushfires then we need to consider our options. These may include changing the land use zoning to allow only lower-risk buildings (for industrial rather than residential use), or increasing building requirements for bushfire protection.

Before commencing rebuilding, planning agencies need to plan how communities can be made resilient and if there is opportunity to use the affected land for houses designed with the highest bushfire attack level or shops or offices with higher fire ratings.

Alternatively, planning agencies can choose to use cleared land adjacent to high bushfire risk as parks or roads to provide additional separation between buildings and vegetation.

Organisations involved in planning need to focus on increasing the separation between buildings and vegetation, as well as additional fire safety measures for buildings.

How to rebuild

We need to consider increased construction standards for buildings to better protect them against bushfires — things like fire resistant walls, thicker glass and metal screens for windows, non-combustible roofs and access to water to fight fires.

However these provide only some protection. Buildings may continue to be lost in future bushfires, so what we construct in these areas needs to be reconsidered.

Options to rebuild in high risk areas should include buildings that are seen as low risk to human life and livelihoods such as storage or warehouse-style buildings and light industrial buildings. Owners of these buildings may need to accept they may be lost to bushfire.

Buildings that contain large numbers of people that need assistance during bushfires such as schools, aged care and hospitals should be located with extensive separation from bushfire risk, as well as with increased construction standards with multiple evacuation routes.

High-risk areas could be used as parks. This could also increase the separation between vegetation and dwellings.
from http://www.shutterstock.com

The speed and intensity of recent fires shows there may be less time to evacuate under existing and future disaster conditions, so continuing to build in high hazard prone areas may no longer be appropriate.

A new national planning policy should guide the states in considering the exposure of communities to these hazards and their capacity to respond, such as evacuation routes, distance to refuge centres and distance from fire services.

A national policy

Before we rush to rebuild our homes, roads and infrastructure we need to review planning policies and bushfire hazard maps produced by state fire services and have their involvement in future decision making around this area.

We need a national bushfire planning policy to address risk that crosses state boundaries and to provide a consistent approach to identifying where communities can locate and what activities can occur in high risk areas.

Mark Maund, PhD Candidate, School of Architecture and Built Environment, University of Newcastle; Kim Maund, Discipline Head – Construction Management, School of Architecture and Built Environment, University of Newcastle, and Thayaparan Gajendran, Associate Professor, School of Architecture and Built Environment, University of Newcastle

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

You can’t boost Australia’s north to 5 million people without a proper plan

Posted on October 26, 2019 by particularkev

Could Darwin one day be home to more than a million people?
Geoff Whalan/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

Julian Bolleter, University of Western Australia

Any moves to greatly increase the population of northern Australian by 2060 could have a devastating impact on the local environment without long-term careful planning by all tiers of government.

That’s the finding of research that looked at several scenarios to increase the population of the north to 5 million people.

That’s an extra 3.7 million people, or an almost four-fold increase in the current population of northern Australia.

But, given the potential impact of climate change on northern Australia, we could see population movement the other way as people in the north head south.

Northern exposure

The region of Australia above the Tropic of Capricorn covers an area of 3,500,000km² – about 45% of Australia’s landmass – yet it houses only 5% of its population.

Proponents of development envisage extreme population growth because of the region’s growing geopolitical importance.

Northern Australia has already been identified as a “gateway to Asia”.

It’s also described as the largest intact “savanna remaining on Earth […] with a rich biodiversity of international significance”.

Current federal government planning for northern Australia is in the Our North, Our Future white paper, released in 2015.

The report adopts a pro-development stance, seeing the north as a place of economic bounty and opportunity.

While it is mute on issues of settlement patterns, there are statements that allude to the government’s support for significant urbanisation:

We need to lay the foundations for rapid population growth and put the north on a trajectory to reach a population of four to five million by 2060.

The white paper also refers to “the development of major population centres of more than a million people”. Such cities would be around six times the size of the current largest northern city of Townsville, population about 180,000.

Three plans for growth

Given the existing city planning documents do not countenance the scale of population growth projected in the white paper, we developed three scenarios for how the federal government could distribute this northern Australian population of 5 million by 2060.

Scenario 1: Growth

Economic and lifestyle factors concentrate the increased population in the four dominant northern cities of Darwin, Cairns, Townsville and Mackay. Each would have populations of more than a million by 2060.

Scenario 2: Decentralised Growth

The populations of Port Hedland, Broome, Kununurra, Darwin, Cairns, Bowen, Townsville and McKay will each increase by 462,000 people.

Scenario 3: Concentrated Growth

Economic opportunities see northern Australia’s growing population concentrated in Darwin, which would grow by 1.5 million people by 2060.

This figure is in line with the Australian government’s vision of northern cities with “more than a million people”.

The fate of the north

Irrespective of the scenario, our findings show population growth will not be good for the local environment without any overarching long-term planning frameworks to steer urbanisation.

This is particularly the case for scenarios 1 and 3 where the required increase in urban area either outstrips, or is only just commensurate with, the availability of cleared land adjacent to Darwin, Cairns and Townsville.

As such, population growth at the scale proposed by the white paper could result in substantial destruction, degradation and fragmentation of peri-urban ecosystems – where urban meets rural – by urban development and expanding road networks.

Scenario 1: Growth for Darwin.
Julian Bolleter, Author provided

In Darwin’s case, in Scenario 1 the additional 925km² of urbanisation required would sprawl south of the city in a corridor to as far as Humpty Doo (1) and down to Acacia Hills (2).

Scenario 1: Growth for Townsville.
Julian Bolleter, Author provided

In Townsville, in Scenario 1 for growth, the additional 925km² of urbanisation would result in sprawling along the coast and around the existing centres of Giru (1) and Woodstock (2), and around Mount Surround (3).

While Townsville has 957km² of cleared land and theoretically could just accommodate this growth, it is likely to cause extensive damage to the local environment through land degradation and fragmentation by urban development.

Scenario 3: Concentrated Growth for Darwin.
Julian Bolleter, Author provided

In Darwin, with Scenario 3 and concentrated growth, the urban expansion required for the city is 1,500km². This would dwarf the city’s 296km² of developable land and result in substantial clearing of remnant vegetation.

Proper planning required

Clearly then, if the scale of population growth envisaged in the white paper occurs without any comprehensive planning, the result will be harmful for the north.

To avoid this fate we need a bipartisan settlement strategy (most closely resembling Scenario 2) to steer the urbanisation of northern Australia.

Policymakers and planners should develop this strategy based on a comprehensive landscape analysis of northern Australia. If the scale of population growth envisaged in the white paper occurs without such planning, the result will be ruinous for one of the world’s last great wildernesses.

But the federal government should also decide whether a population of 5 million in the north is something we should aspire to at all.

If the worst climate change projections are borne out, we could end up with migration from cities such as Darwin to cities further south, even into the southern states.

Julian Bolleter, Deputy Director, Australian Urban Design Research Centre, University of Western Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Indonesia isn’t the only country planning new cities. Why not Australia?

Posted on May 3, 2019 by particularkev

File 20190501 136784 1vrb4zb.jpg?ixlib=rb 1.1 — Indonesia plans to relocate its capital from the sprawling city of Jakarta – and it isn’t the only country with plans to build whole new cities.
AsiaTravel/Shutterstock

Wendy Steele, RMIT University

The announcement that President Joko Widodo’s government will move Indonesia’s capital to another location, due to the severity of human-induced degradation in Jakarta, highlights a key tension for cities today. In the face of increasingly unsustainable urban environments, do we retrofit existing cities, or relocate and build new cities to achieve greater sustainability?

The answer is both. But each has its challenges.

Creating new cities

The goal of turning cities from sustainability problems to solutions is driving a suite of “future city” innovations. These include the planning and development of whole new cities.

An increasing number of countries are planning to build cities from scratch using technological innovation to achieve more sustainable urban development. Forest City in Malaysia, Belmont smart city in the United States and the Sino-Oman Industrial City are just some of the examples.

Forest City is Malaysia’s biggest development project.

The urban ambition includes creating carless and walkable cities, green cities able to produce oxygen through eco-skyscrapers, high-speed internet embedded in the urban fabric, the capacity to convert waste into energy, and reclaiming land to create new strategic trade opportunities.

However, striking the right balance between innovative ideas and democratic expectations, including the public right to the city, remains a challenge.

The Minnesota Experimental City offers a cautionary tale. The aim was to solve urban problems by creating a new city. It would use the latest technology including nuclear energy, automated cars and a domed roof enclosure.

Despite significant government and financial backing, including its own state agency, the Minnesota project failed due to a lack of public understanding and local support for a top-down futuristic project.

Who gets left behind?

In 1960, Brazil moved its capital from Rio de Janeiro to the futuristic city of Brasilia. While the city was designed to accommodate both rich and poor, it quickly became unaffordable for the average family. Half a century on, it was reported:

The poor have been shunted out to satellite cities, which range from proper well-built cities to something more like a shanty town.

The Indonesian capital Jakarta is part of a larger mega-city.
Rainer Lesniewski/Shutterstock

In Indonesia, more than 30 million people – a fifth of the nation’s urban residents and more than a tenth of the 269 million population – live in Greater Jakarta. The capital city Jakarta is just one part of a larger mega-city agglomeration, the world’s second-largest after Greater Tokyo. This vast connected urban meta-region is known as Jabodetabek, from the initials of the cities within it: Jakarta (with a population of 10 million), Bogor (1 million), Depok (2.1 million), Tangerang (2 million), South Tangerang (1.5 million) and Bekasi (2.7 million).

A key reason for moving the capital is that Jakarta is prone to serious flooding and is rapidly sinking. Jakarta also suffers overpopulation, severe traffic gridlock, slums and a lack of critical urban infrastructure such as drainage and sanitation.

Relocating the capital away from the crowded main island of Java offers the opportunity to better plan the political and administrative centre using the latest urban design features and technology.

Two key questions arise. If environmental degradation and overpopulation are the key issues, what will become of the largely remaining population of Greater Jakarta? At a national scale, how will this relocation help overcome the socio-economic and spatial disparities that exist in Indonesia?

Egypt, for example, is building a new capital city to overcome severe urban congestion and overcrowding in Greater Cairo. But there is no guarantee the new capital will resolve these issues if the emphasis is solely on technological innovation, without adequate attention to urban equity and fairness.

More of the same in Australia

The Australian population is projected to grow to 36 million in the next 30 years. This is focusing political, policy and public attention on what this means for the future of the nation’s cities.

Despite all the advances that have occurred in technology, the arts, architecture, design and the sciences, there is surprisingly little innovation or public discussion about what might be possible for 21st-century Australian settlements beyond the capital cities.

Future Australian city planning and development focuses largely on enlarging and intensifying the footprints of existing major cities. The current urban policy trajectory is in-fill development and expansion of the existing state capital mega-city regions, where two-thirds of the population live. But what is lost through this approach?

In Australia only two ambitious “new city” plans have been put forward in the last 50 years: the Multifunction Polis (MFP) and the CLARA Plan.

In the late 1980s the MFP was envisaged as a high-tech city of the future with nuclear power, modern communication and Asian investment. It failed to gain the necessary political, investment and public support and was never built.

The current CLARA Plan proposes building up to eight new regional smart cities connected by a high-speed rail system linking Sydney and Melbourne via Canberra. Each of these cities is designed to be compact, environmentally sustainable and just a quick train trip away from the capital cities.

CLARA has outlined a “value capture” business model based on private city land development, not “government coffer” funding. How these new cities propose to function within the constitutional framework of Australia is as yet unclear and untested.

The privately funded CLARA plan is to build up to eight compact, sustainable, smart cities connected via high-speed rail.

A bipartisan challenge

Are we thinking too narrowly when we talk about future Australian cities?

The “future city” prompts us to rethink and re-imagine the complex nature and make-up of our urban settlements, and the role of critical infrastructure and planning within them.

The future of Australian cities will require creativity, vision (even courage) to respond effectively to the challenges and opportunities of sustainable development.

This will not be the remit of any one political party, but a bipartisan national urban settlement agenda that affects and involves all Australians.

Wendy Steele, Associate Professor, Centre of Urban Research and Urban Futures Enabling Capability Platform, RMIT University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

With health assuming its rightful place in planning, here are 3 key lessons from NSW

Posted on April 24, 2018 by particularkev

File 20180412 549 1xplikd.jpg?ixlib=rb 1.1 — Health objectives are at last being integrated into all levels of planning in New South Wales, from cities and towns to local places and buildings.
pisaphotography/Shutterstock

Patrick Harris, University of Sydney; Elizabeth Harris, UNSW; Emily Riley, University of Sydney; Jennifer Kent, University of Sydney, and Peter Sainsbury, South Western Sydney Local Health District

The way cities are designed and managed has big impacts on our health. While Australia is considered a world leader in research on health and cities, nationally our planning policies remain underdeveloped relative to our knowledge base. To remedy this, healthy planning advocates need to better understand how urban planning systems can be influenced.

Several recent, mostly positive, experiences in the New South Wales (NSW) planning system provide insights into this process. Each represents a milestone for land-use planning in this state given extensive reforms have been on and off the table for the past decade.

The connections between city planning and health are many and varied. Key aspects include environmental sustainability, pollution risks and liveable places. Being liveable means having access to healthy food, nearby employment and services, and opportunities for active lifestyles.

These issues are increasingly important given projected population growth pressures on urban infrastructure. Other areas facing similar pressures, in Australia and overseas, might wish to take note of what has happened in NSW.

Since 2014 we have used political science to investigate attempts in NSW to include health in legislative reform, strategic city planning and major urban infrastructure assessments. As well as scrutinising relevant policies and associated documentation, we have interviewed more than 50 stakeholders. This has provided insights into how and why recent developments came about.

How has NSW brought health into planning?

Healthy planning has always had champions in NSW, but really hit its stride during a major legislative reform exercise that began in 2011. This came to a head in November 2017, when the state parliament passed amendments to the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979.

This legislation now lists two objects of direct importance for health:

protection of the health and safety of occupants of buildings
promotion of good design and amenity of the built environment.

Also in 2017, the NSW Office of the Government Architect produced a policy of “design-led planning”. Known as “Better Placed”, this policy positions health as a top priority. It embeds health within design processes, methods and outcomes for different levels of planning from cities and towns to places and buildings.

In our view, Better Placed is an exemplary policy in demonstrating the importance of urban planning for health.

In another positive development, the Greater Sydney Commission recently released Metropolitan and District Plans that position health as a core objective (number 7). The plans consistently refer to health across the central themes of liveability, productivity and sustainability.

To their credit, the NSW government and the commission have developed plans concurrently with transport and infrastructure and released them together. The evidence suggests this integration should have public health benefits. The emphasis across the commission, transport and infrastructure plans on creating a liveable and accessible city increases our confidence in this outcome.

Three key factors in making health a priority

Our research suggests three crucial factors in elevating the status of health in planning.

1. A core group of non-government, government and academic representatives has led health advocacy for over a decade. The group’s messages and activities intentionally focused on collaboration across agencies in the public interest.

This advocacy has grown in sophistication since the early days of making submissions about “health” issues that risked being treated as peripheral to the main game of planning (infrastructure, for instance).

Within government, NSW Health (both state and local departments) has developed an increasingly effective response to urban planning opportunities for promoting and protecting health.

2. The previous minister for planning (Rob Stokes), the Office of the Government Architect and the Greater Sydney Commission have each provided vital policy mechanisms for including health. This illustrates the importance of particular agents in the right place at the right time.

The minister was essential in establishing the commission. This effectively created a respectful distance between strategic planning and the “economics trumps all” planning agenda seen in some policy environments.

The “design-led planning” emphasis came about when Stokes was planning minister. The starring role given to health in Better Placed gives healthy planning advocates, for the time being, unprecedented opportunity to influence strategies and plans.

3. Delivery now requires close attention, as these positive shifts alone have limited power. For instance, the commission’s plans emphasise collaborative infrastructure delivery to create an equitable city. Infrastructure has profound health impacts, costs and benefits.

Shifting infrastructure funding to benefit the city’s West will be the core fault line for delivering on promises of equitable infrastructure provision. However, infrastructure project funding and appraisal are crying out for reform. Better indicators, transparent analyses to inform options, improved governance arrangements and greater accountability have all been identified as required reforms.

The NSW planning system has begun to recognise the importance of urban planning for health. These developments present a tremendous opportunity to influence how healthy public policy can be delivered for the benefit of the whole city.

Patrick Harris, Senior Research Fellow, Menzies Centre for Health Policy, University of Sydney; Elizabeth Harris, Senior Research Fellow, UNSW; Emily Riley, Research Assistant, University of Sydney; Jennifer Kent, Research Fellow, University of Sydney, and Peter Sainsbury, Adjunct Associate Professor, South Western Sydney Local Health District

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Gas crisis? Energy crisis? The real problem is lack of long-term planning

Posted on March 19, 2017 by particularkev

Kevin's Walk on the Wild Side

Image 20170317 6113 1aln8fl — The long view: energy policy needs to stay firmly focused on the horizon.
Mattinbgn/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

Alan Pears, RMIT University

If you’ve been watching the news in recent days, you’ll know we have an energy crisis, partly due to a gas crisis, which in turn has triggered a political crisis.

That’s a lot of crises to handle at once, so lots of solutions are being put forward. But what do people and businesses actually need? Do they need more gas, or cheaper prices, or more investment certainty, or all or none of the above? How do we cut through to what is really important, rather than side details?

The first thing to note is that what people really care about is their energy costs, not energy prices. This might seem like a pedantic distinction, but if homes and businesses can be helped…

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Global Family Planning Crisis

Posted on November 29, 2014 by particularkev

Sharing my thoughts with the world from a Particular Baptist perspective

The pandemic has fast-tracked some trends

Cities require co-ordination to function properly

Beware quick fixes that ignore new trends

What does the future hold?

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Important facts to keep in mind

Moving the country forward

We need to look locally

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The benefits of density done well

Beware the siren call of suburbia

Don’t blame public health failures on density

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World’s largest work-from-home experiment

Stress test for NBN and energy networks

Less commuting means less congestion

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Rush now, regret later

How to rebuild

A national policy

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Northern exposure

Three plans for growth

Scenario 1: Growth

Scenario 2: Decentralised Growth

Scenario 3: Concentrated Growth

The fate of the north

Proper planning required

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Creating new cities

Who gets left behind?

More of the same in Australia

A bipartisan challenge

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How has NSW brought health into planning?

Three key factors in making health a priority

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