Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
[intro music]
[applause]
Good afternoon. I'd like to share an idea about our cities.
In November last year, hundreds of people turned up in Dubai to discuss what
are the big issues into the next couple of decades.
Cities did not get on to that agenda. And that worried me. Why?
Because at the moment 50% of us live in cities, 3.5 million people.
In the next 40 years that's going to rise to 70%. And that's going to be 6.4 million.
You're almost going to have to double the urban capacity,
since we started civilisation in 40 years.
That's pumping out 75% to 80% of the greenhouse gases.
Cities are the problem, and we need to find a solution to them, otherwise we're not going
to solve the problem that faces us, which is climate change.
What happened to our cities after the industrial revolution? We relied on two utopian ideas.
And one was that we could, through the modernist, simplify cities: we could rationalise them,
we could separate things out, and we created very poor living environments.
Many of these have been built, and particularly in Asia.
The other utopian idea was the garden-city movement, where somehow we could
live in the country, and we could work in the city.
If only the trains and trams in Melbourne was as uncharted as that.
This is what we built, this is how we spend much of our day.
This is the infrastructure that is resulting from this
concentration of those movements back into our city.
Big infrastructure is not only vulnerable, it's inefficient.
When, if Melbourne is to expand by another million people
(and that's what it's about to do) the politician's reactions
is that we just take another 40,000 hectares of land and sub-divide it on the fringes.
But we know that doesn't work.
If you go to Griffith University's VAMPIRE study,
what it tells us is the people on the periphery,
increasingly, are suffering from financial and social isolation.
We also know that it's inefficient in terms of our money.
It costs about 300 million dollars more over 50 years
to put a thousand houses on the fringes as it does within
the centre of the city. If you, therefore, expand Melbourne
by one million, and put half of that on the fringe,
it'll cost you 110 billion more than you have to spend.
Basically, the situation we've got is, our cities
are not efficient in the way that they're currently built.
Am I optimistic about how our cities can change? Yes I am.
Basically, in 2006 I was asked by the European Union to look at cities that transform themselves.
And I looked at 12 cities, some of them were Glasgow (after the war),
it actually decentralised its population. It was failing socially and economically.
In 1985 it started to centralise its population, and started to succeed.
Bordeaux, another strategy was to build a high quality public realm.
Trams, good spaces, good public spaces, and they brought people back to the city.
170,000 people a day climbing on to a tram system they hadn't had previously.
In Malmo, in 1985 when the shipping industry went off to Korea, it lost 40% of its work force.
What it did was build a university downtown, a bridge to Copenhagen,
and built this piece of zero urbanism, er, zero carbon urbanism.
Basically it collects it's water, it collects its own energy,
it's built to a 120 people per hectare. Feels very familiar when you walk there.
In Bogota, and I had to slip in two that weren't European, you had Enrique Penalosa.
Penalosa came into power saying he would not spend another percent on the car.
And what he did, was he built bikeways, bus-roads, parks, etc, and he dropped
the crime rate in Bogota by 85%. That's political courage.
And we've seen political courage because when Seoul held the Olympics, this is where
their stream was, and what they did is they actually took the, er, the road down,
and re-introduced the stream.
In Melbourne, we've seen the transformation of a city over the last 25 years,
and I won't go through the strategies, but there's one I would like to just share with you.
This is a transformational strategy, it's taking a piece of infrastructure
(in this case buildings) and re-using them.
At the end of the 1980's with the property crash, what happened was we put together
a program to re-use these buildings. We transformed office buildings
into residential buildings, and this is what happened:
each one of those red dots is five people, er, five dwellings.
This completely transformed the centre of Melbourne, without building very much;
just taking redundant office buildings and transferring them in the main, to residential.
What I want to talk to you about now is what I call the 7 and a half percent city.
I believe we can actually double the population of our cities, by using approximately
7 and a half percent of the land. And in doing that, we can make them better cities.
If you jump up in a helicopter and have a look at most of the cities,
and the suburban cities and, er, Australia (as part of),
you'll find railway stations and around them you'll find a concentration of activity.
You walk round that, and measure it, and in Melbourne's case it came to about
6,500 hectares. And if you then take a reasonable density over 60% of that area,
you can get 860,000 people in that without building higher than about 6 to 7 stories within those centres.
It's important that those activity centres are well connected, they're well connected by rail,
and therefore those people can get to other locations; unfortunately, also railways into the centre of the city.
But then if you look at the road-based transport systems (and I'll show you how we measured this),
it's another 3% of the area. And that's the road-based public transport system in Melbourne.
The yellow are the trams, the others are the buses.
We've got a fantastic public transport system, but under-utilised.
We then went to test the capacity of this.
We went to measure every cadastral parcel in the city, metro areas.
There's 1.5 million of those. Along the road, tram and bus routes.
We excluded any properties that were in the central city or in activity centres,
and we got that diagram you can see on the right hand side here of the selected parcels.
We then took out sensitivities within those for redevelopment. We took out parks, we took
out public use and industry - we only selected parcels where there was another form of access
so that we could get decent streets. 30 years of urban design,
design a good street, you design a good city.
Why? It's 80% of the public realm.
So we only selected where we could get alternative forms of access.
We cut out recently developed sites, we cut out heritage buildings,
and we cut out 50% of the properties in heritage overlay areas.
You can see the total down the bottom dropping: we now have 36,000 sites.
We then dropped our properties of less than 6 metres, and the total available sites at the end
of that exercise: so these are sites that we thought could be developed on,
was 34,000 or 6.6 thousand hectares.
If you then apply a density to those, and here we've applied densities of 180 to 450,
which sounds high, but let me show you what that looks like in a second, you could get a population
of up to 2.4 million people living, just adjacent, to the tram and bus routes of Melbourne.
This is what 237 people per hectare looks like.
449. And remember I said 450 so that's the maximum height you'd have to build along those areas.
This is 900, this is Vienna.
So, we can get most of this population in about 5 or 6 stories
for the first block, piece of land, along these tram and bus, bus routes.
This is what it looks like, we do arbitrary selected 4 of the areas around the centre of the city.
This is Johnson Street, it's got a bus route running through, a pretty unimpressive street.
It could possibly look like this.
This is Nicholson Street. You can see the city of Melbourne in the background there,
and you can see this expensive infrastructure which is the tram line, you can see the
under-utilised properties that are adjacent to it.
This is not unfamiliar along a lot of our tram routes, and this is what it could look like.
So you get the idea.
Maribyrnong Road, or Riversdale Road.
If you get up on Google, and have a look at some of these areas,
as a principle of how you'd do that, along the tramlines
(which I'm going to highlight in a second) you'll see the built-form
is already changing. So this isn't something new, this is something
that's actually happening on the ground as we talk.
Underneath those areas, the parcels are starting to be conglomerated.
This, the secret is not to break out of that zone. Not to in fact see the development going back
into the residential where, the character, you'd like to retain. And we've done it.
In Swanson Street, about 10, 15 year ago, we changed the height,
just one part of the planning scheme, we changed the height,
and you can see the residential that's been built on the way
up to the University, and right below and on the right hand side,
you can see it drop straight back down to about 2 or 3 stories. So it's not difficult.
It's one simple mechanism in the planning scheme.
We've actually developed a one-page planning scheme for the corridors.
Don't build higher than the width of the street, cut off angles to the back of the property, entry from
the back. So you can throw away that planning scheme like that and go down to about 1 page.
It frightens the planners.
[soft laughter]
So this is what the system of transport around Melbourne looks like,
once you've taken the train lines, the activity centres, and the bus routes,
a well distributed form of transport where you can get this happening.
Last one of 1.5 percent comes from known redevelopment sites where there are already
permits for about 200 people per hectare.
I won't go into that, but it gives you another half a million people living there.
The rest, and this is the most important thing, 90% is suburbia. We can leave that alone.
We can actually make that the new green lung of the city, which we're going to need.
So what does that look like on a model? Looks a bit like this,
here's the centre of the city, you run out those transport networks and you start to roll out
this ribbon of High Street, looks a bit like this, and the stuff in between you leave alone.
They become the new green wedges. There you encourage people
to put photovoltaics in the roof, make their back gardens productive,
collect their water, and plant more street trees.
And at the bottom of their road they've got urbanism,
with a doctor, creche, and all the other things they need.
Albert Einstein got it right:
"We can't solve the problems by using the same kind of thinking we used to create them."
We're going to have to think in a different way.
So what does that different way look like?
If we had to actually get to this Melbourne at 8 million.
Well we've just introduced in Melbourne a planning scheme
where we've identified exactly where we want the development.
So we've thrown away 200 pages of strategic planning, and we've brought it down to 28.
So if you're in the green/yellow area you're in an area of establishment
and that area will always stay exactly as it is, with minor changes.
If you're in one of these orange areas, there's already a planning scheme
(and we'll modify that slightly to make sure that we get good sustainable development).
If you're one of these red areas, we're going to make it very easy for you to develop.
So we're going to, in fact, try and fast track the planning scheme just as we fast tracked residential
in the early 1990's with post code, "3000."
This is what'll happen, this is happening at the moment, this is Elizabeth Street.
Elizabeth Street in a few years time will look like that:
they're already, about 5 permits have come through in that particular area.
And areas like this we'll recycle into industrial and mixed use,
and they'll start to look a little like this, and they'll be well
connected by the new rail link that is with the federal government's full consideration.
How do we do this thing? Well they're already doing it.
The Victorian government faced with people getting back
on the public transport system made travel to the city before 7 o'clock free.
2,600 people move before 7 o'clock.
That's saved them 5 trains (that's a hundred million), and they forwent 15 million in fees.
They saved themselves 85 million by just re-timetabling.
Can we re-timetable our cities? I believe we can.
We can be more sensible about how we use the real estate.
Here's the real estate of the road: we can get more people
into buses and trams then we can into cars, so let's just reallocate it.
So if you're driving down Nicholson Street,
5 o'clock in the night, and you're sitting in your car,
and the bus in front of you is jammed in the traffic, look at the concrete next door and say,
"Why isn't the bus running on that? Why is it not sharing the same shelter as the tram?"
It's that shift in thinking we can so easily make, and need to make.
And if we do make it and one of the criticisms of this proposal
was that we'd congest the streets, but then you look at the ABS
data and it tells you that those people who live close to public transport use fewer cars.
And we saw an example of where that can happen this afternoon.
Imagine if we gave priority of the bus system that they do in Curitiba, where we dedicate space
on the roads and the bus can actually move quickly through the traffic, and how efficient that could be.
And if we even realise that anybody who uses public transport
mostly walks for 30 minutes a day, therefore, they're getting
exercise as part of their public transport, where someone sitting
in their car driving in from the periphery, walks for less than 7%.
The cost of obesity in Australia is 58 billion a year. And this caught my eye.
[laughter].
And it was basically that apartments in 62 areas of Melbourne are selling faster than detached houses.
So we've already moved there. And why have we moved there?
Because this is what our populations do. The fastest growing sector of the population is people over 50.
And that population's going to double in the next 20 years.
And I'm over 60. I don't want to live on the fringe in a four bedroom unit or a house.
A lot of people want to live as part
of a community, and those communities are much closer to the centre of the city.
We're going to have to change the way we build, and this,
this building going up in Melbourne at the moment,
what you're seeing there has been built in the last 10 days.
It'll be finished by Monday morning when I get back,
it's a unitised development by Non Decastelinies,
built in the factory, stacked on sight in about 3 weeks, and costing
about 20% less, I think, then conventional construction.
The savings are enormous, so well, what he's done is taken
it to the ute, to the nail gun, he's put it in the factory.
The other thing we need to realise, is that there's still some myths out there.
The myth is that Solar Voltaics is the most expensive way of getting energy.
Solar Voltaics have dropped from $12,000 for 1.5 kilowatt array, this is a reputable energy company
doing this, and you can pay 10% up front and the rest over 24 months, to the other day at $3,000.
I know this because 18 months ago I was tiling my house, and I got a quote.
Christmas, it was down to $6,000.
I paid $4,500 two weeks ago, and the paper on Thursday, it went to $3,000.
In the same time, our energy prices have doubled.
Or, oh, sorry, gone up by 20%. So over the time that I'm going
to repay my loan, the price's going to go up by 40% on my energy,
as we go to Solar Voltaics. And a 50 square km solar panel will do all the energy needs of Australia.
What we need is actually take the fear out of where we're going.
These proposals for the Venis Bionaly by the architects
of Australia- this is called Australian urbanism.
Is it no surprise that we live in fear of what the city
might be in the future if we present it with these images?
This is not helpful. [laughter]
Do you want to know what the real, reality looks like?
This is, this is Curtin Street, you can see the city in the back,
you can possibly see a little tram coming down the left there.
You know what it's going to look like in 20 years time?
It's going to look like that. There's going to be more trees,
there's going to be solar voltaics in the roof, there's going to be water collected
and there's going to be 4 or 5 stories running along that tram line.
Not only is that sustainable, and socially better than what we got, but it's something very familiar.
I hope when I go back to Dubai, next time round, cities will be on the agenda.
Thank you very much.
[applause]
Captioning services provided by Michael Lockrey.