Planning Research Centre
The Planning Research Centre's main purpose is to further fundamental research into physical planning and development. It also sponsors seminars in specialised fields, undertakes research and consultancy projects, runs professional development courses, and promotes the publication of research material. It has an active membership comprised of members of government and industry.
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Sydney Daily Telegraph, 23rd April 2004
$50,000 PENALTY ON NEW HOMES. By Mark Skelsey
Developers building new homes in western Sydney may be hit with a $50,000 surcharge to provide infrastructure.
That was just one of the announcements made yesterday when Premier Bob Carr and Planning Minister Craig Knowles launched a Sydney Metropolitan Strategy.
The Premier also announced Professor Ed Blakely, an American urban affairs academic who became a permanent resident of Australia only last week, will be one of the key figures in planning Sydney’s future.
Developers at yesterday’s announcement were angered about the possibility of a levy on land releases to fund infrastructure.
The levy could affect an estimated 150,000 homes to be built in northwest and southwestern Sydney over the next 25 years.
“Our estimate is that new land releases in the northwest and southwest will require infrastructure worth $7.7 billion over 25 years,” Mr Carr said.
“That’s something in the region of $40,000 to $50,000 per lot.
“We have to find ways to fund infrastructure – options such as developer contributions and user charges, public-private partnerships, budget funding and public borrowings.”
It seems certain developer levies – which are inevitably passed on to consumers – will be increased to cover not only local parks, libraries and drains, but also more expensive infrastructure such as new railways, busline and highways.
Mr Carr conceded that the cost of levies would be passed on developers to consumers when they sold the land.
Housing Industry Association planning and environment executive director Wayne Gersbach said a levy would be another NSW tax on property.
Mr Carr also announced other measures including a series of planning forums headed by Professor Blakely over the next nine months designed to help develop a new metropolitan plan.
Mr Knowles made it clear he wanted an end to vacant shops and cheap discount bargain basement shops in Sydney’s rundown shopping centres.
He nominated Parramatta Rd, which could have a 30 per cent reduction in traffic following the mooted construction of the M4 East motorway, for more apartment building.
Other shopping precincts subject to investigation will be Canterbury Rd, the Hume Highway and streets linking the Sydney CBD and Sydney airport.
The Planning Department will also put Penrith, Parramatta, Liverpool and Blacktown under scrutiny.
“Some parts of our city are in need of rejuvenation,” he said.
“The alternative – doing nothing – will see the replacement of once viable High Streets with $2 and bargain basement shops and the inevitable decay of these important precincts for the future of our city.”
Other measures include the city centre CBD light-rail extension being put on public exhibition and new house extensions having to meet new water and energy efficiency targets by October 1, 2005.
This could mean water-saving shower heads, energy-efficient hot water systems and better insulation and shading in new extensions.
Property Council of Australia NSW executive director Ken Morrison expressed concern that apartment building could crowd out employment-generating offices in key western Sydney centres.
Sydney Daily Telegraph, 23rd April 2004
MAN WITH A CITY STRATEGY.
Premier Bob Carr told a Powerhouse Museum audience of about 200 people yesterday that Sydney had to cope with an extra 100 people a week.
Professor Ed Blakely followed Mr Carr and proudly announced that he must have been number ‘995’ last week.
Professor Blakely, a former US planning academic who has been married to an Australian for 36 years, became a permanent resident last week.
He was appointed Sydney University’s urban and regional planning chair in January and now has an even bigger task – helping guide Sydney’s future.
Yesterday, in a tie fashioned from the street grid of Chicago and talking with an American twang, he looked and sounded anything but Australian.
However, he should know Sydney intimately after he finishes chairing its metropolitan strategy reference panel.
The Professor said he was confident this was a city where he could “make a difference”.
“If you think about the population pressures and where growth can be, it doesn’t all have to be here (in Sydney),” he said.
“Newcastle, Wollongong … there are other places where this growth can be directed.”
Sydney Daily Telegraph, 26th April 2004
IMPROVING ON PERFECT IN WORLD’S BEST CITY. By Stavro Sofios
The man who holds the future shape of Sydney in his hands has outlined his vision to The Daily Telegraph.
In a report card on the city, Premier Bob Carr’s new top urban planner Ed Blakely rated it “10 out of 10” as the best in the world, far ahead of such centres as London and New York.
But despite the high regard the American professor has for Sydney he still sees room for improvement.
Some of his plans are certain to create controversy – from trams running down the middle of Parramatta Rd to huge apartment developments to house a booming population.
The urban affairs academic, who became an Australian citizen just a week before Mr Carr gave him one of the city’s top planning jobs, said Sydney and San Francisco were the best cities in the world – while New York and London rated just a seven.
“Sydney is a very big city and San Francisco is a very big city but you feel like they’re family cities. The neighbourhoods are intact here, people feel that their neighbourhood is consequential,” Professor Blakely said.
Professor Blakely, who has lived in Sydney “on and off” for 36 years, will head a metropolitan planning taskforce which has until the end of the year to report back to the State Government on how to plan Sydney’s growth.
He has suggested the State Government subsidise rents for small businesses to bring them back to the CBD.
Planning Minister Craig Knowles said last week he wanted an end to vacant shops and discount bargain retailers in Sydney’s rundown shopping centres.
Professor Blakely wants more apartments in key areas like the inner city to draw people back.
“I think Sydney grew too fast in the 1970s to the 1990s, we grew faster than our infrastructure and we’ve been playing catch-up ever since,” he said.
The Sydney metropolitan planning strategy, announced last week, will target parts of Sydney struggling to cope with the urban sprawl, including congested Canterbury Rd and the Hume Highway strips.
Developers could also be hit with a $50,000 surcharge on each house they build in the booming western suburbs in a bid to pay for infrastructure.
Sydney Morning Herald, 19th May 2004
TRAM PLAN STALLED AS SOLUTION TO CONGESTION. By Alexandra Smith and Tim Dick.
The State Government has refused to commit to a proposal to return trams to Sydney’s CBD as it begins public consultation on a 30-year strategy for the city.
Opening the first day of the forum on Sydney’s future, the Minister for Planning, Craig Knowles, promised much more than a “developers’ digest”. The plan would also deal with strategies for the city’s social and economic future.
But nearly two years after a series of studies into a light rail extension were completed, the Government is still not committing to a proposal advanced by the current light rail operator, Metro Transport Sydney. It was submitted to Mr Knowles at the forum yesterday. He described it as “an option to be examined”.
The company wants to operate trams along George Street, from Central to Circular Quay.
Mr Knowles stressed he was not “rubber stamping” the proposal but placing it on the drawing board for further exploration. He said a traffic working group, made up of government departments, agencies and the City of Sydney Council, would investigate the light rail proposal.
Under the $180 million plan, about 13 new trams, each carrying 200 passengers, would leave an expanded bus, tram and rail interchange at Eddy Avenue, near Central, every 2 ½ minutes. Metro Transport had considered operating trams on Castlereagh Street but identified George Street, which is heavily congested with buses, as the preferred option.
Mr Knowles said several transport options for the inner city had been examined, including conventional bus, guided bus, monorail, light rail and heavy rail.
“It’s doubtful that there is a ‘magic bullet’ solution to the inner-city traffic congestion, but perhaps there is a place for the modern tram,” Mr Knowles said.
“We need to examine further how (it) might operate in this city including, in the long term, the potential for a Central Station to Circular Quay link to fit in with a broader tram network in inner urban areas.”
Metro transport – which also runs the monorail – hoped 40,000 people would use the trams each day. The company’s chief executive, Kevin Warrell, said the system would be jointly financed by private and public investors.
Ed Blakely, who chairs the Metropolitan Strategy Reference Panel, told the forum three themes needed to underpin any strategy for Sydney: ensuring competitiveness, liveability and protection of the environment.
He said Sydney was “a very important place, not just for us, but for people all over the world”.
“We have to make portions of our community so interesting, so vital, that many other people in the world want to come to live here,” he said.
Part of achieving that would be to provide “more and different” housing, and to look at affordability and “obtainability” and alternative ownership models, such as non-profit housing co-operatives.
To protect the environment, Professor Blakely said, “we have to grow jobs where the people are, so they don’t have so many trips across the region”.
The goal of the process, which aims to have a draft master plan for the region stretching from Kiama to Port Stephens and west to the Blue Mountains by December, was to “find new ways to make an old city a new city”, he said.
Australian, 19th May 2004
GURU’S RADICAL PLAN TO REMIX THE GLOBAL CITY. By Bernard Lane.
A radical plan to redistribute Sydney’s social mix and make the city fit for global competition has been outlined by the NSW Government’s new urban planning guru.
Ed Blakely, the chair of the expert panel working on Sydney’s 30-year metropolitan strategy, proposed more assertive use of planning rules to promote a better mix of housing and people, US-style non-profit housing corporations, and 20 to 30-year house leases as an alternative to freehold. At a metro-strategy forum in Sydney yesterday, US-born Professor Blakely said that Sydney had to negotiate the pressures of growth if it were to remain globally competitive.
“The first sign of failure to me (would be) when Shanghai starts pulling away some of this business in international trade, particularly in futures markets,” he told The Australian.
“Over 25 per cent of the GDP of this whole nation goes through Sydney – New York’s not even close. This is a national challenge.
“Our bus drivers have to be bused to their bus routes because they can’t live any place near them,” said Professor Blakely, chair of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Sydney.
“Our key personnel – police, fire personnel, nurses, etc – can’t live anywhere near the places where they work.”
He said it was “ironic” that in Australia the market had a much freer hand in setting property prices than in the US, where non-profit housing corporations were a moderating influence.
Kick-started by grants of government land, similar housing corporations here could buy and build housing with, say, a third of dwellings kept for those on lower incomes. When selling, owners would have to sell back to the corporation.
“We ought to have a third market, there ought to be corporations out there working day and night for an end user who is not the traditional home buyer,” he said.
Existing public housing could be given to these corporations for rebuilding, contributing to urban renewal. Superannuation funds and ethical investment funds could help finance the corporations.
Professor Blakely acknowledged that debt-laden home-owners would object to his proposals. “They don’t want any kind of affordability thing because it might lead to a lowering of the values of their property,” he said.
Asked what would happen if Sydney’s social divide grew deeper, Professor Blakely said: “You start getting the gated communities and other things which are a manifest of a really divided place.”
The Australian, 3rd June 2004
CITY LIMITS: HOW THE BEST-LAID PLANS GO AWRY.
The man charting Sydney’s growth has warned of significant economic challenges, reports Bernand Lane.
When Ed Blakely first saw Sydney almost 30 years ago, it was provincial – and pristine compared with the cities of his native US.
Now, as the leader of a panel of experts charting the future growth of Australia’s biggest city, Professor Blakely encounters a Sydney transformed: cosmopolitan, globally competitive yet very much under pressure.
“The transit system has really reached the end of its tether. It needs a massive investment,” he said.
“If Sydney is not able to handle what are really population pressures … then it’s going to have huge economic problems.”
Public transport that works, clever jobs closer to where future Sydneysiders will live, affordable homes that use less water and energy – these were among the intertwined themes that preoccupied bureaucrats, academics, builders, designers and others at a metropolitan strategy forum held last month.
There is a lot at stake as Sydney struggles to come up with a metropolitan strategy for the next three decades, during which the city-region – bounded by Nowra to the south, Port Stephens in the north and the westerly mountains – is expected to swell from its present population of 4.1 million to well over 5 million.
“This is a national challenge,” Professor Blakely said. “Twenty three per cent of the value-added GDP of this whole nation comes through Sydney. New York’s not even close.”
As a global financial centre, Sydney has close rivals, such as Shanghai, ready to seize the initiative if Sydney becomes a less liveable, less competitive city. “The first sign of failure to me (would be) when Shanghai starts pulling away some of this business in international trade, particularly in futures markets,” he said.
Sydney’s rapid growth – it has outstripped New York and greater London – also represented a great opportunity, according to the scientist Tim Flannery, a recent convert to the gloomy gospel of global warming.
“The pattern of growth that is set here (in greater Sydney) will really shape patterns of growth throughout Australia,” he told the forum.
“If that expansion happens without you people building another dam, without you people digging up a single extra kilogram of fossil fuel, you will have triumphed in a marvellous way.”
This whole exercise in planning began with a confession of failure. Previous plans were “little more than a developers’ street directory”, NSW Planning Minister Craig Knowles said.
He has put out a ministerial directions paper which concedes that new, poorly designed areas were opened up on the city fringe without enough services to support them; that more intense development of existing suburbs will demand better services; that the most likely regional areas for future population growth lack the necessary jobs and transport; and that plenty of money, expertise and time will be needed for the plan to succeed.
“There’s obviously still a healthy cynicism – that we’ve heard all this before,” Jennifer Westacott, Mr Knowles’ department head, told the forum. In the past, central plans for growth had come undone because the various bureaucracies that provide the necessary services – transport, water and sewerage, health, education – could ignore them.
One of Sydney’s leading authorities on planning, Maurice Daly, praised what he saw as a fresh approach, specially the attempt to co-ordinate the myriad agencies whose work must underpin growth. “It’s certainly new,” he said. And he thinks Professor Blakely’s involvement is a good thing, “particularly because he’s got no baggage”.
Professor Blakely has had a distinguished career as an urban planner and academic in the US, where catastrophe – earthquake and bushfire in California and September 11 in New York – gave him rare expertise in how to repair the urban fabric.
But he has also had a long standing personal and professional connection with Australia. His wife is Australian, and his latest academic appointment is with Sydney University as professor of urban and regional planning. And he has been made chairman of the so-called reference panel of experts to advise the NSW Government on its metropolitan strategy, a draft of which is expected to be ready in December 2004.
The state has a history of preferring to pay off public debt rather than reinvest in public assets, such as transport. Professor Blakely asked: “How much has this paying down debt cost us in not providing adequate infrastructure to face the future?”
He said several billion dollars might be needed for upgrading of the rail system alone. “Urban development financing is a real obstacle because we have not been using what I call asset-based financing,” he said. “This is not foolish debt.”
Indeed, debt-raising is among the Government’s preferred options for financing infrastructure. The others are budget funding, new charges for developers, clawing back added value of land near new infrastructure, private sector partnerships, and investment by super funds.
Local council rates, at present capped by legislation, also “should be squarely on the table” as a funding source, economist Ric Simes told the forum.
For fairness and efficiency, he said, the metropolitan plan would have to be clear about the link between the benefits of infrastructure and any costs imposed. Developers already complain about a lack of transparency in infrastructure charges for rezoning.
Spending money is always easier than raising it and last month Mr Carr announced $1.4 million for the mini-cities of Bankstown, Blacktown, Campbelltown, Fairfield, Liverpool and Parramatta. “They need some serious attention, because that’s where our future job growth can occur,” Professor Blakely said. “The CBD will actually export jobs (west and) we will have a much better poly-centred economy.” Transport also needed to change and improve. The greater west is especially car-dependent. Public transport links between these mini-cities are poor, partly because of Sydney’s radial network. Professor Blakely suggested busways and tramways. Mr Carr held out the prospect of improvement when the M7 motorway, the western link in the Sydney orbital network is completed by end-2006. Meanwhile, the premier announced there would be more land rezoned – between Penrith and Bankstown – to encourage investment in logistics, research and high technology. “Transport will pull the jobs in.”
A centres policy such as this is just common sense, according to Professor Daly, a former academic and principal of Daly Research Systems. There was a similar policy in Sydney’s historic Cumberland County Plan of 1947. That plan, with its admirable green belts, was swept aside by a revolution in car ownership – a revolution the planners had failed to anticipate or understand.
“I’ve got a feeling we’re on the cusp of a change that is equally significant, only more difficult to comprehend,” he said. “How are you going to make the plan flexible enough to accommodate what we don’t know?”
University News, 4th June 2004
THE PLANNER TRYING TO EASE SYDNEY’S GROWING PAINS. By Alan Valvasori.
Planning for the needs of more than six million Sydneysiders over the next 30 years is the challenge facing Professor Ed Blakely, the University’s newly-appointed chair of Urban, Regional Planning and Policy in the School of Architecture.
Barely five months into his new job, the Californian-born expert on suburban economic development was invited by the NSW government to chair an influential taskforce to map out Sydney’s metropolitan planning strategy for the next three decades.
Before his Sydney appointment, Professor Blakely was dean of the Milano Graduate School at the New School University in New York. He was also professor of economic development at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-director of the Institute for Urban and Regional Development.
Married to an Australian, Maaike, for 36 years, Professor Blakely lived and worked in Australian in the 1980s, has been a regular visitor and has extensive consulting and teaching experience here.
NSW Premier Bob Carr announced in March that Professor Blakely would head the Sydney Metropolitan Strategy Reference Panel – a taskforce of eight experts in economics, town and urban planning, sustainable development, transport and environment.
Professor Blakely and his panel have been asked to deliver a comprehensive 30-year urban development plan to cope with Sydney’s breakneck population growth – currently topping 1000 new citizens each week. The city’s population is expected to soar to 7.4 million by 2051.
With only nine months to devise a blueprint, Professor Blakely and his taskforce have set about a series of consultation sessions with experts, community leaders and citizens to consider the challenges the city faces and generate possible solutions.
The first of these sessions was the Sydney Futures Forum in May where 200 experts explored aspects of the city’s future development.
At the forum, Professor Blakely proposed a creative approach to urban living to relieve some of Sydney’s growing pains. Possible solutions included US-style non-profit housing corporations, 20- to 30-year house leases as an alternative to freehold and “co-housing” – similar to student accommodation – where residents share communal living areas while retaining their private room.
Some of his suggestions have been controversial. Professor Blakely is in favour of imposing a hefty surcharge for developers on each house they build in the western suburbs.
He is also in favour of universities offering their staff cheap loans to buy houses near where they work – thus discouraging the drain of “intellectual capital” away from campuses.
“What guides Sydney now is not just its location, but its brain power. Brain power is the essential ingredient informing this city and should inform everything we do,“ he told the forum.
“Sydney’s future has to be guaranteed by how we treat our most important resource, our people, and what we provide for them.
“We are in competition with other places around the world as they attempt to attract the best people in the world. We must be in a position to do that, too.”
He said delegates at the Futures Forum were “in incredible agreement on the major issues facing Sydney”. There was a unanimous view that the basic planning framework and principles for urban planning in Sydney had to be a “bottom-up process” rather than imposed from a central bureaucracy.
There was also agreement on the priorities to be tackled when embarking on a masterplan for Sydney’s future: transport, infrastructure, affordable housing, and the location of employment. New financing structures – such as public/private partnerships – and how sustainable urban development might be funded is also a priority.
“The consensus view so far is that Sydney has, perhaps, been too successful in inner-city development. So now we have to focus on the outer suburbs to improve their capacity to attract citizens with nicer living spaces,” Professor Blakely said.
“But that’s all going to be done against sustainability principles so we save water, energy and trips in the motor car. This will mean that Greenfield development will have to be higher-density than they are today.”
He says that the panel is looking seriously at what values citizens in Sydney consider most important to motivate the direction of urban planning for the city. Three values or “themes” the panel has identified in its consultation so far are competitiveness, physical sustainability and liveability.
Professor Blakely says Sydney scores ten out of ten for “liveability” compared to some global cities like London, New York and Paris. But he says Sydney has some work to do to maintain its “neighbourhood” feel while enjoying all the benefits of a major city.
Using a sporting analogy; Professor Blakely says: “If you’re scoring ten out of ten like a top athlete, you have to work very hard to stay there because all your competitors are going to try that much harder to beat you.”
Ideas generated at the Futures Forum will be circulated in a discussion paper. Several community workshops are planned from June to August, and the taskforce’s proposals are due to be presented to the government by December.
Sydney Morning Herald, 25th August 2004
UNIVERSITIES URGED TO SPREAD THEIR WINGS AND INJECT NEW LIFE INTO THE BURBS. By Darren Goodsir
Universities have been told they should be playing a pivotal role in revitalising some of Sydneyâs run-down neighbourhoods by spreading their functions and faculties into the suburbs.
At his inaugural professorial address last week, the head of the NSW Government's metropolitan strategy, Ed Blakely, told a gathering at the University of Sydney that tertiary institutions had a responsibility for driving a more dynamic society.
He said they should look at further decentralising their central campuses and establishing lecture halls and student and staff accommodation away from their primary bases.
He said the Parramatta Road corridor, earmarked by the Government for rejuvenation as part of the M4 East motorway proposal, was a perfect strip for lecture space or conference facilities.Even the Eveleigh Technology Park and its surrounds, near Redfern, could be upgraded through the development of staff and lecturer accommodation.Ê He said the professional and academic classes brought with them a sense of power, greater social amenity and vitality.
Professor Blakely said a planning vocabulary was emerging that places human intelligence and creativity as the central ingredient in plan makingä.
It is in this context that the role of the university is transformed as a new and critical engine of the new economy and not merely the developer of talent for existing firms or the custodians of the past.
Professor Blakely was appointed this year to head the metropolitan strategy team, charged with developing a vision for Sydney for the next 30 years, and improving land use, transport and urban design.
Heritage Listing May Not Be Enough To Save Campus. By Lisa Pryor and Anneli Knight
A plan by a Sydney university to sell its Lindfield campus for residential development could still go ahead, even if Ku-ring-gai Council supports heritage listing of the bushland site.
Last night the council voted to consider an independent consultant's report on the heritage value of the site, with a view to having the Sulman Award winning complex included on the state heritage register.
The University of Technology, Sydney, is seeking to have the bushland site rezoned to allow more than 500 homes to be built. They include unit blocks up to five storeys high in an area prone to bushfires and beyond walking distance of the nearest railway station.
Whether the North Shore home-buyer market will take to brutish, concrete architecture from the 1970s remains to be seen, but the proposal would not be stopped by heritage concerns because the university always planned to preserve the award winning buildings if rezoning took place, a university spokesman said.
Residents, staff and students who oppose the sale of the 22-hectare site, which is set amid the bushland of Lane Cove National Park, are planning a protest meeting tonight.
Rebekah Doran, president of the university's student association, said it was no coincidence that the campus that housed the university's teaching and nursing facilities was once slated for closure.
The campus they're closing is the one with nursing and education, which are the two courses exempted from the 25 per cent HECS increases.ä
There is disagreement over whether the uncertainty about the future of the campus is to blame for the declining student numbers or whether the downturn is an indication that todayâs students would prefer to study in the city.
The university had to rethink the future of the campus after State Government plans for a railway station were abandoned and a plan for a multifunctional campus involving Chatswood High and TAFE fell through, the university spokesman said.
The residential development could house 1000 people, although the design would aim to minimise impact on the bush, and roof gardens would be encouraged. Preserved university buildings could be used as a library or commercial space.
Ian de Vulder, spokesman for the protest group Communities Against University Sell Off, warned that the area was prone to bushfires and that it was contrary to the Government's strategy for high-density development because it was not rear a railway line.
Ten years ago bushfires destroyed seven houses in Winchester Avenue, on the perimeter of the university, and seriously damaged another five.
A primary teaching student, Michelle Barlow, said closure of the campus would be sad for people in the area as well as students, because a community hub would be lost.
Heaps of schools use it for dance competitions and rehearsals, she said.
The UTS vice-chancellor, Ross Milbourne, has said a decision on whether to proceed with the redevelopment plan would not be make until next year at the earliest, and it was unlikely to be implemented before 2008.
PLANNING RESEARCH CENTRE NEWSLETTER ( April 2004) |
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INSIDE THIS ISSUE |
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- PRC Hosts Premier Carr and Minister Knowles - Director introduced to the Community - PRC New Research Directions - Director Visits Local Planners |
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About 80 PRC members and friends attended a reception to welcome Professor Blakely as the new Director of the Planning Research Centre at the Baker McKinsey Conference Rooms, Circular Quay on 6th May , 2004.