THE PROBLEM OF ‘PLANNING’

The proposition is that this it shouldn’t be called ‘Planning’ because this profession has no overall plan, merely a set of malleable possibilities; we should call it ‘Development Management.’ We couldn’t be worse off without planners because there is no plan being implemented; there is no vision being achieved, just a random application of sundry ‘maybes/should-bes’ that get negotiated for each project. If we had a plan, we would know that the future of our city was in control.

As it is, we have a flexibly ambiguous set of rules and conditions that can be traded/modified/adapted by wheeling and dealing to get the conglomerate clutter that we see as cities today. We do not even have the broad ‘lateral thinking’ rules promoted by Edward de Bono that enforce preferred outcomes in the application of their essential, necessary logic: planning principles. We have very little to ensure that any outcome will give us a better place to live in; and none that can assure us that our future will be an improvement, even though we label everything and anything as ‘progress.’

We simply have random, chaotic management agreeing to proposals around a table with developers, giving outcomes that no one in power really cares about, with consequences that are never considered for corrective feedback. It is just a matter of ticking boxes and moving on, ‘forward,’ to the next agreement with the least possible trouble. In these situations, developers hold the power to manipulate and tease, as they threaten and cajole. Councils do not even have the instruments to fully check the statistics, figures, and commitments detailed in the submissions they approve, relying only on the applicants themselves for the facts in favour of the development. Officers frequently come under political pressure to agree to schemes in order to keep Councillors happy. Councillors are the third party that sits around the table, frequently acting as catalysts for the developer. The process is truly better described as ‘Development Management;’ we should stop pretending that it is ‘planning.’

For example, with one current application that the local Council agreed to negotiate on, the following comments were noted to be forwarded to a colleague:

With Council now negotiating conditions for more extraction, has anyone noted how the previous conditions on the first approval have never been enforced: how conditions for approvals are just ignored by Council when it comes to real outcomes? Council might be keen to resolve matters with ‘strict’ conditions to make things appear to be in control, but it shows little interest in enforcement. Frequently Council has no trained, committed staff, or any tools to allow for proper administration. Even when breaches occur on fairly straightforward conditions, Council just does not care and does nothing to ensure strict compliance.

One only has to look at the local problem of people jumping off the bridge into the creek: in spite of clear signage prohibiting this act, and the media coverage on this matter for years, the jumpers continue. Council shows no inclination to do anything about enforcement. Then there is the other strategy that gets used with development applications: the renegotiating of conditions that occurs some time later, in private, away from the public eye and any right to object.

Conditions are used by planners to just get rid of nagging issues. Sadly, one can only expect more of the same. It is truly laughable to think that Council cares for anything but doing away with the problem ASAP. Outcomes and their impacts are just irrelevant, something to be ignored when things get resolved and the next matter takes Council’s attention.

It is an insult to call this ‘planning.’ It is simply negotiating outcomes using development management. The frustration for Councils is that they have, in some cases, to inform the public and call for comments. The sooner Councils can get out of this obligation, so it seems, the better it will be for Council, because then Councils can do what they like away from the public eye, and address matters with spin.

. . .

One already knows what to expect as the response; what the reaction to this review/proposition/critique will be: there will be more insistent explanations forcefully put forward to rationalise everything as being totally reasonable and desirable, all in accordance with ‘the plan’/law, because this is the typical response of ‘planners’ to every situation they find themselves in. The response will be forceful, domineering, and irrefutable: go away. Planners occupy a position of power that they no longer deserve given their lack of interest in real outcomes. There is no desire to respond to any qualitative issue, just the will to manipulate the bland application of logic with the contorted reasoning of a legal expert spinning meanings: and they hold all of the aces when it comes to a disagreement. This needs to change, even if it means the end of this profession.

One cannot leave this matter without noting how it might best be remedied apart from doing away with the occupation. The root of the matter seems to be the plan. Rigorous plans must be produced to provide certain rules, principles, and conditions that are unequivocal, not open to negotiation or variation; that can give desirable, integrating, predetermined outcomes that are reviewed to improve matters; and that can be and will be legally defended. Having ambiguous, flexible plans full of quaint ‘motherhood’ statements not only makes it easy for developers to get what they want with ‘deals,’ but they also make it possible for judges to grant appeals that seek, e.g., eight storied buildings in zones that are supposed to be limited to three. The irony here is that Councils/planning officers frequently feel as though they have to negotiate in order to ensure some control over the outcome, instead of letting the appeal go to a judge who is no expert in planning matters, let alone planning subtleties, and who is likely to produce some ad hoc, unwanted outcome that can become an unwanted precedent.

Quality plans and a determination to enforce them are needed; but it is not only plans that have to attend to quality: planning itself needs to engage with qualitative matters as a primary concern rather than attend only to a list of 'facts' and trivial/trite issues and strict, mundane interpretations, and involve itself in real outcomes, and the feedback from these results so that matters can only ever be improved. Both care and commitment are needed.

29 APRIL 2023

Has the problem become so serious that we now have to consciously talk about designing for humans? - see:

https://www.archdaily.com/1000073/unstudio-unveils-the-design-of-a-human-centric-mixed-use-development-in-nanjing-china

BELONGING: ARCHITECTURE & BROCH EXPERIENCE

Belonging Australians, Place and Aboriginal Ownership - Peter Read, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2000.

Peter Read’s Returning to Nothing: The Meaning of Lost Places, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1996, revealed an understanding of place, meaning, and feeling that belittled that of architects, highlighting, yet again, how an historian can expose and explain sensitive matters to do with place far more openly and comprehensively than any architect, even though architects pride themselves on being the experts in habitation, space, and place, and can recite erudite explanations that attempt to engage such issues rather smugly - coldly and intellectually.#

Unfortunately, Read’s study only proves this to be so, showing how architects frequently insensitively miss the real point of caring for connections in an eagerness to be bespokely clever. The study points out how architects need other disciplines, not to use as a prop for various new theories like seeing architecture as music, and interpreting architecture as a language, etc., but to adopt and learn from informative, core material to enrich perceptions, to be a beginning for the subtle, inclusive, and responsive forming of space and place.+

With the importance of this diversity in understanding in mind, one has to express concern that architectural studies have retreated back behind the walls of ‘the School,’ with courses now being managed by the School’s staff or selected imports rather than letting students engage in other disciplines - (at least in University of Queensland). Students are given ‘special architectural’ courses on other speciality subjects that leave matters not only watered down for their consumption, but also adapted to how staff believe the issues should be handled for things architectural. This specialisation of speciality subjects might lift student participation numbers for the School’s budget, but it does also turn architects into lesser, mollycoddled egotists, apparently not prepared to undertake the rigours of equivalent study of another field in its own context.^ This part-time approach allows the sessions to be called ‘Mickey Mouse’ courses that make architects look like idiots in need of special treatment. Is it this adaptive attitude that allows architects to become self-important gurus to be managed with kid gloves?

It is unfortunate that our era has become so self-centred, and hyped by a distracting, entertaining technology, that style appears to have become the central point of interest and ambition of all new work: quirky style. One can only encourage the reading of Peter Read’s wonderful studies in the hope that architecture might regain its human roots, and engage with people in a richly caring and supportive manner, instead of becoming examples to show the skill of the smart architect, more interested in ‘the shot’ for publication than in supporting any lived need or response.

So it was with some excitement that Read’s next study was discovered. This happened some time ago. Events over this lengthy period have repeatedly put off a closer look at the new work; but when perusing the shelves recently for a book to take away for a weekend, the hand landed on this book titled Belonging, with the explanatory subtitle of Australians, Place and Aboriginal Ownership.* This discovery was a timely event given the interest in ‘The Voice’ that the political world is generating today in Australia (April 2023).

Mousa Broch, Shetland.

In this text, one finds some references to aboriginal experience. In the writings on brochs – see: https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2023/03/the-broch-its-intramural-stair.html and https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2023/03/the-broch-symbol-place.html - the importance of interpreting brochs with the knowledge that the broch dwellers saw things differently to us, has been noted. While one cannot say that the aboriginal experience was the same as that of the broch dwellers, one can learn something about the aboriginal experience and use this both as a reminder of the type of difference there might have been, and as a template for us to use to test assumptions, for we have little else in this emotive matter to help us.

Broch of Gurness, Orkney.

So it is that sundry pieces of Read’s text that have been highlighted with this in mind, have been reproduced here, to provide a basis to begin understanding how different broch dwellers were, and to suggest other fields of knowledge that might help us in our struggles to glean meaning from scattered ruins.

p.3

The epigraph to the 1998 book Seeking the Centre, (Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1999), a study of the significance of the desert in Australian culture, asserts: . . .

The author, (Rosslyn Haynes), writes: ‘The poet Judith Wright has succinctly expressed the conceptual divide between European notions of a landscape derived from the perspective of an empowered observer, whose magisterial gaze calls an appropriately aesthetic prospect into being, and the Aboriginal understanding of a spirit-filled landscape through which individuals access their identity.’

p.18

Assertion is not belonging; that’s possession, without knowledge. Miriam Rose Ungunmerr of the Daly River region of the Northern Territory believes that what Australians need is ‘inner, deep listening and quiet, still awareness.’ My ‘quiet, still awareness’ includes outrage . . .

p.19

I’ve got perhaps ten per cent of the feel; so it does give you more of a respect, but it’s an unknown book that we don’t know how to read. Intellectually and emotionally I know the [Borroloola] area quite well, and I know how rich the stories are of that place. The extraordinary thing is to think of all of Australia being like that. And that’s the extraordinary indictment on western people in Australia that maybe forty percent of Australia’s left with stories intact . . . It gives you an emptiness driving to Sydney down that freeway - even the European history has been obliterated. No one now knows what the full level of those meanings were.

Gurness.

p.20- 21

Working amongst the Maori, King’s [Michael King, Pakeha, 1985] Celtic ancestory allowed him the more readily to absorb the deep values of which his English education had kept him in ignorance: a feeling of connection between living and dead; the sense of spirituality which recognises that people and places are more than physical presences; the conviction that the consequences of behaviour remain somehow embedded in the ethos of places, just as they do in the lives of people; a belief in the power of psychic communication in those who are open to such faculties; a need for ritual and tradition; emotional honesty; the fierce warmth of friendship and a lack of physical inhibition in the physical expression of it; an equal lack of inhibition in the expression of anger and grief.

p.25

Discussing the inter-relatedness of species, she [Debbie Rose in Nourishing Terrains Australian Heritage Commission, Canberra, 1996] remarks:

A ‘healthy’ or ‘good’ country is one in which all the elements do their work. They all nourish each other because there is no site, no position from which the self-interest of one can be disengaged from the interests of others in the long term. Self-interest and the interest of all of the other living components of country (the self-interest of kangaroos, barramundi, eels and so on) cannot exist independently of each other in the long term.

p.82

I don’t believe in any great thing up there governing things, and I don’t have an architect-of-the-universe view of the world, but I do think you’ve got to be opportunistic about gaining meaning, to link things that may appear to be unlike each other, or linking things which in fact are like each other but which you’ve tried to forget are like each other. It’s the connecting sensibility, and that’s what Aborigines are doing talking about the dreaming and land . . . Connect Connect Connect. We [Westerners] tend to compartmentalise much more in a linear way.

p.84

He learned first the social rather than the religious stories of the land. In the rocky ridge country dwelled the menumemeri, Marrithiyel-speaking little pygmy men, quite black, who were felt, or heard, at night or who twinkled at the edges of vision. They are dangerous. A man travelling by night or camping in their country is liable to be enslaved, a woman to be raped. Amongst the men of Bill’s generation, stories were told of Marrithiyel who had found themselves surrounded in the ridges, but who had talked their way out of trouble by speaking to menumemeri in Merrithiyel and by giving gifts of flour, tea or sugar.

p.85

Aboriginal land was thronged by the presence of the creators, the spiritual guardians, and of the dead. It sang, it cried out, it assumed multiple forms simultaneously, it knew when it was respected or violated, cared for or abandoned. Country knew, and knows, newcomers; it looks to visitors to identify themselves; in return, country will care for its children.

p.85

The anthropologist Debbie Rose, (Deborah Bird Rose, author of Dingo Makes Us Human, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1992), felt the connection one nightfall in the Victoria River district not far from the Daly. Sitting beside her in the ute was her mentor Jessie. Debbie was normally conscious of what she called Jessie’s ‘attentive acceptance’ of the natural world, which that evening so affected her that Debbie experienced something of what, she believes, is an Aboriginal perception of country, ‘channels of energy connecting everything to everything, every tree, every leaf, every blade of grass, every stone, the hills on the horizon.’ She felt ‘concentrated and connected, incredibly alive and incredibly valuable.’  

 p.86

As Debbie Rose puts it, ‘Dream country is belonging. Every person has a place in the world in which they are needed, and in which they are “healthy”.’

The idea is that these writings might establish an ambience that can create a framework to assist with the understanding of the broch people, given that man and the relationship to the world/cosmos has some basic roots in emotional and spiritual needs.

#

The previous example of the work of an historian being important to architects was a lecture given many years ago on the Japanese House by a University of Queensland historian - (apologies: name forgotten). The understanding of the house and its details extended to a knowledge of the place and its social role, giving a broad but integrated understanding of the elements of this unique house in an all-embracing, comprehensive exposé on form, structure, purpose, and meaning. This talk could be compared to other presentations given by architects that reveal the stark difference in approach, which is similar to that discrepancy one experiences in Read's writings on place, memory, and feelings, and an architect’s version of the quality of place and its richness. The architect’s version is self-conscious, theoretical, and indulgent; the historian’s version is of the everyday, involving real people and real emotions - complex, sensitive, and enduring.

+

It was Aldo van Eyck in an article in Team 10 Primer (edited by Alison Smithson, The MIT Press, London, 1974), who first raised this subtle but significant difference in these phonetic matches when he declared that we must attend to PLACE not SPACE, that abstraction that Modernism seemed happy to use as an a location for matters experientially significant; the anchor of mystery that was difficult to discuss in other terms. Architecture as Space was an influential book by Bruno Zevi, published by in 1948 (Italian); 1957 (translated); 1974 (revised); 1993. van Eyck noted that the concept of place included space and embraced a far-reaching set of complex emotional engagements.

^

Historically, the architecture course at U of Q was involved in doing course work in Mathematics, Chemistry, Physics, Geology, and Engineering in these separate schools, as well as the architectural courses, with architecture students being involved beside those specialising in these ‘outside’ studies - in the ‘real’ world as it were. Courses were never ‘tailored’ to suit lesser architectural expectations, or to ‘manipulate the books.’

*

Tom Heath, the late Head of the Queensland University of Technology School of Architecture and author of Method in Architecture, Wiley, 1984, once gave a talk on one of his papers in which he explained the necessary requirements for a title for a research paper: the title should be in two parts, with the first part being a short, snappy word or words that catch attention, followed by the second part which is a more lengthy explanatory text that spells out the subject matter of the work. Read’s titles fit these requirements very nicely.

ON JUSTIFYING ART

It is unfortunate that, yet again, we have another artist using letters, justifying his/her work in spite of the critique: see – https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2019/01/gold-coast-dazzle-removed.html. Following grammatical criticism of her work, Rose Nolan has been bold enough to justify her ‘All Alongside Of Each Other' art in Sydney’s Central Station by saying, “It is not an English class, it’s about the rhythm of the words” – see: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/apr/09/all-alongside-of-each-other-artwork-at-sydneys-central-station-exposes-a-grammatical-sore-spot

The response sounds much like the student who has spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors in an essay, arguing that these are irrelevant; that it is only the meaning that is important, as if the two might be separate.*

The critic is placed in an awkward position, a little like this artwork, because one is just not allowed to question artistic genius or inspiration irrespective of grammar or anything else. Is this a ‘no rules in art’ proposal, or just ‘my rules’? Either way, such art alienates rather than enriches. This circumstance does beg the question: is artistic expression necessarily isolated from a coherence that recognises common necessities, be these grammatical rules or something else; that art is truly open slather, anything at the whim of the artist’s ‘originality’?

Tradition held that something had to conform with all conventions before a work could be beautiful: matters personal, including opinions, were irrelevant.

Artists today seem to believe otherwise with responses that appear to be both deaf and indulgent. Nolan expresses her surprise that people might even be worried about the grammar and, it seems, not be overwhelmed by the power and presence of the art. “It’s interesting that people have locked on to that,” she says.

Alongside

As a preposition, alongside means ‘close beside’, ‘next to’ or ‘together with’:

The trees alongside the fence have all been damaged by the wind. (near)

Put your bike alongside mine. (next to)

I find it difficult to cope with this illness alongside all my other problems. (together with)

We also use alongside as an adverb, meaning ‘along the side of’ or ‘next to’ something:

I parked my car in the drive and William parked his alongside.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/along-or-alongside #

One does wonder what the future of anything might be when feedback is given such dismissive attention; when other opinions are considered to be irrelevant.

Is this the expression of our ‘selfie’ world?

*

NOTE

One might liken this situation to a stuttering news reader, arguing that there is no issue here, as the news is the most important matter; that the manner of delivery is irrelevant.

#

The critics point out that the inclusion of the 'OF' in the title of this work, (which is the work), is grammatically incorrect; that the text should read: 'ALL ALONGSIDE EACH OTHER.' That the artist argues that the inclusion of the incorrect 'OF' gives the whole a certain desirable rhythm is worrying, as if this 'OF' is not an unnecessary, jarring pause.

Nolan points out that this is the way she would say the words. Here one has to express further concern, because such a position would allow deviant expressions like 'SHOULD OF,' that appear frequently in ordinary speech as a phonetic variant of 'SHOULD'VE' - 'SHOULD HAVE' - to become acceptable public statements as art, along with many other awful possibilities.

There is another point to make: the more we legitimise errors in our grammar, the more the rules of grammar break down, leaving us with a shambles that seems to be growing every day in our media and social media.

ON PERFECTLY FRAMED PHOTOGRAPHS

In order to illustrate the problems with selectively chosen, carefully framed images being used to present a project - a practice that has been criticised previously – see: https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2023/03/architectural-presentation-problems.html - one can use the images in this article on Perfectly Timed Photographs – see: https://www.thefunpost.com/en/make-timed-will-look-perfectly utm_source=google&utm_medium=paid&utm_campaign=create&ly=native_one&mbid=19892358130_ - to show how illusory such deliberately composed images can be; how potentially misleading they are.

The images that have been published as ‘perfectly timed’ examples in this article vary from amazing to cleverly funny; certainly they are all quirky in their own way and offer a sense of how manipulative the preferred, arranged image can be: it has the power to truly dramatically transform how and what we see. It is this ‘trickery’ that lies at the heart of the concern with the photographer’s output. The tools available and the techniques used for positioning, aligning, and framing leave photographs open to easy manipulation.

One can appreciate how an architect could be cajoled into allowing, even encouraging, the photographer to use his skills to ‘add wings’ to make a project ‘fly.’ So it is that we get the cliché statement in presentations by architects who might be showing images of their work taken by themselves, that they “haven’t had the project photographed yet,” when it is obvious that we are looking at photographs of the project. What is being said is that a professional photographer has not yet woven the magic to create new and unseen interpretations of the work; the artful illusions.

The images are self-explanatory: each reading involves an interesting discovery/realisation that, in itself, is not only intriguing, but revealing.

. . . and there are many more!

24 April 23

NOTE

More tricky illusions: see - https://www.kueez.com/en/first-seem-arent