While higher density housing will always increase overall numbers of people and in turn lead to increases in vehicle numbers, but higher density housing allows shorter commutes thus leading to less pollution, less congestion over the entire city and will ultimately lower fuel and other costs.
Higher density housing most definately will require improvements to older infrastructure BUT these improvements will be more efficient because the distances that water, waste etc travel will be shorter.

Well, of COURSE higher housing density will create serious problems, especially if the basic infrastructure is not able to handle the consequences.

The same applies to urban sprawl.

The absolutely bleedingly obvious inescapable conclusion is that there simply MUST be a limit to it all. Not Sydney nor any other place can just keep on growing. So are we going to finally get our heads around the need to limit the number of people only after things become much worse and impossible to fix or are we going to do it while we’ve still got some chance of preventing things from becoming a whole lot worse?

The debate about urban consolidation as opposed to urban sprawl, while rapid population growth is just allowed to continue with no end in sight, is just absurd beyond belief.

All that we could achieve with this silly line of debate is to possibly somewhat improve the efficiency of packing more and more people into already stressed cities and regions. Ultimately, this will make things much worse than if we were to work towards stabilising the size of populations in stressed areas.

And no, enticing people to move to Cairns, Townsville, Mackay, Darwin, Busselton, Esperance, Albury or Coober Pedy, is not the answer either. All of these places (except the last?) are big enough. Some smaller towns might like a few more people, but the only real answer is to take up a Kelvin Thomson or Dick Smith type of philosophy and work directly towards stabilising our national population and thus eliminate or greatly reduce the main driver of population growth in Sydney, southeast Queensland and elsewhere.

Working out how to most efficiently accommodate ever-more people in denser inner urban areas or on the fringes in urban sprawl, is extremely difficult. But stabilising the national population would be incredibly easy….if we could just get our collective headspace around the urgent need to do it.

And the Canberra Clowns keep the immigrants coming!

While higher density housing will always increase overall numbers of people and in turn lead to increases in vehicle numbers, but higher density housing allows shorter commutes thus leading to less pollution, less congestion over the entire city and will ultimately lower fuel and other costs.
Higher density housing most definately will require improvements to older infrastructure BUT these improvements will be more efficient because the distances that water, waste etc travel will be shorter.
Posted by beefyboy, Thursday, 11 March 2010 10:43:18 AM

Beefyboy, all these points you make sound logical at first glance, however they are not necessarily correct. These things need to be proven. As an example I remember listening to a program on Urban design when it was explained that a study had demonstrated that people living in high rise apartments actually used more water and power than the same amount of people living in houses. I can't explain to you why this was, but that's what the study showed. Just pointing out that what at first sounds like a logical conclusion may not be correct.

Also have to agree with the above statement on immigration. It is of virtually no benefit to Australia. I feel the majority of Australians are dead against it. In my line of work I meet with around 30 people a day. Years ago such comments regarding immigration I would hear every 6 months or so. Now anti-immigration statements are almost a daily occurence.

The Urban consolidation Policy is promoted to provide the quickest profit for certain developers at the least financial outlay to the government. This policy uses environmental reasons as a false justification and a way to con the environmentalists into thinking that urban consolidation will create a utopia of some kind. All that is happening is like the article states Concentrated pollution and concentrated problems.

Plenty of land in Sydney and there is no need to keep congesting and polluting Sydney. Congestion as the article points out causes health problems and that in turn puts more strain on the overloaded hospitals. The cycle needs to be broken.
Whilst we have an ever increasing population and that seems to be the way of the future if the past is the benchmark, then we need to address the problem and provide more infrastructure to cope with the congestion. Get rid of the urban consolidation policy and allow development to occur further out. This of course would not necessarily suit the developers who have ulterior motives to continue to build high density. I believe certain big Developers are running this country and some politicians put forward policies that favour these big developers. McGurk knew more than we are told.