[Peakoil] AFR: Canberra threatened

[Mike Hettinger]

Makes the GDE that much more of a folly.


> 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
>
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