With the release on Friday of the WAPC’s Activity Centres Policy for Perth and Peel, there has been a lot of reflection around the office on the four-odd years of seeking to influence the development and implementation of this policy.
What is clear, looking back, is that statutory rather than strategic considerations largely have had a greater influenced on the final documents. This unfortunately follows a common path of policy development shown below.
Within this process, elements of the existing statutory system acts as a circuit breaker, moving focus away from a strategic pathway in which statutory outcomes are developed as a consequence of a strategic vision, to a process where the policy is shoehorned into existing statutory structures.
Diversity
An example of the result of this within the new Activity Centres Policy for Perth and Peel is the ‘Diversity Performance Targets’ outlined within Table 3. A diverse activity centre is one in which a variety of different land uses (or jobs, or user types) exist in close proximity. The Policy “encourages higher-order centres (strategic metropolitan, secondary and district) to develop in a manner that does not result in a predominately single-purpose centre.”
Based upon the ‘mix of land uses’ floorspace proportion metric outlined in the Policy, an activity centre with over 100,000m2 of shop retail floorspace, may be considered diverse with 50% shop retail, and 50% ‘mix of land uses’. In reality, this may mean a centre comprised of a large box retail shopping centre adjacent to a series of showroom retail offers, conforms to the metric.
From a statutory planning perspective the diversity measure included in the policy is understandable, and easy to measure with current data available. Strategically however, it is obvious that the outcome may not be that which is ultimately desired.
Many alternatives are available from fields as varied as economics, environmental sciences, and engineering, however these would require a change in the paradigm of statutory assessment processes (including the collection of information required to measure performance).
There is no doubt that statutory planning processes are incredibly complex, and have a very important role to play in the implementation of planning policy for our cities and regions. I realise that this blog might seem highly critical of the discipline, possibly unfairly. My argument is simply that statutory planning should be guided by a well-articulated and understood strategic vision…..I fear that at the moment the tail may be wagging the dog, and that ultimately we will all be worse off for it.
