Gleeson’s aims are more ambitious, and his book makes far more confronting reading. Lifeboat Cities is an attempt to map out a human survival strategy. Like Clive Hamilton in Requiem for a Species (2010), Gleeson believes belated attempts to restrict greenhouse gas emissions are too weak to prevent serious climate change with disastrous consequences.

Stuck in a ‘Promethean dream in which we imagined ourselves masters of the natural universe’, we are sailing into a storm of huge proportions and the impact will be comparable to ‘global war’. The only thing to do is to prepare the lifeboats – our cities – and to seek calmer waters. Like the survivors of a shipwreck, we will have to strictly husband our resources and ‘smell the soil of privation’ for as long as the perilous voyage to safety lasts. There is no way we can avoid ‘a long period of massive consumption cuts’ that could involve ‘taking decisions about harmful consumption out of individual hands and imposing systems of safe and fair rationing that do not exceed ecological limits’.

Gleeson, alive to the incipient ‘dangers for democracy’, attempts to reassure readers that rationing can be achieved with ‘fairness and solidarity’. He notes the voluntary sacrifices made during World War II and points approvingly to the emergency measures introduced by Allied governments, including the suspension of markets and of some civil rights. He proposes a guardian state with wartime-like powers to ‘identify and enforce the massive emission cuts that Australia must make’. Banning air conditioning and reining in ‘the massive recent expansion of air travel’ are cited as measures that could be taken without infringing upon basic civil rights such as ‘cultural and political expression’.

Gleeson may have intended the phrase ‘guardian state’ to sound benevolent, but it has an unsettling Orwellian ring. How will the guardian state manage dissent against its rulings? Wartime governments have not always treated critics gently. I think Gleeson is far too quick to discount the achievements of liberal democracy. Despite manifest flaws, it remains the least-worst system yet devised to manage human affairs. He also attempts to shove too much blame for our current circumstances under the blanket of neo-liberalism. Despite a high profile in public discourse, neo-liberal ideas have never gained an unfettered hold on public policy in Australia. The Howard government could be more accused of implementing middle-class welfarism than of imposing the ‘stultifying, unjust rule of neo-liberalism’.

Nor am I convinced by Gleeson’s recourse to the ideas of twentieth-century German social theorist Erich Fromm. Fromm argued that while modernity liberated us from the bonds of ‘pre-individualistic society’, its atomising effects alienated us from ‘Earth, kin and community’. Freedom brought us ‘independence and rationality’ but made us ‘isolated, and thereby, anxious and powerless’. We escape from this unbearable state into the ‘consolations of consumerism’. While it is ridiculous to present shopping malls as ‘the end point of human ambition’, that does not mean that we are all in need of rescue from soulless individualism or consumer enslavement.

Nevertheless, this is a book bulging with ideas. Gleeson challenges us with confronting concepts and revealing insights delivered in pithy, lively prose. His argument that we are suffering from a crisis of over-production, rather than one of over-consumption, may sound like a semantic quibble, but it enables Gleeson to nail the paradox at the heart of our economic model: ‘We know we must consume less, but we don’t know how to produce less.’ No government can contemplate recession.

The focus on production also serves to remind us that Australia’s long economic boom did not end privation or entrenched disadvantage: society may feast on material goods and scarce resources, but not everyone has a place at the table. The legacy of Australia’s long economic boom is not ‘affluent resilience’ but vulnerability. Rather than being fattened up enough ‘to lose a few kilos to a recession’, many are left ‘with no excess stocks to run down’. In May 2009, 1.3 million households – almost a quarter of Australian mortgage holders – were experiencing ‘financial stress’.

Our vulnerability is exacerbated because we under-consume ‘socially nutritious things’ such as care. The latter is vital to all of us at stages in our lives, yet it is undervalued. We have focused on wealth rather than well-being, and, as Gleeson writes, the ‘absence of care nurtures its deepest foe, despair’. Gleeson argues compellingly for a new social compact based on care, not just as an obligation but as ‘an enormously enriching experience and practice’ – care as a counterpoint to consumption and as a new social ambition for our educational system and our social life. Gleeson also seeks to rehabilitate three unfashionable but worthy values – restraint, sacrifice and solidarity – values that can be celebrated by conservatives and progressives alike. Refreshingly, he also seeks to return equity to the centre of our political concerns, given the ample evidence that equity fosters social cohesion and health while restraining environmental damage.

Gleeson is more concerned with social relations than with physical structures, but a critique of the compact cities approach to urban planning forms another key strand in his argument. According to Gleeson, proponents of the compact city regard sprawl as the key source of our environmental, social and transport woes and so demonise suburbia as the ‘consumptive beast whose appetite has ruined us all’. He relocates blame away from the suburbs by offering evidence that the cosmopolitan denizens of the inner city stomp deeper carbon boot marks into the fragile earth than do their car-bound sub urban cousins. Air travel can quickly subsume the environmental benefits of walking to work or installing solar hot water. In general, environmental costs grow with wealth – the richer we are the more we consume and pollute, regardless of where we live.

In his sympathy for the suburbs, Gleeson is apt to oversimplify the compact cities argument as ‘a vision of a closely crowded urban humanity’, a tall city of ‘towering ambition’ cut from ‘the pattern book of industrialism’. Intelligent proponents of the compact city ideal – such as Toronto-based urban strategist Jeb Brugmann or Melbourne planner Rob Adams – do not argue for cloud-scraping apartment towers but for medium-rise housing in blocks of four to five storeys based around key transport hubs and routes. Barcelona, not Hong Kong, is the compact city’s poster child.

Paul Mees shares Gleeson’s disdain for advocates of the compact city for whom ‘hating the suburbs has become a kind of moral crusade’, but offers a more nuanced critique. He points out that due to measurement errors, the difference in densities between European and Australian (or North American) cities has been exaggerated and that most new housing development in Europe follows the suburban model pioneered in the ‘Anglosphere’. The romantic heart of Las Ramblas is not where most residents of Barcelona actually live. More importantly, Mees (and Gleeson) argue that we are in serious trouble indeed if our environmental future depends on re-engineering suburbia ‘because large increases to the density of big cities take many decades ... [and] … problems like global warming and volatile oil prices are real and urgent …’

Mees’s views on public transport are distilled by his catchphrase ‘density is not destiny’. It is easier to provide rapid mass transit in Hong Kong than in Houston, but successful public transport systems can be built in any city, regardless of form. They do not require massive investment, large-scale engineering or whiz-bang new inventions, because the challenges are political and administrative, not technological or financial. Central planning can build well-coordinated systems that link bus routes with existing radial rail lines to create a spider web network that covers city and suburbs. This makes it easy to go anywhere anytime, because changing from one mode or route to another is as simple as turning left or right in a car. Mees cites the example of Zurich. Zurich is rich – most of its residents can afford cars – and it is not particularly densely settled, yet it has the highest per capita public transport use of any city in Europe. In 2000, sixty-six per cent of people travelled to work on public transport, sixteen per cent walked or cycled, and only nineteen per cent travelled by car. Compared with other cities, Zurich’s public transport system needs only modest subsidies, with high levels of cost recovery from passenger fares. Mees calculates that Zurich’s financial support for public transport equates to sixty-six cents per passenger, which is just one third of the current Melbourne subsidy of $1.92 per passenger for a far inferior service.

Mees’s approach to public transport suggests that a rapid, far-reaching transition to more climate friendly urban systems may be easier than we think, but he argues that such changes will only happen when citizens demand them. The genesis of Zurich’s public transport success lay in protests to defeat ‘modernising’ freeway plans and to preserve old-fashioned infrastructure such as trams and trains. Europe’s urban transport success stories confirm ‘the critical importance of public debate and even conflict’ in bringing about change. If we are to avoid the lifeboat scenario foreseen by Brendan Gleeson, then we are going to have to become much more active, demanding and impatient citizens.