Community is key for developments on the fringe
As Melbourne’s urban fringe expands, the distance between where people live and the vital amenities they require grows with it. Developing Melbourne’s outskirts must be about developing thriving communities, and a balanced approach to housing, infrastructure, transport and community centres to accommodate the city’s growing population is critical.
Establishing project viability before designing new estates is crucial. Planners often do not give enough consideration to developing and sustaining both a sense of, and the reality of, community.
A lot of Melbourne’s urban expansion areas are more than 20 kilometres from the GPO. But instead of great viable swathes of land, many of the farm allotments being bought up for development are on a scale that is unviable. Empty paddocks are prime territory for developers, but a patchwork of 20- to 50-hectare parcels of land on Melbourne’s outskirts creates a fragmented arrangement.
Our growing population and the Australian dream of home ownership are driving the city’s expansion. And critical to the viability of these new communities is the basic infrastructure that will support them – roads, rail, community centres, sporting facilities and jobs. To make these outer land areas workable, places where people really want to live, the community infrastructure needs to be sold in early.
Affordability is a major driver in our city’s expansion, with the reality of home ownership increasingly unattainable for families overwhelmed by inner-city prices. Along with affordability, we must advocate for diverse housing. Melburnians want to choose from a greater range of housing types. We don’t all have the same needs, and there is a shortage of semi-detached houses and apartments in Melbourne’s outer areas that must be addressed.
We need accommodation for all types of people, including social housing, in the growth areas, and secondly, we must assist vital emergency services in strategic land identification, including developing sites, and locating future potential infrastructure.
When we talk about building homes on Melbourne’s outskirts, what we should be talking about is creating communities. Lack of robust community is the reason for dysfunction on urban fringe developments. Government, council and developers wrongly assume that everybody wants the same thing. People live in developing areas of the urban fringe because of affordability issues, but for others, there’s choice involved, there’s the attraction of green space and a large backyard, there’s the attraction of having family close by.
The question about these developments should be: what infrastructure with community in mind has been implemented? Although improvement in infrastructure is one thing, if it isn’t connected by quality transport and good roads, another raft of issues emerges. Some of Melbourne’s new estates do not have a train station within walking distance, or even any plans for a viable public transport link to the CBD. Lack of infrastructure and transport encourages car dependency, and in many instances, relying on a car is not a lifestyle choice.
While some speculators have done very well from Melbourne’s growth areas, with expansion comes a growing uneasiness about Melbourne’s ability to sustain these new communities. Residents and councils are worried about the basics: the inability of roads and other infrastructure to cope as new residents face long journeys to work because there are not enough local jobs. This is something that should concern us all.
Developers, government, council and landowners must tune into the community imperative in order for urban fringe developments to thrive. In the future, people may well pay more to live in a solid community, and with it, enjoy the benefits of varied cultural components and diversity that is presently given so little consideration.
Planned expansion is the only way forward, where a balance between the sometimes competing interests of developers, landowners, government and councils are brought to the table for workable solutions. The future of our city’s growth areas relies on our ability, Whether or not we are advocates of such expansion, to accommodate more people, different households, diverse housing types, better-planned neighbourhoods and the vital infrastructure required to sustain it.
Gerard Coutts is a property strategist and director of Gerard Coutts & Associates
