Battle of the city versus urban sprawl
Planning goals ignore the realities of population growth, says Bob Cotgrove
FOR more than 50 years a battle has been fought between urban planners, supported by politicians, architects, engineers and key bureaucrats, and the vast majority of people living in the world’s burgeoning urban areas.
The battle is about the planners’ vision of the future city redesigned for high density land use along mass transit corridors versus ordinary people’s desires for healthier and prosperous lives for themselves and their families.
The battle began in the US in the 1950s when engineers, faced by rising car ownership and road congestion, began building inner city freeways as a means of satisfying motorists’ demands for unlimited travel.
The “solution” was a disaster. Freeways were not only ugly but were destructive of inner city neighbourhoods.
In 1959 the half-completed Embarcadero Freeway, an elevated double-storey waterfront freeway in San Francisco, was stopped by protest action and the anti-car movement began.
US planners looked for alternatives and thought they had found them in compact European cities with their historic centres and urban travel dominated by public transport.
They overlooked that the same trends towards personal motorised transport and low density suburban living were emerging in Europe and subsequently across the world.
They overlooked that cars and trucks are driving forces for economic growth and car ownership was responsible for social revolutions: the entry of mothers into the workforce, mobility of the increasing proportion of elderly people, and opportunity for working class families to live separately from where they worked.
Nevertheless the dominant planning paradigm persists with its “cars bad, mass transit good” mantra using terms “transit-oriented development”, “smart growth” and “urban containment” while denigrating “suburban sprawl” and its residents as lazy, antisocial and “car dependent”.
Planners are selective in their choice of model cities. First it was Toronto, then Seattle, then Zurich. The fashionable city of recent decades has been Portland, Oregon.
Planners focus on inner city areas where relatively small increases in population are used to justify claims consolidation policies are working. They neglect to mention that in each of those cities as in all major cities in the world the vast majority of population growth has occurred, and continues to occur, in outer suburbs where residents travel almost exclusively by car.
In Portland, only 8 per cent of its growth of 300,000 since 2000 has occurred within 8km of the centre, while 63 per cent accrued beyond 16km.
The trends apply in Australia. Between 2001 and 2011 outer suburbs contributed 46 per cent of growth in Sydney, 62 per cent in Melbourne and 68 per cent in Perth.
In Hobart between 2001 and 2016 half the population growth was in Kingborough and Clarence. More people moved to Sorell than to either Glenorchy or Hobart.
Most of the growth in Hobart and Glenorchy was in outer suburbs, places like Tolmans Hill, Lenah Valley, West Moonah and Austins Ferry.
Yet the State Government, with the backing of all parties, insists light rail winding through industrial areas and empty paddocks of the northern suburbs will kickstart urban growth along the railway corridor.
The focus on the inner city and neglect of the outer suburbs has created division between the professional elites who control the development process and can afford to live centrally and the forgotten majority of ordinary people living on the fringe who battle each day to provide a better life for their families.
Political parties would do well to remember that the votes of people in both groups are of equal value.