A young couple want to buy their dream home. They search high and low for their three bedroom, two bathroom with a backyard brick veneer ambition, but everything they find is out of their reach. Until they venture further and further from the CBD and find the perfect balance of home, sustainability, price and community at Aurora, in Epping North. Aurora ticks all the boxes – except one. Public transport. A long awaited rain line.
With a projected population of 40,000, Epping North is one of the fastest growing suburbs in Melbourne. Original plans for the Aurora development, presented in 2006, suggested a rail line that ran through Aurora, stopping at Lalor, Epping Plaza, Aurora and Epping North. The 540 homes currently at Aurora are still waiting for this infrastructure.
With petrol prices increasing and roads becoming more and more clogged with the expansion of the Urban Growth Boundary, the Melbourne Metro system needs to be upgraded and expanded to keep up with demand – especially in areas such as Epping North.
While the Aurora Community Association plans to use the upcoming election to launch a fresh push for the government to install the rain line, the question is raised as to who is responsible for this infrastructure?
Is it the developer, who put in place plans to bring new residents to the area? It is the department of transport, or the rail networks, building networks to ensure more commuters use their services? Or is it the government, continually expanding the Urban Growth Boundary and not putting the infrastructure in place to support it?
Place Making is as much about the actual place as it is getting to and from it. Aurora might be a wonderful place to live, but if its accessibility is lacking, how can we expect it to thrive?
This is the development dilemm but asking who should put in a rail line is to ask the wrong question. What needs to be asked is why a settlement of 40,000 people need to travel vast distances daily outside their own community? Building more sprawl has reached its natural limit. The cities are now too big to function without a complex web of mechanised transport and as we can see, this is highly inefficient.
What is needed is a statewide plan that builds self contained, sustainable towns that have a balance of economic and social capital building dynamics. These towns can be part of a larger city like Melbourne, but if they are not balanced places to live and require huge investments of infrastructure to connect people to un-naturallly far away jobs, schools and recreation facilities, then they just shouldn’t be built.
The state planning laws are now so rigid that developers are prevented from building anything but housing estates or mega malls, so we get this zoned out sprawl that clearly is not working for anyone. The next few decades of very high oil prices is going to really bring the stupidity of government created sprawl inot sharp relief.
The losers are going to be all those young couples who will see the value of their homes disappear as fast the oil prices rise and with nothing but other houses around them, the communities won’t have functioning social capital on which to build either.