On A Clear Day

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday March 18, 2006

WHEN the air is very clear, like yesterday, Sydney is plausibly the Emerald City. Look west, and the parks and backyards merge into a darkening green that undulates towards the sharp blue silhouette of the mountains. The problem is that green cities are not green. They are more the brown and grey of bricks and concrete. Being green, in an environmental sense, is not about more trees in the suburbs, but fewer suburbs. It is about consolidation; better use of the urban infrastructure you have, rather than developing more. To many in Sydney, urban consolidation is heresy. To an increasing number, however, it is how they live.

The trend is highlighted in a new Citigroup report on NSW housing, reported in today's Herald. There is the usual gloom - Sydney's housing is too expensive, driving people to more affordable abodes in the regions and interstate. However, there is some comfort in the trend to apartment living. A decade and a half after urban consolidation was introduced, Sydney is clearly getting the hang of it. Truthfully, many people do not have much choice. Citigroup notes a general shift from the suburbs closer to the city's central business district. Approvals for detached houses are the lowest for 22 years in Sydney. However, apartment approvals are 300 per cent higher than they were in the early 1990s when urban consolidation began.

Denser developments on established transport routes mean a more efficient city.They foster demand for rail, where poorly serviced new suburbs are an invitation to travel longer and further by car. For Sydney, however, urban consolidation is not just environmentally desirable, it is a planning necessity. This city, dysfunctionally dependent on the car, would be unmanageable if it sought to accommodate the million new residents expected in the next 25 years by simply spilling out over more of the countryside. So, two thirds of the 640,000 new dwellings needed by 2031 will be built in established suburbs, close to existing transport. But this is a threat as well as a promise; as the Herald reported yesterday, experts warn that new medium- and high-density development cannot be allowed to blight existing areas with poor quality development as it has so often in the past. The challenge for planners and developers is to rethink apartments into desirable homes where families would be content to live and grow, not mere stopovers on the way to a house and land package in the suburbs.

© 2006 Sydney Morning Herald

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