In releasing the Expert Panel on Planning Reform’s latest report yesterday, panel chair Brian Hayes said he would be disappointed if the report didn’t generate controversy.
There’s little chance he’ll be disappointed: controversy is often part of urban and regional planning and land development, because they can be emotional issues which affect how we live, work and play, and how our children will do the same.
Reducing local influence over development assessment decisions through greater use of regional panels and “experts” is likely to generate more controversy than the rest of the proposed reforms.
This means we’re in for a robust discussion about the role of local councillors in development assessment.
There’s no question that the assessment of the suitability of proposed housing, commercial buildings or industrial development is a tough and specialised job. It’s at times demanding work that requires a broad knowledge of the built and natural environments and a finely honed capacity for objective judgment.
The Expert Panel would have heard during its listening and scoping phase that it’s unreasonable to expect grass-roots elected members to have all of these skills.
Following this argument to its conclusion, it’s also unreasonable to ask councillors to separate their role of representing the interests of their electorates from their participation on a Development Assessment Panel (DAP), where decisions must be made based only on consistency with the local Development Plan.
Therein lies the conundrum.
How can we have a planning system that offers certainty to the development sector and the community, if you are looking to potentially reduce their representative’s participation in it?
One means of tackling this paradox is to develop a planning system that empowers councillors and communities to have a far greater role in the longer-term strategic planning of towns and suburbs.
This would require a quantum leap in communities’ participation in planning for what they want their neighbourhoods to look like in the future.
It means shifting the planning system’s focus from planning for people to planning with people.
Planning with people requires a mindset that invites and encourages communities to have a key role, at the beginning of the process, in solving the emerging problems that the planning system seeks to address.
It will require governments and planners to work closely with communities to define long-term aspirations and plan to achieve them.
The planning system is engaged in almost all the land-use issues that affect the way we live: housing affordability and choice, economic development, environmental sustainability, employment generation, healthy living, community safety, transport, heritage conservation and infrastructure provision. The list goes on.
Often, planning processes get bogged down in the perceived conflicts between these broad issues when, in practice, they all fit together to shape the way in which we live.
Groups in conflict over specific developments can generally agree on guiding principles that should underpin the development of our city and our state.
For example, we all generally want Adelaide to be a place that is economically and environmentally sustainable, where we and our children can have challenging and rewarding employment set in an environment that is valued and preserved.
If we use this planning reform process to focus on our shared ambitions for the state and we design a planning system to plan with people, not just for people, we’ll more readily find consensus on the processes and practices that drive us towards those goals – even if they do cause controversy along the way.
Darren Starr is president of the South Australian division of the Planning Institute of Australia and director of Leading Edge Town Planners, a specialist town planning practice based in Adelaide.
