Paul Mees (1961–2013)

Urban Policy and Research Editorial Board Member 1994–2013  

The Editorial Board of Urban Policy and Research lost one of its longest serving members with the premature death of Associate Professor Paul Mees on 19 June 2013. Paul served on the Board continuously and with distinction from 1994 onwards, offering consistently constructive collegial input into the growth and development of the journal. Paul also published much of his scholarship within Urban Policy and Research, a record that includes some of the most insightful accounts and appraisals of Australian urban planning.

In 1994 Paul was drawn to the academy from his career in the law and from his prominent civic and community service in confronting urban environmental questions and problems. At the time he was known widely as an articulate and unceasing advocate for the improvement of public transport, but saw this as a vehicle for his greater interest in the prospect for cities to sustain fair and decent human lives through capable institutions, including planning. Paul's conviction that our transport systems fundamentally shape the prospects of the good city drew him towards an intensive engagement with foundational questions in Australian transport and urban policy and scholarship. This tireless effort did much to elevate transport policy, a long neglected but powerful force in shaping urban conditions.

Paul's first entry to the scholarly record was as a public advocate (Mees & Walford, 1989) but he soon assumed the mantle of erudite scholar. In an early article, he sought to differentiate Australian urban patterns and policies from those in the USA via a characteristically concise statement of the problem:

We need better models of the dynamics of retail change than those we have inherited from North America … Melbourne is a ‘strong centre’ city from the point of view of retailing, but current urban development and transport policies appear to be based on the opposite assumption. (Mees, 1993, pp. 22–30)

Much of Mees' research in the mid-1990s digested contemporary planning presumption and policy, spurred by a PhD begun in 1994 and his new teaching role in the School of Environmental Planning at the University of Melbourne. The questions posed concerned such problems as the shortening of work journeys (Mees, 1994a), the nature of trade-offs in strategic policy (Moriarty & Mees, 1994), and dispersal versus growth models (Mees, 1995).

One such article exemplifies his abiding interest in rigorous comparative evaluation—exercising richly conceptualised empirical data. This was a study of Melbourne's transport and land-use planning contrasted with Toronto. It also offers an early exhibition of his enduring contentions about the overstated role of density in successful public transport systems:

Toronto is a ‘paradigm’ of successful public transport, as Newman and Kenworthy claim … It is less clear that Toronto's success relative to Melbourne can be linked with land-use planning policies promoting higher population densities. (Mees, 1994b, p. 160)

Paul's PhD, awarded in 1997, expanded on this fundamental insight into the links between transport policy and urban morphology. His findings and propositions contested much contemporary urban knowledge, including academic wisdom. He spent 1997 in Canberra, as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Urban Research Program (URP) at the ANU. Exposure to the city, its extraordinary planning history and the peerless environs of the URP, established an abiding fascination with Canberra. The late 1990s brought a vigorous intellectual confrontation with the Kennett Victorian government's public transport privatisation agenda.

A return to Melbourne University in 1998 saw Mees confirmed in a Lecturer position in 1999, followed by publication of his landmark volume A Very Public Solution (Mees, 2000b). The long form showcased his mastery of prose and extended scholarly argument, conveying technical material in an emphatically logical yet accessible form. The radical promise in its opening paragraphs, that public transport could avert dystopian urban failure and the climate crisis, made the text essential reading for urbanists. None other than Sir Peter Hall (2001, p. 130) exhorted that it “be read by anyone who is bothered about cars and cities”.

In the 2000s, Mees' captivation with Melbourne and Toronto expanded to Auckland (Mees & Dodson, 2001, 2007) whose many errors exemplified the primacy of transport policy in forming urban outcomes. Auckland's late 20th century planning failures rested partly on a deliberate misreading of Fooks (1948). The inspiration Mees had separately drawn from Fooks' urban density insights—and his incredible personal history—added to the Auckland interest. Mees' revision of Auckland's planning history reinvigorated that city's culture of urban advocacy.

The 2000s saw Mees enter an extraordinarily vigorous and sustained phase of intellectual work, producing articles on a proliferating and diverse array of topics that included: privatisation (Mees, 2002, 2003a), planning ambition and prospect (Mees, 2000b), travel behaviour marketing (Morton & Mees, 2005), the journey to work (Moriarty & Mees, 2006; Mees et al., 2007), transport studies of Sydney (Mees, 2000c), Wellington (Dodson & Mees, 2003), Auckland (Mees & Dodson, 2007), infrastructure capacity (Mees, 2007a, 2008), Vancouver (Mees, 2007b) and urban density (Mees, 2009a), all critically contesting current policy and surveying alternative planning tracks. Highlights include his scathing disassembly of the Melbourne 2030 metropolitan strategy (Mees, 2003b), his relentless excoriation of the privatisation policy (Mees, 2003b) and a profound critique of accepted density metrics (Mees, 2009b).

In the 2000s, he also enjoyed international recognition and authority. The Toronto Transit Commission sought his advice on its restructuring. A Chair at one of the world's top planning schools was offered (but declined). The European Union's landmark Hi-Trans guidebook on public transport planning placed Mees' (2000a) fundamental propositions about the “network effect” at its core, even replicating his key diagram illustrating this principle (Nielsen 2005, p. 86). A subsequent invitation saw him advise the New Zealand government on transport policy (Mees et al., 2010).

Mees departed Melbourne University for RMIT in 2008. There he produced his master work, Transport for Suburbia (Mees, 2010a), which combines expansive sweep with exhaustive yet engaging detail. In doing so, he confirmed his significance as Australia's most provocatively constructive urban thinker. The signal argument of the text was that deftly crafted transport policy, aided by institutional frameworks dedicated to the public good, can deliver high-quality public transport even in dispersed suburbia. It punctures established planning dogma on the determining primacy of urban form and design in shaping cities. This book further showcased Mees' engaging scholarly style; the gnawingly evocative introduction titled “Public Transport 101” immediately became essential reading for any serious transport planning course. His views were also digested by planning students across Australia via the chapter he contributed on transport to the second edition of Planning Australia, a widely read text (Mees, 2010b). Moreover, in the year of Canberra's centenary, he furnished another revisionist triumph recovering and revalorising that city's extraordinary yet forgotten transport planning successes (Mees, forthcoming).

Paul Mees was an exemplary teacher, readily applying the prosecutorial style he had honed in debating troupes and legal practice to the systematic appraisal of planning thought and knowledge. Yet he was equally vigorous in his commitment to the fair treatment of students. Even advisers to political actors whose policies ran counter to Mees' views sought his lessons, acknowledging the incomparable tutelage he offered. Mees was also a firm but nurturing mentor of PhD scholars, challenging them as supervisor, and sometimes co-author, to new insights into public transport planning and its institutions (Mees et al.2007; Petersen & Mees, 2010; Stone & Mees, 2010).

One of Paul's faults was an excess humility borne of incredulity that the academy might tenure him to, in his words, “pursue his hobby”. Formal institutional recognition trailed far in the wake of the immense esteem in which he was held by his peers. He was belatedly made Associate Professor in 2013.

In his scholarship, Mees was a methodological optimist, certain that the application of relentless scholarly and empirical critique—via his avowed method of ‘bland empiricism’—would ensure public institutions acted in the public interest, not just for their own or sectoral advantage. Despite the immeasurable esteem his public and scholarly work brought them, both of the institutions at which he taught found Mees' critique discomfiting. Among his many colleagues, however, Paul was both admired and respected. The two concurrent Australian Research Council Discovery grants he held at the time of his death—one of only two planning scholars to enjoy such success—clearly testified to his eminence. It is doubtful that Mees could have achieved his remarkable record of advocacy and scholarship without the steadfast support of his wife Erica Cervini.

Associate Professor Paul Mees, activist, advocate, scholar, stater of facts, disrober of emperors, beer theorist, colleague, husband to Erica, dear friend, and Urban Policy and Research Editorial Board member, has passed. The path to the good city is darker now the bright torch he held is gone.