Research by Victoria in Future indicates that the State’s regional population is projected to increase from 1.5 to 2.3 million over the 40 years to 2051. This population growth “will be greatest in regional centres, areas on the borders of Melbourne, and areas with significant amenity attractors”. In the southern region of Loddon Mallee, which encompasses the Shire of Mount Alexander, population growth is “projected to continue at almost 50 per cent above the Victorian regional average”. Recent change has also occurred within the Shire due to its popularity as a ‘tree change’ destination and improved accessibility to Melbourne. We spoke with Johan Louw, Director of Environment and Infrastructure at the Shire, about the region’s popularity, what is driving change, and how planning is addressing current and future community needs.

What do you see as the key factors driving growth within the area?

The Shire’s close proximity to major transport networks such as the Calder Highway and the Bendigo railway line provides great accessibility for commuters to major centres such as Melbourne and Bendigo. Importantly, recent infrastructure upgrades and improvements to services have also reduced the travel time to these centres.

A rural, country lifestyle is another important factor. The particular qualities of this area include the natural environment, farming, natural and built history and the number of regional centres and towns that are close by. Additionally, property prices are lower than in Melbourne.

So the balance between lifestyle and accessibility to a variety of places that can be reached within or just over one hour, whether for work or leisure, is important.

What demographic trends are reflected in this population growth?

A number of years during the past decade recorded higher levels of population change; however more recent growth has been at a relatively low rate similar to other regional centres. We also have a larger ageing population compared to Regional Victoria, with a higher percentage of one and two person households.

What opportunities will continual population growth bringing to the Shire?

Increased population growth will provide increased economic growth but will put more pressure on existing infrastructure.

Shellbourne

Regional Development Victoria aims to “support the implementation of integrated regional plans”. Is this being realised and what benefit is this bringing to planning within the Shire?

Although there is some coordination of regional planning, such as the regional tourism body being established between Bendigo, Loddon, Mount Alexander and Central Goldfields, the real benefits have not been realised. In terms of infrastructure and services, this would include the optimisation of existing assets and an improved opportunity to deliver higher quality on new projects.

What are the main barriers in achieving these outcomes?

Primarily cost and lack of investment by the State Government due to other priorities.

Larger regional cities are typically framed as hubs, providing certain services to surrounding smaller towns. What is the current process for deciding whether services remain dispersed in a number of towns or centralised to larger cities? How does this work across shire boundaries given that Bendigo, the closest large regional city, is within another shire?

Population and funding primarily influence the consideration of services. This means there are minimal State or Federal Government services provided in the Shire given its proximity to Bendigo, which is typical of the approach taken by both levels of government where services tend to be located in larger regional centres. The majority of services provided within the Shire are then located in Castlemaine, which has the largest population and is also geographically central.

A more structured approach for regional planning and decision making has been occurring through the Regional Management Forums. Regional Growth Plans are being prepared for Loddon Mallee North and Loddon Mallee South in a partnership between local government and state agencies and authorities. This will provide the means to implement strategic land use and infrastructure directions for the Loddon Mallee Region.

There are also strong local networks for the provision of health and community services funded by State and Federal Government. Local government staff are active in these networks and advocate for the fair provision of services so they are not just in large regional centres such as Bendigo. However, there is no consistent process for the distribution of services and their geographical spread; this seems to be dictated to by funding and the desire to be seen to be spreading services as far as possible. In reality this means limited outreach services to towns outside large regional centres.

Pollard

In terms of the relationship between transport and recent growth, how important was the introduction of Vlocity trains in 2006 and the 2009 Calder Freeway Upgrade?

Before the new train service and freeway upgrade, travel times between Castlemaine and Melbourne were in excess of 90 minutes. Travel time to the Melbourne metropolitan area, including airports, is now just over an hour by freeway, with express train services taking just over an hour to Spencer Street Station.

This has delivered significant benefit to the Shire. Economically, it is now much easier for local businesses to access major markets, both to buy stock and to deliver locally made products. Metropolitan customers also have improved access to local businesses in the Shire. Socially, there is increased accessibility to key services and choice in the mode of travel. While the potential reduction in vehicle trips due to improved rail services provides environmental benefits.

The number of people travelling by train both for work and leisure has increased significantly given the speed and frequency of the service. About 2.4% of trips to work are to Melbourne, although there are few people commuting from Melbourne to Castlemaine for work.

Accessibility to transport plays a key role in improving social and economic participation for communities in rural and regional areas. Could you discuss the Transport Connections ‘Getting Around’ Project?

Now in its final phase, this three year State Government funded scheme encourages communities to work together to identify and address transport disadvantage through local partnerships and by creating opportunities to make use of existing transport resources.

Transport disadvantage is generally thought of in relation to those that are aged, disabled, or financially constrained but the reality is that in the Mount Alexander Shire, geographical isolation is the biggest contributor. We have in particular an ageing population with already 25% of the population over 60 years of age, a figure expected to rise to one in three by 2021. This will add significantly to the demand for transport services that meet the needs of older, less mobile people.

The limited availability and location of public transport in the Shire is an overriding barrier to residents accessing community services and facilities. Townships outside Castlemaine in particular have insufficient transport services ranging from a complete absence of public transport to limited services.

It would be ideal to have flexible public transport and local public transport or community transport that is funded or subsidised in the same way as public transport. Providing all residents with equal access to services and facilities and opportunities to access employment, education and social interaction is critical.

What initiatives has this Project provided?

Following a series of consultations in 2011, Council has represented the community’s transport needs to Public Transport Victoria and will continue to advocate these needs which include improved rail and bus services and infrastructure.

Council has assisted the communities of Newstead and Baringhup to seek sponsorship to obtain mini buses to establish door-to-door community bus services using volunteer coordinators and drivers. Council is also implementing a trial using existing mini buses available to us, to provide some door-to-door pick up in areas without any public transport. This will provide an option for residents to come into Castlemaine for shopping and social purposes.

In addition, Council is working with partners to improve transport options for students in our Shire. This includes TAFE students and students requiring transport services to access education facilities in our Shire and Bendigo.

At a regional level, Council is working with six other municipalities to develop a website which will be a one stop shop for public and community transport services.

If you were to map out a broad, long-term transport vision for the Region, what form would you see this taking?

Continue to improve public transport along the Calder Corridor including more express train services and frequency of trains in both directions between Melbourne and Bendigo. Council is working closely with Public Transport Victoria on its Rail Vitalisation Project, investigating improved transport infrastructure and services between Melbourne and Castlemaine as well as the potential reactivation of train services and stations, such as Harcourt Station to the north of Castlemaine. East-west connections are also important as is continuous improvement in intra-shire transport connections.

There tends to be an emphasis on north-south corridors, which ultimately connect back to Melbourne. In terms of future growth within the region, does more emphasis need to be placed on the east-west connections you mentioned above?

Improving east-west links would strengthen Mount Alexander’s connection with other key rural centres such as Ballarat. Connecting Bendigo-Ballarat via rail must be considered as a priority. As Castlemaine is on the convergence of the Pyrenees and Midland Highways, both of these roads should be a better standard. They should also be better identified as to which cities they connect as their convergence at Castlemaine leads onto the Calder Freeway providing access to Bendigo and Melbourne.

What are the longer term benefits of ensuring strong transport connections?

From a metropolitan perspective, longer term benefits include a reduction in the demand for land and reduced impact on existing transport infrastructure within Melbourne. From a rural perspective, there is an opportunity to increase economic growth.

Maldon

Has population increase resulted in a diversification of employment opportunities or the strengthening of certain sectors?

While there have been recent periods of relative increases in population growth, during 2011 the Shire did not experience any real growth with an Estimated Residential Population (ERP) growth of 0.1%. Employment is dominated by a small goods manufacturer which has approximately 1,300 employees. Other major employers include the Department of Justice who operate two prisons, Castlemaine Health and the vehicle modification sector. There is some growth in small home office operations. However, this is countered by approximately 1,000 residents who commute to Melbourne for work.

What particular sectors are seen as providing sustained and strong economic growth for the Region’s future?

This is not well understood at this time, as there needs to be more data. However, given our ageing demographic, it is anticipated that the health services may see some growth over the next 5-10 years. It is also anticipated that emerging businesses in the Shire such as hospitality, food and wine and the boutique retail sector may grow as a result of the Shire’s proximity to the Melbourne metropolitan area.

The majority of working residents are employed within the Shire. However, a number of people are also travelling longer distances to work. What are some of the issues and patterns within the workforce?

Lifestyle choice is a big factor in residents choosing to live in the Shire. The Shire, like many regional areas, struggle with attracting the skilled workforce that is required. This is particularly evident for the manufacturing sector in terms of engineers, fitters and turners, accountants and so on.

It is also anticipated that when the relevant census data is released, it may reveal a shift in employment destination and method of travel with many more people commuting to Melbourne for work by train.

Muckleford

The Loddon Mallee Regional Strategic Plan identifies the “strong settlement patterns with towns nestled in the surrounding forests and agricultural landscapes”, and that “These non-urban breaks must be protected”. Is maintaining these features proving challenging given the increasing demand for housing?

It is not so much demand for housing that makes it difficult to retain non-urban breaks, but the desire for rural residential lifestyle blocks in farming areas. This also impacts on the productivity of good agricultural land.

Has there been an increase in demand for these properties over recent years and is this occurring around specific towns or throughout the Shire?

Growth has fluctuated commensurate with economic events and possibly improved accessibility. We are seeing demand for these properties occurring throughout the Shire.

Media reports on housing affordability often focus on our capital cities. What affordability issues are specific to, or perhaps heightened by, a regional context?

There are flow-on effects occurring from reduced housing affordability in Melbourne to the Shire, particularly Castlemaine, where people are moving from Melbourne for cheaper housing as well as lifestyle changes. This is putting pressure on house prices and availability of affordable rental housing. Issues of accessibility and availability of services, such as health and education, also impact on housing affordability.

The recent Housing Needs and Opportunities paper identifies how the Victorian Planning System does not provide the levers for Council to address the development of affordable housing. This must be frustrating given the references that Council has made to the importance of affordable housing?

Council does not have powers to compel developers to provide greater diversity in housing or promote affordability. It is more a matter of negotiating on a case by case basis, where processes to deliver greater housing diversity or affordability are varied and particular to the development. Previous attempts by Inner Melbourne Councils to get the Victorian Planning Minister to allow those councils to introduce inclusionary zoning policies in their planning schemes where a proportion of new residential development that is affordable must be provided has not been successful to date.

The report also revealed that while singles and couples accounted for 59% of the population, 3 or 4-bedroom properties make up 70% of the housing stock. Do you see any opportunities for incentives that would help bring forward greater diversity in housing stock?

Council’s Planning Scheme allows for development in the proximity of its CBD within Residential 1 Zones. Some intensification is starting to occur, typically in Castlemaine, with the construction of mainly medium density developments. However, developers generally don’t take up this opportunity because land and houses are still relatively affordable compared to Melbourne.

The report concluded by putting forward a number of roles available for Council in responding to housing need. Could you discuss these?

Council is not a housing provider or funder; these are roles for State Government. Council can advocate for increased supply of public housing and for not-for-profit housing associations to undertake new affordable rental housing. Council can also encourage and facilitate partnerships between social housing providers and private developers.

Castlemaine

The Council’s Environment Strategy (2011-14) begins with a state of environment review, sets strategic directions and objectives, and then puts forward an action plan. What results emerged from the environmental review?

The review assessed nineteen environmental indicators under two themes; ‘protect the natural environment’ and ‘use resources sustainably’. The trend for over half the indicators shows they are improving or stable with one quarter identified as worsening. Climate indicators returned the poorest results, although the issues identified are not unique to the Shire and require strategies from all levels of government. Improved data collection is also needed in certain areas to undertake better assessment.

The environmental vision acknowledges the role of both the Council and community in achieving a sustainable Shire. Could you discuss the strategic directions put forward to realise this vision?

Four key directions were put forward. Firstly, Council can lead by example through ensuring that sustainability is part of our day-to-day operations. We can also use Council powers including the Planning Scheme, regulatory instruments, by-laws and rate rebates to bring about environmental outcomes. The community is very engaged with environmental issues, so Council can support and enable the community in their actions. Finally, there are a number of sustainable areas that are outside of our control. These require strong relationships with different levels of government and other stakeholders where we advocate for the needs of the community.

The vision and strategic directions then inform a number of longer term environmental objectives?

Yes, these objectives focus on six areas: land and biodiversity; climate change, greenhouse and energy; water; urban development, planning and sustainable transport; waste and resource efficiency; and Council operations.

In terms of implementing environmental improvements, how are priorities assigned within the action plan?

The actions aren’t prioritised per se. Rather, we have allocated a timeline to each action. Some actions are dependent on external funding, and as such will be ‘de-prioritised’ if funding isn’t secured. However, Council remains positive that all actions can be achieved over the life of the plan.

The policy context is quite complex. Could you provide an overview?

As the third tier of government, councils operate in a complex policy context in all areas of business: environment is no different. It is important for us to achieve the best outcomes we can for our community sustainability within the core deliverables we are charged with. Where expectations or requests from the community fall beyond this scope, Council’s role is that of partner or advocate. We work closely with State and Federal Government partners to bring about the best outcomes for our environment. Joint working groups, promoting events and grant opportunities, and sharing spatial data are some of the ways we seek to bridge gaps between government levels.

There are also a number of existing initiatives which support direct action residents can take?

Residents can loan Sustainable Home Audit Kits for one week at a cost of $10. The kits include portable electricity metres, light meters, non-contact thermometers, water flow measuring cups and energy saving thermometers. The information provided by these kits allows local residents to take actions which reduce energy and water use at home.

We also provide information for residents to join the ‘Compost Revolution’. A number of councils participate in this initiative where residents are able to receive a discount on worm farms and compost bins after completing an online tutorial and quiz.

There is also a land management and conservation program in place. A Land Management Rate (LMR) is offered to landowners of properties over 20ha who operate a farm business undertaking land management activities. This is provided as a 10% discount on the general property rate, with the aim of improving the management of farm land. Council also offers a once-off Remnant Conservation Rebate to all landowners who enter into a Conservation Covenant with Trust for Nature. The covenant is a permanent, legally-binding agreement placed on a property’s title to ensure the protection of native vegetation. The agreement is voluntary and negotiated between Trust for Nature and the individual landholder.

These initiatives suggest that the community is very engaged with environmental issues?

There is a strong community focus on sustainability. This is evident in the number of environmentally focused events, workshops and tours organised in partnership with various environmental organisations. Mount Alexander Shire also has the highest number per capita of Landcare groups of any council in the State. The Sustainability Home Audit Kits mentioned previously have been hired consistently since they were first introduced, so much so that we have developed a waiting list. To continue to support the community’s engagement with the environment, $40,000 is provided per annum in environmental and sustainability community grants.

As a relatively new resident, what lifestyle qualities initially attracted you to the area?

The two key criteria for moving to the Shire were the country lifestyle and its proximity to major centres such as the Melbourne metropolitan area, Bendigo and Ballarat.

Are there other qualities that emerged over time, that were perhaps not immediately apparent?

Good restaurants and quality local produce, and housing affordability, although this was not a key consideration for moving to the Shire. The Shire also has an extensive network of tracks and trails providing access to key destinations, its natural environment and history.

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You can now travel 100km from the city centre and still be in Melbourne. Given this vast geographic area, a significant number of residents have no contact with the centre in their daily lives. However, proximity to the centre is often used as a key indicator when evaluating cities, including livability. Kevin O’Connor, Professorial Fellow in Urban Planning at the University of Melbourne, argues that for the majority of the population, livability is achieved via work, social, family and community connections that are arranged close to where they live. O’Connor suggests the livability of Melbourne is more effectively captured within a geographic structure he has labelled ‘Five Melbournes’. He also proposes that this structure could be effective for metropolitan planning.

‘Five Melbournes’ suggest a city with a number of self-contained areas. Could you explain how the idea emerged?

The idea has an intellectual foundation in the literature associated with what is usually called ‘mental-maps’ and in what research has shown about human spatial behaviour. People have limited knowledge in a geographic or spatial sense, so that influences their perception and constrains their use of space in a city.

To that I added an observed, empirical dimension. I have lived in Glen Waverley and worked at Monash University for most of my working life and it was apparent that most of the people I knew at Monash also lived within a 5 to 8km radius of the University. I then did research on journey to work in Melbourne and I kept finding locally self-contained labour markets. Substantial proportions of the workforces across the suburbs lived and worked within sub-regions. Mapping showed southern, eastern, northern and western regions were all surprisingly self-contained. I then widened my investigation out of curiosity into catchment areas of the big shopping centres and found similar patterns.

Later I was involved in Strategic Planning at Monash University. We did work on the catchment area of students and picked up an ellipse shape that extended a little towards the city on the western side, and then went north and south and a little east. I have subsequently seen catchment areas for other universities in the Melbourne Atlas, and the link between a student’s home and their campus reflects the same sub-regional structure.

I have also had contact with the medical industry and it’s been interesting to me that specialists sometimes have three or four addresses. They will have rooms in Glen Waverly, Doncaster maybe the CBD and perhaps one of the northern suburbs. When you ring for an appointment you are asked where you live and which rooms are the most convenient to attend. Coincidentally, the public hospital system is administered in suburban regions that reflect this arrangement.

And finally, I remember scanning the sport results in The Age. With cricket or football, you see an array of geographic names for sport competitions; there’s an ‘eastern’ football league, a ‘western’ football league, a ‘northern’ football league and so on.

So it struck me that this conceptual idea of people having a limited knowledge of space and so travelling relatively short distances was embedded in every day human travel and connections across parts of the metropolitan area.

You have also related this idea to the Melway street directory?

I have observed that for most people their Melway directory has half-a-dozen maps that are all well used, while the rest are virtually untouched.

So the title ‘Five Melbournes’ reflects an idea that captures the organisation and arrangement of economic, social and community activity across Melbourne?

Yes, and to provide a framework for strategic planning.

What are some of the potential qualities that could be enhanced or developed within these five regions?

I think we can begin with normative or value based dimensions. It seems to me that this structural feature of the metropolitan area offers the prospect of shorter trips to work and a much higher probability of female labour force participation. In the 1970’s when petrol became expensive for the first time, there was some modelling done and it found that if you had multi-centred distribution of employment you had shorter trips. I have done work on male-female differences in travel behaviour and you find that women tend to travel much shorter distances because they’re more interested in being closer to home.

In the long term, I’m beginning to wonder whether there may be a competitive advantage for employers to move closer to where people live. The trade-off is that some activities have to be in the centre of the city for their contacts and the networks. But there may come a time when some employers say to their employees “We’re going to move out to a suburban location so that a lot of you are going to have a shorter trip to work”.

And I think there may be some reward in terms of community organisation and community recognition and sense of place. Just as the sporting organisations are rooted locally, and the medical services are rooted locally, you could reinforce people’s sense of belonging to a city and the city’s organisation.

Route 216, walking dead, vodka

‘Five Melbournes’ has been drawn as four pie slices around a central core. Geographically, have you defined where the pie slices begin and the central core ends, or is this difficult given the way in which boundaries often overlap?

I have not been strict on border location. I think in a general sense there is a group of municipalities; western, northern, inner city, eastern and southern. You could probably find some physical alignments and use them to refine a framework. Perhaps the development of the idea has fallen short on the location of borders. I don’t have a firm answer yet, but I think with a little bit of analysis of data such as journey to work, retail catchments and hospital admissions it would be easy to separate the mass of the metropolitan area into five regions.

Another consideration with borders is that certain services or infrastructure work across regions.

And that’s often a problem, as some facilities are too big for one region. But the regions I am talking about have populations of three quarters of a million, they’re big areas. They all have a university, a major hospital and big shopping centre, so the fundamental blocks are already there. The challenge is actually to link the basic facilities together with regional transport rather than worrying about the borders.

Clearance 4.3m

Providing employment opportunities across all five regions is crucial. Historically, jobs have moved out of the CBD and into the suburbs; however they are still relatively concentrated given the area of the city. What opportunities are there to increase employment locations across Melbourne?

To start with it is important to recognise that 70% of Melbourne’s employment is outside the inner city, as it is in many metropolitan areas. An issue is that the quality of those jobs is uneven, and some regions do better than others. In the long run I think some stimulus could be applied by government to de-centralise more public sector employment. There’s a case to be made that government services could be more regionalised. Another approach is to provide assistance to local councils to facilitate development and developer bonuses for site coverage in suburban locations.

The success that Sydney had in moving State Government employees to Parramatta is a really interesting illustration here. This happened 25 or 30 years ago, for political reasons basically; the strength of the Labor Party in the west. Now the private sector has followed the lead of State Government. But you can’t transfer the Sydney story directly into Melbourne, because the centre of Melbourne is so much more accessible than is the centre of Sydney. So the type, number and growth of employment are a critical part of how people use the ‘Five Melbournes’.

And in the outer suburbs?

I don’t think the jobs have to follow population to all locations. Rather, in each of the ‘Five Melbournes’ we already have big clusters of employment. One of my PhD students looked at the distribution of employment in Melbourne and identified a number of these clusters, such as in Monash, Whitehorse, Preston and Broadmeadows. He then steadily expanded the size of the cluster until it had as many jobs as there are in the CBD, which at that time were roughly 250,000. I was amazed that in a 6km radius around Monash there were as many jobs as there were in the CBD. Around Whitehorse I think it was around 7 ½kms and in Preston it was about 7km. He had to go further in Broadmeadows, around 8 or 9km. It’s really interesting to recognise this scale of development at the core of each of these big suburban regions. 6km isn’t very far in the metric of the way people live and work in the suburbs.

Furthermore, many of these jobs are taken by outer suburban residents. The City of Monash is an example of that situation as employment within it taps a labour market that heads out to the east and south urban fringes. Hence to a degree the clustering of jobs in mid-suburban locations can act as an employment location for residents in the fringe areas.

Are those clusters of jobs primarily driven by the market?

They are, completely. Across much of these mid-suburban locations there are a substantial number of 2 and 3 storey mid-sized office buildings, research facilities and warehouses. There was a recent article in Business Day by Philip Hopkins on Melbourne’s suburban office market. It shows considerable expansion and take-up of space. So the market must be interested in opportunities in these middle suburbs.

So it’s not being instigated by government policy?

No, there’s no government policy other than a feeble Melbourne 2030 activity centre policy, which had no effect on the development of employment because there are few sites available in the activity centres to build commercial projects. In fact, research has shown the majority of new commercial investment has actually taken place outside activity centres. So it’s all market driven. A weakness is that it has little connection to the provision of public transport.

Route 402 internodal

Large retailers, educational institutions and health services are now established in our suburban areas. Who was first to understand Melbourne as a regional city?

I think it was the retailers. In fact, they created what they called ‘regional shopping centres’.

And as I noted earlier, there is a regional framework for the organisation of hospitals. The location of hospitals is an interesting case. I was involved in the debate about Melbourne, probably 20-odd years ago, at the time when there was a big push for an inner city revival and redevelopment of the central area, as expressed in the work of the Central Area Task Force. The irony was that at the time the Health Department were moving three big hospitals from the inner city to the suburbs, which was completely counter to the central area urban planning policy. So one arm of government was acting on observations about inner city change and growth and actually stopping office development in the suburbs while the medical services, which are an enormous employer, was creating large regional facilities closer to the suburban population.

Education provides further examples. Monash and Latrobe can be seen as ‘suburban regional’ universities but I am not sure their location was determined by an effort to bring tertiary education closer to a suburban market. Rather the planning approach in Melbourne was if you’re going to build something new you had to find a paddock, and both Monash and Latrobe were located in paddocks. There was little consideration of incorporating them into established infrastructure.

Private secondary schools, however, have been more strategic in their response. Several have established campuses in middle or outer suburban locations, and new schools have emerged in each of the ‘Five Melbournes’ as well, following population growth. So for this element of education, suburban housing and suburban campuses are connected.

Bleeding, Sykes

Our public transport network emphasises radial connections to the city centre. The SmartBus orbital routes are interesting because they provide cross town services. Does public transport need to become more responsive to regional and local needs?

The orbital buses are a fantastic innovation. I have been advised they are attracting really high usage rates. There was an article in The Age by Katherine Kizilos who travelled on a SmartBus from Mordialloc to Altona. Nobody travelled from one end to the other of course, but a lot of people got on and got off after short journeys, illustrating the regional connections of suburban residents.

Another thing that interests me about transport, and this is based on the experience of trying to get increased bus services for the university, is that the mindset of the transport planner seems to be either a bus every 20 to 30 minutes, or no service at all. The thing that interested me at the time was the way transport services could be more flexible. For example, some private schools developed a system where they ran collector buses in the morning and the evening. And there are retirement villages that have a bus they run to a major shopping centre in the morning and back again in the afternoon. The recent success of the Huntingdale Station-Monash campus express service that runs at very frequent intervals is another example of a locally relevant service. So public transport doesn’t have to be just heavy rail and main line buses all running to very fixed schedules. It seems to me there’s scope for innovative approaches that meet particular needs, and these could assist the links across suburbs.

Why don’t you think these types of services are being encouraged?

I think the level of innovation in the transport ministry or transport generally is hamstrung by heavy rail and bus contracts. I spoke at a planning session in Werribee a while back and there was a residents group from a subdivision which had rather narrow roads and roundabouts. It was extremely difficult for big buses to get through. They asked was it possible to have small buses and the transport people said, in effect “… we’ve got a contract and we can’t change it”. There seems to be a completely lead-footed perception of the way in which transport services can be supplied.

So a different approach is required?

I believe so. I expect transport planners will reply that the economics don’t stack up; there aren’t enough people, that everybody drives a car. But the success of the orbital buses and the Monash link suggests that people do respond to targeted services. And I guess we’re talking funding here, as like most services any innovations will need to be subsidised.

The mobility created by car ownership has been an important factor in the development of suburban Melbourne. Could you discuss the role of the car in the future development of the city?

You are right to recognise the role of the car. I think there’s no argument that the networks that are part of the ‘Five Melbournes’ are largely car-based. In the current situation I think the accelerated demand for smaller cars, and the smaller growth in hybrid and electric cars, seems ideally suited to the local networks of metropolitan region travel. In many cases workers are travelling no more than 10 or 15kms to work, so a small car is perfect.

I think transport planning could include some more refined views of car use, with some attention to slower speed limits that make it safer to operate a small car, and lower registration costs for small engine cars to help encourage even more use.

Underpinning the role of the car is the fact that people require mobility, often between a variety of origins and destinations. That is difficult to provide with public transport so the car is an important option. The challenge is to ensure that car use has less environmental impact than it does at the moment.

It can be a difficult city without a car.

In many cases your opportunities would be quite limited. You need to be careful about selecting job and residence locations if you are without a car. This is especially the case as you go further out. If you’ve got a bit of time and you don’t mind waiting for buses, I’ve been surprised where you can get to in the middle suburbs. The gradual introduction of bus lanes will help peak hour services, so that more travel to work might be possible.

Furniture, homeware, bric-a-brac

Upgrading Melbourne’s existing infrastructure and the provision of new services and facilities presents an ongoing challenge. Can you discuss some of the issues associated with developer contributions?

The current political climate is to reduce them, the idea being that they drive up the cost of the property. And developer contributions are largely an outer suburban impost. However, there is a case that levies should be charged on higher density development in established suburbs as the additional population puts pressure on currently overloaded transport and other infrastructure. To date, higher density redevelopment has been based on the idea that there is surplus capacity in the inner city. When inner city population development began it was quite reasonable to compare historical and current population figures and decide that the inner city was “under-populated” to an extent. However, over the last decade population growth has changed that situation.

This effect has been felt in the demand for schools. In St Kilda, for example, there is a school with double storey temporary classrooms. On a small site the only way to provide additional classrooms was to put new ones on top of the first one. It’s just a crazy way of coping with development. Nobody has thought all this extra population growth involves costs and services. So some different thinking on approval of development is needed, with developers expected to contribute to the costs incurred in additional infrastructure.

Which raises questions about the longer term livability of the inner city?

Yes. In fact I think the inner city could become less attractive as a place to live particularly as increasing numbers of people have kids. More families will find they can’t get children into a school or find there are 500 kids on a site that was designed for 250. Even the attractiveness of inner city housing might be reduced by the problems of finding a place to park your car, or getting on to an already crowded train or tram to get to work. I wonder whether the inner city may be a more difficult place in which to live in the future.

Why do you think there is a resistance to levies?

Well, for some reason there’s a sense of scaring developers away and driving up the cost of housing. Perhaps part of the problem is that levies are a crude way of funding infrastructure as they are paid as a lump sum up front, before development takes place. It has occurred to me that a more effective way to fund urban services and infrastructure could be to shift to a small annual levy on established development. After all it is the operation of established development that generates the real day-to-day costs of running a city. That levy could be based upon the value of houses and commercial buildings, which is often reflected in proximity to public transport service. Real estate advertisements often say ‘walk to railway station’ or ‘bus passes door’ or ‘on tram route’ and the better located house is more expensive than one further out because the transport service is better. The challenge is to recognise this outcome and, via a small annual levy deliver an income stream that could be used to fund the operation of the metropolitan area, particularly its transport system.

Are there other approaches to managing contributions in built-up areas?

I think beyond a certain size of development, planning approval should depend upon mixed use, which includes community facilities, not just retail functions. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility, for example, that a primary school, or a library, is provided on the ground floor of a new residential building.

In this approach you have to base planning approval of a project by considering impacts on a larger spatial unit. For example, approval of a new large residential building might depend upon the capacity of community facilities such as schools and transport services within a 3km radius of the project. Development approval would depend in part on the capacity of existing local facilities.

Recent discussions about the urban growth boundary extension highlighted people’s concerns about the size and spread of the city. What do you think underlines these concerns?

These concerns relate to loss of agricultural land and the spread of more housing and asphalt. They also relate to a mistaken concern that residents will have a “1 ½ hour trip to work”. They misunderstand that most of those people will have relatively short time trips to work to mid-suburban locations like those I mentioned before. In a sense I think that much of the concern with urban sprawl derives from a monocentric view of metropolitan city development and reflects a lack of understanding of the suburban links and connections that I discussed earlier.

This concern with urban sprawl has a long heritage in State Planning Departments. One of the great anomalies to me, as a Labor Party supporter, was that planning departments in governments that were of Labor persuasion have often been the most anti-sprawl and anti-spread, whereas the majority of their seats were in the middle and outer suburbs. That fact played out nicely in this last State election where the Liberals won in middle and outer suburbs, particularly on south eastern train lines, because there had not been adequate attention to the area, especially to the train service.

I worry less about urban sprawl as a physical feature, and more about accessibility to services, and the fact that we are willing to allow housing and population growth, but have no plans in hand to match that with additional schools, doctors surgeries, hospitals, TAFE colleges and the like. I feel a bit sorry that somehow or other we’ve decided the only solution to “manage sprawl” is to reduce the size of house lots and so fit more people into less space.

To me one fundamental weakness in our urban planning is the lack of State Government co-ordination of planning actions and budgetary allocations. So for example when the Growth Area Authority outlines plans for new subdivisions, it should be apparent to the Education department that they have a major commitment in two years for primary schools and say 4-5 years for High schools. That can be extended to many other urban services. So decisions to release land or approve large inner area redevelopment projects are not just “planning decisions” but need to be Government, and especially Treasury, decisions.

Activity node

You have argued against the monocentric city model. Were the Melbourne 2030 activity centres smaller versions of this model and does a focus on centres dominate planning?

Activity centres play a key part in most urban planning thinking about the development and management of a modern metropolitan area, summarised in the concept of the “polycentric city”. The first step is usually to identify centres associated with public transport, and then assign high density housing to those centres. However, this overlooks the location of key activities such as schools, hospitals, medical suites, universities, TAFE Colleges, local government services, retail and entertainment centres and commercial and industrial employment areas, which have been spread around suburban regions in an un-coordinated way.

I think the first challenge in polycentric city planning is not to designate centres but design transport services that improve the accessibility to these dispersed activities. That leads me to focus attention on arterial roads, because that’s where the majority of activity is located in suburban Melbourne. Arterial roads can be easily served with buses and dedicated bus lanes.

So maybe the first action in polycentric city planning could be the creation of a continuously looping bus that connects a series of economic and community activities in a region along arterial roads, running every ten minutes. That bus service would probably connect with the rail network where the arterial road crosses the railway, so the inter-modal link could be created. The service might cost a lot of money, but it’s going to cost a hell of a lot less than moving existing services to land around railway stations that is already sub-divided into small lots and occupied by a mix of users, so is expensive to purchase and effectively unavailable.

In contrast to that approach, consider the almost meaningless list of activity centres in Melbourne 2030, in a context where planning agencies had no powers, nor financial resources, to purchase land or locate services and so meet the needs of the local population. Perhaps the success thus far of the effort to re-develop Dandenong as a centre is an important illustration of polycentric planning. It shows that maybe we can really only afford to develop just a few centres in suburban Melbourne. The rest of the activity will remain dispersed, although accessible along arterial roads, and by car.

So planning policy needs to be more responsive to how the city has developed and how people use the city?

For better or worse, we have a weak strategic planning posture in this city. We no longer have a heritage of substantial intervention and control over large scale long term development. We don’t have a European willingness to discuss a strategy and implement it the way the Dutch, for example, and to some extent the British do. That means we are into what has been called ‘disjointed incrementalism’ or ‘muddling through’. I give these terms a more professional, or positive, edge by interpreting them as ‘moulding’ or ‘redirecting’ existing patterns of activity. I think that an effective planning strategy will be incrementalist, based on what’s happening now, so long as those trends aren’t completely counter to your equity or environmental objectives. And I think that because moulding or redirecting activity is carefully linked to the way people live and work it’s probably something that is really going to be quite effective.

I think that people who are influential in the planning argument in Melbourne are still unselfconsciously wedded to a monocentric city model. They don’t say it that bluntly, and I’m not saying that to put them down, but I think there is a sense that the centre is everything—it’s really powerful. In general it’s believed to be better to have high density in the inner city and somehow or other stop the spread. And that’s the starting point. That there is an option to try and redistribute jobs and services closer to where people live, and so reinforce regional suburban communities, doesn’t seem to be part of the debate.

Why do you think that is the case?

I think it’s a sense of an ingrained professional background and that the planners know better than the people. It comes back to a dislike of incrementalism. Incrementalism or muddling through is seen by some as a terrible way to do planning.

You commented earlier that the planning strategy needs to be incrementalist. What approach is required to support this?

I think the strategy plan for Melbourne would begin with a discussion about the big hardware items such as the road system, telecom system, capacity in the water, etc., which creates opportunities and constraints. In light of that, a second stage would provide a framework that recognises the way in which the city now works, which to me would have dimensions of ‘Five Melbournes’. Then a third chapter would outline access to employment, education, medical and other services, so establishing under- and over-supply. Then there would be a budgeted building and transport strategy that outlines over the next 5 years where we would put schools, hospital extensions, encourage retail development, new office activities and rail and bus services. Finally there would be an outline of the commitment to be made by State and local agencies and so on. I would review this approach annually, using an analysis of carefully selected data to monitor change in key activities, and so re-visit the priorities of the plan as needed.

Does that require a body positioned between State Government and the local municipal level?

There’s a fair bit of discussion about that. I noticed the State Government has just quietly announced they’re going to have a coordinated metropolitan transport planning agency for the first time. There is a push for a so-called ‘Metropolitan Authority’. I wonder whether that’s a bit of overkill administratively, because it seems to me that a well organised Melbourne division of the state planning agency could be just as effective.

‘Five Melbournes’ seems to reflect both a strategic planning view and empirical observations regarding day to day life, where you live and work in the city?

Planning involves the consideration of small spaces and large spaces, and it involves attention to short and long periods of time. Much of the planning debate in Melbourne is about change in small areas over short time periods. However, the fundamental forces on a metropolitan area often act on the 50 year or more horizon, and are felt over large areas. So with the ‘Five Melbournes’ structure I am trying to recognise the importance of the small areas and short time horizons, understanding the importance of what happens within a half hour of your home, but also acknowledge the importance of the big long urban corridors, and the impact within them of Universities, Hospitals, local government centres, and regional retail and commercial centres. Bringing these two perspectives together provides a transparent approach to long term planning.

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You can now travel 100km from the city centre and still be in Melbourne. Given this vast geographic area, a significant number of residents have no contact with the centre in their daily lives. However, proximity to the centre is often used as a key indicator when evaluating cities, including livability. Kevin O’Connor, Professorial Fellow in Urban Planning at the University of Melbourne, argues that for the majority of the population, livability is achieved via work, social, family and community connections that are arranged close to where they live. O’Connor suggests the livability of Melbourne is more effectively captured within a geographic structure he has labelled ‘Five Melbournes’. He also proposes that this structure could be effective for metropolitan planning.

‘Five Melbournes’ suggest a city with a number of self-contained areas. Could you explain how the idea emerged?

The idea has an intellectual foundation in the literature associated with what is usually called ‘mental-maps’ and in what research has shown about human spatial behaviour. People have limited knowledge in a geographic or spatial sense, so that influences their perception and constrains their use of space in a city.

To that I added an observed, empirical dimension. I have lived in Glen Waverley and worked at Monash University for most of my working life and it was apparent that most of the people I knew at Monash also lived within a 5 to 8km radius of the University. I then did research on journey to work in Melbourne and I kept finding locally self-contained labour markets. Substantial proportions of the workforces across the suburbs lived and worked within sub-regions. Mapping showed southern, eastern, northern and western regions were all surprisingly self-contained. I then widened my investigation out of curiosity into catchment areas of the big shopping centres and found similar patterns.

Later I was involved in Strategic Planning at Monash University. We did work on the catchment area of students and picked up an ellipse shape that extended a little towards the city on the western side, and then went north and south and a little east. I have subsequently seen catchment areas for other universities in the Melbourne Atlas, and the link between a student’s home and their campus reflects the same sub-regional structure.

I have also had contact with the medical industry and it’s been interesting to me that specialists sometimes have three or four addresses. They will have rooms in Glen Waverly, Doncaster maybe the CBD and perhaps one of the northern suburbs. When you ring for an appointment you are asked where you live and which rooms are the most convenient to attend. Coincidentally, the public hospital system is administered in suburban regions that reflect this arrangement.

And finally, I remember scanning the sport results in The Age. With cricket or football, you see an array of geographic names for sport competitions; there’s an ‘eastern’ football league, a ‘western’ football league, a ‘northern’ football league and so on.

So it struck me that this conceptual idea of people having a limited knowledge of space and so travelling relatively short distances was embedded in every day human travel and connections across parts of the metropolitan area.

You have also related this idea to the Melway street directory?

I have observed that for most people their Melway directory has half-a-dozen maps that are all well used, while the rest are virtually untouched.

So the title ‘Five Melbournes’ reflects an idea that captures the organisation and arrangement of economic, social and community activity across Melbourne?

Yes, and to provide a framework for strategic planning.

What are some of the potential qualities that could be enhanced or developed within these five regions?

I think we can begin with normative or value based dimensions. It seems to me that this structural feature of the metropolitan area offers the prospect of shorter trips to work and a much higher probability of female labour force participation. In the 1970’s when petrol became expensive for the first time, there was some modelling done and it found that if you had multi-centred distribution of employment you had shorter trips. I have done work on male-female differences in travel behaviour and you find that women tend to travel much shorter distances because they’re more interested in being closer to home.

In the long term, I’m beginning to wonder whether there may be a competitive advantage for employers to move closer to where people live. The trade-off is that some activities have to be in the centre of the city for their contacts and the networks. But there may come a time when some employers say to their employees “We’re going to move out to a suburban location so that a lot of you are going to have a shorter trip to work”.

And I think there may be some reward in terms of community organisation and community recognition and sense of place. Just as the sporting organisations are rooted locally, and the medical services are rooted locally, you could reinforce people’s sense of belonging to a city and the city’s organisation.

Route 216, walking dead, vodka

‘Five Melbournes’ has been drawn as four pie slices around a central core. Geographically, have you defined where the pie slices begin and the central core ends, or is this difficult given the way in which boundaries often overlap?

I have not been strict on border location. I think in a general sense there is a group of municipalities; western, northern, inner city, eastern and southern. You could probably find some physical alignments and use them to refine a framework. Perhaps the development of the idea has fallen short on the location of borders. I don’t have a firm answer yet, but I think with a little bit of analysis of data such as journey to work, retail catchments and hospital admissions it would be easy to separate the mass of the metropolitan area into five regions.

Another consideration with borders is that certain services or infrastructure work across regions.

And that’s often a problem, as some facilities are too big for one region. But the regions I am talking about have populations of three quarters of a million, they’re big areas. They all have a university, a major hospital and big shopping centre, so the fundamental blocks are already there. The challenge is actually to link the basic facilities together with regional transport rather than worrying about the borders.

Clearance 4.3m

Providing employment opportunities across all five regions is crucial. Historically, jobs have moved out of the CBD and into the suburbs; however they are still relatively concentrated given the area of the city. What opportunities are there to increase employment locations across Melbourne?

To start with it is important to recognise that 70% of Melbourne’s employment is outside the inner city, as it is in many metropolitan areas. An issue is that the quality of those jobs is uneven, and some regions do better than others. In the long run I think some stimulus could be applied by government to de-centralise more public sector employment. There’s a case to be made that government services could be more regionalised. Another approach is to provide assistance to local councils to facilitate development and developer bonuses for site coverage in suburban locations.

The success that Sydney had in moving State Government employees to Parramatta is a really interesting illustration here. This happened 25 or 30 years ago, for political reasons basically; the strength of the Labor Party in the west. Now the private sector has followed the lead of State Government. But you can’t transfer the Sydney story directly into Melbourne, because the centre of Melbourne is so much more accessible than is the centre of Sydney. So the type, number and growth of employment are a critical part of how people use the ‘Five Melbournes’.

And in the outer suburbs?

I don’t think the jobs have to follow population to all locations. Rather, in each of the ‘Five Melbournes’ we already have big clusters of employment. One of my PhD students looked at the distribution of employment in Melbourne and identified a number of these clusters, such as in Monash, Whitehorse, Preston and Broadmeadows. He then steadily expanded the size of the cluster until it had as many jobs as there are in the CBD, which at that time were roughly 250,000. I was amazed that in a 6km radius around Monash there were as many jobs as there were in the CBD. Around Whitehorse I think it was around 7 ½kms and in Preston it was about 7km. He had to go further in Broadmeadows, around 8 or 9km. It’s really interesting to recognise this scale of development at the core of each of these big suburban regions. 6km isn’t very far in the metric of the way people live and work in the suburbs.

Furthermore, many of these jobs are taken by outer suburban residents. The City of Monash is an example of that situation as employment within it taps a labour market that heads out to the east and south urban fringes. Hence to a degree the clustering of jobs in mid-suburban locations can act as an employment location for residents in the fringe areas.

Are those clusters of jobs primarily driven by the market?

They are, completely. Across much of these mid-suburban locations there are a substantial number of 2 and 3 storey mid-sized office buildings, research facilities and warehouses. There was a recent article in Business Day by Philip Hopkins on Melbourne’s suburban office market. It shows considerable expansion and take-up of space. So the market must be interested in opportunities in these middle suburbs.

So it’s not being instigated by government policy?

No, there’s no government policy other than a feeble Melbourne 2030 activity centre policy, which had no effect on the development of employment because there are few sites available in the activity centres to build commercial projects. In fact, research has shown the majority of new commercial investment has actually taken place outside activity centres. So it’s all market driven. A weakness is that it has little connection to the provision of public transport.

Route 402 internodal

Large retailers, educational institutions and health services are now established in our suburban areas. Who was first to understand Melbourne as a regional city?

I think it was the retailers. In fact, they created what they called ‘regional shopping centres’.

And as I noted earlier, there is a regional framework for the organisation of hospitals. The location of hospitals is an interesting case. I was involved in the debate about Melbourne, probably 20-odd years ago, at the time when there was a big push for an inner city revival and redevelopment of the central area, as expressed in the work of the Central Area Task Force. The irony was that at the time the Health Department were moving three big hospitals from the inner city to the suburbs, which was completely counter to the central area urban planning policy. So one arm of government was acting on observations about inner city change and growth and actually stopping office development in the suburbs while the medical services, which are an enormous employer, was creating large regional facilities closer to the suburban population.

Education provides further examples. Monash and Latrobe can be seen as ‘suburban regional’ universities but I am not sure their location was determined by an effort to bring tertiary education closer to a suburban market. Rather the planning approach in Melbourne was if you’re going to build something new you had to find a paddock, and both Monash and Latrobe were located in paddocks. There was little consideration of incorporating them into established infrastructure.

Private secondary schools, however, have been more strategic in their response. Several have established campuses in middle or outer suburban locations, and new schools have emerged in each of the ‘Five Melbournes’ as well, following population growth. So for this element of education, suburban housing and suburban campuses are connected.

Bleeding, Sykes

Our public transport network emphasises radial connections to the city centre. The SmartBus orbital routes are interesting because they provide cross town services. Does public transport need to become more responsive to regional and local needs?

The orbital buses are a fantastic innovation. I have been advised they are attracting really high usage rates. There was an article in The Age by Katherine Kizilos who travelled on a SmartBus from Mordialloc to Altona. Nobody travelled from one end to the other of course, but a lot of people got on and got off after short journeys, illustrating the regional connections of suburban residents.

Another thing that interests me about transport, and this is based on the experience of trying to get increased bus services for the university, is that the mindset of the transport planner seems to be either a bus every 20 to 30 minutes, or no service at all. The thing that interested me at the time was the way transport services could be more flexible. For example, some private schools developed a system where they ran collector buses in the morning and the evening. And there are retirement villages that have a bus they run to a major shopping centre in the morning and back again in the afternoon. The recent success of the Huntingdale Station-Monash campus express service that runs at very frequent intervals is another example of a locally relevant service. So public transport doesn’t have to be just heavy rail and main line buses all running to very fixed schedules. It seems to me there’s scope for innovative approaches that meet particular needs, and these could assist the links across suburbs.

Why don’t you think these types of services are being encouraged?

I think the level of innovation in the transport ministry or transport generally is hamstrung by heavy rail and bus contracts. I spoke at a planning session in Werribee a while back and there was a residents group from a subdivision which had rather narrow roads and roundabouts. It was extremely difficult for big buses to get through. They asked was it possible to have small buses and the transport people said, in effect “… we’ve got a contract and we can’t change it”. There seems to be a completely lead-footed perception of the way in which transport services can be supplied.

So a different approach is required?

I believe so. I expect transport planners will reply that the economics don’t stack up; there aren’t enough people, that everybody drives a car. But the success of the orbital buses and the Monash link suggests that people do respond to targeted services. And I guess we’re talking funding here, as like most services any innovations will need to be subsidised.

The mobility created by car ownership has been an important factor in the development of suburban Melbourne. Could you discuss the role of the car in the future development of the city?

You are right to recognise the role of the car. I think there’s no argument that the networks that are part of the ‘Five Melbournes’ are largely car-based. In the current situation I think the accelerated demand for smaller cars, and the smaller growth in hybrid and electric cars, seems ideally suited to the local networks of metropolitan region travel. In many cases workers are travelling no more than 10 or 15kms to work, so a small car is perfect.

I think transport planning could include some more refined views of car use, with some attention to slower speed limits that make it safer to operate a small car, and lower registration costs for small engine cars to help encourage even more use.

Underpinning the role of the car is the fact that people require mobility, often between a variety of origins and destinations. That is difficult to provide with public transport so the car is an important option. The challenge is to ensure that car use has less environmental impact than it does at the moment.

It can be a difficult city without a car.

In many cases your opportunities would be quite limited. You need to be careful about selecting job and residence locations if you are without a car. This is especially the case as you go further out. If you’ve got a bit of time and you don’t mind waiting for buses, I’ve been surprised where you can get to in the middle suburbs. The gradual introduction of bus lanes will help peak hour services, so that more travel to work might be possible.

Furniture, homeware, bric-a-brac

Upgrading Melbourne’s existing infrastructure and the provision of new services and facilities presents an ongoing challenge. Can you discuss some of the issues associated with developer contributions?

The current political climate is to reduce them, the idea being that they drive up the cost of the property. And developer contributions are largely an outer suburban impost. However, there is a case that levies should be charged on higher density development in established suburbs as the additional population puts pressure on currently overloaded transport and other infrastructure. To date, higher density redevelopment has been based on the idea that there is surplus capacity in the inner city. When inner city population development began it was quite reasonable to compare historical and current population figures and decide that the inner city was “under-populated” to an extent. However, over the last decade population growth has changed that situation.

This effect has been felt in the demand for schools. In St Kilda, for example, there is a school with double storey temporary classrooms. On a small site the only way to provide additional classrooms was to put new ones on top of the first one. It’s just a crazy way of coping with development. Nobody has thought all this extra population growth involves costs and services. So some different thinking on approval of development is needed, with developers expected to contribute to the costs incurred in additional infrastructure.

Which raises questions about the longer term livability of the inner city?

Yes. In fact I think the inner city could become less attractive as a place to live particularly as increasing numbers of people have kids. More families will find they can’t get children into a school or find there are 500 kids on a site that was designed for 250. Even the attractiveness of inner city housing might be reduced by the problems of finding a place to park your car, or getting on to an already crowded train or tram to get to work. I wonder whether the inner city may be a more difficult place in which to live in the future.

Why do you think there is a resistance to levies?

Well, for some reason there’s a sense of scaring developers away and driving up the cost of housing. Perhaps part of the problem is that levies are a crude way of funding infrastructure as they are paid as a lump sum up front, before development takes place. It has occurred to me that a more effective way to fund urban services and infrastructure could be to shift to a small annual levy on established development. After all it is the operation of established development that generates the real day-to-day costs of running a city. That levy could be based upon the value of houses and commercial buildings, which is often reflected in proximity to public transport service. Real estate advertisements often say ‘walk to railway station’ or ‘bus passes door’ or ‘on tram route’ and the better located house is more expensive than one further out because the transport service is better. The challenge is to recognise this outcome and, via a small annual levy deliver an income stream that could be used to fund the operation of the metropolitan area, particularly its transport system.

Are there other approaches to managing contributions in built-up areas?

I think beyond a certain size of development, planning approval should depend upon mixed use, which includes community facilities, not just retail functions. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility, for example, that a primary school, or a library, is provided on the ground floor of a new residential building.

In this approach you have to base planning approval of a project by considering impacts on a larger spatial unit. For example, approval of a new large residential building might depend upon the capacity of community facilities such as schools and transport services within a 3km radius of the project. Development approval would depend in part on the capacity of existing local facilities.

Recent discussions about the urban growth boundary extension highlighted people’s concerns about the size and spread of the city. What do you think underlines these concerns?

These concerns relate to loss of agricultural land and the spread of more housing and asphalt. They also relate to a mistaken concern that residents will have a “1 ½ hour trip to work”. They misunderstand that most of those people will have relatively short time trips to work to mid-suburban locations like those I mentioned before. In a sense I think that much of the concern with urban sprawl derives from a monocentric view of metropolitan city development and reflects a lack of understanding of the suburban links and connections that I discussed earlier.

This concern with urban sprawl has a long heritage in State Planning Departments. One of the great anomalies to me, as a Labor Party supporter, was that planning departments in governments that were of Labor persuasion have often been the most anti-sprawl and anti-spread, whereas the majority of their seats were in the middle and outer suburbs. That fact played out nicely in this last State election where the Liberals won in middle and outer suburbs, particularly on south eastern train lines, because there had not been adequate attention to the area, especially to the train service.

I worry less about urban sprawl as a physical feature, and more about accessibility to services, and the fact that we are willing to allow housing and population growth, but have no plans in hand to match that with additional schools, doctors surgeries, hospitals, TAFE colleges and the like. I feel a bit sorry that somehow or other we’ve decided the only solution to “manage sprawl” is to reduce the size of house lots and so fit more people into less space.

To me one fundamental weakness in our urban planning is the lack of State Government co-ordination of planning actions and budgetary allocations. So for example when the Growth Area Authority outlines plans for new subdivisions, it should be apparent to the Education department that they have a major commitment in two years for primary schools and say 4-5 years for High schools. That can be extended to many other urban services. So decisions to release land or approve large inner area redevelopment projects are not just “planning decisions” but need to be Government, and especially Treasury, decisions.

Activity node

You have argued against the monocentric city model. Were the Melbourne 2030 activity centres smaller versions of this model and does a focus on centres dominate planning?

Activity centres play a key part in most urban planning thinking about the development and management of a modern metropolitan area, summarised in the concept of the “polycentric city”. The first step is usually to identify centres associated with public transport, and then assign high density housing to those centres. However, this overlooks the location of key activities such as schools, hospitals, medical suites, universities, TAFE Colleges, local government services, retail and entertainment centres and commercial and industrial employment areas, which have been spread around suburban regions in an un-coordinated way.

I think the first challenge in polycentric city planning is not to designate centres but design transport services that improve the accessibility to these dispersed activities. That leads me to focus attention on arterial roads, because that’s where the majority of activity is located in suburban Melbourne. Arterial roads can be easily served with buses and dedicated bus lanes.

So maybe the first action in polycentric city planning could be the creation of a continuously looping bus that connects a series of economic and community activities in a region along arterial roads, running every ten minutes. That bus service would probably connect with the rail network where the arterial road crosses the railway, so the inter-modal link could be created. The service might cost a lot of money, but it’s going to cost a hell of a lot less than moving existing services to land around railway stations that is already sub-divided into small lots and occupied by a mix of users, so is expensive to purchase and effectively unavailable.

In contrast to that approach, consider the almost meaningless list of activity centres in Melbourne 2030, in a context where planning agencies had no powers, nor financial resources, to purchase land or locate services and so meet the needs of the local population. Perhaps the success thus far of the effort to re-develop Dandenong as a centre is an important illustration of polycentric planning. It shows that maybe we can really only afford to develop just a few centres in suburban Melbourne. The rest of the activity will remain dispersed, although accessible along arterial roads, and by car.

So planning policy needs to be more responsive to how the city has developed and how people use the city?

For better or worse, we have a weak strategic planning posture in this city. We no longer have a heritage of substantial intervention and control over large scale long term development. We don’t have a European willingness to discuss a strategy and implement it the way the Dutch, for example, and to some extent the British do. That means we are into what has been called ‘disjointed incrementalism’ or ‘muddling through’. I give these terms a more professional, or positive, edge by interpreting them as ‘moulding’ or ‘redirecting’ existing patterns of activity. I think that an effective planning strategy will be incrementalist, based on what’s happening now, so long as those trends aren’t completely counter to your equity or environmental objectives. And I think that because moulding or redirecting activity is carefully linked to the way people live and work it’s probably something that is really going to be quite effective.

I think that people who are influential in the planning argument in Melbourne are still unselfconsciously wedded to a monocentric city model. They don’t say it that bluntly, and I’m not saying that to put them down, but I think there is a sense that the centre is everything—it’s really powerful. In general it’s believed to be better to have high density in the inner city and somehow or other stop the spread. And that’s the starting point. That there is an option to try and redistribute jobs and services closer to where people live, and so reinforce regional suburban communities, doesn’t seem to be part of the debate.

Why do you think that is the case?

I think it’s a sense of an ingrained professional background and that the planners know better than the people. It comes back to a dislike of incrementalism. Incrementalism or muddling through is seen by some as a terrible way to do planning.

You commented earlier that the planning strategy needs to be incrementalist. What approach is required to support this?

I think the strategy plan for Melbourne would begin with a discussion about the big hardware items such as the road system, telecom system, capacity in the water, etc., which creates opportunities and constraints. In light of that, a second stage would provide a framework that recognises the way in which the city now works, which to me would have dimensions of ‘Five Melbournes’. Then a third chapter would outline access to employment, education, medical and other services, so establishing under- and over-supply. Then there would be a budgeted building and transport strategy that outlines over the next 5 years where we would put schools, hospital extensions, encourage retail development, new office activities and rail and bus services. Finally there would be an outline of the commitment to be made by State and local agencies and so on. I would review this approach annually, using an analysis of carefully selected data to monitor change in key activities, and so re-visit the priorities of the plan as needed.

Does that require a body positioned between State Government and the local municipal level?

There’s a fair bit of discussion about that. I noticed the State Government has just quietly announced they’re going to have a coordinated metropolitan transport planning agency for the first time. There is a push for a so-called ‘Metropolitan Authority’. I wonder whether that’s a bit of overkill administratively, because it seems to me that a well organised Melbourne division of the state planning agency could be just as effective.

‘Five Melbournes’ seems to reflect both a strategic planning view and empirical observations regarding day to day life, where you live and work in the city?

Planning involves the consideration of small spaces and large spaces, and it involves attention to short and long periods of time. Much of the planning debate in Melbourne is about change in small areas over short time periods. However, the fundamental forces on a metropolitan area often act on the 50 year or more horizon, and are felt over large areas. So with the ‘Five Melbournes’ structure I am trying to recognise the importance of the small areas and short time horizons, understanding the importance of what happens within a half hour of your home, but also acknowledge the importance of the big long urban corridors, and the impact within them of Universities, Hospitals, local government centres, and regional retail and commercial centres. Bringing these two perspectives together provides a transparent approach to long term planning.

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