For about a decade in the late 1990s to the late 2000s, I had the privilege (chore?) of teaching economic development to urban planning students at the University of New South Wales (cruelly referred to as “Kenso Tech” by University of Sydney types).
The whole planning profession by that time had been infiltrated by something called “the new urbanism”. This had consequences, as these graduates – or at least half of them – inevitably moved into the planning departments of local and State governments. And thence to middle management positions and higher in these departments. (The other half went into consulting).
New urbanism is the ruling planning ideology of all governments now. The core of this way of thinking is that people have to weaned off the traditional quarter acre block and the car. With the long commutes to the city, the urban pollution, the freeways (now not so “free”), the whole suburban thing. The big “boo” word was “sprawl”. Just saying it, generally with a malevolent twist, was enough to activate the urban planner’s heart.
One definition has it:
New Urbanism is a planning and development approach based on the principles of how cities and towns had been built for the last several centuries: walkable blocks and streets, housing and shopping in close proximity, and accessible public spaces. In other words: New Urbanism focuses on human-scaled urban design.
Very positive, almost a natural way to design cities, though one might quibble with the “last several centuries claim”. To be fair, absent the invention of the car, cities kinda had to be “walkable”. Cities that formed were simply designed as they had to be, not because this approach was superior. This definition also skips over the fact that the modern version of new urbanism is a reaction against the perceived evil of sprawl. It has turned from an empirical theory of city design to a normative one. Now new urbanism is ideology. It has become the default position of the political left, even before climate hysteria came into the picture. The vision is for European style cities, with light rail to the fore. Hence all the apartments shooting up near transit centres, mostly heavy rail stations. (It is one of the ironies of life that Canberra, Australia’s city planned to within an inch of its life – remember the Whitlamite National Capital Development Commission? – is the ultimate city of sprawl. The distance from Canberra’s southern end to its northern is roughly the same as Sydney. And London!)
Urban affairs stars like the academic-turned-pundit Richard Florida – don’t ever call him a public intellectual, even if he believes he is – who penned the popular The Rise of the Creative Class in 2002. Twenty years old this August. Florida argued that compact, diverse places did best economically. He was a disciple of a far greater and subtler thinker from the 1960s, Jane Jacobs. He got plenty of things right, and a few big things wrong. He captured the zeitgeist in many ways. People, especially young people, were marrying later, if at all, having fewer children, were eschewing the burbs, backyards and pets, and were leading the apartment boom in downtowns. The rise (no pun intended) of apartment living has been unexpected, rapid and lasting. The new culture is all about the “buzz” of the city. The sense that something is always happening. Thousands of people. Street life that is pumping. Bars and restaurants. Live gigs.
https://creativeclass.com/richard_florida/
The fruits of new urbanism can be seen in every city. The tower block revolution, the endless high-rise apartments, the creation of train stations surrounded by ugly towers, often (it seems) jerry built. The biases of the planning profession can be seen as a preternatural bias against the people who live in suburbs. Traditional families who own gas guzzling cars. White. Middle class. Children! Probably religious. No doubt, homophobe, racist deplorables.
People haven’t gotten rid of their cars, though. Not even the apartment dwellers. Not even in cities that, like London, have instituted congestion charges on coming into the city. So, one of the main purposes of new urbanism has notably failed. With people making multiple journeys with multiple purposes and the convenience of the car unparalleled in human history, it was always a pipe dream. Parents dropping children at school or the bus stop, short-haul trips to the local village shops, longer trips to the mall, and cross city trips for family visits, and the rest, we are not seeing the demise of the car any time soon. And governments keep building motorways and tunnels. Just look at Sydney. It doesn’t look like politicians have concluded that the car is dead. (Now the work-from-home revolution, which is a thing, despite the corporate pushback, makes the motorway-led strategy look a little silly).
Hence, we have a kind of doublethink in government. We build motorways, AND we build endless apartments near railway stations. Yet more cognitive dissonance.
Developers love new urbanism, of course. All those apartments to be built on tiny parcels of land. The developer’s dream. With compliant, often corrupt and inevitably poor, local councils joining in the partnership with developers and urban theorists, the fate of our cities has been sealed.
There has been scholarly pushback, of course. But it has not made the slightest dent in the entrenched ideologies of the planners. I remember having the then ABC token conservative, Michael Duffy, give a lecture to my planning students. He was a firm opponent of new urbanism, what you might call a city planning realist who saw that the car was (at least at that time) here to stay. He was nearly run out of town by the students! Indoctrination can be highly successful where young, closed minds are involved.
One of the key push-backers was the American urbanist, Joel Kotkin, an avowed critic of Richard Florida. The New York Times described him as “America’s uber geographer”. He disputed both the empirical and the normative claims of the new urbanists, in books like The Human City (2017).
https://joelkotkin.com/
Another is Wendell Cox.
https://www.newgeography.com/users/wendell-cox
A third is Robert Bruegmann, author of the superb, dissident Urban Sprawl: A Compact History (2005). As his publisher noted:
In his incisive history of the expanded city, Bruegmann overturns every assumption we have about sprawl. Taking a long view of urban development, he demonstrates that sprawl is neither recent nor particularly American but as old as cities themselves, just as characteristic of ancient Rome and eighteenth-century Paris as it is of Atlanta or Los Angeles. Nor is sprawl the disaster claimed by many contemporary observers. Although sprawl, like any settlement pattern, has undoubtedly produced problems that must be addressed, it has also provided millions of people with the kinds of mobility, privacy, and choice that were once the exclusive prerogatives of the rich and powerful.
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo3614185.html
As I say, these noble attempts at pushback have little impact. But it is worse than this. Two things have made it worse, possibly fatal. The new urbanists have upped the ante. The first is the expansion of the role of town planners. The second is climate change mob rule. The mission creep involved in planning activity led to something called “spatial policy”. It took these managerialists into transport planning, housing policy, design, community development and everything else that could be linked to land use planning. This is a powerful caste.
Fast forward to the 2020s, and Covid, with its new possibilities for suppression and lockdown. With the climate crisis now embedded in the decision-making processes of all governments of whatever stripe, the first generation of car haters now have been empowered to set in place their earlier, then theoretical, agendas. The perceived, unargued but widely believed evil of carbon emissions has sealed the deal.
Now the threats of the new urbanists have taken on a far more sinister turn.
For now we live in the age of the “smart city”, proposed limits on travel (both local and international) linked to the asserted climate emergency, the fifteen minute community, contact-tracing technology, digital currencies and the tools of Chinese Communist Party social credit. This is turbo-charged new urbanism, enabled by technology and the craftily embedded sense of “crisis” now accepted by many. Covid crisis. Climate crisis. Population crisis. George Christensen has wisely called the fifteen minute city as “permanent climate lockdown”. (The google search engine optimisation, fact checker activists are all over it. Yes, you guessed it. Conspiracy theory! Just try and search “fifteen minute city” and see what you see. The defence team is in place, well organised and ready to drive forward).
Placing a cap on people’s movements in fossil fuel cars? Use digital ID to track people’s travel? Like Justin Trudeau, use banking systems to freeze the funds of dissidents? Not much conspiracy theory here. Just facts. When connected to central bank digital currency, bingo! You have climate lockdowns. I am not sure why the great resetters try to deny it. It is what they say they want.
We should have seen the threats, and the big plan, much earlier. Of course, we didn’t.
At the heart of the new push by global elites to crush the people is the now openly declared war 2.0 on the car. The car is the most potent symbol of rampant individualism, climate catastrophism and underclass emancipation. The three things most abhorred by the Greta Tintin (yes, her middle name) Thunberg generation.
Moreover, the car creates freedom of movement, and independence. It allows people to interact. The brutal suppression of freedom of movement was a core strategy of the Covid State. Stop people congregating. Stop them meeting. Stop them discussing how we are suppressing them. Then we will adapt the Covid suppression strategies to climate. Stop people moving around. That only adds to emissions and the “climate emergency”.
The war on the car is everywhere. Every Western government is signed on to the United Nations’ Agenda 2030 and the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset. New fossil fuel car sales banned from whenever.
Anthony Albanese will introduce policies to boost the take-up of electric vehicles but will stop short of imposing a ban on petrol or diesel cars as part of his plan to tackle climate change.
The Labor Party will introduce tax benefits to reduce the price of electric cars and plug-in hybrids, forecasting that 89 per cent of new car sales will be electric by 2030.
Across the Ditch, we have this.
End of petrol cars: NZ must ban fossil-fuelled imports by 2032, says Climate Change Commission
And in the United Kingdom:
The UK plans to ban sales of diesel and petrol cars from 2030
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/18/the-uk-plans-to-ban-sales-of-diesel-and-petrol-cars-from-2030.html
In an interview with Mark Steyn, Marc Morano said that Australian banks were stopping car loans. This suggestion seemed ridiculous.
https://www.steynonline.com/12874/the-great-reset-a-steyn-show-special-edition
Every incursion on our lives by the Climate Emergency State seems, on its face, unbelievable. But here we have it:
Bank Australia today announced it will cease funding car loans for new fossil fuel vehicles from 2025 as part of its commitment to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2035.
Encouraging customers to think about their next vehicle purchase is an important part of Bank Australia’s climate action strategy and it aims to support them to make sustainable choices. Around 43% of Australia’s transport emissions are from passenger vehicles. Electric vehicles are a ready-to-deploy technology so they can be one of the fastest contributors to Australia meeting its climate goals.
In announcing this commitment at the National Electric Vehicle Summit in Canberra, Bank Australia Chief Impact Officer Sasha Courville said that encouraging the shift to electric vehicles will be an important step in decarbonising the Australian economy.
“By ceasing car loans for new fossil fuel vehicles, we are sending a signal to the Australian market about the rapid acceleration in the transition from internal combustion to electric vehicles we expect to see in the next few years.”
https://bankaust.com.au/blog/bank-australia-to-cease-loans-for-new-fossil-fuel-cars-from-2025
Is this really happening, on our watch? I wonder how many of the clueless millennials who simultaneously cheer on the climate agenda and drive their gas guzzling, outsized American ute trucks have thought this through.
The ideological war on the (fossil fuel) car, a war on individual freedom, has been going a long time. It has largely been under the radar, and not seen for what it is. But now it is all out in the open, powered by globalist forces and their domestic surrogates, on the back of the “climate emergency” and now empowered by strategies trialled in the Covid plandemic. And if the powers-that-be think we will all be driving electric cars, well, they have another thing coming. The much touted EV is a joke, built on environmentally catastrophic technologies and affordable for no one other than millionaires.
The arguments for new urbanism were always powered by a weird collaboration between leftist planners and venal property developers who saw, as they do, the chance to make big bucks out of the apartment revolution. It all seemed so sensible. Big cities. Transport crises. Population growth. The European romance of light rail and “livable cities”. Funky urban villages. Who could object?
These were always socialist dreams. Now, the fatal conceits of apparently innocent do-gooding planners have delivered us a prospective dystopian future. All done under the radar, and, so, brilliant. What you can achieve with a low information electorate and fearful politicians.
Paul Collits
1 March 2023
The fundamental problem with Australia's urban environment is over-population which is entirely due to immigration. Our present 25 million is not environmentally sustainable or socially desirable.
But try telling that to the Big Australia ideologues. Or the Booster clan who are driven by self interest. Or the urban Herd who can't see past their mortgage.
As for electric vehicles, that is just a fad among many others afflicting our sick society. Like any fad it will pass, but not without, in this case, an immense waste of scarce resources.
I have maintained from the outset that EV’s end goal is restriction of our movement. There won’t be enough charging points, points that will be able to be shut down or speed restricted; smart metres in home with the ability to shut down the vehicle charging point; the short range with our long distances making EV’s impractical; mandating EV’s leading to reduction of ICE vehicle value and the subsequent inability for the working classes to afford these scams. THEY want to severely restrict our movements. EV’s will be the vehicle to achieve this based upon the utter lie of saving the planet.