Melbourne 2030 and most other strategic plans across Australia seek to Essay

Melbourne 2030 and most other strategic plans across Australia seek to increase residential development around activity centr - Essay Example In most suburbs of Melbourne, changes to the built environment have been brought about. â€Å"The Melbourne regional plan, like all of the Australian metropolitan plans, puts forth a spatial vision of the future† (Beatley & Newman 2009, p.196), directs future investments, and guides the state and local use of development decisions. The foremost aim is to accommodate significant population growth, anticipating up to a million new residents by 2030. The core concepts of the development plan include an urban growth boundary, the protection of ‘green wedges’, and the guidance of future growth into a set of activity centres located along transit corridors. The key strategy of the plan is to increase residential development around activity centres. Thesis Statement: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the strategic plans for residential development around activity centres in the policy ‘Melbourne 2030’ for urban developmental projects; and determine their benefits and disadvantages. ‘Melbourne 2030’: Background of the Policy ‘Melbourne 2030’ guides the development of built environment in the city in the form of accommodation for an increase in the population by one million residents between 2000 and 2030. The addition in numbers together with projected changes in household formation is expected to increase the number of households by 600,000 by 2030. ‘Melbourne 2030’ seeks to chart a â€Å"fundamentally new direction in Melbourne’s urban development by determining the location of the dwellings needed to accommodate these additional households† (Birrell, O’Connor, Rapson et al 2005, p.1-1). The city’s sense of place and identity is created by the streetscape that existed till now with mostly low slung bungalows, dense tree and shrub canopy and resultant green ambience, together with open spaces for recreation. Over half a century ago, Melbourne’s metropol itan planners considered these features to be the way residents liked it, and that it was futile to try changing the local characteristics. Currently 90 percent of the families live in single family dwellings, with 50 percent of the dwellings owned by occupants. According to Birrell et al (2005, p.1-1), â€Å"the Melbourne 2030 template is just the most recent incarnation of a radical shift in metropolitan planning since the 1980s†. This transition intends to reshape the city, changing it from its low density heritage towards a more compressedly packed and merged urban form. Strategic Plan of ‘Melbourne 2030’ ‘Melbourne 2030’ underscored two predominant land use strategies. The first was an urban growth boundary demarcated to protect the city’s green wedges,and rural boundary from urban encroachment by constraining future development within this limit, state Buxton and Goodman (2003, p.205). The second key land-use approach was to â€Å"conce ntrate spatial development within a constellation of 112 activity centres of differing scale and mix distibuted across the city, with several of the centres located on chief public transport nodes† (Dodson 2009, p.5). Future housing is divided into three categories: greenfields development, strategic redevelopment sites, and dispersed urban sites within peripheral suburban areas, together with development to a small extent around small rural