(Update, 29/4: This has started turning up everywhere, and The Age has an interview with Kaso here.)

Kaso also has a similar film for Sydney which isn’t quite as polished, but still very good.

As an aside, having mentioned the new SimCity, I would love to have tried out the game and potentially updated my previous thoughts on the franchise, but have had to hold off given my teaching commitments this semester. It sounds like by doing so I’ve been spared a frustrating experience, with mounting reports of problems with the game, including fixes that just make things worse. My favourite problem: the poor person whose city was filling with taxis.

At least you should be able to get home on Saturday night.

And a further update, 11/5: Tilt shift is obviously all the rage at the moment as The Age also featured this nifty short on their website. By Philip Watts, and presumably done completely independent from Kaso’s work, it nevertheless works as a nifty follow-up. If Kaso’s film is SimCity Melbourne, this is SimCity’s disaster mode. And it’s a clever play on disaster movies at the same time.

The consultation period for the review of the Melbourne metropolitan strategy has just finished. I didn’t make a submission and haven’t really had much to say on the topic. This is despite my usual boundless enthusiasm for getting wound up by planning reform measures, and the fact that this seems to be the biggest thing on the planning agenda: certainly it seems to be the last well-resourced thing left happening at the increasingly besieged DPCD.

It’s hard to get too excited by the discussion paper, Melbourne, Let’s Talk About the Future, simply because it’s so high level and hard to argue with. There are a few strange details, some of which have been pointed out by Alan Davies over at The Urbanist (for example here and here): in particular, the “20 Minute City” idea seems both oddly placed as a top-level principle and weirdly un-nuanced as a foundation goal for transport planning. For example, because it doesn’t make any distinction between travel modes, it doesn’t really push for any notable level of localised service provision – a twenty minute drive to the shops is not accessible in any meaningful way. It also doesn’t recognise that travel budgets may vary a lot for different types of trips and mode choice. Many in Melbourne would happily live with a forty minute daily commute if it was on a well-serviced train, for example. The real liveability benefits might be gained from improving the quality of commutes to employment, but facilitating walkable access to local services, rather than accepting a twenty minute benchmark regardless of travel mode or the purpose of the journey.

The real worry I have about metropolitan strategy, though, is that it ends up not mattering because it is both too non-committal and pre-empted. For all the fuss that was made about Melbourne 2030 as a political target, it never said anything that was that dramatic: there are a few broad ideas that have recurred through metropolitan strategy over the years (well outlined in Lester Townsend’s very readable Managing Melbourne report), and it seems likely that the final version of this paper, too, will essentially re-state most of those. Certainly the discussion paper is generally high-level and uncontentious: perhaps that’s in its nature, but if bolder calls do get made in the draft scheduled for release mid year, there will be limited opportunity for the public to react to them. For the moment, though, the positions put are hard to argue with. The scourge of Victorian planning at all levels has been a widespread tendency (built into the very structural fabric of the VPPs) to simply list competing issues without working out how to resolve them in policy or spatial terms; the high-level nature of metropolitan strategy means it is a particularly susceptible to this problem.

Activity centres are a good example. Given the Minister’s apparent antipathy to traditional activity centre policy, I was interested in how the paper would deal with this. And it doesn’t, really: the “Polycentric City” idea seems to be an affirmation of activity centre policy, but there’s little in the way of detail. It doesn’t drill down, for example, to how different levels of activity centre might be nested, what the land supply for different uses in identified centres is, or talk about how much out-of-centre development should be tolerated. This means it doesn’t really help further the debates aired during the zone review process about whether liberalisation of industrial zones is required.

This leads to my second concern about the strategy: that it will be pre-empted. It is unfolding against a background of various other debates and reviews that are at least potentially profoundly city-shaping and which will beat it to the punch. On the infrastructure front, the government maintains its mystifying insistence on moving forward with the East-West freeway link, while Public Transport Victoria have released an ambitious and far-reaching network development plan. The zones review, as I have said, will fundamentally shape the way activity centres develop (or, perhaps, fail to develop). And the government has pushed forward with plans for a new metropolitan planning authority, effectively prejudging some important questions about implementation. Against this background, the metropolitan strategy simply doesn’t feel like the most important front in the planning policy debate.

All that is by way of prelude to what I actually wanted to post about, which is the film Planning for Melbourne’s Future, which is now on YouTube and had previously been squirreled away on DPCD’s webpage. It was released ahead of the Melbourne Metropolitan Planning Scheme Report of 1954 (which is itself on DPCD’s webpage here, albeit chopped into dozens of smaller files; it can be downloaded complete from my planning history database). The video and audio quality are both a bit ropey, but they get the job done.

I love this because it says so much about what has and hasn’t changed in Melbourne over the last sixty years. We’re still messing around with some of the same issues talked about in the film: sprawling outer suburbs due to “haphazard growth” (an issue just kicking off in earnest in 1954); lack of infrastructure and services; traffic congestion; and long commutes. (And those who think Melbourne’s footy obsession is a creation of modern media should note its prominence in the film.)

Yet many of the other issues have changed. They were fretting about industry in the centre of the city (“sixty percent of factory jobs are located within three miles of the GPO”), where that has now moved to outer areas and thus exacerbated the city’s sprawl. The inner suburbs were at the time considered slums – no doubt correctly – but now that housing has been gentrified and we look to denser models such as those Victorian terraces as examples of denser building form that could help avoid the problems of sprawl. Nobody would be quite so overt with their proud display of road interhcnages (though, again, the East-West freeway link shows the simple appeal of grand road infrastructure projects has not abated). And, of course, we have hopefully moved a long way from the sexism of bemoaning that “housewives” are unable to get to the shops, and declarations that “every citizen should concern himself” with planning.

The other change I notice is the way that the strategy was undertaken and sold. The film is much more blunt about acknowledging problems than modern marketing material would be; these days planners are generally much more diplomatic about the way they describe their mistakes strategic challenges. It’s also notable for its emphasis upon serious and detailed empirical study presented in a transparent manner. The 1954 report included a separate 254 page volume of “Surveys and Analysis” (which might these days be released as a discussion paper) and its a document of impressive scope and detail. Today DPCD’s ability to undertake such detailed work is being constantly undermined, through a combination of resourcing cuts, shonky politically driven policy (such as the zones review), and projects being rushed.

Of course, the 1954 approach was very technocratic, with the “wise plan” handed down from on high by a bunch of men in suits. Crucially, the “Surveys and Analysis” plan wasn’t released as a discussion paper: as far as I can tell, it was released alongside the finished strategy as a background report. Planners at least make more of a gesture towards consultation these days (how genuine that consultation is varies from project to project). The difficulty is, because we so seldom go to the public with such rigorous work behind us, the feedback we get may not be as informed or targeted, and it is hard to explain to the public why we favour particular planning solutions.

Folded up the booklet is about a modern A5 size; the first unfold reveals a landscape picture of Melbourne that is approximately A3. They don’t make them like this any more (while the booklet is from 1939, this drawing actually has a January 1934 copyright). You can click on all these pictures to study the detail.

• It seems there used to be an aquarium up near (or in) the Exhibition buildings.
• This shows a “Queen Victoria Hospital” up in what is now the legal precinct, off William Street. The Swanston Street site we now know as the former Queen Victoria Hospital is labelled “Melbourne Hospital.”
• Similarly, what we now refer to as the former GPO is marked as “Elizabeth Street Post Office,” with the actual “General Post Office” down near Spencer Street (which makes sense given the proximity to boats and trains).
• Flinders Street Station carries the label “The Gateway of the Metropolis.”
• There’s a cluster of theatres (including a “Hoyt’s”) on Bourke between Swanston and Russell. I can remember this remaining as cinema precinct until the 1990s, but all are gone now.
• Princes Bridge Station is still a separate entity. (Why did that linger for so long given its proximity to Flinders Street?)

The inside page folds down above the words “For Trips and Tours” to reveal the inner map of Melbourne, at close to A3 size. Again, click to enlarge.

• The old Inner Circle railway is still there, running through North Fitzroy and North Carlton, including a branch line to Edinburgh Gardens. The last remaining section of the old Outer Circle (apart from today’s Alamein Line) also remains, running to East Kew.
• Coode Island is still an island, with the original course of the Yarra much more apparent.
• Mental health facilities are notably prominent: a “benevelont asylum” in Moorabin at the bottom of the map,  the Kew asylum near the centre, and the terriyingly large “Mont Park Hospital for Insane” at the top.
• Pentridge prison is labelled “Pentridge Stockade.”

Just for good measure, here’s the back cover when the whole thing is folded up, which invites you to “call upon the Travel Hostess” at the Victorian Government Tourist Bureau.

On the off chance that anyone has found their way here after reading today’s article, there is more chapter and verse about the problems with the zone review in my submission to the review. It’s very hard to nail the specifics in the space constraints of The Age.

The changes currently proposed to the zones are extensive, covering all major categories of zone (residential, business / commercial, industrial, and rural) and involving multiple significant changes to each zone. The proposed reforms mix together changes that were contemplated under the previous government and the subject of considerable work (the “three-speed” residential zones) with others that have appeared with little foreshadowing (most of the others). Very little information or strategic justification has been provided with this package.

I am a keen proponent of planning system reform and in previous submissions to reviews and writing on system reform have prided myself on providing constructive criticism. Unfortunately the paucity of information makes it difficult to be positive or constructive about this review as the information provided gives a striking sense that these reforms have been rushed and poorly thought through. They also appear to involve policy shifts – notably a weakening of activity centre policy – that are inappropriate ahead of the completion of the Metropolitan Strategy.

Given the general lack of detail, my comments for the most part remain relatively “high-level.”

Strategic Justification and Adequacy of Material

Click the image above to read the discussion paper.

This is the most significant change to the VPPs since their introduction in the late 1990s. Given that, the material that has been released is shockingly deficient. While it may seem unhelpful to harp on this point, it needs to be made as it sets an appalling precedent for future work and calls the legitimacy of the current review into question.

The zones are supported by a ten page discussion paper and four double-sided single page fact sheets. The print is large and there is a lot of white space. Much of the material that is provided is procedural information or simple descriptions of the changes, leaving almost no actual analysis or justification. The crucial industrial zones changes, for example, are supported by a short passage on page 8 of the discussion paper and a single sentence on the associated fact sheet.

There is, quite simply, not enough detail to understand or evaluate the thinking or research that underpins the changes. These changes are too important, with crucial ramifications for activity centres in particular, to be allowed to proceed on the basis of this work.

I would therefore encourage the Advisory Committee to make this point strongly in its report and send DPCD back to the drawing board. While the Advisory Committee may be reluctant to make such a finding, I would encourage it to consider the widespread implications of this review, and the implications for future strategic and system reviews if this approach is allowed to recur.

Planning Panels are, rightly, not reluctant to tell Councils when their strategic work has not adequately supported a change, and recommend that they abandon amendments. That principle should apply even more strongly to the DPCD, and where amendments have enormous state-wide implications. The material accompanying this review does not begin to approach the levels of strategic justification that should underpin such widespread changes.

I therefore urge the Advisory Committee to have the courage to declare this work inadequate.

Sidelining and Abandonment of Relevant Strategic Work

Several existing reviews could have helpfully informed the zones review process. Unfortunately links back to this work have not been drawn, and several of these more substantive projects have been quietly set aside.

VPSMAC

The discussion paper’s section on “background” refers in vague terms to the Victoria Planning System Ministerial Advisory Committee:

The Victorian Planning System Ministerial Advisory Committee was commissioned in June 2011 to examine all aspects of the system, including possible zone reform. Recommendations around review of Victoria’s zone structure were subsequently made.

This seems to invite the interpretation that the zone review follows from the recommendations of the VPSMAC. Yet the VPSMAC’s discussion about zones centres mainly on the need for more flexibility in tailoring zones to particular circumstances, and on the particular example of the Farming Zone. It is difficult to draw a link between the VSPMAC’s findings and the headline changes of the current review.

What’s more, the fate of the VPSMAC from here is unclear. The Committee’s appointment represented the current government’s clearest commitment to rigorous and open system review. The committee’s “Initial Report” was finished in December 2011 and released in May 2012, and it is clear from that report that it expected to continue its work. Yet since then the government has been silent about the future stages of the project.

The VSPMAC work should be allowed to continue, and this work should be timed to allow it to constructively align with the zone review.

Retail Policy Review

The Retail Policy Review is of direct relevance to the proposed commercial and industrial zone changes. This project stalled after an initial discussion paper in October 2008. Its recommendations appear to have become inconvenient for the current government, notably by their opposition to the loosening of restricted retail allowed by Amendment VC88. The review’s page – including the discussion paper – was removed from the DPCD site earlier this year, so it is presumed that this review has been abandoned.

This review or equivalent work is vital to understanding and evaluating the impact of the proposed zone changes, which make sweeping changes to commercial and industrial zones. This review or equivalent work needs to be completed before those changes are made.

Advisory Committee into Residential Zones

The report of the Advisory Committe into Residential Zones, prepared in August 2009, is a substantial document that drew on over 236 submissions to the previous government’s consultation process. It is of obvious and direct relevance to the current review.

Frustrated at the continue failure to release that report, I sought it by FOI in January of this year. The Department refused that request until almost literally the last possible moment. Ordered by VCAT to circulate their grounds by 13 July, ahead of a hearing on 17 July, they instead announced the new zones on 11 July, released the report on 13 July, and released the zones themselves on 17 July, the day they would have had to defend the failure to release the report at VCAT.

Even when released, the Advisory Committee report was not referenced in the zone material or linked to on the associated page of the DPCD website, as would have occurred routinely in the past. So while refusal to release the report was justified on the basis of its links to the current review, the review itself does not mention or rely upon it.

That review should be published alongside the zone review material on the DPCD website. DPCD should clarify how the current draft of the zones responds to that work. The Advisory Committee should make use of the considerable time and effort that went into that review in considering the current residential zones.

Metropolitan Strategy

The final input that has not been taken into account is the work on a new Metropolitan Strategy, since the zones have been announced before that work produced its first discussion paper.

The review makes several assumptions about matters such as activity centre policy (discussed later in this submission) that would be a vital part of the Metropolitan Strategy discussion. Yet the zone reform is proceeding ahead of the strategy, seemingly based on different assumptions. This threatens the legitimacy of the Metropolitan Strategy and means that the zones lack a proper strategic underpinning.

Regional Growth Plans

A nearly identical point to the above applies in the regional context. The zone changes should draw on the findings of the Regional Growth Plans.

The tools of planning should be built in response to a strategy, not put in place while strategic objectives are still being formulated.

Zone Liberalisation vs. Better Application of Zones

In my submission to the VPSMAC I argued that in Victoria we need to rethink the way we undertake strategic planning so that it is more focussed on the codification of spatial solutions to achieve policy objectives. This is the core of what planning should be about, but we have done it poorly during the VPP-era in Victoria. To put it crudely, our strategic planning tends to focus on cataloguing vague decision guidelines for statutory planners (“What Should We Think About?”), rather than actually coming up with some answers to spatial dilemmas (“What Goes Where?”).

The general gridlock and lack of clarity created by this failure of strategic planning has then led to misguided calls for reform that focus simply on smoothing the process, rather than making the system more effective so that there is a point to having the process in the first place. In the context of zones, this tends to result in broad liberalisation: attempts to reduce permit triggers and widen discretion. While easy to do, this reduces the effectiveness of the zones as tools.

I believe that the zone review provides two very clear examples of this problem. The first relates to the rural zones. The current Farming Zone exists because there was concern that the old Rural Zones provided excessive discretion for non-agricultural uses. Yet they were rolled out extremely widely and with insufficient resources put to determining where agriculture should be protected and where other rural uses such as tourism should be focussed. Frustration has mounted because that “What Goes Where?” work – in this case, involving deciding where to apply the Rural Activity Zone instead of the Farming Zone – was not done. Now, in reaction, we see the pendulum swinging the other way, with calls for increased discretion in rural areas.

Similarly, we see in the calls for a liberalisation of both the industrial and commercial zones a general sense that the system is not accommodating modern forms of retail. Again, there are other responses available rather than simply widening discretion in the zones. (This is discussed further in the consideration of activity centres below.)

Opposing such liberalisation should not be mistaken for a failure to appreciate the regulatory burden of the system. On the contrary, as a planner working in local government I am keenly aware of those impacts. However, the burden of regulation is especially egregious if the regulation is having no benefit, and the increasing liberalisation of the zones risks creating such a system. The only reason to have a planning system is to achieve outcomes that the unhindered market would not deliver. The current reforms risk smoothing out impediments to business to the point that other social outcomes – and activity centres are taken as a case in point in the next section – fall by the wayside.

The key to retaining the integrity of the zoning system is not, generally, to increasingly liberalise it. The key is to return to serious strategic planning of the “What Goes Where?” variety. Rather than diluting zones so that they provide little hindrance to business but also little policy outcome, we need to have strong and purposeful zones and then get better at using them to direct outcomes.

In the example of the rural zones, for example, that means doing work to identify agricultural land that should have strong protection, and sites for tourism, and then zoning accordingly. In the context of activity centres, it means properly monitoring land supply and using the zones to ensure that the needs of business are met while preventing a stampede of business to cheap industrial land.

This does not mean that I believe planners should constantly intervene or micromanage. There will be situations where the market should be allowed to run unfettered: this should in fact be the default position where clear planning objectives are not identified that justify intervention. However protecting agricultural land, and reinforcing activity centres, are in my view worthwhile policy objectives that should not be abandoned.

It is my view that the current review has simply liberalised zones without grappling at all with the options surrounding how to better apply zones.

Recommendations:

• Re-examine instances of zone liberalisation in the reforms to ensure that the zone’s ability to codify spatial outcomes is not being weakened
• Once the purpose of the changes is clarified, consider alternate approaches to achieve the objectives that use the zones to direct spatial outcomes.

Activity Centre Policy and the New Zones

Across this review and the changes made by Amendment VC88, there seems a general hostility to activity centre planning, found in particular in the increasing permission of commercial use of industrial land, which is generally out-of-centre.

The Planning Minister reinforced this impression when he made the following comments to a regional newspaper (the Warragul Citizen, August 17):

The planning fraternity [has] very rigid and out-dated views about what forms a town and about what forms an activities area, that are really linked to the 1970s and 1980s… This romantic notion that the only area where a place of employment should be able to open is in a defined area or part of a town [is] just an out-dated point of view.

That quote suggests that there is a belief that traditional activity centre planning is outdated and unrealistic. This would explain the trend across these changes and the previous amendment VC88, which removed floor space restrictions for restricted retail.

Between them, those two changes would see the following uses able to establish in one or more of the industrial zones:

• Offices
• Supermarkets under 2000m²
• Any shop adjoining a supermarket
• Shops of any size that sell goods categorised as restricted retail, including office supplies, pet goods, party supplies, home entertainment, baby and children’s goods, and a range of other goods.

This is supportive of the impression gained from the Minister’s quote: there appears to be a deliberate shift away from older policies that were aimed at protecting industrial land from encroachment and encouraging uses that did not have a very clear need for fringe industrial locations to locate in centres. The industrial zones now appear to be very much open for business.

Such changes seem to assume that there is a lack of adequate commercial land, but an ample supply of industrial land, justifying some sacrifice of the latter for the former. This proposition requires further justification. Even if true, however, it may only be a transient situation, or applicable to certain regions. I would suggest caution is warranted before opening up industrial land and continuing to distort the retail sector by allowing some uses to establish in industrial areas but forcing others to stick it out in centres.

However even if the Minister were right, and traditional direction of uses towards centres is “outdated,” that kind of policy shift should emerge from the Metropolitan Strategy process. Not only is that work not complete, but the material released thus far offers no hint that this is policy shift is on the table. For example, the Strategy’s “Strategic Principles” talk of “reinforcing the role of employment in selected activity clusters in suburban Melbourne,” which if anything seems like affirmation of existing activity centre policy.

The zones have been justified with reference to the Productivity Commission’s November 2011 report Economic Structure and Performance of the Australian Retail Industry in press releases. This at least has the virtue of being a substantial study. However its narrow focus purely on economic competition and efficiency suggests planners should pause before using it as the sole basis of land use policy. Issues such as the social or transport planning impacts of a dispersed, centre-less form are not clearly on the Commission’s radar.

And, again, it needs to be noted that the Commission’s position with regards to activity centres is a long way from currently declared policy. If the zones are to be based upon the Commission’s recommendations then that conflict needs to be confronted and explained in clear policy documents. Simply following the Commission’s recommendations, while leaving current policy in place, creates a policy conflict.

Even the Productivity Commission, however, acknowledges the need to balance freeing up business with the competing imperative of protecting industrial areas from encroachment. In another publication, Performance Benchmarking of Australian Business Regulation: Planning, Zoning and Development Assessments (April 2011), it noted:

Land use zones… in activity centres which are less prescriptive and exclusionary to businesses and industrial zones which are available only to industry would enable planning and zoning systems to facilitate improvements in the competitiveness of city land use.¹

The Productivity Commission’s approach therefore requires an appropriate allocation of land between commercial and industrial zones, and then a loosening of controls within each category. While I still have reservations about the Commission’s work, this is a much more nuanced approach than simply loosening controls across both sets of zones and allowing commercial uses to encroach into the industrial zones.

Such an approach is consistent with my comments earlier in this submission about the need to revive the Retail Policy Review, and to look at solutions that consider the application of zones as preferable to ad-hoc liberalisation.

Detail Concerns

I have not concentrated upon issues of detail in this submission. This is partly due to limitations of time, and partly because I have seen other submissions that have covered many detail issues and feel the points I would make have been adequately covered. For example, I contributed to the PIA Victoria submission and generally agree with its comments regarding detail. I also read the Moreland City Council’s submission and generally support its comments on detail.

In particular, the proposed new Section 1 uses in residential zones appear to have been poorly thought through. There is no adequate means of controlling the amenity impacts of buildings associated with such uses, and no means to control aspects such as operating hours. The conditions surrounding where these uses could locate seem arbitrary and not to serve any obvious purpose. These changes seem likely to further undermine struggling neighbourhood centres, and lead to a ragged, dispersed form at the edge of larger centres. Again, I refer to the PIA submission on this point.

I also query the move to 200m² and 80m² thresholds for the need for a planning permit in the new residential zones. While it is certainly true that good design outcomes can be achieved on small lots with the right tools, simply lowering the threshold without releasing (let alone testing) new design codes to accompany the revised thresholds is inappropriate. Our current ResCode tools are based on twenty years of refinement, across several generations of codes (VicCode 1 and 2, The Good Design Guide, and ResCode) that were based upon a 300m² threshold. Using them to design for smaller lots will lead to poor outcomes and conflict at the application stage.

Conclusion

I said at the outset of this submission that I have prided myself on making constructive comments with regards to planning reform. However, there should be no avoiding the hard truth about the current zone reforms.

These changes appear to be rushed and ill-considered. The supporting material is of a deplorable standard and provides no strategic justification whatsoever. Reviews that could have informed the zones have been variously pre-empted, disbanded or buried. The process – prior to the appointment of the Advisory Committee – has lacked transparency and fuelled speculation in the industry that vested interests might have driven the changes. Submitters have been left to effectively undertake the strategic analysis for this amendment themselves.

This is an extremely poor review, and the process sets a new low bar for consultation and strategic justification. Yet the ramifications of approval of these new zones would be far-reaching, with the potential to seriously undermine activity centre policy that has had longstanding bipartisan support.

I urge the Advisory Committee to do what it can to hold the government to a higher standard.

1. Productivity Commission, ‘Performance Benchmarking of Australian Business Regulation: Planning, Zoning and Development Assessments’ (Australian Government, April 2011), 354.

I just discovered that my great uncle, Fred Mitchell, is selling his photos as prints on RedBubble. Fred’s photos have been a source of admiration in my family for years, but it’s nice to see them readily available somewhere that a wider audience can view and order them.

While his collection is very wide and full of good stuff, it’s his photos of mid-twentieth century Melbourne that I keep going back to: in addition to their intrinsic attractiveness, they are fascinating for their portrait of daily life in 1950s Melbourne. (One of his products is a calendar collecting together many of the best).

The images on this page are all reduced size: you can see them a bit larger on his site, where you can order prints and other products. Clicking any image on this page will take you to that image on RedBubble, since not all of these are readily accessed off his front page. You can’t right click and save these images: if you want copies please do the right thing and buy them off Fred.

Looking through the DPCD’s proposed new zones you can draw a number of conclusions about what the strategic beliefs underpinning them are, even where those beliefs aren’t really spelt out in the material released by DPCD (as I noted the other day, the material accompanying the review is a little thin, to put it mildly).

One of the underlying assumptions seems to be that we don’t need to worry about activity centres so much. The Minister has already moved to allow more kinds of big-box retail to move to industrial land outside of centres (which I talked about here and here); these new changes would allow small supermarkets and offices to join that exodus.

There isn’t a very clear statement in the material about where this leaves traditional activity centre policy. However, speaking to a regional paper, the Minister has given more idea of what his thinking on the issue is.

The Warragul Citizen‘s reporter William Kulich was considering what the impacts would be for Baw Baw Shire, and got comments from Matthew Guy that were far more frank about his view on activity centres, and planners, than I’ve seen in the Melbourne press:

The planning fraternity [has] very rigid and out-dated views about what forms a town and about what forms an activities area, that are really linked to the 1970s and 1980s… This romantic notion that the only area where a place of employment should be able to open is in a defined area or part of a town [is] just an out-dated point of view…. No Coles or Woolies is going to… make a million-dollar or multimillion-dollar investment where there are no people, but that’s what’s kind of being put forward.

Now, it’s not that I think the concept of activity centres should be sacred. But if it’s the Minister’s view that traditional activity centre planning is out-dated, and this is one rationale behind the zones, then that should be more clearly declared so that the Minister can tell us what he sees as the alternative. Is it his view that we should just embrace out-of-centre retailing, give up on concentrating activity near transport, and let the market operate unfettered? That’s a valid point of view – though not one I share – but he should at least say that more clearly.

It’s not a worldview, for example, that clearly emerges from the “strategic principles” released for the Metropolitan Strategy. I would have thought that a fundamental re-shaping of activity centre policy might be better off following from the Metropolitan Strategy process, rather than being rolled out beforehand without clear explanation.

Note: PIA are doing a survey on the new zones: you can complete it here.

Image by “BMcIvr,” used under Creative Commons Licence. Click it for details.

Though there are all sorts of causes for the differences in these cities, we should still keep in mind what sort of urban form we want when framing our planning controls, and think about how high up our list of priorities “adequate parking” should be.

The consultation for the review of the new residential zones, announced back in July, is about half over. A great deal of mockery has been directed at the supporting information provided for us to consider: a ten page discussion paper and four double-sided fact sheets, available on the DPCD webpage. But what kind of strategic work underpinned previous reviews? Well, there are a few obvious comparisons.

The previous government started a review of just the residential zones, releasing a twenty page discussion paper in February 2008. You can read that at this link. The consultation draft of that review is here.

An Advisory Committee considered those changes and its very detailed report is here. That report has only recently been released, after my FOI request. That review was never completed and has essentially been rolled (with changes) into the current round of reforms.

Another review that isn’t quite a zone review, but which is of some interest, is the Retail Policy Review. This didn’t get past a discussion paper (here), and the material was all recently taken down off the DPCD website. It’s of interest because its conclusions about industrial and commercial zones are somewhat different to those of the current review.

Other earlier reviews that are of interest in finding out how we got to where we are include the 2004 review of rural zones. The explanatory brochure for that review is here.

The original panel reports about the VPPs include a lot of information about the thinking behind the current zones. There’s the Advisory Committee into the VPPs, from 1997, and the Final Report into New Format Planning Schemes, from 1999.

If you really want to go back, you can go back even further. Here’s the mid 1990s, pre-VPP guide to the new residential zones, and here’s the guide to the new business and industrial zones.

All of these documents are in my collection of Victorian planning history documents, which I have now given its own landing page: www.sterow.com/vicplanninghistory.

The image above isn’t an aerial photograph. It’s a screenshot of the new 3D view rolled out recently in the latest version of Google Earth for the newer iPads and iPhones. I gather it is available for their Android app too, although it is not yet available on the PC version. This is downtown Boston, one of the first few cities for which this imagery has been released; you can click to enlarge it to have a look at just how realistic the imagery is. If you have access to a device that supports these 3D maps, I suggest you give them a try. They’re amazing.

Google Earth has had 3D buildings for some time now, but previously they were constructed from individually built computer models sourced from various contributors, including an army of amateur hobbyists. As I write, that is still what you’ll see on Google Earth for PC. The buildings seen above, however,  are built using “stereophotogrammetry:” essentially, Google use photographic data to not only capture the faces of the buildings, but also to create a 3D model of the cities’ geometry. The photographs are then mapped onto the model, allowing a near-photorealistic 3D virtual city to be manipulated in real time.

This is a considerable advance on the old approach, as shown in the comparison below. The top is Google Earth for PC, which is still using the old 3D views, and the bottom is the new mapping on the Google Earth mobile app. Apple are apparently to use the same effect on their new native maps application, expected to replace Google Maps on the iPhone and iPad in coming months. The approach should also allow for far wider application of the 3D mapping, since it can be more fully automated than the old approach. (Currently on Google Earth it is just select cities: notably Boston, San Diego, Portland, San Francisco, and Rome). With Google and Apple competing for bragging rights, you can expect that within twelve months such mapping will be rolled out for many areas and across multiple platforms.

This is one of those occasions where incremental technology improvements have led to something that feels decisively new. Google Earth has been around since 2005, and it has had 3D buildings in it since 2006. But the level of realism provided here, combined with the more tactile manipulation possible on touch devices, makes these models a far more compelling way of exploring cities than the older Google Earth.

Is it actually useful though? I have mixed feelings. There’s probably a reasonable case to be made that Google’s Street View has more application to the day-to-day work of planners (and of course that, too, seemed pretty amazing when it was first released). But I can also see it would be a helpful tool for strategic planners and urban designers in visualising and communicating the impact of height controls, and better understanding where new buildings fit in to the existing form of a city.

In response to that, it might be argued that visualising the height and relationship of buildings from this kind of “Superman” perspective isn’t of much assistance. After all, it is the ground level experience that matters. Yet I think these kind of virtual cities have real value in helping us better understand the way the different bits of the city knit together by allowing us to visualise the larger structures underpinning places we know.

I say this because the places I found myself most interested in “flying over” were places that I knew. I have been fortunate enough to have visited Boston several times, and it was this city that I kept returning to in Google Earth. Doing so, I found myself better understanding the way the pieces of the city slot together. So, for example, I’d been through Beacon Hill and admired its very pleasant medium scale form, but you’re better able to appreciate how that form works as part of the city’s bigger system when you see how it slots in between downtown’s higher towers and the green space of Boston Common. Similarly, you get a whole different appreciation of the scar tissue left by the old I-93 around the city’s downtown (the interstate has been placed underground and replaced with the Rose Kennedy Greenway, which is visible in the foreground of the images above).

This increased ability to simultaneously visualise the larger structures of a city, while also zooming down almost to street level, may help mend long-standing shortcomings for planners. One of the weaknesses of planning as a discipline is that since about the 1960s it has become timid about large-scale planning. As Thomas J. Campanella points out, planning after Jane Jacobs switched to a very “bottoms-up” approach, afraid to work at larger scales after the debacles of 1950s and 1960s urban renewal. And while in doing so we have gotten better at the basics of urban design, the ability to match that local-scale planning with wider plans that shape the city as a whole has fallen away.

The updated Google Earth I think gives a hint of the kinds of city-visualisation tools that improved GIS technology will give the next generation of planners. It will be interesting to see if planners’ efforts at bridging the gap between small-scale place-making and the city-wide plan improve alongside such technology.