‘It’s buggered mate’: the need for a new planning system for Sydney

There is a review underway into the planning system for Sydney. I wrote a submission for it for the Committee for Sydney whose strategic advisor I am delighted to report I now am. The Committee was formed by a number of the most strategically minded companies, Not for Profits and Councils in Sydney who combine a deep engagement with the City with a passion for seeing it succeed. As Australia’s only global city, it’s vital it does. Planning is pretty central to the fate of cities so the Committee was bound to take a view on planning reform for New South Wales and given the weighty nature of its membership, it’s likely to be an influential view. The punchline? The planning system is broken: do fix it. Don’t tinker.

The problem is partly governance. There are just too many councils in Sydney at 43. There is no equivalent of the single metropolitan tier we have in London. So, on a routine basis, strategically important development applications which should be approved and which will be of benefit to the community and the city are rejected in the interests of a vocal minority of current house-owners. Nimbyism is promoted by this small scale of council.

But the planning system is broken anyway notwithstanding the governance crisis in Sydney. As someone I consulted told me ‘Planning in Sydney? It’s buggered mate’. There is an arcane reason and an obvious one. The former has to do with s79C of the 1979 EP+A (aka the planning act). The latter has to do with the breakdown in public trust towards the planning system.

Section 79C is the core of the planning system and is the bit on which planner’s base evaluation of development applications. It boils down to a template which highlights the local environmental impact of development over any other consideration. Despite the fact that ‘economic impact’ is a consideration in reality little attention is paid to it. More importantly, because the city’s metropolitan plan is not statutory its strategic concerns –on population growth, an ageing population, productivity, a presumption in favour of transport oriented development ,climate change and infrastructure of more than local significance – get ignored in favour of local plans with statutory backing. So the Committee for Sydney backs a reform of s79C so that it includes wider strategic considerations and greater statutory weight being given to city and regional plans and the establishment of a proper hierarchy between plans.

Although the submission doesn’t support part 3A as it is – this became notorious and contentious as a device for ministers to in effect force through development against the wishes of local councils – the CfS does see the need for a replacement device which enables development of more than local significance to be approved, in the wider interests of the city. Every effective planning system has such a device and boy does Sydney need one.

The final reform CfS proposes to development applications procedures is that we think the highly politicised, subjective and ad hoc approach to development applications taken by many local councils needs to be replaced with a more technical and objective appraisal which essentially ensures that the application is in compliance with the plan and the building code. DA approval is presumed for compliant development. Such a ‘code–assessable development’ process applies in Queensland and the result is clarity and lower transaction costs for developers while ensuring community buy-in. Brisbane twice as fast as Sydney in the last decade and having an effective planning system was partly behind this.

So far, so good. But what I think adds distinction to the CfS submission is the emphasis and value given to engaging the community deeply and early in the plan-making process. This is the quid pro quo for a more ‘code-assessable’ system. We need a new civic discourse on the values and objectives of the planning system and local and city-wide plans. We should use modern social media to ensure that people in their hundreds of thousands get involved in plan-making in this city. And the planning review is a real opportunity to kick-start that enriched community involvement in planning we so obviously need. Call me an optimist, but I believe that we can get more planning applications and more development through even in the middle class inner suburbs if we engage with people more on why, for example, density is a good thing, or why we should do flatted development around transport nodes or how their children will never get affordable homes without this kind of approach.

I see no alternative anyway to such a civic discourse and I for one am willing to accept the results. I think modernist planners and supporters of density have been too indifferent to the need for dialogue with – listening to – people who don’t share their views. The broken planning system in NSW is partly about an attempt by people who thought they knew more to force change on citizens who just weren’t with the programme. There needs to be a first principles discussion between the framers of plans and planning systems and mere people. And when we do that we can make more progress on delivering for Sydney than by just ignoring people and attempting to good to them instead of with them.

I was moved to write this piece by an experience this week of speaking at a slightly weird event in Chippendale on the border between South Sydney and the inner west. There were 5 architects and me. All the previous speakers (all intelligent and decent men, which we all were) more or less moaned about the lack of political will to deliver denser development .Though I agreed with the objective I had a strong sense of being in the presence of a latter day Sydney version of the Culture Wars so much a feature of public life in a divided Australia in the previous decades. The disappointment in and contempt for people who still hanker after the ¼ acre block and suburbia was palpable despite the fact that many of the speakers lived in such places.

I rebelled and said that we in the density camp had never respected people enough to have a proper conversation with them about why we needed this kind of development in Sydney. I pointed out that Australian cities are different to European or Latin American ones – Sao Paulo for example has a population of 18m on the same geographical foot print as Sydney with its over 4m. Maybe density is the answer, and I’m sure that greater density as a principle is correct if we want to build stronger communities less reliant on carbon and long road commuter journeys but we need to be clearer as to what our overall aim is. Are we building Sao Paulo or something else? I’m not clear and I’m sort of an expert. How can mere people know what we mean?