We have all heard stories about city-centric people who do not understand country folk or the lives they lead.

There can be problems with city-based bureaucrats who draft legislation which applies in rural areas. One of the things that we often do not understand about each other is how differently we each use space.

The Wellington LGA is large enough to accommodate all of Sydney. In the image at the right the dark outline is that of the Wellington LGA, and the red outline is that of all the individual Sydney LGAs.

What does this mean? Well, it means that six million people can live in an area similar in size to that of the Wellington LGA.

Now that doesn’t mean that we can start planning for them all to live here, quite the contrary, but this does explain something very important about ‘economies of scale’.

In the city there can be thousands of people occupying a square kilometre, whereas the Wellington LGA would average two people per square kilometre.

Economies of scale are where more people contribute to the cost of something. The higher the density of population the lower the individual cost.

‘All well and good’ I can hear a former mayor say, ‘but we country people do not want to live up close to each other’. Perhaps not, but at some stage someone has to pay for the roads and utilities that service residential development patterns, and the more dispersed the patterns the more they cost to service.

The fact is that government subsidies for country water and sewer infrastructure are becoming very difficult to obtain, which means that if we wish to maintain our current development patterns then more funding will have to come from local sources. This will be difficult, whilst there may be plenty of hollow logs in the country, few are stuffed with cash.

The outlook is that country towns may have to accept more compact development patterns, and this could include encouraging urban renewal and medium density housing.

I’ll talk about urban renewal and medium density housing another time.

For the moment those wishing to dig deeper into the detail may visit http://www.wellington.nsw.gov.au/ eservice/navigation.jsp

I’m happy to answer any questions about the LEP Review.

Syd Craythorn, Principal Strategic Planner, Wellington Council

mail@wellington.nsw.gov .au