11 - Urbanisation

Summary

Rising costs provide natural limits on rates of urbanisation that prevent cities from growing 'too fast', but markets may not work effectively if migrants act on imperfect information about job opportunities, flooding the urban labour market and forcing wages down. This chapter provides the key features of Australian urbanisation, and examines key issues that have been explored in the literature, the relationship between the growth of cities and their hinterlands, and the use of planning to improve the condition of cities, The coincidence of the 'industrious revolution' with white settlement influenced Australian patterns of production and consumption throughout the 19th century. The Australian economy was reshaped in the interwar period by a series of supply- and demand-side changes that shifted resources from rural and mining activity to manufacturing. The issue of whether cities have been 'too large', with their growth diverting scarce resources from potentially more productive uses, has been a major theme in the literature on Australian urbanisation.