Urban Development

Urban development is the first thing I wanted to talk about here in Perth. Urban development is going on at a great pace and the standard approach here in Western Australia is for suburban development to happen at the outer edges of the city. You have suburbs slowly spreading out into areas that are cleared and this is eating into both areas of native bushland and land that used to be used for farming for agricultural purposes. The debate here is that on one side there's the idea that we need more housing. We have a housing shortage in Western Australia and suburban expansion is essential. Suburban expansion on the edges of the city is cheaper and easier to do than building more homes within the city even though it's recognized it creates lots of problems with infrastructure and so on. On the other side of the debate people say that urban sprawl is destroying bush and consequently the natural wildlife that exists there and that it's too easy for developers to ignore these facts.