What do mid-career Melbourne planners profess?

ABSTRACT

This paper considers whether twelve Melbourne mid-career planners actively seek to push the boundaries of existing practice in the context of ‘actually existing neoliberalism’. Based open-ended interviews it is concluded that while there is evidence of a general preparedness to work within these confines, as manifest in Melbourne, many consider they are in work situations that enable them to push against them in line with their own values, albeit in small ways. Why this might be is discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Melbourne
• neoliberalism
• institutional settings
• mid-career practices
• planning practices

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 On 10 May 2019, The Age reviewed “Melbourne: how big, how fast and at what cost?” (2019) by Stanley, J, Brain, P. and Stanley J. a review in part of Plan Melbourne 2017–2015: “The report finds that Plan Melbourne, the key strategic plan for the city that aimed to curb sprawl, is not working”, the Planning Minister acknowledging “there was more work to be do”.

2 On 26 April 2019, The Age reported on the PIA Victoria’s concerns over the proposed North-East Link freeway, the latest addition to the metropolis’s freeway network, one started in the 1960s (Beed 1981), specifically the loss of public space and parkland and the prioritizing of private over public transport concerns.

As one of interviewees said, an engineer by first degree who had worked for VicRoads on previous freeway extensions, this has long been the case.

3 The emphasis in this paper is on the shared or common views of the 12 planners: in quantitative analysis akin to trying to pick out the main factors that run through multi-dimensional data points: that is, seeing through the ‘data noise’ to pick out any underlying explanatory structures. This is useful if trying to see if there are any generational effects at play.

4 In Australia, McClure and Douglas’s work in Queensland (2018) on how local government planners pursuing climate change adaptation have effectively responded to adverse political, institutional and procedural conditions, could be indicative of emergent practice, of planners challenging the dominant paradigm.

5 Further to Endnotes i and ii, Australia’s major political parties at both federal and state level have recently committed to major spending on public transport infrastructure in the state capitals. In Melbourne the proposal is to build a rail loop linking 15 (some new) middle-distance suburban stations, funding for which is built into Victoria’s forward estimates, now made more realizable by the Federal Australian Labor Party’s promise of $10 AUS billion, if it wins government on 18 May 2019. The political will to contain sprawl and better integrate land use and transport planning across Melbourne might at last be here, its planners taking a key role in realizing more sustainable urban development. May 28: the ALP lost the federal election; the political wrangles continue.