Build Up or Beat Up? Some Belated Thoughts on Melbourne’s Mega CBD

Both Rupert Dance over at Plantastic and Designerific and Alan Davies at The Urbanist weighed in with good posts on Matthew Guy’s mooted mega-CBD. This got a big run in the Herald Sun first thing on the Friday before last, followed by a catch-up story later the same day by The Age. (The Herald Sun were obviously fed the scoop: perhaps The Age is being punished for its vigorous pursuit of Guy over the Ventnor rezoning).

Guy’s press release is here, and the map is reproduced below (click to see the original PDF). Oddly, there’s no explanation that I can find for the yellow blobs, though we can infer from their location that they’re industrial precincts. The DPCD website carried an almost comically non-committal story essentially just saying “Matthew Guy said some stuff: here’s a link,” so we can’t look to them for clarification.

The press release is very vague when you try to hunt for specifics, talking mainly of an “expanded capital city zone” and alluding in general terms to additional height. The Herald Sun story goes slightly further:

Mr Guy revealed the concept to the Herald Sun yesterday, saying it could be achieved through a new Capital City Zone, which would abolish height restrictions.

“I think it could lead to the centre of Melbourne becoming one of the truly great high-density population areas for Western cities anywhere in the world,” he said.

“It doesn’t mean we will have Rialto-size buildings in every part of it, but what you will have is greater density and greater height throughout the expanded CBD.”

“It doesn’t mean that anything can go anywhere, but it does mean we are looking to expand high-rise, high-density in a central core of the city.

“We are not talking about five or six storeys, we are talking about a long-term vision to expand the focus of the central business district areas.

“It will make Melbourne an absolute icon in terms of Western cities.”

Davies’ post on the matter does a pretty good job of canvassing the issues raised by the announcement and is part of the reason I didn’t bother posting about it when it first came out. But there’s one passage that reveals he’s read Guy’s tea leaves quite differently from me:

The Capital City Zone isn’t new. It has guided development in the CBD grid and parts of Southbank for the last twenty years (see the Minister’s media release). It should make development easier and the Minister has signalled clearly he envisages development at high densities. Indeed, it can’t have been an accident he made his announcement on Level 56 of the Rialto.

But it doesn’t provide open slather for skyscrapers – proposals are still subject to controls over matters such as height. For example, heights in the CBD shopping precinct, which is subject to the Capital City Zone, remain quite low.

There are two points to be made here. Firstly, strictly speaking the Capital City Zone (the crucial schedules are here and here) isn’t really a facilitative development control at all. It’s a very liberal land-use control, allowing a wide range of uses to start without a permit. That gives lots of certainty to those starting businesses in existing buildings. But there’s nothing that inherently would “make development easier,” since any substantial building still needs a permit. It doesn’t, for example, allow for as-of-right construction up to an approved height.

This leads to the second point, which is that Davies and I have guessed differently at what Guy is getting at. Davies seems to assume existing height controls will stay: but given the Capital City Zone doesn’t actually liberalise development, my assumption is that what Guy really means is that existing height controls through the CBD would be wound back. There’s a clear reference in his release to abolishing height restrictions, though he doesn’t give detail.

This is the whole problem with Guy’s approach: on this, as with other recent announcements, there’s scarcely any detail, so we can only speculate at what he’s really proposing. But from what we can tell, the proposal is managing to be at once a beat-up and yet also completely half-baked.

It’s a beat-up because most of what Guy has flagged is clearly earmarked for CBD-like controls anyway. Here’s the zoning map for Melbourne (it’s enlargeable by clicking on it):

The light blue is the Capital City Zone; this already encompasses a fair bit north and south of the original Hoddle Grid. The dark blue to the west is the Docklands Zone, which is already a high-density zone along the same lines. The railway land to its north is already a well-known and much-discussed future development site, as is the industrial land to the south of Docklands in Fisherman’s Bend. That those will be densely developed isn’t really news.

So what Guy is really adding in to his mega-CBD are some blocks in West Melbourne near Flagstaff Gardens; the already quite dense south Carlton precinct between the CBD and the university; and the already densely developed corridor down St Kilda Road (although I wonder if he really means to mess with height controls down there: that’s the vista towards the Shrine of Remebrance, the most sacred viewline in Melbourne). The roll-out of the Capital City Zone to such areas is actually a relatively unexciting story.

This is what’s infuriating though. Guy is making a big splash with something that in the terms he’s described it – further roll-out of the Capital City Zone – is barely more than status quo. Yet when we dig down to what it seems he must actually mean – roll-back of existing height controls – it shows a disturbing contempt for those already doing work in this area. There is, in fact a detailed review of height controls in the CBD already underway: the related amendment is awaiting the authorisation by Guy that would allow it to proceed to consultation. (There’s also a tangentially related amendment relating to heritage buildings in the CBD, and Guy has reportedly not approved interim protections to those buildings that were requested last June.) Plus, of course, this CBD plan would presumably be of some relevance to the metropolitan strategy review that his own department is undertaking.

Yet Guy hasn’t waited for any of these reviews to complete before floating his CBD changes, and reportedly didn’t tell either officers or councillors at the City of Melbourne (other than Lord Mayor Robert Doyle). Judging by the delayed and thin response by DPCD, it seems unlikely that he had detailed discussions with his department either.

If he had done so, perhaps he could have underpinned his plan with some material that helped explain how it related to the existing built form review and other relevant strategic work. The kinds of queries that Davies raises in his post – relating to transport, infrastructure, and employment – might have been addressed. We might have some more confidence that such a CBD expansion could achieve concentrated density over such a large area in the foreseeable future (it seems to me that by massively expanding the area in which high buildings can go, it reduces the chance of getting any one precinct to develop at a cohesive high density). We might even know what those yellow blobs are supposed to be.

I can imagine Guy is frustrated at the difficulty of getting strategic work implemented by DPCD. So is pretty much everyone else. But planning isn’t easy, either. The implications of these sorts of proposals are complex. He needs to work on transforming the culture at the department into one that can prepare and release innovative planning proposals in a timely manner. That’s about giving them a licence to actually research and justify planning proposals in a fearless manner; and at Guy’s level it’s about having the political will to decisively pursue good ideas when they’re put to him.

Simply ignoring the department and going off on his own conceptual flights of fancy, as seems to have happened here, isn’t the way to get things moving.