[Peakoil] AFR: Canberra threatened

[Alex P]

Doomsday visions for life in suburbia   
2005 Sep 22   
Feedback Robert Harley   
   
http://afr.com/premium/articles/2005/09/21/1126982116019.html   
   
Peter Newman was in California in 1973 when the first oil crisis struck.   
The intensity of the experience - the oil heists from petrol stations,   
the hour-long queues, the draining of petrol from neighbours' vehicles -   
led him to create the term "car dependent cities".   
   
Today, Newman is the internationally regarded professor of city policy   
at Murdoch University and, with another oil crisis under way, those "car   
dependent" cities are again in trouble.   
   
"Canberra, Adelaide, large parts of Brisbane and the coast, these are   
places that are totally car dependent and they are threatened," he says.   
   
In the Newman view, such regions will wither from the outside as high   
petrol prices trap the poor on the urban fringes and coastal   
extremities.   
   
It is one view, and by no means the most pessimistic view, of how the   
current oil crisis will remake Australia's cities - its suburbs, its   
coasts and its real estate.   
   
If the crisis persists - and many believe it is the first shock in what   
will be the end of the cheap oil economy - Australians will start   
changing the way they use cities, towns and real estate.   
   
They'll have to. So much of the nation's urban property, particularly   
the sprawl out beyond the rail lines and along the coasts, has been   
created by cheap petrol.   
   
Where Australians live, where they shop and work, where they travel for   
holidays - for the best part of 50 years it has all been made possible   
by the ease of the car.   
   
Already change is under way. In Melbourne, Metlink has noted increased   
numbers of commuters on its trains, trams and buses since the petrol   
price topped $1 a litre. Patronage is up by about 8 per cent, or an   
extra 76,000 trips a day.   
   
Real estate normally takes a while to feel the change, but Melbourne   
agent Barry Plant, of Barry Plant Doherty, has noticed a different   
attitude among his buyers.   
   
Clearly, petrol prices affect household budgets and the income available   
to pay the mortgage. In the US, at least one financier allows those who   
are buying near public transport to borrow more.   
Plant, who remembers the way real estate at Mt Eliza on the Mornington   
Peninsula "just dropped dead" in the 1970s oil crisis, believes location   
will once again become critical for buyers.   
   
"Buyers will look at the cost of petrol and will sacrifice what their   
dollar can buy for location," he says. "So they won't buy a brand new   
22-square house in the outer suburbs but a 40-year old, 16-square home   
in the middle suburbs, close to transport."   
   
For Newman, the salvation of the city lies in the creation of dense   
nodes within the existing urban fabric, linked by public transport and   
with the provision for living, working, shopping and recreation. "It's   
what the planning strategies have all been saying for some time. But it   
has now become critical," he says.   
   
However, one US writer on urban issues, James Kunstler, has a far more   
apocalyptic vision of the way life and the urban fabric will change in   
the post-petrol world.   
   
"All indications are that American life will have to be reconstituted   
along the lines of traditional towns, villages and cities much reduced   
in current scale," he told New Yorkers in January.   
   
"I am not optimistic about most of our big cities. Any mega-structure,   
whether it is a skyscraper or a landscraper - buildings that depend on   
huge amounts of natural gas and electricity - may not be usable in a   
decade or two."   
   
Kunstler believes Wal-Mart is doomed and local agriculture the way of   
the future. "We are going to have to reorganise everyday commerce in   
this nation from the ground up. The whole system of continental-scale   
big-box discount and chain-store shopping is headed for extinction and   
sooner than you think.   
   
"The land development industry as we know it is going to vanish ... The   
production home builders, as they like to call themselves, the strip   
mall developers, the fried-food shack developers, say goodbye to all   
that."   
   
For Kunstler, that might be a better world.  
  
   
   
Alex 
O4O4873828 
 
ACT Peak Oil discussion list 
http://act-peakoil.org