planning news

34 posts

The Harshest Lesson

Image by Neil Creek, used under Creative Commons Licence. Click for details.Originally published as an editorial in Planning News 36, No. 8 (September 2010), under a joint by-line with Tim Westcott and Gilda Di Vincenzo.

The final report of the Bushfire Royal Commission, released at the end of July, is a challenging document for the planning profession. As intense as debate might sometime set within the profession, we normally have the luxury that our work is free of truly life or death consequences. The tragic events of February 2009 changed that, and chapter 6 of the Commission’s report, which discusses planning and building responses, is disquieting reading. It is unsettling to find so few easy answers in a situation where so much is at stake.

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e-Planning Update

In this special edition of Clause 101 we track the latest news and developments in the field of e-Planning.*

Amendment Process Streamlined through Wikis

The government has responded to criticism of prolonged planning scheme amendment processes by shifting management of the VPPs and planning schemes to a new website, Wikischemia.

The new system builds on the proposal under Modernising Victoria’s Planning Act to allow amendment proponents to undertake steps in the amendment process. The new process will follow this initiative to its logical conclusion by placing the VPPs and all planning schemes on an online wiki, where users can edit content at will.

“This is an exciting leap into the 21st Century,” said Planning Minister Justin Madden. “It makes the planning system more democratic, responsive, and flexible. If there are new policy challenges, schemes can be updated in minutes. Mistakes and problematic provisions won’t sit in schemes for years without being fixed. Best of all, our tests show a substantial improvement in amendment processing timeframes, with the average length of the amendment process slashed from 20 months to 0.1 seconds, assuming you have broadband.”

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Transforming One VCAT

Originally published as an editorial under a joint by-line with Tim Westcott and Gilda Di Vincenzo in Planning News 36, No. 5 (June 2010).

The Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal is currently engaged in a process of introspection. The outgoing President, Justice Kevin Bell, released his review (titled One VCAT) back in February, and in May the incoming President, Justice Iain Ross, has released his own discussion paper, Transforming VCAT. The release of two documents covering such similar material so close together is at first a little disorienting, particularly for a planning profession accustomed to a more glacial approach to review and reform. Yet it was inevitable that the change of President would result in some reframing of the previous President’s findings: the new President is to be congratulated on moving forward so quickly rather than allowing the process to bog down. The term “discussion paper” might imply that the process has returned to square one, but a comparison of Transforming VCAT with the initial March 2009 “consultation paper” The Role of VCAT in a Changing World makes it clear that the slate hasn’t been wiped clean. While Transforming VCAT is also framed as a call for submissions, it builds upon the earlier work and includes responses to various of the Bell review’s recommendations.

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Job Opportunities in the Virtual City: Planners and SimCity

When it comes to the pop-culture representation of various professions, doctors, lawyers and the police have traditionally been the most heavily represented on television. Yet urban planners can claim a disproportionate prominence in the area of computer games: since 1989, one of the most persistent game genres has been city-builder games, most famously epitomised by the SimCity series. It’s possible that SimCity has done more than any other single source to disseminate information about what urban planners do, especially amongst younger sections of the population. But what do SimCity and other city-builder games say – and teach – about our profession?

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Sham Sandwich

By "Tranquil Niche" used Under Creative Commons Licence. Click for details.

Originally published as an editorial under a joint by-line with Tim Westcott and Gilda Di Vincenzo in Planning News 36, no. 3 (April 2010): 4.

“I am a bit tired,” was the Planning Minister’s explanation in the midst of his cringe-inducing interview with Neil Mitchell after the release of the now-infamous Windsor Hotel media plan; the same protest slipped out during the Minister’s subsequent press conference announcing that the hotel redevelopment would go ahead. On both occasions it was an unusually direct and human admission, all the more notable for the contrast with the attempts at tightly controlled media messaging that had created the problem in the first place.

There seems little doubt that regardless of what happens in this election year, the Windsor Hotel will be remembered as a low point in Justin Madden’s career. Yet what are the actual lessons to be learnt here?

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Government Announces White Elephant Breeding Program

under the southern starMelbourne is set to join the global race to construct the largest non-functional building in an ambitious plan announced by the State Government, spurred on by the opening and then closure of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.

That project was opened in January and then closed in February for unspecified reasons. At 828m in height, it claims the title of the world’s largest non-functional building: a glittering prize that the State Government now wants to claim for Melbourne.

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Climate Change, Sustainability, and… (falls asleep)

CH2Originally published as an editorial under a joint by-line with Tim Westcott and Gilda Di Vincenzo in Planning News 35, no. 8 (September 2009): 4.

Have we allowed sustainability to become a boring topic? Is it increasingly tempting to flick past the articles in Planning News and elsewhere that stress the urgency of action on climate change with nothing more than a quick “yep, know that” shrug?

If you can relate to this guilty impulse, we have a problem. Sustainability ought to be our core business as planners. The primary rationale for having a planning profession is surely because in some situations the market, left to its own devices, can lead to bad outcomes: is there a better example of this than environmental degradation? (Indeed it is, quite literally, the textbook example: remember the “tragedy of the commons?”) There surely can’t be a bigger challenge for this and the next generation of planners than ensuring more sustainable communities. Anecdotally, an urge to help plan a more ecologically sound built environment is central to the reasons many of our keen young planners enter the profession.

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The Lawyer’s Tribunal

Originally published as an editorial under a joint by-line with Tim Westcott and Gilda Di Vincenzo in “The Lawyers’ Tribunal,” Planning News 35, no. 5 (June 2009): 4.

By the time you read this, the submission period will likely have just closed for the VCAT review.1

The Tribunal is to be commended for conducting this important review. Commenting on the Tribunal’s performance is fraught with difficulty, however. Firstly, it is hard to generalise about the performance of a Tribunal constituting many different Members; the quality of the Tribunal’s performance varies from encounter to encounter. Given the passion that often accompanies VCAT hearings, it’s also a strong test of participants’ objectivity to try to judge when they got a fair hearing and when they were dealt a legitimate stinker. Finally, one needs to filter valid grievances from the great deal of unjustified criticism that swirls around simply because the Tribunal is at the pointy end of the process and has to make hard and unpopular calls that others chicken out of.

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Senior Industry Figure Recalls Time in Local Government Fondly, Distantly

John Mendoza, partner in respected consultancy Mendoza Planning, launched a blistering attack on the performance and experience of local government planners at a seminar last month, while insisting he valued their contribution to the profession. “Most local government planners are obstructionist, reactionary, poorly educated, and unhelpful,” he said, “but I don’t wish to denigrate them.”

Despite his strong criticism of Council planners, Mendoza was at pains to outline the deep affinity he shared with them. “I am, at heart, a creature of local government,” he said, citing his time as assistant to the junior town clerk at the Hawthorn City Council from 1972 to 1974 as evidence of his commitment to the sector.

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