Monday, 12 July 2010 Entries

A plan for managing our urban assets

Australia’s cities are in rapid transition. The issue is: how do we manage the transition?

Strong population growth, economic restructuring and increasingly aspirational communities are critical urban drivers.

These are positive and dynamic forces, but our existing management systems aren’t coping with change.

Many of our metropolitan strategic plans – the nation’s urban blueprints – are poorly designed, and even the better metro strategies are not well implemented.

In fact, the quality of Australia’s city planning regimes scored a bare pass mark according to a recent KPMG study.

The research, conducted for the Property Council and its partners in the BEMP: Built Environment Meets Parliament alliance, ranked major cities against benchmarks adopted by the governing board of Australia, the Council of Australian Governments (COAG).

In addition to measuring formal planning frameworks, KPMG also assessed each capital city’s performance against real world criteria such as housing affordability.

The first table reveals the relative ranking of capital cities based on their formal planning strategies.

The second table shows performance against four additional benchmarks – budget management, congestion, population growth management and housing affordability for key workers.

The complete KPMG report, including a detailed explanation of the performance benchmarks, can be found at www.propertyoz.com.au/KPMG

KPMG offers eleven strategies for improving capital city planning and performance:

1. Increased Federal Government involvement – establish a robust carrot and stick framework that will incentivise states to improve their planning regimes.

The framework should be based on a national urban policy driven by a Federal Cabinet level minister.

The Building Australia Fund should be complemented by a totally refreshed Better Cities program that provides seed funding for ‘circuit–connecting’ urban infrastructure.

2. Establish a metropolitan delivery authority in each city – place one entity in charge of delivering zoned and serviced land for housing, jobs and community services, along with joined-up critical infrastructure.

3. Ensure metro strategies take precedence over all planning instruments – develop one set of rules that neither local councils nor ancillary state government departments can override.

Compliance with these rules should be the dominant criteria for assessing development applications.

4. Streamline and improve development assessment – fully adopt the 10 Development Assessment Forum principles for reforming development control processes.

By 2012, complying development (sometimes called ‘as of right’ or ‘code assessment’) should be the principal method for assessing development in growth corridors, activity centres and precinct plans. In addition, the entire system should be electronic by 2015.

5. Establish 15-year inventories of zoned/serviced capacity and 30-year overall capacity plans for all cities.

6. Develop and roll out 30-year infrastructure pipelines.

7. Adopt modern public finance mechanisms including growth area bonds – cap developer contributions at reasonable levels by establishing an independent umpire for setting developer charges. Champion PPPs and provide an annual statement of PPP opportunities.

8. Set city-based performance targets – establish measurable economic, social and environmental objectives along with trigger points for delivering critical land supply, housing affordability and growth area priorities.

9. Commit to meaningful public reports on performance against agreed targets on an annual basis, that are independently audited.

10. Increase Australia’s strategic planning and design capability.

11. Improve community consultation – switch from archaic word-based strategy documents to dynamic, 3D, visual representations of planning options.

These measures would revolutionise the management of Australia’s capital cities, one of the nation’s most valuable economic and social assets, and could also extend to other major urban and regional centres.

The Property Council of Australia looks forward to championing these initiatives with its BEMP alliance partners – the Australian Institute of Architects, Consult Australia, the Green Building Council of Australia and the Planning Institute of Australia – as well as other key stakeholders, particularly local government. 
 

Table 1.

Relative capital city planning performance

Table 2.

Performance against external indicators

Peter Verwer | Monday, 12 July 2010 1:29 PM | One Comment