Alternative futures for Australia's peri-urban regions

Regional communities are growing rapidly in Australia, with the population of Melbourne's peri-urban region increasing at 2 per cent a year. Despite this, Australia has a weak tradition of regional planning with two thirds of the population concentrated in capital cities. This paper builds on the authors' previous research into peri-urban regions by testing alternative future scenarios. Using a case study of Melbourne's peri-urban region, an area under intense development pressure, the research explores the capacity for regional growth under a range of different spatial scenarios. The scenarios include 'business as usual', the concentration of growth in major regional cities, and dispersing growth in a network of smaller towns. The methodology employs a geographical information system model and iterative policy decisions. Each scenario is reported on the basis of the location of new population and jobs, and implications for agricultural and urban land consumption, housing needs, infrastructure requirements, and socio-demographic profiles. Scenarios also relate development pressure on rural land and natural resources to development options for regional cities and towns by examining the capacity for transferring development rights from rural land holdings to townships. The paper places regional development scenarios in the context of the dominant Australian paradigm of major city population concentration, and outlines comprehensive regional planning as an alternative to the metropolitan primacy of Australia's cities.