Much like the Great White Flight of post-WWII America, where caucasian middle-class families moved away from the city centres and into the culturally baron wastelands of suburbia, a post-Covid Australia is predicting similar trends.

The scourge of urban sprawl is upon us again, with its consumption of the environment, strain on infrastructure budgets, inefficient and oversized houses on oversized blocks, draped in the most ridiculous landscaping design the world has ever seen… a water and labour intensive, non-yield producing monoculture of grass.

And yet, our cities are showing signs of amazing progressive thinking leaching into the fabric of urban planning, with massive city greening projects, micro-mobility infrastructure development, 30-minute city designing, intercity water harvesting investment, and global city collaboration programs.

So where is the breakdown of communication? Where is the barrier to excellent smart green city development reaching its full potential of socially, culturally, and environmentally regenerative built environments? From what I can tell… local councils.

If a city is predominantly made up of NIMBY councils with archaic understandings of urban planning and next-to-no understanding of the necessity and massive benefits of efficient, sensibly densified cities, and then even worse… being given the power to ‘hold the front line’ on sustainable development, they will be creating detrimental consequences that will be structurally built into our economy for decades.

The Low Rise Housing Diversity Code, the NSW Government initiative to drive sensible suburban density, diversity, and housing supply to our suburbs, was an excellent example of the fundamental flaws in local council planning, and their inability to pull their head out of their proverbial and see the bigger picture.

Local councils the state over, threw their hands in the air, kicking and screaming that their unique little oasis within the greater city, was somehow not a part of the whole, and shouldn’t be subject to such intelligent planning upgrades.

By 2050 nearly 70% of our population will be focussed in our cities, and without sustainably focused frameworks being developed for our suburbs, that take into account the evolution of mobility, infrastructure, and population behaviour, we are going to project and multiply our current problems well into the future.

We need to start putting the commune back in community, and understand that the global landscape of population habitation with its environmental consumption, needs to be one of our primary concerns as we drive steadily towards 9 billion people.