An outsider's view of climate change, adaptation, and science policy in Australia.
Showing posts with label growth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label growth. Show all posts
Monday, November 23, 2009
Density, Sustainability, and Urban Transport
Continuing on the theme of yesterday's post about Melbourne/Australia's growth debate:
Paul Mees, of RMIT has an interesting column in today's paper, in which he calls into question some common assumptions about the relationship between density and public transport, and its implications for sustainability. Mees has applied a more informative density calculation to compare cities, taking into account only "urbanized" land, rather than total land. The result is that a city like Los Angeles turns out to have much higher density than many believe, while New York, which includes the normally forgotten outer Boroughs, has a much lower density than expected. Melbourne comes out somewhere near the middle.
I like Mees' conclusions, which point out that these discussions should maintain a clear focus on what we can actually do to change things in a metropolitan area:
Sunday, November 22, 2009
To Grow Or Not To Grow? That is the (wrong) question.
Last week there was a lot of coverage of issues related to immigration, population growth, and urban growth after the state planning minister said that Melbourne's urban-growth boundary urban-growth boundary will not be moved again in his lifetime. This prompted a variety of soul searching coverage from various Australian news outlets, typically bringing up a lot of worries:
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