November 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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