Page 4185 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 23 October 2019
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When Molonglo was first being planned during the Seventh Assembly the LDA planned a demonstration housing precinct which would have included some very innovative, sustainable and affordable medium density housing. I remember them presenting to us, and many others, some truly inspirational, world-class plans. But then nothing! So much for excellence in sustainable design!
In fact, in some areas Molonglo is not as good as the rest of Canberra. Additional to environmental costs, residents in some instances pay direct costs for the gaps in sustainable designs—I will start here—in particular, street trees. Most members here, I think, live in leafy areas like Holder, Kambah, Tuggeranong, the inner north and the inner south. These are areas with large street trees and also often backyard trees that provide shade in the summer. Many people in Molonglo Valley will never have this because the design of the suburbs simply does not allow for it.
There are lots of things that go into the road reservations in Molonglo, like streetlights, electrical easements, stormwater pipes and driveways. Space for street trees has to be somehow shoe-horned in among all this, and basically developers are not leaving enough space and the government has not required it. Because of this, while some street trees have been planted, they are small species. I understand that landscape architects derisively call them lollipop trees. They will never grow up to provide the deep, shady canopy that people in many older areas enjoy.
On top of this, there is no room for trees of any kind in the gardens. In most cases there is not even room for a couple of shrubs, let alone a space for the kids to play. This problem will impact on the residents of Molonglo Valley basically forever. There is no way, reasonably, to change this. Just looking at it economically, apart from the other environmental and amenity issues, shade-free suburbs get hot early and the trapped heat means they stay hot long into the night. This is permanently locking Molonglo Valley residents into higher air-conditioning bills.
Then there is the impact on property prices. There is a reason real estate agents talk about leafy suburbs, and that is that big street trees raise property values. This has been shown in Canberra, in the rest of Australia and around the world. And, of course, the lack of room for large-canopy trees will have a huge impact on the social and environmental parts of these suburbs. Few trees and shrubs mean few native birds. Hot suburbs are also a big disincentive for people to go out and exercise or to walk over to their neighbours’ house or to take their kids for a bike ride or even the dog for a walk.
Then there is the issue of passive solar design of houses to reduce energy use and people’s bills. To make full use of passive solar design, standalone houses need a long frontage facing north, appropriate glazing and can have shading added where necessary, but not shaded by neighbours. This requires the subdivision to orient most house blocks with a long east-west axis. My office counted up blocks in recent parts of Denman Prospect, and around 60 per cent of house blocks are, in fact, oriented the other way, with a long north-south axis. It is almost impossible to build a passive solar home on these blocks and, if one is built, it would have to be significantly smaller than the ones around it, which has some other pluses. But that is not what the people in Molonglo are building.
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