PLANNING AS STATISTICS

The headline was bold, both as message and font:

Some of Melbourne's oldest suburbs are about to grow fast — but are they ready?

- see: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-02/housing-statement-victorian-government-council-home-approval/103627604?utm_source=abc_news_app&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_campaign=abc_news_app&utm_content=other

The text explained the concept and outlined its strategy:

The state government has labelled Broadmeadows as one of 10 areas across Melbourne where it wants to collectively build 60,000 new homes.

. . .

And in the future, it plans to transform another 120 suburbs into "Activity Centres", as part of a broader aim to add 800,000 dwellings across Victoria over the next decade.

. . .

Experts say these areas need more housing, because other council areas — like Wyndham in the west and Casey in the east — have been growing too much.

. . .

To address this, the government hopes to build 70 per cent of new homes in parts of Melbourne where there's already housing and infrastructure. The current rate is about 56 per cent.

. . .

To do this, we divided Melbourne's councils into growth areas, where there's lots of land that could be suitable for development, and established areas, where there's existing houses and infrastructure.

While there were statistics and maps and statements about numbers and intent, the surprise was that no one knew exactly how this idea was going to be achieved:

While we don't know exactly how the 60,000 houses will be added to the 10 established areas across Melbourne, we do know some of the ways the state government will work with councils to mitigate these risks and incentivise growth.

This is the planning problem that makes such a mess of our cities; there is no plan other than some motherhood statement of intent that is left open for negotiation as developers arrive with their own ambitious interpretations to fill in the great gaps left by the plan, just to suit themselves. Little wonder that our cities are such a shambles. If we are to have a plan for a city, it needs to be much more than an idea, a map, and a set of numbers jumbled into a pseudo-scientific analysis of the situation illustrated by graphs.

The very first challenge is to know exactly how the idea is to be implemented, and exactly what the outcomes are to be. Leaving these unknown while ‘the plan’ is formalised, simply means that there is no plan, because a plan defines a known outcome. All we have is a hopeful vision: 'Indicative Only - Subject To Change.' To detail this strategy as a numerical and geographic game leaves all the critical matters for life and its living floating in an amorphous haze, ignored.

We must know everything we can about possibilities and their impacts before we decide on locations and percentages. Planning without this only gives us more of what we currently have: a shambles that tests the mental health of all, apart from, it seems, the planners who apparently only see the world as graphs, percentages, numbers, and schematic maps – dumb statistics.

We need much better than this; we need to understand place, space, adjacency, privacy, history, functions, symbolism, contexts, and much more before we start formalising any plan. Planners have to engage in these matters because structuring frameworks without knowing any of their impacts on life and its living is very dangerous: it is the blind leading the greedy in a game involving power and money, when we need to manage space and meaning subtly – to care for the intimacy of feeling in the engagement with place and its accommodation, shared with others in order to achieve a personal contentment. Spruiking statistics has nothing to do with this experience that should be shaped in plans if we really want to build homes in a city context, communities, instead of clumps of houses squeezed together willy-nilly to achieve the number required.

MUDDLED ‘POSITIVE’ THINKING

The cry is that we must ‘save the environment.’ There are numerous responses to this plea that all give the impression that issues are being responded to while things go on in much the same, or even in a worse manner, as if it might be a grand display of blind belligerence, or of happy hype - or both.

Take for instance plastics: the world is being seriously littered with plastics that are breaking down and entering the most diverse minute, intimate places in life – see, e.g.: https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/25/uk/microplastics-archeological-remains-study-scli-intl-scn-gbr/index.html; so the ‘war’ is one against single-use plastics – straws, cutlery, and plastic bags. Plastic straws are religiously, with much fanfare and self-congratulation, being replaced with paper straws; plastic cutlery is ousted in favour of wooden knives, forks, and spoons; plastic bags are being supplanted by paper bags.# Meanwhile we continue to use plastics in increasing quantities in nearly every aspect of life, with cunning excuses that use, e.g. thickness - thicker plastic bags; and necessity - health, cost, function; as excuses to keep doing whatever we want; and there is no concern about these apologetic inconsistencies. The pile of waste at the recycling station, last seen to be a stunning ten metres high, (and just as wide, five times longer), is always filled with tonnes of plastic. There is really no concerted or committed effort to do anything about eliminating plastics from our world, or managing them sensibly; we just keep using plastics as we go to great public effort to scratch the surface of a solution by demanding the use of different straws, cutlery, and bags to give a self-congratulatory, ‘feel-good’ outcome – not that the wooden spoons or straws feel good on the tongue!

Hospitals use tonnes of single-use plastics; daily life uses more and more single-use plastics in the kitchen, with an increasing quantity of plastics being used in toys, gadgets, furniture, and motor vehicles, and more: plastics are everywhere, but we act as though we are doing something useful about the problem by concentrating on words that refer to straws, cutlery, and bags as we ignore reality in the same way as we ignore batteries that get discarded without a care or thought, into the general waste – that huge pile of refuse ready to be ‘transferred.’

Likewise we vigorously promote electric vehicles as though these will ‘change the world’ too; save the world: but does anyone do the sums to look closely at the real impacts of producing these vehicles instead of only analysing consumption with comparative assumptions that give the good results desired? With one factory turning out an EV every two minutes – thirty an hour – then every hour, one hundred and twenty wheels are needed; thirty sets of panel parts; thirty batteries; thirty sets of glazing; etc., etc., every hour for every day, for just one factory. What is the impact of this neurotic manufacturing that produces assembled pieces and parts that make serious demands on the patterns of habitation? Our whole world is designed for the movement and storage of cars; these spaces shape our public places and deform our homes with their demands. One also has to ask why so much effort goes into producing vehicles with alarming acceleration, e.g. 0 – 100 in three seconds, as though this might be critically meaningful, and even useful. It says something about our intentions when it is important that one EV can win a drag race while towing tonnes and still out-perform all others. Interest in things environmental carry with them a degree of sensible reasonableness in their accommodation of necessity rather than any embellishment of excess for display. There is a latent efficiency in the effectiveness of caring attitudes.

We have Mr. Musk boasting about his EVs and their power, smart technology – driverless, (why?), and environmental qualities while he is blasting rockets off at the rate of one or two a week, to deliver thousands of satellites to fill our skies. What is the carbon impact of this activity – both its manufacturing and blasting off ?*

We are keen to use our promotional skills to spin opinions while we continue to do whatever we want, making sure that there is no inconvenience to us in our daily lives as we act to ‘save our planet’ with a pompous, self-righteous indignation and AI.

‘Saving our planet’ will mean that we have to put an effort into it, and be prepared to truly alter things drastically as needed; to change ourselves and our ‘convenient’ lives. Dare we do away with all plastics? Dare we do the carbon calculations on total outputs rather than promote the values of selective visions? Dare we act? - or might it be just too hard on ourselves and our comfortable lives?

The same problem of convenience and spin exists in our ideas about cities. While we might spruik the right words, e.g. Foster's statement on cities made at his institute in Madrid:

"the ideal city we would advocate is dense, compact, walkable, and user-friendly. The opposite of the sprawling car-borne city, it’s likely to have neighborhoods that are mixed in use and permit the spontaneity and unpredictability of city life” (see: https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2024/03/fostering-cities.html), we just keep on building ‘Foster’ airports and ‘Foster’ high-rise structures willy-nilly, as though we were doing something sensible with our words that might forgive our actions, all with a grand, distracting ‘WOW!’ that entertains our interests to help us forget what we were cheering about or advocating previously.

There is a great chasm between ideas and outcomes that needs to be resolved. If we are truly wanting to do something about our environment and our cities, then we need to act coherently, with integrity and commitment; [with] a more exalted criticism - see Gertrude Jekyll’s ON GARDENING in the sidebar - to ensure that the acts are achieving what we want rather than relying only on words for nice, hopeful feelings, and a maintenance of the indulgent, easy life. True commitment means a real efforts to achieve real outcomes – [making it] a point of honour to be always striving for the best (ibid.). We have to change expectations and desires if we really want to change our planet and our cities. Words might be buzzy stimulants, but we are also using them as sedatives, to keep ourselves happy with the status quo that we know will change our planet irrevocably for the worst: but who cares; at least I am not inconvenienced?

It is muddled thinking like this that we need to call out if we truly want desirable change. We are only fooling ourselves with these fanciful visions that become excuses to keep on doing whatever we want – building more and more aeroplanes, cars, rockets, airports, without realising the necessary infrastructure and impacts that these actions demand of us and impose on our environments.

We might talk of a ‘dense, compact, walkable, and user-friendly’ city, but what does one have to do to achieve this outcome? What does one have to do to attend to the ‘plastics’ problem of the world? What does one have to do to resolve the carbon issue? We can identify the issues and spruik the right blurb, but the actual outcomes are the core measurement of our success. Are we just getting too clever for ourselves as we start believing in our own hype?

As I walk around the house, I notice the plastic everywhere: plastic toilet seat; shower shelves; knife handles; containers; zip bags; outdoor furniture; light fittings; computer; printer; speakers; keyboard; portable hard discs; chargers; cables; electrical boards and switches; electric tools; vacuum cleaner; bucket; broom; dust pan; radio; clock; stapler; ballpoint pens; ruler; scissor handles; food packaging; milk bottles; soda bottles; the refrigerator interior; the car bumpers; the car seats; ceiling fans; louvre glazing; cupboard door handles; security cameras; cameras; folding table; roller shutter; bottle tops; . . . the list seems endless, reaching into every aspect of life that we consider essential. How do we change things to overcome this ‘convenience’ that says that “You’ll have to pay more if you want something else”?

The very same question can be asked about our cities: how can we make ‘dense, compact, walkable, and user-friendly’ places out of our sprawling habitations serviced by private vehicles and aeroplanes? The silent response is, “You’ll have much more inconvenience if you do away with cars.”

Intentions and words might sound idyllic, poetically wonderful, but we need to create the real experience rather than being happy with the dreams! - to be always watching, noting, and doing, and putting oneself meanwhile into the closest acquaintance and sympathy with the [outcomes] (ibid.).

#

NOTE:

We have had a recent occasion to use a cafe in a health facility. We ordered two cappuccinos and an apple pie to share. The cafe appeared to be environmentally aware, with paper cups and plates, and wooden cutlery. Left on the table after we had finished were: two paper cups; two plastic lids; two wooden spoons; one paper plate; one wooden knife; two wooden forks; three paper serviettes; one paper bag – all of which was immediately discarded. It seemed like an outrageous waste of material.

If traditional china cups or mugs had been used, along with stainless steel cutlery, only three paper serviettes would have been discarded, with the other items being collected and washed for reuse.

One has to wonder about the cliché, alternative ideas that give the impression of sensitivity to environmental matters when they are really only there to save time and labour, with no thought at all for matters environmental. We can find ourselves getting distracted by appearances when matters are really otherwise. It is a lesson we must learn from and apply to all alternative solutions like EVs and wind power, because we can so easily be tricked into believing that these are all beneficial because we want them to be, assume them to be, while the big picture, perhaps, tells us a different story.

It brings to mind our two weeks in forced quarantine in 2020 – see: https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2021/01/quarantine-cuisine-photographic-diary.html. While the government was telling everyone that it cared about plastics and their single usage, each meal delivered to us came with still water in a plastic bottle, as if tap water might be poisoned; and a full set of plastic cutlery, along with plastic food containers, paper serviettes, and paper bags. At the end of two weeks, we had 84 sets of cutlery, 252 items, and 84 plastic water bottles – all the other paper and plastic waste was collected and removed: and we were just one couple out of the hundreds who had to experience this government-required incarceration.

As for hospitals: if one ever has to have contact with any health facility, one soon discovers how single-use plastics are an essential in this industry that seems to be making no attempt to introduce any other measures. Once items like scissors and needles and the like were cleaned, sterilised, and reused; now everything is hygienically sealed in plastic packs filled with all the disposables, as required for a particular task, along with disposable plastic aprons, masks, glasses, gloves, etc. to be used as single-use protective gear. Larger items of equipment that are shared come with disposable plastic shrouds. Ironically, plastic lies at the heart of health.

What are we to do?

*

The Space X Falcon 9 launch produces 300 tons of CO2.

https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/xg0hfr/how_zerocarbon_rocket_fuel_is_doable_and_why/#:~:text=To%20cite%20a%20widely%2Dknown,flights%20are%20comparable%20regarding%20emissions.