2021 – sterow

Who Needs Context and Character?

Urban Planning

Neighbourhood character is a clear example of an issue which cannot be reduced to simple rules. It requires qualitative assessment and the exercise of judgement. Similarly drafting a prescriptive standard to achieve objectives of building articulation to reduce bulk has proved unsuccessful. The focus of assessment of development proposals should always be on outcomes, not the satisfaction of rules for their own sake.
ResCode 2000: Part 1 Report – December 2000

The new DELWP paper Improving the Operation of ResCode: A New Model for Assessment -open for consultation here until next week – is presented as a streamlining of a cumbersome set of existing controls. It presents the alluring possibility of a world in which residential development standards set a fully objective baseline, and the kind of discretionary assessment currently applied to residential development is essentially only required when those standards are varied.

The premise is understandable – the ResCode controls are complex to administer (whether they are disproportionately complex is a different question, to which I shall return). The lure of efficiencies to be achieved with a truly objective baseline for assessment – especially when paired with not-yet-existing-but-foreseeable digital tools that would automate the initial compliance screening – is compelling.

But the paper presents a shortcut. It assumes the current controls can be modified into such objective standards without a rethink – indeed, it wrongly suggests that what is proposed is more-or-less just clarifying the controls so that they worked as intended.

The problem, though, is that the paper underestimates the role that the flexibility and discretion built into the current controls currently play. It suggests a streamlining of controls without doing the additional regulatory design work that would make this feasible. It therefore removes the aspects of ResCode that currently work to achieve acceptable outcomes, without adding back in sufficient mechanisms to take their place.

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Victorian Planning: Re-thinking the Model

Urban Planning

This article is a belated posting of an article that first appeared in the October 2019 VPELA Revue. It is based on the talk I gave at the 2019 VPELA state conference.

What happened to Victorian planning in the 2000s?

It was a heady time. We had a long period of political stability a state level with the Bracks / Brumby government seeing out (almost) the entire decade. We had a brand-new planning system, with the VPPs having been introduced in the late 1990s and implemented by the early parts of the 2000s. And as of 2002 we had a new planning strategy in Melbourne 2030. This was a “no excuses” environment for urban planners.

Yet we didn’t get much done. The planning system wasn’t able, for example, to do much in the way of driving core Melbourne 2030 objectives such as intensifying housing close to transport and activity centres. By 2007 the implementation of Melbourne 2030 was subject to a critical audit, and in the latter years of the Bracks / Brumby government it had been informally deprecated. The system seemed as complex and burdensome as ever.

The reasons for those failures are complex and cannot be fully explored here. For now, I want to focus on the role of the VPP system itself. On the face of it, the VPP system’s (relative) failure is puzzling. There is a logic and rigour to the system’s design that is compelling. Why hasn’t it worked better?

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I’m Back, Baby, I’m Back!

Miscellany

Crazy-looking person from the show Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia

This website has sat largely unattended for a few years now – partly because I was focusing on other things (like my business), but also because every time I considered posting to it I was overwhelmed with exhaustion at the thought of trying to bring it up to date. The page was based on a WordPress theme from before the widespread use of tablets and mobiles, and my occasional half-hearted attempts to migrate it to a more modern theme had always left me defeated.

However, in a sudden bout of not-completely-explicable enthusiasm over the last week or so I have managed, I think, to get it working mostly as I’d like to, with a refreshed design and updated, mobile friendly functionality. A few things are still broken in the bowels of the page (especially on older posts) but it seems to be about 90% there and that’s a huge step up from where it was.

I have no idea if this will lead to more frequent posting here, but I at least feel a major disincentive to posting has been removed. I have celebrated by digging out one piece of ready-made content I’d had sitting ready for two years, but had been put off posting by the state of the page: Victorian Planning: Rethinking the Model. This is, I hope, a timely piece given the process of planning reform that the Victorian government has recently announced. (At time of posting it should, hopefully, be sitting just above this post on the main page.)

(Yes, I realise the George Constanza-ish title of this post doesn’t really match the Always Sunny image I’ve headed the post with. I choose to consider that as a meta-commentary on my state of mind having finished the website refresh).

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