11.5.11

B&W



I spent all of yesterday in a conference about population trends and the future of Perth/WA. Yay for Geography! It was one of my favourite subjects at school. Plus sides of the conference were some interesting stuff about changing land use patterns and urbanisation. Down sides were the rampant over-use of the word "sustainable" and some truly mind numbing graphs. The one statistic that stuck in my mind was that over 50% of WA's waste - i.e. landfill - is from the demolition and construction industry. So all those old buildings they keep knocking over to build concrete things in their place.... totally cranking up WA's already really bad level of waste per capita. And houses keep getting bigger. And full of more stuff.

Some buildings have to go, like the Ent Cent which they started to demolish today. It was ugly and a waste of space. And we do need more houses, so the growing population has somewhere to live. But perhaps we don't all need such giant houses in the future, and could put some effort into making better use of the buildings we already have instead of just replacing them. Something to think about...

H.

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