Melbourne may have recently been voted the world’s most liveable city by The Economist, but there was a time when it was better known as Smellbourne.
In the 1880s, the gold rush saw thousands of people flock to the region to seek their fortunes. While the Yan Yean reservoir provided fresh water, the local environment struggled to keep up with human waste from the growing population, and garbage, scraps and effluent pooled in open drains and cesspits.
All this changed with the creation of the Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works in 1891 and the rapid planning and building of an underground drainage system. This ended the era of widespread diphtheria, typhoid, cholera and dysentery, not to mention the bad odours. More than a century after they opened, Melbourne’s sewage system and Western Treatment Plant in Werribee are still treating water and preventing disease.
This week, urban planning experts will converge at the Housing Affordability Summit in Sydney, and the biennial State of Australian Cities National Conference on the Gold Coast. Australia’s population is heading towards 40-odd million around mid-century, and so, among many topics, they are likely to discuss how rapid urban growth will have health implications and affect job opportunities, that some suburbs tend to make their locals fitter and some fatter, that Australia is facing a growing housing affordability crisis and serious sustainability challenges. They are also likely to talk about the rare opportunities to turn middle and inner suburban “greyfields” into thriving urban centres.
But all the ideas and policies debated will come with a price tag. Each year billions of private and public (read taxpayer) dollars are invested in infrastructure projects, large and small, from masterplans for new suburbs to small pedestrian overpasses, from major new rail routes connecting mines to ports, to the removal of suburban railway crossings.
In the past some of these dollars have been spent wisely. Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide and Perth are on the list of the world’s most liveable cities, thanks in part to sound infrastructure decisions. These include Melbourne’s arts and sports precincts, the inclusion of extensive parklands for fresh air and recreation in Colonel William Light’s plan for Adelaide, and combining rail and road on Sydney Harbour Bridge.
But some planning decisions have come back to haunt us, like Australia’s muddle of railway gauges. It took a royal commission and several decades to connect the mainland state capitals with a standard gauge.
Melbourne has not done well with level crossings either. While Sydney has five, Melbourne has over 170 intersecting the metropolitan landscape, and work is now underway to remove 50 of the most dangerous and congested. In Brisbane, the Riverside Expressway is a car-filled concrete barrier that cuts off the city and its people from the river. And the business case for the $3bn Clem Jones tunnel (Clem7) under the Brisbane river was built on overly optimistic usage estimates. The original operator RiverCity Motorway went into receivership less than a year after it opened, and it was sold in 2013 for $618m.
So how can we make the right decisions for the next century? Australia’s infrastructure sector is crying out for a more rigorous approach, and urban researchers should have the answers. The great potential of data sharing has been highlighted in the Turnbull government’s recently announced innovation statement, and urban researchers now have access to big data and the analytical tools to make sense of it through the federal government’s investment in the Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network (AURIN), one of the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) initiatives, now also with $1.5bn secured funding. And decision makers, especially those spending from the public purse, need to ask for the evidence and insist on good urban proposals backed up by data.
There are some notable examples. Prof Billie Giles-Corti at the University of Melbourne and Prof Fiona Bull at the University of Western Australia can demonstrate how improving walkability in neighbourhoods in Melbourne and Perth could increase physical activity, and help to curb obesity and type 2 diabetes rates.
Their research has shown that the overall health of residents of new housing developments improved when their daily walking increased as a result of more access to parks, public transport, shops and services, and by linking streets with pedestrian laneways. They’re calling on town planners to use online modelling tools to test a neighbourhood’s walkability, which is influenced by factors such as local services, the land use mix, transport options and the connectivity of streets and footpaths.
At the University of New South Wales, Prof Bill Randolph is mapping the affordability of housing for groups like first home buyers or the workforce of a specific industry, by considering information about where they work and what their typical incomes are.
Randolph is concerned with the growing inequality in our suburbs. Disadvantaged and poorer households are being pushed out of inner suburbs, have fewer local employment prospects than in the past and are facing longer commutes to the jobs that are available. The analysis of location-specific housing and income data will allow researchers and policymakers to unpack what is really influencing housing supply, demand and affordability.
And Prof Mark Stevenson at the University of Melbourne is using epidemiology – a research approach traditionally used to study disease epidemics – to study road safety and urban design. While most people think of road injuries or accidents as chance occurrences, Stevenson’s research suggests they are predictable at a population level. He maps incidents, locations and circumstances. Like any other disease studied by epidemiologists, patterns of where, when and why road accidents happen are emerging. These trends can be studied with a view to saving lives on our roads.
These research examples use data and analytical tools from AURIN, a national capability that provides access to economic, housing, health, industry, land use, socioeconomic, employment, and geographic data, so that the benefits and pitfalls of projects can be assessed across a broad range of perspectives.
In this era of supercomputing and big data, urban planners have vast technologies and urban research capabilities to draw on to help to create healthier, more productive and liveable cities. We don’t need to go back to the drawing board; we need to get data-savvy. And we need the big ideas for better cities tested, before the contracts are signed and the ideas set in stone.
