Highrise living in austrlia, a heated debate

High-rise living: Australian cities in 2050 - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Phil:

26 Jan 2010 1:25:40pm

What people fail to realise is that there comes a point where you can only increase population by decreasing the standard of living. China has realised this and is trying to decrease its population so it can raise its standard of living.

High-rise living: Australian cities in 2050 - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

janetc:

26 Jan 2010 12:19:43pm

This wouldn't even be an issue at all if we weren't imported 250,000 people every year.

Slow down immigration and this problem goes away. It's madness to try to keep packing in more and more people into cities that can't handle the population. Transport, health, environment, water - they're all at maximum capacity.

And while Australians might like to think it's all our wonderful talents that make us comparitively rich, it's really mineral export where a lot of government revenue comes from. The more people there are, the more thinly that revenue is spread.

bc:
selfish middleclass responses like the one above highl light the deeply embedded backward views of many Austrian's.
Australia is country of immigration, our greatest strengths lie in our diversity of population, brought from the tides of immigrants, the Chinese, Italian, Vietnamese, Sundanese, Middle eastern etc, etc.
Whats more much of these views come form people from Anglo Saxon Western European ancestry, their ancestors were immigrants themselves, net alone the ones that killed off most if an entire race of people that first lived here.
bloody hell!
thank god for sensiable responses like the one's below:

High-rise living: Australian cities in 2050 - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

sr:

26 Jan 2010 4:52:05pm

It can be great if done right, and the buildings don' t have to be chrome and glass and monstrous, cavernous, or the little cages of the old Housing Commission Flats.

I' m an expat who lives in a city of 2+ million in Latin America in an area approximately 15km x 5km. Here, instead of the ugly Sao Paolo or Bogota huge horrible blocks, you find hundreds of 4-12 storey apartment blocks and complexes, and double storey in most suburbs. I live in one now, 8th floor, after always living in a large house with garden and amazingly, it' s not so bad.

We have privacy inside, I' ve had band rehearsals here until wee hours, I' m sure my neighbours have had big parties but I can' t hear. And when the water guy came to cut the water off (forgot again!) the security guys helped out and kept him busy with a *problem* so I could get to the bank and back again... although I *do* hate walking through security, it' s the one thing that makes you not feel at home. No control over your front gate.

Here, the closeness actually builds a great sense of community that I have never witnessed in Australian cities. I know hundreds of people here, and it' s great walking down the street and everyone is familiar, whereas in Melbourne or Sydney as I remember them, you had a few friends that all lived a car drive away and most people didn' t really know their neighbours.

High-rise living: Australian cities in 2050 - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

wolfkeeng:

26 Jan 2010 2:51:48pm

No I don't like high-rises but, if population growth is to remain a social, political and economic priority then we kinda need them. However, the high-rise lifestyle depicted in this article is a narrow, conventional, ill-considered and thankfully dying approach to high-rise development. Singapore, for example, is doing amazing stuff with urban development, high-rise being the dominate housing form. Some high-rises have whole floors dedicated to open-space. Some of these open spaces are more formal than others. In some complexes there is space provided for personal gardening and vegie gardening. And, of course, a roof is much more than the top of a 'hat' of a building. Great for gardening, water storage (and heating, in the tropics) and community space. If high-rise is the way of aust's urban future, lets at least look for innovative, sustainable, site-specific developments that could contribute positively to the urban milieu.

I'd rather see strong social, political and economic committment to population control.

High-rise living: Australian cities in 2050 - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Adam:

26 Jan 2010 2:14:01pm

I live in a Sydney terrace of about 100 sqM and l like my garden and the fact no one lives above me. But I am privileged. I have seen Hong Kong and HR works well if there are parks, shopping facilities, and transport nearby. However the older public high-rise is known for social problems, is cramped and ugly. Sprawling suburbs have similar social problems if young people can't travel easily or access services. You can't say sprawling suburbs are always always better than high-rise, but you can claim high-rise will solve social problems.

High-rise living: Australian cities in 2050 - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

G:

26 Jan 2010 6:10:26pm

I hate to break it to all the armchair demographic wannabe experts here, but there's a few significant, and very obvious problems with their general hysteria at the very real problem of "too many people".

Simply - the problem is not "too many people", but "too much consumption". Of course, rampant population explosions are a problem too, but they are problems only if the infrastructure does not exist to handle it - which currently, it does not. But is this a problem of the population, or the lack of organisation of the institute?

So - before we all go about stomping our little feet on whatever soapboxes we think will lend our uninformed voices any creedence, perhaps the REAL problems should be understood and addressed, rather than the problems that you've been told about via the media and various other knee-jerk fools.

The solution is NOT to control population to negative or zero growth- why? quite simply, because this is a fight that WE CANNOT WIN: humans are GENETICALLY PROGRAMMED to have children. It is as genetic as the colour of your eyes. There are exceptions, of course, but these are in the VAST minority. Choosing to NOT have children, paradoxically, is the opposite to what should be done to find a solution; you object to the population, your neighbour does not. Your neighbour has childern (also who do not object to the problem, and so on), and your philosophy stops with your genome... dead, never to be raised again.

Education, development of infrastructure, society and industry are not only dependent on human growth, they foster it too. Humans develop their knowledge and understanding not by having a small number of minds committed to the problem, but by diversifying and exploring. Exploration, like procreation, are BASIC HUMAN TRAITS. If you're still unclear about what I mean, then you can google the organisation called "VEHMT", apply a bit of logic; a la Charles Darwin, and figure out exactly how long that attitude will last.

High-rise living: Australian cities in 2050 - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

I am just concerned that developments have enough facilities for families and the elderly. We're not all young, hip, urban types who visit cafes until lattes are coming out their ears. Very few HR developments actually have anything for anyone other than young, single/couple people. Where are the parks and community facilities that would make living in such developments attractive to more people?? Am I living in dreamland? Is it all down to the $ and how much of a profit developers can make? If so, govts will need to step in quick smart and make sure that HR developments are better. And greener (but that's another story, isn't it?).