Planning in Western Australia

URBAN PLANNING

Talk to students in Environmental Planning at Edith Cowan University, Joondalup

“Town planning is about coordinating land use and development through the implementation of plans, policies and statutory processes which enable sustainable growth and ensure a balance is maintained between the communities in which people live and the environment.” Ministry for Planning

Urban planning is rooted in the tradition of modernism. Regulations that dictate where different landuses may be placed originate in a concern to improve the quality of the built environment, which goes back to the excesses of the Industrial Revolution. So we have building and housing codes, and the city as a whole is ordered through master plans that functionally separate different land uses. This approach was given a boost by the emphasis of didacts and theorists like the French architect, Le Corbusier. Although only one of his city designs was built, at Chandigarh in the Punjab, he was immensely influential in the 1920s and 30s, mainly through his writings and small scale architecture. His vision for the city was, at one level, ecologically based. He asserted that development should be dense so that it used less land and concentrated services. Buildings were to be raised above the ground to let the landscape flow through; a nonsensical concept since plants need light, but look at the assumption of control that puts the airport at the centre of this city.

However, it was Corb’s demand for the “separation of functions” that I believe has been most influential and disastrous for urban planning in this century. Here is his plan for “La Ville Radieuse”, the Radiant City. It is separated into functional zones with different building forms; twenty-storey office towers in the CBD; housing in long cranked terraces of five or six storeys and industry pushed away here. It has taken us fifty years to shake loose this vision and re-integrate our cities. Indeed, it could be said that the planning profession was established to enforce this concept. After all, we did not need planners to manage the organic growth of traditional settlements.

Town and Country Planning is based on British practice, being what one writer has called a “ mixture of common sense, emerging middle class values of civic responsibility and organisation and selective elements of sociology and economics flavoured with a strong sense of ‘classical, order related both to architecture and the city.” There is an assumed certainty that the messy processes of everyday life can be controlled and that the properly trained professional can understand and organise the growth of the city and can act neutrally `in the public interest’ This paternalist attitude was described by Tom Wolfe in his book ‘From Bauhaus to Our House’ as assuming that ‘we have exclusive possession of the true vision of the future’.

Since the 1970’s and under the influence of postmodernist and latterly, deconstructivist thought, and of course a greater understanding of ecology, we are much less certain. The embrace of fragmentation and diversity has led to an acceptance of participative planning, a concern with locality identity and power and the questioning of centralised bureaucratic methods. Not all of which is positive. There will always need to be coordinated control over the provision of services such as gas and water. However, in the ecological nineties, decentralisation of control will obviously facilitate the development of more sustainable settlement.

It is, of course, part of a much wider shift from reductive analysis to holistic integration that has been influenced in the planning field by the kind of analytic work that lan McHarg carried out in Pennsylvania in the 1960’s, and by American landscape architects such as John Ormsbee Simonds. Ecological planning, reduced to comprehensible elements that can be ranked and compared in tables has power over even the most rationalist mind.

Probably the most widely used ecology-inspired text of this period was lan McHarg’s treatise on landscape, Design with Nature (1969), which created an awareness of geographic and natural features as elements of conservation. One of the largest applications of McHarg’s methods was partly implemented at The Woodlands, a 25,000 acre new town on the edge of Houston, Texas, developed in 1971. McHarg advised the planners to avoid clear-cutting of trees and to enhance the paths of natural drainage, locating golf courses and other recreation facilities on the flood plain land. The first residents left a completely natural landscape around their houses, without front or back lawns, but this practice has been discontinued. While such an approach can be seen as relatively benign at the level of microclimate, the spread-out design of The Woodlands forces residents to drive for all their basic needs-school, work, and shopping-and thus does little to reduce daily contributions to high entropy. Saving a tree may not in the end be as environmentally astute as saving a trip.

Urban planning starts with an understanding of the natural sensitivity of the land and current practise in the provision of services such as sewage treatment, power generation and water supply. The first step is generally to evaluate the suitability for development and for conservation, and to establish what was called by David Crane, also at the University of Pennsylvania, the “Capital Web”. This is a combination of the network of movement systems, the services buried below ground and the public buildings and parks of the city. Together, these cover all prime public capital investment in the city. They are the static, unchanging elements of the layout of the city. Buildings may change and be redeveloped, but once the services go in and the land is subdivided, there will be little change in the layout. For this reason, the proper placement of roads and open spaces is vital to the city’s long-term image. If the web is clear and readable, it will be an easy place for people to find their way around:

“The configuration of the movement network structures the form of the city and people’s perception and memory of it (in urban design parlance, its image): it provides a legible order and a hierarchy of spaces and locations, as well as of speeds and intensities of traffic and other activities. Places that are central or at centres in the network have the highest economic and symbolic value, where will be found the buildings of greatest commercial and civic value.” Peter Buchanan

Let us look at part of the history of planning ideas through the design of one such capital grid; that for the city that is in the process of development around us. The plan for Joondalup was developed by Gordon Stevenson in 1976.

Here is the original land ownership and a simplified land form analysis. Several site studies were carried out, including an analysis of the geomorphology, soils and of vegetation and soil associations by the then Forests Department. This was combined with the relevant elements of the then Corridor Plan for Perth, first proposed in 1969, and resulted in the key plan shown here.

The refinement and implementation of the capital web for Joondalup reflects accurately changes in planning philosophy since that time. One of the objectives of Stevenson’s plan reflected the sixties focus on the separation of pedestrians and vehicles. He said:

It is fifty years since Clarence Stein and Henry Wright developed a new town planning system of superblocks in a road framework which led vehicles into culs-de-sac between groups of housing or buildings. There were unbroken footpaths leading from all the houses to inner parks. The first application of the system was in Radburn, New Jersey (1929), where pedestrians and bicyclists use a separate network of footpaths through the inner parks with connections between superblocks by over or underpasses. The Joondalup Centre could uncompromisingly follow Radburn principles, with people in large numbers moving through inner malls and spaces without seeing vehicles.

This fear of the car and concern for the free flow of traffic was universal at the time. I remember being horrified by the Buchanan Plan for London that proposed the creation of a grid of high level freeways through Central London.

Such worship, such slavery to the private vehicle! And of course, we still have the descendants of this attitude in the ‘no access distributors’ throughout the housing areas of the last twenty years, in the vast areas devoted to roads and parking in Perth and, of course, throughout the world.

Here you can see how two sections of road effectively cut the City off from the edge of Lake Joondalup; precisely the situation that the planners of Perth are struggling with at the moment.
This is the pedestrian-vehicle movement diagram.

The vital step between analysis and the setting out of a planning concept is subject to considerable ideological input. We have looked briefly at the way the the car was worshipped in the sixties. Experience of the resulting environments, of faceless roads and dangerous pedestrian underpasses, has led to the questioning of this position and a re-evaluation of the basis of community. This is called ‘The New Urbanism’.

Leading from attempts to re-evoke the traditional American small town that are most famously demonstrated by Seaside in Florida, the traditional city block has become the icon of strategies to control metropolitan sprawl. Called by Peter Calthorpe “pedestrian pockets” and “transit-oriented development”, the idea is to cluster a mix of apartments, family housing, offices and retail space around transit stations. Land around these is reserved for agriculture and the car becomes less essential. This has become the paradigm for Joondalup.

A review of the plan by a team that included consultants Hames Sharley resulted this plan, published in 1990. Except for three pedestrian routes, intended to cross roads on bridges, it abandoned the attempted separation of cars and people. The planning community had realised in the interim that cars do not have to move all the time at top speed and, properly controlled, are one of the chief sources of activity in a City Centre. The places where people can be seen from and can get into passing cars are the places where they feel the most safe and where both cars and pedestrians can participate in the life of the city.

Gordon Stevenson, of course, would not agree:
Sad to relate, in recent years, the planning of Joondalup has been regressive. The proposed pedestrian system has been destroyed and motor vehicles have been given pride of place in a plan which contains far too many intersections and is unsuitable for both pedestrians and cars. The shopping area is going to be contained in another large banal suburban shopping centre for which conventional wisdom dictates fort-like buildings, locked up when not in use and surrounded by car parks. It is ironic that proposal for a completely pedestrian centre, agreed by many authorities, and individuals, should be reversed. I find it difficult to accept that a large vibrant town centre should be dominated by the monopolised temples of consumerism and overrun by cars.(1992)

The concerns of the present day are with the creation of real communities and with the efficient use of resources. There is some discussion of natural resources but the ‘S’ word – Sustainability – is sprayed around rather indiscriminately. In December 1997, the Ministry for Planning issued ‘Liveable Neighbourhoods- Community Design Codes’, on a trial basis as the basis for future planning. The introduction includes these rather anodyne statements:

the emerging planning agenda focuses on the idea of an urban structure based on walkable mixed use neighbourhoods with interconnected street patterns to facilitate movement and to disperse traffic. Daily needs may be within walking distance of most residents. With good design, more people will actively use local streets, enhancing safety. Local employment opportunities are facilitated within the town structure providing the community with a firmer economic base and enhancing self containment of neighbourhoods and towns.

Safe, sustainable and attractive neighbourhoods are sought with a strong site responsive identity supportive of local community. This model promotes better community, employment and environmental sustainability than conventional planning practice.

In fact, the element of sustainability appears to be restricted to clustering higher density housing and spreading commercial uses throughout the urban mix. It includes this rather confusing statement: R11 Street and lot orientation and lot dimensions should facilitate the siting and design of dwellings which minimise non-renewable energy use and are appropriate for the climatic conditions, with a predominantly east-west and north-south street layout for temperate climates.

The sizing of lots to allow good solar orientation is a consideration in any well-considered design for residential land. Here, the east-west lots are wider to allow open space to the north, and here is a Department of Energy diagram illustrating the principles of solar management. Well-designed lots will allow the use of well-organised house plans.

However, the form of New Urbanism that we are currently being encouraged to adopt is questioned; none less than by Richard Ingersoll, in an article called ‘Second Nature’: These exponents of what is being called the “New Urbanism,” in their interest to proceed pragmatically’ may be solving technical questions with their models but are ultimately contributing to the chauvinism of the American suburb, where good things happen to white, middle-class people. Such models unselfconsciously help reinforce the injustices of environmental discrimination and trivialize ecological planning as a luxury item, analogous to organically grown produce in the grocery store.

I would like to finish with some other quotes from this writer who, to me, poses the relevant and deep questions that demand a response, both socially and environmentally:

Can there be such a thing as ecological balance if it is not socially determined? Is not human consciousness the major component both of the cause of the imbalance and of its possible rectification?
The Ecology Question as a socially based priority asks that design and planning conceive of sustainability and social justice as reciprocal conditions – that saving the planet and saving the community become inseparable.
To be ecological in a merely technical sense will not be enough to be good, but it can no longer be missing from the criteria of goodness. But most of all for an architecture to be truly sustainable it will necessarily be inscribed in a new urban vision of social justice.

These are the questions that we must ask and it is you, as the planners and decision-makers of the future who must find answers to them.