FENNER CONFERENCE ON THE ENVIRONMENT

Joined-up planning: Reality or a pipedream?
Dr Darryl Low Choy

Darryl Low Choy is an Associate Professor in the School of Environmental Planning and the Urban Research Program at Griffith University, Brisbane. His research interests include collaborative regional planning and management, regional landscape and open space management, peri-urban and rural planning, the role of local government in environmental and natural resource management, and the relationship between science and planning.

Darryl is Griffith project leader of a major national study examining peri-urbanisation in rapidly growing regions. Previously, he was the project leader for the Environmental Planning and Natural Resource Management project of the Coastal CRC.

During 2005 he was seconded to the Office of Urban Management (Queensland state government) as a specialist technical advisor in the preparation of the South-East Queensland Regional Plan. He currently chairs the Queensland State Government's Regional Landscape and Open Space Advisory Committee associated with the SEQ regional planning initiative. He is also a member of the Gold Coast City Council's Growth Management Advisory Board.

I have been asked to case-study south-east Queensland (SEQ) and the regional planning initiatives going on there, but I would like to do that in the context of some of my research, which is really about how to improve the process of planning, particularly at the regional scale and in a strategic sense. So I want to use the term 'joined-up planning'. It is pretty obvious what I am talking about, but I would just like to focus on that in the context of south-east Queensland consistent with the theme of this conference.

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What I would like to do first of all is to look at the imperatives for an integrated regional approach, using SEQ as a case study.

I would then like to describe the SEQ regional planning model as it has currently evolved. It has got some issues that I want to take up, in terms of its disjointed fragmentation processes.

I will then look at the concept of a regional landscape framework, and make the connection with water through that concept. What I am talking about here is a paradigm that we have embraced wholeheartedly in Queensland and people yesterday were starting to debate this issue which is what in the planning fraternity we call values-led planning. It is a relatively new paradigm to be put into practice. Queensland has embraced it, as I said, through its statutory planning process, which is called the Integrated Planning Act (IPA). This is a values-led planning approach, and so too is the regional planning process that is now being used in south-east Queensland.

Lastly, I would like to give you some of my current thinking about a way ahead to improve this regional planning process that we have already embarked upon.

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First of all, the imperatives for a regional planning approach: you see here south-east Queensland. I might add that this is one of the largest regions in the world, if not the largest, that we have ever tried to plan. It is 2.2 million hectares, it is 250 km north to south and 160 km east to west, it has 18 local authorities, and 83 per cent of that landscape is freehold title. So, unlike a lot of other regions in Australia, there is very little government tenured land left in this region, particularly in the environmentally sensitive areas that is, coast, riparian zones, ridge escarpments and the like.

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The institutional maze across this region should not come as any surprise as it is repeated elsewhere throughout Australia and in the Western world. There are 18 local councils, designated by the purple lines; four ROCs, regional organisations of councils, designated by the red lines; and the coloured background designates the five collective catchments that we are trying to do some water quality planning over. There is also one planning region and there are two natural resource management (NRM) plans across that region at the moment. And there are probably in excess of 13 state government agencies trying to exercise some managerial control under various pieces of legislation across that region.

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I will just quickly run through these separate regional initiatives. There is the Regional Trails Network; there is one of the two NRM plans for the region; there is a Rural Futures Strategy done a few years ago, which is still existing; there is the Regional Water Quality Management Strategy done in 2001, still existing; there is a Recreation Demand Study; there is an Integrated Regional Transport Plan; there is a Regional Landscape Values Plan; there is a Nature Conservation Strategy; there is an Economic Strategy for the region; there is a Koala Conservation Strategy for the region; there is a second NRM plan for the region; and lastly I am running out of breath here there is the draft (which is now final) Regional Coastal Management Plan. So I hope I make the point that at the moment fragmentation across this region, in particular, is quite extensive. The issue is how to start to bring these isolated plans and strategies together.

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We have embarked upon a regional planning process, started in 2004. The idea to date, with all of these stand alone, discrete, separate documents out there, has been to try to find some way to bring them into this regional planning process. That has only been partly successful to date.

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The other imperative is shown by this graph. Brisbane City's population growth since the end of the Second World War, projected up to 2026, is shown on the bottom line, and then we have the metropolitan region, which equates to the Australian Bureau of Statistics Brisbane Statistical Division. If you look at the region that has really been planned since the Second World War, you see it is a combination of the Brisbane Statistical Division and the Moreton Statistical Division, which is the orange line, second from the top. But, in the last regional planning exercise, Toowoomba City, which is part of the Darling Downs region, said they wanted to be part of this region the same as Tweed Shire saying it now wants to be part of this region. I haven't got time to go into what is going on here; I'll let your imaginations run wild on those matters.

Communities of interest: the region we are planning for now is the blue line. The point is that they are all showing consistent trends upwards. You can where all the nick points are on those graphs, and if you were to graph out when planning exercises occurred, you would find it's always after those nick points, after the population growth had already commenced. Therefore, the point I am making is that planning to date has been reactive rather than proactive.

The other point I would make about that graph, very quickly, is this. Look at the flat line in the 1970s and 1980s for Brisbane City. People were talking here yesterday about putting on population caps. Brisbane City never publicly said it had a population cap, but through its very planning policies it inadvertently did have one, and there is the proof. Again that is a story for another time, I guess.

To describe the current regional planning model: we evolved from a voluntary collaborative regional planning exercise which started in 1990 and went through to 2003. So we have tried regional planning, but in a voluntary collaborative sense. There was no compulsion on the partners in this process to actually implement anything.

For various reasons, we moved to a statutory collaborative planning process in 2004. That is the current process that I now want to describe.

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The current plan identifies a number of areas not zones, but areas. It has actually put down an Urban Footprint, shown by the pink line. That is the Urban Footprint and an urban growth boundary. Within that, it accounts for the current residential areas plus urban areas for the next one million people up to 2026, plus a 10 per cent growth factor on top of that. The green area, the 83 per cent balance of the region, is known as the Regional Landscape and Rural Production Area. These are terminologies that you are not likely to see in any other regional plan at this stage; nevertheless, this notion about a regional landscape and rural production area has been well and truly recognised although, as we have noted, planning until recently has been heavily focused on the urban environment. It has been largely urban planning, to the detriment of what was happening in the non-urban areas.

The orange areas here are the Rural Living Areas a line was drawn around where all the rural residential has occurred over the last couple of decades and then the plan actually says that in the green area the minimum subdivision size is 100 hectares. So, essentially, future rural residential development in that green area is now prohibited, with the exception that a lot of the cadastre there has already been surveyed below 100 hectares. But that's another story again.

The yellow areas are the Special Investigation Areas that the Regional Plan identified but that could not be parcelled into either the Urban Footprint or the green area at the time the plan was done. That work is ongoing.

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There are 12 policies in this plan, and the two that I want to address today are in the rural and regional landscape and open space group: policy no. 3, regional landscape, and policy no. 11, water management. The other six are identified there, just to give you some idea about the breadth of the policy content of this plan, starting with policy no. 1, sustainability. Right up front, sustainability is acknowledged as a key underpinning set of principles behind this plan.

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The way it works is that we have got, for the first time ever, a statutory regional plan. So it does give direction as well as guidance to lower levels of planning.

The 'new boy on the block' in planning circles is the Local Growth Management Strategy read into that 'local government infrastructure plan'. It gives direction to the statutory plans that were already in existence and that had to be modified, reorganised, to be consistent with the Regional Plan if they were deemed inconsistent. So we have got the local government IPA schemes the statutory town plans. We have also got the mandatory local government Corporate Plans that every council has to produce each year. And that is all being guided by the statutory Regional Plan.

It also guides state government agency plans, would you believe. Again that is a big step forward, to actually align the various state government agency planning exercises with some overarching regional plan.

And it makes provision for structure plans for all new greenfield developments. So no developers can just do part parcels of developments in the various areas; there is a structure plan required now and it is then assessed against the Regional Plan.

So that is the intent. The other issue here is that for the very first time ever, there has been a direct link between infrastructure planning and land-use landscape planning. I think this is the big step forward. The process is far from perfect, but at least it is a process that starts us on the right path toward making those crucial linkages.

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The Infrastructure Plan is produced annually. It is a whole-of-government infrastructure provision. It is a 20-year program that is reviewed and updated annually, and it is linked to the budget and planning process. So here we have got infrastructure leading development at least, that is the theory.

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The other thing I want to point out is that a very broad interpretation has been made of infrastructure. If you accept the definition of infrastructure as 'government expending public funds to improve the quality of life of a community', it embraces the traditional physical infrastructure of roads, water supply, sewerage and the like, social infrastructure hospitals, schools and the like but now also environmental infrastructure. That is another big step forward in terms of getting recognition of the need for environmental infrastructure to maintain a quality of life in a region, particularly one undergoing rapid change.

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So the whole Regional Plan process has got an adaptive management component built into it, or an adaptive management framework. We go from the vision (as in most plans) to the values-led component which I mentioned before, to the desirable regional outcomes and the various policies, then you go into a monitoring and evaluation phase, and there are some sustainability indicators now identified. These are what are being monitored and reported on through the State of the Region Report, which then feeds back to modify the policies.

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It works like this. The legislation says that this Regional Plan will be reviewed every five years. Each year there is a regional Infrastructure Plan, and that is repeated annually. There is a State of the Region sustainability indicator baseline report, established last year, so we have got the baseline. (Admittedly, it is based on existing information and there is a need to now gather a whole raft of other information that was never collected previously.) There is monitoring and evaluation, and then next year there is a State of the Region Report, which is in time to actually feed back to the second version of the Regional Plan in five years' time. And of course there is ongoing monitoring and evaluation.

Out of the Regional Plan, as I mentioned before, comes guidance to the Local Growth Management Strategies for the 18 councils in the region; there is structure planning for large land developers, public and private; and there is also provision for Regional Plan amendments in that process. One has already been done.

So that is the cycle of this approach, getting away from linear planning into cyclic planning with an adaptive management framework built in.

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We can pick up that values-led approach through the regional landscape, as an example. This refers to all that green area that I mentioned before, the 83 per cent of the region which is designated Regional Landscape and Rural Production Area.

To conceptualise that: you see there the coastline; the Regional Landscape and Rural Production Area is the yellow and yes, it does go, according to the Queensland legislation, three nautical miles offshore, so it is land and water; and we have got Urban Footprints identified around the major urban centres, with inter-urban breaks identified; we have got our inter-regional landscape links identified, and then the regional landscape values: cultural heritage, outdoor recreation, rural production, nature conservation and scenic amenity. They are essentially the main values that are embodied in this notion about the regional landscape.

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Where they come together they can be identified spatially as landscape character areas, or as Core Landscape Areas. And then there is a link through the whole system of terrestrial and aquatic landscape corridors.

So that is the concept that is currently being put into practice.

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The regional landscape is a finite resource and it performs a number of functions, as I have identified here. I won't go through all of those but they are obvious. And as they are a finite resource, there is heavy competition in place there.

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In terms of the multiple functions that the regional landscape performs, it is a protective landscape, it is a working landscape, it is a supporting landscape, and that is where the infrastructure the water supply comes in, for supporting the urban area. It is a leisure landscape, again largely supporting the leisure/outdoor recreation requirements of the urban population. It is a viewed landscape, it is an inhabited landscape, it is an indigenous landscape and it is an imagined landscape. And the point I make here is that it is a 'contested' landscape.

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Water in the regional landscape: well, you see here Ebenezer Howard's Garden City plan from 1899. It should come as no surprise to you that he identified that there had to be limits on cities. The centre city had a population limit of 58,000; the satellite cities, 32,000. There was also this 'open space', what we now call the regional landscape, around it. And, surprise, surprise, he had provision for water for each of those settlements.

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Water is a limited resource, but that is what has to be managed.

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If we have to maintain liveability, the regional landscape performs all those functions: a conservation function, mental health function, physical health function and so on. (I am running out of time so I am sorry, I will have to skip a bit of this.) In performing those functions, it makes a contribution with other functions outside the regional landscape to what I call the regional quality of life, and the regional quality of life in turn determines the liveability of the region which is what is driving the population there in the first place.

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These are the values that require protection: biodiversity, water quality, water quantity, good quality agricultural land, scenic amenity, nature-based outdoor recreation, cultural heritage and ecosystem services, which is just emerging.

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If I can encapsulate what I call the regional landscape and open space paradox, it goes something like this. The downward spiral of a region's liveability results from population growth. That is the result of the pull effect of the region's popular landscape and open space attributes. So the positive influences of the regional landscape bring in population, which leads to a demand for housing, new greenfield developments, a loss of open space and landscape quality, a decline in the region's quality of life, loss of the region's favourable liveability status, and a decline in the region's popularity.

We must intervene in that process. Planning has to intervene. If you want to intervene to maintain the quality of life, you intervene early in the process. And that is where environmental infrastructure kicks in. If we don't intervene in that process at the top, then we get to the bottom right-hand box.

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I will just quickly sum up the way ahead.

Do we take a statutory or a voluntary approach? That is the big question. We have gone for an 'in between' approach, but it is basically a statutory process.

What degree of embedment do you put on all the individual, isolated plans that are out there, as I showed you earlier? How much connectivity should there be with the main Regional Plan?

And can we get scientific support for the community values that we have already assumed in this planning process?

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This slide shows the regional planning process that I have mentioned before, giving guidance and direction to state agencies and local government. At the moment we have got a raft of water, or water-related, planning initiatives sitting right outside the process. And there is an attempt to bring them in somehow. The mind boggles; it will never happen under current arrangements.

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In the case study I am using regional landscape and water we need a regional landscape strategy, and it has got to bring in these isolated elements. (Again I am sorry, I have run out of time to explain these.)

A future water strategy is required for waterways and catchments, and it has got to bring in all the obvious elements noted here.

And then we connect those parts through the current regional planning process, which has to have regional water issues driven into that process, right into it. And then within that process we address the landscape strategy and the water strategy.

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We have got to utilise the landscape planning approach in statutory planning statutory planning can't be divorced from landscape planning, as it has been and is being; we have got to refine the community values, and that is based on science; we have got to embed the separate regional planning initiatives; we have got to heavily renegotiate the collaborative regional planning approach that we have taken; and, lastly, we have got to instigate institutional reform to accommodate these proposed initiatives.

Discussion

Question: What I am interested in is actually your last point, in the fact that values could be scientifically ascertained, and the contestability of those various landscape functions. In a sense, you can talk about them in planning; they are really the issues of politics, they are the issues of real estate all the big hard issues. How do you actually resolve those? Can that be done bureaucratically?

Darryl Low Choy: Well, if I can use the example of scenic amenity, here we are acknowledging that that is a component of the landscape that needs protection. So how have we gone about that? We have actually gone through an extensive, whole-of-region assessment with the community about what 'scenes', if you like, they hold dearly and they want protected. That has embraced a sample population of about 4000 respondents across the region.

Now, that gives us a fairly safe ground to understand the types of scenery that they want some protection on, and that they are prepared for the government to pay for because it doesn't come without a cost. So we are basing policy on that sort of science. That's the science that I'm talking about.

In the case of water quality, we know what the science is telling us, in terms of achieving a certain standard of water quality. It's a question of whether or not the community is prepared to pay for that, or prepared to go for a lesser quality and put that money into some other initiative.

So, again, those surveys need to be done. And they are being done.