A regional city needs to have a lot going for it to grow in an economically and socially sustainable manner.
Communities populated entirely by miners, for example, are not going to be attractive for a whole lot of other people.
So how do you attract different professionals, particularly those in knowledge intensive industries, to a regional city?
It’s not simply a matter of having the jobs. It requires an understanding of the relationship between economic and population growth and areas such as social amenity planning, land use and spatial planning, transport and utility infrastructure, and environmental sustainability.
A professional earning $100,000-plus a year will be looking for a certain quality of life before considering a move to a regional city. For the city’s planners forging ahead, this requires a big picture approach:
- What’s the community going to look like?
- How well is it going to be serviced by infrastructure (not just utilities)?
- What level of social infrastructure is there?
- What is the level of cultural planning and infrastructure?
- What educational opportunities are there? Will prospective residents need to send the kids away to Perth based schools? Is there a university campus there and, if not, can one be established?
Regional centres such as Karratha have battled severe growing pains because the necessary planning for a certain quality of life for a residential population was not considered at the front end.
In Broome, the prospect of a gas hub located at James Price Point for the Browse Basin development will, if it proceeds, trigger billion dollars worth of infrastructure investment which will significantly change the nature of that town whether people like it or not.
How will they plan quality of life and amenity issues around a project of such magnitude? What are the transport needs? Can major changes be made in a sustainable fashion? What is the employment profile going to be – fly in/fly out or residential? If it’s the latter, how can changes be made to attract various professions?
There is an emerging acceptance of the importance of demography, an approach that says: “This is what we want to do and our community will ultimately look very different because we are shifting from a business as usual, incremental population growth model to one of facilitated development.” It is a model that incorporates:
- Infrastructure planning
- Social amenity planning
- Land use and spatial planning
- Cultural policy planning
- Environmental sustainability planning
And it can be applied to any regional city anywhere in Australia. The fundamentals don’t change – graduating from a large town to a city has to be done in a facilitated way.
Nice blog, just book marked it for later reference
Thank you for creating such a terrific site. Your site happens to be not only useful but also very stimulating too. We find only few bloggers who can think to write technical stuff that creatively. we look for information regarding a subject like this. We ourselves searched in dozens of blogs to come across knowhow with respect to this.Keep posting !!