Focus must be on details
WEARING a beanie and sitting on a milk crate at her favourite cafe, Irene Duckett looks right at home in slightly grungy North Hobart. It’s not this sort of street cred I’m here to tap into, though, but Duckett’s expertise in urban planning.
The Planning Institute of Australia’s Tasmanian president is brimming with ideas at Capulus Espresso, a hole-in-the-wall cafe in Tasma St, following last week’s annual State Planning Conference in Hobart.
Much of that get-together focused on growth, with PIA national president and former federal politician Brendan Nelson warning that Tasmania is ill-prepared for a major surge in either local or tourist populations.
Nelson said the state’s failure to undertake long-term strategic planning would leave us floundering with a big influx of tourists and new residents.
“We need to ensure the State Government’s targets of 1.5 million visitors by 2020 and a population of 650,000 by 2050 will result in positive outcomes for Tasmania,” he said.
Unmanaged growth jeopardises sound urban development, says Duckett, taking up Nelson’s theme. “It is at odds with community values that are saying we love small-scale, slow changes and not massive changes.”
We have strong community-led planning, she says, citing this tiny cafe as a good example of micro-level feel-good growth.
“What we don’t have is planning from the top down. At the moment we have a strategy for tourism and population growth [numbers] – but there is no [accompanying] policy, no vision of how that’s going to be put into place.”
Interest in planning has never been higher. “We have a level of community engagement that is unprecedented,” Duckett says. She believes it is time to change what she says is an ideologically driven planning conversation.
“The positions are binary and it all comes out of that convict/not convict mentality: we want development, we don’t want development. We want a cable car; we don’t want a cable car.
“At the moment we have a [for and against building] height argument, but I think the important conversation we should be having is about the detail of those buildings.
“You can have some very good buildings that are tall, and you can have some very bad buildings that comply with the height limit, and Hobart’s full of them.”
It is pointless asking “do we want growth”, she says. We need growth. “The question is ‘from these growth strategies which are the options you prefer?’”
And where should that growth happen? Should we let it just run hot in Hobart or intervene with incentives to drive some of it elsewhere? If we back the Hobart trend, how do we accommodate a higher population: in apartments (and, if so, in what sort of blocks); in medium-density housing along a transportation line (hello, Northern Suburbs light rail); or in estates on the edge of town (“we all know the third option is not great”). ONE
of the biggest challenges planners face, she says, is engaging the community in the process early. Activating that engagement needs a creative approach able to transcend technical talk. But it’s an essential conversation to facilitate if government and community are to develop a truly shared vision, she says.
“The big decisions are made earlier when the planning schemes are written,” she says. “They define the standards that can then be allowed. So that is where the community needs to get engaged.”
Duckett is exposed to development conflicts and community opposition through her work as a private planning consultant. Her firm drafted the rezoning proposal for the Cambria Green village estate at Swansea, a zoning amendment fiercely opposed by 14 East Coast groups which are holding a public meeting in Hobart on Tuesday.
Duckett says controversy over the development shows what can happen when strategy and community values do not align strongly enough.
“The Government has clearly encouraged foreign investment and Chinese tourism, [yet regarding Cambria Estate there is] a massive backlash from part of the community saying these are not our values.
“A vision needs to be clearly expressed so when people embrace a government’s values by voting for them, they actually know what those values are.”
Duckett says the beauty of Hobart “isn’t what’s happened here, it’s what hasn’t happened. We’ve developed slowly, in isolation and with the benefits of learning from the planning mistakes of other cities.”
“We have certainly made planning mistakes, but there is much that’s been preserved to treasure. That doesn’t mean we should ossify in our quiet comfort, though.
“I’m mindful that when we talk about preservation and no change, it’s a privileged middle-class conversation. A large proportion of our community can’t afford no growth. They rely on jobs and those jobs will only come from a growth dynamic and constant change.”
She is not, she says, talking about jobs and growth at all costs.
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