THE INFLUENCE OF POLITICS ON PLANNING AND URBAN DESIGN
Presentation Sydney University – Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning
23 April 2009
I have been asked to speak about the influence of politics on planning and urban design.
Politics, values and self-interest
In a market economy, supply and demand is regulated through the price mechanism.
By contrast where outcomes are regulated by governments, the political process can determine, if not influence, the intersection of competing demands. This is particularly the case for property development.
In a democratic society, the role of elected representatives is twofold:
- to reconcile the conflicting demands of stakeholders; and,
- to protect the public interest-which means securing outcomes that are in the long-term interest of the community.
For better or for worse, the role of politicians parallels the role of planners and urban designers in determining planning and development controls and development applications.
Most of you may feel that urban design and planning should be separate from, and above, politics.However, politics is about competing influences, such as the conflicting values and interests of stakeholders. These influences can include:
- The objectives and values of the client;
- The values of planners and architects;
- Local community politics;
- The values of staff within the planning departments of Councils and State agencies; and,
- The political influences on, and the values of, the consent authority
So it is impossible to completely divorce the setting of planning or urban design process from political influences, whether involving elected politicians or others. By contrast, the determination of development can largely be isolated from politicking by removing elected representatives from the process.
The current planning framework
The setting of development and design controls is subject to a variety of political influences depending on the scale involved.
The bigger the scale, the broader the planning considerations.
For example, a new urban centre proposed for a Greenfield area would require consideration of a broad range of issues and stakeholders.
The planning issues may include:
- infrastructure requirements;
- asset protection zones;
- flooding;
- economic goals;
- environmental issues such as native vegetation and threats to certain species;
- the geographic context, e.g. the existence regional strategies; and,
- the character of the locality.
The stakeholders may include:
- the clients/developers, of which there may be many;
- local, State and even national governments;
- designers and planners;
- political and ideological organizations; and,
- Local communities.
On smaller urban sites, the outcomes will be determined by a narrower set of considerations such as:
- permissible uses, i.e. zoning;
- urban context; and,
- neighbourhood impacts.
Here, the stakeholders may include:
- the developers;
- the neighbours and local community; and,
- the planners and designers.
A good grasp of the issues and the players involved will inform the planning process, and reduce time, but also improve outcomes. The process for preparing planning controls should be structured so as to reduce risk.
It may be helpful to review the evolution of planning controls over the last century.
The evolution of development controls in the 20th Century: the changing nature of clients
Some years ago I read an interesting little paperback by Tom Wolfe called "From Our Bauhaus to Our House". The book was somewhat critciaal of the role of modernist architecture from the Bauhaus school in the 1920s onwards. He clearly was not a fan of the" less is more" school of architecture.
I enjoyed the book and felt it had a lot of merit. Unfortunately, in my view, it didn't give the full picture.
It did show the declining importance of architectural design in our cities during the first half of the 20th century. However, it did not show the driving force behind the changes.
In my view, we have shifted from the earlier practice, such as occurred in the 18th and 19th centuries, where the client was paramount in the design of buildings and the design of cities. Typically, clients built buildings for their own use. Dictators built cities for their own status.
There was no middle "man" buying and selling building stock and leasing buildings.
In the early 20th century, with the advent of better technology, such as the invention of electric lifts, the heights of buildings were able to increase dramatically. This in turn increased land values. Buildings became trading stock rather than revered headquarters for major corporations.
So the "Less is More" architecture flourished as the developers were able to build skyscrapers and lease parts of the buildings to tenants who in turn enjoyed a dramatic skyline, such as the Seagram Tower by Mies Van der Rowe.
During the period of sustained economic growth in the 60s and 70s, Western cities developed rapidly with high-rise central business districts, mediocre architecture, and the frequent destruction of many heritage buildings and, in turn, changed the character of the streets that formed these town centres.
With this economic transformation, came the INFERIOR client developer. Most developers saw buildings merely as trading stock and did not care about the quality of the building but only about its return on investment.
City governments responded slowly to this new destructive trend. But most high rise cities eventually responded by introducing protective development controls, so as to act almost as the surrogate client for development.
Cities like Sydney took until the 1980s to respond to the destruction of its heritage buildings and streets such as Rowe Street. In 1978, the Wran government introduced the Heritage Act and in 1979, it introduced new Environmental Planning and Assessment Act. The City of Sydney itself introduced a Central Sydney Strategic Plan in the 1970s but dithered on framing proper planning controls for two decades.
It was not until the early 1990s that the City of Sydney produced its first LEP and its first Heritage LEP.
So, in this way, the city authorities filled the vacuum created by the absence of good client developers.
They did so by introducing quite prescriptive planning and development controls.
Even the City of Sydney's during the 1990's may have been a little too prescriptive with its new controls. Unfortunately, planning and development controls do not in themselves create excellence in building design or even in urban design, they simply prevent the worst from happening.
If rigidly adhered to, they can lead to a very mediocre and uninspired city.
Special difficulties with development controls
As we have seen, the politics of a particular process is not just driven by the values and wishes of elected politicians (or other appointed regulators), but by the values and demands of many stakeholders.
In New South Wales, there is a range of planning and development controls available to local and state governments, in addition to the Commonwealth government's EPBC Act.
Planning and building controls are mixed together in a range of instruments including:
- development control plans set by local councils;
- local environmental plans prepared by local councils and approved by the State;
- regional environmental plans prepared by the State and approved by the State;
- state environmental planning policies prepared and approved by the State; and,
- regional land use strategies prepared and approved by the State.
As a result of the amendments to the planning laws that were passed in June last year, REPs are being abolished, and, due to other changes, many development control plans (DCPs) will be made redundant by the introduction of a uniform complying development code across the State.
The State has also moved to rationalise the number of SEPPs from over 60 to about 20 and this task is about one third completed.
Most development in an urban context is governed by an LEP or a DCP.
Generally speaking, the local environmental plan should contain the land use constraints (i.e., zonings) as well as those other controls that determine the economic value of the site, such as floor space ratios, heights, heritage constraints and other key controls.
By contrast, the role of DCPs is primarily to determine the character of the area and to protect the amenity of neighbours. They are more in the nature of guidelines, although Standards in LEPs can be varied as well.
There are some special difficulties in setting development controls whether they are in a development control plan (DCP) or in a local environmental plan (LEP), or state planning policies.
The difficulties in setting these controls are as follows:
1. In many urban settings, site sizes are irregular, topography may be other than flat, and uniform immutable urban design controls may lead to unintended consequences and inferior urban design outcomes; and,
2. Urban design and density controls are often set conservatively by planning authorities such as local councils,
and do not relate effectively to the demands of the land uses that are permissible under the zoning and that the market may bring to a particular site.
For example, a zoning that allows aged housing as a residential use may not allow a component of an aged housing complex to be taller than two stories so as to facilitate the use of lifts for higher dependency aged residents. Such height outcomes in a two-storey residential zone cannot be planned without creating an unfortunate precedent, even though the occurrence of seniors living on a one-off basis within a precinct may in fact be a good planning outcome.
3. A development control plan, or an LEP, cannot anticipate the mix of uses that can occur on a site and the urban design implications that they generate such as the need for future vehicular access or floor-to-ceiling heights.
4. There is a multiplicity of decision-makers who may have differing views as to what is an appropriate development
control. This invariably leads to development controls being both arbitrary and often a compromise unsupported by a
coherent planning logic.
These decision-makers may include Council planning staff, elected councils, Department of Planning officials, the Planning Minister, and even the Land and Environment Court which can ignore development controls when determining a merit appeals. Local communities too may have a differing view as to what constitutes an appropriate development control such as height.
5 The lack of a clear urban development context will often make it difficult to set defensible urban design controls. When the local area has buildings of varying height and urban design characteristics, it is difficult to determine the predominant character of a precinct and set controls accordingly.
So it is quite difficult to set development controls that are sufficiently robust to be faithfully applied well into the future when development proposals occur.
So why bother setting controls at all? The reasons are simple:
- To communicate a vision for a precinct;
- To manage the expectations of developers and local communities;
- To provide a stable valuation basis for land; and,
- To manage the infrastructure and servicing needs of land uses by setting densities and other controls.
However, most controls contained in LEPs or DCPs, should be adhered to in all but the most rare exceptions. This is particularly the case with density controls such as floor space ratios as these, more than other controls, determine land values. To depart too markedly from FSR controls would lead to a breakdown in orderly development as developers seek to game the regulators.
But there is another problem - the property cycle.
Developers are very quick to argue that site controls render a development project not viable, particularly in times of recession or a downturn in the property market.
Ironically, planning controls come under the most pressure not in boom times, but when there is the least development due to an economic downturn. The danger for governments is that they may bend the rules to make a particular development more viable only to find it does not proceed until the market improves dramatically when it would have been viable in any case.
Some actions to improve urban design outcomes
In the mid-1990s after the City had a new LEP, a new heritage LEP and a new DCP, we realised that these controls were unlikely to promote world-class and innovative architecture nor even good urban design outcomes.
To improve the design quality of city buildings, we introduced architectural competitions. These involved a competitive process whereby a number of independent architectural firms put in competing proposals to a jury of six, comprising three appointees of the developer and three appointees of the City.
This was a way of allowing variations to development controls that otherwise would have set a significant precedent. By using a competitive design process, the City was able to both promote a better design culture amongst developers (i.e. improve the quality of the client), and to promote design excellence without setting a precedent by way of a breach to a DCP.
So long as the floorspace limits were adhered to, the system worked quite well and the standard of City buildings has been steadily improving. The only downside seems to be that some architects feel that they have not been adequately compensated for the work they do in preparing entries to the competitions.
As Planning Minister, I also introduced architectural competitions for landmark sites in the six regional cities. These are Parramatta, Penrith, Liverpool, Wollongong, Gosford, and Newcastle. In these cities, I installed a high level State planning team to prepare, jointly with Council planners, new City Centre Plans, including LEPs, DCPs and Civic Improvement Plans. These plans were completed in about a year, which was a near record for such significant plans.
But the architectural competition process can only work for larger sites and for landmark sites. It also requires a strong consent authority that is able to deal on equal terms with large developers to ensure that they take the process seriously. Whether this requirement in the regional cities achieves the benefits that it has been achieving in Central Sydney remains to be seen.
Some principles to improve development controls
In my view, there are a number of ways the quality of LEPs and DCPs can be improved so that they enhance rather than stifle good urban design and planning outcomes. These include:
1 Keep development control plans as simple as possible. The use of uniform complying development codes across New South Wales is a good start for single dwellings up to 2 stories in height. Hopefully, this will be extended and the plethora of other DCPs can be rationalised.
2 DCPs should be seen as development guidelines rather than mandatory development requirements, with all quantitative controls ranked in priority order.
3 Both LEPs and DCPs should contain a clear vision statement for the precinct. Many LEPs and DCPs contain multiple and conflicting objectives and these should be rationalised to contain only those objectives that define the essential intent of the planning controls in that area, i.e. the character.
4 Where a development control is critical to protecting a precinct (such as a density control) the flexibility of that control should be constrained to some reasonable limit, say 10%. For an LEP, this can be achieved by constraining the use of SEPP1. Most controls, however, should not be so constrained.
For example, within the City of Sydney, stopping a trend of ever increasing overshadowing of public spaces, such as Hyde Park, became a critical issue, and hence the overshadowing controls were excluded from the operation of SEPP1.
More specifically, I believe the existing structure and composition of DCPs needs a major overhaul. In my view, this can be achieved according to 7 key principles.
1. A DCP should respect the existing hierarchy of controls and not duplicate, or contradict, the controls contained in LEPs, SEPP 65, State regulation and the BCA (where feasible).
2. There should only be one DCP governing any piece of land, and preferably only one DCP for the entire town or municipal precinct.
3. A DCP should contain a set of design principles to assist with the interpretation and intent of the quantitative controls.
4. Quantitative controls in a DCP should be limited in number.
5. Quantitative controls in a DCP should be ranked in priority order to guide merit assessment. This ranking would be expected to vary depending on the character of the precinct.
6. Any new DCP should be trialed for 1 year and assessed for feasibility by practitioners and amended to remove unintended consequences.
7 When a DCP applies to a precinct, where a uniform complying development code also applies, the DCP should not contain new or duplicating quantitative provisions, but rather, should outline principles and performance measures
(such as sunlight protection) by which an application at variance with the CDC can be assessed.
The politics of planning and development decisions
As I alluded to earlier, development and planning decisions are the end product of the interplay of conflicting values and demands.
Developers want more so as to maximise their returns. Local residents and communities often want less because they want to protect and preserve the existing character of their neighbourhood.
Planners and architects bring a certain professional objectivity but that objectivity is influenced by their own values. Hence, the outcome can be significantly influence by our choice of designer or planner.
Typically, local communities do not get interested or involved when planning controls are being set. Yet they can get very excited when a development application is lodged even though it may conform to the planning controls.
Local residents tend to only focus on development that is about to happen, particularly if it is very close by.
This problem can be exacerbated because the plan setting process is usually far removed in time from the development application process - often by many years. During that time, some residents have moved out of the area, new residents have moved in, and local expectations have changed.
Moreover, over the last two decades due to cases in the Land and Environment Court, as well as the actions of Councils, community expectations about their role in determining applications have grown considerably. So much so, that in some Councils political pressure has a greater influence on planning and development decisions than proper planning considerations.This has made planning and development decisions very unpredictable, and time consuming.
The Way Forward
Now more than ever planners and decisions-makers need to carefully consider the pitfalls of the current process and do more to improve the processes. There are two ways this can be done.
Firstly, the community must be better appraised at the Plan-making stage and the quality of LEPs and DCPs needs to be improved and simplified.
Secondly, the process of determining applications must be transparent, particularly the extent to which a development
proposal is compliant, or non-compliant, with clearly stated reasons for the decision made. Some councils are good at this, but some are woeful.
Uniform complying development codes will help with small developments of two stories or less. The use of planning arbitrators, when introduced, will also help with small developments that have become stuck in the system. But if we are serious about making the planning system more objective, transparent, and simpler, then we should depoliticise decision-making especially the determination of development applications.
In my view, it is inevitable that all developments at local level will be dealt with by independent panels (possibly appointed by the council itself such as in South Australia). I predict that this will occur within the next 10-15 years despite the complaints of some local government leaders.
The same should also apply at State level where all development applications should be determined by the Planning Assessment Commission.
The processes for public consultation and display vary greatly from council to council. These should be codified and be made mandatory both at the local and State levels. I see some councils that have excessively generous and cumbersome processes, while other councils have sound and effective processes of consultation. Other councils are very poor at engaging the community and at explaining the limitations to the development assessment process.
At the State level, there are other ways of achieving good planning outcomes.
I believe the State government should make better use of its own agencies in partnering with the private sector to achieve key public outcomes such as for urban renewal projects or in the development of key town centre precincts.
In my view, there is no doubt that Landcom's involvement in sites like Green Square, Rouse Hill and Little Bay have made a big difference to the quality of the developments that have occurred in those places.
It seems to get back to the same issue - the quality of the client. Where a client has a significant motivation to achieve a higher level vision and good urban design outcomes, then they are much more likely to be achieved than by the imposition of regulation or red tape.
As has already been mentioned, the role of architectural competitions should be expanded as another means by which the local consent authority has a role in choosing the best design outcome for a site. This is a way of improving the client perspective and ensuring that public objectives are considered at the beginning of a development formulation process.
In summary, to achieve better planning outcomes as well as a more efficient, robust and transparent planning system, we need to have planning strategies, policies and instruments that have:
- Clarity of vision;
- Simpler development controls, ranked in order of priority;
- Sound stakeholder engagement; and,
- Transparent public processes.
Frank Sartor