The Australian
But planners are not making the same mistakes, except in NSW
EXPLAINING one of history's great mysteries, University of Sydney archeologists, reported in The Australian yesterday, say the ancient Cambodian city of Angkor collapsed because it grew too big and was overwhelmed by extreme weather. Its fate, they say, has implications for modern cities. Indeed it does, but not the ones that enemies of the great Australian backyard will claim. Rather than expanding, perhaps Angkor's problem was that it was run by ancient equivalents of the NSW state government. Angkor's administrators did not adapt their infrastructure to changing circumstances. They let their city expand but did not maintain services to support it.
Sound familiar? It will to anybody who lives in the northwestern suburbs of Sydney, where a repeatedly promised and much-needed suburban railway has not been built and the roads are utterly inadequate. But the damage done by official incompetence is not the message inner city activists will draw from Angkor's fate.
This sort of research is easily misused by deep green ideologues who dislike people because they believe our presence pollutes the natural environment, activists who use Jared Diamond's theory of what happened when the people of Easter Island over-used their resources as a metaphor for the modern world. Such arguments suggest we are doomed to repeat Angkor's experience, that we cannot repair infrastructure and do not know how to use engineering to address climate change, that we must not allow people to live where they like. Of course they are wrong ... apart, of course, from NSW.
EXPLAINING one of history's great mysteries, University of Sydney archeologists, reported in The Australian yesterday, say the ancient Cambodian city of Angkor collapsed because it grew too big and was overwhelmed by extreme weather. Its fate, they say, has implications for modern cities. Indeed it does, but not the ones that enemies of the great Australian backyard will claim. Rather than expanding, perhaps Angkor's problem was that it was run by ancient equivalents of the NSW state government. Angkor's administrators did not adapt their infrastructure to changing circumstances. They let their city expand but did not maintain services to support it.
Sound familiar? It will to anybody who lives in the northwestern suburbs of Sydney, where a repeatedly promised and much-needed suburban railway has not been built and the roads are utterly inadequate. But the damage done by official incompetence is not the message inner city activists will draw from Angkor's fate.
This sort of research is easily misused by deep green ideologues who dislike people because they believe our presence pollutes the natural environment, activists who use Jared Diamond's theory of what happened when the people of Easter Island over-used their resources as a metaphor for the modern world. Such arguments suggest we are doomed to repeat Angkor's experience, that we cannot repair infrastructure and do not know how to use engineering to address climate change, that we must not allow people to live where they like. Of course they are wrong ... apart, of course, from NSW.
