Metropolitan plan: Week 12 Blog

This reading explores the settlement patterns of people spanning out into the suburbs causing the regions to expand. Such increases have caused cities to begin to creep in on each other. As this physical distance vanishes the infrastructure needed is a joint venture between the two becomes a responsibility of both towns and governments. Therefore the need for an inclusive metropolitan plan is needed. These plans transcend city boarders but incorporate entire regions. The example used many times within the text was the north-eastern sea board in the United States of America that spans 600 miles from Washington to Boston. To a lesser extent one could consider the South-East region of Queensland with its dense population to be considered a whole metropolitan area.

As the metropolitans continue to grow new phenonmenons are occuring; The megalopoplis, the edge city and the edgless city. The megalopolis refers to a very large metropolitan area with a dense population( of at least 10 million). An example of this would be Tokyo- Yokohama, which is pictured below. The edge city is about industrial estates; where their ae lots of high rise commercial buildings and industry but very little residential zone but their is a defined zone. Whilst an edgeless city is spiratic development of commercial and industrial zones. There is no defined edges, hences the name edgeless. However over time, this will generally turn into an edge city but not always.

Yokohama- High density continues around the bay of Japan until after Tokyo

Taken from:http://www.panoramio.com/photo/19252364


This reading got me thinking about Australia and how hard it would be to do these metropolitan plans due to our three tier-governments. Especially from Tweed heads up to north of Brisbane, where it crosses two states boarders, interferes with numerous state and local government and is the route for national infrastructure ( pacific-highway). Do you think it would be possible to do a metropolitan plan for this area? Or do you think it would have to stop before the boarder of New South Wales?

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