Crystal Legacy

Transforming transport planning in the postpolitical era

The aim of this paper is to examine how the postpolitical era of planning has created both binaries and intersections in the reimaging of transport futures and how the latter precipitates a redefinition of democratic transport prioritisation. Focusing particularly on the point in the transport planning process when urban transport priorities are identified, the paper explores how citizens respond to the inherently political, yet not always democratic, aspects of setting transport investment priorities. This relationship is investigated through a single case study of Melbourne, Australia where a six km inner city road tunnel was deemed a ‘done deal’ by elected officials in the lead up to a state election, removing the controversial project from open public scrutiny. Drawing upon ethnographic research and semi-structured interviews with community campaigners opposing the proposed East West Link road tunnel, this analysis reveals how community-based groups and individual residents alike can evolve beyond NIMBY-focused agitation to garner a spatially dispersed re-politicisation of urban transport priorities. While the postpolitical framing of infrastructure delivery introduces a binary between state interventionist planning and citizen opposition, it is the mobilisation of action through the spaces of intersection where new political paradigms for transport planning are created.

Investigating the Knowledge interface between Stakeholder Engagement and Plan-Making

The ‘ideal deliberative procedure’ provides structure to the process of stakeholder deliberation, yet creates a tension with the formal processes of strategic plan-making. This paper examines process design by drawing upon communicative planning theory, and the rational comprehensive model and deliberative democracy literature. In the context of metropolitan strategic spatial plan-making, the aim of this paper is to examine how the knowledge interface between the process of stakeholder engagement and the process of plan-making enables or inhibits implementation of the plan. A retrospective study examining the development of two metropolitan strategic spatial plans: Greater Perths the Network City plan and Greater Vancouvers the Livable Region Strategic Plan is provided. It is revealed that the engagement of the planners, the public and the politicians occurs within formal stakeholder engagement ‘events’ positioned at different stages of the plan-making process. This paper reveals that the deliberation among the professional planners and the politicians at the process design stage steers the plan-making process in a manner that retains its legitimacy and creates a more implementable plan.

The Problem is the Solution: Testing Agonistic Theory's Potential to Recast Intractable Planning Disputes

Healthy community engagement must acknowledge conflict as a permanent and necessary part of collaborative planning. Using agonistic conflict in debating and deciding about site-specific projects and strategies offers new ways of reviewing and practising community engagement. Agonistic planning is conceived as a mechanism whereby interested parties might engage with planning decision-making that promotes on-going trust and buy-in for contested site-specific decisions and strategic directions. Disputes may produce opportunities for meaningful disagreement that may, if harnessed productively, avoid unproductive or even intractable disputes. Specifically, an agonistic approach offers an ability to modify and recast the initial ‘problems’ that urban projects are intended to address, and facilitates ‘better’ solutions sensitive to locally particular processes and contexts. The article tests key elements of agonistic theory using a high-profile planning dispute in Victoria, Australia. We show how an agonistic recasting of problems within legitimate planning processes is integral to meaningful engagement and progressive outcomes.

Achieving legitimacy through deliberative plan-making processes - lessons for metropolitan strategic planning

Deliberative democracy literature and the theory of “enlarged thought” posit that inclusive stakeholder engagement processes allow a broader perspective on planning challenges to emerge, increasing the legitimacy of metropolitan strategic plans. However, it is often argued that the knowledge that is generated through such processes is constrained by the fragmentation of the plan-making process. This paper examines the interaction between process design, enlarged thought, and legitimacy in metropolitan plan-making processes, using examples of engagement techniques from Greater Perth and Greater Vancouver. It argues that the unique knowledge contribution of the professional planner is vital to the development of enlarged thought.

Negotiating strategic planning’s transitional spaces: the case of ‘guerrilla governance’ in infrastructure planning

Strategic planning can begin as a deliberative and inclusive process of plan making, but then transition into a decisive and exclusive process of investment and priority setting at the stage of implementation. Citizens who once participated in the formal plan making process through government-designed engagement events fade into the background in this critical latter part of strategic planning. At this point they must invent avenues to influence investment priorities. In the context of bicycle infrastructure planning and delivery in Sydney, Australia this paper examines how strategic plans that embrace cycling as an important transport mode translate into decisions to commit to some projects over others. The paper explores four ways community groups seek traction in a highly contentious and transitional space of planning through a process we call ‘guerrilla governance’. Evoking aspects of advocacy and insurgent planning, guerrilla governance broadens how the term ‘governance’ is used within urban planning scholarship, by incorporating such ‘legitimised’ agitation from beyond government.

Planning transport infrastructure: examining the politics of transport planning in Melbourne, Sydney and Perth

Abstract Australian cities have observed a “consensus turn” expressed as broad public support of greater accessibility and public transport provision as revealed in metropolitan strategic plans. In contrast large-scale road projects proposed to traverse the inner-city of three major Australian cities reveals an ongoing and deep-seated attachment by some to car-based travel in Australian urban transport planning. Comparative case studies of these three road projects in Melbourne, Sydney and Perth explores the impact that an antagonistic relationship between the state and community has on the culture of transport planning. Through observational insights, policy and media analysis and interviews with community groups, we show that this antagonistic planning culture arises when there is a fracture between metropolitan strategic plan-making and project planning, and when clear channels of communication and deliberation are undermined.

Is there a crisis of participatory planning

The critical literature on participation warns that a focus on ‘consensus’ evades the political in planning, preventing citizens from confronting and challenging discourse and prevailing orthodoxy about the way the urban ought to be constituted. These critiques raise important questions about the efficacy of participatory planning and its political formation. Moreover, the extent to which citizen’s participation can ever challenge dominant trajectories has reached a point of conceptual ‘crisis’. In this article, I explore the different ways in which participation manifests from the politicising participatory moments in planning. Examining a single case study in Melbourne, Australia, I draw upon 15 key informant interviews with community campaigners who mounted a successful campaign to defeat the controversial East West Link road project. By examining the formal and informal political manifestations of participation over a period of 2 years, this article challenges the sentiment that there is a crisis of participatory planning. It shows how decisions to engage the citizenry in prescribed ways induce other manifestations and formations of citizen’s participation through politics and how these manifestations garner a pervasive and influential trajectory to reshape participatory planning.

The Factors Driving the Escalation of Community Opposition to Affordable Housing Development

Abstract Community opposition to locally unwanted development is not inherently problematic, but it can be destructive where conflict between proponents and objectors escalates. This paper relates mixed-methods findings from a Sydney case-study where opposition to planned affordable housing projects was widespread but uneven. Five factors are identified that escalated individual opposition campaigns in this case: public notification procedures; sense of injustice; prejudice; strong campaign leadership; and the involvement of politicians. We argue that these factors will likely also escalate opposition to the planned development of other forms of critical social infrastructure, and that an understanding of them can help minimise destructive conflicts between proponents and host communities.

Positive Planning and Sustainable Brownfield Regeneration: The Role and Potential of Government Land Development Agencies

Abstract State governments in Australia increasingly outsource the co-ordination and delivery of ‘difficult’ regeneration projects to state-owned land development agencies (LDAs). These LDAs were originally established in the 1970s with a strong redistributionist agenda, operating mainly to deliver low-cost residential land on greenfield sites. In the last 25 years, however, their roles have been redirected towards brownfield regeneration and they have been required to operate profitably. This paper uses the recent rise and fall of a powerful Queensland LDA to examine the potential of ‘positive planning’ in political contexts where governments wish to both limit their involvement in planning and achieve sustainable brownfield regeneration.

Critical Urban Infrastructure

The infrastructure age is upon us. Or at least that is the impression given as the task to address growing pressures brought forth by urbanization, under investment of social and public forms of infrastructure (e.g. social housing and public transport) and growing spatial inequality mounts. Big infrastructure projects are variously spruiked on the political stage, serving as lightening rods for community aspirations and frustrations. However alongside the mega-project national economic and security critical infrastructure politics and bluster lies the everyday nature of infrastructure that weaves its way ubiquitously through time, space and place. This is the taken for granted infrastructure that quietly co-exists in the form of digital technology, sewerage systems, energy, communications, global financial systems, food systems, housing, nature strips and urban tree programs etc. - until something goes wrong and human dependencies and vulnerabilities are painfully exposed.