2014 – sterow

Planning Nerd Christmas Gift Guide: 2014 Edition

Urban Planning

Back in 2008, when we were working on Planning News, Tim Westcott Gilda Di Vincenzo and I put together a “Planning Nerd Christmas Gift Guide.” It proved unexpectedly popular – which in Planning News terms roughly means somebody once mentioned to us that they had read it – so we repeated the exercise in 2009. It seemed like a good concept to dust off, so I have updated those old entries and added new gifts to create a new 2014 version. Thanks to Gilda and Tim for their contribution to the original.

This Christmas season, planners and their kin everywhere will face the eternal question: what to buy for the planning nerd who has everything? Once that special planner in your life has all the PIA merchandise, their own copy of ShadowDraw, and a scale ruler, what else is there? Well, we’re here to help.

The Planner by Tom Campbell

Planners have it rough in popular culture. There’s the planner from the first couple of seasons of Parks and Recreation, Chris Haywood’s dodgy builder / planner in Grass Roots, and then… well, aspiring planner Steven Coren from Seinfeld. However that may be about about to change with the recent publication of Tom Campbell’s The Planner, which may yet do for planners what Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead did for architects and right-wing nutcases.

It follows the life of a young planner in London who is having something of an existential crisis, told in a style that is part Nick Hornby, part Sir Peter Hall. It’s a very entertaining read, full of good one-liners about the life of a planner and a range of unflattering portraits of London.

Availability: You can support local retailing by getting it from Readings or alternately go through Amazon (who do have it for Kindle).

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The Original Draft Plan Melbourne

Urban Planning

acdraft I am quoted in this Age story on the original Advisory Committee draft of Plan Melbourne, which has now been released under Freedom of Information laws after an application by former Labor staffer Andrew Herington. The full draft can be found here.

I didn’t have long to review the documents so my comments were quite high-level, but it doesn’t take long comparing the documents to get a sense of the kinds of changes made. The Departmental versions (the May 2014 final, and the October 2013 draft) are broadly similar but strip a lot of the detail out: there’s an all-pervasive softening of the language. The Advisory Committee draft is not perfect either – they were working within a highly problematic process that had, amongst other things, been largely pre-empted by other policy announcements – but it is certainly a more serious policy document.

Hopefully its release will allow more complete and detailed analysis of where the changes were made, and give some insight into the journey from strategy to coffee table book.

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“Facilitated Form Overlays:” A Better Way to Facilitate Development

Urban Planning

It’s an interesting moment for the planning reform agenda in Victoria, and not just because of a possible change of government.

This year we have seen two key planning reforms rolled out, with the new residential zones and VicSmart both reaching the climactic phase of extended gestations. I have previously argued – here and here – that both have been problematic, but those concerns are secondary to my purpose here. What’s more important is that the ideas of code assessment and “three-speed” zones have dominated discussion about planning reform in Victoria for most of the last decade. Across multiple reviews variations on these ideas have bobbed up repeatedly as the solution to our problems.

Now both are done (even if code assessment morphed into something different in VicSmart.) And whatever you think of these reforms, either as conceived or as in fact implemented, we now have an opportunity to outline some new directions.

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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.

The Residential Zones: The Non-Hysterical Case for Concern

Urban Planning

This article was written for (and as far as I know will be appearing in) the May 2014 Planning News. As it says, it is a response Liz Johnstone’s article “Stop Panning Planning” in the April 2014 issue.

Readers of Planning News will have read Liz Johnstone’s Executive Officer Report in last month’s magazine, endorsed by Brett Davis’ President’s column, which suggested that scaremongering was occurring by opponents of the new residential zones, and that the potential negative impacts of the rollout were greatly exaggerated.

There is no doubt that there is inaccurate reporting going on: the complexity of planning challenges the media’s ability to carry a coherent debate. I also agree with Liz that many of those who are suddenly vocal are, as she put it, the “beneficiaries of ambiguity.” (My own personal version of this frustration is that many of those most agitated about the new zones were silent throughout the assault on activity centre policy though amendment VC88 and the new commercial and industrial zones – I wish they would find a voice on that even more egregious example of #badplanning). It is also true that the areas in which problems occur may be outweighed, in sheer numbers, by areas in which we see a largely neutral rollover to the General Residential Zone.

Nevertheless, I am troubled on a number of fronts with the process surrounding the implementation of the new zones. I believe that there are many planners expressing legitimate concerns, and that these don’t amount to hysterical “Henny Penny” style alarmism. I am concerned that Liz and Brett’s pieces may have created the impression that PIA does not hear or speak for these views.

Certainly there are a range of views on the committee, of which my own is just one. However I think it is important that the industry understand that this perspective is represented on the PIA committee, and that in fact PIA’s submissions to various reviews (such as our comments on Plan Melbourne) have already outlined much of this perspective.

I therefore thought it was important to outline the contrary case for why, scaremongering aside, I believe a reasonable planner should in fact be concerned about the residential zones rollout.

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