New Towns in Australia: Some Planning Problems1

A recommended new cities programme was presented to the Australian government by the Cities Commission in 1973. The proposal has fairly ambitious aims for decentralization of the Australian population into planned growth centres. These growth centres were seen to offer solutions to some of the problems of the larger Australian cities. This paper discusses the aims of the new cities policy and suggests that encouraging population decentralization will face some serious difficulties. The difficulty of planning innovations in a rapidly growing centre is also discussed.