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Urban dreaming: Australian cities for the future

By Anton Roux and John Stanley - posted Monday, 1 November 2010


There does not need to be a fixation on building mega cities. This allows our urban thinking to consider the most desirable strategic locations within the nation, taking into account relationships with resources, the environment and linkages to other cities and regions, both within Australia and externally.

Against this general perspective on the future, the ADC Cities Report: Enhancing Liveability (PDF 7.6Mb) outlines a number of ideas for building better Australian cities, a few of which are presented in summary terms.

Growth should be encouraged in new cities/regional centres, as well as adding numbers to existing cities. The significance of the new cities option increases with absolute population size. Past experience with attempts to drive much faster growth in selected Australian inland cities, such as Albury-Wodonga and Bathurst-Orange, suggests a need to think carefully about possible locations for new cities, but a possible Very Fast Train along the Brisbane-Sydney-Melbourne corridor could open up new options in this regard and resource development in the north-west merits attention for city development. Paul Romer's work on charter cities, which has taken learning from experiences such as China's Special Economic Zones, is likely to be of assistance in managing urban innovation and planning new cities.

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The conditions of our existing cities need attention, so that they can also be seen as "new cities" (adapting/retrofitting our cities). These would ideally be considered in the context of broader settlement policy. A particular focus should be on improving economic opportunities, liveability and sustainability in the somewhat neglected middle ring suburbs. This is where many jobs and large population numbers already exist and where demographic change will create opportunities for sensitive increases in density. These suburbs are ideal locations for a greater share of population and economic activity, provided this is achieved with a high degree of community engagement. Good connectivity to outer suburbs will likewise be important: to improve access from those areas to the employment and other opportunities in middle suburbs.

The village/precinct level is the urban space in which people conduct much of their daily lives and is where their sense of community is likely to be most firmly based. Village/precincts can range from small local centres, through large activity centres to Central Business Districts or parts thereof, with a sense of distinctiveness/identity being a key defining quality.

Enhancing the liveability of villages/precincts within our cities is a high priority. This is about place-making, including issues such as local job creation and innovation (e.g. in areas like energy efficiency, distributed energy generation and water self-sufficiency), promoting community building, extending low rise compact settlement patterns with more mixed use development and affordable housing, improving walkability and connectivity, enhancing local character and providing a high quality public realm (including passive security features).

Whether considering new cities or existing cites, there needs to be a focus on the strategic purposes of individual cities, their current or potential comparative advantages, as well as their place within Australia and the larger world. To move beyond a culture of risk and change aversion, a new type of thinking will be required: one that embraces the use of narrative, centring around purposes and aspirations, as much as it emphasises mechanical attributes and requirements to be functional.

Supply and demand need to extend beyond being seen as static accounting concepts to embrace a much more dynamic view of economic demand, as Professor Graeme Snooks of the Institute of Global Dynamic Systems elucidates in his dynamic-strategy theory. Without a dynamic concept of demand that is connected to reality: to survival, to how we know civilisation actually works rather than our ideologically-bound current conceptions; and that embraces human dignity: the ambitions to embark on major urban projects will always be economically unviable. Cities are complex systems, our sites of prosperity, of social and ecological resilience. Alongside their multidimensional dynamics, directed multidimensional thinking and policy becomes a necessity.

Evidence-based policy has its place – it adumbrates limits and suggests what is already known – but empirical over-determinism should not be confused for policy rigour in our aspirations for urban transformation. Humans are more or less rational beings, capable of imagination, hypothesis, experiment, deduction and induction; and so there needs to be more than incrementalist, backward-looking, trend-based projections or policy, or economic models that claim, for example, that a high speed rail project is unviable when those models are based on faulty, or static, assumptions, and fail to account for the strategic and other intangible benefits of boldness.

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The recent financial crisis and the market failures around climate change have made people aware of the problems associated with negative externalities. What we need to be equally concerned about is a blindness to positive externalities: the squandering of upside potential: such as the unforetold economic gain that can come through new infrastructure and planning incentives, whether it be high speed rail, new cities, or knowledge-economy-enabling high speed internet across the country.

Ideology is not something people often choose to discuss. Consideration of model risk is a way of confronting that, whether it be economic model risk, political model risk or environmental model risk; it transcends partisanship. It makes us aware of the disconnect between reality and how that might work, and our theories, models and assumptions of reality.

If significant changes in urban structure are to be successfully delivered, much greater community involvement in both planning for and delivering city futures is essential: to help ensure community ownership of the process, both at city-wide and village/precinct levels.

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About the Authors

Anton Roux is Director of Programs, ADC Forum.

John Stanley is Adjunct Professor, Bus Industry Confederation Senior Fellow in Sustainable Land Transport in the Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies at the University of Sydney.

Related Links
ADC Cities Report: Enhancing Liveability

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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