What ever happened to (Australian) urbanism?

Endorsing density and crying crocodile tears over sprawl is routine in Australian planning. Infrastructure Australia’s (IA) recent white paper Future Cities: Planning for Growing Population (February 2018) isn’t too different. It models the impact of an additional 2.4 million people in Sydney and an additional 2.7 million in Melbourne by 2046 across three scenarios:

1) expanded low density, 2) centralized high density and 3) rebalanced mid density. To put these scenarios into the vernacular, you could call them the Nimby, the Yuppie and the TOD (transit-oriented development).

Taken as a whole, the policy settings for Australian cities average out to around 60 percent infill and 40 percent greenfield. But when you run the population numbers through these infill targets and focus on the designated TODs for each Australian