An interesting article Peter but aren’t you being a bit hard on the developers. Obviously it would ideal for urban design if everybody forgoes their cars for bicycles and public transport but that is not going to happen.

The developers and the homebuyers live in the real world. An apartment without parking means trying to find a parking spot on a crowded inner city street. It means having somebody break-in to your car on a regular basis. It means parking tickets.

Developers are usually good with numbers. They know that parking spaces are relatively cheap to build and boost the sale value of the apartment. Buyers also prefer apartments with parking.

A good example of this is the old Tooth brewery site in Sydney. The site is ideally located close to four universities and Central station and with only minor heritage issues. It is the largest development site in inner Sydney but the developer walked away after the council severely limited the number of parking spaces. Most people want apartments with parking.

You wrote a good article about urban design but the developer is only selling what people want to buy.

Well my aspirations would be a car and well, a place in the suburbs. the city is a hole of a place unless you get a big flat or home. Old red brick shoeboxes may be fine for college students studying on their parents trust funds or transient residents, but you know its funny really I read story recently that in Sydney, many of the traditional bohemian, offbeat and creative folks are being forced out by either the lowest rents still being unaffordable and/or being unable to secure decent accommodation at prices they can afford.

As a side note I was raised in a prosperous suburb in a business owning family. We've had pools at home, 2 or 3 cars, all th bells and whistles.

Inner city councils are too much against development. Of course people want cars. Public transport is so poor and woefully inadequate that you'd only bother if you were desperate and had nothing else. Try getting home from a job late, getting out to do your shopping, racing home to cook, then going out late with friends. Without a car, all that takes forever.....or spending a fortune on cab fares.

The suburbs have much more to offer. Find a nice apartment in Parramatta or Blacktown, where, and I was surprised myself, you will actually find quality contemporary apartments, quality shops, quality restaurants in a short drive [more in parramatta] and an easygoing way of life where no-one looks strangely at you if you go out in old clothes and thongs to pay your bills and the car can get you anywhere rapidly. The western suburbs of sydney is one of Australia's fastest growing areas and changing quite a lot.

I'd rather a car, ipod or cd's and getting over big distances in a few minutes rather than sitting in some crowded bus with feral backpackers or other rough people trying to hold my nose when someone didn't bath today.

Councils are to blame.

The buck stops there.

On one hand they approve transit cities with underutilised infrastructure, on the other they discourage these same people driving to the main employment hub of the city. You have to drive for bread and milk, yet you cant drive to work.

Poor planning will ruin SEQ.

Make no mistake the council is the key, and they ruin things. Dont blame the poor guys out there trying to make a quid, they are given perameters that they run with that are decided by the council.

Excellent article.

Every time I ask a councillor in SEQ about this, their inevitable response (and they must have agreed this line between them it is so prevalent) is that they can't stop people from coming to settle - all they can do is try to preserve what they can.

My question and I haven't been able to get an adequate answer is that we are allowed to charge developers an amount of money to cover costs of infrastructure needed to service a new development. But we only charge a little bit for roads and sewerage. We don't charge the $12000 it costs in electricity infrastructure everytime someone builds a new MacMansion. We don't charge the $000's it costs to put in public transport and hospitals and doctors and everything else. I would have thought we could legitimately add some of the cost of infrastructure to new developments such that we could redirect people into decentralisation - or simply discourage them from coming by charging what their new home and land is really going to cost society.

My objective is clear I hope. I'm happy to see peeople living in nice new homes but I would like to encourage people to decentralise. My local council blithely accepts and plans for an eventual 670,000 additional people. It's madness. We don't have the roads, hospitals, shops, schools, water or electricity. We don't have anything like what that many people will consume. But if they go out west or north, there are areas with just as much room, much the same general climate and a hell of a lot cheaper infrastructure.

Beats me - but then I'm not a town planner or a councillor who gets election donations from developers.

Kevin

This article draws attention to the urban nightmare being created in what was once a nice place. Bruce Small, the original developer of Surfers Paradise (after whom the ‘Lord Bruce’ ferry which plies the canals is named) got out of the place in the 1970s because he judged it had been ruined, and went off to live somewhere else nicer – he actually said as much.

The article is seriously flawed however because it implies that good design can make up for the ghastly consequences of high growth. It states the problem – 1,000 new arrivals a week – but overlooks the solution, which is to stop the population growth or at least turn the tap from a flood to a trickle.

The huge migration from interstate is being driven by immigration into Australia deliberately imposed on the community by a Federal Government dominated by the vested interests of the property developers – the lazy money-makers, who are happy to see our country (and it’s ours, not theirs) progressively wrecked. This is so much easier than investing in risky enterprises like little Finland (population 5 million) has done with its Nokia mobile phones.

It’s far easier to just whack up more high rises and watch the real estate prices spiral out of all reality, so that people starting out now have an almost superhuman task in front of them to get on the mortgage treadmill. Not to mention the horrendous environmental consequences.

The Howard government has deviously created the impression that it is anti-immigration while ramping immigration up to 110,000 net per year, which, combined with natural increase of 125,000, makes Australia’s population grow by nearly a million every four years.

And you ain’t seen nothing yet. According to the Queensland govt’s medium projection, the population will continue to grow at 50,000 a year (see http://www.oum.qld.gov.au/?id=466) and will be another million (up to 3.7 million from 2.7 million) in two decades. Won’t that be terrific? It won’t really matter what kind of houses people live in, the place will be more of a mess the more people it gets

As with Queensland as a whole, the influx of people has destroyed the lifestyle they came here to enjoy, none more than North Queensland, 5 years ago Townsville was a big country city, now it has transformed into in mine Brisbane, with associated crime, lack of public transport, and greedy councils wanting to develop what is left, without insisting on or themselves developing the appropriate infrastructure.

An ideal paradise turned into a concrete jungle in 5 short years, unbelieveable really.

Brisbane is not a bad city, with decent public transport and the inner/middle suburbs dominated by the magnificent 'Queenslander' house. The suburbs of the past 30 years are depressing outposts of poor, energy-wasting houses, car dependency, insufficient local employment. Government planning policies are to blame. Legislate for water and energy-efficient housing design, make sure there are enough business zones to provide local employment, ensure that transport works before opening up new areas. These are government responsibilities, they cannot be left to the private sector. It's not that hard, it just requires vision and determination. Perth is going the same way with coastal strip development many kms north & south but maybe the transport works better for the outlying areas.

“New building in South-East Queensland should suit the climate and decrease rather than increase demands on scarce water and increasingly expensive electricity production.”

Peter, how can new buildings decrease the demand on these resources? Any new building will increase demand. Yes they should be much more efficient, but even if efficiency was greatly improved for new buildings, the overall demand would still rapidly increase. Even if we were to implement ways of greatly improving efficiency in existing buildings, the rapid rate of expansion would cancel it out and overwhelm it.

Besides, with an outlook of continued unending human expansion, the only thing that improvements in efficiency will do is allow more people to move into the area before the critical mass is reached. This will mean a greater problem, or catastrophe, when the crunch comes.

Crikey, the critical mass in terms of demand on water supplies must be very close to being reached now.

The answer is not improved efficiencies, or at least not in isolation. We have to deal with the issue of continuous rapid growth head-on.

Kevin, I agree with the first half of your post, but I don’t like the idea of decentralisation while the continuous growth paradigm is still firmly entrenched. It would just lead to the more rapid despoliation of other areas. There are still significant parts of the Queensland coast that are not too ravaged, but could easily be.

It is unfortunate that your objective is decentralisation rather than implementing limits to growth. Unending expansion that is actually facilitated by federal, state and local governments, is the real madness here.

There are no two ways about it; governments fail in their primary duty of care to their communities when they allow open-ended expansion, pandering to the business lobby (from where their political donations and all sorts of other favours come) and clearly going against the predominant opinion of their constituency.

.
Shonga, Townsville has continued to worsen as it grows, within the reign of the current mayor – some 15 years now. I agree with you, it is a negative momentum, with the diseconomies of scale clearly prevailing.

Cairns has been even worse in that timeframe, with very significant negative factors in the height of its expansion phase in the 90s.

These councils are a total disgrace in their outright promotion of this rapid and unending growth. But I guess it would be even worse if policies of decentralisation in SEQ were implemented.

Thermoman, you have the classic NIMBY approach.

Happy to live in a society created by your ancestors and the civic-minded folk who developed the community you now live in, but the first to say "Stop, no more" when you feel that your comfort zone is being infringed upon.

The "no more immigration" banner is simply a smokescreen for your selfishness.

The transparency of your position is only underlined by the ridiculous statements you make along the way.

>>...a Federal Government dominated by the vested interests of the property developers... This is so much easier than investing in risky enterprises like little Finland (population 5 million) has done with its Nokia mobile phones<<

Anyone who does even the most rudimentary research knows that Nokia made its own way in the world, and received no assistance from the Finnish government in carving out its market niche. Would you support a government who somehow made it difficult to build new houses, while investing taxpayer dollars in "risky enterprises"? Because that is the bottom line stupidity of what you are saying.

>>It’s far easier to just whack up more high rises and watch the real estate prices spiral out of all reality<<

Economics 101 says that if you increase supply of a good or service, the price of that good or service will decrease. You are saying the exact opposite. Now, I have little time generally for economists, but on this simple theory, I have to agree with them.

Are you starting to see a pattern here?

Every state can identify with the seemingly unchecked growth of the 'burbs.
Mile after mile of bush being bulldozed and a sea of roofs taking the place that once was our heritage.
Migrants must be pouring in to account for all this housing boom, the only things not booming are the things that once kept pace, the water ,transport, electricity and communications.Medical services got left behind years ago.
The state government is all green and gushy when it comes to saving power but when it comes to public housing, there is not a solar system in sight, it is all gas guzzling gadgets that are installed.
The developers are having a grand time.and there appears to be no end to the bonanza.

Pericles you write; “Happy to live in a society created by your ancestors and the civic-minded folk who developed the community you now live in, but the first to say 'Stop, no more' when you feel that your comfort zone is being infringed upon.”

Everyone has a right to protect their quality of life and to protest long and loud if they perceive it being reduced. We are all grateful to live in a reasonably healthy community, that has been built up from hard work by our ‘ancestors’. And we would all be very grateful if it stayed healthy.

This issue is much bigger than just comfort zones, it is about the very coherence of our society.

“The ‘no more immigration’ banner is simply a smokescreen for your selfishness.”

It seems to me that the accusations of selfishness, nimbyism and so on are a smokescreen. It is easier for some to just label others as misfits rather than deal with the issues in a polite, impartial and half-professional debating manner.

“Economics 101 says that if you increase supply of a good or service, the price of that good or service will decrease”.

Increasing the supply of a good or service will not decrease the price if the demand increases at the same or a greater rate. Of course with rapid population growth the demand for all sorts of stuff is rapidly increasing, necessitating an ever-increasing supply of just about everything, just in order to stay at the same level in terms of quality of life.

Pericles,

People really "need" very little to survive. No doubt you could also condemn people as selfish because they wanted something more than a joyless, limited vegetarian diet, one shower and change of clothes a week, or a very few square meters of living space. After all, if they accepted these standards, more people could be packed in. Very often people with your viewpoint are religious people who believe that God wants huge numbers of human souls, regardless of their quality of life on Earth, much as Tlaloc and the other Aztec deities were believed to want human blood and hearts.

“Of course people want cars. Public transport is so poor and woefully inadequate that you'd only bother if you were desperate and had nothing else. Try getting home from a job late, getting out to do your shopping, racing home to cook, then going out late with friends. Without a car, all that takes forever.....or spending a fortune on cab fares.”

That’s because the cities and our lifestyles are built around the car. The author is arguing that we need to start designing cities that move people, not cars. Some of the most charming places in the world are built around walking distance communities. Trains freight goods in, and a variety of means get those goods to the shops and restaurants and newsagents that the pedestrians visit. As long as one is prepared to give up living in a tacky blonde brick McMansion and live in an attractively designed New Urbanism transport hub, then everything you need would be within a 10-minute walk. And instead of complaining about the traffic, you’d be enjoying the smell of coffee roasting, cooking out of one store window, veggies out of the next.

The peak oil crisis is coming, and it’s time to get serious about New Urbanism, from the way we build individual energy efficient homes through to the design of our cities and public transport systems. We should be investigating http://www.newurbanism.org very carefully, because nothing can replace oil with the quantities necessary. There is no silver bullet. Please read the submissions to the Federal Government oil enquiry.
http://www.aph.gov.au/Senate/committee/rrat_ctte/oil_supply/submissions/sublist.htm

Lastly, no one here should worry about Pericles. He comes in, calls names, has his rant, and then when you respond with rational argument and points, he shifts his accusations elsewhere and diverts the subject without being polite enough to respond to your legitimate points and sources. I patiently, repeatedly, and obsessively attempted to engage him in the population thread. He misdirected into Global warming — which Time magazine just said has scientific consensus.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1176980,00.html

Do you know what I learned from all my efforts? Wikipedia is right.

“Do not feed the trolls”

Rob88, I beg to differ with your view regarding the Carlton & United Brewery site in Chippendale: the developer did not walk away because of disputes with Sydney City Council about carparking. The developer walked away because there is a general downturn in residential property prices (particularly for medium and high density residential) meaning that easy money can no longer be made by developers in this market in Sydney. They walked away for commercial reasons, but then tried to badmouth the City Council about delays (mostly caused by the developers themselves) and other issues. The Council actually negotiated on the numbers of carparking spaces and eventually allowed more carparking per dwelling than the existing residents of Chippendale have per dwelling (they made this concession as a large number of existing residents of Chippendale are renters with no cars, where the new development was perceived as likely to attract more owner-occupiers). There was some politics: on a few issues, the City Council decision didn't concede anything to the developers so the Council would look sympathetic to the Chippendale residents, but the Council did this knowing that their decisions would be overturned by the Central Sydney Planning Committee anyway. Decisions on developments worth over $2 million in the city of Sydney are made by the CSPC, which is stacked with a majority of State Government appointees. So in any case, don't blame Sydney City Council.