Wednesday, June 23, 2004
Stemming the suburban flow and the SEQ Regional Plan

A tourniquet is being applied to stem the flow of suburbia into South East Queensland’s remaining native bushland. The ‘200km City¹’ beckons; koalas, bushland and public access are threatened.

The average Queenslander's house is increasing in size at a phenomenal rate. Average new build is expanding even faster. Now the average new build size is a whopping 815m² (up from just over 520m² in 1990) – that is 28 X 28 metres of living space.

This could be excused if families were as fertile as Federal Treasurer, Peter Costello, hopes ("three, a girl, a boy and one for Australia", he said). But that is not teh case. At the same time house footprints are expanding, the number of people per dwelling is falling. So whilst the population of SEQ increased by 68,900 in 2003, the population densities of urban and peri-urban areas to fell.

New-build in the peri-urban communities typically have twice the number of bedrooms as there are occupants, a lounge, a dining room, a formal lounge, a formal dining room and en suites as standard.

But it is not the physical asset that holds the key. The bricks and mortar are intimately linked to the over exposed, Queensland ‘lifestyle’.

Who's lifestyle is it anyway?

These ‘lifesyles’ are heavily promoted through the media. Choosing a new house should be as simple as picking a can of beans off the shelf in the supermarket. There are even seasonal ‘sales’ and 'special offers'. And just as the ad-men from Coke and Nike say, you are not just buying a can of sugary water or a comfy pair of training shoes, you are buying into a whole new lifestyle of soft focus evening dinner parties, joyous weather and bicycle rides by the lakes with Costello’s next generation.

And it is not just TV and print advertisements. Your new life is lived through sponsored TV magazine programs and lifetsyle fairs, all convincing you that the latest in deck-design is not simply a desire, but one of your lifestyle’s necessities. It all bundles up into a pretty enticing package. Why think about how to live your life, when you can choose it from the pages of 'Better Homes' ?

But just as Coca Cola do not promote the tooth decay and Nike do not feature child-labour sweatshops, lifestyle packages do not promote the lengthening commute times or 8-lane highways crawling at below speed. Representation and reality take different routes home. In real life the money rich-time poor have no time to enjoy the lakes in ‘North Lakes’ – they are spending their time in their SUV, listening to traffic report tell them about the jam they are sat in².

All because no one had the foresight to build the new community near a railway line.

Similarly, the ads do not allude to the lost bushland and high quality agricultural land, the loss of natural habitat corridors and biodiversity destruction. Nor to suburb ghost towns that lack basic amenities accessible on foot because the 'big-box' retailers have decided that people without cars do not deserve to shop. Whole communities have been split in two by dual carriageways, punctuated by traffic lights with inadequate crossings. And the bikes? Only on the weekends around the lakes. No one commutes by bike .

But to challenge this lifestyle is seen as a challenge to human aspirations. Aspirations on which the generation fleeing to the dormitory badlands have grown up with – the property owning and share dealing fantasy of the New Right Baby-boomers and their grown-up children. My wealth, my future – the ad-man said so. The only responsibility we have is our responsibility to consume, expand and be just as aspirational.

This expansion has political backing: it is stated Federal and State Government policy to continue to support measures to increase Australia’s population. No breaks should be put on the City of the Gold Coast’s natural growth and ‘pull-factor’ growth – despite there being not enough water to drink beyond 20073.

However, despite what it seems, it isn’t all about consumer agency. These city-deserters are heading where the ad-men and their corporate clients want them to go. Business interests have used their political and financial leverage to promote sprawl, built on access to cheap energy and land and little guilt for squandering it. For a long while greenfield and previously undeveloped land has come all too cheaply, with various levels of government failing to gauge to the true costs of releasing this land for development (suin terms of utility supply without passing it on to the profiting developers. Local councils have even fought each other to get the development, the growth, the revenue and the prestige. Those that have proposed a more objective rethink to development have been electorally hijacked by pro-development industry selected representatives⁴.

But it doesn't have to be this way. Effective urban management and political leadership are the key drivers in providing the right incentives for more sustainable and equitable living. Currently, secondary and infill development is expensive and troublesome, despite there being many hectares of eminently useable land in the inner suburbs. If developers were encouraged to focus their energies on revitalising the inner suburbs, urban land sales would become more buoyant, driving down prices through greater competition, forcing fewer people out to the margins, escaping higher house prices.

Fortunately, it is not all one-way traffic of town. Despite outliers in the commuter belt growing more rapidly than Brisbane proper, some of the fastest growing areas, in terms of population growth, in Brisbane are the inner city suburbs of Spring Hill and Toowong. Thanks to better quality urban design outcomes, a new generation of home owners and new attitudes towards city living is drawing the (generally childless, at least until later in life) next generation of home owners into the city into higher density. But this must be part of a wider scheme of urban management, to protect (or redesignate) green space for recreation and wildlife, better sub-nodal areas of employment and services and more versatile transport links. The attraction to these places is also driven by the cultural vitality that the Brisbane Renaisance (post-Joh) is going through and the political vision for the city. But this vision needs to widen its scope to include the outer suburbs in the revitalisation process, to benefit the residents over the visitor or investor.

The new build presents an excellent opportunity to pursue building design with a reduced ecological footprint: new building codes⁵ will soon ensure that new housing makes more effort to reduce CO2 emissions from cooling rooms and heating water and include water saving and recycling systems. However, any gross reductions in emissions are likely to be negated if average dwelling sizes continue to increase and they become even more packed with energy sapping electrical devices⁶.

The fabled Regional Plan

Late in the day, a tourniquet is being applied to stem the flow of the suburbs into what is left of natural SEQ. The much talked of Regional Plan for South East Queensland will define an urban growth boundary to outline the planned extent of the urban and peri-urban form until 2050. It will also identify growth areas, sub-regional frameworks (through alternative patterns of development), co-ordinate infrastructure planning in SEQ and secure the fate of protected bushland. Most importantly, it will be a statutory document that will bind all parties into the final agreement.

This regional plan will challenge the way land has been viewed in the Australian psyche. For the first time, the cult of the ‘pioneer⁷’ that has been built on the exploitation of Australia’s abundant natural resources and the pushing back of the frontier , will have to recognise limits to this expansion.

When the draft plan goes out for consultation in October 2004, there will be battles to be fought on the margins and a rush of speculative planning applications for major developments, but if enough space can be found to house the influx until 2050, what’s left maybe protected as green space (both agricultural, recreational and wilderness) for the time being. Ecological questions on carrying capacity may then be asked.

In non-wilderness growth regions, like SEQ, the protection of green space, habitat corridors, biodiversity, and environmental sustainabilty are all built on intelligent urban management, spatial planning and ‘green-lines’. It cannot be left to consumer demand and the market which has singularly failed to value any of these concepts correctly and encourages perverse outcomes in land-use, population densities and ecological footprints.

---

NOTES:

1. The ‘200km City’ is the title of a Museum of Brisbane exhibit, sponsored and promoted by the Brisbane Institute. It will be a series of images, photographs and exhibits, depicting the 200km coastline between Coolangatta in the south and Noosa in the north – nearly all of which has been developed.


2. An overwhelming number of Brisbanites commute to work by car. 91% of Brisbane residents commute by car, compared to 69% in Sydney, 27% in Tokyo and just 9% in Hong Kong. (Newman and Kenworthy, Institute for Sustainabilty and technology, Murdoch University, Perth, Australia and UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, World Urbanisation Prospects: The 1996 Revision, UN, NY, 1998.


3. Assuming business as usual and no pipeline from Wivenhoe Dam to the Gold Coast, the supply of drinking water to the Gold Coast City will have reached capacity within 3 years.


4. Gold Coast City Council, Maroochy Shire Council and Redland Shire Council have all returned ‘pro-development’ Councillors on the one hand and a more pragmatic independent Mayors on the other. Typically, election advertising spending for these candidates was higher than is the norm.


5. Adoption of this building code, State wide, has been delayed by the Smart State Government.


6. It is suggested that the shift towards set-top boxes for rendering digital television will boost CO2 emissions due to their poor ‘standby’ performance through use of cheap materials. ‘Internet fridges’ are expected to negate huge improvements in efficiencies in cooling technology.


7. Despite having a national culture based on the great outback, jackeroos and farmers, Australia is one of the most urbanised countries in the world.

---