Page 3894 - Week 12 - Thursday, 23 November 2006
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The street settings often prevent buildings from exploiting the potential for solar passive design, for retention of water on the block and environmentally sensitive urban design. We know how to do it. I think the message is that every new development must integrate this knowledge, and I think Forde will be the big test.
The social setting is also important. Apart from our homes, the most important feature in determining our sense of belonging is the place where our home is set, and one way that we tell our life story to anyone else is in terms of the journey we have taken through places where we have lived. The ability to move far from home in cars, planes and other transportation has weakened that attachment to place for some people. But even world travellers need to spend time at home and most people have an address. Of course, some groups spend more time in their neighbourhood—the elderly and the less mobile, children, parents at home with children, the unemployed and the ill and otherwise disabled. So there is already every good reason for our suburbs to be good places for them to live.
That has been recognised by ACT planners, from Griffin to the National Capital Development Commission, which ensured that every suburb who had a shopping centre, a primary school and usually a preschool, although, as we heard yesterday, they have a different history. They came from parent initiative, not planning. Some suburbs—for example, Giralang—were designed so that children could walk to school and residents to the shops without ever crossing a busy road. Sadly, we have seen a deterioration of this amenity over time as shopping centres have become unviable due to planning, segregation of sectors, hierarchy of intermediate and town centres and, of course, that ease of driving in our cars past local amenities.
Schools have closed, often as a response to demographic change, and we have the impacts of globalisation where mobility of labour has required people to move. I believe that people move, on average, every three to five years. That is quite astounding to me! Meanwhile, we know that communities are strengthened by the links made between parents of school-aged cohorts by people running into each other at local supermarkets, local events and coffee shops, and we know the term for that is social capital.
Climate change and peak oil are relevant issues. We hear a lot about climate change these days. We hear less about the peaking of oil supplies, the subsequent increased cost of keeping cars on the road and the possibility that we may not be able to do that for very much longer. We will have to make decisions between the various uses we put our oil to. Urban design, however, can tackle both climate change and peak oil at once. It seems that the early planners had it right about that.
There are new principles of planning to respond to these issues, and sometimes I hear Mr Corbell talk about them and sometimes I hear Mr Savery talk about them. I believe that ACTPLA and the minister have integrated a lot of aspects of the new planning, which recognises the importance of the neighbourhood at a time when we see so many things spinning out to decrease the amenity of local centres. We see local schools closing. In many cases it would probably be better for the social capital if they did not. These kinds of planning are variously termed new urbanism, smart growth,
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