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The
New City aims to foster critical thinking and debate on
the future of our cities
and the disproportionate influence of inner-city thinking on
urban planning and economic, social and environmental policy. Editors: John Muscat,
Jeremy Gilling
Urban
Diary: Jan
Gehl's pedestrian ideas for Sydney ...
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Editorial: 14 March
2010
Ruining our cities to save them
Eco enclaves and Mad Max suburbs
Latching onto Kevin Rudd’s call for
“a big Australia” and
forecasts that our
population will grow by 60 per cent to 35 million in 2050, urban
planners are ramping up their war against suburbia. In paper after
paper, academics across the country have been pushing the same line.
Climate change, peak oil and the financial crisis mean we can’t go
on driving and borrowing for low-density housing. Choices must be
narrowed to buying or renting compact homes in high-density,
multi-unit developments along public transport corridors, preferably
rail lines.
Underlying it all is a radical vision of suburban doom. “That is one
of my themes”,
said Professor Peter
Newman, anti-car activist and head of Curtin University‘s
Sustainable Policy Institute, “that we stop cities developing into
eco enclaves surrounded by
Mad Max suburbs”.
The alarming truth is that planners are blasé about prosperity,
living standards and choice because they see them as second-rate
issues. The point is to save us from eco-apocalypse.
And their voice grows louder by the day. The mantra of green
urbanism has long been heard on ABC radio programs like
Background Briefing and FutureTense, but matters
reached a crescendo in January when ABC TV’s 7:30Report
rounded up the usual suspects for a
four-part series on
preparing our cities for the population boom. Framed by scary
graphics and a menacing soundtrack, the series delivered a stream of
breathless dialogue from talking heads like Newman, who declared
that “if we just roll out those suburbs one after the other, making
a more and more carbon intensive world in our cities, then we’re
stuffed.”
This current of thought has always lurked beneath the Rudd
Government’s “nation building” agenda. But last October it burst
open when the prime minister
announced his plans
to wrest control of urban policy from the states.
Rattling off tenets of the planning ideology, Mr Rudd said “we must
ensure that communities are not separated from jobs and services”,
that “increasing density in cities is part of the solution to urban
growth”, that “forms of development need to be fully integrated with
current and future transport networks”, that “climate change
requires a whole of government response”, and that “we must make
long-term investments in transport networks that minimise carbon
emissions.” It’s all a question of government action, if he is to be
believed.
That too was the message from infrastructure minister Anthony
Albanese at the recent launch of State of Australian Cities 2010.
Little wonder that he appointed Newman to the board of
Infrastructure Australia.
Defying urban laws of gravity
“Cities are an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and
success” said the great urbanist Jane Jacobs, but today’s planners
seem to think they’re as pliable as dough. Just tweak a couple of
variables, say transport modes and population densities, and
everything falls into place.
As a discipline, urban planning never emerged from behind Berlin
Wall of command economics, albeit with a green face. Early hopes
that the financial crisis would shift public sentiment in this
direction have faded, and climate change hasn’t registered as an
issue for commuters and home buyers.
Despite this, planners show no sign of losing confidence in their
power to abolish fundamental laws of supply and demand. They’re
still apt to dream up grand schemes for zoning, development and
infrastructure controls with barely a thought about the impact on
land values and bid-rents, two price inputs with far-reaching
implications for urban commerce.
Nor have they managed to repeal the law of unintended consequences.
Year after year, the Demographia
housing affordability survey
confirms the link between “more prescriptive land use regulation”
and high median house prices. This is elementary economics.
Restricting the supply of land for development, a starting point for
all green planning, combined with rising demand from population
growth, will ratchet up values, with knock-on effects for the whole
economy. The survey continues to rank all of our capital cities, and
some of our regional centres, in the “severely unaffordable”
category. No amount of “cutting-edge design” or “more imaginative”
planning can counter this effect.
The claim that concentrating development in dense “activity centres”, “urban
villages” or “transport corridors” will ease the problem is a
sham. Development controls will always drive up the price of land.
When planners talk about affordability in this context, they really
mean inferior housing in terms of space, amenity and title, even if
it’s dressed-up as “design innovation” or “green rated building”.
But inferior quality may not be enough to compensate for escalating
land values, so consumers get less housing for higher prices. And
more are stuck renting instead of buying. Large numbers of low to
middle income earners will be shut out of the housing market
Interestingly, Perth appears in Demographia’s “severely
unaffordable” category along with Sydney and Melbourne, despite
having only around a quarter of the population. Newman neglected
this detail while praising the city’s rail network on the 7:30
Report.
Though Perth can fall back on the resources boom, south-eastern
cities aren’t so lucky. They are service-based regions with very
dispersed patterns of employment, even by world standards.
Writing in a publication of the 2008 9th World Congress of
Metropolis, Sydney University’s John Black observed that “apart from
some noticeable peaks, employment density is quite uniform across
the [Sydney metropolitan] region”. According to the
NSW Department of Transport,
only 12 per cent of Sydney’s jobs are in the CBD and second tier
centres like North Sydney, Chatswood, Parramatta, Hurstville and
Penrith have less than 2 per cent each. David McCloskey, Bob Birrell
and Rose Yip of Monash University (demographers, not urban planners)
report the same about
Melbourne. The CBD hosts around 20 per cent of jobs and the rest are
scattered all over the metropolitan region.
Platitudes like “we must locate people close to where they work”, or
“we must locate jobs close to where people live”, have little basis
in reality. They infringe another immovable law of economics,
relating to economic rents or bid-rents. This mechanism determines
how industries and firms are distributed. Put simply, a parcel of
land will go to whichever use delivers the highest profits.
Centrally located land (near major transport or infrastructure hubs)
commands high prices, and goes to the most profitable uses.
Peripheral land goes to less profitable or marginal activities.
Over the last thirty years, economic deregulation, flexible
transport, advanced communications and population growth have raised
up a sector in the latter category, extracting value from cheap
outer-metropolitan land and low rents. It includes industries like
transport and distribution, building and construction, food,
consumer products, personal services, wholesale and retail. They
depend on favourable location costs and proximity to urban markets
and labour pools. According to the Greater Western Sydney
Economic Development Board,
“prime industrial land with direct access to transport
infrastructure is 75% cheaper [in GWS] than other areas of Sydney”.
Ultimately, green planning will phase out cheap urban land,
undermining this sector and destroying jobs in the process.
Breakthroughs in automotive and energy technologies offer the
prospect of adaptation to a distant future of expensive oil. There’s
no way to adapt to rising land values.
Green rated chaos
Many are in denial about this, recycling visions of the “concentric
ring model” of urban form. This relic of pre-war sociology allocated
industry to the core, or cores, and residences to the periphery.
Take the SydneyMorning Herald sponsored
Long Term Public Transport Plan,
recently released with great fanfare. Authored by a committee of
green-tinged experts and academics, the plan proclaims, according to
a Herald feature, that “Sydney retains a strong centre-based
structure, with nearly 40 per cent of the city’s jobs and most of
its major retail, educational and entertainment facilities located
within 26 key centres”. This is an essential precondition for the
proposed network of denser rail infrastructure.
But the plan’s own figures don’t add up to Sydney having a “strong
centre-based structure”. A hefty 60 per cent of jobs aren’t
centralised and the plan actually cites 33 “centres” flung all over
the Sydney region, from Norwest Business Park in the north, to
Penrith in the west and Hurstville in the south. Apart from the CBD
with 12 per cent, none of the centres have more than 1.8 per cent of
Sydney’s jobs.
Concentrating housing in a city of dispersed jobs means horrendous
traffic congestion, the costs of which loom large in State of
Australian Cities 2010. Currently, around 72.3 per cent of
Sydney’s people
drive to work. No configuration of public transport
will be efficient, leaving motorists to converge on dense
localities. This is a city projected to explode from today’s 4.2
million people to 7 million in 2050. In Melbourne’s case, McCloskey, Birrell and Yip state plainly that raising densities along tram and
train lines will end in chaos. Of the 1.4 million people who work
outside central Melbourne, only 4.4 per cent use public transport.
On the other hand, attempts to concentrate jobs will throw thousands
onto the dole queues. At least this is a type of solution: the
unemployed don’t commute.
Ironically, some thriving “centres” in the Herald plan
wouldn’t exist without the expansion of Sydney’s arterial road
network. Examining the “edge city” phenomenon in Sydney, Peter
Murphy and Robert Freestone conceded, way
back in 1994, that
the jobs-rich “global arc corridor” owed a lot to strategic road
junctions like the intersection of Lane Cove Road with Epping Road
in North Ryde and with the Pacific Highway in Gordon.
“The most prestigious development has overwhelmingly favoured the
middle-ring northern and north-western parts of Sydney in centres
easily accessible by car ...” say Murphy and Freestone, having
explained that “there are now diversified employment centres in the
suburbs which have grown up almost despite, rather than because of,
traditional land-use planning policies”. These days the NSW
Government bows to green intimidation, failing in its new
Metropolitan Transport Plan
to complete the highly successful Orbital Motorway Network, leaving
M4 West, the F3 link and duplication of the M5 tunnel in limbo.
Demands that at we reshape our cities to fight climate change are
illogical. Let’s assume, for argument’s sake, that there’s a case to
cut Australia’s 1.4 per cent contribution to global carbon. Even the
Australian Conservation Foundation’s Consumption Atlas
ranks urban settlement patterns well below the general level of
consumption as a factor in emissions. And general consumption is a
function of living standards, not urban form. Since the world is far
from putting constraints on consumption, calls for a transformation
of settlement patterns are baseless.
But it’s worse. The Consumption Atlas and an
analysis by
Demographia’s Wendell Cox disclose that emissions across affluent
inner-urban areas exceed those on the fringe. By focusing on
settlement patterns rather than consumption levels, green planners
engage in a form of class discrimination. The costs of climate
change are heaped on outer-suburban working people, who lose jobs,
mobility and housing amenity, while the affluent emerge unscathed.
