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.