The Sydney Metropolitan Strategy/excerpt of address delivered by John Mant/ 1st Sydney Futures Twilight Symposium
June 1, 2006
Reading the Plan one is reminded that the great advantage of Sydney is its geography. And the main problems of Sydney are its geography and its governance.
The Sydney Metro Plan is not a strategic plan but an end state land use-zoning plan with a list of issues on which there should be further work. What is the difference between a strategic plan and an end- state plan? A Strategic Plan identifies objectives or outcomes to be achieved if the weaknesses and threats in the way of achieving a Vision are to be addressed. It then goes on to suggest the strategies and actions that need to take place to achieve the necessary outcomes. An End State Plan provides a snapshot of the land use pattern for some date in the future – 2031 in the case of the Metro Plan. An end state plan is achieved by making population projections, picking the most likely and then finding the land on which the projected population could be housed and employed. When the planning exercise commenced the Reference Panel and the then Minister said that the output of the Metro Strategy would be a Strategy Plan not an End State Plan. As it has turned out, it appears as one of the most exact End State Plans ever produced. There are exact looking targets for housing accommodation and job distributions allocated to comparatively small areas for the year 2031 – not 2030, which is a round number, but 2031, which is exactly 25 years away and sounds very authoritative. Now, we all recognise that it is hard for a government to do a strategic plan, but the extent of end statedness of the Metro ‘Strategy’ is extraordinary. And the exactness of the predictions! One problem is that it is not clear how much land must be rezoned to meet the targets. There is a suggestion that the high-end targets should be used. Given that much of the demand is to be supplied on land on which there is already urban development, and that therefore not all land that is rezoned will be built on, will Councils have to rezone 10% more land than is needed, 20%, or 50%? And if they don’t rezone considerably more than is needed, will not the land that is rezoned become very valuable, given that the owners will have a monopoly on supply? If affordable housing is an objective, then considerably more land should be rezoned than is needed. And if a true cost recovery is achieved, to what extent should development be staged as against responding to market forces?
For full paper, click on link below
The Sydney Metropolitan Strategy
The new City of Cities metropolitan strategy is probably the most comprehensive planning strategy that Sydney has had since its first strategy over fifty years ago. It has, or has set in motion, an old-fashioned level of planning detail that recent strategic planning around the world has forsaken. New employment zone locations, hierarchies for 1,000 old and new shopping centres, new urban sector structures, subregional dwelling targets, and more give the strategy an almost heroically detailed pathway for the government�s intended future for Sydney.
But there is a danger that the mass of detail seduces us into thinking that, therefore, the strategy has thought through all the issues facing Sydney and planned for them. What are the challenges facing Sydney over the next 25 years? Does the strategy fail to properly plan for these challenges? Sydney is a special city with its own distinctive challenges and problems that need creative planning in association with the right political will to overcome them. I will argue that the City of Cities strategy, while having a number of worthy features, nevertheless falls short of the framework the city needs to maintain its liveability.
For full paper, click on following link
Is the ‘City of Cities’ strategy the answer for Sydney?
In welcoming you to this series on the future of Sydney, I wish to recognise the long history of this place, and pay my respects to the Eora people, on whose land we meet today.
In conjunction with the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, I am very pleased to be able to open and chair the first of this symposium series. In a desire to stimulate a comprehensive debate among its citizens about the future of our city and its region, the University of Technology Sydney, the university of the city, will present six twilight symposia focusing on critical issues in the city’s future. The symposia are held every six weeks or so, with the final event a free public forum 2 weeks out from the March 2007 state election.
Each symposium will be addressed by leading figures in the field, planners, advocates, academics and social critics, who will identify and analyse the issues and look for solutions. There will be time for questions and comments. The collected papers will be published by UTS e-Press through the TFC occasional papers series; there will be a series blog. The series will be podcast. I would particularly like to thank our sponsors and partners in this series, the Transforming Cultures research centre at UTS, the Western Sydney Organisation of Councils, Sydney City Council, the Local Government and Shires Association, and the NSW Council of Social Service.
The context for today’s symposium is that broad brush plan recently released by the state government, the Metrostrategy, a document and a process that seeks to draw the parameters for the next 25 years, and address the challenges to what the state government has called “Australia’s only global city”. In addressing these issues we are fortunate that the government’s planners have provided so much information about their assumptions and goals, and that so many people have already contributed to the debate.
However it has not been a process without controversy, some even challenging its claim to be a strategy at all. Today we have three participants in that debate- John Mant a member of the now defunct Metrostrategy reference group and well known as an adviser to governments and as a planning commissioner, Bob Whitehead a journalist and commentator, and Glen Searle an academic and planner in the DAB faculty.
