Population reality delivers a boost for high density

DENSITY is not always a dirty word, according to international urban development guru Jeb Brugmann, who says Australia needs take a more creative approach to building cities that cater for a rapidly growing population.

Mr Brugmann, who will today address the Australian Davos Connection’s Cities Summit in Melbourne along with Kevin Rudd, said Australia must face the reality that the great dream of leafy low-density suburb living is “the most inefficient and inconvenient way of forming a settlement”.

Australia, like the US and Canada, was caught between an ideological preference for low-density living and a growing dependency on urban infrastructure, the Canada-based expert said. And the result was a housing crisis.

“We think that the good life or the `dream’ is something related to land ownership and having wide open spaces, so most of our development continues to be something that, on the one hand, reflects this cultural bias towards the the outback, and on the other hand reflects our dependency on urban life,” Mr Brugmann told The Australian.

He said the “epicentre” of the sub-prime housing crisis in the US was in “the new suburban areas” of California, Nevada, Arizona and Florida, where any marginal increase in fuel and energy costs or in interest rates made outer-suburban McMansion living unaffordable.

“The sort of development that was going on in the United States was so inefficient from a user point of view . . . that any marginal tinkering with the cost structure and people couldn’t afford it,” he said.

Mr Brugmann said developed countries needed to see the concept of “density” as much more than just “a lot of people crowded together”.

“It’s not about regulating people into living differently, it’s about creating greater choices for people and establishing a demonstration of the fact of how great it would be for people to live in a different way.”

Mr Brugmann said that in Australia it was important for urban development policy to focus “less on how to kick-start the real estate market” through economic stimulus and more about creating robust forms of urban development in the long term. Rather than indiscriminately giving first-home buyers a grant, governments would be better off “giving the subsidy to the people who buy into the most creative, cutting-edge forms of urban development”.

Lauren Wilson
From: The Australian
March 29, 2010 12:00AM

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