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What do you think of Australia building a new city?

61K views 400 replies 108 participants last post by  falchoon 
#1 ·
I recently read an article...

http://www.theage.com.au/national/a...ty-to-cope-with-population-20100125-muho.html

... that said Australia needed to plan a new, Dubai-like city to cope with population growth. It got me thinking and doing some research.

So, lets look at the USA: it has 343 cities with over 100,000 people, and 51 of which have over 1 million. Australia has 18 cities with over 100,000 people, 5 of which have over 1 million. And I know that there is a big population difference between Australia and America, but consider that Sydney and Melbourne already have over 4 million people.

And Australia's population is supposed to double by 2030, so that would mean Sydney and Melbourne would grow to just under 10 million. And, if all cities grow evenly, this would mean only two cities would grow to over 1 million: Newcastle and the Gold Coast. And Australia is one of the fastest-growing nations in in the world, so if we had a population of 100 million, as we will soon, Sydney and Melbourne will have populations of over 20 million. And considering how polluted, clogged, sprawling, and chaotic both cities are, there is no way we can support that, unless they want to end up like Bangkok.

And a new city, if planned correctly and sustainably, could easily take all that if we have the resources, brains and money. It would take a huge load off Sydney and Melbourne, who would then be able to fix themselves up, as they can't now as they're barely getting by to cope with their massive growth rates.

The article says a new city on the north-west coast, around Karratha, should be built. Maybe, but I did some maths, and we'd probably need 3 new cities. If I was in power of this, I'd build one where the article says, on the north-west coast, one in inland north NSW, and one of the west coast of Cape York.

One thing cannot be denied, and that is that, currently, Sydney and Melbourne cannot support their growth rates and are already overcrowded.

So what do you think? Australia can't keep going like this, that's for sure...
 
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#4 ·
I don't quite understand why its suggested that a new city is necessary or desirable, or how a city started from scratch could gain enough critical mass to absorb a significant proportion of population growth. Maybe I should read up more on the history of Canberra, but would a new city really work? If we want to shift population growth away from the major cities, then wouldn't it be better to promote growth of existing large towns. For example Darwin and Townsville, which could and should be much bigger, and already have good population growth. They're like new cities where half the work is already done.

I'm gunna leave it here. It's threads like this that are on topic, but don't really fit well into any of our on topic forums. I'm assuming they'll be skyscrapers in the new city? :)
 
#3 ·
Probably would have been best in News and Weather, but a mod can move it there.

Personally, I'm against the creation of new cities. When we start pressing 100+ million people, maybe, but now I would prefer globally relevant large, cosmopolitan cities.. you can't just 'create' a city and expect people to move there - there has to be some pull...
 
#5 ·
Australia does not need to plan and build any new cities from scratch. Our capitals should keep developing but we should also promote density and growth in our regional cities. In Victoria alone we have Geelong, Ballarat, Bendigo, Wodonga, etc... which could easily be developed to sustain a larger population. I also think one of the cities in Gippsland should be developed.
 
#26 ·
A country does not just "build" new cities - unless it is a centrally planned nation like China. Australia is a free market country with a free economy. They government cant just magically decide to "build" a whole city, and then force people into it. Look at some of the huge ghost cities that the government in china built. One example is the city of Ordos. Huge monuments, statues, museums, and art gallery - and no people. It just does not work that way. Particularly in a free market country. "We" cannot and will never just artificially decide to "build" a new city from scratch. If that is what the market and the people want, such things will evolve over time as they have in the past - on outskirts of cities or near resources or wherever. Also we have so many existing smaller towns ie Townsville for example which are around 200 000 - would be more likely for these to go on growing.
 
#7 ·
What are you talking about? Planned cities have been built all over the world (usually unsuccessfully), and the government builds the transport and utilities networks for them. You don't "force" people to live there though, just provide them with the opportunity to do so.

A new city would only work if there was an economic reason for it's existence. Otherwise we should just concentrate on building up our existing smaller cities.
 
#8 ·
It'd probably be easier in infrastructure to further develop larger towns but since most of Australia's population lives in South-East Australia and there is little ability to greatly expand agricultural production means that we will have reduce exporting of food on the east coast to cope with the growth. Would be easier to build a new town where there is a further opportunity to expand agriculture. Anyway a boom town from scratch has a chance of a super-tall, an older town has none.
 
#9 ·
Development of existing regional cities is far easier than trying to start from scratch. In Victoria alone, the continued development of Bendigo, Ballarat, Latrobe Valley and Geelong is a great step forward.

Overall though, in a Victorian context, people are still choosing to settle in the Melbourne region by a far greater amount. A city can not just shut up shop, and say to go to other locations in the state, as they will likely just head to another state instead. Remembering that Sydney tried that kind of strategy for a while, and is still suffering because of it.

The only thing a state can do is try and foster growth of business opportunities in regional areas to drive growth.
 
#10 ·
I think Masdar in the UAE is a really interesting planned city, focused upon sustainability, R&D and education. I wonder if in the future, small planned cities like this might be a way of ensuring that new standards of energy efficiency and design can be met.

I also think that Australia should really focus upon decentralising our population centres, and that future growth should be directed towards the North, where there is substantially more water to support large urban centres. I just don't think the South-East can sustain many more people unless we radically change the way we consume water and natural resources. I know that population growth tends to happen organically, however Darwin has the natural resources to comfortably support a city the size of Sydney. I love the idea of Australia having a steamy, tropical metropolis in the Northern Territory.
 
#12 ·
I think Masdar in the UAE is a really interesting planned city, focused upon sustainability, R&D and education. I wonder if in the future, small planned cities like this might be a way of ensuring that new standards of energy efficiency and design can be met.
Interesting idea, but would be a huge investment to make.

I also think that Australia should really focus upon decentralising our population centres, and that future growth should be directed towards the North, where there is substantially more water to support large urban centres. I just don't think the South-East can sustain many more people unless we radically change the way we consume water and natural resources. I know that population growth tends to happen organically, however Darwin has the natural resources to comfortably support a city the size of Sydney. I love the idea of Australia having a steamy, tropical metropolis in the Northern Territory.
Im sure the insurance companies will love the thoughts of that.. not. Nothern Australia is cyclone territory, which doesnt really sit well with placing very big cities there.

Nazor, there may be strong reasons for a city in northern WA, but there is a need to diversify the economy up there, which will take time and big investments/incentives to help facilitate it. The added infrastructure would also likely be quite expensive to help get that idea to work. The idea may be great, ut reality may be a totally different equation..
 
#13 ·
I don't think building a new big city is any good, i think making towns that are in a good position bigger Eg: Broome, Townsville, Hobart and other coastal cities.

I have heard some talking about new australian states, Far North Queensland (where Townsville is the capital and major port) and North West Australia (broome is capital and major port) new England (North East part of NSW, Port Macquarie major port and Coffs harbour or tweeds heads capital. ) We should make existing cities larger by population and financial.

More information on this wikipedia article, don't know how reliable it is though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Australian_states
 
#17 · (Edited)
We don't have a large population, our cities need every person they can get to be competitive as world cities. We just need to be better at handling growth and be more willing to increase density.
Also to call Sydney and Melbourne overcrowded is a bit ridiculous, have you never seen Tokyo or Hong Kong? Or New York or London?
 
#19 ·
Also to call Sydney and Melbourne overcrowded is a bit ridiculous, have you never seen Tokyo or Hong Kong? Or New York or London?
Of course Sydney and Melbourne aren't overcrowded. They just cannot cope with their population growths.

* Tokyo and New York - These cities are much denser than Sydney or Melbourne, and because of that, they can cope. And they are planned and built to cope with large populations.
* Hong Kong and London - You're looking at Sydney and Melbourne's future. Dirty, congested, polluted, low standards of living...


And to everyone, consider if it is really very sustainable to have 2 cities nearing 5 million, but only 18 'cities' in the whole nation, especially when there is all these MASSIVE amounts of space? Too much is wasted :eek:hno:.
 
#18 ·
They should also make a new country in inner city sydney, only Nimby's will be allowed to live there and any structure over half a meter will be banned. The only legal paint will be green and any form of currency or bartering will be punished by death. Luckily within a few years it will die out and the price of annexation will be very tall buildings. These tall buildings will constitute a city in themselves and so all our population problems are over. The same thing can happen in other cities although I still think NW WA should have a massive new city.
 
#20 ·
Melbourne could handle such a large population well with it's wide streets of a grid layout, Melbourne has a good potential to evolve into a Chicago sized city. Sydney might have more difficulties and be more like London yes, but I disagree that London is so awful. ;)

And to everyone, consider if it is really very sustainable to have 2 cities nearing 5 million, but only 18 'cities' in the whole nation, especially when there is all these MASSIVE amounts of space? Too much is wasted
You call it wasted space, I call it preserving nature.
 
#23 ·
I don't think we need to build a new city. But we should do more to stimulate population growth in regional centres. There are plenty of regional centres that could take on lots of new people, and at least they already have the bare bones (if not more) of an infrastructure. Places like Townsville, Ballarat, Bendigo, Toowoomba should be a lot bigger.
 
#24 ·
but consider that Sydney and Melbourne already have over 4 million people.
I am wondering where is the boundary of these 4m people, is the resident of Strathfield counted, what about Parramatta and Liverpool? What about Campeltown?


And Australia's population is supposed to double by 2030, so that would mean Sydney and Melbourne would grow to just under 10 million.
I believe, it will most likely more then 10m.

And, if all cities grow evenly, this would mean only two cities would grow to over 1 million: Newcastle and the Gold Coast. And Australia is one of the fastest-growing nations in in the world,
Are we really the fastest growing nations in the world?

so if we had a population of 100 million, as we will soon, Sydney and Melbourne will have populations of over 20 million. And considering how polluted, clogged, sprawling, and chaotic both cities are, there is no way we can support that, unless they want to end up like Bangkok.
If the city can not support the population, then it will not grow to 20m.

But why can't can't it support, majority of the city is still only medium density, short building, majority of the outer Sydney is low density, we will just have to continue to expand the city center.


One thing cannot be denied, and that is that, currently, Sydney and Melbourne cannot support their growth rates and are already overcrowded.
It is not overcrowded, its infrastruture has not keep up with population growth.

So what do you think? Australia can't keep going like this, that's for sure...
this is why a lot of Australian doesn't want population growth.
 
#25 ·
With the population growth, won't people move to the capitals, and then once the capitals/major cities start to become stressed people just start to move outwards. Like mandurah, busselton, albany, bunbury, geraldton. for example in WA.

Because in Perth its massively spread out, and crap all density, so people will keep moving out, till either they are too far away from the CBD, and need to come back closer to get the work efficiently, or there basically isn't any more land, which we won't have that problem. Where then the mid-rises will then take over from the CBD outwards in all directions again like suburbia did.

I believe we have the room in most our major cities, we just need to boost the infrastructure, no point spending $100 trillion dollars on a new dubai like city which is utterly pointless, when we can increase the major cities populations as well as slowly increase the smaller cities around it who benefit from the major cities anyway.

I read somewhere that they were planning on moving all the major military bases to North-West Australia, to protect the natural resources from China.
It was on Perth Now donno if anyone saw it.

But if that were to happen, that would mean a major boost for the North-West economy, and that would stimulate a massive population growth.
 
#30 ·
as much as id love to see a new city i don't think we really need one (at the moment), and rather than building a new one they could simple expand cities such as Perth and Adelaide, both of which are either currently, or are set to go through massive economical booms.
 
#32 ·
While I think cities like Darwin, Townsville, Hobart should be built up more as clearly the likes of Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney are not coping... but I think we should build up the regional towns/cities between the Melbourne - Sydney - Brisbane corridor?

Newcastle as an example is two hours north of Sydney. It's population is 500,000 - why can't a city like Newcastle be home to 1-2 million, with the right planning and infrastructure.

The Gold Coast is another example which is currently spilling into northern NSW... this city is currently the 6th largest in the country and largest non-capital city.

Albury-Wodonga - is this large regional town capable of becoming a larger city with 500,000 people?
 
#34 ·
I'm not adverse to creating new cities.

For instance, in VIC:

Bendigo. Bendigo Bendigo Bendigo!@!@!!!

To the west of the current city is pretty much flat farmland (If the country is exporting food, we've god a surplus of food and farms), flat and the existing corridors (road/rail) can easily expanded to cater for the infrastructure needed to build a "New Bendigo". given there's ~100k people already there, plus its incredibly diverse economy for such a small regional city, you've got the seed for further growth.

Lake Eppaloch serves as a major irrigation catchment and water supply for Bendigo as is: water can be diverted from irrigation into service the new city. The Bendigo rail line would need upgrades from the current 160kph/RFR standard with a few more deviations - like a new corridor along the Calder Freeway from Diggers Rest to Gisborne (to avoid Sunbury), re-duplicate the tracks and upgrade them to 200kph line speeds - (current) Bendigo would be within an hour of Melbourne, "new" Bendigo 1h20m. The west of Bendigo gets a lot of sunshine - huge scope for a solar farm to power the place. The plain the new city would sit on would have the space to fit a new domestic airport for the city (flights to Adelaide/Sydney/Canberra/Brisbane/Gold Coast/Perth).

I reckon 500k, no problems - given that Vic is growing anywhere between 70-90k p/a in the long term, 50k for Melbourne, the rest for the regions.

Yeah it would take a lot of political will, but a major regional city to the west of Bendigo, could be a real goer.

Same could be done with Ballarat really, and join up Moe, Morwell and Traralgon in the La Trobe valley and entice new industries down there when the Red Barrens' new carbon tax puts pressure on the coal electricity generation (the Valley's main source of employment).

over 30 years:

New Bendigo + Bendigo ~600-700k
New Ballarat + Ballarat ~400k
Geelong ~500-600k

all three cities are perfectly located to leverage off Melbourne's growth.

And the difference between now and a new massive masterplanned city and Canberra (and Brasillia for a 60s example) would be completely different - imagine if Melbourne planning principles from the 2010s created a whole new city from scratch? Yes Please!
 
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