Urban sprawl fuels deadly fire risks on city outskirts
Over time, bushfire-prone Australia has gotten better at building homes that can withstand a fiery blaze.
But mistakes are still being made in the planning stages, putting properties in urban slums at risk in the event of a flare-up, an expert says.
“It depends on the layout of the street network to allow people to get in and out easily, to allow emergency vehicles to get in and out easily,” Benjamin Driver, senior lecturer at the University of NSW’s School of the Built Environment, told AAP.
“We need to think at an even higher level, at a metropolitan scale, and really protect our food bowl, which acts as a natural buffer between the city and the forests.”
Wildfires have already claimed many lives and destroyed dozens of homes this summer.
Australia is hot and dry and has always been prone to fires, but human-caused climate change is making fires more intense and frequent.
At the same time, the country is experiencing a severe housing crisis, and governments are actively trying to increase supply to alleviate shortages and increase affordability.
While the focus is on “well-located” homes and densifying inner-city areas, new homes are still being built on urban fringes and encroaching on bushland.
Mr Driver said the continued sprawl of Australia’s major cities was depleting farmland, which acts as a buffer between urban areas and bushland.
Highlighting London as a good example, he said it was possible to stop the expansion of the city’s footprint.
“Of course they’re not at risk of bushfires, but they have a greenbelt around metropolitan London that they’ve maintained for decades.”
Mr Driver said vegetation management and landscape buffers could help protect city views, but wholesale eradication of bush near buildings was not the solution.
“People think if you have too much brush it will burn,” he said.
“But actually more shrubs, more trees, it keeps the ecosystem largely resilient and it actually keeps more moisture in the landscape.”
In urban greening projects, risks can be minimized by choosing trees such as less flammable species than gum.
More green space cools the local climate and increases humidity in the air, which can help prevent buildings from catching fire on hot, windy days when fiery embers can travel up to 50km from the fire front, the urban planning expert said.
Mr. Driver said subdivisions in wildfire areas have improved roads connecting streets so residents can escape and first responders can get in, but the “one way in, one way out” situation still persists.
“It should have been banned a long time ago,” he said.
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