..be burying thirty-five of our citizens per week. It would attract some comment in Melbourne as the trains would effectively stop running. But I suspect that the trains in Mumbai cannot afford to stop running more than momentarily given that seven million people use the suburban rail system on a daily basis. Naturally on the sub-continent they are desperately trying to do something about the death rate, but are handicapped by people making holes in the new barrier walls to get to their favourite shortcuts.
Not so long ago I was talking to an accountant from an IT company with the curious name of Jamcracker, which is based in Mumbai, who had decided to move to Melbourne. It was a Friday lunch hour in Collins Street, the veritable heart of this thriving metropolis and I asked him what was the most uncomfortable aspect of the world’s sixth most liveable city. Judiciously ignoring the opportunity to lead with ‘casual racism’ he observed it was the fact that the streets were so empty.
It is, of course, all relative. I arrived in Melbourne more than four hundred moons ago from the then more vertical city of Christchurch, a smallish agricultural centre with a population less than quarter of a million of fine British expatriate shopkeepers, unlanded gentry and deviated septa. In those days the joke about sheep outnumbering the people was actually true. I found the number of people in Melbourne almost traumatising by comparison with the vast empty echoing spaces of Christchurch. I developed Enochlophobia of the supermarket variety.
Melbourne’s population density is around one thousand five hundred persons per square kilometre; that of Mumbai between twenty and thirty thousand. But if eighty per cent of the world’s population will soon live in cities, it might be time to think that if they had the same population density of Melbourne there would be no arable land left to feed the prospective nine billion or more projected inhabitants of the earth. On the other hand, if Melbourne had the urban density of Mumbai we could all live in Toorak and South Yarra. That’s what living cheek by jowl and in the odd slum can do for you.
We should be fairly clear how Melbourne, and probably all other Australian metropolises, manage town planning. After a somewhat cursory investigation, in other words relying entirely on my own prejudices, I decided on two words; Greed and Sloth which you may identify as the two least interesting of the seven deadly sins, (he said both apathetically and vaingloriously).
The average Australian property developer, relying as he does on an innate feeling for the easy dollar, has come to realise that more and more people are coming to the city. He buys land on the outskirts of the conurbation. Probably already good market gardening area - perhaps even zoned ‘Green Wedge’ or mixed agricultural. Being a model citizen and ever mindful of the needs of his fellow man he then, in a fit of civic mindedness, secures his election to the local shire or council and has the land zoned ‘Residential’.
The State government, of any convenient purchasable colour, notices that this is a new and exciting development replete with yet to be built parks, supermarkets and fire stations and springs immediately into action to provide the necessary infrastructure.
'Springs into action' might be a slight exaggeration. Maybe 'staring into space twiddling its thumbs whilst suburbs spring up like rashes around the bottom of a baby whose nappy hasn’t been changed for three weeks'.
Of course, this is how it looks to an untrained observer who sees only the unimportant things like commuters queuing twenty minutes at the freeway exit to get to and from their suburb every morning or evening; bus services cancelled because the traffic is so dense that keeping to a the timetable is a complete fantasy; or trains so packed that after the first three stops nobody can get on.
The most likeable places that I have visited have generally been the result of slow and organic accretion of a populace and buildings over time, an obvious example being Italian hill towns that grace places like Tuscany. However, that such a process is still possible in our times is a romantic fallacy in this age of near geometric population growth - it might be thought that the slums of Mumbai are just the modern extension of organic growth writ large, but you really wouldn’t want to live there.
Large scale planned socially engineered housing, as exampled in the less fortunate banlieues of Paris such as Clichy-sous-Bois, hasn’t worked as they become high rise ghettos with a self- reinforcing ethos of failure characterised by high unemployment and violent crime. The grandiloquent social architecture of Le Corbusier has not worked particularly well either although Chandigarh, a smallish Indian government town, may be the exception. Buildings may be machines, but people are not.
Large scale governmental city planning as seen in Canberra or Brasilia seems to produce nice buildings in a sterile environment accompanied by a high suicide rate, (the only authentic personal statement left for public servants to do), and no productive industry. It is interesting that the only new completely planned cities in the world seem to be national capitals. Ultimate power can still lead to erectile malfunction on a large scale.
So what to do – even here in God’s forgotten country?
As voluntary sterilisation of everybody with an IQ of less than one hundred is unlikely to work, I am proposing a few simple steps.
No Australian city can get any bigger; in fact must shrink in area by a minimum 5% per decade and that shrinkage should be equalled by a similar amount of newly created park land within the existing boundaries. Therefore no more arable land can be covered by MacMansions and other brick excreta. All hobby farms are to be banned as well - that is nothing under 130 hectares is eligible for tax concessions.
All politicians and public servants must travel by public transport.
But I am proposing that to get size down and community involvement up that we use the caravan park as a model. Therefore nobody can reside on more than one hundred square metres of land; that is a ten by ten metre square of at least partial greenery.
I’ve seen that caravans and their annexes seem to be able to hold a reasonable size family in delightful intimacy. The option remains whether people choose to share ablution facilities as I know that the more circumspect find descending on an already warm toilet seat somewhat discombobulating.
So if we give over half of every square kilometre to roads, parks and shared facilities I think that we can get the population density up to a respectable twelve thousand per square kilometre. To increase the density more – for example to reflect the value of land as it approaches the urban centre - we can stack them on top of each other in vertical caravan parks. They might just resemble apartment buildings.
Caravan parks seem to work over the Christmas period. This way we can have Christmas all year in a city one eighth the current size.