11 May 2012 – The Victorian Government said today it had slashed red tape for planning. Key measures involved: Reform of the planning scheme amendment (rezoning) process – reducing the number of steps and the length of time involved A code assessment track for simple, low-impact permit applications Reform zones and planning provisions to simplify complex and lengthy regulations A review of the Farming Zone to give more flexibility to Victoria’s farmers and rural communities An increase in performance accountability for local councils and state referral authorities. The Victorian Planning System Ministerial Advisory Committee received 547 written submissions, and held meetings with over 130 individuals, groups, associations, peak bodies and local councils during 2011, Planning Minister Matthew Guy said. Details www.dpcd.vic.gov.au/planning  
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9 May 2012 - Queensland planning projects swept the field  at the 2012 Planning Institute of Australia Awards for Planning Excellence in Adelaide on 1 May winning eight of the 12 awards. Read More  
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3 May 2012 – The NSW Government has released a discussion paper for contribution to a new metropolitan strategy for Sydney over the next 20 years.. “Throughout the year the Department of Planning & Infrastructure will consult with communities, residents, businesses, workers, government and industry about what people want from Sydney,” an announcement form the Department of Planning and Infrastructure said. A draft strategy will follow in mid-late 2012. A final document will be released following community consultation. For details see: Sydney Over the Next 20 Years The Discussion paper  
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By Jane Jose 10 April 2012 – This year could be a turning point for Canberra.  Just a year away from the national capital’s big party to celebrate 100 years as a planned city, the ACT Government is launching a renewed planning strategy with an integrated transport plan. The work is prompted by the community and government’s strong push to improve the city’s carbon footprint, while sustainably housing 80,000 more people. An estimated 55,000 additional homes are needed by the year 2030. The two new strategic plans for transport and land use are intended to work together to improve liveability, housing choice, environmental   sustainability and to make it easier for people to get around the city. Canberra is predicted to grow from its 2011 estimate of 365,000 to 457,300 by 2030 and the total population of the six local government areas that make up the Canberra region is projected to increase by 148,700 by 2030. The renewed planning strategy says:  “This population projection... 
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12 April 2012 – What makes a city a thriving hub of jobs and competitive advantage? SGS Economics and Planning held a forum in Sydney in late March that suggested agglomeration was the key. But if so, this raises important questions, the  speakers said. For instance, should the city centres be prioritised over the suburbs? Is density for agglomeration compatible with liveability?  Which transport connections should be the priority?  Is Infrastructure NSW the answer to the integrated transport and land use planning challenge? Read More  
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By Patrick Fensham 12 April 2012  – This article, focused on the opportunities in Sydney for jobs and more housing, is an edited version of a recent presentation by Patrick Fensham at a cities forum by SGS Economics and Planning, where he is a director. Geography and topography and existing development Read More  
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By Tina Perinotto 3 April 2012 – The states and territories capacity for strategic planning and report card against key performance criteria are neither uniformly good or bad. There are some high achievers in some areas that could be good exemplars for other jurisdictions, but overall there is huge room for improvement. None of this is surprising. The assessment is from the Council of Australian Governments Reform Council’s Review of Capital Cities Strategic Planning Systems. Read More  
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28 March 2012 – The convenor of a national urban design forum in Victoria next month, Bill Chandler, believes there needs to be a better understanding of the economic value of good urban design particularly in regional cities where more than four million live. “Bad design costs you money,” he told The Fifth Estate. There is a more subtle way to promote good design: encouraging people to enjoy street life, to be part of a community, to have the necessary facilities such as close public transport.” Mr Chandler, who coordinates The Australian Urban Design Initiative, a national network of some 420 members, cites an initiative of Associate Professor of Urban Planning at Deakin University, called Midicities. Interest across Queensland includes a group of Regional Development Australia committees and municipal, academic and agency partners. This is being led by the Logan and Redlands RDA, which will host a national MidiCities conference from 11-12 July in Logan City, Queensland. The... 
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29 February 2012 – A new SA urban renewal authority aimed at increasing the supply and diversity of affordable housing and to accelerate the renewal of social housing stock will start operating from 1 March, the SA Premier and Minister for Development, Jay Wetherilll has told the SA Parliament. The authority will be responsible for all the residential and industrial land holdings of the Land Management Corporation and Defence SA industrial holdings will be added to this portfolio, Mr Wetherill said. . It would have a mandate to work on creating a vibrant city, maintaining safe communities and healthy neighbourhoods and having an affordable place to live for everyone. The authority would work with communities, local government, the private sector and the not for profit sector and would have a strong focus on community engagement, he said. It will plan all future significant redevelopment projects of assets owned by the South Australian Housing Trust and work with not-for-profit organisations... 
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21 February 2012 – Two recent articles including a review of a new Canadian book highlight some of the destructive impact of cars: Congestion. This puts a handbrake on the Australian economy, and chokes the movement of goods and people, effectively costing an estimated $9 billion in 2005 Deaths/injuries. Worldwide, 1.2 – 5 million people are killed annually. Australia recorded 1370 deaths and 32,500 serious accidents in 2010.  In no other area of social life are such high rates of death and injury tolerated Health and social costs of car-dependence. These include inactivity and obesity and premature death from car-generated air pollution Read More  
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23 January 2012 – New York’s city zoning comes in for an entertaining analysis in this article by Julie V Iovine from The Wall Street JournaI that shows that NSW is not the only state to suffer from frustrating zoning laws.  Read More  
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26 May 2011 – FAVOURITES: Peter Newman and Jeff Kenworthy of Curtin University’s Sustainability Policy Institute in Perth, Western Australia, say a new phenomenon is under way –  “peak car use”.* Peak car use suggests that we are witnessing the end of building cities around cars – at least in the developed world. In the 1980s we called this kind of city building automobile dependence (Newman and Kenworthy, 1989). The peak car use phenomenon suggests we may now be witnessing the demise of automobile dependence in cities. The Global Cities Database (Kenworthy and Laube, 2001; Read More  
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7 December 2011 – The response to the 2011 State of Australian Cities Report has been quite astonishing and led to the need for extra server capacity to handle demand for downloads, Infrastructure Minister Anthony Albanese said at the recent State of Australian Cities Conference in Melbourne. “After I announced the report’s findings before the State of Commonwealth Cities Symposium in Brisbane on 20 October, my department had to add extra capacity to its server to cope with the demand. Read More  
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6 December 2011 – Without clear guidelines liability for future climate change impacts may be unintentionally placed on the designer or planner of a project, a report on Australia’s major cities by Consult Australia has warned. Read More  
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By Lyn Drummond 15 November 2011 – A website where potential developers can easily calculate their infrastructure commitments, bypassing the often complex paper work of local government has won Shoalhaven City Council the top prize at the Planning Institute of Australia NSW Division Planning Excellence Awards Read More  
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By Peter Droege 7 November 2011– From his forthcoming book chapter Droege, P. (2011). Beyond Sustainability: Architecture in the Renewable City. In Crysler, C. Greig, Stephen Cairns and Hilde Heynen. Eds. Sage Handbook of Architectural Theory. Thousand Oaks, CA and London: Sage Publications. www.renewablecity.org New concepts enter architecture, landscape and urban design. Mitigation, adaptation,  zero-emissions, climate protection, low carbon, carbon neutral or post-fossil design are to resuscitate meaning in that worn word, sustainability. Even terms borrowed from psychology are rallied to the battle: resilience denotes the presumed ability to brave the adversities of climate change, energy and economic risks. The deluge of words belies the fact that comprehension and action lag behind the pace of climate change. Atmospheric Carbon dioxide concentrations exceed safe levels by more than one third (Schellnhuber 2009, Hansen et al. 2008). To refer to this enormous problem as... 
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By Lynne Blundell Read More  
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By Lynne Blundell 25 October 2011 ­– Speeding up the development process by cutting down on friction and misunderstandings between stakeholders is the dream of developers, planners Read More  
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6 September 2011 – Favourites – A new worldwide study of sustainable precincts commissioned by Sustainability Victoria has unearthed some of the drivers to the most successful sustainable communities Read More  
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5 October 2011 – Former NSW Government Architect, Chris Johnson has been appointed as new chief executive of the Urban Taskforce. This follows the  move  after four years of former CEO Aaron Gadiel to a senior role at Gadens. Mr Johnson was NSW Government Architect for 10 years and was later appointed executive director in the NSW Department of Planning. He is also a former member of the Central Sydney Read More  
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By Tina Perinotto 29 September 2011 – When the owners of a two-bedroom waterfront property on Lake Macquarie on the NSW Central Coast were offered $430,000 recently they jumped at it. Read More  
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By Tina Perinotto 29 September 2011 – The NSW Planning Institute has been gathered in Wollongong this week from Wednesday for its annual three day conference. The woes of the state’s planning fiasco must be weighing heavily on its collective shoulders. Despite planners’ typically calm and sanguine nature they cannot help, you imagine, feeling just a little jaded by the new O’Farrell government’s promise Read More  
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On PCA’s Cities Summit, spruikers and detective work,  amid great content 22 September 2011 – Joel Kotkin was billed as the controversial keynote speaker at the Property Council of Australia’s Cities Summit 2011 on last Monday (12 September) in Sydney. He was. He should have been billed as a Demographia clone. The Fifth Estate did not know Kotkin and arrived a little late for the intro where his politics may or may not have been introduced. Read More  
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18 September 2011 – The Tea Party in the US has sustainable development in its cross hairs. In their view it’s a plot to destroy the American way of life: the “single family residence – which is to say, the middle class suburb with tract homes, soccer moms driving mini-vans, and consumption of energy restricted only by the wallets of the homeowners themselves…fixation” with the automobile – and hence the mobile freedom that comes along with It,” says Treehugger in its latest alert on this reactionary trend that promises to be the new front of the climate deniers/resources industry. Treehugger quotes, Tea Party mouthpiece, Tom DeWeese, President of the American Policy Center on the Agenda 21 “conspiracy”:. “Sustainable development” says DeWeese, “envisions local communities all across the US adopting comprehensive community plans that have as their real, though unstated, purpose the elimination of the very middle class quality... 
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The violence of ABC listeners, Rod Leaver and Green Building Week, Low Carbon calls for interests and will Turnbull cross the floor? 15 September 2011 – Interesting comments came from Janne Ryan this morning (Thursday) speaking to a class of young architecture students at UTS in Sydney. Read More  
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By Lindsay Bevege 13 September 2011 – Australian cities were prominent in the top 10 most liveable cities based on the Economist Intelligence Unit’s global liveability index. But we are also in the top 10 of another index that shows us in a less favourable light: the per capita ecological footprint measured by the Global Footprint Network. The two indices have a roughly inverse relationship. Developing nations have the lowest per capita ecological footprint but their cities are at the bottom of the EIU’s index – and almost every other index of human welfare. Read More  
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9 September 2011 – MIT researchers have used social networking data to create a new spatial mapping toolbox for cities available free to urban designers and planners. “Network centrality measures are useful predictors for a number of interesting urban phenomena,” Andres Sevtsuk, the principal investigator of the City Form Research Group at MIT told ScienceDaily. Read More  
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By Lindsay Bevege 23 August 2011 – A common theme in the London riots was that the young rioters felt no stake in the neighbourhood in which they lived and so had no compunction in trashing it. Read More  
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By Lyn Drummond 24 August 2011 – Global water issues, such as scarcity, maintaining quality, energy and nexus, and developing the nation’s water and sanitation cannot be combated without supporting global alliances, says Tom Mollenkopf, chief executive officer  of the Australian Water Association. Read More  
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24 August 2011 – How do you design walkable neighbourhoods? What are the principles in play? The US’s Congress for the New Urbanism program director Heather Smith has co-author of a manual to deliver these, Designing Walkable Urban Thoroughfares: A Context Sensitive Approach available as a free download at this website Ms Smith recently attended the annual meeting of the US Institute of Transportation Engineers in St Louis last week, which focused on this topic and provided the following note in a newsletter from CNU: At the ITE meeting, there was an excitement about new methodologies and techniques for designing safer streets. From sessions on Tampa Bay’s pedestrian action plan and an analysis of New York’s express bus system to several sessions dedicated to bicycles, pedestrians, and drivers in the midst of a typical highway- and car-focused meeting, this year’s ITE conference addressed a whole range of concerns. The CNU and ITE urban thoroughfares manual got... 
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