Speaker
Description
If recent policy announcements are to be believed, Sydney and Melbourne, Australia’s two largest cities, appear destined for major disruptions driven by two headline policies being implemented in the third decade of the 21st century: transit-oriented development (TOD) and local living policies in the form of 15- and 20-minute neighbourhoods. These policies share complementary aims of reducing reliance on cars by creating mobility environments conducive to active and public transport. What interests us in this paper is whether they can overcome their inherently contradictory agendas: TOD seeks to cluster housing and non-residential uses around a limited number of railway stations and tram corridors; 15- and 20-minute neighbourhoods seek to provide access to daily living needs, including public transport, everywhere. However, Australian cities are among some of the world’s most dispersed and car-dependent, creating enormous tensions between the aspirations of these policies have largely been imported from North America, which often gesture towards the desire for a more European urbanism, inflected by the recent discursive capture by ‘x-minute cities’ premised on travel time of much older planning concepts.
TOD policy in the Australian State of NSW, of which Sydney is the capital, aims to accommodate 74% of the state’s housing target within the former ‘6 Cities Region’ within 45 rail station-based precincts over the next 15 years; Victoria is aiming to accommodate 23% of new dwellings projected for its capital, Greater Melbourne within 50 rail and tram-based activity centres. Both states’ local living policies have the ambition that everyone should be able to live in a 15- or 20-minute neighbourhood. These cities’ populations are well over five million each and are projected to almost double by 2050 to over 9 million.
Our analysis is twofold: Using SNAMUTS (Spatial Network Analysis for Multi-modal Urban Transit Systems) we seek to understand the trajectory of residential and other forms of urban intensification relative to accessibility by public transport in Sydney and Melbourne in the last decade. We then compare this analysis with the distribution and accessibility of core non-residential uses required for 15- and 20-minute neighbourhoods (retail, open space, schools and transit stops). From these two analyses of the spatial distributions of housing, amenities and mobility, we speculate on their future trajectories under current policy settings, in the context of the kind of mode shift that should accompany Australia’s commitments to Net Zero by 2050.
Some conundrums appear as these speculations are developed: TOD (as implemented in Australia) is increasingly premised on the relative scarcity of high levels of transit network accessibility. Under such settings, what sort of land use and urban design policies might support the kinds of mode shift towards levels that would justify their recognition as ‘Transit Oriented’ urbanism, i.e. greater than 50 per cent public transport use? At the same time, what kind of transport, land use and urban design policies might support transitions so that the entire populations of Sydney and Melbourne can indeed choose to live in metropolitan areas comprised entirely of 15- or 20-minute neighbourhoods? What can we learn from these speculations when we trace them back to the emergent urbanisms that we encounter in the current Sydney and Melbourne? What transformations will planners (and planning systems) need to undergo to facilitate the actual urban transformations that these core policies aspire to?
| Keywords | TOD; local living; accessibility; land use integration; sustainable transition |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
