Is Perth a Global City?
Business News 15 Sept 1995Perth is waking up to the fact that if we do not plan our immediate future, we will not have a long term future. It will belong to someone else.
Planning for the future by doing Futures Studies is becoming flavour of the decade. This is very great news indeed.
In Australia we have never had to really think about the future. This lucky country was so bountiful that if we worked today just a little bit harder at doing the same stuff we did yesterday, tomorrow was automatically bigger and better.
We just carried on from our parents' generation, who had carried on from their parents' generation, and so on. Perth gradually grew from a tiny town on the banks of the Swan to a capital city of 1 million people, mostly anglo-celtic. No big brain-strain changes there.
No longer. We are now in a world of constant and continuing change. Everything in our world is changing. Our workstyles, our lifestyles, our values, our fears, and our dreams. If we want Western Australia to be a particular kind of place in the next fifty years, we have to make some very complex and tough decisions now. Several futures studies are occurring to do just that.
The ASTEC (Australian Science & Technology Council) Futures Study and the WA2029 Study have been discussed previously.
The State Planning Commission (SPC) is the WA government agency responsible for most of the land use decisions throughout WA. The SPC is conducting its own study to determine what WA will look like in 2029.
Given that the SPC's major concern is land use, its focus is on where people are going to live, where industries will be based, and what parts of WA will remain relatively untouched.
One huge issue keeps rearing its awkward head in each of these studies: is Perth going to plod along with its steady growth and gradual sophistication or is Perth undergoing a radical shift in its development pattern to soon become Australia's second (after Sydney) global city?
No one has the answer. Various experts, from economists, geographers, historians, urban planners, political scientists, (and even futurologists!) voice differing opinions based on their beliefs.
We have to go with our educated guesses. There are no definitive stats that can tell us if Perth is likely to be just a larger version of what it currently is, or if Perth is bursting to be a city focussed more on the rest of the world than on Australia.
What would you like your city to be? Each option (and there are others, mostly a mixture of these two) has both good and bad features, depending on your own likes and dislikes.
A global city is very cosmopolitan, with a great variety and diversity of workstyles and lifestyles within its domain. The biggest difference to the Perth we now know, however, would likely be that property values would reflect international levels which are much higher than anything Perth can comprehend.
What is occurring in Sydney with its "global city" real estate costs is that the ordinary Sydneysider is moving out of the city (and state: 65 000 left Sydney for Queensland and northern NSW in 1994) and only those working in the global economy can afford to remain.
Would you be one of those in Perth? Would you be financially pressured into moving to Geraldton, Bunbury, Albany?
On the other hand, with a global perspective, we would have more social and cultural opportunities, more international involvement in sporting and cultural events, more diversity in employment options, greater educational opportunities, a wider multicultural mix, and a much greater role to play in the wider world.
A tough decision - to encourage Perth to become a global city or to encourage Perth to remain a large country town isolated from our fellow Australians and our global marketplace.
On behalf of all the decision makers in the futures studies who are NOT asking: what do YOU want for Perth? I would love to hear your comments. I promise to pass them on. Phone me, fax, or email.
Is it your city?
printer friendly version | Tell a Friend