Ben’s Reviews > Breaking Point: The Future of Australian Cities > Status Update

Seamer finally directly tackles the question of how to stimulate local centres. His two suggestions are to rezone nearby areas for mixed-use residential developments, and to ensure that local centres have a supermarket. After these 2 suggestions, made over 2 paragraphs, he ends lamely by suggesting that ‘surely there are other solutions on the horizon’. But his whole book is about localisation! What a joke!

One thought though is that decentralising cities and CBDs will require a massive increase in the use of micromobility devices such as electric bikes. Otherwise, congestion, although it will be spread ought and decongested, will still increase and reappear in newly mixed-use suburbs. I personally believe that the use of these devices ought to be normalised as much as possible, for many reasons, with this just one.

But decentralisation creates a problem for land use planners: how to change zoning to permit the re-entry of previously disallowed businesses and business types into residential zones? This is new to me, but I know that it's been dealt with at least since Jane Jacobs agitated for mixed-use zoning in gentrified suburbs. Permit more co-working spaces, cafes, and unobtrusive home offices for sole-traders?

One unexpected (to me) benefit of increasing access to flexible work is staggering worktimes across the workday and thus reducing road congestion. If everyone starts work at 9am, traffic peaks and crawls. Everyone hates this. So, asynchronous work (i.e., work that does not *have* to be conducted within certain timeframes, i.e., lots of white-collar work) should be made flexible. This improves worker QOL and traffic.

This was published mere months before COVID. Its chapter on WFH is prescient. A tiny increase in people WingFH reduces road congestion by about as much as a major metro project, but at none of the cost, saving billions of dollars. It might also naturally incentivise the creation of local neighbourhood centres, increasing amenity city-wide instead of concentrating it in the CBD. On net, it seems a slam dunk.

Seamer asks: rather than increase housing supply in places people want to live, why not increase the number of places people want to live? I like the idea of decentring capital cities, of creating more local hubs. But the obvious rejoinder is: why isn't this already done? Why are cities such overpowering gravity wells of funds, services? No doubt it works, but I think he's underselling its difficulties.