Australia’s distinctive strategic planning arising from rapid national population growth and sub-national state competition for metropolitan development
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Date
2016
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AESOP
Abstract
Australia has the highest rate of population increase of all developed nations, driven by a high rate of immigration. It is also a federated nation, and one in which each state’s population is heavily concentrated in a primate capital city and in which the state governments have constitutional control over urban planning and development (Searle and Bunker, 2011). This combination of factors has led to globally unique state responses to metropolitan planning and development in response to the challenges set by these factors. The planning problems arising from these factors are: 1. How to provide housing and employment for rapid population increases in the largest four cities, each with more than 1.5m people. 2. These increases are exacerbated by interstate competition in which the size of each state’s largest (capital) city is seen as a marker of state success, leading to a reluctance by governments to consider slower growth rates. 3. How to provide adequate infrastructure to accommodate population growth in outer metro greenfield areas in line with traditional Australian preference for low density housing, in a context of state fiscal stringency; one consequence is high cost housing land as land supply is restricted and the state puts infrastructure charges on to developers. 4. In particular, how to provide adequate public transport to growing outer suburbs when public transport there will be loss-making because of low densities and therefore difficult to justify from the prevailing neoliberal viewpoint.
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Proceedings of the IV World Planning Schools Congress, July 3-8th, 2016 : Global crisis, planning and challenges to spatial justice in the north and in the south
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