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Once upon a time buildings, clothes, kettles and the layout of newspapers were things that were ‘designed’. We could even refer to ‘the design professions’ and be very confident everybody understood we were talking about visual disciplines.

Designers used to be people who worked out optimal ways things could be configured – things like buildings, clothes, graphics, and functional objects. They were the professionals who figured out ahead of time the most efficient trade-offs between useability, manufacturing cost, safety, recyclability, cost of materials, marketability, aesthetics, and more. Continue reading

IN THE maze that is Sydney property planning, let’s start with the incontrovertible. There is not enough housing. Demand grows by 25,000 homes a year but only about 18,000 are built. That helps keep housing prices out of the reach of many, particularly the young.

Next, whatever the strengths and flaws of past policies intended to free up housing supply, they did not work, or did not work enough. There is little sense in persisting exclusively with a policy or suite of policies that do not do the job.

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It’s a start, but all the tough decisions are yet to be made. That’s the industry verdict on the state government’s “once-in-a-generation” overhaul of the state’s moribund Planning Act.

The Planning Minister, Brad Hazzard, yesterday released a wide-ranging issues paper that pulled together months of community consultations by review chairmen Ron Dyer and Tim Moore, confirming that the 30-year-old planning system was broken beyond repair.

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Malcolm Holland From: The Daily Telegraph December 02, 2011
SENIOR bureaucrats in the state government’s environment department have routinely stopped publishing scientific papers which challenge the federal government’s claims of sea level rises threatening Australia’s coastline, a former senior public servant said yesterday.

Doug Lord helped prepare six scientific papers which examined 120 years of tidal data from a gauge at Fort Denison in Sydney Harbour.

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“The first wave of modernism was about beauty and sensuality, but the second wave may be about confrontation – confronting the mistakes of the past,” said Brad McKee, Editor, Landscape Architecture Magazine, at The Second Wave of Modernism II: Landscape Complexity and Transformation, a day-long conference organized by the Cultural Landscape Foundation at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. McKee described the changes that have overcome American cities: the rise of global competition and the decline of large-scale manufacturing, the mass number of companies and people who fled industrial waterfronts, leaving toxic wastelands. “This is the industrial legacy designers confront.”

He added that toxic brownfield sites have proliferated over the years with devastating but often undiagnosed effects on families. The idea that human health and the built environment are linked has only been gaining steam in the past 10 years. But now at least, “obesity, diabetes, asthma, depression, anxiety can all be attributed to factors in the environment.” For McKee, the public is also now skeptical about “big ideas”, grand concepts imposed by policymakers and designers. Urban dwellers can see the damage these ideas can cause so the next waves of Modernism in cities may focus more on “places for people,” and integrating public health and ecological sustainability into design.

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My career as an urban designer has been spent, not surprisingly, doing what urban designers do: crafting plans and regulations for municipalities to build great places. A side effect of this, much to my wonderful wife’s chagrin, is that whenever we travel I remain ‘on the job,’ annoyingly interrupting her shopping with some variation of: “Would you look at that terminated vista!”

She walks away as I take 37 pictures of “the enclosure!”

We willingly pay thousands of dollars to travel long distances to soak in the ‘character’ of wonderful places. My wife intuitively knows that the shopping will rarely disappoint, and I know that these places are invigorating, inspiring and flat out illegal to build in my home town.

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You’ve probably never asked yourself how many gnomes make a good neighbourhood or how many pretty letterboxes and neat lawns it takes to make you feel safe walking down a street.

Sarah Foster from UWA’s Centre for Built Environment and Health has and she has the answers.

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Ministry of Environment, Water, Population and Communities, October 27, 2010.
Tony Burke, Minister for Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities, today released Australia’s new strategy for biodiversity conservation on behalf of the Natural Resource Management Ministerial Council.  
Australia’s Biodiversity Conservation Strategy 2010–2030 sets 10 targets to measure the nation’s progress in protecting our natural environment. Continue reading.

Jessica Irvine and Damien Murphy, October 6, 2010.
THUY DIENH manicures the nails of Mosman ladies and loves working for rich people.

For four years the 30-year-old manicurist from Fairfield has travelled east each work day to service the hands and feet of the well-heeled, and she has seen the nail salon business she works for blossom with the sharemarket and housing boom.  Continue reading

Matthew Moore, September 21, 2010
COMMUNITIES across NSW are so frustrated and cynical about the planning system they doubt it is worth the effort of even engaging with it, according to a report funded by the Department of Planning.

It says a principal Planning Act objective of encouraging ”public involvement and participation” in the process has steadily eroded, leaving communities angry with consultation they often feel is simply tokenism. Continue Reading