TWICE

I grew up in suburban Melbourne and Sydney in the 1960s. I was lucky. You could walk or cycle to schools and shops, lots of places to explore; ...

But the sustainability killer is the number of people living in the house. Where once one refrigerator in the kitchen was sufficient, now there are two or more refrigerators in the family room or garage to store booze, soft drinks, bait, fish and the like. Parked on the front driveway, the front lawn, the nature strip (weird term), cars are necessitated by the lack of public transport in the outer suburbs: no trams, no trains, and privatised bus services that are hopelessly inadequate. Children may have shared a bedroom and one bathroom in the past (I did). The sites are skinny to minimise the length along the street and sites so small that the houses are oriented to the boundaries, not the sun. The houses are so crowded on the sites that passive solar is not possible, and cross-ventilation breeds a loss of privacy, so air-conditioning is the norm.