As Melbourne hosted the EcoCity World Summit this week, we may be thinking about the progress Australia has made in achieving sustainable urbanization. Australian metropolitan planning has long recognized the urban geographer Clive Foster as what is called a “compact urban consensus”. This is a commitment to an integrated, well-designed, low-energy city with high usage rates for public and active transportation. But after decades of pursuit, we don’t seem to be close to this ideal. The 2016 State of the Environment report made important findings on the development of metropolises. It sees these trends (at least in part) as market-driven compression rather than planned integration. Leanne Hodyl’s 2014 research report shows: High-rise apartment buildings are being built in the heart of Melbourne, with a density four times the highest density in Hong Kong, New York and Tokyo – the world’s highest density city. Her conclusion is that Australia’s regulation of high-rise buildings is unique.
The compact city vision has guided the Australian metropolitan strategy for at least three decades, with the aim of achieving a form of sustainable development that deviates from the extensive monocentricism of the post-war metropolis, relying on cars. However, during this period, planning is not the main direction of urbanization. Instead, it has been dominated by a stronger political consensus, neoliberalism. No matter how people view the compact urban ideal – and it is questioned by urban planners – its implementation requires a commitment to planning urbanization. But in an era of ruthlessly hollowing out national capabilities, including those needed to manage cities, this situation can never happen. Instead, other forces shaped the process of urban change. These include national policies (especially immigration, taxation and financing), technological innovation, cultural change, political economy (especially neoliberal governance) and increasingly unrestricted market forces. The “fanaticism” of this group of changes can be attributed to the signs of intensification and pluralism.There is no denying that these forces have produced many welcome and stimulating changes in our cities. However, our current route, if not revised, will make it possible for Australian cities to stay away from the ideals of sustainable urbanization. The increase in “bad diversification” – especially social polarization and poverty – deviates from this ideal as much as physical failure. Increasing social ills, especially hail and domestic.
Market-driven intensification allows for urban values and comfort, as well as the breakdown and looting of human well-being in many places, and the development of capital has been put on the robes of the legitimacy provided by compact urban ideals. We can generalize it as “urban fracturing”: a new way of extracting profits through accumulated layers of material and symbolic values. In 1999, Miles Lewis observed that the massive reconstruction of Melbourne’s Central community was parasitic. That is, it utilizes (and thus exhausts) existing comfort without increasing existing comfort. More generally, the value of the city from public (or public) to private is deprived of countless forms: through over-developed comfort and infrastructure mining, the transfer of public housing to private investors in reconstruction, to unrealized land Value increments continue to be tax-free, privatization of assets and services, and rapid and favorable development approvals.
These various plunders and injuries may also reduce the sustainability and resilience of our cities, especially in “climate emergencies”, when they are clearly threatened. Reducing the ratio of green space to open space in the redevelopment area poses a particular risk to the rapidly rising population of the city centre. Considering that the Melbourne City Council has developed a heatwave response plan, it will evacuate urban residents to the Melbourne Cricket Ground, Etihad Stadium and Convention Center. The committee recognizes that 82% of residents now live in buildings that are “not passively ventilated”. This is the code for the air conditioning tower, which does little for the reasons for sustainability. The new model shows that rising sea levels may overwhelm many of the city’s high-rise reconstruction areas in Australian cities. This includes the evacuation area identified in the Melbourne Heatwave Response Plan.
Must resume governance.
As the 2016 census confirms, our rapidly growing core metro area is evolving into a more complex landscape that cannot be easily described. It may be easy to conclude that their source of the problem resists identification. But this is wrong. The core of our city failure is all the necessary forms of governance – economic, social and spatial. Our city seems to be increasingly unsustainable, chaotic and frank and uncontrollable, just because we allow this to happen. The history of historic urban governance, especially in Brisbane and Melbourne, has produced a more balanced and enjoyable urbanization model than we have now. The cost and failure of the “long night” of neoliberal governance has increased, and it has become more and more resonating in national politics. Economist John Quikin believes that this is providing new, even fresher, appetite for public intervention and ownership. We must hope that this desire to restore national capabilities extends to cities that are rapidly deteriorating in their development trajectories that threaten national well-being. The first necessary condition is the ability to restore public economic governance. The demand for infrastructure and urban services is particularly large, which has shaped the general process of urbanization.
