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Victories and disasters in planning.

By Robert Gibbons - posted Thursday, 6 January 2011


On Line Opinion ran an opinion piece by John Mant on 21 December 2010: “Australian cities: the things we don’t talk about”. He explained some major reasons why “planning” is often nonsensical in Australia.

Australians are notorious for their poor understanding of their own history and we can’t understand the future without the history. This system review complements Mant’s planning profession perspective.

What is “planning”?

In theory, planners see it as quilt-making: start in a corner but with a design in mind and move through the whole but with flashes of inspiration as you go. Planning is to be systematic and linked with forms of democracy and top-down and bottom-up governmental procedures; and needs money from private and public sources.

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In reality cities start on transport channels, on the coast with hinterland access, or on rivers, harbours or road/rail junctions. These situations produce “planning by necessity” as seen in Rome, London, Paris, Sydney and elsewhere before the mid-1800s. Cities have to have wharves, ports, bridges, railways, roads, water and sewerage networks and the like; and other things happen around those, like houses, schools, shops and hospitals. Erasmus Darwin designed a Sydney Harbour Bridge before Captain Phillip’s fleet even arrived. This logic continues today with the National Broadband project.

Theoretical land use approaches were developed as governments asserted reforms - Parisian roads and the Eiffel Tower, English healthier suburbs and American parks and suburbs, and increasingly clean air, water and food. “Planning to inspire” became important.

Economic models were developed to assess the costs of concentrated development against sprawl, airport locations and the like. However, this lead to “mistaken planning”. Peter Self pointed to “Nonsense on Stilts” in London’s 3rd Airport debates from the 1960s, as over-extensions of economic “logic” (often seen even now).

With the onslaught of “spinning”, we saw the emergence of “deception through planning”. Vested interests pushed their agenda without economic, financial, environmental, legal or sociological discipline.

These two factors led to “discipline through planning”, such as attempts to rein in the unruly NSW sibling.

Underpinning all is “planning in isolation” - land use and like strategies divorced from taxation and other incentives, pricing and subsidy distortions, practicality of projects in a network context, technology commonsense and the like. This topic stands as is for present purposes.

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Planning by necessity

Australia was a colonial overlay on a challenging continent, with great distances and thin patronage. There were “civilised” expectations even in the early 19th century but without a real government system and tax base. Adelaide and Melbourne had designer-founders.

Right from the off Sydney was venal and unregulated with slums in outer as well as inner suburbs, crooked narrow streets, noxious industries and sewer discharges upstream of swimming pools and on sources of drinking water, and sloppy land allocations.

In the 1870s Birmingham mayor, Joseph Chamberlain - in charge of England’s colonial affairs on both sides of 1890, chair of the London County Council in the 1890s, and so nearly Prime Minister in 1902 but father of later PM Neville - made massive efforts to improve living conditions so that potential sailors and soldiers would grow up strong and healthy (“eugenics”).

Chamberlain’s municipal programs inspired NSW’s leaders to build the services which would enable working families to move out of slums into suburbs. The opening of the Paris Metro in 1900 and of Berlin’s in 1902 further inspired the city underground electric railway; the Bridge was a railways-plan which had no road tolls in its initial calculations; and rail electrification overall was based on the eugenics thinking. (Melbourne took many decades to replicate that inner metro.)

All initial road, rail, tram and water networks were built on a radial basis - strongly centred on the initial suburbs. The first planning inquiry, the Improvement Commission of 1908-09, reinforced that idea; but its primary motivation was to argue for Greater Sydney. In 1910 Sydney had over 40 municipal bodies; it still has.

The second inquiry and report, the Cumberland County Council’s Scheme in 1948, was inspired by London, to constrain development rather than spread over the plains, while transport bureaucrats were then proposing the transplantation of the tram system from the railway-serviced zones into railway-feeder zones (in the spirit of Zurich).

Land development was largely laissez-faire and privately-driven, limited more by the availability of water and sewerage. It was not until the Wran Government from 1976 that “planning” became based on “planning” as a legal and philosophical direction. Major land releases had happened throughout the century but intensified from the 1960s.

The later “necessity” elements included the Snowy hydro scheme; the expansion of Mascot Airport; the relocation of coal handling to Port Kembla and of containers to Botany Bay; the Ord River scheme; the construction of various universities and of various waste and nuclear facilities; and the redevelopment of old railway yards and workshops. Currently the national NBN expenditure of more than $40 billion is being justified as essential and necessary.

Planning to inspire

The “improvement” mentality of the early 1900s enraptured cities whose citizens were suffering the effects of industrialisation and municipal ineptitude. More than 50 million people attended the 1900 Paris Exhibition. Monumental schemes were developed in England, France, Germany, Russia, Japan and America, and elsewhere.

Royal Commissions in 1890 and 1896 and an independent inquiry in 1898 showed that while tram congestion was a critical concern, steam trains were unsuitable to run into the Sydney CBD.

The great Australian scheme was Sydney’s Improvement Commission with its parks, housing plans, transport schemes and the rest that pushed that city into world leadership. The planning focus became the provision of a modern electric train service in the suburbs and under the CBD and to the North Shore. Governments in the 1910s and especially Jack Lang’s in the 1920s committed to building the improvement scheme to the tune of £27 million (the Bridge accounting for just £10 million).

There was a land speculation boom in the 1920s which led to thousands of unsold houses in the 1930s. Tram patronage collapsed in the 1930s as the city changed.

Postwar Reconstruction brought a bloom of enthusiasm, driven by a belief in “planning” and the need for more suburbs and motor cars. Sydney City was campaigning for a “master plan”.

The Cumberland County Council scheme and the concurrent Main Roads Development Plan presaged a transport-driven metropolitan plan. Home ownership started to rise, producing Australia’s character statement of the quarter-acre block - based on the car. The nature of politics started to change, based on mortgages and consumer debt.

The scheme also produced major losers such as developers and fringe councils. The short-term demographic projections were too low. There was great pressure to drop the Green Belt and some land on the fringe was released between 1951 and 1959, with the sewerage backlog already growing by 6,500 homes a year. The 50-odd local councils were supposed to prepare planning schemes but only 3 did.

Meanwhile in Melbourne the Metropolitan Planning Scheme was released in 1954. The Dictionary of Melbourne summarised it thus: a “cautious, practical response to problems of low-density sprawl, the need to decentralise industrial employment, traffic congestion, use zoning, and Cold War concern about 'protection of the population from the effects of aerial warfare'”. (It did not predict the rise of shopping centres.)

The Cumberland plan was scuppered by former Lord Mayor now minister Pat Hills in 1959. He released much more of the Green Belt and announced the Warringah Expressway and Western Distributor and other massive works. He was warm in the arms of the Department of Main Roads and their US consultants, all of whom had moved away from the CCC.

The County Council’s legendary planner Rod Fraser counter-attacked with a public transport plan but this went nowhere. The same applied to several strategic plans written by Rob Caldwell in the mid-1960s and Jim Colman’s “A Plan for Sydney” in 1967 on behalf of the Civic Reform Association. The government’s Sydney Region Outline Plan of 1967 was a door to faster growth - let it happen, develop along road and rail corridors, more houses on the outer.

The Sydney Area Transportation Study (1974) had been a massive attempt to dress up the roads and balance them with railway, tram and cycle projects. The Whitlam Government inherited the sewerage backlog. This was a national disgrace. Many of the freeway works announced by Hills and incorporated in SATS and in Melbourne were rejected by the national government, saving inner western and northern suburbs.

The new Wran Government endorsed the URTAC Report (1976) which tailored project schedules to available funds, for example by deleting the extension of the Warringah Freeway; and several outer rail extensions were approved. Wran re-commenced the foreshortened Eastern Suburbs line which had been dormant from 1952 until 1967. It finally opened in 1979, representing a similar period of quietude to the completion of the inner rail loop (1932 to 1956). The ESR survived due to its notorious “holes in the ground”; whereas the Doncaster line in Melbourne that had been planned since the 1890s, commenced in 1974 but had its hole filled in two years later, remains to be built.

The Greiner/Fahey Government battled with the substantial infrastructure gaps on the fringe and finally released its Integrated Transport Strategy (1995). ITS had no measures against accepted economic, financial and like criteria; and two of the projects were the first modern PPP crises.

Planning to deceive

The UK government had made major progress in developing PPP frameworks and it was expected that greater confidence would be generated. The framework included transparency in performance indicators and inclusion of all stakeholders.

Fahey won the right to hold the 2000 Olympics which regenerated enthusiasm in infrastructure at all levels of government and society.

The Carr Government from 1995 conducted the Olympics but got into progressively deeper mire over train, bus, ferry and road performance. Wran/Unsworth had released a series of strategic plans; this accelerated under Carr to the point that re-announcements, cancellations, deferrals and modifications attracted adverse press comments and measurable community discontent.

In not one document were outcome indicators stated; contract details became “commercial in confidence”; and indeed most announcements were in the form of press releases which disappeared from ministerial websites. Several local government reviews were conducted (structures as well as planning processes) but none produced appreciable results and one, the attempt to return the City to Labor hands, backfired spectacularly. The Chatswood to Epping rail link was a PR disaster with cost over-runs and performance issues.

Several “missing links” in the road network were approved as PPP tunnels but both failed in every way - investors’ money was lost, tolls were high, there were construction mishaps, and the strangulation of alternative routes was resented. Journalists accused planners of milking fees up-front, leaving investors with soggy results.

The need for substantial investment in the major public transport networks excited the private sector lobbies as well as unions and the press.

The election of the Rudd national government in 2007 led to the creation of Infrastructure Australia and the strengthening of the Council of Australian Governments. Regrettably in the next year NSW premier Iemma deferred the NorthWest rail line and then converted it into a European-style NW Metro but then replaced it by a short CBD Metro - which Infrastructure Australia rejected.

The private sector lobbies were loud in proposing a full metro network with a radial structure to replace the existing rail system. Various private “plans” were extravagant in their tram and metro/rail proposals but thin on practicalities and on operational, economic, financial, environmental, energy and community information. Their proposals to further tax western Sydney residents did not acknowledge the inequities embedded in the metropolis or better ways of proceeding (strengthening the prospects of PPPs).

Then premier Rees appointed a metro review panel which largely comprised metro advocates but it disappeared without reporting. The Barangaroo development is proceeding without an effective mass transit solution or connection to the city’s existing rail and bus networks.

Against this background, there remains a debate about servicing a growing population. The Hurstville to Strathfield line is the major opportunity to reconfigure the rail system away from the CBD and Harbour Bridge but it has dropped off the agenda.

Discipline through planning

The federal government’s frustration and the explicit fears of other state leaders that Sydney’s accumulated needs would penalise them, led in December 2009 to the establishment of the COAG Cities Planning Taskforce and to COAG adopting national objectives and criteria for future strategic planning of major cities.

COAG agreed also that all States will have in place city plans that meet the criteria by 1 January 2012. Funding will be tied to compliance as federal minister Anthony Albanese tries to spend wisely across multiple communities. There is ample evidence of declining affordability and liveability in all of the major urban areas.

However, the reverse happened. New Premier Keneally persisted with the politician-led changes: the CBD Metro was dropped along with all metro rail proposals including Albanese-funded West Metro, an inner tram scheme was adopted in the face of possible superior options, a western fast rail proposal that had not been publicly mooted within memory was “approved”, and a small financing strategy popped out - all without meeting COAG criteria. Tram projects are proceeding on a compromised basis, with small service catchments but with prejudice to better routes should future generations choose to adopt a Zurich approach.

Keneally announced a series of developer-friendly policy initiatives such as sequestration of private properties for on-selling to developers; and the incentives to supermarkets to undermine mainstreets and accessibility/carbon futures identified by Mant.

The COAG agenda was diluted elsewhere. A large land release was approved on the fringe of Adelaide without rail transport provision and a freeway expansion promised in a South Australian election campaign. Albanese praised the “30 year strategic plan for Adelaide” which was dated 17 February 2010 but neither were in its “What is happening now”. Then he offered the election sweetener of an Epping to Parramatta rail link which was in no governmental priority list - a use of political discretion at the expense of systematic resource allocations across all states and territories, regions and cities, linked with measurable needs.

The federal trend now is to deal more directly with local government, with rationalisation of the latter. This is a complex prospect as amalgamations are challenging and the “begging bowl” approach of subsidiary levels and proponents masks their capacity to contribute.

The population debate is largely a distraction given existing backlogs and crises in the major urban conurbations. There’s little money left in the federal kitty with so many mouths to feed and no improvement in planning/implementation capacities in line with international best practice - at all levels.

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About the Author

Robert Gibbons started urban studies at Sydney University in 1971 and has done major studies of Sydney, Chicago, world cities' performance indicators, regional infrastructure financing, and urban history. He has published major pieces on the failure of trams in Sydney, on the "improvement generation" in Sydney, and has two books in readiness for publication, Thank God for the Plague, Sydney 1900 to 1912 and Sydney's Stumbles. He has been Exec Director Planning in NSW DOT, General Manager of Newcastle City, director of AIUS NSW and advisor to several premiers and senior ministers.

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