Melbourne’s livability is sowing the seeds of discontent
By Christopher Deere, The Age, 25 October 2008
Overcrowded transport, choked roads, urban sprawl, water shortages something has to give.
Perhaps it’s only the prospect of looming middle-age – after all, I’m old enough to remember when post offices sold nothing but stamps and telegrams – but more and more I have the sense that I am no longer living in a city that will allow me to feel at home.
The unhurried pace and orderly attractiveness of Melbourne is gradually becoming harder to find and believe in, as so many of the city’s barometers of place and belonging react sharply against the increasing strains of a grimmer climate and an urban population that expects to live under its grace.
The recent news that the city (and the state of which it is the capital) has recorded its driest September since the earliest days of European settlement is surely a sign that something is very wrong with the way that Melbourne is being managed.
It might be that the old measure of normal autumn rainfall is now little more than a fond memory along with affordable housing and the leisurely commute. The new normal, in all of the forms of its realisation for the residents of this big city, is a much harsher and less forgiving reality
Water is at the heart of our several problems: there simply isn’t enough of it, and yet we persist in building waterfront homes that will be the first to suffer the brunt of rising sea levels and storm-surge activity when the weather finally loses its temper. The miracle cure of a desalination plant will merely aggravate the environ mental effects that are used to justify its very construction, while more brown coal will be burned to provide its power and service the bulging metropolis that needs its recycled water.
When three passenger plane-loads of people are moving to Melbourne every week, hoping to find homes and jobs and schools for their children, it’s blindingly obvious that something has to give.
It is not possible (or comfortable) for so many people to try to make meaningful lives for themselves in the face of fewer available opportunities and scarcer resources. Every passing day becomes another exercise in compromise, as a single room in a communal household is let out for the same amount that, only three years ago, would have rented a comfortable flat, and a family drive in the country takes up most of the day and almost an entire tank of expensive petrol. Somehow, each one of us is being made aware that this battered old town is now grinding away at our collective being.
So we snap at strangers in the queue at the supermarket, or even at our own friends and family at the end of another harried day during which most of our time and energy has been taken away from us, squandered by the many little mechanisms of survival that we have learned to apply against a demanding and crowded community.
Public transport ticket inspectors have turned into their own version of the Brownshirts and random episodes of unprovoked violence against vulnerable people are approaching the rate of an epidemic, serving as a visible sign of the growing sense of underlying unease that is haunting our everyday lives. The anxiety of the unsettled sprawl is turning into an immediate and alarming personal risk.
Melbourne’s much-hyped livability is a symbol – and, now, a symptom – of its festering malaise. The humiliating peak-hour crush on our trams and trains is a combined consequence of a local population growing beyond a manageable level and the passing of global peak oil production, which will all too soon show its ugliest face in the price of food and power.
“livability” is a malleable concept: it means something different to someone who lives in one part of the city such as Clifton Hill, than it does to someone who lives at Reservoir, or even at Altona Meadows. When the rising cost of the petrol that is needed to run a car for every member of a household or the rising cost of renting or buying a secure home is more than anyone can comfortably pay, then livability is little more than an abstract term that finds no meaning in actuality. All that matters is finding a way to make it through another day without seeming to slip backwards.
Melbourne is unmistakeably divided between its European and its American territories of urban geography and civic existence. The European, with its handy tram and small terrace houses and distinctive village settings and walkable neighbourhoods, is close to the city and palpably metropolitan in its layout and mentality. The American, with its long road corridors and large property allotments and monster shopping centers and nearly deserted daylight streets, is stubbornly suburban (or even resentfully exurban) in its subjugation of so much open space that, even in my childhood, was rural land well beyond the city’s boundaries. As the inhabitants of a hastily contrived and seemingly high-value housing estate at Cranbourne have so recently discovered: there is a very real financial and personal cost to be paid when you try to live on land that is too close to a reminder of the excesses of urban existence.
Melbourne now provides us with many such reminders, as more people strive to live in a place that cannot support all of us in a way that will last. The wider world seems to be filled with the tangible tension of our broken wish to live beyond the sensible means of a city that is rapidly outgrowing its welcome.
Christopher Deere is a freelance writer and photographer
Linked from Overpopulation