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

Abstract

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 hin-terlands 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.