ATS2547: Cities and Sustainability

Week 7 Urban design and planning

Melbourne
Dr. Erin Castellas, RmW814
 Recap last week

 Questions?
 Field trip
 Please fill out consent forms emailed to you:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe-
LeEBs2He2uBX65y02mewKiGcrlukiHZMUoUTIVek3onkWQ/viewform?c=0&w=1

 Tuesday 2 May
 Itinerary on Moodle—depending on your group, you will meet your
group leader at a specific time
 Fitzroy walking group
 Docklands tours—MUST BRING PHOTO I.D.
 Ceres

 Own transport

 Bring a notebook or something to take notes; mobile phone to do

some self-guided research

 Sensible shoes, lunch and/or money for lunch if you think you’ll get
hungry, water bottle, hat, sunscreen, jacket (if weather inclement)
 Fitzroy
 Inner suburb to the northeast of the
CBD, about 3km outside the city
centre
 City of Yarra
 One of Melbourne’s smallest and
most densely populated suburbs
 100 ha
 We’ll observe and research the fairly
recent history of urban renewal and
gentrification as we walk around the Background reading:
streets and stop to do some self- •http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-06-
directed research and note taking 10/photos-capture-fitzroy-in-melbourne-
before-trendification/6502218
•https://www.domain.com.au/news/an-
upandcoming-suburb-can-do-your-head-
in-20140215-32sw1/
 Docklands
 200 ha waterfront urban renewal
development for 20,000 residents
and 60,000 workers, began in 1997
and due for completion in 2025
 Criticised for a range of planning
problems and some have labelled
the precinct as “soulless”
 Also hosts some of Melbourne’s most
green buildings and more recent
developments have prioritised social
cohesion and community building
(e.g. Library at the Dock).
Background reading
•http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/can-
docklands-be-put-back-together-again-
20120302-1u82a.html
•http://www.propertyobserver.com.au/finding
/location/vic/26766-oct-11-news-
docklands.html
•http://www.victoriaharbour.com.au/news-
and-events/news-and-events/news-
docklands-library-to-be-melbournes-most-
sustainable-civic-landmark
•https://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/Commun
ityServices/CommunityFacilities/LibraryAtTheD
ock/Documents/Library_at_The_Dock_sustain
ability_fact_sheet.pdf
•http://www.environmentdesignguide.com.au
/pages/content/cas--case-studies/cas-48-
water-sensitive-urban-design-in-the-
melbourne-docklands--wetlands-storage-and-
reuse-system.php
 CERES
 CERES – Centre for Education and
Research in Environmental Strategies, is a
not-for-profit, sustainability centre
located on 4.5 hectares on the Merri
Creek in East Brunswick.

 CERES was established in 1982. Once a

desolate wasteland, today CERES is a
place of nature and beauty, inhabited
Background reading
by a vibrant and diverse community. http://ceres.org.au

 Technology demonstration Please download the ‘Chook’ app

from Ceres prior to arriving:
https://ceres.artpro.net.au/
 Permaculture and Local food networks

 Social enterprises
 Fieldtrip (15% assessment)

 800 word report due 5pm, Friday 5 May

 Choose one of the sites and write about the sustainability issues you
observed at that site. What sustainability principles are ‘at stake’ at
your chosen site and how did you observe those to be important?
What sustainability tensions or paradoxes does this site represent?
What trade-offs are being made on this site in sustainability terms?

 Marking criteria:
 Ability to connect real-world examples to concepts of sustainability
 Ability to discuss tensions and paradoxes of sustainability in relation
to a real-world context

 References not required but draw on the content of the course

What we will cover today
 How have cities changed over time

 Planning in Melbourne…how has our city been shaped?

 Guest Lecturer: Shaun Schroter, Architectus

How have society and cities
changed over time?

“There is a myth, sometimes widespread, that a person need only do

inner work, in order to be alive like this; that a man is entirely
responsible for his own problems; and that to cure himself, he need
only change himself … The fact is, a person is so far formed by his
surroundings, that his state of harmony depends entirely on his
harmony with his surroundings. “

Alexander, C. (1979) The Timeless Way of Building.

New York: Oxford University Press, 109.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKnAJCSGSdk
Industrial Revolution
(mid 1700s to mid 1800s)
City Beautiful
(late 1800s to early 1900s)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FUwwP2un
TQ
 City Beautiful
(late 1800s to early 1900s)
 Urban landscapes and architecture that are magnificent, orderly and
clean to nurture the mind and soul of society

 Grandiose icons of the urban elite

 Societal message: people should be civilised in harmonious social order

“Daniel Burnham, designer of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago,

proclaimed that beauty itself could reform society and conjure new virtue from citizens. His
showpiece was a model city of gleaming white Beaux Arts monuments scoured clean of
any signs of poverty. For the rest of central Chicago, Burnham proposed a City Beautiful:
an overlay of grand avenues and elegant buildings that would restore to the city ‘a lost
visual and aesthetic harmony, thereby creating the physical prerequisite for the emergence
of a harmonious social order.’”

Montgomery, C. (2013) Happy City: Transforming our lives through urban design Penguin Books Ltd. pp.
23-24.
 Howard, E. (1902) Garden cities of tomorrow. 2nd Edition, S. Sonnenschein & Co. Ltd., London.

Garden City
(1900s to 1920s)
Town Country
Closing out of nature. Social opportunity. Lack of society. Beauty of nature.
Isolation of crowds. Places of amusement. Hands out of work. Land lying idle.
Distance from work. High money wages. Trespassers beware. Wood, meadow,
High rents & prices. Chances of forest.
employment. Long hours, low wages. Fresh air. Low
Excessive hours. Army of unemployed. rents.
Fogs and droughts. Costly drainage. Lack of drainage. Abundance of water.
Foul air. Murky sky. Well-lit streets. Lack of amusement. Bright sunshine.
Slums & gin palaces. Palatial edifices. No public spirit. Need for reform.
Crowded dwellings. Deserted villages.

THE PEOPLE
Ebenezer Howard’s vision Where will they go?
of cities free of slums
Town-Country
where the benefits of both Beauty of nature. Social opportunity.
town and country can be Fields and parks of easy access.
enjoyed. He sought to Low rents, high wages.
Low rates, plenty to do.
balance individual and Low prices, no sweating.
community needs in the Field for enterprise, flow of capital.
context of a capitalist Pure air and water, good drainage.
Bright homes & gardens, no smoke, no slums.
economic system. Freedom. Co-operation
 Garden City
(1900s to 1920s)
A utopian model of open
spaces, public parks, radial
boulevards, self-sufficiency,
community ownership.

A few Garden Cities were

built (e.g. Letchworth in
1903, Welwyn in 1920) and
the concept inspired
suburban development,
with green belts to control
urban sprawl.

Reality did not live up to the

ideal though; residential
suburbs comprised of
individually owned homes
and people still needed to
commute to larger centres
because local industries
could not provide sufficient
employment.

Howard, E. (1902) Garden cities of tomorrow. 2nd Edition, S. Sonnenschein & Co. Ltd., London.
 Modern City
(1920s to 1970s)
Inspired by technological advances and mass-
production techniques modernists (such as
Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier)
imagined that “cities could be fixed by
rebuilding them in the image of highly efficient
assembly lines. ‘We claim, in the name of the
steamship, the airplane and the automobile,
the right to health, logic, daring, harmony,
perfection’”.

Montgomery, C. (2013) Happy City: Transforming our

lives through urban design Penguin Books Ltd. p.67
 Modern City https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDCEtnXlA4Y
(1920s to 1970s)
• Shift in concern from aesthetics to efficiency and scientific management
• Fix urban problems by separating the city into functionally pure districts
• Land use planning zones to reduce congestion, improve health, make business
more efficient and most importantly, protect property values
• Societal message: Society can be socially engineered through functional design

“This country was founded on the principle of freedom,’ he

announced. ‘Now the automobile has brought something
which is an integral part of the American spirit – freedom of
movement.”
Norton (1936) Transport: Four Frictions. Time Magazine, August 3.

“The modern city is probably the most
unlovely and artificial site this planet affords.
The ultimate solution is to abandon it … We
shall solve the City Problem by leaving the
city.”
Ford, Henry (1922) Henry Ford, the Modern City: A
Pestiferous Growth, in Ford Ideals: Being a Selection
from Mr. Ford’s Page in the Dearborn Independent.
MT: Kessinger, (Whitefish, 2003, 154– 7)
“They had to change the idea of what a street is
for, and that required a mental revolution, which
had to take place before any physical changes
to the street,’ Norton told me. ‘In the space of a
few years, auto interests did put together that
cultural revolution. It was comprehensive.”
Quotes in Montgomery, C. (2013) Happy City:
Transforming our lives through urban design Penguin
Books Ltd, p.71

Quotes in Montgomery, C. (2013) Happy City: Transforming our lives through urban design Penguin Books Ltd.
 Post-Industrial City
(Late 1990s to 2000s)
“The most dynamic economies of
the twentieth century produced
the most miserable cities of all”
Montgomery, C. (2013) Happy City:
Transforming our lives through urban
design Penguin Books Ltd, p.7.
“The right to the city cannot be conceived of
as a simple visiting right or as a return to
traditional cities. It can only be formulated
as a transformed and renewed right to
urban life.”
Henri Lefebvre , 1968 in Montgomery, C. (2013)
Happy City: Transforming our lives through urban
design Penguin Books Ltd, p.233.
 Post-Industrial City
(Late 1990s to 2000s)
 Influences of the Garden City and Modernist City endure through
land use planning rules (encourages class separation, commercial
strips; discourages mixed land use, pedestrian areas)

 Influences of globalisation, economic rationalism, ICT

 Emphasis on human capital in the form of knowledge, ideas, services

 Recognising the biophysical limits that constrain urban development

 Increasing desire for ‘liveable’ and ‘sustainable’ cities

“A new wave of urbanists now pit sprawl against the vertical city, arguing that the physical and
cultural density of Manhattan is the model for a sustainable future. But the journey to a happier
city cannot simply mean choosing between downtown and the sprawl edge. Most central cities,
with these layers of imported traffic, noise, pollution and road danger, do not currently meet our
needs for well-being much better than sprawl. We must redesign both landscapes and the fabric
that connects them in ways that answer the needs that led us to retreat in the first place.”

Montgomery, C. (2013) Happy City: Transforming our lives through urban design Penguin Books Ltd, p.78.
Land use

http://www.slideshare.net/SarahDee24/urban-land-use-6098777
Land use
CBD
New York

Worldpropertyjournal.com
Inner City

Dublin

Vaw.msu.edu
Suburbs London suburb

Dailymail.co.uk
Rural-urban fringe
 Examples of Urban Form

 Business as usual – laissez faire, low density, dispersed.

 Compact city – increased population and density of inner suburbs.

 Edge city – increased population, housing densities and employment at

selected nodes within the city, with increased investment in orbital
freeways linking the edge cities.

 Corridor city –growth along linear corridors radiating from the central
business district, supported by improved public transport.

 Fringe city – additional growth predominantly on the fringe of the city.

 Ultra city – additional growth predominantly in provincial cities within

100 km of a capital city and linked by high-speed rail transport.

Source: CSIRO
 Planning in Melbourne
 Let’s take a look at the current state of planning in
Melbourne

 Take ~20 minutes in small groups to review key

components of Plan Melbourne:
http://www.planmelbourne.vic.gov.au/

 What are your general impressions?

 Is it addressing sustainability challenges? Which ones?

How? Are they feasible? Who’s involved? What are the
implementation challenges?

 What are you sceptical about? What is notably missing?

What is controversial? What would you include/do
differently?

 How will outcomes be achieved? By whom? When? At

what cost? Are these feasible? Which? How?
 Planning in Melbourne
Plan Melbourne (2013-14)

But surrounded by controversy

and claims it was drastically
watered down

"The final version of Plan

Melbourne, like Melbourne 2030
before it, is vague at crucial
points. This makes it safer as a
political document but much
less useful as a planning
strategy," – Dr Stephen Rowley,
RMIT

Future Melbourne 2026 (2016)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uT9-gp6N52E

http://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/future
 3 things to remember from today
1. Cities have evolved over time to idealize specific urban forms
that translate cultural values into design aspirations

2. There are many challenges cities are facing that need to be

approached with innovation, planning and design ideas

3. Urban form is fundamentally linked to planning and design

processes – achieving sustainability demands this is done in an
integrated approach
IMPORTANT:
-No lecture next week (mid
semester break)
-No lecture in week 8 (ANZAC
day); tutorials Thursday/Friday
-No lecture in week 9 (Meet your
group leader at your field trip
destination at the set time)
Guest lecturer: Shaun Schroter,
Architectus
And to finish…some fun design
ideas seen in cities

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohfCuDnw8jo