Environment

Making Australia’s growing cities more sustainable

Peter Newton, James Whitten, Magnus Moglia, Stephen Glackin, The Conversation

The way we organize our cities and regions creates problems everywhere. We face difficult and polluting car commuting, a lack of affordable housing, and urban design that creates car dependence and negatively impacts health.

For example, lower levels of walkability are associated with higher rates of obesity, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease. Parks and greenery are associated with improved mental and cognitive health.

Australian cities are sprawling. Many suburbs are difficult to reach by public transport, bicycle or foot.

Our vast cities use a lot of land per person. Their resource use and carbon footprint is enormous. It also produces a large amount of waste.

To solve these problems, government planners need to think beyond the capital. Australia needs to develop a strategy to connect these capital cities with surrounding regional cities to form “megacity regions.”

This is a settlement model that could work better than current metropolises and make urban growth more sustainable. The advent of hybrid work, high-speed internet, and high-speed rail is facilitating this form of payment.

What is a megacity region?

According to the OECD, a megacity region is a network of urban areas connected to capital cities by commuters from home to work. Megacity regions connect these urban centers more efficiently, making cities more sustainable and productive.

An early example is the Bos-Wash corridor of North America (including Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, DC), which emerged around the mid-20th century. Megacity regions are now common throughout Europe (for example, the Rhine-Ruhr region in Germany, which includes Dortmund, Essen, Düsseldorf, and Cologne, and the Randstad region in the Netherlands, which includes Amsterdam, The Hague, Rotterdam, and Utrecht). Japan’s Pacific Belt (including Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, Hiroshima, and Fukuoka) is one of many examples in Asia.

How ready is Australia for metropolitan areas?

The 2019 CSIRO Australian National Outlook considered the question: ‘What will Australia look like economically, socially and environmentally in 2060?’ Its modeling showed that “stronger regions” generate significant benefits across transport, health, education, employment and housing. In one scenario, 16 million people will live in regional Australia by 2060, with 10 million of those living in regional cities.

The CSIRO concluded that “investing in the growth of regional satellite cities with good connectivity to the capital” will create many opportunities. This growth will benefit the region while easing pressure on the capital.

In recent years, the New South Wales Government has developed an initiative to grow Sydney into a six-city region, from Newcastle to Wollongong.

The Melbourne Committee called for the creation of an Australian East Coast megaregion to foster economic growth and attract foreign investment.

In 2023, the Victorian Government announced Plan Victoria, a state-wide strategy to replace Plan Melbourne.

But without strong regionalization policies, Melbourne and Sydney are likely to become sprawling megacities with populations of more than 10 million people this century. This increases the strain on transportation, infrastructure and housing.

What makes change possible?

Cities and their central business districts are important for their agglomeration effects, i.e. the accumulated benefits of concentrated socio-economic activities. However, this often also leads to social, economic and environmental problems.

Integrating regional cities into the economic activities of capital cities could alleviate some of these problems. It also has the potential to generate many benefits, including new, more efficient industries, stronger communications networks, and stronger labor markets.

Credit: The Conversation

Payment systems have evolved throughout history. The walking city became a railway-centered city, and then a car-centered city. At the time, all these models supported an average round-trip commute of one hour each day (Marchetti constant).

Our research investigates how new technologies and work practices are enabling the fourth migration to megacity regions. Drivers of this change include ubiquitous high-speed internet, hybrid work, high-speed rail, and more.

ubiquitous high speed internet

NBN broadband data from 2012 to 2021 shows there is little difference in the penetration of typical residential internet connections between Melbourne and regional Victoria. High-speed business connectivity made a big difference.

Australia’s major capital cities continue to serve as powerhouses of bandwidth-hungry information economy industries. They have more highly skilled workers and higher rates of high-speed internet penetration.

Overall, the data reflects that most regional cities in Victoria have ‘population services’ industries rather than ‘producer services’ industries. High-speed internet may expand employment opportunities, but it alone is not enough to decentralize the knowledge industry.

hybrid work

Since the coronavirus, both working from home and working in the office have become established. Hybrid work improves sustainability primarily by reducing car use and road congestion.

Currently, just 18% of Australia’s knowledge workers work ‘office-only’.

Not having to come to work every day means knowledge workers can live away from their workplace. This changes the employment landscape for regional centers. Many information economy jobs can be done outside of urban areas, where housing costs are lower.

high speed rail

A high-speed rail system has been discussed in Australia for many years, with various options being proposed.

Victoria introduced “faster” regional rail in 2005-2006. Since then, the population of the urban centers served by these lines has grown faster than that of the “offline” lines.

The difference in employment growth between online and offline centers was larger for producer services than for people-servicing jobs. The latter is more closely tied to the demands of local residents.

Designated growth areas on Melbourne’s outer fringes have much higher rates of population and employment growth, indicating that current transport policies support urban sprawl. High-speed rail helps urban growth “jump over” suburbs to reach regional cities.

What will high-speed rail bring? In the UK, the advent of high-speed rail (over 200km/h) has led to significantly higher population growth in local areas online compared to offline. Online districts generally saw a stronger shift towards information and knowledge-based industries than offline districts. Some areas outperformed metropolitan areas outside London.

Why is this important now?

The federal and Victorian governments are preparing strategic plans to guide long-term urban development. Both have issued discussion papers to solicit public opinion.

These documents are long on planning principles and short on mission-scale programs that can be transformational. This type of change is currently the focus of international long-term planning. Land use planning for metropolitan areas should also feature prominently in Australia’s urbanization plans.

We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to deliver urban development at a scale and shape that can transform Australia’s payments system.

Provided by The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.conversation

Source: Making Australia’s growing cities more sustainable (9 November 2024) from https://phys.org/news/2024-11-australia-cities-sustainable.html 9 November 2024 obtained in

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