Pity the urban designers: caught between the rapacious and politically influential "build lots to lowest cost" developers and the emerging reality of energy decline that makes our current urban layout almost defunct (and simultaneously removes the means to make any radical, large scale changes to it). In other words they are moving from a world where they have been fairly irrelevant (lacking influence) to a new world in which they are also irrelevant (because natural forces will be the strongest influence on any urban vision but many of them cannot imagine a world that is not a continuation of what has been in any case).

Tragically, the one thing we do not want to do is "discover the limits to growth" since, when you have, disaster surely follows. We need to stop growing while we are well within our resource limits (Oops! Too late!) so that we can have spare capacity in case of large flucuations in resource availability in future.

“The very reason and rationale of the latest SEQ Regional Plan is predicated on never ending population and economic growth.”

Juris, thank goodness you have thought of this. That’s one critically important thing that Ross Elliott didn’t mention, and didn’t respond to when I picked him up on it, in the recent article and thread to which you refer: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=9276

So you would agree that the SEQ plan is nothing short of a population growth facilitation mechanism, with no suggestion that this sort of growth should ever end.

“The SEQ Regional Plan is indeed ambitious. In fact it is the most ambitious document of its kind in Australia. Is high ambition a vice or virtue?”

It is absolutely a vice! In fact it is a mindblowing W*NK!

What an absolutely crazy concept to just continue packing people into a region that has glaringly obvious resource-supply and congestion problems, not least water and traffic.

“Could it be that the unstated premise of the plan is that growth will find its own balance, with the help of nature?”

Effectively this plan has the unstated premise of continuing to sardine people into the region until the quality of life is lowered to a point that no one will want to go there. That’s about it in a nutshell.

The fundamental purpose of a strategic plan in a region with major population growth pressure and with major ominous consequences becoming highly evident, is SURELY to work towards limits to growth!

This wouldn’t be hard at all if the will was there…. if government wasn’t in coitus with the real estate industry and other big business interests and was actually doing its fundamental job of looking after the whole community.

Limits to growth are seen as necessary and completely non-contentious on islands – Norfolk I, Rottnest I, Magnetic I, etc. But in cities or regions, it is completely taboo! How crazy are we?

The SEQ plan stinks! It needs to be entirely reinvented!!

It sounds like the urban planner’s sardine fetish is alive and well. We have the same planners in Melbourne who have free and almost unchallenged reign in The Age to argue day after day that we must have higher urban densities, even though most people show by the houses they buy they actually want gardens and we live in a country that has a population density of 2.7 people per square kilometre. I’ve been to horribly crowded cites such as London and Paris, and I would hate to see that unhuman living imposed here by the far-too-powerful planning industry. If we built a second city the size and density of Melbourne, we would still have more than 90 per cent of the state untouched by either it or the original Melbourne. There is a limit to how many people the country can carry. Within that limit, the answer to increasing population is decentralisation.

It is difficult to take an article seriously when the author states: "Free market forces have helped us to become one of the most obese and unhealthy nations in the world." In North Korea,where market forces are clearly absent, apart from Kim Jong-il and his cronies, the populace are certainly not obese and when they can find food presumably are healthy.