Stephen Rowley

377 posts

Trial by Water

Urban Planning

Back when I was writing for Planning News, I wrote an editorial about Justin Madden’s handling of the Windsor Hotel debacle. My point then was that politicians are not well served by the over-manipulation of their communication, which ends up alienating the public and cutting politicians off from legitimate sources of feedback. It has therefore been great to see that the new Victorian Planning Minister Matthew Guy has kept up with his twitter account and is obviously writing the posts himself rather than letting a media person do it. So rather than the usual drip feed of press releases, Guy’s account is full of obviously self-generated content that a media adviser would have probably tried to talk him out of, such as salutes to Joh Bjelke-Petersen and amusingly childish baiting of Labor politicians. To his credit, too, he has been responding directly to various tweets sent to or about him. (Update – 19/1/2011: He has now protected his tweets. I can’t see them now so I have no idea whether he’s deleted them or not).

All this is good, and an advance on Labor’s media management, which makes me somewhat reluctant to pick on things he has said. But this morning he re-tweeted this comment from the 3AW feed:

Neil Mitchell: I would take Bob Brown and put him in cage with the looters and scam artists and put him in a river .. he’s a dill

While a re-tweet isn’t necessarily an endorsement, there is no suggestion by Guy that he is posting it as, for example, an example of an unhelpful contribution to the debate. Where do we start with this?

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Walt Disney, Urban Designer

Film Urban Planning Urban Planning and Film

I wrote the other day about Courthouse Square, the ubiquitous town centre used in countless films and TV shows. For someone like me, interested in both films and cities, a place like this is fascinating as a built embodiment of the kind of community that films and television shows hold up as an ideal. In reality, most of us live in far more mundane suburban environments that suffer various shortcomings: they are too dispersed, with residential, retail, and employment activities frequently located far apart; they have too little public transport, making us too dependent on cars; they are short of true public space, substituting instead private spaces such as shopping malls; and so on. Yet in films and television shows places like Courthouse Square are held forth as an alluring image of the town that has a discernible centre, public space, civic facilities, and an old-fashioned charm. These sets are interesting to an urban planner such as myself because they represent the best efforts of highly experienced dream manufacturers to build the ideal community.

What’s even more interesting, though, is the example of Disneyland. Essentially, what we have here is a filmmaker, Walt Disney, who after World War II became increasingly disinterested in making films and turned instead to place making. He purchased land on the fringe of the city that epitomises the post-war urban fabric, built an environment strikingly similar to one of these movie towns, and then charged admission to it. The front section of Disneyland, and the one section that every visitor must pass through, is Main Street USA, a tangible realisation of the Hollywood movie town (my essay here gives extensive detail on the traits of the classic Hollywood town). Disney, renowned for his escapist film fantasies, was here selling people an escape to the fantasy of a pleasant, pedestrian-friendly urban environment with a civic square and public transport. In postwar L.A. this was a commodity in such short supply that Disney was able to turn around the fortunes of his struggling business driven almost solely by his Disneyland profits.

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Deserted Disneyland

Film Photography Urban Planning Urban Planning and Film

A look at the architecture of Disneyland, uncluttered by visitors. Who says you can’t get away from the crowds?

If you’re perplexed as to why this would be of interest to anybody, I talk more about Disneyland at this post. You can see a similar set of shots for the Magic Kingdom at Disney World here, allowing you to compare the architecture of the two parks.

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Transforming VCAT: Was I the Only One Who Missed This?

Urban Planning
Transforming VCAT (click to view the document)

At some point, quietly, VCAT have slipped out their “three year strategic plan,” which appears to be the final output of the review started by former President Justice Kevin Bell. It’s not immediately clear when they did so: it’s not dated, and has simply been posted as a news update on the VCAT website. If there was wider coverage of this release, I missed it. As I write, the page for the review itself (www.transformingvcat.com.au) still hasn’t been updated with the final report; there’s also an older, lonelier page for the review as it was started by Justice Bell at www.vcatreview.com.au that also currently fails to reflect any of the final outcomes. The latter page doesn’t even refer to the re-branded discussion paper released by Justice Iain Ross.

(For those having trouble keeping up, Justice Bell released a “consultation paper” called The Role of VCAT in a Changing World in March 2009, followed by a “President’s review” called One VCAT in February 2010; and then Justice Ross released a “discussion paper” called Transforming VCAT in May 2010, followed by this undated three year strategic plan with the same name).

It’s a shame the release of the document has been so lackadaisical, because it is generally a positive document that I think Victorian planners, as regular users of the system, should welcome. I wrote two editorials for Planning News covering the review process (here and here) and it should be obvious from those that I have some issues with the way VCAT currently operate. This review won’t magically resolve those issues, and one of the biggest issues facing currently facing the Tribunal and its users – the long wait times for hearings – is a resourcing issue that can only be resolved by the new government allocating funding appropriately. Yet there are some really good things in here that if followed through should definitely improve the operation of the Tribunal.

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“Stephen Rowley is Quite Obviously a Drooling, Mouth-breathing Moron”

Miscellany Urban Planning

I was googling myself the other day – I know, I know – and stumbled across this page squirreled away on the Age website, where Jason Hill had blogged about my Planning News article on SimCity (which is reproduced in full here).

What made my day was this comment underneath by “RealityCheck:”

Stephen Rowley is quite obviously a drooling, mouth-breathing moron.

“OMGZ, no MS Flight Simulatorz, who willz flies all de planes!?” … retard.

On a sidenote, this article does explain the absolutely horrendous state of australia’s capital cities.

Love ya work Rowley.

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Our Last Planning News

Miscellany Urban Planning

Planning News December 2010Today saw the delivery of the last issue of Planning News for which I was co-editor, and my last post to the magazine’s facebook page. So I guess we really are done. I hope you can excuse a few self-indulgent thoughts.

It has been a privilege to work on the magazine. No other Australian state has a monthly planning magazine; Victoria is very lucky to have one, particularly since it also sustains the three-times a year VPELA newsletter as well. It is a tribute to the establishing editors of the magazine that they had not only the vision to see how important monthly publication was, but also the persistence to ensure that it happened. All the subsequent editors owe them a lot, as they proved the monthly turnaround could be done and established Planning News as the key channel for debate in the Victorian planning industry.

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A Photographic History of Hill Valley

Film Television Urban Planning and Film

As an urban planner and a filmy watchy guy, I’m particularly fascinated by the way our ideas about cities and towns are shaped by the environments we see in film and television. You can get a giant size chunk of my research on this by reading the essay here, but as another little snippet, consider Hill Valley in Back to the Future.

Click to view

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Revenge of the Nerd

Film Film Reviews

The Social Network (David Fincher, 2010)

Early in David Fincher’s Facebook origin story The Social Network, nerdy and socially inept Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) is chatting to the Winklevoss twins (both played by Armie Hammer). Zuckerberg has proven himself a programming whiz with a campus-blitzing piece of computer hacking; they’re a pair of old-money golden boys looking to recruit him to work on their start-up web business. Despite the modern trappings, the exchange is filtered through more traditional power dynamics, with the tall, good-looking, WASP Winklevosses deigning to let the thin, geeky, Jewish Zuckerberg into the entry hall of their exclusive campus fraternity. It’s at that moment that the analogy between David Fincher’s prestigious Oscar-favourite drama and a campus fraternity comedy such as Animal House snaps into focus.

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Exhibition Review: Dreams Come True

Film

Dreams Come True (ACMI, 18 November 2010 – Tuesday 26 April 2011)

When putting together a museum exhibition I guess one of the key questions is: “who is the audience here?” When reviewing an exhibition, that question might even be more critical.

I have written a previous grumpy review of an exhibition at ACMI (about their Setting the Scene exhibition) and at the time raised the issue that maybe part of the problem was that I wasn’t the intended audience. In that case, I was actually too interested in the subject matter: if an exhibition is pitched at a general audience, someone very caught up in the subject is perhaps inevitably going to judge the material harshly. ACMI’s latest, the Dreams Come True exhibition of fairy-tale themed Disney material, also covers material I’m particularly interested in. So, once again, I have to flag that perhaps I’m a little too close to this to give the exhibition a completely fair go.

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