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| Once wild grasslands now covered in suburban sprawl. |
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| Digital composite created by Csaba Szamosy for Imagine The Future Inc, 1996, from photographs by Carmen Stewart and Merrill Findlay (ITF). |
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| Young residents of the basalt plain catch freshwater crayfish, or 'yabbies', in Pipemakers Park on the Maribyrnong River. |
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| Photo by Carmen Stewart, 1996. |
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People from every inhabited continent on the planet are now living on Victoria's basalt plain.
They have built, bought or rented houses, raised families, worked together, and shared their leisure time to create a diverse and highly urbanised (or suburbanised) society.
This process began in the mid-1830s, with a few tents on the banks of the Yarra and other rivers. Now suburbs and towns, consisting primarily of detached dwellings on individual blocks, cover great swathes of the plain.
Most of these human settlements are designed and constructed in ways that are very environmentally damaging, both in terms of their inputs (all the food, energy, water and other resources people consume or use), and their outputs ('waste' products, including Greenhouse gases, sewage, garbage, pollutants etc). This means their ecological
footprints (the extended environmental impact caused by people's resource consumption) are giant-sized and therefore unsustainable.
While many people enjoy rich and fulfilling lives in vigorous and supportive communities, others, including some young people, experience loneliness, despair, isolation, cultural deprivation, poor educational opportunities, unemployment, poverty and homelessness. For them, the livability of their towns and suburbs is very low.
Those who recognise the social and ecological challenges present-day human settlements present are actively developing visions of possible futures in which the negative impacts of towns and cities are significantly reduced, while their 'livability' is increased - so that everyone can enjoy rich and fulfilling lives. And slowly these people are finding ways to implement their visions of the future, to forever change the way they and their fellow humans live on Victoria's basalt plain.
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| Urban consolidation on a brownfield site in the Municipality of Maribyrnong, 1996. Will such developments reduce the ecological damage associated with suburban sprawl? |
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| Photo by Merrill Findlay for Imagine The Future Inc, 1996. |
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What are your stories about living in towns and suburbs on the basalt plain? How do you think we can reduce resource consumption while increasing the livability of human settlements to make them more socially and ecologically sustainable?
Copyright Imagine The Future Inc 2002.
Text by Merrill Findlay.
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