Page 2132 - Week 07 - Thursday, 16 May 2013
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The conference was addressed by Chief Justice French of the High Court of Australia, who talked about planning decisions and their effect on property rights, and the interaction between planning law and policy and native title rights. There were also keynote addresses by Dr Susan Parham, Head of Urbanism at the University of Hertfordshire’s Centre for Sustainable Communities, and Professor Will Steffen, Adjunct Professor at the ANU’s Fenner School of Environment and Society.
Dr Parham’s paper discussed the planning and design of low carbon and sustainable cities, outlining research from the mid-1990s to today. It indicated that the way cities are planned, designed and governed makes a huge difference to ensuring resilience. However, a gap between knowledge and planning has often resulted in action being taken only after irreversible changes have taken place. Importantly, urban environmental problems are interrelated, and addressing them requires changes to lifestyles, business practices and urban development patterns.
In the pursuit of sustainability, Dr Parham argued that a city’s capacity to adapt should be a priority. Some of the problems facing future planners include: rural depopulation and the drift to cities; suburban sprawl; planning for “landscapes of consumption” that ignore the principles of place making—for example, town centres should be more than just a shopping mall; insensitive approaches to the renewal of existing areas; a focus on “object” architecture; areas that are difficult for people to access and move around; and difficulties or a failure to plan for sudden or severe climate change risks. Dr Parham also discussed food-centred regeneration in the UK and urban regeneration around food markets.
Clover Moore and Will Steffen emphasised the need for real changes in cities to address climate change, and that a societal transformation is required.
During a discussion of best practice case studies for achieving effective planning, Philip Roth from Places Victoria, a government agency responsible for overseeing sustainable development, discussed the Fishermans Bend urban renewal area, located on the south-western edge of the Melbourne CBD. The rezoning of the area to capital city zone was aimed at facilitating a major urban redevelopment of Fishermans Bend to include high-rise residential towers, terraced townhouses, offices, schools, local parks and other commercial opportunities. One of the issues to be addressed is the potential “gentrification” of Fishermans Bend and how to protect the existing 20,000 blue-collar jobs that are already there.
Some of the interesting statistics presented at the congress related to the demographic changes affecting the Canberra region. The region experiences a 1.6 per cent annual growth rate, while the growth rate in surrounding New South Wales shires is slowing. And while interstate and overseas migration is a major factor for capital region population growth, it remains volatile. The projected population growth for the capital region over the next 20 years is 600,000 and it will become Australia’s largest inland population centre. Across the border, the new town of Googong, some four kilometres from Queanbeyan, is expected to have 16,000 residents within 25 years, which is about one-third the size of Gungahlin.
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