According to a new poll reported in the UK's Daily Telegraph, Americans are trading suburban sprawl with New Urbanism.

This move has been taking place for some time in Australia and I suspect has been happening equally in other places that have a very strong orientation to personal transport rather than public.

I think that I must have been one of the very early people participating in this trend - first out of Sydney to Mudgee looking for the country life style back in 1989, and then back to Sydney after we had a lengthy drought - though not as severe as the current one, and after being hit with soaring interest rates via the recession that Paul Keating said we had to have.

Now I see the bifurcation of real estate prices in Sydney, with suburban homes in the west decreasing in value and houses in the inner suburbs of the east, like Paddington and Surry Hills, continuing to defy gravity.

What it all says, is that we define ourselves by the spaces and communities that we choose to live within. Richard Neville has an interesting view about the near future in his blog.

I think that there will need to be a massive rethink of infrastructure everywhere around the world to deal with the sorts of challenges that come from a continuing high cost of petrochemicals and energy. Frankly I see New Urbanism as a short lived affair. Coming soon to a community near you will be lessons in economic survival in a new energy constrained society. It will include looking at real estate investment and local services and communities - and over the next 18 months we will start to see smart money from the US and Europe seriously looking to find places to move to in Australia and New Zealand. The guys who are buying oil futures now and driving the price toward 200 bucks a barrel are the same people who are reading the data on supply. They are used to doing the numbers. They will figure very soon that the safest places to be in a world which is coming apart are where people speak the same language, have few guns, have a plentiful supply of water, etc etc. That means that you have to stop thinking about countries as being destinations and start thinking about small communities.

The places that provide the right mix of services, access to an airport, access to broadband, security, education etc are going to be the places where real estate values skyrocket over the next couple of years. (By the way, the fact that the New South Wales government couldn't manage a piss up in a brewery may actually be a good thing. Their inefficiency and inability will hopefully mean that New South Wales doesn't get swamped with people!)