A Melbourne Vision For The Future Of City Making

PalaverPR Media Release: 10 September 2009

A MELBOURNE VISION FOR THE FUTURE OF CITY MAKING

When Australasia’s leading urban design ‘thinkers and doers’ gathered on the Gold Coast last week (September 2-4), the person they listened to most was Professor Rob Adams, successful Director of Design and Urban Environment at the City of Melbourne.

As a keynote speaker at the 2nd International urban Design Conference Adams declared that cities, under various pressures and driven by factors beyond their control, will be forced to undertake long-term change if they are to be both sustainable and enjoyable places, and are on the verge of the “best decade they will ever have”.

At the same time he also gave a masterclass presentation on his latest study, titled Transforming Australian Cities The central proposition of the study, which last month won the Australian Award for Urban Design, is that by utilising 6 percent of the area within the existing urban growth boundary, Melbourne could accommodate a further 3.3 million people.

In presenting a summary of the study to last week’s conference audience of some 275 urban design experts, Adams used the analogy of the challenge experienced by Universities in the 1960s when they had to cater for a wave of baby boomers. “They had the lecture theatres available, but everything had to be re-timetabled to free up capacity. Similarly, we have to work harder to re-timetable our cities”.

Adams argues that better utilisation of existing infrastructure should take precedence over expansion, noting that although the population of metropolitan Melbourne is projected to reach 5 million by 2029, in reality its basic infrastructure is unlikely to vary or be supplemented greatly. While the ‘bones and arteries’ are in place they will need some grafting and unclogging to be less inefficient and less vulnerable.

In other words Adams doesn’t envisage that a 21st century Melbourne will require lots of ‘new build’. In line with the theme of last week’s conference - the Survival of Tomorrow’s City - he also argues that the status quo won’t suffice.

His mantra instead is to intensify commercial and residential development along existing corridors and to develop density “a little faster” by insituting new ‘as of right’ medium-rise height limits for buildings along those corridors (e.g. in a uniform range of 5-8 stories depending on location).

A scientific, geomathematical level of precision has been brought to this planning, that has “interrogated every parcel of land to identify 34,000 (eligible) parcels”. It is this level of planning that Adams believes will ensure “stability for a much-loved product” and that should, with his advocacy, eliminate some myths around the achievability of the kind of liveable medium-rise density seen in cities such as Barcelona, making allowances also for housing affordability and diversity and placing a high value on vibrant amenities.

This Melbourne of the future will be a city that thrives off the back of its public transport corridors; a green, multi-functional city that does more to perform as a water catchment, and with streets that are transformed into “linear forests” through extensive tree planting, with suburbs acting as “new green wedges” between the corridors. It will be a city that saves billions by “building in the right places”.

The genesis of Transforming Australian Cities is a case study of Adams’ ability to put the right ideas into the right hands at the right time, as well as an example of collaboration with an ally in the form of the Victorian Department of Transport. In the case of the ‘city-state’ that is Melbourne, Adams acknowledges that the political conditions and unusual political relationship between the City of Melbourne, on the one hand, and the dominant position of the State of Victoria, on the other, have a huge influence.

Because the State holds the most decision-making power over planning decisions, Adams’ own role has evolved more towards being a relatively independent catalyst for change. “For me, it’s all based on knowing what level you’re most effective at”.

The published study, available via www.melbourne.vig.gov.au, states that while corridor development is not a new idea, the idea of linking it to a consolidation of a city’s fringe-contained suburbia is. Avoiding what are called the “hidden costs” of building at a low density of the periphery of our cities and shifting an obsession with large scale infrastructure investment to smaller distributed solutions, is core to what the study calls future city making.

As projected for Melbourne it is an approach that “relies on small investments at all levels of Local, State and Federal Government, with complementary private investment encouraged by government policy direction”. The conclusion reached is that “nothing less will resolve the current problems confronting us”.

So, who in New Zealand is listening?

Leading the way in urban design

In a career spanning three decades Adams has championed the arts, urban design and environmental sustainability for Melbourne – the city he adopted after first establishing himself in Zimbabwe. In 2007 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia for services to Architecture and Urban Design and was named last year as Kevin Rudd’s Environmentalist of the Year.

The City of Melbourne itself has a resident population of just 86,000 people, expanded every day by an influx of at least 750,000 workers and visitors. Over and above his brief for the City, Adams’ extended influence is based on a combination of how long he has been on the job coupled with the professional connections he has made and the respect he has earnt. This has come through his involvement, and that of the fee-for-service team he has built around him, in the successful delivery of a series of campaigns, projects and publications, including Postcode 3000, Places for People and now Transforming Australian Cities.

Adams says that significant credit for Melbourne’s transformation is due to the longer history of the work that people like Professor Emeritus David Yencken and former Victorian Minister Evan Walker exerted to put Melbourne ‘back on the map’. He says the ongoing driver for successful gains made by Melbourne is about having the patience to take an incremental approach or slow strategy, in which he describes his role as that of a ‘choreographer’.

Beyond seeking out sources of inspiration from leading figures such as Denmark’s Jan Gehl and relevant lessons from his travels, Adams isn’t a fan of thinking that puts too much emphasis on direct comparisons between cities, or that suggests ‘what works for one city will automatically work for another’. Rather he prefers to describe Melbourne as a work in progress, adding: “If we make Melbourne as good as we can and the people are proud of it, then other people will be proud of it as well. The challenge of urban design then is to make your place what it is on its own terms”.

This fits with a conversation held at the conference between Adams and the only New Zealand practitioner to present at the event, Auckland-based urban designer James Lunday, of Common Ground. Lunday’s contribution to the conference was to state that: “Before seeking out a place on the world stage, urban design in New Zealand has to find its feet on its own terms first. First and foremost, we need to climb the ladder on the results we achieve and standards we set here for ourselves in Auckland. And we need to do that by pursuing a design led future”.

Adams said he believed New Zealand already has a sound footing in the form of published work such as The Value of Urban Design and the urban design protocols that have emerged from the Ministry for the Environment, a body of work that is also being viewed as an ‘exemplar’ by the Major Cities Unit of Infrastructure Australia, headed by Dorte Ekelund who also presented at the conference.

Contributed by urban design journalist, Stephen Olsen Wellington. Stephen attended the 2nd International Urban Design Conference in Australia 2-4 Sept 2009

ENDS

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