Ah Eclipse, your mistake of course is to seek one magic bullet, when
the future is all about diversity. Diverse energy sources, diverse
food supplies etc, are what it is all about.

I should have thought of you today, for I did a quick trip to the
big smoke and dropped in to a shopping centre. Given the size of
the arses that I saw, a bit of growing vegetables and eating a bit
less crappy foods, should work wonders for the health budget!

Yup, permaculture is an amazing system and its quite surprising how much
people can grow with it on very little land, even in their backyards.
They even have fun and don't need to pay to visit the gym!

*But Australia uses over a MILLION barrels of oil a day*

A million barrels a day huh? Save 30% that is wasted now, 30%
from gas, 30% from oil, and you have't even mentioned electric cars
driven on electric energy from coal, or the sun, or wind, or whatever
floats your boat. Throw in a bit of uranium if you pleae.

Diversity in the key.

*As you pointed out, it means less travel, it means less tourism, it means job cuts in tourism (a major employer),*

Sheesh, how shocking. No shopping trips to Paris for the chardonay
set for instance. My heart bleeds for them, it really does :)

Life will be tough! They might even get a bit of dirt under those
fingernails, the poor dears...

It is remarkable how fanatics clutch at one straw after another each time one of their specious arguments gets demolished. For more than 10 years I have been asking academics (and anyone else) advocating high-density “where in the whole world can one find a high-density city that does not exhibit the ills you claim high-density will alleviate?” Of course I mean a whole city, not just a tokenist street or some small precinct from which cars are shifted to the edge. I never get an answer – obviously there is no such city. It is all a pipedream.

Oh, I get it Tony. ;-) Just side-step all the previous points about peak oil, call us fanatics, and use a complete straw-man argument demanding to see *100% Density!?* I don't think even I was arguing for that, just less sprawl and *more* density.

You have not addressed peak oil. We can *already* see that the average European uses half the oil of the average American, leaving all that "wonderful" American sprawl utterly exposed to the risks of an oil crisis. Give it 5 to 10 years, and New Urbanists will be laughing so hard at all your trumped up faulty arguments for Sprawl, which is actually the "Greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world".
http://endofsuburbia.com/preview1.htm

Fanatics? Not really. It's a growing reality. Professor Peter Newman on the Science Show details how young people are moving into denser redeveloped vital city cores here in Australia.
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2009/2571785.htm

Examples?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Examples_of_New_Urbanism
has Australian examples, listed State by State, and then around the world, including:
1000 homes, eventually 30 thousand residents.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stapleton_International_Airport

Featured in “The Truman Show”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaside,_Florida

Poundbury in the UK.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Future growth!
“More than six hundred new towns, villages, and neighborhoods in the U.S. following new urbanism principles are planned or under construction. Hundreds of new, small-scale, urban and suburban infill projects are under way to reestablish walkable streets and blocks. In Maryland and several other states, new urbanist principles are an integral part of "smart growth" legislation.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_urbanism#Examples

“On 14-16 September 2008, 220 scientists, government officials, educators, professionals and citizens from 25 countries were invited by the Council for European Urbanism to meet in Oslo — 

— WE OBSERVE that on a comparison basis, efficient, compact, livable and beautiful settlements have significantly and often dramatically lower levels of greenhouse gas emissions, and other major benefits.”
http://www.ceunet.org/oslodeclaration.html

I'm for denser, but not TOO dense!

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/007800.html

“there is a direct relationship between the kinds of places we live, the transportation choices we have, and how much we drive. The best car-related innovation we have is not to improve the car, but eliminate the need to drive it everywhere we go.

To give you a sense of how gentle a goal that is: the turn-of-the-century Garden City suburbs, with their generous lawns, winding streets and tree-lined boulevards averaged 12 units an acre. New Urbanist suburbs, not particularly dense, weigh in at 15-30 units per acre. Traditional town house blocks have as many as 36 homes per acre. Parts of Manhattan, I've read, can reach 160 units per acre, but even without crowding together high-rises, many extremely livable parts of Vancouver have 40 homes per acre.

And we're getting better and better at designing density that works. We're finally rediscovering the art of placemaking, learning to build dense communities with plenty of open space, welcoming public places, thriving neighborhood retail and a tangible sense of place. Some of this is technical: understanding that surrounding neighborhood cores that have lots of people, many homes, shops and offices, with less dense but walkable residential areas can make for places that actually feel far more livable and relaxed than most conventional new suburbs (of course, compact communities are also safer). Good compact communities offer an outstanding quality of life (on that, more below).

In other words, we know that density reduces driving. We know that we're capable of building really dense new neighborhoods and even of using good design, infill development and infrastructure investments to transform existing medium-low density neighborhoods into walkable compact communities. Creating communities dense enough to save those 85 million metric tons of tailpipe emissions is (politics aside) easy. It is within our power to go much farther: to build whole metropolitan regions where the vast majority of residents live in communities that eliminate the need for daily driving, and make it possible for many people to live without private cars altogether.”

*Give it 5 to 10 years, and New Urbanists will be laughing so hard at all your trumped up faulty arguments for Sprawl*

Not so Eclipse, because of course supplies to keep you new Urbanists
going, have to come from somewhere.

Now your ideas are fine for inner city development and computer
yuppies who live office lives, but that croissant does not just
magically appear in your cafe, the flour has to be ground somewhere
etc, so you have secondary industry. That needs space. For those
industries to be possible, it also needs people living near those
facilities, to make, build, repair things. That is where the village
concept, including sprawl, is ideal.

There are good reasons why US fuel consumption is so much higher
then European consumption that are not about sprawl, but just about
waste, as fuel as been so much cheaper there for so long. Do not
forget, in the late 90s oil was still down to 10$ a barrel.

Europeans always paid a great deal for fuel, so in Italy when I was
there, you'd see Fiat 500ccs everywhere, in the US it was Yank tanks.
In Europe there were lots of thick walled brick/stone houses,
with double glazed windows, in the US more wooden boxes, badly
insulated, single glaze with draft blowing under the doors. Cheap
oil would keep them heated.

Change the price of oil and you will see a dramatic change of all
these things in the US. No need to drive down to the drive through
coffee place for a cup of coffee, its not that hard to brew your
own, etc.

A village concept does not need the cars we use, which are large
enough to drive from Sydney to Perth. A golf cart type would do,
with a couple of batteries, perhaps even solar charged. Govt
regulation is what presently prevents them.

I'm surprised Eclipse Now doesn't cite Sydney as a successful example of this Smart Growth Law,an infallable Law as its adherents would have us believe.After all,the Smart Growth zealots of the NSW Dept of Planning have had 20 years to prove this Planning "Law".

From my Science(Chemistry) days at Sydney Uni,I seem to remember a failed Law is just a Theory.

As every man and his dog can see,this Smart Growth "Theory" doesn't seem to be working in Sydney

I would say 20 years is long enough to prove this Planning "Theory",so it looks like it becomes just another Planning Postulate or Hypothesis,and a failed Hypothesis at that.

As such, Smart Growth should be marked "Unsuitable for Sydney Conditions", and consigned to the Planning waste bin.

Regards from Tony2