• Peter Newton

Image: City Lights Sydney, istockphoto

30 November 2010Australia’s cities may rate highly on global indices of liveability but we are living beyond our ecological means writes Peter Newton.

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AUSTRALIA’s cities rate highly on global indices of liveability. In the 2009 Economist Intelligence Unit’s Liveability Index , Melbourne ranked third out of 140 world cities, Perth fifth, Sydney ninth, Adelaide eleventh and Brisbane sixteenth. Indeed, the liveability of our cities is a key factor in attracting global capital and labour, as well as tourists – all highly mobile and sensitive to the proclivities of places. Australian politicians are especially keen to espouse the liveability of their cities, most recently by Bob Brown (leader of The Greens) in his address to the Melbourne Press Club when he proclaimed that  'Melbourne's lifestyle offered not only the best in Australia, ''but the whole planet''.' (The Age, 12 November 2010).

Australia’s cities, however, need to be top performers in several other areas, including economic competitiveness, productivity, social inclusion and environmental sustainability. In a forthcoming paper titled 'Liveable and sustainable? Socio-technical challenges for 21st century cities'(1), I examine the relationship between liveability and environmental sustainability for 140 world cities, where city sustainability was measured by the magnitude of per person resource consumption as reflected in the ‘ecological footprints’ of residents.

A joint ‘mapping’ of these two dimensions (as reflected in the graph above) reveals that city liveability is being achieved at the expense of ecological sustainability: that the world’s most liveable cities are acquiring and retaining their status as a result of participating in a level of resource consumption – by their built environments and their residents – that is ecologically unsustainable under current ‘business as usual’ scenarios of urban development and household resource consumption. Amongst some of the worst offenders around the world are Australia’s capital cities (highlighted in the graph). Each Australian city resident is, on average, requiring six to seven global hectares of land and water to supply all the resources needed to support their current consumption lifestyle. The global ecological footprint is less than three hectares per person on average. Consequently, if all the world’s population aspired to the built environment quality and lifestyle offered to a resident of, say, Melbourne then two and a half planet earths would be required to supply the subsequent demand on resources – as things currently stand.

A key 21st century challenge, therefore, is to find pathways – on the supply side and the demand side – capable of maintaining levels of liveability in high income countries coupled with a significant winding back of profiles of unsustainable resource consumption that characterize built environments in Australia, North America, the Emirates and Western Europe.

In my view there are three pathways to achieve liveable and sustainable cities: technological innovation, new urban planning and design paradigms, and changes in household consumption.

Firstly, technological innovation is capable of delivering new urban infrastructures for the sustainable provision of key urban resources and services. These include new ways of producing energy such as solar-electric and solar-hydrogen transitions, local renewable energy development. Improvements to water management including integrated urban water systems, city as catchment, greywater re-use, distributed water systems. And planning and housing changes such as greater emphasis on low rise medium density precinct regeneration and modular construction.(2)

Secondly, new urban planning and design paradigms can underpin a transition to more sustainable urban development such as virtual building: automated performance assessment of designs using building information models (see Technology, Design and Process Innovation in the Built Environment).  And a new development model for the regeneration of greyfield precincts in the middle suburbs of Australia’s big cities (3)

Thirdly via behaviour change of households in relation to their pattern of urban resource consumption (an article is due to be published on this topic in early 2011).

The over-arching challenge for urban transition, however, centers on current metropolitan planning systems and political-institutional structures in high income western democratic societies such as Australia, which currently appear incapable of the longer term transformational decision-making and implementation processes, that extend beyond individual electoral cycles and stakeholder groups, necessary for meeting the strategic performance objectives of cities: liveable and environmentally sustainable, as well as competitive, productive, socially inclusive and resilient. A global market awaits the development of implementable solutions to these challenges.

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Notes

1. Slides from a talk I gave on  Australian Cities: Liveable and sustainable at the Grattan Institute, 26 October 2010 , are available online: http://www.grattan.edu.au/publications/055_newton_presentation.pdf

2. For more details see Transitions: Pathways towards sustainable urban development in Australia, Peter Newton, CISRO, http://www.publish.csiro.au/pid/5854.htm

3. See Beyond greenfield  and brownfield: The challenge of regenerating Australia’s greyfield suburbs , Peter Newton, Alexandrine Press, http://www.atypon-link.com/ALEX/doi/abs/10.2148/benv.36.1.81 (Note: accessible online by subscription or pay per view)

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Professor Peter Newton is a research professor in the  Institute for Social Research at Swinburne University of Technology.