Wednesday, April 07, 2004
The 200km City

Very soon, every kilometre of land between Tweed Heads and Noosa Heads - a distance of some 200km - will be sealed in concrete. A boat trip north along the coast would reveal a continuous ribbon of residential, commercial, industrial and recreational human land-use. This is the epitome of urban sprawl.

Only the protected oceanic coast of Bribie Island will be left green, but this only disguises the developments on the mainland coast on the leeside of the island – rapidly being engulfed in the maze of ‘canals’, golf-courses and water-front homes that is Pumicestone Passage.

Urban sprawl is a bad thing. That is something that everyone agrees on. So why does it still happen?

Sprawl ? Not here mate

Personal notions of 'urban sprawl' are contested. Rising aspirations, fuelled by increasing wealth, building on the cheap and ever more land being released for development has allowed many residents of South East Queensland (SEQ) to move out into the new suburbs, to experience the fairy tail lifestyle that was once out of reach for ordinary Australians.

Once you are in the suburbs, safely installed on your 809 square metre plot, urban sprawl takes on a whole new meaning. It is something that happens beyond your suburb, on the fringes, next to where concrete meets tree. Our perceptions have changed with our experiences - and with that, our attitudes towards growth management, voting intention and sustainability.

Urban sprawl has generated a greater Brisbane metropolitan area that is the geographical size of London but with less than a quarter of its population. On the one hand this offers great opportunities for high quality urban and suburban living. On the other, this is sad indictment on poor planning for growth.

The 'Los Angelisation' of South East Queensland

The causes of urban sprawl are as well documented in SEQ as they are in Los Angeles. A population explosion (over 1000 people per week are moving to SEQ), inappropriate housing densities, reduced occupancy rates of dwellings due to second home ownership and changing life patterns, little political commitment to grapple with and cheap access to petrol. All this has been soaked up in new rural land release and property sub-division encroaching on the remaining protected green space.

In recent years the phenomena of double figure property values increases in major population centres is forcing people away from amenities and services into dormitory developments that span the major highways, well away from existing water supplies, public transport networks and local shopping precincts.
Tentative answers lie in planning for growth that does not celebrate the politics of the lowest common denominator - of rolling over and accepting no limitations on SEQ's and the planet's sustainability. 'Growth Management' is the prevailing paradigm of planners: smart growth that finds best outcome answers to where this growth is going to occur.

But this regional planning framework requires more than the voluntary association it receives currently. It needs the command of statutory force to compel State and local authorities to adhere to sustainable regional strategies. It therefore needs the involvement and consent of the people that are going to live this strategy. Smart growth is all about planning infrastructure development to ensure that residential development, public amenity and transport infrastructure overlap.

Controlling urban sprawl cannot be done without protect green space - drawing 'red-lines' if you like. Red lines not just surrounding urban growth ('green-belts') but those passing through, around it and within it, creating wildlife corridors, sustainable transport options (by this I mean walking and cycling) and providing vibrant and equitable recreational open space. This is going to be difficult. Already, 83% of SEQ lies in private hands.

It is tricky, questioning aspirations, but breaking the public perception that high density equals low quality when it comes to residential development will require a sea change. There is strong opposition to high density developments in the inner suburbs. People are concerned about their own house prices and 'sort of person that lives in an apartment'. It involves in-fills, conversion of empty industrial units into highly livable developments.

Brisbanites need to come to terms that acreage eats up remnant vegetation and suburban living needs a progressive and equitable housing mix. Imaginative high quality, high density housing schemes will keep people closer to their schools, public transport nodes, shops and services. It will, dovetailed with progressive transport policies draw people out of their cars. Currently, only 8% of commutes in Brisbane are by public transport. When population and sprawl continue this will exacerbate.

Brisbane is a city of 1.5 million people in a region of some 2.4 million. The pushing of ever-larger highways from the Brisbane to the periphery of SEQ has enabled car-driving commuters to travel further and further. This undermines efforts to generate sub-regional economic centres of employment that encourage the dispersion of skills and jobs creation away from Brisbane city centre. The notion that large urban centres such as Ipswich and Rochedale are just ‘dormitories’ for commuters must be challenged. The Gargantuan developers that create whole towns must be forced to introduce mixed-use developments, not to create empty white-elephants, but be supported by partnerships of government and business to reduce worker’s commute times and improve quality of life.

An opportunity exists in sprawling SEQ. Brisbane's obsession with evermore development brings huge levels of new-build - new-build that needs the most stringent of environmental assessments. Sustainable building is far more efficient at the building's outset than later in its life.

Over 40% of new mortgage lending in SEQ is for investment and second properties. One benefit of this is a competitive rental market - yields for landlords are well below industry expectations. Another, more worrying by-product of this is the increasing levels of second home ownership - particularly in newly opened rural areas in the Sunshine Coast. Second home ownership pushes occupancy rates down, closes local businesses and drives up house prices both in the suburbs and in the get away areas. Second home-owners should bear the full cost of their unsustainable habits through progressive taxation of properties that are not sole dwellings.

Paradise lost?

SEQ promotes itself as a destination that provides high quality sub-tropical living. Urban sprawl will envelop many of the region’s attributes that make it so in a self-defeating dynamic. Costs of servicing this living will spiral and irreversible ecological degradation will occur long before market mechanisms kick in to push people away - leaving Brisbane as an urban spagetti bolognaise of red flat roofs and winding concrete freeways, resembling coastal California.

Is it density and design or is it sheer numbers? According to the Regional Strategy for Growth Management (SEQ2021), even the 2021 figures will only push SEQ's population density up to a figure still well below that of the South West Region of England - one of the most rural areas of the UK.

However, if the projected 60% rise in population brings a 60% increase in land turned over to suburban cul de sacs, carparks and shopping malls, SEQ would be finally, completely devastated. Unprotected farmland and remnant vegetation would all but disappear, Australia's already shocking commitment to combating climate change would be buried and the rivers would run dry. Resources would have been squandered for quick buck and a place in the sun.

Will what made SEQ a desirable place to live be lost? Probably not. “Sea-Changers” is the label given to the new generation of Australians seeking a life by the ocean. Will they profess to wanting uncomplicated lifestyle, more space and ‘a better place to bring up a family’, they soon fill up their lives with commuting and the things that made their complicated lives in the city unbearable in the first place. Ecological reasons for their move – to be closer to forest and remnant bushland - do not figure at all.

Not at all ! Shopping Malls are what we came for

Indeed, Sea-Changers main gripe is that their access to local services is poor: they wish they didn’t have to drive so far to the shopping mall and doctor’s surgeries. Suburbanites require only more suburbia, gold courses and other developed recreational amenities. But fear not, economic multipliers will operate to ensure that outer suburbs are soon filled with larger schools, larger hospitals and larger carparks.

It seems that the pro-development tone will continue, post election, for Brisbane at least. A Liberal Mayor that promises more roads and tunnels, more shopping malls adjacent to main roads and more growth will up the development rhetoric and have the developers that funded his $1 million campaign chomping at the bit for a piece of the action.

However, the next four years could see a more sober Gold Coast, but time will tell whether the rookie Mayor will be able to tame the development beast.

Moral issues govern the rights and wrongs of population growth. Do Queenslanders have the right to pull up the drawbridge and say "no more"? One shire council, Noosa, already has a population cap – a limit to growth. But this will just create niches for the wealthy, excluding access to any affordable housing, discounting equity and stagnating cultural vibrancy. We should not allow people to isolate themselves in lifestyle communities sold to them through glossy TV ads depicting well-watered gold courses and man-made canals. If the growth must come, we must all share the brunt in terms of financial cost and ecological destruction. Only then will we wake up to the issues staring at us coldly in the face - the 200km city - while we sheepishly avert our gaze.

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