Would a satellite city re-energise Ted Baillieu?
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Is a new satellite city between Melbourne and Geelong the fillip Ted Baillieu needs?
The editorial in The Age yesterday, Mr Premier times are tough but you can leave your mark in the west, is one of the strangest opinion pieces I’ve seen in a long time. It’s so odd I wonder if its collateral damage from the current restructure at Fairfax.
It ostensibly mirrors an accompanying feature, Faith no more?, on the malaise that’s seemingly overcome the Baillieu Government after just 18 months in office. The gist is Mr Baillieu appears to be a reluctant Premier who’s struggling with undelivered promises, industrial relations fights, political scandals and alienated interest groups.
The Age’s leader writer reckons Ted Baillieu has to offer more than catch phrases like “decisive action.” The Government can get its mojo back by articulating a clear, coherent vision and agenda.
That’s fair enough, but the editorial starts looking weird when the writer reveals what he or she reckons is the silver bullet that could rescue Mr Baillieu’s declining personal popularity – “decentralisation”! In particular, a satellite city on the edge of Melbourne:
Instead of allowing the urban growth boundary to become ever more rubbery in response to perceived population pressure, the government could plan the development of a new city between Melbourne and Geelong.
The editorialist says that would give the Government the “opportunity to take the decisive action its publicists boast about.”
No doubt the newspaper is closer to the political action in Spring Street than I am, but seriously, I’d have thought what Mr Bailleau needs to do right now to bolster his stocks is take some real action, not bluster about decentralisation. After all, the next election is two and a half years away, not ten.
Melbourne already has two satellite cities in the west in Melton and Sunbury. They have their virtues but I seriously doubt they’re so compelling that another one will grip the collective imagination of Victorians. I think the electorates response would be more in the nature of: so what?
Some concrete initiatives to improve public transport, education or health seem much more likely to convince the public of the Government’s decisiveness than broad promises of a new city in Melbourne’s (not Victorias, even!) west. Initiatives to bolster the State’s economy and improve the lot of job seekers and the prospects of small businesses would have broader appeal.
But even if decentralisation were the magic bullet the Bailleau Government needs, this wouldn’t be the way to go about it. I wonder if anyone at Fairfax has looked at a map recently. Because a new satellite city located circa 45 km from Flinders St Station wouldn’t be decentralisation, it’d be sprawl by another name!
The distance between the built-up edge of Melbourne at Werribee and the built-up edge of Geelong at Corio is just over 25 km as the crow flies (and that’s ignoring the township of Lara about 3 km north-east of Corio). Corio is much the same distance from Flinders St Station as outer suburban Pakenham.
Melbourne already has a big and spreading influence on its hinterland. Only last week the ABS announced that the Melbourne Greater Capital City Statistical Area now includes the towns of Bacchus Marsh, Gisborne, Mount Macedon, Lancefield, Wandong and Kinglake.
The inclusion of these towns primarily recognises the high proportion of work and social trips their residents make to the suburbs and the centre of Melbourne. The distance from Melbourne’s CBD to Lancefield is more than 60 km, or about the same distance to Geelong’s CBD.
So just like those who live in Melton and Sunbury do now, the residents of The Age’s new city would mostly work somewhere in Melbourne. But they’d drive a bit further than they would if they’d settled in Werribee.
Then there’re the residents of Geelong. They value their separate identity and would almost certainly fiercely oppose a satellite city between Werribee and Geelong. They’d fear the result would be almost continuous urban development from Melbourne to Geelong.
Some observers think decentralisation is a viable alternative to continued growth of our capital cities. Perhaps that would be true if the growth were to take place somewhere distant like Albury-Wodonga, but creating a satellite city on the edge of Melbourne wouldn’t be decentralisation in any meaningful sense. Maybe it would be a better form of sprawl, but it’d still be sprawl.
Perhaps this strange editorial slipped through amid the current ructions at Fairfax and a more sensible and thoughtful approach will soon be restored. I can’t help thinking though that the custom of newspapers assuming they can and should have an authoritative opinion on anything and everything, no matter how technical or specialised, is long past its use-by date.
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“I can’t help thinking though that the custom of newspapers assuming they can and should have an authoritative opinion on anything and everything, no matter how technical or specialised, is long past its use-by date.” Is totally agreed with.
The discussion groups I participate in are asking which current land owners benefit from this kite flying by The Age. Maybe The Age could become the convener of a kite flying club on self serving urban issue interest groups in Victoria?
Journalists – is there anything they don’t know? Just wait for this person’s foray into constitutional law, or international diplomacy!
By default, I can agree with AD here. But only because this is Australia and its implementation would be incompetent.
Inherently there is nothing wrong with the idea. Build a satellite city essentially as a TOD with fast PT links to Melbourne (and Geelong). But AD is right, they would build it as sprawl–indeed sprawl would be designed in just like it is at those other new western exurbs. In Brisbane they are planning a similar thing, a new giant “town” way out to the SW–I have no idea why anyone would voluntarily want to live there, especially as it gets sweltering in summer and cold in winter, is a huge distance to anywhere (though they will probably claim it is just an hours drive to the GG) and has not a thing to recommend it, other than I presume, lower property prices (but let’s wait and see on that one).
It certainly makes sense to build new towns as satellites using the best design from what we know works–a dense central walkable core with density dropping a bit further from the centre; ban separated big malls or big box centres (force all retail to be in central core or limited other foci) etc etc.
Of course there needs to be the most efficient PT possible–probably a high-speed commuter rail like the Paris RER (high-speed being 70-80 kmph, ie. high relative to low-speed city Metros). If the city is going to invest in such transport then it makes sense to have it serve multiple centres, but each needs to be a significant centre, ie. a new town TOD. To maintain speed and efficiency the stops must not be very close or it defeats the purpose. Of course this model is known as “beads on a string” (or pearls).
They must be properly and nearly completely designed at the beginning and obviously not according to developers criteria. The open spaces within, and the open spaces between adjoining communities must be sacrosanct, ie. forever there must be legal convenants against encroachment.
And so you can see it is impossible in Australia. They would leave it mostly to developers who would claim the buyers only want mcmansions in sprawltown. PT would be planned ….for building about 20 years into the future (natch, it would forever remain “20 years in the future” as billions get spent on roads urgently needed because the sprawl and absence of PT created congestion which MUST be fixed …). No one would respect the open space, especially between, in this case, the new town and Geelong, so there would rapidly develop linear strip sprawl ugliness. If one government created the right kind of development the next government would undo it, if only because they want to undo everything the previous government did (witness Campbell Newman).
But Alan, a properly designed TOD with appropriate density a long way from the centre is not sprawl. Sprawl is low-density exurbs with high-car dependency and long journeys to anywhere, and difficult to service with PT, and a consequent lack of civic amenity (except of course Maccas and chain stores in giant malls surrounded by hectares of parking which Australians have been conditions to think of as “amenity”).
michael r james:
Can get all the virtues you mention, e.g. TOD, with incremental fringe development without the need to build a satellite city. Satellites in Australia have a poor track record in attracting enough jobs, so residents end up travelling further to work.
One of Melbourne’s virtues is the idea of having green wedges rather than a green belt (Melton and Sunbury are exceptions however). Wedges mean all the length of rail lines can be used to support developed areas (whereas with Melton, there’s 9km of rail line that goes through a “green” belt).
Alan Davies at 10:07 am
I don’t have enough experience of Melbourne but the “green wedges” sound like linear sprawl to me. Probably has lots of rail stations, right? Which slow down the service to slow commuter rail that gets slower and fuller the further it extends. Almost certainly spreads out (=sprawl) retail and business making it unlikely any single of the numerous foci to thrive. Sounds like the worst of all worlds.
There is nothing much in the world that really meets the bill but two kinds of model are worth discussion (three if you include your wedges):
(1) old mega-city extension to what were originally distant towns now inside the commuter belt; as it happens I lived in two in the UK, Brighton and Oxford (of course anyone living in SE England lives in this extended London megalopolis, it includes places like Cambridge & all the south coast towns, Reading, Slough etc). Both within 1 hr on fast(ish) train that either stops once (Gatwick) or nowhere (Oxford trains are mostly express); there are also express buses that are quite popular in Oxford because of the West Way (freeway) that gets them into Central-West London quite efficiently). This model is now at least half a century old and it retains the separateness of the towns–although both Ox & Brighton are actually commuter belt towns, everyone thinks of them as having their own very strong sense of place etc. Of course all the really big older cities have this phenomenon, like NYC, Paris, Berlin etc. A difference is that London deliberately set up the protected zone of the green belt. The others have not contained sprawl as successfully–and match more closely your so-called wedges. Though NYC has nice smaller towns on the LIR out on Long Island and these are known as up-market commuter towns.
(2) Satellite New Towns. London fills the bill again with the likes of Milton Keynes (similar distance as Oxford), Welwyn Garden City etc. In fact MK has itself turned into mini-sprawl and, though not a failure, we would know how to make it more successful–essentially model on Ox-Bridge & Brighton! Paris began the same type of thing in the 60s as Paris threatened to engulf the entire Ile de France (it still did but thankfully not as your wedge model though of course it had already sprawled along those linear corridors; please watch the final day of the Tour de France in a few weeks and you’ll see some of the most beautiful forests & parks with bikeways plus beautiful small centres within stones throw of Paris), such as Evry which I have much discussed on this site–there are others but I personally know about Evry; colleagues who were more or less obliged to work there at the French Genome Centre swore they would never live there—guess what? many now live there because it is quite nice and green, much more affordable but still on a quick RER trip to the centre of Paris).
Of course Evry was planned properly by the French technocrats (some of whom I believe are even economists! but not AngloSaxon types
) so there were various industries located there, such as the aerospace stuff (main SNECMA) and others (the Genome stuff took over HP headquarters and another took over Electrolux, another a part of the Snecma space; Pharma has since moved in. The Genome and biotech stuff happened later, though as I remarked in earlier posts, it is a shock to realize this year is the 20th anniversary of the formation of the Genepole!
Your attitude is defeatist –it is not possible to instantly create local employment so let’s just give up! This is really just an admission that the laissez faire Anglo model fails, at least in the complacent Australian version. That idea of a New Town between M and Geelong seems pretty reasonable to me, and I see it is close to Avalon (which of course is really Geelong Airport) so there is already an employment focus, especially if the LCCs use it more and more. Because it is on the bay, but still close to both M + G I know I would rather be there than in those dismal western exurbs!
Then (to return to point 2) there is Stockholm which has New Towns that apparently are extremely popular –this is a different scale to the mega-cities but is still a reasonable model for Melbourne.
And in fact on an even bigger scale (being China, the biggest one in the world): Shanghai is rebuilding itself as a central mega-city with ten satellites separated by an attempt at a green belt(s). With their central planning and perhaps less rampant pandering to special interests (as happens in other Chinese cities), or in fact simple common sense and better planning–it will be very interesting to observe. Of course it is building the (world’s biggest) Metro system though the usual Anglo economist suspects are complaining that they are “overbuilding” infrastructure. Arguably Hong Kong serves as an earlier Chinese model in its New Town of Shatin and others–a deliberate attempt to create new centres .
And Alan, that little word is the absolute key. You must make viable (and dare I use that overused realestatespeak, vibrant) centres; there must not be too many–the very worst model is wedge sprawl with multiple little centres along the track, slowing PT, diffusing commercial and retail activity, and eating up all available green space. The “9 km of empty space” may add a bit of extra capital cost at the beginning but its payoff is in the final urban plan and true amenity. I don’t know why Australians have such trouble grasping the concept. Well, in as much as they give any thought to it at all.
Oops:
“..it includes places like Cambridge & all the south coast towns, Reading, Slough etc..”
I did not mean to imply that Reading and Slough were south coast towns! I should have inserted an “and” in there somewhere.
Incidentally, I have not spent any significant time there but people who live in them claim that Reading and Slough do not deserve their rather desultory grey reputation. In fact they have genuine centres and of course their own employment bases, as well as being London commuter towns. Reading has its university of course (which likewise is often sneered at a bit —yes, by the likes of me!–but again is quite respectable. I think it is no accident that a lot of these better places are big in education (obviously Oxbridge, but Brighton has huge number of students including U Sussex–my alma mater–and a well known Institute of Technology, famous Art school and a zillion language schools for foreigners. It all makes for a very lively place.
That was a hint: perhaps design a university or tech college etc. Good for seeding the nucleus of a centre, rather than suburbanites who (mistakenly) believe their sprawl is more desirable.
(trivia: I ran into Nick Cave about 6 months ago at my regular cafe in Brisbane, the Belle Epoque, because he & Mick Harvey were staying at the Emporium Hotel which is a boutique hotel used by many gliterati; he is a fellow “Hove actually” dweller. You know the joke? Asked where one lives in Brighton, one answers “Hove ecktually”, Hove being much more U than shabby Brighton next door!)
Here we go again. I worked on a decentralisation program in the early 1970s that was endorsed by the Victorian, NSW and federal (Whitlam era) governments. Some financial incentives were offered to businesses to relocate out of Melbourne. Victoria’s five growth centres – Portland, Ballarat, Bendigo, Wodonga and Latrobe Valley – had offices and officers allocated to them. There were modest successes for a couple of years, then the Fraser government took office and the program faded away. I arrived in Melbourne in 1958, when the orchards and market gardens of Templestowe and Doncaster were being subdivided for housing. Melbourne’s sprawl was a topic of debate then and has remained so ever since. But as soon as anyone mentions real restrictions on the city’s growth, the ‘social engineering’ cry goes up and nothing is done. On the fringes of Bendigo, Ballarat, Geelong – even smaller centres like Castlemaine – the mistakes of the post-war years are being compounded. Unimaginative, low-density ‘display homes’, car dependency, and inadequate or non-existent social and civic resources are still the rule. I don’t know the answer.
@barfiller Posted June 29, 2012 at 10:36 am
“then the Fraser government took office and the program faded away”
Another trope rolled out regularly is that Whitlam tried and was an utter failure! Whitlam was in power for a mere 30 months, so of course it was the conservatives who killed it.
Australians somehow believe they can defy the laws of physics and geometry. Once cities reach as big as Sydney and Melbourne (and Brisbane because it is even more sprawled than these two so the phenomenon happens at lower total population) you cannot keep expanding the sprawl outwards without incurring truly punishing penalties that no amount of road-building can cure.
@barfiller
Oops, meant to thankyou for your post.
Speaking as a satellite resident of Albury-Wodonga, anyone remember Monaro – the town? Multi-Function Polis?
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