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Former World Bank principal planner Alain Bertaud warns that Melbourne’s green wedges and tight planning controls have turned it into a “starfish” city with growth radiating outwards.
Bertaud says this design exacerbated the housing crisis in Melbourne with a lack of affordability that affects younger generations the most.
Bertaud, the author of Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities, visited Melbourne last week as part of a series of talks around Australia organised by housing advocacy group YIMBY Melbourne.
At a roundtable discussion attended by planning and housing experts, Bertaud said cities around the world used to compete to attract companies but in the future would do so to attract young workers.
He pointed to Amazon pitting US cities against each other to determine which would house the company’s second headquarters, which prompted cities to offer billions of dollars in tax incentives.
However, Bertaud said the problem with this approach was that if cities subsidised Amazon to establish a base, they would pay property tax even if Amazon didn’t. Instead, he said, they should compete for young workers.
“If you do not solve your housing problem, you are going to lose some of the younger workers and the economy of the city will go down,” he said.
A city’s economic survival strategy depends on ensuring housing affordability for young people entering the workforce.
Bertaud said regardless of where workers lived in a metropolitan area, they should be able to access a job anywhere in a city within one hour.
“This means that the transport system has to respond to that,” he said. “And that means, of course, housing is available for everybody.”
Bertaud is critical of planning controls such as minimum lot sizes and minimum floor sizes, which he said could limit housing availability, as the parameters are set by planners who do not know the price of land, the distribution of income or the price of construction, which are constantly changing.
“You have established a rigidity based on perceived needs,” he said. “What you need is something you can afford and a house which is not a poverty trap. That means where you can access your job for which you are qualified and that you prefer.”
Bertaud also took issue with Melbourne’s 12 green wedge zones, which were conceived in the early 1970s and legislated in 2002, and preserve the land for non-urban uses such as farming, biodiversity and low-density activities such as airports and quarries.
“You had a policy with the wedges which defined what could be built and what cannot be built long in advance,” the renowned planner said. “Somebody has drawn a line, which is completely arbitrary, and shaped the city in a way I will call it a half starfish.”
Bertaud said Melbourne’s starfish shape meant growth had to radiate outwards along the city’s arms, and there was a large concentration of jobs in the city centre with a “radio concentric” system of public transport.
However, his experience of cities with a concentration of jobs in the city centre, like Paris, London and New York, is that eventually jobs move out to the periphery because central rents are too expensive.
Bertaud said the starfish shape with jobs dispersed in the suburbs would lead to more reliance on cars because that would be the only way to travel from one “arm” of the city to another.
“If this is the trade-off most people want to do, then the only feasible means of transport is individual car, the model is Fort Worth [near] Dallas,” he said. “You have the city you deserve.”
Bertaud said the starfish design was not necessarily bad, as Hong Kong has a similar population size to Fort Worth and one of the most sophisticated public transport systems in the world, yet the average commuting time is shorter in the Texan city.
“I think it’s terrible if planners have a vision of a city which is completely different than from what people want,” he said.
Jonathan O’Brien, the lead organiser of YIMBY Melbourne, said Bertaud’s starfish analogy was evident in Melbourne’s expansion.
“If you look at Melbourne, we have ended up with these linear corridors that run along train lines or highways or both, which mean it is hard to connect orbitally, which I think is part of what the Suburban Rail Loop is trying to solve,” he said.
O’Brien said YIMBY Melbourne was concerned about planning regulations that force people to consume more land or floor space than they otherwise would, and Melbourne’s green wedges might contribute to this.
“Do we need to push further and further out or is there opportunity to make the trade-offs within the urban growth boundaries but underutilised land like the green wedges?” he said.
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