Sustainable Urban Planning

attachment to cogent belief for those who would plan. They also illustrate the

extent to which local and regional planning has held a marginal position within

the policy framework of settler society governments.

The first Australasian context is from Williams’s (1985: 51)

data-based assessment of how well the local government plan-

ning system was working for New Zealand in the mid-1980s. The

local agencies he approached were asked at that time to describe,

along with a host of other questions on local government matters,

the main purpose of their statutorily required District Planning

Schemes. Only a handful of the 231 local authorities consulted –

all of whom replied – were able to furnish a response on this item

relating to ‘purpose’, a lack of response which predicated a lack

of planning belief. The second example arises from Ann Forsyth’s

1999 study of the massive Rouse Hill project in Sydney

(Constructing Suburbs: Competing Voices in a Debate Over Urban

Growth) further ‘exposing the rhetorical nature of planning’

pushed and pulled by market forces and the environmental and

governmental participants she styles as ‘middle-level, middle-class professionals

and activists’.

From Britain (Reade 1987: 84) there is an observation that ‘the consequences of

planning...seem to be very much out of line with those intended, and to be to

a large extent even the opposite of those intended’. Given the widely presumed

42 Principles

1 Providing public services to meet the general needs of the population (national defence,

education, health).

2 Investing in areas of community provisioning that are of little attraction to private capital

because of low rates of return, diffused benefits and the large size of the investment

required (mass transit, hydroelectric facilities, public housing, state-owned enterprises).

3 Subsidizing corporate interests to encourage specific actions (sectoral growth, redevelop-

ment, infant industries, farm acreage reductions, relocation of industry, employment of

handicapped) workers.

4 Protecting property owners and local business interests against the ravages of unre-

strained market rationality (land-use planning, zoning, anti-pollution controls).

5 Redistributing income to achieve a more equitable and just social order.

6 Applying comprehensive and coordinated planning approaches to problem resolution and

the development of potentials (multipurpose river basin development, comprehensive

rural development, growth management).

7 Restraining market rationality in the name of social interests (coastal planning, job protec-

tion, wilderness preservation).

8 Transferring income to the victims of market rationality (unemployment payouts and

worker compensation).

9 Ameliorating other dysfunctional consequences of market rationality (social and spatial

inequalities, business cycle aberrations, resource conservation).

Figure 2.1 Overall uses of within-nation planning

Ann Forsyth gives a five-

group listing of

proponents for

competing ‘visions of

good city form...[as]

... expansionists,
developers, scientific
environmentalists, local
environmentalists,
consolidationists’. Rouse
Hill as first envisaged by
developers and planners
has been scaled back,
modified and
constrained.