We live in a global urban age. Australia’s major urban areas are expanding rapidly. Melbourne had 91,600 residents in 2014-15, an annual growth rate of 2.1%. It is one of the fastest growing cities in the developed world.
Other big Australian cities have also seen rapid growth over the past year – Sydney at 1.7 per cent, Perth and Brisbane at 1.6 per cent. In 2014-15, the five largest cities added more than 250,000 residents. Over the next ten years, it is expected to be 2.5 million, equivalent to adding an extra Brisbane.
Behind the glitter of livability
We need to be unabashedly honest about our situation when it comes to providing the well-being of the next three million Australian city dwellers. Australian cities are known for their high livability, but such corporate metrics mask a lot of malice.
After three decades of market-driven urbanization, our cities have become engines of social inequality. The rich have been eliminated, inflating the housing market and taking advantage of the best government services and infrastructure, as well as proximity to high-paying jobs. The poor are being moved to cheaper remote locations where jobs, infrastructure and services are weak.
Our city is socially divided. We have done little to correct these failures.
Our cities are also machines of environmental degradation and climate change. Buildings and transportation systems are overwhelmingly powered by fossil fuels. The expanding edge continues to deplete fragile habitats and precious agricultural land. Even the fill development has increased urban land clearing, as backyard trees are bulldozed for townhouses and apartments.
We run the urban system so that every new resident adds to the environmental damage. We need to separate urban growth from environmental loss.
We waste public resources on the massive transport infrastructure of private cars. Our neglected public transport networks struggle to meet demand or are absent, leaving entire communities dependent on expensive cars. Parking lots – ubiquitous, space-hungry, inefficient and cheap – consume valuable urban space.
Our governance arrangements do not match the scale of our urban problems. Financing arrangements favor the federal government, an absent urban policy participant, in addition to the campaign, when infrastructure gadgets shower from above. At the same time, states are fulfilling their city service responsibilities
None of our cities have a democratic process that operates throughout the metropolitan area. Brisbane is within reach, but there are only ten councils in the urbanised south-east of Queensland.
We urgently need to move beyond our failed model of urbanization and development.
The fourth phase of urban growth?
Australian cities began as crowded 19th century administrative port towns. With the emergence of housing and poverty, we suburbanized cities in the 20th century. Through post-world war ii reconstruction, we solved the housing shortage through new housing suburbs associated with nearby manufacturing, as models of public welfare.
The third phase of urbanization occurred in the 1980s because we outsourced manufacturing. Our city has redesigned the global capital mandate by repositioning our industrial core within the city around the symbolic work and leisure complex, while eliminating planning and privatizing infrastructure.
We started to fill our cities, but in a haphazard way, missed out on many of the hypothetical benefits of integration. Reliance on markets only increases our urban woes by reducing the influence of democracy on urban decision-making.
With the failure of past plans now evident, the threat of damage and the unruly depletion of the planet is leading us to a fourth era of urban restructuring. What urban futures await? What might “city v4.0” look like?
Priorities for cities in the 21st century
The problem is huge and complex, but here are some short starting points.
The first major task of City v4.0 is to decarbonize our urban system quickly and thoroughly to reduce our heavy consumption of planetary resources. We need to urgently reduce the use of fossil fuel vehicles by moving to public transport and active transport.
Transport decarburization can be achieved through a combination of registration costs, road user fees, clearing of road space and public transport expansion, although it is sometimes calibrated around a progressive cost structure to avoid social harm. Walking and cycling, the cheapest and most sustainable models, require an order of magnitude leap in the amount of money and support they enjoy.
We cannot wait for collective adoption of electric cars. If it can, that prospect is still decades away. Electric cars are largely reserved for the rich. They provide some respite for poorer families, who drive older and less efficient fossil fuel vehicles over vast suburban distances.
We need to ensure that decarbonisation is inclusive, not adding another axis of social division of Labour. It also means abandoning most of the transport cost-benefit analysis that we ignore for environmental and social costs.
Once entrenched, social differences are difficult to correct, so efforts must begin immediately. The first task is to achieve a more uniform distribution of quality work, services and infrastructure in our cities, so that location does not equal opportunity. This will require investment, aggressive government planning and new revenue-raising models to fund better urban services.
We will have comprehensive and progressive land taxes in our cities. These would benefit from the inflationary gains of the housing market in recent decades-which favour the have-and divert them to public purposes. For example, taxing higher value services rich internal property to fund suburban service and infrastructure deficits is an urgent urban reform for more inclusive and equitable cities.
Perhaps some land taxes could be used to rebuild our degraded stock of public housing. In recent years, that proportion has fallen among all housing units.
Further mechanisms, such as inclusive zoning, are urgently needed to make our cities more inclusive and productive through more affordable housing. Eliminating the minimum parking standards for infill development can improve housing affordability and support sustainable transport.
Our cities need comprehensive plans to ensure that urban land is cleared from reclamation development without overheating, ageing and Browning it. About half of all urban vegetation is on private land, so we need to arrange for conservation and expansion of green space. Conversion of underutilized road space to parks or biodiversity corridors has multiple benefits and should be widely adopted.
A new paradigm for planning and governance
Although rarely discussed, the further opportunity is to reactivate our lost capacity for regional planning. Population growth in major cities should be stopped in favor of regional centers.
We need to see our major cities not just as individual primate cities, but as network urban areas. This will require coordinated planning to better distribute the new population, supported by active investment in employment and services. This will involve trains that are faster than the expansion bits currently serving our regional cities.
Finally, our governance arrangements need urgent restructuring to integrate democracy into the meaningful dimensions of the metropolitan area. This would provide a viable middle ground between the incompetence of local governments and the general responsibilities of state governments. The metropolitan plan, which has a clear democratic basis and a clear financial basis, should be a priority for the improvement of urban democracy.
Across the country, we need to better coordinate policy and funding between the federal government, which controls immigration and taxes, and lower levels such as the states, which have all the responsibilities of city services. Introducing a spatial perspective into all domestic federal policies to understand how federal actions affect cities and their districts will improve policy performance.
As a nation of immigrants with a high population growth rate, Australia takes people away from less environmentally damaging countries and cities, turning them into the world’s worst global consumers through our inefficient and degraded urban system. There seems to be little to limit the appetite for migration or the feasibility of stopping urban population growth.
Therefore, in an era of global urban transformation, we urgently need to change the way we manage, build and develop cities to version 4.0, so that each additional resident can enhance, rather than diminish, the livability, environmental sustainability and prosperity of the city.