Who should be
involved in city making and how?
City making is
everybody’s responsibility. It is a civic responsibility and not just the
responsibility of the government, planners, architects, developers and builders.
It is a civic responsibility because we all have to live in or with what is
built in our neighbourhoods.
It is we who bear
the externalised costs of developments; we who fund the public infrastructure
or put up with its inadequacies; we who fund public housing and services for
those not catered for by the market.
For the last 10
years REDWatch has been engaged with planning in Redfern & Waterloo. We
have participated in Government defined consultation spaces as well as created
our own spaces for dialogue and campaigns, and pushed successfully for improved
community engagement and for outcomes that work for the community as well as
for government.
We recognise that
our area does not stand in isolation. How can it as part of the global economic
corridor and the next station out from Central? In Draft Metro Strategy terms
we live in an area where the NSW Government has been “addressing social
exclusion upfront to make an area more viable for urban renewal”(p34 footnote 8).
For us the Metro Strategy promises to support strategic renewal in this highly
accessible Central to Eveleigh corridor (p84). Not mentioned are the proposed
renewal of our public housing estates and the proposed removal of 1 in 5 public
housing units in Redfern Waterloo under a dubious “social mix” policy.
Groups like ours have
been involved in actively making our part of the city and we have to be actively
involved in the decisions about broader city-making also.
The problem for us
is how we participate more broadly when our membership mostly has day jobs and
all have limited time and resources. We do not have the option of sending
people off to industry functions and conferences where senior planning figures
talk about Government or international planning policy. We are not invited to
Government consultations about future policy. We are not part of the gossip
circles or professional associations of the planning system. We cannot pay
people to write our submissions and we do not have members who can afford to
pay lobbyists.
In short we are the
people who are last to find out about proposals, have to quickly analyse
lengthy proposals without briefings, educate ourselves about the issues, inform
our communities about possible impacts, listen to their response and then try
and respond intelligently in a written submission, and we are expected to be
able to do all this in four weeks with minimal resources! If we misunderstand
or do not agree we are labelled obstructionist!
Last year REDWatch
supported the establishment of the Better Planning Network which now counts over
350 community member groups across the state. It makes sense to us to have a “peak”
group focusing on the proposed planning system changes and then feeding back
this analysis into local groups rather than each of us doing it. It is very
early stages for BPN but we have to look at how groups are linked across the
state, regions and sub regions.
According to the Draft
Metro Strategy our prime voice informing the planning system will be in the sub
regional plan. We will be one of hundreds of groups trying to get their area’s
issues recognised in a plan covering 17 councils reaching from Hunters Hill and
Mosman to Botany and from Ashfield to Woollahra. This is a big change from
dealing with our local neighbourhood Government Authority and City of Sydney
Council.
REDWatch is one of
the lucky ones, in that we have been dealing with planning issues for years.
Spare a thought for what it means for Redfern Waterloo public housing tenants
who Housing NSW found very difficult to get engaged. Many don’t believe that a government
who can’t provide them with urgent maintenance and quite enjoyment of their
homes could ever get itself organised enough to redevelop their estates and
even if they did they say “Housing never listen to us so why would they start
now”.
So you begin to see
the huge challenge for government and residents that is coming in the new
planning system for NSW if community engagement is going to be put at the front
of this system. It has to work otherwise the screams at the back end when
buildings go up and people haven’t had a say will be politically loud and long.
If anyone asks me, my
advice is – don’t remove the ability for people to comment on DAs until you can
demonstrate code assessable development and regional strategic planning are
really working.
We all need to be
involved in this process of city-making in our city. There needs to education
about planning matters so we have an informed community to be involved in that
discussion. There need to be processes that really listen to community concerns
and explain back to the community what is being proposed in the plans and how
it will impact on them. Having heard people’s input there needs also to be
discussion so that, as far as is possible a community consensus emerges.
Community Engagement
has a bad name in Redfern Waterloo. We have been over consulted and seldom
recognise what we have said reflected in the final report. Community engagement
will need to become a facilitator of community voices and ideas, not a filter to
give proponents what they want to hear.
If we can do some of
this then hopefully we really can have all citizens creatively involved in the
making of our city.
Source: Geoff Turnbull REDWatrch Spokesperson 18//4/2013. This presentation was also reproduced by the South Sydney Herald
Making cities, building communities. You can see the presentations from this panel under People Building Better Cities on the Faculty of Architecture Thursday Night Lectures page.