Expensive oil will not only make long commutes unaffordable but it will add to the cost of growing and distributing food. Since phosphate is also dwindling some have suggested we should grow food using sewage sludge close to the suburbs. In theory this will save on input and transport costs. The effect would be a breakdown of the urban/rural divide. Havana, Cuba exemplifies this approach and Detroit, US seems headed that way.

In an expensive energy economy it may turn out there is less need for millions of people to flock into the CBD every day. Whatever it is they do may be less important than creating food. Perhaps cities could transform into low energy transport corridors interleaved with farmland. It's hard to see this with inner Sydney or Melbourne but crunch time isn't here yet, maybe by 2030 or so.

Yes, the alternative to all this concern about urban sprawl or densification is to stabilise our population so we can stop having this conversation.

Another in a long series of articles by the planning industry telling us we have to squash up!

I see no reason that we are condemned to always put more than 60 per cent of our population into only six cities because they just happen to be on the river mouths where the British settled some 200 years ago. Decentralisation ought to be our aim.

The proportion of United Kingdom’s population inside London is only 12.5 per cent. The proportion of Victoria’s population inside Melbourne is over 70 per cent.

The amount of land needed to give every Australian his or her own 1,000-square metre block of land was 22,526 square kilometres earlier this year. The amount of land left over would be 7, 663,974 square kilometres (99.7 per cent of the country).

A more detailed discussion is at <a href= http://melbourneurbanist.wordpress.com/2010/10/20/what-should-we-do-about-melbourne/> What should we do about Melbourne? </a>

God, we're so lucky aren't we?

If it weren't for Stephen & his other planner mates we still wouldn't know we all really want to live in some giant hi rise, in the center of each city.

We might even think we like a yard for kids to play in, somewhere to park a car or two, even a boat, but of course we have Stephen to tell us what we really want.

Idiot, get with the real people, & out of academia mate.

The retailers worked it out 50 years ago, but you don't have them give lectures in planning do you? Yes, they moved their operations to where the people were. It proved very successful.

Now if we could just get academia to wake up to this fact, they, & the idiots in the public service they advise could do the same.

Once we get the public service out in the burbs, get the bloody universities out there too. Could you imagine any planner sighting a uni in the middle of no where, at a dead end, with virtually no useful public transport? No! well look at UQ, & weep.

Will you lot just grow up, & join the world. You are getting pretty much like the global warming mob, all bull dust, & about as useful.

Stephen
What a lot of rubbish you put forward. You need to have a rethink of what you are saying. At some time in the future with population growth continuing there will be a change in thinking and planners will come up with the wonderful idea that we have to decentralize and spread out a bit further. Just how many skyscrapers can we jam full of people. I myself live on the outskirts and feel really sorry for those who are like battery chooks living on top of one another and pecking at each other with petty complaints. Bored out of their brains and then getting into their cars on the weekend to escape to the outskirts to get some clean air and refresh their brain.
It amazes me that the same planners are those who burn up petrol to take trips away from their so called high rise utopia.