Are we squandering infill housing opportunities?
Posted: December 5, 2011 Filed under: Housing, Planning | Tags: Alphington, councils, density, dual occupancy, infill, medium density housing, third party appeals 29 Comments
Eight unit Infill project, Alphington
I’ve argued before (here, here and here) that new housing supply within Melbourne’s established suburbs is excessively dependent on small-scale infill housing projects. In the expansive middle ring suburbs, around half of all housing projects provide only one or two additional dwellings, with the great majority providing only one.
It’s therefore important to look at other options, but given it’s carrying most of the burden, it’s also worth asking if infill is being managed as efficiently as it could be.
The exhibit above shows a newly completed infill development at 2-4 Old Heidelberg Rd in suburban Alphington (here are some interior pictures). It provides eight dwellings on an 825 sq m site that originally would’ve been intended to accommodate a single detached house like its neighbour.
That’s a big up-lift in density – if most infill projects yielded this many new dwellings we wouldn’t have a supply problem. But the great bulk are simple dual occupancy developments. This raises the important issue of whether we’re maximising the value we’re getting from the limited supply of precious infill sites.
If projects that could yield four, six or eight new units are only providing one, then that could represent a very high opportunity cost. Given that activity centres in the middle ring suburbs are mostly failing to deliver much new housing, what we ideally want to see is each lot delivering to its full potential – yielding the maximum number of new dwellings that, having regard to its particular circumstances, it reasonably could.
There are of course many “objective” reasons why not all projects can yield as many dwellings as 2-4 Old Heidelberg Rd. Some redevelopment sites are small or inconveniently shaped. Some may have infrastructure inadequacies or access might be hard.
There are also a range of legitimate planning constraints like heritage, over-looking and solar access that might limit the number of units that can be built on a given lot. And the nature of the market in a particular area could mean the highest return comes from building fewer dwellings rather than maximising the total number.
But there are reasons to suspect that “objective” factors do not always, or even usually, explain why a lot isn’t developed to its potential. Consider these two contiguous lots in Elphin St Ivanhoe – although they’re the same size and have a common context, one has six dwellings and the other has two.
The most commonly cited explanation for these sorts of anomalies is the “dead hand” of the planning system. Additional cost and risk is imposed on projects by self-interested opposition from existing residents. Councils often lack the resources and skills to deal with the complexity of sophisticated opposition and, not surprisingly, often take a position more sympathetic to their constituents than to the developer.
There’s a range of measures that have been suggested to tilt the balance more toward redevelopment. These include abolition of third party appeals (the issue got a run in The Age recently), code-based approval systems, more resources for councils, better forward planning, and so on. I endorse this position but there’s no doubt it’s very hard politically, both for councils and the state government.
I think there’s another approach that’s worth thinking about, particularly for the middle ring suburbs. We know infill developers tend to be small and it could be that many simply lack the knowledge, skills, access to finance and appetite for risk to enable them to undertake larger projects. They might not have the wherewithal to push for larger projects in the face of vigorous opposition from neighbours and limited support from timid councils.
Perhaps the project class with the greatest potential for “under-utilisation” is dual occupancy. Landowners carve off a bit of land and sell it, usually for the construction of one additional dwelling. That way they get to stay in their old house and transform some excess land into cash without taking much risk.
That’s a net addition to supply so it’s positive. While in many cases the value of the existing dwelling will preclude more intense development, dual occupancy is a lost opportunity if the entire site could’ve been successfully redeveloped for four, six or eight dwellings. Read the rest of this entry »
What’s happening with suburban jobs in Melbourne?
Posted: November 5, 2011 Filed under: Employment | Tags: CBD, density, dispersal, Employment, Jobs, M/C Journal, suburbs 8 Comments
Density of employment in Melbourne, 2006, in one km wide circular bands by distance from CBD (jobs/km2)
The first exhibit shows the popular view of the geography of urban employment in Australia’s largest cities. It is commonly assumed the great bulk of jobs – and certainly virtually all “good” jobs – is located in the CBD.
This is an understandable view given the first exhibit shows the spatial distribution of employment density in Melbourne in 2006. It indicates the density of jobs in the Central Business District (CBD) – the first one km radius ring around the town hall – is an order of magnitude higher than anywhere else in the metropolitan area. It closely aligns with the cluster of high rise office buildings that define the CBD in the popular imagination.
Share of metropolitan employment in Melbourne in one km wide circular bands by distance from CBD, 2006 (%)
But is this is an adequate representation of the geography of employment in Australia’s second largest city? The second exhibit highlights that density is not the same as the number of jobs. It shows how employment is really distributed within Melbourne – the CBD is easily the largest single concentration of employment, but it nevertheless has only 15% of all metropolitan jobs. In fact only 28% of metropolitan jobs are located in the inner city – i.e. lie within a 5 km radius of the town hall – and 50% are located within 13 km radius.
This dispersed pattern is not recent. Melbourne was compact and dense up until the end of the nineteenth century when the appearance of mechanised transport – primarily trams and trains – enabled middle class residents to escape the crowding and congestion of the centre for the space and amenity of the suburbs. This trend was boosted dramatically after WW2 when increasingly widespread car ownership democratised access to affordable land on the urban fringe.
Firms followed a similar pattern. Initially, manufacturing and distribution firms moved to the outer suburbs so they could escape congestion in the inner city, exploit new space-intensive horizontal production methods, and be closer to the suburbanising workforce. The suburban population generated increasing numbers of jobs to service its consumption needs, amplified by the increasing level of outsourcing from the home. More recently, some higher order activities have moved from the CBD to near-CBD and inner city locations and some back office functions have moved to the suburbs.
By 1981, only 35% of Melbourne’s jobs were located within 5 km of the centre. The “average job” was 12.4 km from the centre and the “centre of mass” of employment was 5.9 km away. The trend to the suburbs was very strong over the succeeding 25 years. By 2006 just 28% of jobs were within 5 km radius and the ‘average job’ was now 15.6 km from the centre. The centre of mass had moved 2 km further outwards to the vicinity of Tooronga, 7.9 km from the CBD. Read the rest of this entry »
Is Melbourne pushing the boundary (too far)?
Posted: September 15, 2011 Filed under: Planning | Tags: CSIRO, density, Geosciences Australia, image, La Nina, satellte, sprawl, suburbs, urban growth Leave a comment
Melbourne in 1988 - a part of the 2010 image, showing the effects of the drought, is visible on the RHS
Geosciences Australia has released a new series of satellite images comparing the extent of development in Melbourne in 1988 with 2010. Click on the image above to go to Geosciences Australia’s web site where you can do a “swipe” comparison of the two images i.e. move the cursor across the image to progressively reveal the second image underneath.
According to a report in The Age, the images show a “massive” increase in urban sprawl, with Melbourne’s urban footprint surging to the north, west and south-east. Melbourne has “marched into surrounding rural landscapes” and its “unofficial boundary is now more than 150 km east to west”.
Melbourne has certainly expanded at the fringe over the last 22 years, there’s no doubt about that. However I’ve argued before that both the extent of sprawl and its downsides are routinely exaggerated, so I want to have a closer look at these images and at The Age’s interpretation.
One thing that struck me straight up is that any comparison of the two satellite images can be misleading unless the viewer appreciates Melbourne was still suffering the effects of a long drought in 2010 (compare the size of the dams in each year). So areas that appear to have gone from green to brown between 1988 and 2010 might reflect lack of rain, rather than an increase in development.
In fact 1988 was an unusual year. There was a La Nina event in 1988-89 – the first since 1973-76 – and hence there were wetter than normal conditions. Have a look at this older CSIRO comparison of satellite images of Melbourne in 1972 and 1988, and note the CSIRO cautions that 1972 was much drier than 1988.
It should also be borne in mind that 22 years is a reasonably long period in urban development terms. We shouldn’t be surprised to see substantial change when a metropolitan area is growing. Have a look at these images to see how spectacularly some other growing cities have changed in the course of 20 years.
The level of growth also needs to be considered. Melbourne’s population grew from circa 3.1 million to around 4 million between 1988 and 2010. That’s an increase of about 30%, which is considerably more than the apparent increase in the size of the urbanised area. That’s to be expected, as a large proportion of population growth – currently approaching half – is accommodated within the existing urban fabric via redevelopment.
And then there’s The Age’s claim that Melbourne’s urban footprint spreads “more than 150 km east to west”. It doesn’t. Using GIS, I measure at most 75 km from the western edge of Wyndham to Lilydale in the east and 85 km to Pakenham in the south-east. If I measure instead from Melton (putting aside that it’s separated by 9 km of green wedge from the continuously urbanised area), I still get less than 80 km to Lilydale and less than 100 km to Pakenham. Some might think that’s still too big, but it’s a lot less than 150 km plus. Read the rest of this entry »
Why is housing in European rural villages so dense?
Posted: July 25, 2011 Filed under: Housing | Tags: Alexis DeTocqville, Cadel Evans, Castelnuovo di Garfagnana, density, Parrot and Olivier in America, Peter Carey, rural village, Tour de France 11 Comments
Castelnuovo di Garfagnana, near Lucca, Italy
I can’t let the Tour de France go by without finding some way to reference this great spectacle and Cadel Evan’s singular achievement.
Something I noticed watching the Tour is how traditional French country villages have relatively high density housing compared to Australian country towns. I’ve seen the same pattern in the Italian countryside – villages of three storey (or more) apartments set within productive agricultural land.
Yet in contrast, Australian country towns are predominantly detached houses on large lots. Only the odd commercial building – like pubs – is two storeys. Why didn’t town dwellers in Australia choose to live in multi-storey buildings like Europeans?
I don’t know the answer but it’s worth thinking about and so I’m hoping someone does. There’s a host of potential explanations. It might be the car, yet parts of Australian country towns that pre-date motorisation are lower density than their European equivalents. It might have something to do with differences in the value of agriculture, yet there are some Australian towns where agriculture must’ve been of comparable or higher value than many areas of Europe e.g. wine growing regions.
Perhaps building materials were generally harder to get than in Australia – i.e. more expensive –and this encouraged smaller dwellings. Maybe the more extreme climate had an influence too, giving residents an incentive to cluster buildings for better insulation. I also wonder if there was a different tradition of village housing in England compared to the rest of Europe that was followed by early settlers in Australia.
Perhaps it was driven as much by politics as by anything else. I recently read Peter Carey’s Parrot and Olivier in America, which is loosely based on the book, Democracy in America, which French aristocrat Alexis DeTocqville wrote after touring the young democracy in the early 1830s. I was struck by the enormous gulf in the world views of the aristocracy and the common people in France at this time. So perhaps it was in the interest of the local aristocrat in country areas to maximise the amount of land in agricultural use and minimise the quantity of land and resources devoted to housing the peasants. However once the “common man” settled in the New World he could make his own choice about how much space to devote to housing and how much to agriculture.
As I say, I don’t know but I’d be interested to hear other’s views.
Is inner city living the solution to obesity?
Posted: July 13, 2011 Filed under: Education, justice, health | Tags: CBD, density, exercise, health, Inner city, obesity, Public transport, suburbs 11 Comments
How much exercise is needed to burn off food?
It’s often pointed out that residents of the inner city, on average, are less obese than residents of the outer suburbs. Since the inner city is denser, more walkable and has much better public transport access than any other part of the metropolitan area, the conclusion seems obvious to many – a key strategy to address obesity should be to encourage higher dwelling densities and better public transport in the suburbs, especially the newer, fringe areas.
The flaw in this thinking is it fails to observe that the inner city – defined roughly as the area within 5 km of the CBD – is a different world. Relative to the suburbs, the inner city has an emphatic over-representation of younger, well educated and affluent residents with fewer dependents. The proportion of the population made up of young singles is three times that of the metropolitan area as a whole and there are twice as many young couples without children.
These are the sorts of people who on average are slimmer because they’re younger, who are of an age where appearance is enormously important, and who are well educated enough to know about nutrition and eschew fast food. They can afford to buy high quality fruit and vegetables and pay for gym memberships. Because they’re more affluent, they have fewer children on average and hence less need for a car.
They live in smaller dwellings so they can be near the CBD and take advantage of its enormous and unparalleled concentration of high-paying professional jobs, its matchless endowment of cultural attractions and its huge and diverse range of social and entertainment opportunities. There’s no other concentration of activity within the metropolitan area that comes even close to the richness of what the inner city offers.
Because they live at higher density, driving is too hard for many trips – roads are congested and parking costs range from expensive to impossible. So residents often walk or use public transport instead. That’s O.K., because they happen to live in that transit-rich, small and unique geographical area where every train line and tram line in the entire metropolitan area – the result of 130 years of construction and at least one spectacular land boom – converges.
So population density and access to public transport are not the underlying forces driving this group’s superior average BMI. Rather, it’s a combination of the small but highly specialised group who can afford to live there, on the one hand, and the special characteristics of the area, particularly the presence of the CBD, on the other.
It’s pie in the sky to imagine the sheer scale and complexity of the highly specialised attributes offered by the inner city could be replicated in the suburbs – much less the outer suburbs – within the foreseeable future. The inner city is focussed on the CBD and in almost every city in the world, the number of jobs in the city centre is an order of magnitude larger than any suburban centre (Atlanta is possibly the sole exception). In Australia, the centre offers the cream of corporate jobs.
The importance of proximity to the CBD in explaining the special character of the inner city is demonstrated by the fact walking’s share of work trips plummets from 13% in the inner city to just 2% immediately one locates in the adjacent inner suburbs. This share is only marginally better than the outer suburbs.
Will building at higher densities and providing better public transport in the outer suburbs significantly lower the incidence of obesity? Not likely. Even if all outer suburban dwellings were townhouses, the incentive to walk is much lower if there’s no CBD, cultural precinct, river, beach, historic buildings, hundreds of cafes, and hundreds of thousands of jobs to walk to. Perhaps most importantly, the outer suburbs don’t have the constraints on driving and parking that often make walking or public transport a superior alternative in the inner city. Read the rest of this entry »
Will redevelopment of Fishermans Bend really be ‘revolutionary’?
Posted: February 19, 2011 Filed under: Planning | Tags: affordability, density, Docklands, Fishermans Bend, growth area, Housing, Inner city, Jennifer Cunich, Matthew Guy, Property Council Australia, UCB, Urban Growth Boundary 13 Comments
The Age breathlessly headlines the Government’s proposals for the redevelopment of Fishermans Bend as Premier Ted Baillieu’s “inner city housing revolution”. Planning Minister Matthew Guy says the area will evolve as ”Australia’s first inner-city growth corridor”.
Whoa there! I think it might be time for a relaxing cup of tea and a lie down. Let’s put these claims in perspective.
According to Mr Guy, the area under consideration is 200 Ha. That’s quite a bit smaller than the 41,000 Ha expansion of the Urban Growth Boundary approved last year.
Mr Guy also says the area is going to be developed over a 20-30 year time frame. If its total capacity is the 10,000 to 15,000 dwellings estimated by the Chief Executive of the Property Council, Jennifer Cunich, that’s at most 750 additional dwellings per year on average, and as few as 333 per year.
Just to put that in context, 42,509 dwellings were approved in the metropolitan area in the 12 months ending on 30 September 2010. Ms Cunich is quoted as saying even that’s less than we need – she says there’s a shortfall of 6,000 homes per year across the State.
While the redevelopment of Fishermans Bend is important, the claim that it’s a ‘revolution’ is hyperbole.
Likewise, the Minister’s claim that Fishermans Bend will be a ‘growth area’ – a term usually used to refer to massive outer suburban release areas – is more than a trifle exaggerated. Consider that 17,000 new dwellings were approved in Melbourne’s (outer) Growth Area municipalities in the year ending September Qtr 2010.
The Minister’s claim that the project will focus on “more affordable” housing also seems ambitious. Read the rest of this entry »
Will networking make public transport the mode of choice?
Posted: February 1, 2011 Filed under: Employment, Public transport | Tags: auto, car, CBD, density, John Stone, network, Paul Mees, Public transport, road pricing, suburbs, traffic congestion 9 Comments
What's the biggest danger?
According to a report in The Age last month, new research published in the latest issue of Australian Planner shows that higher suburban densities are not a precondition for vastly better public transport. Reporter Andrew West says:
City dwellers have been presented with a false choice – live in apartments and enjoy good public transport or retain the house and land and rely on cars
The research by Dr John Stone and Dr Paul Mees contends that it is not necessary to intensify land-use across the whole city before significant improvement in both patronage and economic efficiency of public transport becomes possible.
They say the contribution made by urban consolidation “to recent public transport patronage growth is modest and makes little impact on the density of the whole urban region”. Most residents of Australian cities will continue to live in houses and suburban subdivisions that are already built so “alternatives to the car will need to be effective at existing urban residential densities”.
They argue instead for a ‘networked’ model of public transport. Improving the way existing public transport resources are managed – especially by providing higher frequencies and improving coordination between services and between modes – will yield significantly higher transit patronage in the suburbs without the need for broadbrush increases in density.
I’ve argued before that increasing residential density, by itself, will not necessarily increase public transport patronage significantly, much less shift travellers out of their cars in large numbers.
I’ve also argued that there are generally better gains to be had from using existing resources more efficiently rather than relying on strategies based around huge new infrastructure investments or massive land use changes.
And I think the idea of networking public transport is absolutely critical. By embracing transfers, networking provides faster travel paths to all parts of the metropolitan area than is possible by radial routing.
However it’s not obvious to me that ‘networked’ public transport, by itself, would have the sort of major impact on mode share in the suburbs implied by The Age’s report. I can see that it would make public transport much better for existing users and I’ve no doubt it would increase patronage, but I’m not persuaded that it would be enough to address the ‘false choice’ that The Age says Melburnites have been presented with. Read the rest of this entry »
What is the inner city?
Posted: November 28, 2010 Filed under: Planning | Tags: Brisbane, definition, density, Employment, history, Inner city, Jobs 7 Comments
We all use the term “inner city” but I doubt we’re all talking about the same geographical area.
For some people, the inner city means the area where cafe society thrives – probably a 10 km circle around the CBD in cities like Sydney and Melbourne. Or it might mean the extent of medium density historic terrace housing.
Some Brisbanites think of the inner city as the large area covered by the Brisbane City Council (1,367 km2) while some Melburnians think of it as the area serviced by tram lines.
Planners have addressed this problem by adopting simple measures. For example, in Melbourne the inner city is customarily defined as the area covered by the central municipalities of Melbourne, Yarra and Port Phillip (77 km2). Sometimes the Prahran portion (SLA) of the City of Stonnington is also included.
In my work on Melbourne I define the inner city as the area (79 km2) within a 5 km radius of the City Hall . This approximates closely to the three inner municipalities, but I use it because it’s consistent with what’s done elsewhere. US researchers typically use a 3 mile radius to define the inner city – an area approximating the size of the central Counties of the larger metros.
There are a number of problems with this sort of ‘administrative’ approach. A key one is that there is no underlying rationale for where the boundary is drawn – why not 2 km or 10 km? Another is that it doesn’t really connect with people because it has no obvious reference like, say, the tram network. Read the rest of this entry »
Do fringe dwellers want density?
Posted: November 11, 2010 Filed under: Growth Areas, Housing | Tags: density, Docklands, growth areas, Henley, Housing, mcmansion, Stockland, urban fringe 8 Comments
150 m2 house on 294 m2 lot at Craigieburn
The benefits of residential density are more complex than they appear. The attractions of living cheek by jowl in places like Surfers Paradise or the CBD may not apply everywhere, especially on the fringes of our major cities.
Almost everyone knows, it seems, that density has enormous benefits. It is correlated with lower levels of car ownership, fewer kilometres driven and higher public transport use. It lowers infrastructure costs and is also associated with lower consumption of energy and water. According to some, it’s even connected with higher levels of social capital and lower rates of obesity.
However most of the benefits – both private and social – do not derive from density per se but rather from location. Lots of people want to live in high amenity places like the beachfront or in proximity to the jobs, entertainment opportunities and transport infrastructure of somewhere like the city centre. These sorts of places are in short supply so demand can only be met by increasing density.
Higher density necessarily means less land per dwelling but it doesn’t inevitably mean smaller dwellings. However unless you’re filthy rich, one of the compromises you will have to make to capitalise on a sought-after location is a smaller dwelling. The 350 m2 McMansion on the fringe might at best be a 140 m2 three bedroom unit on the top of Doncaster Hill or an 80 m2 two bedroom unit in Docklands.
The point is that many of the social benefits associated with density – like higher public transport use and lower car ownership – are a function of the location, not the dwelling type. In turn, lower energy and water use is not primarily a direct function of density but rather a result of their smaller size.
This might seem self-evident or even a distinction of no more than academic interest. But as I’ve argued before, the failure to fully understand what density is, can lead to bad policy. It is also a particularly pertinent point in the context of advocating higher densities in places like fringe Growth Areas.
Is Qantas shirking its corporate responsibilities?
Posted: November 8, 2010 Filed under: Airports & aviation, Public transport | Tags: Airbus A380, Boeing 747, Channel Nine, density, Exxon Valdez, fuel dumping, Gulf of Mexico, Moscow, Qantas Leave a comment
Socialist city - Moscow's density increases the further you get from the centre!!!
There’re a couple of letters in today’s issue of The Age (8/11/2010) related to Qantas’s A380 problems that I think illustrate a tendency to over-egg the corporate responsibility pudding.
A Peter Tregear of Brunswick is surprised that on a recent flight from Hobart to Melbourne, Qantas’s in-flight news service did not cover the serious engine trouble the airline was having at the time with the A380 Airbus.
He wonders if the news provider, Channel Nine, came under pressure from Qantas to excise the story or whether it was self-censorship by the network. Either way, he concludes, it’s not a great moment for either journalism or corporate honesty. He asks if Qantas has something to hide.
I would say the last thing some passengers want to hear about while they’re mid-flight is the vulnerability of flying. A flight from Hobart is likely to have more occasional flyers who might have some fear of flying than (say) flights on the Sydney-Melbourne routes that have many frequent business travellers.
This story dominated the terrestrial news so I don’t think passengers wouldn’t have known about Qantas’s problems before they boarded. And the in-flight news is invariably so out of date so it would be hard to argue passengers were being denied ‘new’ information. Read the rest of this entry »
Can public transport “solve” the obesity epidemic?
Posted: October 14, 2010 Filed under: Education, justice, health, Planning | Tags: AFR, Bailleau, Charlotte, Deirdre Macken, density, John MacDonald, obesity, transit 7 Comments
My entry in Ted Baillieu's (proposed) competition. Flinders St Station - originally planned Swanston St elevation
A new US study has found that there is a significant association between public transport use and reductions in Body Mass Index over time.
This study has excited a lot of attention because it used a before-and-after “natural experiment” (see here, here, and here).
The researchers did an initial “before” telephone survey of residents living within one mile of a proposed new light rail line in Charlotte NC. They followed up with an “after” telephone survey 6-8 months after the new line opened.
There are some major methodological limitations with the study. Respondents self-reported their weight. The initial sample of 839 fell to 498 respondents in the follow-up phase. Only 26 respondents used the new line to commute on a daily basis.
Nevertheless, I have no difficulty with the proposition that those who choose to commute by transit are likely to be thinner than those who choose to drive to work. After all, transit requires the expenditure of more calories on walking and standing than driving does.
But in my view, the key issue is to what extent better health outcomes – and in this context specifically weight reduction – should shape transport policy. In order to look at that issue it is essential to understand what’s driving the “obesity epidemic” in Australia. Read the rest of this entry »
How dense are Melbourne’s outer suburbs?
Posted: July 12, 2010 Filed under: Growth Areas | Tags: density, growth areas, Kenneth Davidson, Melton, The Age, Toolern 4 CommentsKenneth Davidson claimed in The Age yesterday that Melbourne has 15 years’ supply of outer suburban land zoned for urban development at the world’s lowest residential densities of 12.5 to 15 houses per hectare.
Lowest in the world? I think that’s possibly a little harsh when Melbourne is compared with the outer suburbs of US cities. However what I’m really interested in looking at is what Melbourne’s supposed “lowest residential densities” actually look like. What does 15 dwellings per hectare mean on the ground?
An ideal case study is the new mixed use development planned for Toolern, near Melton. According to the Precinct Structure Plan, when fully developed it is expected to cover 24 sq km, house an estimated 55,000 residents and host businesses that provide 28,000 jobs.
This is an enormous project, covering an area around a fifth larger than the entire inner city municipality of Yarra. It is equivalent in area to a 2.8-kilometre radius circle – if the centre were Melbourne Town Hall, it would extend to Richmond Station in the east, Alexandra Parade in the north, Bolte Bridge in the west and Albert Park in the south.
The minimum average density set down for Toolern is 15 dwellings (per net developable hectare), the same as the target minimum for the growth areas set out in Melbourne @ 5 Million and its predecessor, Melbourne 2030. Read the rest of this entry »
London in the time of cholera
Posted: June 24, 2010 Filed under: Education, justice, health, Infrastructure | Tags: cholera, density, health, John Snow, London, Mathew Kneale, Steven Johnson, Sweet Thames, The Ghost Map 2 CommentsI’ve just read The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson. This extraordinary book, which nominally chronicles the campaign of physician Dr John Snow to persuade Victorian England that cholera was caused by contaminated water rather than noxious odours, also takes the reader on long and fascinating asides into topics like how living at density selected for alcohol-tolerant genes.
Deaths from cholera, Victorian London
As this article points out, large cities in all parts of the world used to be very dangerous places where the very proximity of humans directly led to disease and death.
I already knew the basics of John Snow’s battle with the established order and his famous map of Broad Street from TV programs and the odd book, like Mathew Kneale’s excellent novel about a Victorian hydraulic engineer, Sweet Thames.
But the particular value of Stevenson’s take on London’s cholera epidemic is the attention it gives to the broader circumstances of the times and the way he burrows deeply into the underlying social, medical and technological issues.
He talks, for example, about how humans living at close quarters historically addressed their vulnerability to polluted water by drinking alcohol instead (notwithstanding it is itself poisonous and addictive). Nothing new about that perhaps, but what is interesting is how the desire to live at higher density gradually selected for genes that could tolerate alcohol: Read the rest of this entry »
Is a bigger Melbourne a better Melbourne?
Posted: June 23, 2010 Filed under: Planning, Population | Tags: Andrew Mcleod, city size, Committee for Melbourne, density, Los Angeles, Manhattan, New York, Shaping Melbourne 6 CommentsThe CEO of the Committee for Melbourne, Andrew Mcleod, advanced an interesting argument about the importance of growth when launching the Committee’s new report, Melbourne Beyond 5 Million, earlier this month.
He contended that Melbourne can get better as it gets bigger. His main argument is that Melbourne in 2010, with 4 million people, is double the size it was in 1960 and is, he says, unambiguously more liveable.
Big city - East Village, Manhattan
So is bigger better? I don’t think I have a definitive answer and I’m not even sure there is one, but I think it’s useful in light of the high population growth projected for Melbourne to canvass some of the issues.
The fear many people have is that a bigger Melbourne will mean housing is less affordable and roads and public transport more congested. Some people also think it would be less safe, less equal and have a much larger per capita ecological footprint.
But there are advantages in getting bigger. Larger cities are usually denser and have a lower ecological footprint than smaller cities. There is also an extensive literature showing that the productivity of cities increases with population.
There are different opinions on the underlying reasons but many observers, like Harvard’s Professor Edward Glaeser, think that big cities enable people to connect and learn from one another. They tend to be more diverse and offer greater specialisation in work, consumption, socialising and ideas.
There are more than thirty cities in the OECD countries alone that have a larger population than Melbourne. They must be doing something right if people want to live in them. For all the complaints made about Los Angeles, many more people seem to want to live there than in Melbourne. Many talented Australians aspire to move to LA to work in specialised industries like entertainment, higher education and technology. Read the rest of this entry »
Why do inner city residents walk and tram to work?
Posted: June 3, 2010 Filed under: Planning, Public transport | Tags: CBD, Cycling, density, Inner city, new urbanism, Orenco, Public transport, socioeconomic status, sustainable transport, symbolic analyst, traffic congestion, walkability 4 CommentsMore than half of all trips to work by residents of the inner city are made by walking, cycling or public transport. In fact three quarters as many residents walk and cycle as use public transport for their commute.
Why? Is it because of the higher density of the inner city?
Inner city Melbourne (photo by ExTester)
The view that density predicts more sustainable transport use is a common one. While it has some role, it is not the key force at play here. In fact there’s evidence that the population density of some parts of the inner city is not that much higher than that of the suburbs – this is because the average size of households in the inner city is relatively small compared to suburban locations.
There are also examples of higher density developments where use of public transport is quite low, for example edge cities in the US and suburban New Urbanism developments like Orenco in Portland, Oregon.
So if density isn’t the primary force driving more sustainable transport use in the inner city, what is?
Here are four plausible explanations.
The first is proximity. Inner city residents live cheek by jowl with the largest concentration of jobs in the metropolitan area – the inner city has 28% of all metropolitan Melbourne’s jobs and the CBD, despite its diminutive geographical size, has 14.5%. There is no other location in Melbourne that comes within cooee of the job density of the CBD. Read the rest of this entry »
Are all suburban centres the same?
Posted: April 20, 2010 Filed under: Activity centres, Employment | Tags: Activity centres, density, industries, location quotient, specialisation index, suburbs 2 CommentsLast week I looked at the geography of suburban jobs in Melbourne (Where are the suburban jobs?), finding there are 31 centres that account for just 20% of all suburban jobs. There is a large variation in the size of centres, with the largest four – Clayton, Tullamarine, Kew/Hawthorn and Box Hill – accounting for nearly half of the jobs in these centres.
Today I want to look at the economic functions of suburban centres, as indicated by their industry composition. If a centre is specialised by industry compared to jobs in the rest of the suburbs, it suggests it has a distinct economic role. It could also mean that the benefits of agglomeration may not be especially important.
Specialisation Index scores for suburban centres. 13 centres score 0.3 or higher. Dotted line shows score for suburban jobs located outside centres (click to enlarge)
Actually it’s a little more complex than that – specialisation implies that being in a large, diverse centre is not that important, but being spatially close to firms in the same or a related sector is. In other words, firms seek to minimise the costs of density by locating just with “their own kind” and avoid the overhead of firms from whom they obtain little benefit.
The data shows that the economic functions of suburban centres are many and varied and differ markedly from the 80% of suburban jobs that are not located in centres. Some centres are dominated by a single industry and accordingly have a distinct “personality”. There are thirteen such centres, mostly focussed on Retail or Manufacturing, although Latrobe is concentrated in Education and Heidelberg in Health.
Yet that only tells part of the story. With only one exception, all centres have a specialisation in at least one of 17 industries and some are specialised in multiple industries. For example, although Box Hill is not dominated by a single industry like Latrobe is, it nevertheless has specialisations in Health and Government (defined as having at least twice the share of jobs in each of these two industries as jobs located outside centres do). Health accounts for 27% of jobs in Box Hill and Government for 17% – the respective figures for suburban jobs outside of centres are just 11% and 4%.
Some centres like Burwood East, Sunshine and Broadmeadows are specialised in three industries. The only truly “diversified” centre is Kew/Hawthorne, whose sectoral composition is reasonably similar to that of the rest of the suburbs in all industries (note that larger centres tend to have fewer specialisations because there is less variability). Read the rest of this entry »
More myths about Melbourne’s density
Posted: April 15, 2010 Filed under: Planning, Population | Tags: ABS, density, Melbourne, population growth, Suburban sprawl, Sydney 1 CommentThe Australian Financial Review ran an article on the weekend by Deirdre Macken that perpetuates the myth that Melbourne and Sydney are archetypal sprawled cities (Shifting sands of suburbia – gated unfortunately). The article claims that Melbourne’s population density is 520 persons per km2 and Sydney’s is 370 persons per km2. Melbourne denser than Sydney? That should have set off a few bells.
The problem is the journalist used population figures from a new Australian Bureau of Statistics publication, Regional population growth, Australia, 2008-09, released on 30 March 2010. Rather than use the urbanised or developed part of the metropolitan area to calculate population density, the ABS uses the Melbourne Statistical Division (MSD) as the boundary. This is a patently unsuitable definition for this purpose because it includes some very large undeveloped areas. As I’ve noted before, the MSD boundary extends to Warburton in the east!
How big is Melbourne?
Posted: March 26, 2010 Filed under: Planning | Tags: agglomeration economies, city size, density, Justin Madden, London, Melton, new towns, Planning, Suburban sprawl, The Age, urban boundary 11 CommentsHow big is Melbourne really? This issue is ‘front of mind’ this morning because of a recent claim in The Age that Melbourne “is already the eighth largest city in the world in geographical size, stretching about 100 km from east to west”.
This is a common view. In June last year The Age’s editorialist said “Melbourne’s population of 4 million already sprawls across roughly 100 kilometres in all directions, occupying a bigger area than much more populous cities such as London or New York”. Read the rest of this entry »
If all of the USA (and Australia) were at the density of Brooklyn
Posted: March 14, 2010 Filed under: Planning | Tags: Australia, Brooklyn, density, infographic, Melbourne, New Hampshire, one-big-neighbourhood, Population, USA Leave a commentIf the entire population of the USA were housed at the same density as Brooklyn, it would all fit in New Hampshire with space left over! See more on this infographic here. I calculate that the entire population of Australia could be accommodated at the same density as Brooklyn within a radius of about 25Km from the centre of Melbourne – the boundary in the south east, for example, would be around the intersection of the Monash Freeway and the East Link freeway. That would leave a lot of space left over! Read the rest of this entry »
The Melbourne Urbanist 