Page 443 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 4 March 2008
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planners from the NCDC and the NCA. They are still there on the sidelines and they have still got useful contributions to make. We also have people who live in their community and who want to live more in their community, without having to jump in their car and drive to the other side of the city to do those things that they live in Canberra to do.
While in other parts of the world we hear that best practice now involves design of communities at the neighbourhood level, rather than at the citywide or, at best, town level that I believe this government is undertaking, we find that we are still lagging behind. I know that very few of the people who work for ACTPLA are, in fact, trained and qualified planners, because they are in very short supply in the world, and to get them you need to be at the cutting edge of doing best practice. I have a sense that some of those people might feel quite frustrated at the moment. I see that in evidence on the ground, going around to other cities, seeing what is happening there and comparing it to what seems to be happening here. I have a sense of it from talking to people who work in sustainability industries and just from knowing how hard it is to make the changes that will make our cities, our towns, and even our new suburbs that are still on the drawing board, the places that people will want to live in in 2050. I have heard it said that we are building the slums of the future. That is so absurd when we are probably one of the wealthiest cities in the world.
Let us look at the importance of planning. At the very least, we need to have planning and transport integrated from the very beginning. It needs to take place before the lines are drawn on the ground. We need to look at how people will move around that suburb and that community, at the street level and into the city. Is that happening? I do not believe it is happening, even though it is part of the sustainable transport plan. It may happen sometimes, but I am not sure that it happens all the time.
Planning and community development: the way people live in a society, in a city, is very much influenced by planning. If, for instance, you have to cross the town to go to a meeting, the planning has not considered community needs. If, for instance, you have to jump in a car to take your children to school or to the nearest childcare centre, I do not believe that that planning was done with social outcomes in mind. Indeed, I ask: where are the social planners in ACTPLA? How many of them are there? I keep asking these questions, and I do not really get satisfactory answers. It is not enough to go and get a consultant to help with the social design at one moment. You need to have the social planning and the environmental planning integrated from the very beginning. I know that a very similar thing occurs with environmental issues—they get the environmental experts from outside.
In terms of important planning issues, I refer to planning and health. It is now understood that obesity issues are very much related to the way people live. Can they walk or do they have to drive? We know that it is those in the lower socioeconomic class—people with less money, fewer choices about where they live and what they buy to eat—who have the most problems with obesity. Planning used to be seen as a way of overcoming social inequity. It used to be about, in Canberra in particular, making sure that we had a social mix, that we did not isolate people from each other, that we reduced social problems by making sure we had a sprinkle of people throughout the capital. We can still have those principles; we must have those principles. We have to be designing cities with 2050 in mind.
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