5. The Expanding Urban Fringe: Impacts on Peri-urban Areas, Melbourne, Australia

The resources of peripheral urban areas are under unprecedented threat because of the rapid conversion of rural land for urban purposes. Yet these resources offer significant long-term advantages to cities by increasing their resilience in times of rapid change. Cities which retain the values of their hinterlands may be those which survive best this century. The fate of the peri-urban area of Melbourne, Australia, and associated decision making processes, provide a case study of the pressures on peri-urban regions and the common inadequacy of government responses. Australian cities are characterised by two co-existing city types. Dense, nineteenth century mixed use inner urban areas characteristic of European cities are becoming denser. Yet new outer urban development continues the detached housing model and separated land uses typical of North America and adopted in Australia early in the twentieth century at some of the world’s lowest housing and population densities. Spatial difference is matched to social inequity. Higher income, tertiary educated, professionally employed households are concentrated in service rich inner and middle ring suburbs and selected outer urban areas, while lower income households without tertiary qualifications are concentrated primarily in service poor outer urban areas. Australian cities consume land at one of the world’s highest per capita rates, continually transforming nearby rural areas with high natural resource values to urban uses. These cities also affect broader non-urban areas. People are attracted to semi-rural lifestyles within commuting distance of metropolitan areas. Unless governments intervene, land is subdivided into rural-residential lots and agricultural pursuits relocate further from cities. Tourism and recreational developments are constructed on rural land and a range of other urban related land uses gradually emerge until the rural nature of these areas is irrevocably altered. Every Australian capital city adopted a metropolitan strategic spatial plan after 2000 which attempted to limit further outer growth into urban hinterlands through a range of urban containment policies. However, none of these plans succeeded in containing the urban sprawl or in radically changing the dominant model of outer urban development from detached housing with little variation in lot size or house types, large average lot sizes and separated land uses. Every State strategic plan has been substantially modified or abandoned. This chapter describes the impacts of metropolitan centres on peripheral urban areas, examines development pressures on these areas, why they are important to cities and why Australian cities continue to spread despite stated policies to the contrary. The city of Melbourne, Australia, is used as a case study, but broader conclusions are drawn for other cities.