Melbourne 2030: A Response

What was once called the Department of Infrastructure has released a new Metropolitan Strategy for Melbourne. True to its heritage, Melbourne 2030 is comprehensive, wide-ranging and at the same time locally specific in its application. It represents a government response to the challenge created by population and household growth in the Melbourne metropolitan area in the coming decades. Its underlying logic reflects recent thinking on the benefits of highdensity residential development, the clustering of land uses and the restriction of fringe growth to create a more compact city. It is presented as a framework document providing the structure around which more detailed plans are presented. The document was published with five such detailed plans; a Plan 6 for integrated transport was released 2 months later. At its heart the Strategy relies on one interpretation of the way land use and transport interact in metropolitan development. This is that land use shapes transport patterns. This thinking is expressed in the Strategy in the creation of high-density housing near railway stations, higher density new suburban settlement and the clustering of commercial land uses to encourage inter-firm links. These outcomes are expected to create a range of outcomes including the opportunity for change in the transport habits of future residents. The Strategy will be implemented through just a few types of actions. These include a wide array of land use regulations (to control housing density and location as well as the location of commercial land uses), the designation of subcentres, the specification of transport routes and population targets for municipalities, all reinforced through considerable effort applied to urban design and local area plans. With this small and old-fashioned array of instruments the Strategy is expected to reshape the distribution of houses and to a lesser extent jobs in such a way that a wide range of economic, environmental, equity and community development objectives are achieved. The Strategy has great confidence in the power of design. That confidence is perhaps best expressed in the observation that the control of land release “will create communities rather than subdivisions” (p. 34). Apart from the fact that perspective seems ignorant of the success that has been achieved with current policies on land release, especially in the hands of developers like Delfin, that expression is an important one as it makes clear the mantra of the Strategy: control over physical layout is the way to achieve its objectives. Paradoxically the Direction statement that follows that observation makes little reference to the availability or accessibility of jobs or the provision of community infrastructure and services, all of which would seem critical to the ‘creation of communities’. I believe this approach to a Metropolitan Strategy is very narrow and that narrowness will limit its ability to really influence metropolitan outcomes. That impression emerged from a number of specific questions that arose as I read those aspects of the Strategy that are close to my research interests and was reinforced by broader concerns about the emphasis of the Strategy.