Greater Sydney Curse

[glend (Glen)]

First up, this is not a Sydney bashing piece, I lived there for 30 years, and have seen a lot of change in that time. Rather, this is a little discussion topic for the New Year. I was down in Sydney for a couple of days over Christmas for the usual family commitments, and could not really relax until I crossed the Hawkesbury River heading home. The Greater Sydney (Mega City) as defined by Gladys, now stretches from Wyong on the Central Coast, through the Blue Mtns, and South to the fringe of the Southern Highlands. This Pandemic Isolation area has truly etched the boundaries of the anthill that the Mega City has become.
As we have seen this past year, a sick individual moving around amongst the concentrated masses, can quickly create infection hot spots, and exponential growth risks. How do we engineer (re-engineer) our cities to reduce risks in the future? This constant outward metropolitan amalgamation and integration, creates an environment which increases communicable disease risk significantly.
Is it not time to appreciate the regional model, where smaller populations, separated by nature, or distance, offers a better quality of life. With the technology available today we can replace a hard infrastructure network with a virtual one.
My neighbor, who is a local real estate agent, tells me that in the lead up to Christmas, his phone was constantly ringing with property enquiries from people trying to flee the Anthill. This does not inspire confidence that our still technically Rural designation, can be preserved; and that the boundaries are not just being pushed further out.
Perhaps the season of renewal, and disease, has caused people to re-evaluate how, and where, they live.
How do you see it?

[Allan_L (Allan)]

Hi Glen,
Well I moved here 31 years ago (almost to the day) because I had reason to "to re-evaluate how, and where, (we) live" as you put it. (Then living in Fairfield). And a local job was advertised I successfully won.
This was to improve the living situation for myself and my young family.
A good decision as it turned out for a few reasons. (stress, schools, community, relative safety etc)

It surprised me that not more Sydney siders had already done similar.

So I can't fault those making the decision to relocate now, good luck to them and I hope they get work locally.

The appeal then was a regional area with close proximity to facilities when needed. (Daughter went to Syd Uni; son1 went to Newcastle uni; son2 went to Ourimbah campus). But we passed farms on access roads. Best of both worlds.
Sadly most farms are gone to housing developments. But it was good while it lasted.
Basically as the city grows you need to move ahead of it if you want to retain those aspects. A lot of the locals were doing that when I was moving in. I guess its a matter of relative perspectives and the boiling frog syndrome.

We just need our incompetent council to ensure the infrastructure can support it and somehow grow more local jobs.

Anyway, I am glad to be here, as I believe are you.
Dark(ish) skies are a bonus.

Hope this isn't off your discussion topic.

[Camelopardalis (Dunk)]

As with everything, it’s a double-edged sword in this kind of situation...

If you keep the ants continued existence bound to the queen and her anthill, it’s (in theory) easier to isolate the ants from all the smaller, more vulnerable remote ant humps, which the ants from the anthill don’t have a need to visit often. Those humps are crucial the supply chain however, since the anthill needs a supply of fresh leaves to survive.

If the ants were more de-centralised, then ant transience is more prevalent but limited in range (since they have to pass the leaf to their neighbour), but is no less devastating to the ant population as the result of any contamination is rapidly distributed to the four corners of the colony as a necessity for said existence.

It’s a chicken-egg situation that I’m not convinced human-kind has found a solution to. Population concentration is fascinating. Mega cities have sprung up over the years almost by accident because of the queen not trusting her ants to do the right thing when not closely watched. For many corporate queens, they’ve had to make that leap of faith to survive this storm.

Whether or not the queens re-enforce their grip when leaf supply becomes “clean” again will be an interesting scenario. There are lots of benefits to the distributed ant hump colony, but each hump then needs sufficient resources to build itself up to be self-sufficient and not dependent on the anthill or orders from it.

FWIW, the humps in SE QLD have grown up over the past few decades inherently more distributed, but there is still some visible degree of de-centralising going on, which is competing with ants fleeing from contaminated regions to the south. I’m not convinced that the hierarchy of queens know how to coordinate their efforts in building the infrastructure in such a rapidly shifting population...