Intermediary cities: The long-term answer to Australia’s big-city issues?

A new report has trained a spotlight on “intermediary cities”, examining how density and population issues in the country’s central hubs can be mitigated with the development of medium-sized urban centres.

The result of the Monash Commission’s latest inquiry has come down, with the collection of policy experts delivering an expansive report on how a number of issues related to big-city living — rising home prices primary among them — could be solved through investment in “intermediary cities”.

The commission argues that smaller cities of this nature — with a population of between 50,000 and 1 million — can serve not only to support strong economies in large metropolises, but can even encourage the stability of regional areas. This is due to a number of factors, including their ability to attract people with a preference for city amenities, thereby reducing density within major central business districts (CBDs) and alleviating pressure on housing and infrastructure.

At the same time, they offer these amenities within a more reasonable vicinity to small towns, for those who are interested in regional living but are unwilling to go too far from certain conveniences.

In Australia in particular, this could help stabilise the flow of regional movers, ensuring that sea and tree changers don’t ultimately feel cut off from the creature comforts they left behind.

In many ways, intermediary cities can be thought of somewhat like a connective link between big cities and the regions; yet by necessity, they must function as desirable locations in and of themselves, and that requires more resources than they are perhaps currently receiving.

As the report noted, it all comes down to intermediary cities being “networked and harnessed correctly”, in order to make a “significant contribution towards future societal development”.

In Australia, the examples of Canberra and Bradfield were used to explain how intermediary cities currently do (and potentially could) function to improve the liveability and resilience for large cities of the future. But it noted that integral to the success of this strategy is governments’ willingness to dedicate infrastructure spending to areas that all too often get overlooked.

“CBDs and primary cities such as Melbourne, New York and Vancouver could be said to have attracted the bulk of developmental focus,” it noted.

But, paradoxically, “these cities are also synonymous with the stark disadvantages of this model — traffic congestion, housing affordability, environmental quality and social inequality are amongst the most prominent issues of the 21st century”.

Alongside this major-city model, there’s already a gradual awareness of the need for alternatives to densely packed CBDs sprawling out into endless suburban expanses.

“There has been a gradual developmental shift towards encouraging polycentric cities, or the existence of multiple centres in one geographic area,” the report noted. “Intermediary cities are critical to the development of polycentrism to create connection between large CBDs, to outlying suburbs, and regional and rural communities.”

But the time to start prioritising them, according to a number of international bodies, is now.

The G20 describes intermediary cities as “offering a significant, untapped potential for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals”. The OECD predicts the rise of the intermediate city as one of four possible future settlement patterns in the post-COVID world from a future-of-work perspective. And at COP 26 in Glasgow, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change indicated that in order to prepare large cities for the future, discussion, planning and taking steps to develop intermediary cities should begin immediately.

Clearly, those who are working to improve urban planning outcomes for city residents, the environment, and the businesses that function within them agree that the benefits of intermediary cities are obvious.

Prioritising spending to help them flourish is perhaps the harder part, but the report noted that with a shift in perspective, governments and citizens alike might come to see spending in intermediary cities not as a diversion of funds away from major cities but as critical to their ongoing vitality as well.

“The intermediary city and the CBD cannot exist successfully without each other,” the report noted. “The metropolis should be considered as polycentric, with concentrated areas existing among a constellation of interconnected parts. All of those parts contribute towards meeting the needs of not only the citizens within that particular city, but across the entire network of cities, the country or even the international region.

“By holistically considering cities’ existence and relationships as part of a larger metropolitan network, it becomes possible to determine how best to arrange each part of the system and leverage their advantages in a complementary way.”

In releasing the report, Monash University president and vice-chancellor Professor Margaret Gardner stressed that solving the issues currently facing Australia’s largest cities, and the cities of the world for that matter, cannot rely on “doing the same as we have done before”.

The ongoing pandemic, she noted, has put the need for developing alternative living models into sharp focus.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has given leaders and governments a unique opportunity to review what liveability means for a wider group of people. Living locally and in nature has renewed our focus — large global cities and smaller cities can work together to effectively address these issues in a new way,” she said.