Onward, Outward, Upward? A Review of Contemporary Australian Metropolitan Growth Policies

Abstract

All five of Australia's largest metropolitan areas are actively considering the best policy framework to deal with anticipated growth. For SE Queensland and Perth the pressures are immediate and powerful as burgeoning economies and significant inward migration put a premium on developable land. The pressures in Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide are less intense but remain an issue in the longer term. Cities which have opted for Urban Growth Boundaries are faced with a significant decision as to the elasticity of those boundaries and the relationship between urban consolidation and expansion. This paper makes a comparative review of current growth strategies for the major Australian metropolitan areas (Melbourne, Sydney, Perth, Adelaide and SE Queensland) and specifically seeks to address two fundamental questions: What is the chosen strategy to accommodate growth - urban consolidation, extensions to existing urban growth boundaries, the expansion of townships beyond the existing urban boundary, the designation of land for new settlements? What are the proposed arrangements for implementing and assessing proposals for development in new growth areas, including the roles and responsibilities of state and local governments, the establishment of growth area authorities, commissions or assessment panels? st century, metropolitan planners in Australian cities are faced with a number of significant challenges. Most of these are not new – the desire to curb urban sprawl, the imperative of providing affordable housing and the need to fund the timely provision of infrastructure and services. But there is also now a new imperative to respond to climate change by making cities less vulnerable and more resilient to the inevitable consequences of global warming. The nature of the challenges varies somewhat from place to place and so, to some extent, do the responses. This paper seeks to provide a snapshot of current metropolitan strategies, with particular reference to the ways in which they are seeking to accommodate future growth and to the means by which the strategies are intended to be implemented. The principal purpose of this paper is to review current metropolitan plans for five Australian city regions – Perth, Adelaide, Sydney, Melbourne and South-East Queensland. The review draws primarily upon published sources. It examines the leading strategies set out in these plans and the methods proposed to implement them. Institutional arrangements and processes vary from state to state but there are some common elements. The paper concludes with a comparison of the five selected metropolitan areas, seeking to establish common approaches and trends. The paper represents the first step in a more detailed comparative study of contemporary metropolitan growth strategies. 2. Earlier metropolitan plans and their implementation – a brief historical review The history of attempts to anticipate and shape the future growth of Australian cities, together with the evolution of the institutional arrangements for planning over the past 50 or so years, are now fairly well-documented (see, for example, Logan, 1987; Hamnett and Freestone, 2000; Gleeson and Low, 2000 XXXXXXX). Much has changed over that period, but there have also been some enduring themes. The early years after the Second World War saw the release of several ambitious plans for Australia’s major cities. This was an era when high economic growth, rapid population increases and the new availability of cheap motoring fuelled rapid urban expansion. These ‘first-round’ plans (Logan, 1987, p.50) were influenced by long-established British planning concepts – new towns, green belts, ‘slum’ clearance projects and, to a lesser extent, public housing – overlain by a growing enthusiasm for freeways.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 6 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.