City residents to face higher-density living under plan to fix Melbourne's urban boundary CITY dwellers will face higher-density living and regional towns will become bigger population centres under a plan to fix Melbourne's urban boundary. In a major policy shift, the State Government wants to relieve Melbourne's growth pains by making Victoria a "state of cities rather than a city state." The city's unsustainable urban sprawl will be checked and more people encouraged to settle in regional towns such as Geelong, Warragul, Seymour and Bacchus Marsh. Planning Minister Matthew Guy said Melbourne had reached its geographical limits and the days of expanding the urban growth boundary were over. "We are deeply worried about liveability in some of our outer urban areas in places that we've inherited, which had no infrastructure upgrades for a decade or so," he told the Herald Sun. The new city limit will be drawn up under the Metropolitan Planning Strategy, but it is likely to closely follow the current urban growth boundary. Labor extended the UGB by 40,000ha in 2009-10 and Mr Guy added another 6000ha last year, giving the city at least 20 years of land supply for new housing. Mr Guy said the Government wasn't closing the door on Melbourne's population growth. But it was vital to have a smarter plan for a city that added more people each year than Brisbane, Adelaide, Canberra and the Gold Coast combined, he said. "Melbourne will need to accommodate greater density in defined areas; hence, our new residential growth zones," he said. That's also the reason to introduce a neighbourhood residential zone to then protect areas which need to be protected so we don't grow every area exactly the same. Mr Guy said resources would be poured into regional towns as Melbourne's growth suburbs filled up in coming decades. "Twenty years from now, if you want to live in a house-and-land-style market, that's going to be outside Melbourne," he said. It's going to be in Warragul-Drouin, it's going to be in Ballan, and in Geelong . . . The director of Monash University's Centre for Population and Urban Research, Dr Bob Birrell, said it was a remarkable policy change for a Government focused on expanding housing opportunities on the city fringe. "If this is a genuinely fixed urban boundary, it will mean that competition for land on the fringe will go up and as a consequence the recent trend for people to move to places like Warragul and Wallan will probably increase," he said. This may be what the Government hopes, but it might not be real decentralisation -- rather, it will just be an extension of Melbourne's sprawl to ever more remote satellite towns.