An engineer's city - landscape vandalism

Moonscape - the Marmion Avenue extension

photo courtesy of Sun City News

This long weekend we holidayed in Yanchep, 45 minutes north of Perth. To get there is a lesson in the history of planning for suburbs, starting with the 1960s suburbs - roads built through land on which housing is progressively built where the outcome is a mixture of housing types. Next is the 1980s suburbia made of wide curvilinear roads, lined with back fences. We got lost at one point, and had to double-back a few times until we discovered the way out (hint - these road names end in "Entrance" or something similar, but look like all the other roads). Next is the suburbs of the 1990s and early 2000s that are much like the 1980s except that retaining walls make a big appearance everywhere. Here, slopes not visible to the naked eye are severely retained, and combined with sand dunes streets become walled enclosures. Apparently building companies will not build unless the lot is flat.

On the urban fringe main streets are beginning to appear, before a 10km undeveloped coastal landscape separates suburbia from our holiday destination. Marmion Avenue was recently extended across this undeveloped land to the next town.

It is on this newly constructed road that we can see the true reign of the engineer. What would otherwise be a simple road becomes a technical feat. To make the two-lane road, a wide swathe of land is cleared - the road itself is probably 10-12m wide - probably an 80m wide reservation is cleared and flattened. Where sand dunes are encountered, precisely-engineered slopes are constructed either side of the road and the slopes fenced off (there is no other fencing anywhere along the road). Three roundabouts are constructed - two of which have no road connections and the third being a little-used road to the coast. Finally,despite being a 10km long stretch of road with no hazards or side roads, an 80km/h speed limit is maintained, even though the road is so over-engineered that any driver would have no problems travelling at 110km/h (if not for the roundabouts to nowhere).

The landscape around the road is scenic - rolling sand dunes are all that can be seen, there is no other development - other than the massive scar made by the road's construction. There is no other way of looking at this other than the vandalism of a pristine landscape for engineering's sake. Sure the land may be set aside for suburban expansion, but that is no reason to destroy the land in the meantime.

What makes me angry is that the road is obviously designed for development that may not catch up to it for 10-20 years. It is the wrong way of going about things - the road should have been built to rural standards using only the land required for the road - when development happens the road can be upgraded. This line of thought is more consistent with planning to extend networks are required, rather than just assuming that development will continue indefinitely and making provision for it.

The local government i work for is looking at constructing a new entry road into its central area. Instead of acquiring the full 80m wide road reserve, it is instead asking for a 40m wide reserve. If the remaining land is eventually required, it can take the rest at a later stage. If only this thought was applied to Marmion Avenue.

Urban Patterns - Beyoglu, Istanbul

Urban Patterns : Beyoglu, Istanbul

Jessica Judd 2008

Vegetable Pesto Tartlets

Perth is just starting to get cold. The evenings are dark by the time i get home from work, and sitting in office/car means that the body stays cool. But my girfriend is out tonight, so i decide to walk to the local shopping centre, The Mezz, something i have not yet done. Google Earth suggests a 1.2km drive taking 4 minutes - i walk there in 10 minutes exactly.

The streets of Mount Hawthorn are based on a rectangular grid layout that is common to pre-war suburbs, with tree-lined streets and footpaths on both sides. It is, however, dark. If there were obstacles or holes they would be difficult to see. There is also little life on the streets. The only people i see are a couple of joggers, a family attempting to fix a broken car by torchlight, and a man harvesting the from lavender bushes in the verge garden outside the shopping centre.

It seems that density and flexibility of land uses would go a long way in improving the walkability of the suburb. Already with a strong main-street, tripling or quadruling the density would significantly increase the number of people in the area, and make the existing shopping strip much more viable. It would also encourage incidental businesses to crop up on local streets around the centre, making walking though the area much more interesting and safe, as well as providing a variety of destinations. Suburbs such as Mount Hawthorn could easily retrofit this kind of development. To achieve this, state government really needs to make a strong stance by encouraging the refurbishment of existing areas.

Back to my walk. Where before i left i had rugged up in an overcoat and cranked up the heater in the house, coming home i was overheating and had to strip layers off - walking sure is a great way to warm up on a cool evening.

For no particular reason, i thought i would share with you my dinner tonight (hey, after doing planning all day in the office, it's great to get away from it in the evening!) - vegetable pesto tartlets (thanks to the Women's Weekly "4 Fast Ingredients"). Cut a pastry sheet in half and fold over the edges, and spread over it sun-dried tomato pesto (if your local walkable supermaket doesn't sell this, tomato paste is an ok alternative). Drain and pat dry some antipasto char-grilled veges (i used capsicum, tomato and olives) and place on the tartlets, and spinkle with feta. Bake for 10 minutes in a hot oven, and top with some fresh basil leaves. At this point, i should mention that any urban dweller with a conscience should have a herb and vegetable garden, no matter how small it is. Looking after a garden is a very satisfying experience!

Networking our cities

Recently Mathieu Helie suggested using networks as a new method of focusing urban development in the right locations - he suggested the following proscriptive standards:

• "For private development: you may build on any available part of the network so long as you replace the part you used up by extending the network around your new block.
• For community development: any time a part of the network becomes too complicated (for example it takes more than 4 steps to get out of a sector), extend the boundary of that part with a higher capacity road (a boulevard)."

Before we look into this, let us first consider the current planning system post 1940s, which is of course based on the zoning of land as a precursor to urban development. Perth is known for having a very successful regional scheme that covers the metropolitan region - it has been very successful in shaping Perth's urban development into corridors well serviced by transport networks and utilities. It has been so successful that Perth is now well known for having one of the lowest densities of any City, and for providing more roads per capita than any other City. The growth is coordinated with a broad-brush at the regional level.

At the district level, structure plans set up the more detailed framework within which development is to occur. Ultimately, development fills in the urban-zoned land to create a contiguous urban district. In the meantime, the half-developed areas look like this:

The result is a series of disconnected developments. There is no focus, the town centre is centred on a main street isolated from the remainder, with poor connectivity. It will be decades before the sections all connect, before an effective public transport system can be set up, and decades before the district attains the kind of population that supports intensification of central areas, and decades before local employment opportunities begin to take over from far-flung employment areas located at the ends of railways and freeways. Even then, it is unlikely that this form of ad hoc urbanisation will form the kind of diverse urban areas found in traditional suburbs.


Pre-1940s, limited access to motor vehicles meant urban development was necessarily constrained to existing transport routes. New development was undertaken in conjunction with extensions to tram networks, such that Cities were more or less developed along the same principles suggested by Mathieu.


Perth already has the framework in place to provide for growth of a network, with only surprisingly-minor tweaking of the existing system. The main changes needed are:

• Get rid of the "Urban" zone. Instead, identify land suitable for urban development (i.e. excluding environmentally-significant areas, main agricultural areas, regional freight routes, and so on;


• Create the rules that only allow subdivision and development where it connects to and extends an existing network (roads, public transport and utilities); and


• Simplify local planning regulations to provide for greater flexibility for land uses, so that extended networks can develop a mix of uses organically.

The benefits of such a system include much greater efficiency of the provision of services, greater certainty for owners and developers, and the development of a flexible City network that has a greater capacity to respond to social and economic changes.

A failed "main street" development

We have recently moved to a new suburb, where the closest shopping area is the Dog Swamp Shopping Centre. Despite its appealing name, the Shopping Centre features an unusual configuration of not one but two boxes, staring at each other across a carpark. The configuration does not do the shopping centre any favours, as each box is locked in competition with the other to attract customers.

Luckily, we are not far from the traditional shopping street of Mount Hawthorn. Excitedly, my girlfriend and i arrived to explore the main street - only to find that it was eerily quiet, like a sleepy country town. Despite being of a decent size, there was nowhere near the same number of people on the street in comparison to similar-sized main streets elsewhere. The main street itself couldn't be faulted, as it had all the usual suspects like cafés, a grocer, fashion retailers, a pub and bottle shop, post office and numerous salons all built up to the main street in a traditional manner.

It took me a week to discover The Mezz - a recently refurbished shopping centre right in the middle of the main street. Its refurbishment ticks all of the urban designer's boxes. It is built up to the main street, with shop frontage, generous pedestrian shelter, two-storey built form with articulation of the façade, and carparking hidden at the rear. It also features a new "main street" at the rear with more shop fronts on both sides, with gaps between the shops offering only fleeting glimpses of the carparking area. The reason it took me so long to find is this:

This picture shows the only entrance to the shopping centre from the main street. Can't find it? Hint: It's just to the right of the Dôme café. Inside, the entrance looks like this:

Pretty underwhelming; it looks like this street entrance has been put in as an afterthought, and probably to the detriment of the café.

Why does this shopping centre fail? Quite simply, it subtracts from the main street. By providing such a poor link between the shopping centre and the main street, it does not invite people to move between the two, but instead discourages it. Shopping centre users have no reason to go to the main street or vice versa. In essence, it has destroyed the symbiotic relationship that all shops in a shopping centre depend on, that shoppers will pass their shops and buy on impulse.

Neither is the new main street successful - it has no relationship to the real main street or even the side streets that it connects to. The design in inward looking and offers nothing to its surrounding environment. This is a view of the new "main street" from the side street:

No wonder we found the Mount Hawthorn main street unusually quiet - The Mezz is designed to operate in almost complete isolation to the main street it is attached to, much like the two halves of the Dog Swamp Shopping Centre. With this shopping centre versus main street dichotomy, both are likely to struggle to survive, given the lack of a relationship between the two parts. Town planners and urban designers when considering any development proposal should always ensure that the development adds to, and does not subtract from, its environment.

Places people would want to get married in

Kate (Tina Fey) being rewarded with five minutes of uninterrupted eye contact with her boss Barry (Steve Martin) in Baby Mama

Recently my girlfriend and i were watching Baby Mama, starring Tina Fey. In the film her new-age boss, played by Steve Martin, has asked her to be in charge of designing the organic food store's new flagship store. Amongst other things such as public involvement at the earliest possible stage, one of the criterion given to her is to design a store that people will want to get married in.

Many local governments will often provide extensive design criteria covering aspects such as roof pitches, window sizes, colour palettes, setbacks, building height - the list can be extensive. However, often the outcome is the creation of buildings that are deemed to comply, the bare minimum to achieve the specific criteria, neighbourhoods lacking in innovative, interesting places.

What if we get rid of all of these prescriptive standards, and instead introduce a single proscriptive standard - "Will people want to to get married in it?" If yes, approve. If not, send it back and try again.

It can be applied to anything - think of your local neighbourhood.

- King Street in Perth's west end? Tick.

- The Rocks in Sydney? Tick.

- London, Paris, Rome, or any one of the towns and villages lining the Mediterranean? Tick.

- Most suburban shopping centres? Cross

- Service commercial strips? Cross.

This also has the advantage of being a lot easier to interpret that the standard planner-speak terms like "amenity" and "does not detract from the streetscape," to which to the average person may not have the same level of understanding.

The adoption of this standard would encourages architects and designers to design buildings of beauty, rather than buildings that comply with a certain set of rules, and no doubt communities will be able to provide valuable input on the developments happening in their neighbourhoods. And any thing that leads to the creation of beautiful places must be a good thing.

Taking the cars off the road

Frematle's endangered High Street mall, photo courtesy of http://john.curtin.edu.au/fremantle/lawrence.html#six

Across Australia, business owners have been calling for pedestrian malls to be reopened to traffic - a slap across the faces of the planners who fought for the creation of these malls in the 1970s. After all, don't malls create a safe environment for shoppers to stroll at will, without the hassle of noisy and smoky cars, obstacles and greatly-reduced pavement widths?

Towns in question include Townsnville, Fremantle, Wooloongong, Darwin, and many others. At least six have already been reopened to traffic in Sydney. Opening malls to traffic has generally led to a reduction in crime and anti-social behaviour, and a decrease in the number of vacant shops. Of course, the lack of diversity of land uses in these mainly-retail malls contributed to a decrease in activity after hours, as well as the opening of suburban shopping centres as a major competition for these malls.

An interesting parallel is the market failure of San Diego's Uptown development, a new urbanist neighbourhood with pedestrian-friendly streets and carparking located out of sight at the rear of buildings, and mostly underground. Touted as a leading example of new urbanist design, the neighbourhood has seen a lot of businesses fail on its main street, including a yogurt shop, women's clothing store, coffeehouse, Italian restaurant, chicken rotisserie restaurant, local clothing designers' store, evening gown rental shop, and travel agency, all of which have gone out of business since the district opened.

The failure could be attributed by the district's willingness to cater for the car, by providing its ample parking underground, conveniently linked to the shops on the main street, but separated from the pedestrian environment.

All of this seems too familiar - where else have we witnessed attempts to separate car and pedestrian movements? This was one of the critical design elements of the Radburn new town, which influenced the design of many Australian suburbs in the 1960s. The practice of pedestrian open space links entirely separated from the road network was intended to provide safety - ironically it had the complete opposite effect. It didn't help that many Australian versions turned their backs to the open space, creating spaces almost entirely unsurveilled.

Only in areas where there is a high density and a diverse mix of uses can pedestrian-only environments flourish - even then cars and delivery vehicles should be incorporated - otherwise there will again be the risk of creating vehicle spaces that are unsafe, for all the same reasons.