Podcast & Transcript: A Post Growth Approach to Urban Planning with Michael Buxton

"It's really a disturbing that a government like the Victorian government, [...] repeat parrot-like the Property Council Mantra that there hasn't been enough dwelling approvals in Melbourne and in the state, [...] yet their own reports showed with graphs that was a false narrative. Their ultimate aim really, is to remove citizen interaction and involvement and local government involvement in decisions over the future of a city. And this is completely incompatible with the democratic ideal. It's a very authoritarian model. It's designed to remove us, the citizens, from deciding and contributing to decisions about the future of a city." [...] This is wrong, but it's happened, and it's a well worked out, well, planned approach, that the governments in Australia, particularly the Victorian government, which is the most authoritarian in the country, have adopted. It's a very worrying trend. (Prof Michael Buxton, Planner.)

 

Transcript of Interview

[Note that the concluding remarks by Michael Bayliss, right at the end, have still to be transcribed, but the entire interview with Professor Buxton is transcribed below. Please allow for human error.]

MICHAEL BAYLISS: Now, this episode is seminal for you Mark, because this is the first time you've exclusively hosted an interview. 

MARK ALLEN: It's my big moment, and I'm going to make the most of it! I'm going to milk it for all I've got!  

MICHAEL: And it was on a topic very close to home for you too, on planning and urban planning.  And I think the way we organise and build our towns is very crucial to the post growth and degrowth movements, in part because the construction sector is so closely aligned to the growth base model. 

MARK ALLEN: Land use planning is critical and that's one of my big criticisms of the overall environmental debate. It's all about emissions and keeping fossil fuels in the ground - which is all absolutely crucial, we mustn't underplay that - but the way we plan is so, so, crucial because there's 40% of emissions - and I talk about this later - 40% of emissions, actually are involved in development. And then the way we plan also determines the emissions of the future. Do we plan communities that are walkable that are close to public transport? Do we build houses that are resilient and robust? Do we retrofit our existing buildings and respect the embedded carbon within them? These are all huge issues that are integral to creating a sustainable, low-carbon world. And one of the things that I do is, I try very hard, through town planning Rebellion, to remind people that town planning land use planning in general needs to be Central, to our overall discussion and our overall approach, to solving the multiple limits to growth crisis we're facing. 

MICHAEL: And a good thing that you're not just on your own advocating for this, Mark. We recently received a report from planning democracy based in Victoria who Kelvin Thompson chairs and Kelvin Thompson is a Statesman who we've both worked with very closely over the years and it drew attention to the fact that the Victorian state government is rolling out housing density requirements for local councils. So, in many councils across Melbourne, they're required to double the number of dwellings, and so the arguments, of which will be explored throughout this episode, is that it's undemocratic because residents and councils can't have much control about at what point they stop growing. Now, the report from planning democracy, the newsletter, also notified of two OAMs Order of Australia awards, that went to, not only Mark O'Connor,  who was a founding member of Sustainable Population Australia, but also to our special guest, Michael Buxton, who was awarded on the King's Birthday, the OAM, for significant service to Urban and environmental planning, to tertiary education, and to the community.

MARK: Yes, interviewing Michael Buxton was a real joy. I have always looked up to him and learned so much from him, and it's really good to know that we have such a distinguished planning professor who actually questions the growth for the sake of growth mantra and really understands and gets it about how the planning system really is right now in place to accommodate a neoliberal growth-based system that has no exit strategy. 

MICHAEL: And so, for me, it was, it was just wonderful to be able to talk to him and, um, yeah, great privilege. So we'll have a delight in listening to your conversation with Professor Michael Buxton and then we'll be back after the interview to touch base further. 

INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL BUXTON by MARK ALLAN  August 14th, 2024.  

MARK: Hi Michael, welcome to PGAP. Thank you so much for being here. So, Michael Buxton, is, I quote one of Melbourne's most respected and outspoken planning experts, who taught for two decades at RMIT University, before officially retiring in 2018. He also spent 10 years lecturing at Monash University and another 12 years in the public service, including the Environment Protection Authority. And Michael, you've literally taught thousands of students. And, unfortunately, I wasn't one of them because I studied planning at the University of South Australia, so I never got to go to one of your lectures, which is a shame. 

How involved are you with planning these days? I mean, for example, does the media still approach you to comment on important issues? 

MICHAEL BUXTON: I'm still truly involved. I'm an honorary professor at RMIT still. So, I'm still associated with the university and I do a lot of media work. I do a lot of work with Community groups. There are hundreds of community groups really heavily involved in planning and transport issues in Melbourne. And also in Regional groups, in regional planning and protecting rural land area. And I still write and publish in professional journals and newspapers. So, too involved in a lot of ways. 

MARK ALLAN: Yes. So, not a complete retirement, then, you know, it still sounds like you're very busy. 

MICHAEL BUXTON: No. I'm waiting for retirement to start, so ...

MARK ALLAN: It's great. I mean, it makes me happy to hear that you're doing that because you're a really important voice on a lot of issues around sustainable planning. So that's, that's really, really good to hear. I mean, one of the big issues of today is, of course, that we have a housing crisis. And so, the dominant narrative is that we have to build a lot more houses. Because of this, there is a lot more pressure to cut what's so-called green tape or red tape and really prioritize getting buildings up as quickly as possible. 

But do you think that with this sort of narrative, we've neglected important issues around design and the robustness of new developments in the rush to get as much stuff built in as quicker time as possible? 

MICHAEL BUXTON: Yes, we've really succumbed, I think, to a false narrative. It's a narrative that's been pursued by all governments in this country and of course, by the property industry. 

And it basically goes along the following lines, that we don't have enough housing, and we don't have enough housing because local councils haven't approved enough housing developments, and local councils haven't done their job because a whole lot of selfish NIMBY residents are stopping them from doing their job. 

Now, all three of those elements that are false. 

All over Australia, there's been more than enough housing approvals in the existing suburbs, as well as in the new growth areas on the fringes of cities. In fact, in Melbourne, for example, there's been double the number of multi-unit dwellings built in the middle ring and established suburbs. As there has been in the really dense, high rise inner the suburbs. Councils actually have approved more developments than are needed. And most residents are not against development, but what they are against is the type of development that's occurring, and in the the places that it's often occurring in, which are pulling down Heritage and degrading the environment. 

And they're very concerned about the inadequate quality and the sameness of development. There's been far too little housing affordability and far too little housing diversity, you know. So, in Melbourne, for example, the dominant housing type has been apartments, medium-rise and high-rise apartments. They tend to be uniform in style. They're really not catering for diverse housing needs, and they're quite expensive for what you get. 

So that's a false narrative. It's a really dominant one that's been foisted on the Australian community by successive governments in league with the property industry. So it's not doing Australia proud.

MARK: do you think that we need to change zoning laws? Because, you know, I can walk down a street and I can see beautiful Heritage houses and then I can see some post-war fibro Bungalows, a few doors down and think, oh well, okay, that's that's where you might want to put the medium density, just there. You could build a couple of nice town houses there and replace those and then you'd incorporate the Heritage building into the street and protect that. 

But with zoning, it seems to be just like a blanket. Everything's up for grabs. It doesn't matter how beautiful or how old the building is, or how robust it is. Do you think that zoning should be more complex, inclusionary? So that they look at the Heritage, the embedded carbon within buildings, and ensuring also that there's an affordable housing elements into it? 

Because from my own experience of living in share houses, in Melbourne, we've we've lived in share houses that are then demolished and they replace those share houses with apartments, but the people who lived in those share houses are not able to afford to live in those apartments. So they're pushed further towards the fringe, and adding possibly to the sprawl issues. So do you think that there needs to be a reassessment about the way we approach zoning in general?

MICHAEL BUXTON: Not necessarily zoning. Um, we we did a study a few years ago at RMIT that looked at the current zoning laws in Melbourne, for example, and we did a calculation of how many more dwellings could be fitted in to the established Metropolitan framework, you know, the established area under those zones. And we found that you could easily fit several more million people into the established city under the current zones. And that's exactly what the government is trying to do. Its trying to fit two or three more million people into Melbourne, but their solution is to the problem - the false narrative they've identified is to get rid of zoning basically, to override existing zoning provisions, and open up the planning approvals process, so that developers decide what to build and where to build. 

So the problem that we are, that we talked about earlier, the government solution is to remove as many planning controls as possible to try to liberalize the system even more than it has been. 

We must remember that most Australian current planning systems are very liberal in the sense that they really have reduced over the past 20 years, consistently reduced, the number of prohibitions and regulations. So, it's become deregulated systems on the whole, and the government wants to fully deregulate that in Victoria, and other governments are working from the same template. 

MARK ALLAN: Yeah. And with the terms of affordable housing, do you think that we are getting enough affordable housing into the mix or do you think we need to do more and more public housing, and do you think that should be incorporated into developments? Perhaps more public private partnerships to ensure that there is that affordable element? 

MICHAEL BUXTON: We're not getting enough affordable housing. I think we're not getting, really, any affordable housing in many jurisdictions. And the reason for that is that we've got rid of the regulations! 

MARK ALLAN: Yeah. 

MICHAEL BUXTON: So, far from getting rid of a regulated planning system and freeing up more zoning, we need better regulation. 

So, for example, if you look In many American cities, for example, California, there are mandated, affordability targets. For new developments, 20 25% mandated and often there are there are height controls. So developers know that in developing a particular site they have to reserve a certain proportion of affordable housing units. And it's generally considerable [? inaudible] 25%. 

But in Melbourne, what's happening is that freeing up the zones have passed the development approvals process, in effect, over to the development industry, so that they get what they want. 

We look at the central city of Melbourne, for example, the government brought in a pretend regulation, a plot ratio, in fact, they liberalized the system and they provided no mandated affordable, housing targets. So what developers have done is built higher and higher buildings, 50 60, 80 story towers, with no affordable housing provision in those Towers. 

So they've profited mightily from a liberalized or deregulated system by basically being encouraged to speculate on land and then to build ever higher. So they get a higher and higher return without giving anything back to the community in the form of affordable housing. So, the answer to affordable housing is not freeing up the system even more than it has been - and it's been considerably deregulated. And that's the property Council narrative, that governments have have mouthed. 

But the answer is regulated, affordable, housing targets that have to be met in all new apartment construction. And what happens then is that developers price that in to the whole process of development from land assembly to returns from all sorts of other costs that they have. Profits are slightly less but we get a much more diverse, affordable and useful product.

Now, this happens in many parts of the world but it's not happening here. 

So if we look at the central city of Melbourne, from 2005 to the current time, if there had been a 20% mandated affordable housing Target, which could easily have been met from, you know, the massive high-rise component - there's no question about that. It would have just meant slightly less profits. 

But if that had been mandated, we would have had 40,000 affordable housing units in central Melbourne - and that hasn't happened. We don't have any.

MARK ALLAN: A lot of the issues that I talk about always boil down to this terrible situation, we're in now, which is neoliberalism on steroids, which is all about deregulation, deregulation deregulation. And it just keeps coming back and hitting us hard on the head every time and I guess one of the big issues is that the Property Council have a huge influence on the governments. 

We've got to really wrestle our democracy back because it's turning into more of a corporatocracy, now isn't it? Where we just end up with this situation where the big vested interests, like the property Council, get to hold the narrative. 

MICHAEL BUXTON: Well, it's really a disturbing that a government like the Victorian government, and other governments too around Australia - but if we just take the Victorian government - if they repeat parrot-like the Property Council Mantra that there hasn't been enough dwelling approvals in Melbourne and in the state, and yet their own reports from what used to be a research branch until they abolished it - but their own reports showed with graphs. Yeah. Really detailed figures using ABS figures that there was a false narrative. And yet the Premier -  even yesterday, the new Premier, Jacinta Allen - came out yesterday, and said that some suburbs were being locked up still. And they haven't been locked up, there's been enormous growth in the middle ring suburbs in in Melbourne, and in many other cities in Australia. They haven't been locked up. But, you know, premiers and and political leaders keep repeating this false narrative.

There's been really substantial growth on the ground and, and what's happened recently in this country, is that development numbers have fallen. And that's because of the property industry. It has got nothing to do with residents or councils. It's because of problems in the property industry have led to fewer approval applications. 

They can't get enough labor, they can't get the finance. There are supply chain problems, and so on. So, in the last two years, approval numbers have dropped. That's because the development industry is applying for Less approvals. And the ones that have been approved, many are not being constructed because of property industry issues. 

They've got nothing to do with the process of approvals and yet governments are wedded to this neoliberal idea, this deregulation idea, and they just keep repeating it.

Their ultimate aim really, is to remove citizen interaction and involvement and local government involvement in decisions over the future of a city. And this is completely incompatible with the democratic ideal. 

It's a very authoritarian model. It's designed to remove us, the citizens, from deciding and contributing to decisions about the future of a city. 

This is wrong, but it's happened, and it's a well worked out, well, planned approach, that the governments in Australia, particularly the Victorian government, which is the most authoritarian in the country, have adopted. It's a very worrying trend.

MARK ALLEN: it really is. And I've noticed that government figures use the NIMBY term as well as a way of just shutting down nuanced conversation around, you know - so that to me it's like if the public try to have a say, you kind of shut down with words like, 'Oh, you're a NIMBY,' and that kind of thing. I've been called a NIMBY and I've been called a YIMBY. So I'm happy that I've been called both. I've been called an NIMBY for trying to protect Heritage buildings in my local area, and I've been called  a YIMBY for trying to get more medium density going on in Albany. As I said before, Albany itself has got a huge number of poor standard fibro Post-war Bungalows, that are being badly maintained. 

But there's no incentive for people in Albany to subdivide and work to create medium density development because it's just so much easier to get large rental dividends, because we have this housing crisis. I'm just wondering how we can kickstart more medium density, especially in regional towns. Because another thing that the government like to push is, oh, you know, we can accommodate population growth by having more people going into Regional towns.

But you look at Albany and we've got a lot of sprawl going on. We're actually campaigning at the moment to protect some bushland from development and it's the worst kind of sprawl. You've got your low density houses with three garages eating into Bush land, while you've got all of this potential in the center of town to create some really good quality Urban Design and it's just not happening. 

I was wondering whether or not, you think there should be more like public-private partnerships, so that maybe the government can help support people to to subdivide and do really decent medium density where it's needed. 

BUXTON: I'm not too sure about private partnerships - public-private partnerships as a solution. They can work, and there are many different models. 

Basically I think the solution here is to adopt a different democratic model of decision-making, one that used to apply in this country. 

Every city is different and every - to some extent - and Regional towns and cities are different again, they have different problems. But what you've described is happening in New South Wales, Queensland, and Victoria. 

For example, if we go to the regional towns and cities in Victoria, they're now developing beyond the traditional boundaries in in typical Suburban development that you would find in the outer suburbs of Melbourne. They've just been transplanted almost, so that you get detached houses five, six km, often, from the city centers, and there is no public transport, no services, there's no retailing.  People are dumped there in these standardized housing units, often quite large, but totally dependent on cars and separated, basically, from the town. 

There is a lot of room within town boundaries, generally speaking, in the way you've described through sensitive redevelopment or infill. When we look at these towns and we, we've done the research in Victoria through RMIT, we've found in some of our big Regional towns like Ballarat and Bendigo, which are now becoming quite large Regional centers - There's a there's a great deal of undeveloped land in within the traditional town boundaries but that's ignored by the development industry. The development industry just go and buy land on the fringe - broad acre land - because it's easy. They have a development model but they just roll out, unthinkingly. They make money from it. And it's a bit more difficult to actually go and find these places, within the town boundaries. They're there in many different forms, but you have to have a different building model. 
You have to have perhaps a range of housing types from, in the cities, in the town centres, to low rise apartments in the right places for example, to townhouse attached housing in other areas - small, large, medium, denser, housing, again, matched, very explicitly, to the heritage and environmental demands of the surrounding streetscapes. 

But all this can be done. It's done in many parts of the world, but it's easier for the development industry to just go and buy a lot of land on the fringe and not worry about trying to get a much more diverse and useful housing product close to where all the services are.

So this is happening everywhere. And one of the reasons is that governments in this country generally don't do Regional planning well. 

In many parts of the world there is strong regional planning and network city. So you have your regional centers linked to the main metropolitan area by high quality public transport. Whenever Australians go overseas, they see this working very well. But we don't have network cities. We don't have a regional planning tradition. We simply push most of - or all the development to occur mainly in the capital cities where now over two thirds of the Australian population live in five capital cities. 

This is highly concentrated and it's getting worse. So again this just comes back to the need for planning; for government intervention to stop this model of allowing the development industry to decide all these questions. 

This is not right.  This is a proper role for government to take. A they're not doing it. Their solution is the one that the Victorian government has adopted: to take away controls, to remove the planning system, or fundamentally alter it, to so-called 'free it up,' to allow the development industry to do what it likes.

Now, that's no solution, because it's going to lead to the wrong type of development in the wrong locations, to the detriment of the future functioning of a city and to the citizens. 

MARK ALLAN: And also, on top of all of that, of course you've got the the relatively poor standard of development and the fact that we're building housing, that's only going to have a shelf life of a few decades. 

To me, that's outrageous. When you think that, you know, development in construction is 40% of all emissions. From a climate change perspective alone, when you look at the fact that we are simultaneously losing the embedded carbon in many buildings that could be retrofitted, and then we're replacing them with buildings that are only going to have a shelf life of a few decades. When you look at the terrible carbon Legacy and the wasted emissions that we we're just burning up in poor standard car dependent development. 

Do you get frustrated as a planning professor that town planning isn't more Central to the climate change debate?

BUXTON: Yes, it's very frustrating. We're not only building the wrong type of buildings but we're building them very badly. You know, in our big capital cities, particularly the eastern cities, Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane - but particularly in Melbourne - we have two models of construction high-rise and medium-rise apartments primarily in the established city and low density sprawl on the fringe, fundamentally based on detached houses. Very poor planning, either type of dwelling.

So that we're building these outer-urban housing developments with massive numbers of people moving into them.  And they're very poorly planned, with dedicated houses separate from town centres with shocking public transport, very few jobs.

They're not going to be great places to live, and they won't be great places to live as energy prices go up and the planet starts to heat up further. 

So - and the same applies to apartment construction. 

So, when we look at apartments in this country, a very high number of them are built so badly that they have fundamental faults that need rectification not too soon after the occupants move in - at great cost to the occupants.

And this is causing tremendous anxiety and tribulation to many, many apartments buyers and home occupiers. 

So this all relates to, and arises from, deregulation. 

So the building sector was the really the first element of the Planning and Building process that was deregulated, and it began back in the early 90s in this country. So, governments tended to remove, in most states, local government from the approvals process and outsourced approvals and monitoring of quality to the private sector.

That inevitably has led to a shocking standard of construction. I think a lot of the buildings that we build will have to be pulled down within a generation.

It just highlights the the problems of deregulation, and the only solution to this is for governments to re-enter the process and to start doing their jobs. 

MARK ALLAN: Is there any sign of that happening? And I mean, for example, I know there's a plan to build the outer suburban, metropolitan Loop. 

Now, on paper, that sounds like a good idea. You're getting more public transport to where it's needed, but that will also be a conduit for, I imagine, transport orientated development, medium density development, in Melbourne. 

Do you think that there's any hope that the that the government could re-enter the fray and improve standards of development before we see, you know, this big building boom of apartments along the  the new Railway line. Do you have any optimism? 

BUXTON: None whatsoever! What's happening with that model is government is re-entered the fray, and what they've done is adopted what's been called internationally, a model of authoritarian decentralization. That is, governments come in and they take control of the process to free up the planning system and then to hand it back to the developer, hanad it to the development industry. 

So they become authoritarian in the sense that they, they rewrite the rules as a central source of power, and then they hand a 'freed up system' so called, to the development industry to do what they like. 

Now, in that case of the city Loop, the government in Victoria is modifying that slightly. So, what they're doing is they've identified these huge precincts around the city loop stations. So the city loop is a circular railway going through the middle ring suburbs of Melbourne.  

It's going to be 90 kilometers in length. Nobody believes it's all going to be built. They may build the first stage from Cheltenham to Box Hill, with half a dozen stations, but the area around the stations is then taken out of the control of local government and the communities. 

And the government is determining what can go there, in in a very general sense: height controls, and so on. 

So the government itself has a vested interest in higher-rise, development and more expensive housing in those areas because it needs to to capture the value increase in the land from this process, to the tune of a third of the total cost.  They estimate at $35 million. It's more likely to be $50 million for the first stage, and between over $120 million for the lot, probably closer to $200 million. 

So the government has a vested interest in allowing the development industry to build higher and higher developments because that increases the price of the land, and the government gets a bigger stake from the rezoning and the increase in the value of the land, through the value capture process. 

So that's a shocking contradiction and a conflict of interest! But the government model, yes, it's been to intervene in an authoritarian way, but it is intervening to gain the worst possible built form outcomes. 

It's handing back the actual process of building these and the final decisions to to the development industry. 

The really other worrying thing about this is much of the work is being done by consultants. 

So, even though the government is finally going to tick off on these approvals, and senior ministers have laid down the framework, that is, more money back from the the value capture,  and they've set these conditions, so -

But it's 'consultants,' - that is, the private sector, who are doing most of the authoritarian planning. And then ultimately, of course, it's handed to the development industry, with communities and local governments being locked out. 

Now, you might think this would be a model that would be suitable to an authoritarian regime in China, for example. But it it's most unsuitable in the democracy. 

And that's what we're being slugged with. 

But there have been really interesting models in the past. I mean, Perth, for example, back when it started its inner city intensification back as early as the 90s, and around the turn of the century, built really high standard, quite dense, attached row-housing type construction - three stories often - but really high quality, really well put together, with the interesting streetscapes - a major example of the beneficial infill to a city. 

And they really began well, and did - I think - set a model. And they tried to improve the standard of their outer-urban development too, by mandating, originally offering an option to developers, but then moving towards a more rural-focused higher density, and better design of suburbs, better linked to public transport. 

So I think Perth did a lot that was a model, but unfortunately over the entire country, you know, this this other model has been gradually, relentlessly, become dominant.

MARK ALLEN: And of course, I mean, it's true what you say about Perth, but it's also continued to sprawl terribly. And when you look at the population of Perth and the amount that it sprawls, it's probably 1 of the worst examples in the world and it's continuing to to rapidly sprawl. 

And I guess when you live in a growth based society - especially one that demands ever increasing population growth - good quality densification, I guess, is only going to delay sprawl to some extent.

Here at post-growth Australia, our focus is on creating a system that, among other attributes, will allow Australia's population to stabilize at around 30 million. Not by being anti-immigrant but by making it so that we don't have to grow our population in order to create a standard of living based around GDP, and to focus putting our resources into proactive mutual aid. Do you think that there needs to be more conversation around acknowledging the fact that planning, for the most part, is really about accommodating growth and that we do need to work towards a leveling-out of population and a steady-state way of being?

BUXTON: Yes. I mean I grew up with a planning system that wasn't entirely based on planning for growth. It was based on providing high quality living environments, protecting the natural environment, and achieving really beneficial functional outcomes for the way people lived and worked and interacted, and got around. 

And it's extraordinary how, over time, particularly this century,  the narrative again has moved to 'Planning has to cater to growth.' And that that is the dominant narrative. 

I mean it's one that The Victorian government, for example, is obsessed with. It's the only way you can describe it. They're obsessed with it, and they will go to any lengths to try to cater for growth, but in the worst way possible. 

So, what we're finding in Melbourne and in Victoria is that all our systems are being degraded because of the incredible pressure that growth is placing on them. 

I mean, just this week,  the health system is under tremendous fire because not enough money is being made available to maintain quality health services, and that is because of growth. 

I mean, growth has meant that governments simply do not have the money to do things like build an incredibly expensive, new transport system in the city Loop, *and* to provide health care, proper education, and all the other services that people need and expect. 

So, it's an illusion that successive federal governments support because, without growth, we would now be in a recession, without doubt. They're able to say that we're still not in a recession.

And then that growth then becomes an end in itself. Growth is never is never an end in itself, but it's become an end in itself to prop up the economic indicators. But at great cost to the standard of services that governments clearly cannot meet, because of the impact of the growth on demand for them. 

This has crept up on us in the 90s and then it hit us in the early 2000s and it's now utterly dominant in this country because of the high rate of immigration. 

Unless we get on top of this, we're going to find that our cities are going to be totally dysfunctional. The service levels are going to deteriorate even more with terrible social consequences.

The disparity in income, for example, is a really major issue in this country now. People are finding it hard to make ends meet. Increasing numbers of them are seriously affected by not having enough to live on. 

Part of the problem is housing, but it's also the cost of living. 

So unless governments can find a way to limit growth, and to then build up the level of services, and to learn - as many many other countries have done - to live within the parameters of a population, a stable population, then everything is going to get worse. And this is the great worry that I have. 

I was brought up in the 60s and the 70s, when nobody questioned the belief that everything was getting better. There was this confidence, this expectation, that we would all own our own houses, that we would all get better educated, or proper source of income and live happy, productive lives.

And gradually, that belief is now being eroded a dramatically. Not only by international trends and events, economic and environmental, but also by the way, governments are fundamentally unable to stop growth. 

They seem addicted to it, and it's going to cause terrible problems over the next generation or two without doubt.

RESTART HERE

MARK ALLEN: And without a doubt. And this is why we think we need fundamental systemic change towards some form of post-growth society. We can do so much working collaboratively with our friends abroad to create really good quality, decent sustainable communities, and we can learn a lot as well from other countries.

We're reaching a stage now where we're reaching the limits to growth on multiple levels and I think things are going to change rapidly whether we like it or not. 

BUXTON: I think that idea of collaborative planning is critical. So, the way forward in this country is for governments to adopt-  what is now a new level of government of governance - but it is really just reinventing previous systems of governance that worked very well, and that is to adopt a collaborative approach between residents, government, the development industry, and local government in particula, to work out what buildings can go where, what are the most appropriate type of buildings in the most appropriate locations. 

This is not rocket science. It's done all over the place, but not in Australia because the people, the citizens, are seen as the enemy, under the dominant narrative that the governments have adopted, but unless we can go back to a collaborative approach and treat people as they should be treated, as citizens with rights and wonderful knowledge. I mean, we're talking here about a broadly-based citizenry with wonderful expertise, knowledge, interests and skills, and ideas!

So many planners and so many people in governments regard citizens, as ignorant, and a problem. They're not! They're the solution! 

And in my experience, I work with hundreds of groups, and these groups uniformly come up with workable solutions, to the problem of housing for example.

And I have seen this work in many places where a collaborative approach. where you get people together, and they work on simple answers to this question, what type of buildings are appropriate in the most appropriate locations? 

And then we get back to what you began, which is we figure out ways to protect heritage, to gain high quality environments and to protect what people most value, which is amenity. 

By the way, amenity and heritage have enormous economic value to a community. Let's not underestimate that when we see politicians uniformly jump on planes every chance they get and go over to visit European cities, leaving the cities that they come from behind to be pulled down and turned into unlivable places. 

Amenity matters and amenity matters economically. It matters to identity, it matters to health, and it matters to quality of life. So, these solutions are there, waiting for governments to recognize the best governance model to achieve them, and that is to bring all the players together and figure out how we can maintain the highest possible amenity and quality of life, fundamentally protecting what remains of our heritage values, while doing our best to cater for the growth pressures that are on us for the moment. 

But ultimately we have to move towards a steady state economy and take lessons from the countries that have worked out ways to do this. 

But unfortunately at the moment, that's not where we're at. And only citizen pressure - in a democracy, people have to stand up for their rights. They have to protect their cities. They have to save what needs to be saved, and work towards a future, which is best for them, and their children. 

And if we don't do that in the democracy, then, we're letting ourselves down. And we have to hold politicians to account now, to meet demands, and not just to the property industry, but to the citizens who elect them. 

MARK ALLEN: That is a brilliant place to finish. Thank you so much, Michael. We really, really appreciate it. It's been a real joy talking to you. 

Thank you. Thanks very much for the opportunity. 

MICHAEL BAYLISS: Welcome back to PGAP. Mark, just spoke with our amazing special guest, Professor Michael Buxton. Well done. Mark. Thanks Michael. 

 

STILL TO TRANSCRIBE:

I learned a lot from that. It was a great interview. It's interesting because just recently I've been - and you've actually been helping as well. We've been campaigning to try and reduce urban sprawl here in Albany, in a country town and for us since . And as Michael talks about how we sort of tend to replicate outer Suburban development in our small towns and I did some inquiries because it's a big land release going on near me, and it's very, very close to a shopping center. There's a supermarket within walking distance. And I assumed that at the very least there would be incorporating some town housing, some medium density development, you know, to create at least some level of walkability but it's all low density. 700 square meter blocks. Oh, what a surprise? You don't I think we're in Regional Western Australia. It's just really depressing because it's hard enough seeing all this beautiful Forest being lost, but then to see it being lost to the laziest. Least. Short-terms. And, you know, planning is a 4 year degree, I'm sure the planners who were involved in that must have known in their hearts of hearts that there are better better Solutions than that. But there are disempowered to do anything because the system that planners are working in is not open to bottom up influence or feedback, we just become we go to UNI, we learn all the all the clever stuff and then we just become poor and the neoliberal Machine like like so much else. Like all my, every other profession to 1 degree or the other, the growth based system just sucks up. Everything sucks people's dreams and career aspirations. It does. And then, as Michael talked about, uh, the standard of development is also incredibly poor, so it's also a double whammy. We're not only losing habitats to new development, But that's of the worst kind, we then find out that this development is only built to last a few decades. So all that embedded carbon all of those emissions going into building these houses. It's just going to be for a few, a few decades. And in Melbourne, in particular, some of the apartment blocks, as Michael was discussing within a few short years of them being built, They're um, becoming so Irreparable that in some cases the the go-to is to actually pull them down and start again I would absolutely hate to be someone purchasing a a brand new unit off the plan in a Melbourne development. Um it's just uh it's just a really another really bad reflection of where we're at. Yes. So I remember when we lived in, uh, Melbourne and all that high-rise issues coming into the media and I once joked that, um, you know, the standard of building of Apartments is so bad that not even Spiderman would fight crime there. You know, the webbing would just go into the fixes and then slip off. That's right. It'd be like a health and safety issue for him, you know. Um, screw fighting Dr. Octopus. They're a bigger problems. They're not. That's right. If that's Spider-Man's already a bit peeved with Melbourne because it was originally been named after a man called Batman. I mean, it's a true story, superhero thing. It's a true story. Um, it was going to be named after a guy called John Batman, who was the European colonists to yeah. And by colonists standards he was um I mean being yeah he was a very controversial figure as you can imagine. Um so I'm very glad they didn't name him after Batman. But uh, yeah. So there we go. Spider-Man doesn't want to fight crime in a city that was almost called Batman due to 

Standard of building. So we sorted that 1 out what a funny. Our world in a funny old planing system, you've got to find the humor in it. Haven't you somewhere laugh or cry? Yeah, laugh or cry? Yeah, no. Thank you all so much for uh, listening to another episode of pgap. And uh we always try to bring in the often overlooked urban planning issue. And uh, if you want to hear more episodes on this theme or others, please contact us with your feedback. And as we're a word of mouth, uh, based podcast, we don't rely on Advertising. Um, please share this episode widely with your networks. It would be really, really appreciated it would it would and until the next time until then,