Urban Broadcast Collective

In this episode of This Must Be the Place Liz and Laura are joined by Monash Urban Planning and Design students Lachlan Burke, Sylvia Tong and Will McIntyre to share perspectives on whether and how urban planning can work across borders. They first talk about MAPS (Monash Association of Planning Students); how they gravitated to studying urban planning (from biology, environmental engineering, development studies and philosophy); and the upcoming MAPS 2019 Festival of Urbanism Commuter Race including how a MELWAY (the iconic street directory) will help with navigating it. (Note: the Festival took place in September 2019). Lachlan and Will then reflect on lessons learned across their planning studies and the international development projects they’ve been involved in, from Midigami (Sri Lanka) to Mongolia. Lachlan discusses two aid projects he’s been part of in Sri Lanka, including post-tsunami housing reconstruction in Midigami - the subject of a presentation by Sri Lankan researcher Dr. Rangajeewa Ratnayake at this year’s Festival of Urbanism. Will shares insights from a lifetime of exposure to cross-cultural and interdisciplinary development projects, including those that formed his father’s work for the Asian Development Bank. It was while working on green infrastructure projects in Mongolia that Will first became interested in the broader scale and context of urban planning -“I realised you need to know how the city works in order to be able to implement anything”. The episode reflects on the challenge of development projects maintaining long-lasting outcomes. For example, new elevated housing built outside of tsunami buffer zones suffer longer-term from water pressure issues. Wells dug without adequate hydrological analysis (or evaluation) suffer from repeated contamination and collapse. Across the examples run questions of accountability and evaluation, and the need for greater community ownership (versus issues of donor fatigue). And the borders of communication and translation, broadly understood – how to bridge planning words and knowledge across languages and cultures, and across disciplinary boundaries. “There are different ways of doing things that we’ve never considered, and you’ve never considered, but let’s work together to discover those”. Mentioned in this episode: • TED video about public spaces that was Sylvia’s motivation to study Urban Planning: https://www.ted.com/talks/amanda_burden_how_public_spaces_make_cities_work/transcript?language=en • Engineers Without Borders and human-centred design: https://www.ewb.org.au/blog/implementing-a-human-centered-approach • Planning Institute of Australia members and academic subscribers can access this paper by Ian Woodcock documenting a local example of interdisciplinary and human-centred planning for railway station design: Woodcock, I. (2015) The design speculation and action research assemblage: ‘transit for all’ and the transformation of Melbourne's passenger rail system, Australian Planner 53(1), 15-27, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07293682.2015.1135818 • Festival of Urbanism- Donor-driven Tsunami Housing in Sri Lanka: Resident Outcomes and Experiences: http://www.festivalofurbanism.com/2019/2019/9/2/donor-driven-tsunami-housing-in-sri-lanka-resident-outcomes-and-experiences • Festival of Urbanism- Quick MAPS: Monash Association of Planning Students Commuter Race: http://www.festivalofurbanism.com/2019/2019/7/29/quick-maps-monash-association-of-planning-students-commuter-race .

This episode of This Must Be The Place is a bit different – normally I talk to people, but in this episode I (meaning Liz Taylor, Monash University) actually just read out an essay I wrote recently about my experience of living in a building with combustible cladding. Also about reading Kafka (and David Graeber) and…well that’s the basic premise. I’ve called it Trial by Cladding. Please note – facts in this essay are as of around July 2019. A more recent (October) updated version of this essay and the cladding situation is on the Sydney Review of Books: https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/trial-by-cladding/

In this episode of PlanningxChange, Tim Eaton, Executive Director of Regulatory Standards, Assessments & Permissioning at the State of Victoria's Environmental Protection Authority is interviewed about current issues. These are many. In recent times, environmental issues have been constantly in the headlines, with a recycling crisis, chemical warehouse fires, distrust of government agencies and the general concern at the impacts of a rapidly expanding population. Tim speaks of the need of the EPA to have resolve and be seen primarily as a regulator. There is also the need to provide guidance and in some cases education to local authorities, industry, planning decisions makers and the general community. The EPA has been in existence nearly 50 years (commenced operations on 1 July 1971) and in this time there have been massive improvements in air quality, water quality and general amenity levels (ie. noise, odour etc). Tim speaks to the new environemnt provisions currently up for debate which some see as being too vague, broad and onerous (the burden of proof test, vague definitions about wellbeing including mental well being etc). Tim makes the case that these provisions suit the times. In the interview issues such as 'nocebo' are discussed, that being the stress caused by thinking of potential health issues. In a world where bad news headlines fill the community with dread, it is worth recognising the great environmental standards now achieved in first world nations and the expectation that these standards should be enjoyed by all on the planet. The interview throws up interesting facts such as there are 20,000 littering reports made by the general public to the EPA each year. Or that one hundred years ago, 1 in 4 deaths in the USA were attributed to contaminated water. The interview was recorded in front of a live audience (a first for PX) at the VPELA Conference held in Lorne late August 2019. Our thanks to VPELA for the invitation. For more details about PlanningxChange podcasts go to www.planningxchange.org. Interview released 16 October 2019.

In this episode, Jess Noonan and Peter Jewell of PlanningxChange interview Sophie Jordan, a Melbourne based town planning consultant running her own small practice. Sophie has considerable experience working across the public and private fields. She brings a new perspective (from the small end of town) on the challenges and opportunities associated with contemporary city development. Questions include, has planning policy kept up with the great societal changes that have happened in the last 30 years. Also, how does a small practitioner balance life/work pressures.

In this episode Jess Noonan and Peter Jewell of PlanningxChange interview one of Melbourne's most inspirational urban designers, Orlando Harrison. A professional with a good knowledge of the past and an over the horizon view of future opportunities. Inspired by classical thinkers such as Aristotle and on the other extreme the science fiction writer Phillip K Dick, Orlando blends a nod to tradition with a view that 'the future is our friend'.

McIntyre Australia was founded in 2016 by husband and wife team Ned Scholfield & Racquel Boedo. The pair first started to think about creating their own fashion wool label after spending a year working together on Ned's family farm 'Glenoe' in western Victoria. A compelling story of farming, passion and fashion. There are unusual links between fashion and city development; this PlanningxChange podcast interview provides clues on how dynamic forces can create better products, environments and places. It also makes a compelling case that old traditional industries can be reborn and that such fresh changes have highly beneficial outcomes for rural and regional areas. As an aside the pair also talk about urbanism in Europe and how this can be transferred to Australia.

"In every instance ... the user is paying. They're either paying by getting up early, by walking much further, or they're paying in frustration in looking for the perfect park and there's a time penalty you can translate directly into dollars”. Who pays for transport, and who benefits from it? In this episode of This Must Be The Place, Liz is joined over lunch by transport researchers Laura Aston, Nicholas Fournier and Knowles Tivendale to discuss equity in transport pricing. Lunch isn’t free, but getting around sometimes is – or at least it seems to be, for some people. Talking tickets, tolls and time are Laura Aston (http://publictransportresearchgroup.info/our-team/research-students/laura-aston/): a PhD Candidate from Monash’s Public Transport Research Group. Nick Fournier (http://publictransportresearchgroup.info/our-team/staff/nick-fournier/) is a research fellow at PTRG who recently moved to Melbourne after finishing his PhD at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, on multi-model travel decision making and equity. Knowles Tivendale is Director of consulting firm Movement & Place (https://www.movementandplace.com.au/), and a lecturer and associate of PTRG. Why was congestion charging successful in London but not Manchester? Why was congestion pricing so appealing in Stockholm that the public voted for it at a referendum after a successful trial? Why do Melbourne’s toll-roads differ in their model of who pays? Are transit users the only beneficiaries of public transport infrastructure? The episode ponders the principles and practicalities of how mobility costs and benefits are distributed, and what this might mean for Colac (a town that, for some reason, comes up a lot). Re: parking, Knowles suggests “there are times when the demand is so light that free access is fine…but when things get very congested, that’s clearly a time to ration the resource”. He questions whether rationing parking based on availability in time (rewarding those who get up early) is the best way to ensure fair access to the train network. Regarding CBD congestion, Nick suggests “you can move 1000 cars per hour per lane..if you’ve got more people than that moving through, then they probably shouldn’t be in cars, they should be walking”. Nick also brings a US perspective, highlighting some surprising differences in the way the US funds highways, contracts public transport, manages congestion and deals with commercial vehicles. Nick argues transport pricing needs to be nuanced, offer alternatives and “not just gouge people”.

Design with confidence (Koos de Keijzer). Melbourne based architect, Koos de Keijzer talks with PX of the changing professional environment for architects and the challenges to create better citzen and residential outcomes within urban areas. He talks as a practising architect with offices in Australia, New Zealand and Vietnam. The interview discusses the golden rules of architecture, the benefits of experimentation and lessons learnt from past large scale urban design projects. An internationalist, Koos draws experience from both European and Asian urban places.

Clarksdale Blues & Resurrection (John Henshall). Melbourne economist John Henshall has a long term romance with the Mississippi delta town of Clarksdale. The birthplace and inspiration for many blues legends (and playwright Tennessee Williams), Clarksdale fell on very hard times, its great blues heritage all but forgotten. The resurrection of the town as a focal point of blues heritage, the associated pride in place and economic revitalistauon is detailed in Hensall’s recently released book 'Downtown Revitalisation and Delta Blues in Clarksdale, Mississippi: Lessons for Small Cities and Towns’. The book and the events leading up to the author’s romance with Clarksdale are outlined in the podcast interview.

In this episode of This Must Be The Place Elizabeth chats with Professor Carolyn Whitzman, on the eve of Carolyn winding up her 16 years at the University of Melbourne. Carolyn will now be heading back to Canada, specifically to Ottowa (“like a Canadian Adelaide”). In the episode she explains how being an academic was her second career, after working as an activist and ‘femocrat’ on violence prevention programs in Toronto. While her early contacts with Melbourne were as part of a campaign against an Olympic bid (“Bread not Circuses”), after completing her PhD and morphing into ‘pracademic’, Carolyn eventually moved to Melbourne to take up an academic position. Here she reflects on some of the themes in her research, teaching and projects in that time - which have been broad ranging but which have tended to centre on ideas of rights, marginality, and inclusivity. This episode focuses more on Carolyn’s work on affordable housing: on reasserting housing as a basic need or right, versus its role in wealth creation and inequality. She discusses working with housing developers and with their perceptions of how to adapt different models of affordable housing provision to the local context. There have been some projects and innovations that have cut through – for example a recent Launch Housing project of modular housing on a road allowance, and developments using airspace above parking lots. There is a slowly expanding understanding of what “good intensification” might mean. The challenge, Carolyn suggests, is how to scale affordable housing up – this an area where Canada offers some precedents, for example in Vancouver’s not for profit alliances, and the federal-level Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. Carolyn hopes that her move to (and third career reinvention in) Ottawa, as it expands both its light rail system and its affordable housing sector, might mean “getting a little bit closer to the ideal of what an equitable and inclusive city would be like”. But there’s also much to take back from Melbourne, perhaps more so its public spaces and design culture, than its often-absurd transport and housing inequalities. Carolyn suggests that Melbourne doesn’t necessarily meet (and indeed sometimes is losing), “the preconditions for a decent life” but says that “I’d love everyone to be able to benefit from this beautiful city”. As well as being about rights to the city for diverse groups, more broadly the episode is about the challenges of change, and the fear that goes along with it. Also discussed: community participation, matching growth with planning and infrastructure, trust in government (lack thereof), cat fud and the far side, parking (versus football ovals = clash of titans?), Vancouver (Canada-lite), the idealism and motivation of students (versus the realities of exploitation and politicians that usually awaits them), public transport, Point Cook, federal government roles, planning schools, expertise, and generalisations about national anxieties. Note/apology: the episode is recorded in Carlton’s Kathleen Symes Library and Community Centre and has a fair bit of community background noise in it.