People will still starve in poor countries but the number is independent to the number of people dying of AIDS.

Its hard to stop people having babies when you are considered rich if you have many children in that culture.

I don’t think it’s so much as being seen as rich as it is hoping againt hope one of your kids becomes a doctor and provides for the entire family. How many overseas students from India and what not send most of the money they make back home?

More kids = more chances of one of them making a decent income overseas or locally and providing a pension for the parents.

not a nice thing to think about.

its hard to stop people having babies when you are considered rich if you have many children in that culture. doesn’t matter if they are all starving.

the writer postulates that it is economic development that is the contributing factor in decreasing fertility rates and population sizes.

This one’s a bit hit and miss. Here in Taiwan you’ve got a crazy national work ethic and consequently the lowest birth rate in the world.

Then a couple of hundred km away you have China which has a similar worth ethic and the world’s largest population.

I think it’s all very well for the developed world to have controlled populations but the real problem is poor people living in crap countries and breeding themselves silly. They then all want a piece of the good life pie and that slice gets smaller for the rest of us.

I suppose it then becomes a question of if we understand the relationship between population size and quality of life, do we sacrifice it for people who don’t know any better and/or simply don’t care.

Unsustainable population will quickly outdo even the best of urban planning as urban planning simply can’t keep up with out of control birthrates.

I read an article somewhere (I’m sorry, I cannot remember which magazine for the life of me), in which the writer postulates that it is economic development that is the contributing factor in decreasing fertility rates and population sizes. He/she used developed countries (North America, Europe and the Far East) as examples.

Food for thought, because this implies that if we concentrate on global economic development, global population growth should follow that of today’s developed countries.

Of course, we’re talking about urban planning here, so talk of unsustainable populations is a different matter (related but different).

Yet our politicians seem oblivious to the fact and appear to have consulted nobody but the building industry on consultation of whether or not any of this sprawl is sustainable.

America did the sprawl on the back of a resource and economy boom. Australia is continuing to implement it on the back of a flourish resource export industry that will one day be in decline.

What then?

330 people die in a train that caught fire, government couldn’t find a culprit and wrote it off, gave approximately 200-500 USD in compensation to the families affected and moved on. A ferry sinks, killing approximately 3000 people, government prosecutes the owner for failure to safely operate the ferry and keep it maintained, guy gets off scot free. There is no value for human life in countries that are too poor to care, a definition that will quickly apply to all countries.

The world cannot handle the 12 billion people we’re estimated to have by 2050. The sooner humans realise they are to this planet what the bubonic plague is to us and begin to limit their expansion for fear of killing their one and only host, the sooner we can get things under control.

Seriously, people need to stop wining about their commutes.

This was one of my pet hates at a previous job. I swear every morning the conversation would be

‘oh man the traffic just keeps getting worse and worse. Took x hours to get here this morning!’

‘I know it’s bloody ridiculous. I live in (some suburb I’ve never even heard of) and the roads are chaos!’

‘Oh that’s a nice suburb. My sister in law was thinking of buying a house there next year. It’s so peaceful and quiet.’

‘Yes it’s a wonderful place to live. She should really consider it. We just moved in last year and are absolutely loving the country lifestyle!’

Oz, this isn’t Asia as much as we wish it was people will take things for granted and we can’t get our shit together.

Some Taiwanese aren’t much better. One of my first experience with Taiwan commuter culture was the guy that told me he even used his scooter to go down to the local 7-11.

The local 7-11 being roughly 50m down the road.

When I asked him why he said because walking was too slow.

The “reason” behind this expansion and how it’s a “transport oriented development” is that the Victorian Government is pushing for the Regional Rail Link for the Western expansion.

Is the regional rail link going to link the outer fringes or actually have provide an additional route to the useful areas of Melbourne?

If the regional rail link serves only to link the outer fringes, that’s hardly going to inspire people to move there. What kind of incentive is being able to travel from one frustratingly isolated suburb to another with ease?

i too enjoy my day commute. but if it was through a city i’d probably hate it.

Seriously, try riding your bike from ringwood (20-25. When we’ll see who has the longer commute.

The biggest diffrence between them and Me is that I enjoy mine, and they are likley to hate theirs.

Oz, this isn’t Asia as much as we wish it was people will take things for granted and we can’t get our shit together. This is the nature of “white” australia.

Oh oz, you just be hatin’

AK: Anyway, the reason I enjoy horizontal sprawl, is simply because I used to live in Cairo. Cairo is a city with approximately 25 million people living in it while being the size of Sydney, give or take.

Expansion there is consistantly vertical, so you have towers upon towers everywhere, with everything from residential apartments to shopping centres to businesses. All that seems alright so far, but then you’re faced with the problems it creates. When population is condensed to 15 thousand people per square kilometre, as opposed to 2 thousand people for Sydney, shit happens.

AK, I’ll quote Prof Al Bartlett, who quotes an interview with Isaac Asimov:

Bill Moyers interviewed Isaac Asimov. He asked Asimov, “What happens to the idea of the dignity of the human species if this population growth continues?” and Asimov says, “It’ll be completely destroyed. I like to use what I call my bathroom metaphor. If two people live in an apartment, and there are two bathrooms, then they both have freedom of the bathroom. You can go to the bathroom anytime you want, stay as long as you want, for whatever you need. And everyone believes in freedom of the bathroom. It should be right there in the constitution. But if you have twenty people in the apartment and two bathrooms, then no matter how much every person believes in freedom of the bathroom, there’s no such thing. You have to set up times for each person, you have to bang on the door, ‘Aren’t you through yet?’ and so on.”

And Asimov concluded with one of the most profound observations I’ve seen in years. He said, “In the same way, democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive overpopulation. Convenience and decency cannot survive overpopulation. As you put more and more people into the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears.

It doesn’t matter if someone dies, the more people there are, the less one individual matters.”

Ironically, it seems quite easy to think that VLINE services that corridor very frequently.

Also, Northern Expansion is to be served by… *drum rolls*, SOUTH MORANG.

Forgetting that it’s also only one station out beyond the existing line with several suburbs already developing behind it.

if the population is to get denser we will need to use buses and even subways because the roads will become too congested for even the buses. but it seems most people are ether ‘too good’ for public transport or the public transport is too unreliable.

then there is the water issue, there is not enough. but recycled water is unsanitary. on the plus side if we build up and have no gardens we wont have to water them.

our current health care system wont cope with more people.

for some reason we seem to treat new inventions as worthless gimmicks. like the recent ceramic fuel cell that had to go to Germany to get any recognition.

lastly youth, crime and education. Kevin Rudd did a great thing for education trying to get every student access to a computer and the start of the NBN. but it seems some people are trying to pocket there share. and everything is costing more than it should. students dont care about there education anymore, well at least very few do. crime is on the increase but just putting more police in the area like they have in my area isn’t gonna stop crime. its gonna take a whole new mind set.

Melbourne and Sydney are a long way of reaching 20+ million status yet look at the bloody size of the cities!

First step is crushing the a ‘house and land package’ is the great Aussie dream mentality.

Incedentally police in Taiwan carry what look like m16 machine guns when doing simple things like roadside breathtesting. It’s hardly an indication of the crime level given Taiwan’s is quite low (walking around here is perfectly safe regardless of where you live). I think it’s more of a deterrent than anything.

Unfortunately the housing industry in Australia is the classic “too big to fail” phenomena – no government can afford to burst the housing bubble or upset the construction industry.

One day it’ll have to change. I just fear the how and then when…

Anyway, the reason I enjoy horizontal sprawl, is simply because I used to live in Cairo. Cairo is a city with approximately 25 million people living in it while being the size of Sydney, give or take. Expansion there is consistantly vertical, so you have towers upon towers everywhere, with everything from residential apartments to shopping centres to businesses.

All that seems alright so far, but then you’re faced with the problems it creates. When population is condensed to 15 thousand people per square kilometre, as opposed to 2 thousand people for Sydney, shit happens.

No matter how much infrastructure you throw at such a high condensation of people, it’s not enough. If every 2 people have a car between them, that’s 7500 cars trying to drive out of the same area every morning, and come back and park in the same area at night, provided they even have parking spaces available.

The rich areas get all the attention, because well, you’re stuffing 15 thousand influential rich people in the same area, of course they’ll squeak much louder than the poorer areas, and normally get the grease.

The biggest problem with that sort of condensation is that it creates slums. Certain areas in Cairo makes Melbourne’s wastelands seem like the happiest place on Earth.

To put it quite simply, I could name several large sized neighbourhoods where policemen can’t even enter them, much less bring law and order to them, and while I imagine certain places in all cities might be bad, can’t be as bad as that. Oh, as a final note, please keep in mind that policemen in Cairo carry machine guns, not capsicum spray and a battery operated taser

We have three CBD’s, Perth, Fremantle and Rockingham, All of these are cities in their own right, but there are houses occupying every bit of land in between

Yeah this is something that needs to be sorely addressed in Melbourne and Sydney (particularly Melbourne). Here in Taiwan they’ve got standalone cities everywhere that run on their own and act as business hubs. Additionally they’ve then got 3 large cities (Taipei, Taichung and Khaoshiung) which act as major CBD districts but are also self contained with residential housing integrated in them.

Admittedly Taiwan’s population is the whole of Australia living in the size of Victoria but still, planning wise it’s much better then a single CBD setup.

Until we fix this as long as the population keeps growing we’re just going to continue to have problems, and expanding horizontally isn’t going to fix anything. It’s not like the CBD is getting any bigger.

@lemmiwinks

Thanks for those, I’ll add them to my to-watch list.

The Perth CBD is for business only really and is pretty much dead at night. Freo and Northbridge are the places to go.