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.

People seem to like a hard edge – a clear and unambiguous boundary – between city and country. But it only works if the non-developed land is “pure” bush or bucolic farming land, without service stations, hobby farms or other urban detritus. Head out of Melbourne in most other directions and development – almost all of it tacky and ugly – tracks you like a mangy dog.

The continuous built-up area of Melbourne (the pink bit in the middle of the map) occupies less than 2,000 km2. This is much less than is commonly assumed by the media and is just a little more than a quarter of the area covered by the official or administrative boundary, which is 7,672 km2. There are a number of “islands” of development within the boundary (also shown in pink), like the townships of Melton and Sunbury, that are officially part of the metropolitan area but separated from “mainland Melbourne” by green wedges. It makes sense to count a place like Melton township as part of Melbourne because 65% of workers living there travel across 9 km of green wedge to work in mainland Melbourne.

These islands make discussions about sprawl particularly fraught. Is it just the central core of continuous urbanised development that sprawls or should all the islands within the boundary also be included? If they are, then that not only includes towns such as Melton, Sunbury and Pakenham, but also towns like Warburton, Healesville and Gembrook that appear to the first-time visitor to be country towns. And given that island townships like Garfield and Bunyip in the outer south-east corridor are officially part of Melbourne, it’s reasonable to wonder why towns that lie just outside the boundary, like Drouin and Warragul, aren’t also seen as part of Melbourne’s sprawl.

This story from a 2003 issue of The Age shows how closely linked many country towns located outside the boundary are to Melbourne:

Census 2001 figures cited by a Monash University Centre for Population and Urban Research report for the Southern Catchments Forum show that, remarkably, more than half of the working residents of the Macedon Ranges area are employed in Melbourne. Similarly, about 40 per cent of the working residents of the Moorabool region (which includes Bacchus Marsh) and the Melbourne side of the Greater Geelong area commute to Melbourne for work. It’s clear, the report says, that these areas are “largely dormitory towns servicing the metropolis.

According to another report in The Age published in November last year, “Melbourne has sprawled 50 per cent further than its official urban growth boundary and is overrunning small country towns ……… Developers are building large suburban-style estates as close as three kilometres to the boundary, marketing to metropolitan commuters while avoiding the infrastructure levy”. The “50 per cent further” claim is a ludicrous exaggeration but the general picture isn’t. The paper quotes the secretary of the Macedon Ranges Residents Association, Christine Pruneau, who says such estates make a mockery of the urban growth boundary:

Every small town near the boundary is really being hammered ……… These are little towns getting development that looks like it belongs in Essendon and it’s changing the character of the places into suburbs of Melbourne”.

This sort of development could be interpreted favourably as “decentralisation” rather than negatively as “over-spill”. Perhaps this is why cities like London, where development has jumped beyond the greenbelt and into tightly defined satellites cities, are often assumed to be less sprawled than Melbourne despite having much larger populations. I think a lot of the widespread dislike of sprawl comes down to the absence of a hard edge. If Melbourne had reserved a real greenbelt in the 70s or 80s and prevented tacky roadside development, it’s not that fanciful to think today’s outer suburbs might be seen as satellite cities – as decentralisation rather than sprawl. But in terms of the downsides of fringe development, I’m not sure we’d be any better off. We might in fact be worse off because of all that extra travelling over the greenbelt.

I’ve previously argued that a sensible way of defining where a city “ends” is the extent of contiguous urbanisation combined with that area’s labour catchment. The latter metric reflects the fact cities exist because of agglomeration economies, especially in labour. Satellite cities that are closely tied to the continuously urbanised area by commuting should be considered part of Melbourne. Work travel isn’t the only possible measure – there could be analogous social linkages – but the significance of commuting, I would argue, is the amount of time spent physically within Melbourne. Commuting typically involves spending in the order of eight hours within Melbourne’s boundary on around 270 days per year. The really hard bit is figuring out just what proportion of workers would have to commute to urbanised Melbourne to qualify the township as part of Melbourne. It’s probably far-fetched to think that this kind of thinking would lead to the official boundary being extended to include places like Bacchus March, but it would provide a more sophisticated way of assessing where sprawl begins.