How do we create places where people want to work, live and play?
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Loading ...Liveable neighbourhoods are based on new urbanism principles and have innovative design to improve residents’ lifestyles and building the community. They promote ‘nodal’ development; support the use of public transport, and walkable neighbourhood clustering. Transit-oriented development (TOD) is an important component, as are main street commercial and medium density residential developments.
Lots are orientated to open space with access from the rear and the neighbourhoods provide for a variety of density of development to create diversity and lifestyle choices in close proximity to recreation and commercial facilities. Liveable neighbourhoods aim for high quality landscaping and urban environment sometimes including public art.
“New urbanism is associated with community planning based on compactness, walkability, liveability, mixed uses and high design and development standards”, (Freestone, 2007).
The ‘city beautiful’ model’s impact can be seen today in the formal design of residential estates, parks and open space. New estates such as Arlington Rise, Settlers Run, Somerly, Harbour Rise and Fernbrooke all subscribe to the liveable neighbourhoods philosphy.
“Conventional car-based suburban extensions have become a thing of the past under Western Australia’s new Liveable Neighbourhoods code”, (Morris, 2006).
The national leader in new urbanism development is Perth. Successful projects featuring mixed use, walkable urban development were toured during a conference on New Urbanism in 2006. Given that the Planning Report Card 2006 results showed that Western Australia has the highest rate of community participation, this may be just one reason why new urbanism has succeeded in Perth.
In comparing Sydney and Melbourne, Sydney has been described as treating its pedestrians as second-class citizens, while Melbourne has been applauded for inviting people back into the city. Danish architect and urban planner, Dr Jan Gehl, believes that Sydney’s pedestrians are in a class below cars, often spending up to half their journey waiting for traffic lights.
While, Steve Vizard gives the following description of Canberra, “Canberra, Sunday … and our nation’s capital is deserted. Quarter of a million people are suppose to live here. This is supposed to be Australia’s largest inland city. But … I don’t see more than twelve residents at a time. I’m not convinced that there are more than a dozen people running this joint on a fabricated Emerald City-type arrangement. The city is an empty Brobdingnagian cemetery full of outsized marble icons festooned with giant kangaroos and implacable emus.
“An every-Australian suburb, neat, subdued, everthing in its place: Duntroon, the war memorial, Lake Burley Griffen, monuments, sweating marble and heat. Embassies impersonating fast-food outlets. A contrived Balinese temple, a giant-footed pagoda. Not a person in sight. Not a hair out of place. Embassyland. A little too clean, rubbishless, carless, smogless, messless, humourless, peopleless. A suburb in waiting.”
Sustainability, liveability and urban design have become the challenges facing planning. Balancing and integrating social, economic and environmental factors is fundamental to the idea of sustainable development. Although as Freestone (2007) argues that imagination has to be always reigned in by practical considerations. Striking the right balance can prove a long and bruising story.
Transit-oriented development aims to provide compact, walkable communities, however, developers and agencies associated with TOD’s should be careful that they do not end up with a struggling community beside a bypass road, that in the end sucks the life out of the area, bankrupts the businesses and changes the very fabric of the community.
Obesity in children, not just adults, is becoming more and more common and at an alarming rate. Professionals such as Dr Carol Whitzman are arguing that the lack of walkable neighbourhoods is contributing to a lack of exercise in children and adults.
“The roots of the planning profession are in public health”, (Whitzman, 2006), however public health issues have now moved on from being about clean water and good sanitation. Public health is now about obesity, heart disease, diabetes and lack of exercise.
The Victorian division of PIA’s Planning for Health and Well-Being Project is encouraging planners to “influence local urban design so that health is ‘planned in’ rather than ‘planned out’”.
The growing advocacy for better bike and foot paths, walkable communities that have facilities within walkable distances and times from each other are essential components for new urbanism developments.
As Charles Landry states, the aim of cities today must be to ‘think of your city as if it were a living work of art where citizens can involve and engage themselves in the creation of a transformed space. This will involve different creativities: the creativity of the engineer, the social worker, the planner, the business person, the events organiser, the architect, the housing specialists, IT specialists, psychologists, historians, anthropologists, natural scientists, environmentalists, artists of all kinds and, most importantly, ordinary people living their lives as citizens. This is comprehensive creativity.”
Community engagement techniques such as those espoused by Dr Ned Crosby are a fantastic method to ensure participation in development projects. Dr Crosby invented the citizen jury process which is known in such guises as Wisdom Councils, Dynamic Facilitation, Deliberative Surveys, World Cafe and 21st Century Town Meetings.
In 2005, four Australian cities ranked in the top ten list of international cities ranking on urban quality of life. The EIU (Economist Intelligence Unit) ranks 127 cities worldwide.
My question is this, how do we take all of the information, historical, geographical, social, etc. and make it all work to everyone’s advantage? Canberra was supposed to be a model liveable city, but it comes across as cold and lifeless. How do we create walkable neighbourhoods with great ‘walkscores’ and reduced traffic without encouraging people to bypass the commercial areas altogether?
How, as planners, do we create places that people want to live in, work in, play in, walk in, communicate in, belong to and encourage growth in?
The answer has to be in community engagement and participation. Dr Crosby’s community engagement techniques appear to foster community empowerment and ownership. Our universities must teach planning students different participatory skills and tools for community engagement. Local, state and federal government must employ these techniques to ensure that the community is involved and engaged in major development projects.
References and Further Reading
Anonymous (2005) Creating Communities Newsletter Winter 2005 “WA ‘first’ for community engagement”, Department for Planning and Infrastructure.
Anonymous (2006) Urban Design Forum Issue No. 74 “Poor urban design can contribute to obesity”.
Anonymous (2007) “Sydney pedestrians 2nd-class citizens” online
Bajracharya, Bhishna (2006) Urban Design Forum Issue No. 74 “Promoting transit-oriented development”.
Eads, Brian (2005) Australian Readers Digest “Taking Back Our Cities”.
Freestone, Robert (2007) Designing Australia’s cities: culture, commerce and the city beautiful 1900 - 1930, University of New South Wales Press Ltd. Everbest, China.
Hague, Cliff (2007) Australian Planner Volume 44 No. 1 3/2007, “Re-inventing Planning: challenges and skills”. Planning Institute of Australia.
Hall, Professor Sir Peter (2007) Australian Planner Volume 44 No. 1 3/2007, “Priorities for Australian cities”. Planning Institute of Australia.
www.ideasthatmatter.com - related to Jane Jacobs
Landry, C (2006) The Art of City Making.London, Earthscan.
Latest community initiatives - www.dpi.wa.gov.au/dialogue
Liveable Neighbourhoods (2000), Western Australian Planning Commission, Perth, State of Western Australia.
Morris, Wendy (2006) Urban Design Forum Issue No. 76 “Perth Showcases New Urbanism”.
Planning Report Card (2006) Planning Institute of Australia (PIA)
Reinventing planning - www.globalplanningnetwork.org
Whitzman, Dr Carolyn (2006) Australian Planner “Investing in the energy source of the future: Free range children”, Planning Institute of Australia.
Vizard, Steve (1998), “Two Weeks in Lilliput - Bear-baiting and backbiting at the Constitutional Convention”, Penguin Books Australia.
Posted in Community Planning, Family, Planning Practice, Social Planning, Suburbs |
Two thoughts, one relates to greenfield sites, the other to activity centres.
This week Capire P/L and David Locke and Associates ran a charette for the proposed Cranbourne West housing development - this would be a good example of getting stakeholders together to come up with a concept design. What would even more interesting is run some post-occupancy surveys of households who had moved into new housing areas to get their likes and dislikes. I believe the Hornery Institute does this.
On Activity Centres, u/g planning students have been doing some precinct planning for the Ivanhoe Activity Centre. In many ways this is an ideal site for planning a more walkable/liveable neighbourhood but if one looks at all the recent retail investment - boutiques, restaurants - they draw people in from a wider catchment and they come by car, which spill out of the numerous carparks. An attempt to make Ivanhoe more liveable i.e. restriction car access will be met with howls of protest from all the retail investors.
So maybe we should be doing much better out in the greenfields but we have big problems with built up areas too.
After reading your article I couldn’t help but compare the liveability of my home town of Melbourne to where I live at the moment, which is Oslo. It’s my personal opinion that Oslo is a far more liveable city than Melbourne. Why? Mainly because, there is a strong pedestrian focus which means that most essential services (public transport, child care, Medical and supermarkets) and not so essential services (bars, open spaces, parks and retail outlets) are within about the standard 400m. And, if I need to get across town, for example to go to work, public transport is as efficient as using a car.
Furthermore, Matthew Kahn an environmental economist from UCLA’s Institute of the Environment believes Oslo is a ‘green and liveable’ city. He ranked 72 international cities using criteria included, but not limited to, Environmental legislation, energy prices, waste production and disposal and available parkland. Under such criteria Oslo was ranked second place only to be beaten by Stockholm (http://www.thelocal.se/8578/20070922/)
However, to be fair if criteria included factors like affordability, climate, and character I’m sure Melbourne would out rank Oslo.
I think values play a big role in what it is that makes a city liveable; and therefore I agree with your article that if planners are going to create places ‘that people want to live in, work in, play in, walk in, communicate in, belong to and encourage growth in, they must be consulting the local community’. Such consultation will enable planners and the community to establish ‘where they are’ and develop the policy that will get them to ‘where they want to be’. Therefore, inclusion of the local community is essential and planners are responsible for ensuring individuals and groups are heard. But, more importantly planners should be informing these groups about planning practices & some theory, which would enabling them to be able to meaningfully participate in the dialogue of creating policy and plans. This would eliminate the more common situation where community participation is limited to reacting to planners already devised proposals.
Two articles that I skimmed over and think will be beneficial to you in terms of providing information on the importance of community participation in planning liveable cities are:
Arnstein, Sherry (1969) “A Ladder of Citizen Participation” AIP Journal, vol. 35,
July, pp. 216-224.
Davidoff, Paul (1965) “Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning” AIP Journal, vol. 31, November, pp. 331-38.
I read the Oslo example and thought that I would share. I live currently in Port Vila, Vanuatu, the capitol. Vanuatu was recently lauded for the size of its eco-footprint, which somehow became a synonym for happiness, ealding to Vanuatu claiming to be the world’s happiest country.
Port Vila is home to between 25000 and 45000 people, most of whom are black and poor and who live in housing which would not pass any test, let alone the occasional hurricane and earthquake. Land ownership is traditional, which has sadly meant that most land ownership is in dispute, and white men and corrupt black politicians have exploited these disputes, with much land now being in 75 year leases to white speculators. Health and education are poor by any standards. The public transport system is by mini-bus, all privately operated but with capped fares. Most black people work in poorly paid jobs, usually for white people (domestics, gardeners, etc.). Most walk to work as they cant afford public transport, often walks of five or more kilometres each way. Most roads are hugely potholed and there is little regular maintenance done. There is no sewerage, no controlled storm water and no electricity or mains water in many housing areas so, why are they so happy?
I think that liveability may, sadly, rely on more than built environment.
People in Vanuatu greet all people they pass as a matter of course, they are more often than not polite and they are tolerant of other people bahaving badly. Police often do not respond to calls, so people have to resolve their own disputes - sometimes with the aid of chiefs or religious leaders. Families all live in extended settlements. Perhaps if we encouraged greeting, living in extended family and resolving our own disputes, we would need to worry less on built environment. I think that we look to planners, rather than residents to make liveability is an indictment in itself.
While concepts such as New Urbanism can be moulded to suit different geographical and social areas concepts such as Transit Orientated Development are more geared towards larger cities and are harder to apply in rural areas.
As part of the DPCD’s (former DSE) Victorian Planning Provisions are included Clauses 55 and 56 which provide guidelines for subdivision and developments. Clause 56 is specific to residential subdivision and requires aspects of proposed subdivision to adhere to a number of requirements so as to prevent intrusions into people’s privacy, prevent overcrowding, ensure liveable and sustainable communities and ensure that they are connected to the appropriate reticulated services.
Clause 55 relates to residential developments and requires that issues such as neighbourhood character, dwelling diversity, infrastructure, to be addressed. Also to be addressed are safety, open space, overlooking and, noise impacts. This is for the purposes of creating neighbourhoods that are safe to live in and provide uniformity for the area. Clauses of planning schemes and relevant policies such as these are designed to help planners to create areas that are attractive to people so that they want to live, work and play in them.
For people to be attracted to an area and want to spend time in that area they have to feel safe, it needs to be accessible and easy to get around, provide appropriate services and While a basic concept or strategy could be applied to a number of different areas the specifics of it need to be modified somewhat to adapt to the social, geographic, and identity of the area. While not all planning outcomes are going to be ideal and adhere to everyone’s idea of where they want to live work and play the combination of the VPP, State Planning Policies, MSS and Local Planning Policies are a way of consolidation as much historical, social and geographical information as possible.
REFERENECES
Department of Planning and Community Development. Victoria Planning Provisions.
http://www.dse.vic.gov.au/planningschemes/VPPs/
I agree with mcm that happiness and liveability don’t just depend on the built environment. It also depends on the social environment and other cultural factors.
It depends on personal perspectives, some people will drive to a supermarket which is within 200 metres and others will make the decision to walk.
Melbourne’s inner city residents are the most advantaged in terms of transport, as they have the opportunity to drive, walk or take public transport. The choices for outer suburban residents are fewer, and driving appears to be the most favourable due to the poor transport connections and pedestrian unfriendly streets. It is unfortunate that there are disadvantaged people in the world who don’t have a priviledge of choice, they have to walk. Idealy, we should all have the same opportunities and we would all be able to decide on our preferred mode of transport or way of life. As planners we should try to give the community equal opportunities, that is, make the streets walkable, have a efficient and inclusive transport system and facilitate vehicular transport.
As Gleeson (2005) argues that Australian urban development has achieved a healthy balance between master planning and relative design diversity allowing for individual expression. He continues that “over programming’ new suburbs, forcing conformism and consequently causing the community to search for individuation.
I agree with Gleeson that Australia needs to improve on the tools already in place, Australia needs to guide development sustainable and gain political support to do so. I think that to make our urban environments more liveable, the community needs to be more involved in the planning process, and through education the community can learn why it is better to walk or take public transport as oppossed to driving. In my opinion, its the communities reposibility to make places more liveable, the communties perspective has to change so that the community can demand a more sustainable environment, with streets favoring pedestrians and a better public transport network.
Gleeson, B (2005) ‘Towards a new Australian suburbanism’ Australian Planner, vol. 43, no. 1, pp. 10-13. >, viewed 18/10/07
New Urbanism is based on a design approach to urban development which is related to the earlier planning theories (Faistein 2000, p.461). New Urbanism is an urban design movement originated in American social context that claims its objective as celebrating local history, climate, ecology, and building practice (New Urbanism, Wikipedia [online]). New Urbanism’s denouncing of urban sprawl and American suburbia and emphasis of social contact gives New Urbanism some legitimacy in social sphere (New Urbanism [online]).
To achieve the objective of New Urbanism there are probably many other approaches in addition to new urbanism, which does not necessarily fit all social contexts. While urban design is important to human activities it is not the only factor that shapes the way people work, live and play. Although New Urbanism addresses the physical side of planning the non-physical side also needs to be dealt with. There is a room for New Urbanism to improve its effectiveness. New Urbanism tends to describe over-emphasises the importance of infrastructure to a degree that concludes physical design determines social behaviours or relationships. In fact, it is probably social factors and people’s values and cultures that shape the environment people live in. What makes New Urbanism more effective is an urban form that stimulates neighbourliness, community involvement, feelings of integration and community involvement, what makes just-city more effective is an urban vision involving material well-being and cooperative form of welfare provision (Faistein 2000).
As the author of this blog highlights, the answer to urban planning has to come from community engagement and participation. The lack of participation in Australian society is a concern. For instance, lack of indigenous participation in decision-making in Australia is obvious. The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) thought there was a lack of effective participation by indigenous communities in the formulation of the Native Title Amendment Act that had compromised Australia’s obligations under articles 1(4) and 2(2) of International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (Triggs 1999 [online]). Therefore, Fainstein (2000)’s model of Just City has more relevance to the current social needs.
References
Fainstein, Susan (2000) “New Directions in Planning Theory” Urban Affairs Review, vol. 35, no. 4, March, pp. 451-478.
New Urbanism [online] http://www.newurbanism.org/ [accessed 21 October 2007]
New Urbanism, Wikipedia [online] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_urbanism [accessed 21 October 2007]
Triggs G 1999, Australia’s Indigenous Peoples and International Law: Validity of Native Title Amendment Act 1998 (CTH), Melbourne University Law Review [online] http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/MULR/1999/16.html [accessed 21 October 2007]
Cherie, your blog reminded me of a paper I read last year called “Community Strengthening through urban sociability” it was prepared by Dr John Montgomery and funded by the Department of Victorian Communities (now DPCD). I wish I had revisited this paper earlier in this course because it draws upon a lot of the theories and concepts that we have discussed in this course, but from a very community centric angle. In particular, it explores the concept of “community”, including what values are placed on the spatial and physical elements within that community, and also provides some discussion on the role of creating and preserving “community” in planning and though policy development.
Montgomery discusses the increase in planning for community development in 1970s England, following the slum clearance projects of earlier decades, and also talks about the “sociology of community” as described by Alan Tranter, which is the idea that community is made up of four elements - social capital, wellness, quality of life and cultural anthropology, which are all interlocking.
“Social capital refers in the main to a population’s capacity to benefit from life chances and opportunities for improvement, but also to the set of values and support systems those populations build up over time. Wellness is an indicator of health, physical and mental, and therefore the extent to which people can pursue opportunities and their personal aspirations. The quality of life includes living conditions, disposable income, access to recreation, leisure and culture, and local environmental conditions. Cultural anthropology refers in the main to shared values, traditions and customs and the overall way of life of a particular social group. These are often, but not always, derived from ethnic identities.”(Montgomery 2006))
Other concepts explored in this paper include that of “Cultural Planning”, “Indicators of successful urban places” and so on, but I find the sociology of the community above and interesting model for the kind of factors we as planners should be considering when trying to develop places where people want to work, live or play.
This link will take you to the paper – check it out if you get a chance
http://www.dvc.vic.gov.au/Web14/dvc/rwpgslib.nsf/GraphicFiles/Community+Strengthening+through+Urban+Sociability.pdf/file/Community+Strengthening+through+Urban+Sociability.pdf
References:
Montgomery, J (2006) Community Strengthening Through Urban Sociability, Department of Victorian Communities, Victoria, Australia
While Cherie quotes Morris (2006) as stating: “Conventional car-based suburban extensions are a thing of the past under Western Australia’s new Liveable Neighbourhoods code”, other areas in Australia (e.g. Queensland) are still rolling out the same old suburban sprawl of the past forty years that is very much reliant on the private car, as well as lacking any “real” or viable activity centre that provides employment other than a supermarket, bakery, etc. It’s just the same low density suburban nothing…and approved by councils that declare their following to new urbanism thinking – rubbish!
I agree with Cherie that transit oriented development (TOD) shouldn’t be ebtered into without extensive research and justification. Like the term sustainability, TODs are the flavour of the month for developers looking to get increases in density in their developments and in turn increased profits.
Ask the community what they want and its low density with good roads and no congestion, not medium density public transport focused walkable communities. Planners (and governments) need to educate the community, not tell them how they should think but provide the benefits of new urbanism principle for the whole community.
Charles Landry’s ‘comprehensive creativity’ (in Cherie’s blog) definitely demands a lot of input from a lot of interest groups leading me to think, who actually gets any work done around here? For sure the development of ‘community’ would depend on the interrelated yet independent input of each stakeholder, but how are planners to facilitate all these groups in creating ‘a place where people want to work, live and play’?
Communicative Model theoretically sounds so promising as each stakeholder has the opportunity to express their desires. But if the planning process is truly democratic and allows all of Landry’s groups to deliberate, I don’t think much will be achieve. The Regional Forestry Agreements (RFA) was a government initiative to empower NGOs such as the conservationists and the logging industries to work with State and Federal Governments in the development of forest usage agreements. However the inability of the NGOs to come to any consensus lead to the ousting of their participation as the governments needed policies to be set within a structured timeframe.
However, in the RFA example, the NGOs entered deliberation with their preconceived notions of what they expected to achieve and they were not willing to compromise. Therefore the process needs to be made more manageable and as discussed by coatesbec’s response stakeholders need to be educated on the different agenda’s of planning.
Planners need to account for the desires of all stakeholders and only the communicative model allows such participation. But planners need to play a more active role in structuring negotiations to ensure that a consensus can be reached.
Mobbs, C. (2003). National Forest Policy and Regional Forest Agreements. Managing Australia’s Environment. S. Dovers and S. Wild River. Sydney, The Federation Press: 90-114.