Filed under: Environment, Gawler, Planning, Urban Growth Boundary, Urban Sprawl | Tags: Community consultation, Gawler East, Lend Lease, Planning, sustanability, 30 Year Plan, gawler, transparency
Increasing the community is raising concerns about urban growth and it’s long-term impacts.
The worrying trend though, is that developers are not releasing information about the plans they have. It increasingly looks like developers will simply push their plans onto communities with little regard for the wider, overall impact that new developments have.
In the Gawler East development we can see this being played out. There are sufficient indications that the developer has drawn up detailed plans for the area. It can reasonably be assumed that they will plan to maximise their profits with the possibility of over 4000 building allotments. This translates to around 10,000 more people in Gawler. Add in the new developments in the pipeline of around another 10,000 to be housed in Southern Gawler and the population doubles in a very short period of time. Our current population is around 20,000.
What will be the impacts on our community with this sudden increase of our population? Without proper studies and assessments we are only guessing.
When developers plan new estates they rarely look beyond their boundaries to impacts population increase have on the wider community.
In particular, everyone living in Gawler understands the problems we currently have with traffic.
This is an ongoing concern that has been echoed by a number of different groups and organisations in the community. For example the Gawler Business Development Board (Bunyip April 10th 2008) have identified traffic management issues in Gawler as a serious problem that needs to be resolved.
Does any one seriously believe our current traffic managements problems will be solved by doubling the population of Gawler?
There is an urgent need to stand back from this rush to develop and undertake detailed independent assessments of the long-term effects of this new development.
We as a community need to fully understand what will be the costs, environmentally and socially as well as the day-to-day impacts on our lives from this development.
It needs to be firstly established if having a development at Gawler East is in fact feasible or desirable. There appears to be an assumption that it is, simply because a line has been drawn on a map
At the moment the whole process does not seem to be open to the community to assess.
The developer will want to maximise the returns to its shareholders. The community wants to be happy that this profit is not paid for through its loss.
