Pandering to a dead paradigm

Celebratory applause has welcomed news of a new residential development near Mooroopna whose obedience, it seems, is to a dead paradigm.
The Victorian Government has tipped in $2 million toward a $6.5 million project in Mooroopna’s “West growth corridor”.


Mooroopna's railway station
 - effectively cut off from
 the town.

Applying values that have held our gaze for decades, the so-called corridor, north-west of the town, of nearly 300 hectares will allow for about 1600 housing allotments and become home for some 4000 people.
In an era of seemingly endless energy, including easy access to a wrongly assumed infinite flow of oil, and a time when we were unaware of how residential sprawl equated with size of our carbon footpint, such applause would have been appropriate.
To excavate a weary cliché, “the times they are a-changn’”, or more accurately, have changed, and although predictions are invariably wrong, the future of the “west growth corridor” is, in an energy constrained world, decidedly questionable.
Rather than cast our lot in with a project that breaks new ground, literally, we should be redirecting that cash toward the total redevelopment of central Mooroopna allowing for an increased density of residences with access to near car-free public spaces and, of course, the opening up of the railway station to those on foot.
Density does not equate with overcrowding, rather with thoughtful placement of residential areas generating a distinct sense of community that is mostly missing from many modern housing estates.

A former Mooroopna fellw, Jack Findlay,
won the world motorcycle championship
in 1975 and his feat is acknowledged at
this stature in the middle of the town.

Ideas from the mid and late 20^th century that saw housing estates developed on the basis that people wanted detached homes on individual blocks, remote from community services and absolutely car dependent, continue in present times and provides, it is almost certain, the template for what is envisaged near Mooroopna.
What is planned for the corridor appears to be the manifestation of thoughts remote from an acceptance of facts illustrating an understanding that rather than encouraging remote residential expansion, we should be working towards the reverse; the creation of a new central Mooroopna.
The utopian vision is vibrant – the future of the former Ardmona fruit factory is not bathed in optimism and that space should become the heart of the new Mooroopna providing easy pedestrian access to the railway station with the other end of that public space open to the town’s existing main street; surrounded by residences of two or three stories; a public vegetable garden; shops and a variety of government services.
Like it or not, we face a future of scarcity in which the skills of the artisan will become invaluable and spaces, places and facilities should be allowed within the “new Mooroopna” at which these people could work and their services be accessed.
The “five minute life” would be possible – home, work, shopping, socializing, leisure and public transport all within easy walking or cycling distance.
Whether or not Mooroopna is ideally sited is debatable, but the fact is that it is where it is and so short of uprooting the entire town, something that is impracticable and undesirable, those with the cash and the planning power should be revitalizing the heart of the town.
A “new Mooroopna” would be that heart, contrary to the west corridor growth plan which does nothing to appease the need of community rather; it worsens world troubles and simply enriches the few who endorse such expansionist plans.