Why did Melbourne 2030 fail?
Posted: November 22, 2010 Filed under: Planning | Tags: Brownfields, Challenge Melbourne, Decentralisation, empty nesters, growth areas, Infrastructure, Melbourne 2030, Oliver Hulme, peri-urban 6 Comments
(click) Heaps of parking in central Paris in 1976!
The Age editorialises (21/11/10) that Melbourne 2030 is effectively dead and I agree. The latest nail in the coffin in The Age’s opinion is the apparently burgeoning growth of housing in townships and hamlets located in the peri urban area outside the Urban Growth Boundary (UGB).
I’ve argued before that this sort of “decentralisation” is poor policy (e.g. here and here). But I also think The Age has tended to ‘catastrophise’ the scale of the problem, especially with its highly misleading contention that Melbourne has “sprawled 50% beyond the official growth boundary, spanning 150 kilometres from east to west”.
However what interests me at the moment is why Melbourne 2030 failed. The key reason in my view is that it blithely assumed that enough affordable dwellings – mostly town houses and apartments – could be provided within the established urban areas to avoid the need for the UGB to be extended.
This objective was never realistic for a number of reasons. Read the rest of this entry »
Is suburban sprawl a threat to farming?
Posted: July 15, 2010 Filed under: Growth Areas, Miscellaneous | Tags: agriculture, Australian Collaborative Land Use Mapping Program, Australian Natural Resources Atlas, farming, food miles, Green Wedges, peri-urban, Peter Houston, Urban Growth Boundary 3 CommentsOne of the oldest processes in urban development is the conversion of peripheral land from farming to residential use. The standard argument is highest and best use: housing gives a bigger pay-off than farming. It’s the same basic logic underlying why natural bushland is cleared for agricultural use.
On Monday I looked at the idea of “food kilometres” but today I want to look at whether productive agricultural land should be converted to urban use.
Straight up, the evidence suggests urban development doesn’t pose much threat at all. The productivity of agriculture in Australia has increased 2.8% p.a. over the last 20 years, double the rate at which the wider market economy has grown.
Moreover, the Australian Natural Resources Atlas shows that the area of land used nationally for urban development amounts to just 0.5% of the area of land used for agriculture. Another estimate by the Australian Collaborative Land Use Mapping Program puts the ratio of urban land to agricultural land at 2.8%.
A more detailed study by Peter Houston published in 2005 found that agricultural land on Melbourne’s urban periphery comprised a little less than 6% of the total land base used for agriculture in Victoria. Melbourne seems to be an exception – the average figure for peri-urban areas across all mainland States is a mere 1%. Read the rest of this entry »
The Melbourne Urbanist 