Waking from the dream - Page 9
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 20: Cities on the Edge
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Brendan Gleeson
The denial of our innate urbanism, and the pleasure and productivity that we have derived from our cities, is a national trait worth abandoning. This collective daydream means that we risk neglecting problems until they become too intrusive and threatening to ignore, and by then difficult, expensive or impossible to repair. Our cities and suburbs have harboured a set of social and ecological stresses that are approaching critical levels. The ‘Human Settlements' section of the 2006 State of the Environment Report makes grim reading. Between 1998 and 2004, Australian energy use per capita grew by 4 per cent at time when we should be making radical cuts to individual greenhouse emissions. There's no sign of improvement: ‘Primary energy consumption is forecast to increase by 48 per cent ... by the year 2019 ... It is significantly above the expected rate of population increase, and it is driven by the continued growth in per capita consumption and economic growth.' The mass urban embrace of air conditioning, as well as raising overall electricty consumption, is shifting peak demand to summer, driving the expansion of water-guzzling power generation systems.
The mounting water deficits are well known: less nationally understood is just how close South-East Queensland has come to outright default in recent years. Politicians looked genuinely scared as they announced ever tougher restrictions on water use. The rains returned in early 2008, but climate change reminds us that urban water crisis is now a permanent spectre facing our cities. The other big urban pressure cooker is the stampede on to our long-neglected public transport systems as petrol prices surge. Every city has registered large jumps in the number of people trying to use public transport. This has mildly tempered the malign neglect of public transport in some cities. In Brisbane, municipal politics now centres around which political party can build new buses quickly enough to meet surging demand for services – though the spending remains dwarfed by the vast sums being thrown at new road tunnels and bridges. By contrast, in Sydney they're still dumping half-hearted plans to build new rail lines.
If not stopped, the long slide to a more divided society will surely end in tears. We cannot allow further social polarisation without expecting some serious communal trouble. Still, some fairies continue to make joyful song at the bottom of the garden, bless them. Sea-change and tree-change inspire rousing songs of liberation, celebrating the mass release of the citizenry from urban confinement. This is an intoxicating but deeply misleading vision of Australia as it enters the third millennium.
There is no mass urban entrapment. Australia's long marriage to city living continues. None of the deeper paradoxes of suburban life register in the contemporary argy bargy about Aspirationals and McMansions. These new urban arguments making their way into the public domain, as caricatured as they are, may yet signal the breaking down of urban silence in popular culture. I sense that public interest in, and discussion of, urban affairs have never been stronger. After prolonged neglect, the various media are increasingly willing to put urban issues on centre stage. Key metro papers have dedicated urban affairs reporters. The Sydney Morning Herald and Brisbane's Courier-Mail have campaigned for stronger metropolitan planning and governance, drawing and generating considerable public interest.
During the 1990s, the Herald increased its interest in urban issues, and campaigned with rising vigour for improved planning and management of Sydney. It was rightly critical of the Carr government, targeting its failures to invest in public transport and develop a sound metropolitan plan for Sydney, as well as various policy fiascos, including the nationally notorious Cross-City Tunnel.
Anne Davies' excoriating 2006 Herald essay, ‘The great Carr crash' summarised the troubled urban legacy of Carr's decade-long rule. In a later interview with pre-political Maxine McKew, Carr brushed the criticism aside as ‘barking mad', bragging of a sixty-one billion dollar investment in capital works. And what of Sydney's crumbling and occasionally lethal public transport system? The resort to public-private partnerships and user tolls for roads? The crumbling public realm of western Sydney? The Olympics were a bright exception to a record of malign urban neglect. They showcased what was possible with strong planning and quality public infrastructure. Pretty much everything worked, was on time and stayed in place. Everyone noted the contrast with the shambolic free-enterprise Atlanta games in 1996. For some reason, the same government that staged them failed to apply the lessons of this brilliantly successful experiment to its mainstream urban management responsibilities.
New South Wales had talented planning professionals, including at the highest levels, but let them languish without much interest or support. Many drifted away from the public service or were moved on. In his last days, Carr finally got work underway to prepare a metropolitan plan for Sydney, a much-lamented hole in the state's urban policy fabric. For a time, it looked as if the state might finally show some policy resolve and move to tighten the governance of Sydney at least. A good plan for Sydney emerged, but so did new hostility to planning in the Cabinet. By March 2008, the Herald reported a survey which found that ‘One in five Sydneysiders are so sick of traffic and the high cost of living they are considering moving to another city'.
Many look to the new Rudd Government with hope. It went into the 2007 election without a comprehensive urban agenda. But there have been encouraging early signals that it recognises the importance of an urban response to the environmental and social threats facing Australia. The Prime Minister's 2020 Summit identified ten key topics for discussion and cities made the list – just.
One thing that must be urged on the new government is urban resolve. A merely advisory or voluntary urban approach will not effect the deep changes needed to our cities to make them sustainable and secure. The job cannot be left to the states: they lack the resources and the powers needed to transform and make safe the national settlement system. And several are too mired in deeply impious planning systems to lend honest help to the cause of policy strengthening. A lesson to learn from the states' struggles to confront urban problems in the last decade is that resolute action is almost always welcomed by the public and accepted by industry. ‘Institutional shocks' seem the only way of cutting through accumulated confusion and inertia. The occasionally inspired New South Wales government rapidly transformed the state's residential building sector via its 2004 BASIX regulatory initiative, which overnight managed to kill off some of the most wasteful new home products. Initially apprehensive, the industry adjusted and moved on. Similarly, green improvements to the national building code are forcing universal changes to construction practices, but not quickly enough. The Queensland Government's dramatic intervention in South-East Queensland's growth through its highly directive 2005 blueprint plan was welcomed by the public and by the development industry. In February 2008, SBS Insight in a program on ‘City Limits', featured an A.V. Jennings executive urging the federal government to introduce tougher sustainability standards in the development sector to clarify the regulatory framework so that developers could get on with their business. The only explanation for continued lack of resolve on urban issues must be the entrenched grip of neo-liberalism on the major political parties and the bureaucracy. The public and major sections of industry do not share this view.