Miscellany

23 posts

Coming Soon…

The new edition of The Victorian Planning System: Practice, Problems and Prospects is now available for pre-order from the publisher’s page, with an expected publication date of ~~April~~ June.

I’m really pleased with this new edition, which is very thoroughly rewritten, including a thorough review of the concepts about system design and decision-making. My aim has been to write a book every Victorian planner feels they should own.

More will follow soon, but for now, here’s the blurb:

The Victorian Planning System: Practice, Problems and Prospects is an accessible introduction for all those who use the Victorian planning system, including planners, lawyers, councillors, developers, design professionals and community advocates. It explains key terminology and processes in simple terms and explores how the planning system is used to pursue policy goals. This discussion is contextualised through examination of a variety of planning policy challenges, including housing affordability, activity centre planning, and climate change.
This second edition has been comprehensively revised and updated to address changes since 2017. These include the finalised Plan Melbourne 2017-2050, the “Smart Planning” program, integrated Planning Policy Framework, revisions to residential development provisions (including the Better Apartments Design Standards), and the new Environment Protection Act, among others. Other new or heavily revised content includes discussion of planning in growth areas, biodiversity offsetting for native vegetation removal, and Aboriginal heritage.
This edition also includes reconceived discussion of decision-making and regulatory design. It reviews the history of planning system reform in Victoria and explores why the system is still not as effective, efficient or transparent as it should be. In response, the book outlines a vision of a new planning paradigm that is more capable of achieving bold policy goals. It is essential reading for all Victorian planning professionals.

The publisher’s page is here.

I’m Back, Baby, I’m Back!

Miscellany

Crazy-looking person from the show Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia

This website has sat largely unattended for a few years now – partly because I was focusing on other things (like my business), but also because every time I considered posting to it I was overwhelmed with exhaustion at the thought of trying to bring it up to date. The page was based on a WordPress theme from before the widespread use of tablets and mobiles, and my occasional half-hearted attempts to migrate it to a more modern theme had always left me defeated.

However, in a sudden bout of not-completely-explicable enthusiasm over the last week or so I have managed, I think, to get it working mostly as I’d like to, with a refreshed design and updated, mobile friendly functionality. A few things are still broken in the bowels of the page (especially on older posts) but it seems to be about 90% there and that’s a huge step up from where it was.

I have no idea if this will lead to more frequent posting here, but I at least feel a major disincentive to posting has been removed. I have celebrated by digging out one piece of ready-made content I’d had sitting ready for two years, but had been put off posting by the state of the page: Victorian Planning: Rethinking the Model. This is, I hope, a timely piece given the process of planning reform that the Victorian government has recently announced. (At time of posting it should, hopefully, be sitting just above this post on the main page.)

(Yes, I realise the George Constanza-ish title of this post doesn’t really match the Always Sunny image I’ve headed the post with. I choose to consider that as a meta-commentary on my state of mind having finished the website refresh).

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My Next Book is Out Soon

Miscellany Urban Planning

It’s been a long time between posts, I know, but in my defense that’s been largely because I ended up writing two books, one on the heels of another.

My second book is both an introduction to, and a detailed study and critique of, the Victorian planning system. I have put a page up at www.sterow.com/vicplanningbook that gives much more of a detailed breakdown of what it covers. In short, though, I hope it is both a good introduction for those new to the system. and a thought provoking discussion for those familiar with it.

It is already available for pre-order at 12% off from Booktopia, here. It should be available by the end of the month or the first week of February at the latest.

While I’m posting, I will just brag that back in November my first book, Movie Towns and Sitcom Suburbs, was awarded the Cutting Edge Research Award at the Victorian Planning Awards. The following are extracts form the citation:

This work is an outstanding feat of scholarship… Movie Towns and Sitcom Suburbs offers a new perspective based on thorough research. It is a formidable academic work that is highly readable… The work is thought provoking about how community views are shaped, how planning seeks to influence day to day life, and how public opinion can be harnessed to guide and implement change.

You can see more detail about that book, including ordering links, at www.sterow.com/movietowns.

Two Bits of News

Miscellany

As you might have noticed things have been quiet around here, with this site serving mainly as a repository for the occasional things I’ve written for Planning News. However, I do have a couple of biggish bits of news to update with.

The first is that I am officially now at work on a book. This has been coming for a while now, but I actually have contracts and so on all lined up now. The exact title and production schedule are still TBA, but it will be with Palgrave Macmillan and I assume is likely to appear sometime late next year. It will be based on my PhD research, which blends film and urban planning topics together to look at the interactions that have occurred between how we picture cities and towns culturally, and how we build cities in real life. Obviously I’m super excited about this, if only because it gives me a decisive answer to those who complain I never write about film any more.

The other news relates to the life changes I am making to get this done. For the last year I have been working part time in local government and part time at RMIT. While I have enjoyed this dual balance, it hasn’t been terribly well suited to doing the writing I wanted to (whether on my book or other projects likes this site). So with considerable regret I have now left my old local government job, after fifteen years in state and local government planning.

I’ll be filling the gap with some consulting work under the banner of RCI Planning. In the initial phase at least (while I write my book) my main target will be local government VCAT advocacy though the website lays out some of the other intended areas of practice.

We’ll see how this goes, but the hope is it will give me a bit more flexibility to do the writing and other projects I want to pursue. Who knows, maybe I’ll even start writing on film here regularly again.

Call Upon Your Travel Hostess: 1939 Melbourne Travel Map

Miscellany Urban Planning

Map of Melbourne and Suburbs - 1939 Victorian Railways Map: Front Cover

This vintage Melbourne travel map was passed on to me from the collection of a relative, and I thought Melbourne map buffs might find it interesting. Produced by the Victorian Railways in November 1939, it’s a small booklet that folds out into a double-sided map. This is the front cover when folded, showing the central city from the banks of the Yarra.

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Fred Mitchell’s Shots of 1950s and 1960s Melbourne

Miscellany Photography Urban Planning

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).

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The Visual Aesthetic We Deserve?

Miscellany Photography Urban Planning

The purchase of Instagram by Facebook the other week interested me, if only because I have been noodling around with the service myself in recent weeks. This fits my long-standing pattern of being just enough of an early adopter to leap on board something at the exact moment it becomes passé. At one level I can understand the incredulity about the price (a billion dollars is a lot to pay for a service thats only revenue plan seems to be “get purchased by facebook”) and about the merits of Instagram itself (Jon Stewart epitomised a widespread perspective when he described it as a “thing that kind of ruins your picture.”)

While its value to Facebook may seem dubious, I can see the merit of Instagram itself from a user’s perspective. It is true that at one level those filters are, at worst, ruining your picture as Jon Stewart says and, at best, just adding a cheap veneer of artiness. No doubt people will sneer at the Instagram aesthetic, driven as it is by gimmicks like the graininess, ersatz tilt shift, and old-timey colour filters in the image at the head of this article. Yet while the Instagram effects are in a sense cheap tricks, they are also doing something real, which is stripping the naturalism from the photo and making us see it with fresh eyes. I like that something so popular is making people look differently at their images, and stirring the realisation that even that naturalistic look from a good camera is not a neutral aesthetic choice.

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Subscription Options: How to Follow Me, and How to Selectively Ignore Me

Film Miscellany Urban Planning Urban Planning and Film

Just a quick heads-up that I’ve added the option to subscribe to the site via email. You can find the link in the right-hand column (or just click here). This will send you new posts to the page via email (maximum once per day).

In my continuing attempts to help my film readers who aren’t interested in my urban planning stuff, and vice-versa, I’ve also created separate mailing lists that cover just my film content and just my urban planning content. These are also in the right hand column, or alternatively here:

Film Mailing List

Urban Planning Mailing List

Hopefully these will be attractive options for those who have no interest in one or other of the major “streams” of my content. (You can also view the site at category specific URLs: www.sterow.com/film and www.sterow.com/urbanplanning).

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Merry Christmas, from YouTube

Film Miscellany Television

Tim Minchin’s Christmas song White Wine in the Sun is now pretty well known in Australia I think – or at least no longer obscure enough to seem novel when posted on a website like this. But I want to post it anyway, and I figure it will be new at least to any overseas readers who haven’t been chased away by my articles about Victorian urban planning. What I like so much about it is that it so completely and comprehensively rejects two of the cores of traditional Christmas iconography – the religious underpinnings and the northern hemisphere winter imagery – but gets instead to the core of what Christmas is (or should be) all about.

While I’m posting Christmas clips from YouTube: another favourite of mine is this duet by David Bowie and Bing Crosby, recorded for television in 1977. It’s such a strange juxtaposition of talent, and very corny, and yet it works. There’s something about Bing Crosby’s voice, in particular, that evokes Christmas in a very profound Pavlovian way for me.

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How to Not Read Everything I Write

Film Miscellany Urban Planning

I occasionally feel self-conscious about the weird mix of content on this site, with film reviews sitting alongside detailed discussions of urban planning issues. While I think some of my planning stuff (like my essays about the town of Seaside, or the urban design and planning of Disneyland) might be of interest to a broader readership, some of my posts are pretty technical and I appreciate must be annoying to the readers that followed me over here from my old film-related site, Cinephobia.

For this reason, I’ve now made it slightly easier to skip to just the content you’re after by creating subdomains you can bookmark for each of the two main threads of content. The two new addresses, which should be self-explanatory, are:

www.sterow.com/film

www.sterow.com/urbanplanning

You can also get an RSS feed that just delivers the film or planning articles. Here’s the film feed, and here’s the planning feed.

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