Parts of that Shire are now blackened by the bushfires. Will opinions change now?

your chip is so big it’s precluding your ability to make or read a rational argument

As I said above, there are some new suburbs that are extremely well designed, but many of their impressive new features are sadly mitigated by the expansive house size that has become the norm. They also still make up the minority of suburbs, as flying over Melbourne rather graphically illustrates. There’s a reason it’s still used as a case study of bad urban/suburban planning.

Methinks you just don’t like losing an argument -which is my rudeness in response to your rude ‘whatever’.

One of the more interesting phenomneons to me is that while Australians have traditionally cited space as a reason for living in the suburbs – one’s own back yard for the kids to play etc.

One big problem is that block sizes are also shrinking, so whilst part of it is due to increasingly large house footprints, there’s also a lot less land to put them on. When looking for a block last year to build on with a decent amount of yard space we were competing against people who want to subdivide and put two (or three) houses where there is currently only one. The density is so high in some suburbs that people might as well just live in townhouses. In Canberra the government are selling new blocks of lands that are as small as 300m2.

Although I do agree that low density suburbs are not conducive to good public transport – not only does it cost a lot, but the services are never going to run often enough to be convenient. The park and ride model (drive to nearest public transport hub) works quite well though.

HOUSING CAPACITY AND UTILISATION

Commensurate with their reduced housing capacity, the average number of residents per dwelling was lower in high-rise units (1.8) than in separate houses (2.8). On balance, the housing capacity of high-rise units tended to be more fully utilised, with spare bedrooms more likely to be found in separate houses. In 2001, there was an average of one person per bedroom in high-rise units compared with the equivalent of four persons for every five bedrooms in separate houses.

IOW, on average stand-alone ‘burb’ houses have more room which is underutilised, otherwise known as wasted space.

And as someone who’s studied demography & transport in my geog degree, the design of the suburbs is huge part of the reason why public transport isn’t readily available, and where it is, is expensive. The expansive model of suburban development in Australia is highly inefficient both in terms of taking up way too much land (including contributing to the loss of prime agricultural land), far too dispersed to allow for effective (particularly cost effective) public transport, and is very much designed around the car and the desire for a ‘quatre acre block of one’s own’.

One of the more interesting phenomneons to me is that while Australians have traditionally cited space as a reason for living in the suburbs – one’s own back yard for the kids to play etc. – in fact house sizes have expanded so markedly that the dwelling now often takes up pretty much the whole land lot. It’s hard not to link this to the increase in sedentary activites which now mean we build the kids a massive rumpus room to house the X-box & large screen tv for gaming, rather than an outdoor area for playing. Our suburbs are on the whole not well designed for social and individual well-being. In the book “Slow” there’s a great chapter on a growing movement to make suburbs more liveable, including putting proper footpaths, green areas etc. back in. I see it happening in some areas of Australia, but even flying over Melbourne lets you see that it’s going to take a lot of retro-fitting.