Sydney's metropolitan area is already oversized. People are already regularly commuting for well over an hour to the city center on congested public transport, or driving on congested roadways. I don't think Melbourne is much different Where would we put 25,000 new homes today?
Rob Adams, former City Architect at City of Melbourne, did a study a little while ago that showed you could fit in 1 million more residents if you filled in grayfield sites with medium density, and without impacting on existing heritage zoning. Grayfield being existing under-utilised land (i.e open carparks that can could be built over).
It's been a while since I watched this video but the proposal is for 5 storey high developments along transport corridors that do not tower over suburbs like high density developments, but which also serve to engage with street life more effectively than existing low density.
It can be done. But obviously needs a departure from existing low density suburban sprawl, and a tight control over overdevelopment. But it can actually result in better amenities, faster transport, for residents.
Shanghai has lots of high rises; well, they are mostly 30 story apartment buildings that can be reliably built with concrete and unskilled labor. Yet, there is a lot of speculation market in the China so prices are still high even if supply expands (and many apartments are empty because they are just being used as speculative investments). One of the reason I didn't look at Shanghai was commute times (Microsoft's Shanghai office is in the boonies vs. Beijing where the office is at least inside the 4th ring rood).
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean by "high rises", but I don't think this is true. I live in Tokyo, inside a 10+ floor building, that's surrounded by similar buildings.
Just off the top of my head, I can think of a lot of places with multiple blocks full of high rises, such as Ginza, Shibuya, Akihabara, etc
The solution is to peg it to job growth. Today in nyc you have nimbys in greenwich village who hope it stays as it looked the last 50 years for the next 50 years. Such a neighborhood near so many jobs and transit cannot remain a mid rise tenement district until the end of time.
Why do so many people here take for granted that living in Asian-style megacities is inevitable, or even remotely desirable? I really don't want to live in such a place.
You don't have to. All it takes is a few that will soak up the population that want affordable housing. 99% of the rest of the land will be left for you to live in as you see fit. Just don't expect your housing to be an investment or subsidies for your extra cost of infrastructure and energy.
