Opinion: Our cities are not only unprepared for fires supercharged by climate change, they are making the situation worse | emfarrelly
Cities have always been shaped by fire. The 1666 Great Fire of London, destroying 70,000 homes, turned a huddle of half-timbered shacks and shop-houses into the grand rows of terraces we see today. First, under Elizabeth I’s first building act which forbade all projection and decoration, came the very dour and upright Georgian terraces of Westminster and Islington. Then, as the law slowly softened, the more expansive and flossied-up Victorian terraces of Kensington and Camden Town emerged.
These same laws also produced old Sydney. Because our first building acts copied London’s almost word-for-word and our builders used the same pattern books, our terraces show the same basic pattern of protruding party-walls making a fire-proof matrix and well-proportioned windows with hidden frames. Being a century or two later than London’s, ours are distinguished by their near-universal wrought iron balconies.
of expected climate-stress, its water supply predicted to be just half of demand inside 30 years. Sydney has suffered prolonged smoke hazard, 10 times toxic levels. And Canberra, the pristine bush capital, entered the new decade with the world’s most poisonous air;Yet Melbourne is still sprawling massively, turning farms into sprawl. Bush-encircled and car-dependent -
like Resimax’s huge new Eynesbury development housing a potential 10,000 people on 828 hectares some 40 kilometres west of Melbourne’s CBDCanberra, perhaps the lowest density non-city known to man, where entire villages could be accommodated on the median strips alone, has also announced yet another shiny new suburb. Called, with ghastly irony,
, it will house 5,000 people in the Molonglo Valley. The official rationale for this madness? “Pent-up demand for houses on single blocks,” said the ACT’s Suburban Land Agency. Who needs government when you have market.
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