Page 3478 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 21 September 2005
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Giralang is an interesting case in point. It has valuable health care facilities, a lively school, an extraordinarily busy service station and, until recently, a viable and valuable family tavern. Anyone who has visited that centre would immediately notice that the shops had not been maintained, let alone upgraded, for quite a long time. Clearly, for the owner, who also ran the supermarket for some time, the opportunity to get out of running a shopping centre and capitalise on the appreciated land value that comes with poor area zoning was hard to resist.
When this first blew up in the media, the planning minister made the point that how we live our lives has changed and that the design of suburbs, with local schools and shops and the presumption of mothers at home with the kids, is really a thing of the past. There is a point in that, but such an analysis, if it ends there, is superficial. There are still mothers at home and fathers, part time perhaps, running business from home on occasion, or studying. And there are, of course, their children. There is also a growing population of ageing people who would like to stay independent or semi-independent for a longer time and people who are ill or live with disabilities and for whom neither full-time care nor full employment is possible or desirable.
If we allow the core of our suburbs to be transformed into apartment complexes with secure parking, then those people who live in our suburbs, rather than sleep in them, will become isolated. It ignores the interaction between people and place. We know that some suburbs have revived and achieved lively centres. Attracting the right businesses that are prepared to respond to the needs of local communities or set up niche businesses that bring people from elsewhere has proved to be the secret to success.
Isolation and disadvantage are real problems in affluent and mobile communities like ours, and one of the responsibilities of planners is to be alert to those dangers and to build a stronger dimension of social and cultural planning into their processes. It is not a matter of social engineering; it is a question of community care.
I also question the notion that localities are not important to young people. There is growing affirmation that, even in times of a supposedly international understanding of the world, most people are still defined by their place. While parents may drive their children continually from one location to another to link up with friends from across town or to engage in a range of classes and organised activities, that is not the most desirable or the most sustainable way for people to live; nor is it inevitable.
Last week I was host to a forum here at the Assembly about the unhealthy impact of our reliance on cars. It was a presentation by Sarah Hind from the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at the ANU. One of the many telling pieces of research that she referred to was the greater health benefit to children of free play over structured sports and physical activities and the decided benefits for children from such structured activity if they walked to the event rather than were driven to it. In the context of burgeoning obesity, just that one piece of research alone is a pointer to the importance of ensuring our suburbs are able to offer a way of living which is sociable and offers physically opportunities.
I would also like to consider the role of neighbourhood schools. Narrabundah primary school is a small school that fulfils an extraordinarily important role for its community.
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