The future of urban planning in NZ – good improvements or government takeover?

Yesterday the Ministry for the Environment released a pretty important discussion document – Building Competitive Cities. You can read more about the document here, and it is possible to have your say on it up until December 17th.

The reason I say this document is important is because it will potentially fundamentally change the way we do urban planning in New Zealand. It forms part of the government’s second wave of RMA reforms – with the first being the “Streamlining and Simplification Act” that was passed last year. The name of that Act was a bit of a misnomer in some respects – as it added around 100 pages to the already very lengthy RMA – and it probably became better known as the legislation that banned general tree protection rules. When the tree protection rule changes come into force in 2012 it will be interesting to see what happens.

But anyway, as this document is particularly important for the future of urban planning – particularly in Auckland – it’s worthwhile having a decent read through. It will also be very worthwhile providing feedback, as from what I’ve read so far there are good aspects to the proposed changes (which are presented as ‘options’) but there are some pretty scary changes proposed as well.

The document looks at planning and urban design as well as infrastructure provision. One of the major problems in our current system, which is well recognised by the discussion document, is the poor integration that currently exists between our planning systems and infrastructure provision. Nowhere is this more obvious than when it comes to transport – where generally we continue to plan for urban intensification but build transport to support urban sprawl (not that the discussion document says that of course). Here are the major problems with the current system identified by the document – first with planning and urban design:
I would agree with many of the points that are raised here. It is particularly strange that the RMA largely ignores urban environments even though around 85% of New Zealanders live in towns and cities. Furthermore, there is complexity in the planning system – with different policy statements (both national and regional), different plans and different other strategies all being intertwined and interconnected in often confusing ways. I also agree that implementation tools are often proving to be ineffective: why has Auckland done so poorly to provide urban intensification at a decent standard over the past ten years, even though all our policies and plans focus on the need to do that?

Problems with infrastructure provision are also highlighted:
Many of these problems are also highly legitimate. It is weird that when it comes to designations, the actual decision maker is the very same agency that applied for the designation themselves (I mean they’re not exactly ever going to turn themselves down are they?) It is also quite unfair that compensation schemes are so inflexible – with probably the harshest part of this being that someone who has a motorway put through their house gets compensated, but someone who has a new motorway at the back of their section doesn’t – even though the noise and pollution may have wiped huge amounts off the value of their land.

However, some other “problems” highlighted in terms of infrastructure worry me in terms of what the suggested solutions might be. Does “Lack of national clarity and consistency of objectives, direction and standards” really mean that where councils and central government disagree on what infrastructure projects are necessary (like we’re seeing in Auckland at the moment) that central government should always win through? Also, in terms of “complex and inflexible approval process”, the main gripe seems to be that there are increasing demands to undertake detailed design at the notice of requirement stage – which is really just “route protection”. However, the alternative to this is pretty scary: that we might just get motorway designations without any idea of what mitigation is proposed or how high a bridge is proposed to be? The notice of requirement is the one opportunity the public has to participate in this process, and designations are so powerful I can see why people would want to know details of design: so that they can see how effects on the environment are being avoided, remedied or mitigated.

I guess to summarise, perhaps the main problem with the planning and infrastructure system is its complexity – this is outlined in the diagram below (see the appendices for what the acronyms mean):
Perhaps the most interesting thing to highlight here is that the document considers the relatively weak influence of the Government Policy Statement for transport (which is basically a roadsfest of motorway building) on the Regional Land Transport Strategy (a far more balanced transport strategy) to be something problematic. This is unsurprising, as the government made it quite clear they were disappointed that Auckland came up with a balanced RLTS and not a motorway-festival, but still potentially very dangerous for our hopes of achieving the kind of balanced transport system envisaged by the RLTS. If future versions of the RLTS (or whatever replaces it) need to give effect to the GPS to a greater extent, it will be very difficult for Auckland to start achieving its transport vision.

If we start to look at the options the discussion document proposes to fix the problems outlined above, as I noted at the start of this blog post there are a number of very useful proposals.

Looking first at efforts to make the RMA reflect the urban environment more, there are some good possibilities discussed:

Having some sort of very high level requirement that projects are assessed on their contribution to creating quality urban environments is a damn good idea. Of course there will be endless debate of what a quality built environment is, but having high-level directions in section 6 and/or section 7 that force councils to grapple with these issues when making plans (and when assessing consent applications) is a very good idea.

The next set of options worries me to a greater extent though – as we start getting into the vexed issue of central government trying to impose on local government the planning outcome that they (or their wealthy developer friends) want. Here are the options:

Option 4 makes good sense, and option 3b is something that I think is critical – in that we need to make housing affordability far more central to the way that we plan towns and cities than is the case at the moment.

However, option 3a is the stupidest idea ever. It basically would result in the end of our Metropolitan Urban Limits and a return to the days of letting Auckland sprawl forever. It is stupid because it assumes that urban growth demand has to take place on the edge of cities, even though all our planning documents – including a very detailed recent strategy produced by the ARC – shows that road-dependent urban sprawl is the most expensive option infrastructure wise, and produces the worst outcomes in terms of sustainability and economic benefits. Requiring local authorities to continuously have enough zoned land for 20 years worth of sprawl is also stupid because it completely neglects the issue of transport affordability. Someone living on the edge of the city may have a cheaper house, but they will probably end up spending 25-30% of their income on transport. This option must absolutely not proceed if we are to have a hope of creating more sustainable urban outcomes.

Shifting along, the document starts to talk about “spatial planning”, which is the real planning buzzword at the moment – and seems to me as a useful place-based way to bring together land-use planning and infrastructure planning. The options presented would either retain the status quo situation (where Auckland will have a spatial plan but it can be completely ignored by everything), or the following:
Effectively, the options under 6 relate to where the spatial plan would fit in the structure of the current planning documents I outlined in the diagram above, with 7 being the options that relate to the extent to which the final planning documents (generally the District Plan) needs to consider the Spatial Plan.

As long as we have a good spatial plan (ie. as long as the Auckland Council has the ability to choose a public transport led compact city future) then integrating the Regional Land Transport Strategy and the Auckland Regional Policy Statement into that one spatial plan could be a very good thing. It would be impossible for them both to continue to ignore each other, as has happened over the past decade or so. Of course, on the other hand of the reforms effectively force the Auckland Council to come up with a spatial plan that promotes sprawl (by having to always have 20 years worth of vacant urban-zone land to sprawl onto) and entrenches auto-dependency (by having to give effect to the Government Policy Statement) then the result will be a complete and utter mess.

A potentially tricky part of these changes relate to the extent to which appeals to courts should be allowed on the spatial plan. A number of options are presented:
In the first phase of the RMA reforms last year, there was a huge outcry over the original proposal to ban appeals on District Plans, other than on matters of law. In the end the government backed down on that proposal.

There are two clear sides to the argument: one is that allowing appeals makes the process of plan-making exceedingly lengthy and often the result is an ugly compromise that pleases nobody and retains a lot of stupid rules to please the parties that tend to appeal the most (the Westfields of this world). On the other side of the argument, if you don’t have appeal rights on plans then a council could effectively zone a place next door for heavy industry and you wouldn’t be able to challenge it in court.

My feeling is that because appeals are allowed on District Plans, which are the ‘nitty-gritty’ details of how the spatial plan will be implemented, it is probably not necessary to also have an appeals process for the high-level strategic stuff that the spatial plan is trying to achieve. The spatial plan is strategic and more general than a District Plan – and ensuring that it can be bold, that it can be implemented quickly and that it doesn’t end up being an ugly compromise are all important. So I can probably live with limiting appeal rights to points of law only.

A possible outcome of the changes could be a simplification of the interaction between plans and policies into something like this:

Bringing everything together into that Spatial Plan could result in some pretty exciting outcomes – in terms of finally integrating what we do for land-use and transport. But it does mean that the spatial plan has to be excellent, otherwise we’re pretty stuffed.

Where I get worried again about the changes are in relation to the extent that central government wants to inject itself into planning – which has traditionally been the realm of local governments. Furthermore, it would seem that the particular area that the government wants to increase its influence over is the formulation of transport policy at the local level. Is this Steven Joyce’s ultimate revenge on the ARC for coming up with a balance RLTS rather than a roadsfest I wonder? These are the recommendations that seek to increase the role of central government in Auckland’s planning system:
Now certainly I can understand and agree with the need to promote alignment between central and local government on these matters. It really is crazy how different the government’s transport vision is for Auckland, compared with what Auckland’s transport vision for our own city is. But really, is that the problem of local government – or is it a problem because central government is ignoring most of what has happened at a local government level in Auckland for the past decade?

If there is to be better alignment between the two levels of government, then one feels that this should result from both parties coming together – not on having regulations that effectively mean that central government can overwrite pretty much anything that Auckland itself wants to do. As I foresee it, there’s no way that Auckland Council will come up with a spatial plan that’s acceptable to the government: because in areas like transport there is just such a massive gap between the priorities of the two. But is that wholly the problem of Auckland Council that it doesn’t share Steven Joyce’s roads focus? I tend to think not – so this is an area that requires quite a bit rethink.

This post is probably getting long enough, so I will leave the remainder of the recommendations to a future post. But to briefly summarise there are definitely some good elements of the proposed changes. I like the integration that a spatial plan will bring, I like that more thought will go into adapting our planning system to the urban environment – as that’s where most people live and where most development occurs. But there are some big worries in here too: the promotion of urban sprawl as a supposed solution to housing affordability problems simply ignores recent research in the Auckland area that suggests sprawl is actually the most expensive option which produces the worst outcomes.

The other thing that worries me a lot is what I effectively call a “takeover” of the planning process, and in particular of local government’s role in transportation policy, by central government. It’s difficult to not come to the conclusion that this results from the government’s frustration that Auckland’s elected local representatives don’t share the same roadsfest vision that they do. But I wonder – is this Auckland’s fault, or is it their fault for being so out of touch with what the people of Auckland are so strongly supporting?

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