I think you're far too conservative. Instead of "sustainably" expanding existing cities we should just go out and build new cities. Australia has a fuck tonne of coastal available.
Step 1 - find a coastal region that can accommodate a large deep sea port.
Step 2 - Commission a large port. Build some roads connecting into existing highways.
Step 3 - Turn the place into an SEZ. Firms will get special tax incentives to move there. Focus first on getting anchor employers and export industries instead of some utopian idea of public amenities. Relax some migration rules for the city. Instead of giving it some cringe low density Anglo Saxon zoning laws, we have Japan style zoning laws.
Step 4 - Rinse repeat every 10 years or so. We can even name the city after the PM who permitted it to give them an ego boost. We also re-ignite the pioneer spirit of Australia without the genocide.
It seems wild to me that Australia has a housing crisis when it has so much prime land available for development. Grow some balls for fucks sake.
I totally agree and would love to see some big bold moves to make new cities a reality. I see a lot of people saying this these days for all the reasons you state - love the idea of reigniting the pioneer spirit (without the genocide) haha.
I don't know if you caught this article, but I actually get into it a bit about why the advent of the knowledge economy has basically completely negated that magnetic power and value of our endless frontier of free / cheap land over a couple of short decades.
The reasons I don't spend much energy talking about building new cities is I think people underestimate just how hard it is to get a brand new city off the ground. Not impossible - but very hard.
If you think about why cities get started in the first place, it is often because they had some fundamental purpose that drove people to locate there organically - often things like mining, trade, agriculture, logging etc. Without that you get into a lot of chicken v egg circling of the drain - like are tax incentives enough to drive employers to move somewhere, when there are no people living there to work for them?
So failing something organically driving people to locate there, that thing needs to be provided and it needs to be provided in a massive, consistently sustained way for decades - and even then there's no guarantee it would work - no small feat.
Take Canberra as an example - if you suddenly moved all of the federal government jobs out of that city, how long would it take before it became a city in decline? Not long I reckon.
This is why I tend to err on the side of better ways of growing of existing cities - it's a much less ambitious undertaking.
All that said - I really like all of your ideas to drive growth to that new city and would totally support such a project.
I look at the article later today. But if you look at your Asian neighbours they have built dozen of new cities (even the ones that aren't dictatorships). You definitely need tax breaks especially for the first generation of large employers for them to move in. Cities are primarily labour markets.
Another possible anchor institution can be a university. Monash is like the largest university in the Southern hemisphere. Why not make a deal that they can admit more international students if they move to the new city over ten years.
I also think work from home could be a new way to make this work. Maybe if the government passed some kind of federal "right to work from home" legislation, we'd no longer be shackled to our 5 major cities and would basically make it possible to live / work from anywhere in the country. This could solve the issue of getting a broad range of major employers to open up new offices.
If a job can be fully remote it would just get outsourced to a different country over time. For the jobs that stay in Australia it would be as hybrid work. Satellite cities would be the prime beneficiaries of hybrid work.
Ahmed, you have hit the nail squarely on the head. It's so much easier to allow piddly-diddly developers to tack on a residential area on the margin and assume that every resident family can acquire all the cars that they need to get to all the places that they need to get to, beyond the ever expanding horizon. What it boils down to is gutless governments and bureaucrats. Eventually the externalities that impact the lemmings driving all those cars catches up with us. Productivity per human being evaporates.
What is needed is a new city based on mixed use, in other words abandon zoning. Enable people to live where they work. Foster the pioneering entrepreneurial spirit. Let children walk to school and enjoy the opportunity to find mentors and see work going on, and participate in it as they have time, locally. Local is a good word. Play in the street again.
Developers currently work within a framework that is constrained by the limited vision of those that draw lines on maps in the tiny spaces that they can get to control, according to a regulatory framework that is the product of the tiny bureaucratic mind.
Meanwhile, Australian governments are preoccupied with the absurdity of 'net zero'.
There is a lesson in what the Chinese have been able to accomplish. Don't assume that its a command economy. Its not. Locals, the guys that we would call Mayors are appointed by the central government on the basis of demonstrated competence in generating employment and raising living standards. Its the Chinese civil service that has been managed this way for thousands of years. Their first job is in a rural village and they work up from there.
Let us imagine that net zero was actually a good idea and we instituted a rule that private vehicles can henceforth travel no more than 30km per week. Let's take it a step further and imagine how a city might have to be reconfigured to enable all private vehicles to be scrapped. It would be necessary to scrap existing cities and start afresh. Imagine everyone walking to work, school, shops, medical centre and so on. Increasing face to face interactions. Mobilizing communities that ideally are self governing. Facilitate more decentralized decision making.
Unfortunately its not the Anglo-Saxon way. We are governed by people who go to the right schools, a de-facto hereditary aristocracy.
I mean zoning isn't inherit to Anglo Saxon culture. Before the mid 20th century we didn't have all these regulations for construction. In Australia we even had a land value tax at the federal level before Menzies got rid of it. We just need to go back to our free market roots.
Ahmed, you have the right instincts, and a fund of common sense. I wish I could say that about urban planners and politicians.
There is no shortage of regional towns that could, with the proper support, demonstrate what is possible. However, they are dictated to by the state government bureaucracy.
I am wrong about the extent of dictation from the state being responsible for the inflexibility of the planning system. Its the central bureaucracy that has to promote the development of new centres and they are not doing it. When it comes to the development of existing small towns the existing town plan, and the hidebound thinking of local councillors and the local planning staff who tend to be reactive rather than imaginative, that is the problem. In WA the town plan is supposed to be revised to cater for changing circumstances and needs, every five years. Unfortunately, the locals rarely see the need for change and dig their heels in. The wording gets changed but the essence remains. New restrictions will be invented keeping the staff busy as they deal with complaints from ratepayers. The NIMBY element gets it's way. In this way its the incumbent residents and planners that prevail. Those who can not get established under the existing regime are unheard and are forced to go live somewhere else.
Its a tough one because it goes against so many sacred cows in our society. If it works, it is bloodly brilliant. If it fails there are public executions of public figures expected to happen at noon on a given day. I recall a lecturer at Uni saying the cows in Albury Wodonga graze on the most expensive paddocks in Australia given the forward infrastructure (water and sewerage trunk infrastructure pipes) put into the ground below their present day hoofs in the 1970's to accommodate future population of this nominated growth area.
I am not against the idea, but it requires a complete rethink about how we "do" urban / metropolitan development. We have adopted the laissez-faire model with resulting multiple development fronts and all the while the responsible level of government or government agency is playing catch up to the most squeaky wheel.
I just don't see the political will and business support to bring about the necessary changes, unless we Australians all suddenly turn revolutionaries and I can't see that happening.
While slightly off topic, it does go part of the way towards what you are speaking of here - the difference between Leadership and Management - I saw a brilliant video on YouTube yesterday that was one of the most wide ranging talk on this subject matter and it was IMHO food for thought about how we can implement change in any area (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzoIAJYPQwo).
Yes I've recently realised that most of my articles are kind of futile in that they are based on what we could do if we had an entirely different set of political values (and different degree of political will as a result).
I will check out this video it sounds right up my alley and I think moving our way of doing things from a managerial to a leadership mindset is at the root of so many of our problems!
There is a huge housing shortage in the UK (as there is pretty much everywhere) and new towns and neighbourhoods are popping up all over the place. But many of them seem to be making the mistake of focusing first on the housing and then moving onto community and transit infrastructure. I
do some comms work for a master planning and urban design company here in London and one of the key pillars to a successful new town, from their (and also my!) perspective is transit links. Build the bus routes, train lines, cycle paths first, and then the housing can expand based on the routes so that everyone has easy access to them. It makes so much sense when you think about it for 3 seconds, but when the issue of housing is such a priority, it seems like the bigger picture gets blurred out.
Anyway, this newsletter was great and is relevant not just in Australia but pretty much everywhere. Xx
My Dad LIVED that Very Fast Train episode of Utopia. He’s a management consultant bought into to do the feasibility study on a freight line between Melbourne and Brisbane. It’s a damned no-brainer. They had half a dozen feasibility studies done already since the 1970s and it’s just been shelved. It’s the kind of thing where the business case was not the problem here. Dad and his colleagues would come and check their offices for bugs because the number of conversations in that episode that went exactly like the script had them wondering if they’d been bugged or hacked. And we still don’t have a damned freight line.
Not sure why this article appeared in my feed today. I don’t know anything about how comprehensive planning works in Australia but in US cities these plans required for all cities and seek to accomplish a lot of what you are advocating for. There can be ways to build out some infrastructure incrementally without too much redundancy. My favorite local (Milwaukee) example is our riverwalk system for which a plan was in place in the mid-1980s as deindustrialization and abandonment of the largely industrial riverfront areas was still in full swing. The plan and accompanying zoning overlay required that any new construction accommodate a riverwalk and public access along the rivers edge. A funding mechanism was established whereby the city paid off 70% of the costs of the riverwalk and dockwall repairs (about $3500/meter). Other funding mechanisms included use of tax incremental and business improvement district financing and grants. The city did proactively build some key initial segments but the majority was built as development occurred over 40 years and thousands of units of housing were constructed. The plan was farsighted in including 30 docking locations for a private water taxi system that is still not economically viable but someday will be as plans for public access along another 20 miles of waterfront in the harbor and former industrial areas south of downtown are built out.
I would like to think that such comprehensive plans exist for most US cities but the reality is that few do, fewer get implemented and almost none are regional plans essential to transportation and infrastructure development. The waterfront Milwaukee plan sounds interesting — its not the sort of thing that really happens in most US cities.
Thanks David we have similar arrangements here usually when it is a govt owned asset and they are seeking an outcome that they don’t want to (fully) pay for.
In California they raised 800 million usd for a new city to be built in what was essentially pointless farmland. It was defeated by the locals and their "orderly growth" policy where you can't convert farmland to urban land. This is why California is losing population
Great article and makes several relevant points. I have been thinking that society should not expect public transport, for at least in the short to medium term, have to show a return on investment. It is for the greater good of society and should be considered an essential service to a city.
Hard agree on this one. Far too often our infrastructure spend is a reactive case of the proverbial squeaky wheel, rather than a proactive investment in a vision for development.
I’d also argue that this is influenced heavily by the duration of the political cycle, and self-interested politicians not wanting to wear the cost of an immediate deficit for a future government to reap the benefits of.
However, I think you hit the nail on the head towards the end by highlighting that the real crux of the problem is that the profit motive incentivises this behaviour - when the only reason you develop land is because you can make money, you’ll always seek the lowest investment for the highest margin.
Personally, I’d argue that a market-led development strategy is fundamentally incapable of the kind of development you advocate, and therefore it is the role of government to either invest in the public infrastructure through direct builds or, if you happen to be a feeble government, by creating the adequate incentives and disincentives that will facilitate private investment in these projects.
Totally agree and I see this happening every day in my career. The point where the private sector becomes ineffective in delivering good outcomes is when you jump from the scale of a single project to a larger precinct (where it is not being handled by a master developer with a decades long delivery pipeline).
We start with a precinct and an amazing vision for things like shared public space, public transport, shared parking, affordable housing - with precious little detail on the delivery model. Then when it comes time to build the thing, nobody has anywhere near the capital to put skin in the game and build these elements in first. They they inevitably carve the precinct up into tiny sites for sale and ask each developer to provide their own amenities, parking, "affordable" housing etc - totally defeating the purpose and benefit of acting at the precinct scale in the first place!
Also agree that the govt needs to either front-load that investment in enabling infrastructure as I describe, or alternatively get involved in some kind of PPP in the early stages so that the delivery model can actually factor in some public support for these projects.
Whoever does it, they need to have a massive cash pile to draw upon right from the outset to front load that investment.
Sorry for the late reply on this one but as usual we’re in fierce agreement. Incredibly well said, and I think what I take away from this is that we should make you Planning Tsar for life. All Hail Flanopolis.
I’ve been shouting this into the void for at least 30 years. I’m in the area of SW Sydney experiencing rapid growth with the bare minimum of infrastructure to go with it. The train lines could have already been built. But not only is the struggle against apathetic politics it’s against the NIMBYs as well unfortunately.
Too some extent this is what happened with the North West metro in Sydney. They built it right out to Tallawong which was green fields then they fill it in later as they are now doing.
I was surprised you did not discuss discount rates in this article. Given our standard policy prescriptions, cost benefit analysis discounts by 7% per year. This means that benefits 40 years from now are weighted at about 16th the rate of current benefits.
Yup - the train and public transit discussion reminds me of the iconic picture of the 7 train (IRT flushing line) in NYC when it was built - there was literally nothing around it and now everything around it is built up.
You make too much sense, which sadly in Australia won't get you very far!
A lot boils down to, as you mentioned, the short-sightedness of our "leaders". I recently learned MPs like to ridicule and tease idealist members with the word "oncer", as if this is the most terrible fate in the world. Only if you're a raging narcissist with a fragile ego...
But we're in a new era now where most people under 40 just DGAF if they change jobs/careers regularly. I'd love to see just ONE leader go out with a blaze of glory by advocating for a future like this. The real thinkers and go-getters left plugging away in this country will really get behind them regardless of if they get re-elected.
Courageous leaders who buck the trend are seen through history but that fact seems to be lost on most Australians.
BTW I had one thought when reading....Avalon in VIC seems to slightly fit into this philosophy. Avalon airport is expanding, Bay West will become a major port, Wyndham and Geelong are working together to help develop industrial and commercial sites around the area and protect existing green space while limiting residential sprawl (for now). Could this be the model for a new city as it grows over the next 20 years or so?
I think you're far too conservative. Instead of "sustainably" expanding existing cities we should just go out and build new cities. Australia has a fuck tonne of coastal available.
Step 1 - find a coastal region that can accommodate a large deep sea port.
Step 2 - Commission a large port. Build some roads connecting into existing highways.
Step 3 - Turn the place into an SEZ. Firms will get special tax incentives to move there. Focus first on getting anchor employers and export industries instead of some utopian idea of public amenities. Relax some migration rules for the city. Instead of giving it some cringe low density Anglo Saxon zoning laws, we have Japan style zoning laws.
Step 4 - Rinse repeat every 10 years or so. We can even name the city after the PM who permitted it to give them an ego boost. We also re-ignite the pioneer spirit of Australia without the genocide.
It seems wild to me that Australia has a housing crisis when it has so much prime land available for development. Grow some balls for fucks sake.
I totally agree and would love to see some big bold moves to make new cities a reality. I see a lot of people saying this these days for all the reasons you state - love the idea of reigniting the pioneer spirit (without the genocide) haha.
I don't know if you caught this article, but I actually get into it a bit about why the advent of the knowledge economy has basically completely negated that magnetic power and value of our endless frontier of free / cheap land over a couple of short decades.
https://theemergentcity.substack.com/p/from-convicts-to-the-castle-how-real
The reasons I don't spend much energy talking about building new cities is I think people underestimate just how hard it is to get a brand new city off the ground. Not impossible - but very hard.
If you think about why cities get started in the first place, it is often because they had some fundamental purpose that drove people to locate there organically - often things like mining, trade, agriculture, logging etc. Without that you get into a lot of chicken v egg circling of the drain - like are tax incentives enough to drive employers to move somewhere, when there are no people living there to work for them?
So failing something organically driving people to locate there, that thing needs to be provided and it needs to be provided in a massive, consistently sustained way for decades - and even then there's no guarantee it would work - no small feat.
Take Canberra as an example - if you suddenly moved all of the federal government jobs out of that city, how long would it take before it became a city in decline? Not long I reckon.
This is why I tend to err on the side of better ways of growing of existing cities - it's a much less ambitious undertaking.
All that said - I really like all of your ideas to drive growth to that new city and would totally support such a project.
I look at the article later today. But if you look at your Asian neighbours they have built dozen of new cities (even the ones that aren't dictatorships). You definitely need tax breaks especially for the first generation of large employers for them to move in. Cities are primarily labour markets.
Another possible anchor institution can be a university. Monash is like the largest university in the Southern hemisphere. Why not make a deal that they can admit more international students if they move to the new city over ten years.
I also think work from home could be a new way to make this work. Maybe if the government passed some kind of federal "right to work from home" legislation, we'd no longer be shackled to our 5 major cities and would basically make it possible to live / work from anywhere in the country. This could solve the issue of getting a broad range of major employers to open up new offices.
If a job can be fully remote it would just get outsourced to a different country over time. For the jobs that stay in Australia it would be as hybrid work. Satellite cities would be the prime beneficiaries of hybrid work.
What if you build houses for the people that are struggling to afford rent and the ones who are currently living in tents?
Ahmed, you have hit the nail squarely on the head. It's so much easier to allow piddly-diddly developers to tack on a residential area on the margin and assume that every resident family can acquire all the cars that they need to get to all the places that they need to get to, beyond the ever expanding horizon. What it boils down to is gutless governments and bureaucrats. Eventually the externalities that impact the lemmings driving all those cars catches up with us. Productivity per human being evaporates.
What is needed is a new city based on mixed use, in other words abandon zoning. Enable people to live where they work. Foster the pioneering entrepreneurial spirit. Let children walk to school and enjoy the opportunity to find mentors and see work going on, and participate in it as they have time, locally. Local is a good word. Play in the street again.
Developers currently work within a framework that is constrained by the limited vision of those that draw lines on maps in the tiny spaces that they can get to control, according to a regulatory framework that is the product of the tiny bureaucratic mind.
Meanwhile, Australian governments are preoccupied with the absurdity of 'net zero'.
There is a lesson in what the Chinese have been able to accomplish. Don't assume that its a command economy. Its not. Locals, the guys that we would call Mayors are appointed by the central government on the basis of demonstrated competence in generating employment and raising living standards. Its the Chinese civil service that has been managed this way for thousands of years. Their first job is in a rural village and they work up from there.
Let us imagine that net zero was actually a good idea and we instituted a rule that private vehicles can henceforth travel no more than 30km per week. Let's take it a step further and imagine how a city might have to be reconfigured to enable all private vehicles to be scrapped. It would be necessary to scrap existing cities and start afresh. Imagine everyone walking to work, school, shops, medical centre and so on. Increasing face to face interactions. Mobilizing communities that ideally are self governing. Facilitate more decentralized decision making.
Unfortunately its not the Anglo-Saxon way. We are governed by people who go to the right schools, a de-facto hereditary aristocracy.
I mean zoning isn't inherit to Anglo Saxon culture. Before the mid 20th century we didn't have all these regulations for construction. In Australia we even had a land value tax at the federal level before Menzies got rid of it. We just need to go back to our free market roots.
Ahmed, you have the right instincts, and a fund of common sense. I wish I could say that about urban planners and politicians.
There is no shortage of regional towns that could, with the proper support, demonstrate what is possible. However, they are dictated to by the state government bureaucracy.
I am wrong about the extent of dictation from the state being responsible for the inflexibility of the planning system. Its the central bureaucracy that has to promote the development of new centres and they are not doing it. When it comes to the development of existing small towns the existing town plan, and the hidebound thinking of local councillors and the local planning staff who tend to be reactive rather than imaginative, that is the problem. In WA the town plan is supposed to be revised to cater for changing circumstances and needs, every five years. Unfortunately, the locals rarely see the need for change and dig their heels in. The wording gets changed but the essence remains. New restrictions will be invented keeping the staff busy as they deal with complaints from ratepayers. The NIMBY element gets it's way. In this way its the incumbent residents and planners that prevail. Those who can not get established under the existing regime are unheard and are forced to go live somewhere else.
Its a tough one because it goes against so many sacred cows in our society. If it works, it is bloodly brilliant. If it fails there are public executions of public figures expected to happen at noon on a given day. I recall a lecturer at Uni saying the cows in Albury Wodonga graze on the most expensive paddocks in Australia given the forward infrastructure (water and sewerage trunk infrastructure pipes) put into the ground below their present day hoofs in the 1970's to accommodate future population of this nominated growth area.
I am not against the idea, but it requires a complete rethink about how we "do" urban / metropolitan development. We have adopted the laissez-faire model with resulting multiple development fronts and all the while the responsible level of government or government agency is playing catch up to the most squeaky wheel.
I just don't see the political will and business support to bring about the necessary changes, unless we Australians all suddenly turn revolutionaries and I can't see that happening.
While slightly off topic, it does go part of the way towards what you are speaking of here - the difference between Leadership and Management - I saw a brilliant video on YouTube yesterday that was one of the most wide ranging talk on this subject matter and it was IMHO food for thought about how we can implement change in any area (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzoIAJYPQwo).
Yes I've recently realised that most of my articles are kind of futile in that they are based on what we could do if we had an entirely different set of political values (and different degree of political will as a result).
I will check out this video it sounds right up my alley and I think moving our way of doing things from a managerial to a leadership mindset is at the root of so many of our problems!
There is a huge housing shortage in the UK (as there is pretty much everywhere) and new towns and neighbourhoods are popping up all over the place. But many of them seem to be making the mistake of focusing first on the housing and then moving onto community and transit infrastructure. I
do some comms work for a master planning and urban design company here in London and one of the key pillars to a successful new town, from their (and also my!) perspective is transit links. Build the bus routes, train lines, cycle paths first, and then the housing can expand based on the routes so that everyone has easy access to them. It makes so much sense when you think about it for 3 seconds, but when the issue of housing is such a priority, it seems like the bigger picture gets blurred out.
Anyway, this newsletter was great and is relevant not just in Australia but pretty much everywhere. Xx
Thanks Annabel!
My Dad LIVED that Very Fast Train episode of Utopia. He’s a management consultant bought into to do the feasibility study on a freight line between Melbourne and Brisbane. It’s a damned no-brainer. They had half a dozen feasibility studies done already since the 1970s and it’s just been shelved. It’s the kind of thing where the business case was not the problem here. Dad and his colleagues would come and check their offices for bugs because the number of conversations in that episode that went exactly like the script had them wondering if they’d been bugged or hacked. And we still don’t have a damned freight line.
🤣🤣🤣 hope he’s ok
He survived just fine. But he’s getting ready to Tarzan into ‘retirement’ and throwing cats into the nicely arranged pigeons behind him.
Apparently the current affair shows used to do the same thing after Frontline episodes were aired in the 1990s.
Not sure why this article appeared in my feed today. I don’t know anything about how comprehensive planning works in Australia but in US cities these plans required for all cities and seek to accomplish a lot of what you are advocating for. There can be ways to build out some infrastructure incrementally without too much redundancy. My favorite local (Milwaukee) example is our riverwalk system for which a plan was in place in the mid-1980s as deindustrialization and abandonment of the largely industrial riverfront areas was still in full swing. The plan and accompanying zoning overlay required that any new construction accommodate a riverwalk and public access along the rivers edge. A funding mechanism was established whereby the city paid off 70% of the costs of the riverwalk and dockwall repairs (about $3500/meter). Other funding mechanisms included use of tax incremental and business improvement district financing and grants. The city did proactively build some key initial segments but the majority was built as development occurred over 40 years and thousands of units of housing were constructed. The plan was farsighted in including 30 docking locations for a private water taxi system that is still not economically viable but someday will be as plans for public access along another 20 miles of waterfront in the harbor and former industrial areas south of downtown are built out.
I would like to think that such comprehensive plans exist for most US cities but the reality is that few do, fewer get implemented and almost none are regional plans essential to transportation and infrastructure development. The waterfront Milwaukee plan sounds interesting — its not the sort of thing that really happens in most US cities.
Thanks David we have similar arrangements here usually when it is a govt owned asset and they are seeking an outcome that they don’t want to (fully) pay for.
In California they raised 800 million usd for a new city to be built in what was essentially pointless farmland. It was defeated by the locals and their "orderly growth" policy where you can't convert farmland to urban land. This is why California is losing population
Great article and makes several relevant points. I have been thinking that society should not expect public transport, for at least in the short to medium term, have to show a return on investment. It is for the greater good of society and should be considered an essential service to a city.
Cheers Symon! Agree with all said.
Excellent article. I must tell my fellow Americans about this land use strategy.
Hard agree on this one. Far too often our infrastructure spend is a reactive case of the proverbial squeaky wheel, rather than a proactive investment in a vision for development.
I’d also argue that this is influenced heavily by the duration of the political cycle, and self-interested politicians not wanting to wear the cost of an immediate deficit for a future government to reap the benefits of.
However, I think you hit the nail on the head towards the end by highlighting that the real crux of the problem is that the profit motive incentivises this behaviour - when the only reason you develop land is because you can make money, you’ll always seek the lowest investment for the highest margin.
Personally, I’d argue that a market-led development strategy is fundamentally incapable of the kind of development you advocate, and therefore it is the role of government to either invest in the public infrastructure through direct builds or, if you happen to be a feeble government, by creating the adequate incentives and disincentives that will facilitate private investment in these projects.
Great article as always Flan!
Thanks Shirls!
Totally agree and I see this happening every day in my career. The point where the private sector becomes ineffective in delivering good outcomes is when you jump from the scale of a single project to a larger precinct (where it is not being handled by a master developer with a decades long delivery pipeline).
We start with a precinct and an amazing vision for things like shared public space, public transport, shared parking, affordable housing - with precious little detail on the delivery model. Then when it comes time to build the thing, nobody has anywhere near the capital to put skin in the game and build these elements in first. They they inevitably carve the precinct up into tiny sites for sale and ask each developer to provide their own amenities, parking, "affordable" housing etc - totally defeating the purpose and benefit of acting at the precinct scale in the first place!
Also agree that the govt needs to either front-load that investment in enabling infrastructure as I describe, or alternatively get involved in some kind of PPP in the early stages so that the delivery model can actually factor in some public support for these projects.
Whoever does it, they need to have a massive cash pile to draw upon right from the outset to front load that investment.
Sorry for the late reply on this one but as usual we’re in fierce agreement. Incredibly well said, and I think what I take away from this is that we should make you Planning Tsar for life. All Hail Flanopolis.
I, too, am firmly pro-toilet.
🤝
I’ve been shouting this into the void for at least 30 years. I’m in the area of SW Sydney experiencing rapid growth with the bare minimum of infrastructure to go with it. The train lines could have already been built. But not only is the struggle against apathetic politics it’s against the NIMBYs as well unfortunately.
Too some extent this is what happened with the North West metro in Sydney. They built it right out to Tallawong which was green fields then they fill it in later as they are now doing.
Absolutely! That is a great project.
We did. Kemble.
I was surprised you did not discuss discount rates in this article. Given our standard policy prescriptions, cost benefit analysis discounts by 7% per year. This means that benefits 40 years from now are weighted at about 16th the rate of current benefits.
It’s funny I actually only just learned about this! I should edit it in
Yup - the train and public transit discussion reminds me of the iconic picture of the 7 train (IRT flushing line) in NYC when it was built - there was literally nothing around it and now everything around it is built up.
You make too much sense, which sadly in Australia won't get you very far!
A lot boils down to, as you mentioned, the short-sightedness of our "leaders". I recently learned MPs like to ridicule and tease idealist members with the word "oncer", as if this is the most terrible fate in the world. Only if you're a raging narcissist with a fragile ego...
But we're in a new era now where most people under 40 just DGAF if they change jobs/careers regularly. I'd love to see just ONE leader go out with a blaze of glory by advocating for a future like this. The real thinkers and go-getters left plugging away in this country will really get behind them regardless of if they get re-elected.
Courageous leaders who buck the trend are seen through history but that fact seems to be lost on most Australians.
BTW I had one thought when reading....Avalon in VIC seems to slightly fit into this philosophy. Avalon airport is expanding, Bay West will become a major port, Wyndham and Geelong are working together to help develop industrial and commercial sites around the area and protect existing green space while limiting residential sprawl (for now). Could this be the model for a new city as it grows over the next 20 years or so?