Is 'the suburbs' a useful idea anymore?

While the great bulk of suburban jobs are in relatively small centres (such as Ormond), around a fifth are in large concentrations like Clayton, Box Hill and Tullamarine. These are much smaller than the CBD but they indicate an emerging polycentric urban form with most specialising in one or more particular industries (see Are all suburban centres the same?).

I don’t expect the term ‘suburb’ is likely to fall into disuse any time soon, but we need to get over the idea that we live in a binary world comprising a tiny active centre on the one hand, and a giant inactive suburban dormitory suitable only for resting, on the other.

Here’s a better representation of contemporary reality: there are a number of key places in the metropolitan area where activities want to agglomerate and where the wider community is best served if they do. Because it’s extraordinarily expensive to build and operate transport infrastructure, these locations are likely to be characterised by a high level of accessibility to other parts of the metropolitan area.

They include the CBD and much of the inner city, but they also include places like Clayton, Tullamarine, Box Hill,Ringwood, Footscray, Sunshine, Knox, Broadmeadows and Dandenong.

So asking if a 13 storey residential tower is too much for “the suburbs” – as if the 2,400 square kilometres of built-up Melbourne that lies outside the inner city is all the same – is the wrong question. The “suburbs” is an idea that’s lost most of its usefulness.

The right question is whether or not a markedly higher concentration of activities is appropriate in a place such as Ormond, having regard to strategic considerations like the capacity of infrastructure. The question of whether or not 13 storeys is appropriate on a particular site in Ormond – in this case the rail station – is a consequential and secondary question that should have regard to urban design considerations.

I note though that, as pointed out here, the area surrounding the rail station is already zoned for commercial and mixed uses.