Contemporary Issues in Australian Urban and Regional Planning

Julie Brunner, John Glasson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317592884
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Contemporary Issues in Australian Urban and Regional Planning looks at a wide range of planning issues in Australia from the city to the regional scale, covering key topics in sustainable development and planning including economic, social, environmental and governance perspectives. It also covers issues of climate change, population and urbanization trends, economic competitiveness and the Quadruple Bottom Line (QBL) Sustainability agenda.

The book is organized around three key elements:

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• Pressures and Principles of development and planning for sustainability

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• Planning Practice and Processes focused on essential topics including cities, regions, rural areas, and social and environmental issues and

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• Future Processes and Prospects for planning practice and education covering the fundamental issues of assessing sustainability, managing risk, effective participation and evolving approaches to planning education.

Contemporary Issues in Australian Urban and Regional Planning is an invaluable resource for students and practitioners of planning and related fields and provides a critical perspective on current issues in evolving natural and socio-economic contexts in Australian planning.

Part I

Pressures and principles: the changing planning context

1 The evolving framework for planning in Australia: moving towards sustainable governance?

Shahed Khan, Jenny George and Julie Brunner

1.1 Introduction

This chapter is concerned with governance aspects of planning as a public activity or, more specifically, as a crucial element of urban and regional governance. ‘Planning’ here is defined as a broad set of practices which design, organise, manage and regulate land use and development, especially (but not exclusively) in cities. This includes, in particular: the development of strategic policies for managing land use and development issues (such as natural or built heritage conservation, economic restructuring, housing provision, etc.); the creation of land use plans (at various scales) which guide where different types of development and public infrastructure can take place; and the assessment and regulation of development including approval, monitoring and compliance (often referred to as ‘development control’).

The chapter presents, in sections 1.2 and 1.3, an account of developments across the world in the area of planning due to impacts of economic globalisation and a global concern for environmental sustainability since the mid-1980s. It describes the concepts of civil society and governance as consequences of these developments. In democracies like Australia, planning functions are in the public interest and, hence, overseen and largely undertaken by government. This means that the institutional systems of government are critical to the way that planning works and what it can achieve. Therefore, in sections 1.4 to 1.6, the chapter briefly describes the (very complex) arrangements through which Australian governments carry out the task of planning, before looking at some of the recent trends in planning system reform, placing them in the context of the much-vaunted shift ‘from government to governance’ (Meehan, 2003, MacCallum, 2009, etc.).

1.2 From ‘government’ to ‘governance’ – developments since the mid-eighties

Government and governance

The formal system of administration and law applying across the country and in local communities is generally referred to as the Government. The term ‘governance’ appears to have emerged in planning literature a few decades ago and refers to a broader concept including the informal as well as formal arrangements by which policy and services such as planning are often now delivered (Abbott, 2012; Benz and Papadopoulos, 2006; Pierre and Peters, 2000). Government has traditionally been seen as an administrative and political organisation with governing authority. The main functions commonly associated with government are the creation of rules and regulations and their enforcement. Traditionally seen as a command and control institution, government is viewed in terms of organisations characterised by well-defined hierarchy and distribution of responsibility and delegation of authority.

The concept of governance sees government as “one of the actors in governance. Other actors involved in governance vary depending on the level of government that is under discussion” (UN-ESCAP, nd). All actors other than government and the military are grouped together as part of the “civil society” (UN-ESCAP, nd). Governance has come to represent “the process of decision-making and the process by which decisions are implemented (or not implemented)” (UN-ESCAP, nd). It is seen as something with a broader scope and concern than that conventionally ascribed to government. “Governance” is not a new concept and has had a revival as an idea in currency since the mid-1980s. Previously, the term “governance” was “primarily used to describe decision making in organisations like universities and corporations, rather than in political and government circles. But … the term has been resurrected and has assumed a number of dimensions” (Carino, 1999: 1).

A role for civil society

The concern for development has undergone considerable change from the post-war years to recent times, reflected in changing planning paradigms. “The concept of development has moved from the exclusive focus on economic growth of the 1950s to the inclusion of distributional goals like the reduction of poverty and inequality during the UN Development Decades, to the current battlecry for ‘sustainable human development’” (Carino, 1999: 9).

The concept of civil society can be traced back to the 16th century and the Scottish philosopher/historian Adam Ferguson. Like “governance”, “civil society” also seems to have regained significance. In recent decades, civil society initiatives have, on numerous occasions, obtained protections and freedoms for citizens (see http://eisa.org.za/). Today numerous independent voluntary organisations have formed across both developed and developing nations, to improve social justice, the built environment and/or to celebrate their city’s heritage. Many such civil society groups organise events, facilitate collaborative projects and/or work with local government agencies to promote democratic planning and decision-making.

The involvement of civil society changed the nature of planning, as highlighted by Douglass and Friedmann (1998) reporting on a range of case studies from across the world. These authors observed that globalisation and its impacts on citizens and their built environment had spurred civil society to engage in the pursuit of a more democratic politics of planning. In doing so, the role civil society assumed has varied widely between resisting government’s and corporate sector’s intrusions into community to facilitating public and private sector initiatives in urban management. Consequently, the focus of planning broadened from regulation to include a larger political activity pursuing more liveable cities (Douglass and Friedmann, 1998).

In a globalising world, it is natural for collective initiatives organised at international level to come about to improve and/or standardise the performance quality of national governments. The Open Government Partnership (OGP), for example, was launched in 2011 as “a global, multi-stakeholder effort to make governments better”. With over 60 participating countries, it seeks to promote “open government reform” in member countries by encouraging governments to commit to transparency, accountability, and citizen engagement. According to the organisers, “civil society participation is enshrined in OGP’s foundational principles and management structures” with OGP encouraging its member countries to work together with civil society (http://www.opengovpartnership.org/).

Urban governance reforms

“Governance clearly embraces government institutions, but it also subsumes informal, non-governmental institutions operating within the public realm” (Bøås, 1998, quoted in Weiss, 2000). This suggests that with the move towards governance, government systems had to undergo changes and planning and urban management have needed reform. Meehan (2003) reviews the literature analysing changes in governance in terms of new arrangements and practices. She lists a number of causes for change, such as: division or sharing of public power amongst different tiers of regulation across various levels of jurisdiction; decentralisation of policy formulation and implementation; the weakening or reduction of the state through the “‘agentization’ of government”; and the privatization of utilities and services. She also lists “partnerships, networks and novel forms of consultation or dialogue” leading to the changes (Meehan, 2003: 2).

Planning and urban management reforms can be explained from various perspectives, such as functional and institutional. Koch (2013) describes the “functionalist” explanation for the creation of new forms of governance as “the political response to national or international structural developments (e.g., globalisation, multilateral politics, changes in the capitalist regime of production, and technological progress)”. According to Koch (2013), the functionalists claim, “global economical change feeds the reform of political decision-making bodies”. The institutional view, however, suggests that changes to institutions “cannot be explained based on their alleged functionality or efficiency alone” but by the political dynamics of the institutions in face of external pressures “that constrain and translate exogenous developments and thus condition future governance change” (Koch, 2013).

As Healey (2007) notes, the broadened concept of governance is better suited to handle the complex sets of practices necessary to public action: in planning especially, policy problems frequently cross borders between government levels, portfolios, expert disciplines, territorial jurisdictions, and capacities or delivery (e.g. private and non-profit sector). As networking and partnership arrangements increasingly become more common, planning agencies and authorities have adopted wider focus through broader governance modes (MacCallum, 2009; Steele and MacCallum, 2014).

1.3 Changing paradigms and players

Sustainable development

In the wake of the Brundtland Report (1987), the 1992 Rio Earth Summit brought a focus on planning and local governance in the delivery of sustainable development (see Chapter 2). This yielded Agenda 21 whose chapter 28 focused on governance functions of local authorities specifying a range of initiatives local authorities should undertake. It encouraged them to “enter into a dialogue with its citizens, local organizations and private enterprises and adopt ‘a local Agenda 21’” (http://habitat.igc.org/agenda21). Consultation and consensus-building were stressed through engagement with citizens and “local, civic, community, business and industrial organizations” (http://habitat.igc.org/agenda21). Agenda 21 subsequently led to drafting of Local Agenda 21 (LA21) that was widely ratified by countries across the world, including Australia. LA21 envisages collaboration and multilateral partnership initiatives led by local governments as facilitators and the major players.

Sustainable development principles of subsidiarity, public participation and partnership (Dernbach, 1998) also align with the overall shift in planning theory towards collaborative and deliberative planning in line with Habermasian ideas of communicative rationality and communicative planning. These shifts have suggested a redefining of the planner’s role as mediator and facilitator. There is also an ongoing challenge in planning to more broadly recognise the cultural and ecological values in urban and regional governance (Gleeson and Low, 2000). Moving well beyond the institutional view of planning as exercising a bureaucratic function, Gleeson and Low (2000: 5) assert an approach that “seeks effective, equitable and democratic steering of the state apparatus for the benefit of citizens”.

From a similar but broader environmental governance focus, institutes such as Worldwatch promote a culture of governance of the commons, involving shared co-operation towards protecting our mutual resources (http://www.worldwatch.org/). Such approaches to planning and governance enable policymakers to incorporate the more ambitious notions of sustainable governance or good governance, such as social justice and ecological concern. According to Doppelt (2003), they need to have a social conscience and a collaborative voice.

New players in planning

Bellamy and Palumbo (2010) asserts that neoliberal reforms along with globalisation have contributed to the shift from government to governance, whereby traditional organisational hierarchies gave way to new forms of networks. These have also resulted in a more participatory relationship between state and civil society. Bellamy and Palumbo (2010) highlight a move towards more flexible forms of regulation and creative implementation and beyond statute law.

The private sector has emerged as a key partner to governments in planning and development. Public-private partnerships (PPP) have increasingly been implemented over recent decades to finance and execute major infrastructure projects. This is seen to contribute cost effectiveness in building and managing these projects, by bringing the perceived efficiencies of the corporate sector into complementarity with the regulatory and policy frameworks established by government (Chan et al., 2009).

This “new governance” theory supports arrangement that include collaborations between public and private actors with the view that this allows them to “reallocate elements of governance authority to the best actors able to exercise them” (Abbott, 2012: 551). Abbott (2012) argues that the burden on the state is reduced with private actors sharing resources and capacity. In this light, proponents believe the state is not in retreat but engaging in the most effective pursuit of public goals while enhancing public par...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Foreword by Professor Oren Yiftachel
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I Pressures and principles: the changing planning context
• PART II Practice and processes: contemporary planning issues
• PART III Future processes and prospects
• Conclusions: towards the future
• Index