Urban Nation: Australia's Planning Heritage

By Robert Freestone

Urban Nation: Australia's Planning Heritage provides the first national survey of the historical impact of urban planning and design on the Australian landscape. This ambitious account looks at every state and territory from the earliest days of European settlement to the present day. It identifies and documents hundreds of places - parks, public spaces, redeveloped precincts, neighbourhoods, suburbs up to whole towns - that contribute to the distinctive character of urban and suburban Australia. It sets these significant planned landscapes within the broader context of both international design trends and Australian efforts at nation and city building.

• Language: English
• Publisher: CSIRO PUBLISHING
• Release date: Apr 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9780643101906

Book preview

URBAN

NATION

AUSTRALIA’S

PLANNING

HERITAGE

URBAN

NATION

AUSTRALIA’S

PLANNING

HERITAGE

Robert Freestone

CSIRO PUBLISHING in association with

the Department of the Environment,

Water, Heritage and the Arts

and

The Australian Heritage Council

2010

© Commonwealth of Australia 2010

All rights reserved. Except under the conditions described in the Australian Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, duplicating or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Contact CSIRO PUBLISHING for all permission requests.

Every effort has been made to trace and acknowledge copyright. The publishers apologise for any accidental infringement and welcome information that would rectify any error or omission in subsequent editions.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Freestone, Robert.

Urban nation : Australia’s planning heritage / Robert Freestone.

9780643096981 (pbk.)

Includes index.

Bibliography.

City planning – Australia – History.

Land use – Planning – History.

307.12160994

Published by

CSIRO PUBLISHING

150 Oxford Street (PO Box 1139)

Collingwood VIC 3066

Australia

in association with the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts

Set in Rotis serif

Edited and indexed by Aedeen Cremin

Cover and text design by Andrew Rankine,

Atypica

Typeset by Andrew Rankine, Atypica

Printed in China by

1010 Printing International Limited

CSIRO PUBLISHING publishes and distributes scientific, technical and health science books, magazines and journals from Australia to a worldwide audience and conducts these activities autonomously from the research activities of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).

The views expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of, and should not be attributed to, the publisher or CSIRO.

Cover images

Town planning in the bush: Surveyors at work on the layout of Palmerston, later Darwin (1869), detail.

SLSA: B 11603 – Government Surveying Party, Palmerston (Darwin), 1869

The ‘parkland town’ ideal of South Australian Surveyor General George Woodroffe Goyder (1864).

SA Parliamentary Papers 36 (1864)

Woomera, South Australia, from the town’s water tower showing

‘Nob Hill’ for senior defence personnel in the foreground (1963), detail.

Courtesy Jim Frost

Development corridors for the expansion of Melbourne recommended to the Victorian Minister for Local Government in 1967, detail.

Town and Country Planning Board, Organisation for Strategic Planning (1967)

Stanton Road, Haberfield, Sydney (c1911), detail.

© Snape Collection. Courtesy of the Haberfield Association Inc.

Neighbourhood unit plan for the suburb of Aranda, Canberra, designed by Oskars Pumpars, with a spine of recreation space (8) and focused around shops (1), primary school (2), parish centre and school (3) and joint church (4), detail.

NCDC Tomorrow’s Canberra (1970)

Projected scheme for the Rocks, Sydney (1970), detail.

Scheme for the Redevelopment of Sydney Cove (1970). Courtesy of SHFA.

The paper this book is printed on is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) © 1996 FSC A.C. The FSC promotes environmentally responsible, socially beneficial and economically viable management of the world’s forests.

Rob Freestone is Professor of Planning and Urban Development at the University of New South Wales.

His research interests are in planning history and metropolitan restructuring. He is a Fellow of both the Planning Institute of Australia and the Australian Academy of Social Sciences.

His other books include Designing Australia’s Cities: Culture, Commerce and the City Beautiful 1900–1930 (2007) and Model Communities: The garden city movement in Australia (1989).

CONTENTS

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Introduction

The heritage of planning; Understanding and defining planning; Approach

Chapter 1 A National Narrative

Colonial foundations; Recognising the need for urban reform; Emergence of the modern town planning movement; Planning achievements and changing priorities in the 1920s and 1930s; Post-war reconstruction; The long boom; Rethinking planning; The vicissitudes of national urban policy; Responding to change; Neo-liberalism; Globalisation and the quality of life in the 2000s; Conclusion

Chapter 2 Imagining Ideal Places

Urban settlements; Suburban extension; Urban redevelopment

Chapter 3 Founding the Capital Cities

Sydney; Hobart; Perth; Melbourne; Brisbane; Adelaide; Darwin; Canberra

Chapter 4 A Nation of Planned Towns

Spreading beyond Sydney; The Macquarie towns; The urban frontier in the 1820s; Town design under Governor Darling; Western Australia; South Australia; End of an era; Critique of the grid; New cities for a new nation; New towns in balanced national development; New towns in regional economic development; Planned industrial communities; Early mining towns; Irrigation towns; Planned regional resource development; Other specialist new towns; Modern mining towns; The rise of the leisure community

Chapter 5 Metropolitan Strategies

The nineteenth century; Early 1900s; The 1920s; The 1940s; The 1950s; Corridor cities of the 1960s; The Canberra Y Plan; The transport–land use planning nexus; Towards sustainable metropolitan strategies 1970s–1990s; Contemporary plans

Chapter 6 Suburban Dreams

Late colonial model suburbs; Federation model suburbs; The coming of the garden suburb; State-assisted garden suburb development 1910s–1920s; Suburban industrial villages; Planned subdivisions; The 1930s; The 1940s; The rise, fall and regeneration of public housing estates; Radburn plans; The neighbourhood unit; The 1960s; New trends and shifting priorities in the 1970s and 1980s; Master planned communities

Chapter 7 Renewing Cities

Early city improvement; Late nineteenth-century issues; The early twentieth century; At mid-century; 1940s reconstruction ideology; Urban renewal in public housing; Commercial redevelopment; Inner-city revitalisation; Contesting renewal; From renewal to rehabilitation; Building better cities; Renewal for competitive cities

Chapter 8 Parks, Precincts and the Public Realm

Government domains, parklands and commons; Green spaces and squares; Urban parks and the town planning movement; Internal reserves and playgrounds; Recreation reserves, foreshores and lakes; Saving open space; Regional open space; Modern civic and cultural spaces; Town, retail and business centres; Urban design; Environmental design

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

FOREWORD

Former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam stated during the 1970s that ‘Australia is one of the most urban of all nations’ and it is within urban areas that Australians spend most of their lives. From colonial times, engineers, surveyors, architects, builders and – since the profession emerged in the early 20th century – town planners, have produced considered plans for Australia’s urban environments. These include country towns, mining communities, city centres, suburbs and indeed entire metropolitan regions, as well as their open spaces and transport networks.

The best and most creative planning ideas through the generations, backed by courageous governments, are now major features of our nation’s achievements and our heritage. In late 2008, for example, I had the privilege of adding the Adelaide Park Lands and City Layout to the National Heritage List. Adelaide Park Lands and City Layout is one of Australia’s greatest examples of planning heritage. The listing was the work of dedicated researchers and the people of Adelaide who love and value a memorable city form which today reflects enlightened 19th century theories of an ideal city layout.

To research the fuller national story of Australia’s urban planning, and assist in decisions on related heritage assessments, the Commonwealth Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts commissioned a study in 2006. The study was undertaken by a core team of researchers assembled by the City Futures Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, comprising Professor Robert Freestone, Dr Christine Garnaut, Dr Susan Marsden and Dr Simon Pinnegar. Their work provided immediate direction for some challenging National Heritage List assessments.

This publication by Robert Freestone, developed from the 2006 study, presents the story of Australia’s planning heritage. It introduces the reader to the variety of planning concepts and ideas that have evolved since colonial settlement, and shows how these ideas have been expressed in the urban landscape. It explains the planning genesis of our capital cities, country towns, suburbs and urban open spaces, discussing not just the successes but also the failures of some schemes.

There are many illustrative plans in the book – some just rudimentary scribbles of ideas and others, extensive metropolitan planning schemes – while the numerous historic and modern photographs provide views of changing urban environments. The book reminds us of the effort made by some of our visionary colonial governors, surveyors and planners whose bold actions and vision helped establish urban precincts of great character that contribute to the heritage of urban Australia today. It also reminds us how communities have passionately fought to protect loved places from unappealing development and to shape better outcomes.

There are planned urban areas within Australia, both large and small, that are recognised in the various state and territory heritage registers and lists, while other examples mentioned in the book are yet to achieve this status. Regardless of heritage status, all of these places provide a tangible and fascinating record of the evolving mission of town planning. This book will help these past gems of urban planning to be recognised and appreciated more fully and perhaps direct the aspirations of future planners and developers to continually strive for better urban planning standards to meet pressing economic, social and environmental challenges.

I want to thank author Robert Freestone for contributing invaluable information that is the outcome of a lifetime of professional research. Urban Nation: Australia’s Planning Heritage is an exceptional work and I am sure it will be a major educational and heritage resource.

Peter Garrett

Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book is based on a thematic essay prepared as part of the Urban and Town Planning Thematic Heritage Study undertaken by the City Futures Research Centre in the Faculty of the Built Environment at the University of New South Wales for the former Australian Department of the Environment and Heritage on behalf of the Australian Heritage Council in 2006-07. The core study team included Christine Garnaut (University of South Australia), Susan Marsden (Professional Historians Association of South Australia), and Simon Pinnegar (University of New South Wales), who made invaluable inputs to and critiques of the original essay, and provided specialist contributions to the larger unpublished study. David Nichols (University of Melbourne), Raymond Bunker and Libby Sadler (both University of New South Wales) also assisted with key components of the original study. Quality assurance for that study was injected by a peer review team comprising Bob Meyer (Cox Richardson), David Wright (formerly National Capital Authority), David Jones (University of Adelaide), and Ray Tonkin (Heritage Victoria) as well as the Departmental project management team including Jane Lennon (Australian Heritage Council), Janine Cullen, Graham Crocket, and Madelaine Maple. Participants at a workshop for the original project, chaired by Roger Beale and held at Old Parliament House, Canberra, in September 2006, contributed many valuable suggestions which have helped shape this published outcome.

Publication of this book has been made possible by the financial and personnel support provided by the Australian Government Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts and the Department’s commitment to make their heritage studies a publicly available resource. As chief liaison and project manager since the commissioning of the original study, Juliet Ramsay has provided a continuous high level of logistical assistance and material input. This book would not have been possible without her belief in and support for the project. While this book is the most public output of what was a vitally collaborative project, ultimately the sins of commission and omission are mine alone. The book’s findings and conclusions do not necessarily represent the views of either the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts, or the Australian Heritage Council.

The translation of the thematic essay to a book has been materially assisted by several people, notably Aedeen Cremin (editorial), Andrew Rankine (design), and Kristy Graham (DEWHA) who devised the basic framework for picture research. Individuals who assisted in picture research and copyright permissions included Richard Aitken, David Carment, Jim Colman, Carol Dettman, Paul Downton, Jim Frost, Christine Garnaut, Egle Garrick, Claire Hogarth-Angus, Rachel Fawcett, Pedro Fortunato, Robert Irving, Susan Jackson-Stepowski, Dennis Jeans, Paul-Alan Johnson, David Jones, Chip Kaufman, Lynda Kelly, Philip Knight, Miles Lewis, Stuart McKenzie, Paul Memmott, Wendy Morris, David Nichols, Kaye Noske, Bruce Pennay, Bruce Petty, Mark Powell, Helen Proudfoot, Ashley Russell, Morgan Sant, Penelope Seidler, Mark Skelsey, Sharon Speller, Peter Spearritt, Hugh Stretton, Vince Taranto, John Toon, Patrick Troy, and John White.

The following institutions and organisations are gratefully acknowledged for granting permission to reproduce images as well as for providing images: Architecture Media; Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA); Albury-Wodonga Corporation; Chapter and Verse Publishers; City of Sydney Archives; Australian Department of the Environment, Heritage, Water and the Arts (DEWHA); Benedictine Community of New Norcia; Colonel Light Gardens Historical Society; Courier News; Ecologically Sustainable Design Pty Ltd; Fairfax Media; Fremantle Press; Haberfield Association; Hunter Development Corporation; Lady Denham Museum, Huskisson; Mitchell Library and State Library of NSW (SLNSW); Melbourne University Publishing; Norwest Land; National Archives of Australia (NAA); National Capital Authority (NCA); National Library of Australia (NLA); Northern Territory Department of Planning and Infrastructure; NSW Department of Housing; NSW Department of Lands; NSW Department of Planning; NSW Roads and Traffic Authority (RTA); Powerhouse Museum (PHM); Public Record Office of Victoria (PROV); SA Department of Planning and Local Government (PlanningSA); State Library of Queensland (SLQld); State Library of South Australia (SLSA); State Library of Tasmania (SLTAS); State Library of Victoria (SLVIC); State Library of Western Australia (SLWA), Battye Library; Springfield Land Corporation Pty Ltd; Subiaco Redevelopment Authority; Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority (SHFA); Sydney Olympic Park Authority; United Kingdom Sustainable Development Commission; Town of Kwinana; University of Queensland Fryer Library; University of Sydney Rare Book Library; University of Sydney Archives; University of Western Australia; and the Urban Development Institute of Australia, NSW (UDIA).

Robert Freestone

The University of New South Wales

Sydney, May 2009

INTRODUCTION

Glaciation, lava flow, reef, mountain range, rainforest, mallee, desert, river and lake, mangrove swamp. Coastal wallum, wildlife habitat, ancient cremation site, rock engraving, mimi figure, wandjina, quinkan, dreaming track, scarred tree, fish trap, landing point, contact site, primitive cottage, barrack, penal settlement, church, custom house, bank building, poppet head, miner’s hovel, gold town, homestead, woolshed, shepherd’s hut, log gaol, silo, machine shop, bottle kiln, pub, public urinal, Parliament, Opera House, government domain, housing estate, company town, civic centre, public square, parkway, regional park, redevelopment project, new town.

(amended from Yencken 1981)

David Yencken’s list of generic landscapes – from the remnants of ancient glaciers to the Sydney Opera House – demonstrates that the heritage of Australia is rich, diverse and often fragile.¹ It encompasses a large spectrum of Indigenous, natural, and cultural places, values and phenomena that collectively help define the Australian nation and the distinctive character of the continent it inhabits and has modified. One measure of this legacy is the 150,000 places listed on national, state and local heritage registers that provide recognition of the items deemed most significant. The built environment is well represented on these registers and also on professional and community listings by bodies such as the National Trust.

Australia is an urban nation. Capital cities, regional centres, suburbs and country towns are open air museums of inherited places and landscapes for which we are the custodians and stewards. When archaeology, environment and history merged to form the concept of the ‘national estate’ in the early 1970s, individual buildings and structures of stately or arresting architectural design became the mainstay of standard surveys rolled out to better identify and document the heritage of urban places. Formal recognition of Australia’s built heritage is thus skewed towards architecture, a bias lingering from the roots of the urban conservation movement.

Subsequent waves of heritage assessment have progressively extended, deepened and questioned the scope of what constitutes heritage into an ever-widening array of everyday landscape features, symbolic values and markers of national, local and cultural identity. Even the archetypal icons of Australia’s heritage enumerated by Yencken over a quarter of a century ago are no longer immediately representative of what either does or should constitute heritage. The string of additional place types added in italics to the quotation above inserts the legacy of urban planning – a crucial dimension of the historic built environment which has been imperfectly captured by existing inventories and studies. This book attempts to remedy this by canvassing at a national scale the enduring and distinctive imprint of planning on the Australian urban landscape.

THE HERITAGE OF PLANNING

Planning has had a considerable impact on the structure and evolution of urban, town and regional landscapes. This influence has come formally and informally, incrementally and cumulatively, singly but often collaboratively with other professions, for better and, sometimes, for worse. Because of the often elusive nature of planning and an often negative public image associated with regulation, the extent of its built environment impact has not been appreciated. The impact has also been overshadowed by the creative works of architects, even though the spatial framework of architecture has often been defined by planning.

As a result, relatively few planned places have been formally acknowledged as having heritage significance. Those that have, on various registers and lists, are often primarily recognised through their manifestation of other cultural themes, such as housing, infrastructure and politics, in ways that do not necessarily convey their significance for the history of planning in Australia. Many more are not spoken for because planning has not been considered a major theme of Australian history – most national history texts say nothing about urban history and many urban history texts say little about planning – and has made only a limited impact on heritage thinking.

If planning history and heritage are erased from our cultural understandings, then a shared and critical understanding of the mission of collective intervention for the public good through planning is impoverished. Without an understanding of the historical purpose of planning in Australian society, there is no scrutiny of decisions which obliterate or transform for the worse the character of places made by planning and the historic intentions behind them. There is plenty of evidence for such poor decision-making in the past by all levels of government: the wholesale demolition of planned communities; damaging siting and design of new buildings; historic vistas blocked by new structures; the puncturing of cohesive planned townscapes; cramping of the curtilage of planned spaces; alienation of open space; and the thoughtless reconfiguration of planned precincts to accommodate new development. Change and adaptation are inevitable, but insensitive and destructive actions reflect a lack of historic appreciation of the social intentions and legacy of urban planning.

It need not be that way. But while architecture, landscape architecture, construction and engineering have begun to systematically document and assess past contributions to the urban built environment with the results filtering into wider community and professional consciousness, planning has been relatively silent. Specialist site-specific studies have been commissioned by state agencies and local authorities, but more expansive conservation and heritage studies on the planning theme are scarce. One 1998 study on designed landscapes for the former Australian Heritage Commission drew attention to places distinguished by their planning but ranged into a much broader landscape palette of parks, forests, irrigated and reclaimed lands, botanical gardens, nurseries, and arboretums.² Another study in 2000 explored the notion of urban heritage but was confined to city centres and then extended into many different aspects of urban development.³ There is nevertheless a growing academic literature on the history of urban planning in Australia which constitutes an important resource for charting significant historic events, stories and places. This literature constitutes the primary research base for this book.⁴

UNDERSTANDING AND DEFINING PLANNING

Much of Australia has been planned. Its myriad of cultural landscapes are products of a multiplicity of rational intentions, even if circumscribed and blinkered on occasion. Planning has had a complex evolution and has meant different things at different times. The phrase ‘town planning’ has only been in popular usage since the 1910s when it arose to capture goals of efficiency, health and beauty of cities over and above the existing preoccupations of the established built environment professions of architecture, engineering and surveying. The greatest activity of planners today is not to create completely new towns, but rather to influence outcomes in existing environments. Much of that work lacks broader recognition by the wider community. Planning influences urban outcomes through numerous policies, guidelines, rules, negotiations and agreements in complex ways.

Some regard planning as an ongoing management process rather than as a design product. This is partly because the scope of planning has expanded and fragmented through time. There are now many different forms of planning: environmental, ecological, development, land use, social, town, regional, city, urban, transport, policy, coastal, rural, physical, strategic, statutory. Planning operates at many different scales: neighbourhood, local, community, metropolitan, state, national, even international. It both crosses and unites the public and private sectors. This multidimensionality means that the core meaning and mission of planning remains a topic of debate at professional and educational conferences. It has been said that different conceptions of planning ‘sit uneasily alongside each other’ in new planning documents, where planning might be cast variously as an institution for promoting particular public ends, as a facilitator of market allocation, and as a forum for dialogue.⁵

Accordingly, there are shifting community understandings of what planning is. Much planning is informal – bottom up as much as top down – and good planning outcomes have come from the contestation of official policies. At the same time, as a technical activity, planning can be connected with socially regressive trends; for example, it has often been implicated in land speculation and premature development. Planning can also have a range of unfortunate indirect and knock-on effects, often not anticipated. Disasters are an unavoidable theme of planning history. Planning as an everyday activity remains highly political, and responsibility for key decisions on the basis of planning advice is usually vested in elected representatives.

Planning can thus be perceived, conducted and experienced in multiple ways. The contribution of planners has historically been contingent on many contextual factors and their role in the production of the built environment has been more foundational and seemingly less heroic than that of other stakeholders, such as architects. Of the many extant ‘plannings’, the major focus in this book is on urban planning as purposeful intervention into the processes of urban place-making to achieve social goals such as public health and safety, better housing, land use arrangements, environmental protection and economic development. This is physical or spatial planning connected to formal plans as logical statements of intent. While initiated by a range of actors – public, private (and community), and public–private partnerships – with the majority of planners historically in the employment of governments, the major theme is state-directed intervention.

The essence of a planned landscape lies not so much in individual elements as in their combination. It is less about the design of discrete buildings (more the purview of architecture) or their construction (engineering and building) or green surrounds (landscape architecture), but more about their spatial interrelationships in making something special that is larger than the mere sum of the parts. The spaces between built structures are just as important as the structures themselves. In these terms, planning’s contribution lies often in optimising connections and linkages, functional as much as visual, within a landscape logic structured by areas, nodes, networks, zones, and boundaries. The significance of a planned landscape thus extends beyond aesthetic appeal. It is also a statement of social intent whose physical pattern and evolution must be meaningfully linked to processes of implementation. In this sense the ultimate realisation of a planned place is invariably the product of many stakeholders interacting, often over a long period of time.

APPROACH

This book attempts a wide-ranging survey of the landscapes shaped by urban planning throughout Australian history, drawing extensively from the published literature. The primary focus is on the geography of place. By trying to capture the broad sweep of planning in action at a national scale, it aims to insert urban planning more centrally into understandings of Australian history and to elevate awareness of the potential heritage value of planned landscapes.

The nature and scope of this study are unprecedented in Australia. Indeed, the only vaguely comparable international survey appears to be Britain’s Planning Heritage, published in 1975. This is essentially a regional tourist guide to ‘interesting examples of the way town and country have been consciously developed over the last four thousand years’ with an extensive and eclectic set of places represented including Stonehenge, Roman viaducts, zoos, industrial facilities, and country homes.⁶ Some Australian historical planning studies have taken a national perspective, but their coverage has been restricted to particular themes.⁷ The aim here is more expansive in time and space, while stopping short of attempting a comprehensive history of urban and regional planning in Australia.

The emphasis on the design of places made by modern urban planning warrants four caveats. First, this survey of the outcome of planning decisions must be set against the backdrop of broader forces of urbanisation and urban life, a coverage provided elsewhere.⁸ Second, with planning a product of its times, it is necessary to provide a broader institutional context for the evolution of planning practice. Third, because the direction of planning in Australia has been influenced by larger fashions and trends evident at an international scale, it is also necessary to provide some background to the history of design. Fourth, the coverage is Eurocentric in that town founding and planning was part of a broader settlement project by Europeans. While Aboriginal culture never produced cities, its gathering places had a sense of place and their locational logic was essentially the basis of a civilisation. Although most disappeared ‘under the ruthless process of colonisation’,⁹ many of the major transportation routes established by British colonists followed Aboriginal travel routes and some rural towns were established at their intersection.

A grand linear narrative of place-making is eschewed here in favour of parallel accounts structured by major themes intended to capture the major dimensions of the landscape impacts of Australian urban planning through history. These themes were partly informed by the ‘building settlements, towns and cities’ strand of the national ‘historic themes framework’ developed by the former Australian Heritage Commission to assist in the identification, assessment, interpretation and management of heritage places.¹⁰ The six themes were:

Founding the capital cities: the original plans of the state, territory and national capital cities which remain the lynchpins of the Australian urban system today.

Planned rural settlement: the development of the urban frontier in rural and regional Australia and those places planned in advance to support general rural and special-purpose settlement.

Structuring the expansion of the metropolis: the physical imprint of plans intended to guide the size, shape and structure of growing metropolitan areas.

Planned suburban communities: places exemplifying the role of planning in the suburban development process.

Renewing cities: places created through the planned selective redevelopment of the urban fabric.

Planning the public realm: civic and open spaces and other planned precincts purposefully fashioned by planning interventions.

The organisation of this book flows from the concerns canvassed here. There are two introductory contextual chapters. The first provides a broadly chronological history of Australian urban planning as shaped by broader forces such as economics, urban and social development, and demographic and technological change. This introduces the main events, ideological currents, and institutional developments at particular junctures to inform and interconnect the content of the core thematic chapters. The second chapter briefly outlines some of the major design ideas and paradigms which have influenced Australian urban planning and design over two centuries. Then come six chapters, essentially chronological, addressing each of the major themes in turn. This framework basically provides a thematic categorisation of places, but it is not intended as a rigid classification because many places ultimately express multiple themes, making them all the more interesting and potentially significant. A concluding chapter discusses how this thematic history of planned urban place-making in Australia provides a platform for identifying yet more potential places of heritage significance for the nation.

previous page: The archetypal planned urban landscape: An aerial view of Parliament House looking towards Canberra city centre in Australia’s national capital (2006).

© NCA

CHAPTER 1

A NATIONAL NARRATIVE

The scope of urban planning in the early twenty-first century is vast when compared to the far more restricted science of township layout at the beginnings of European settlement of Australia. This chapter provides a summary overview of the development of urban planning in Australia from the late eighteenth century to the present day, focusing on the evolution of general philosophies, the emergence of institutions, major events, and contribution of individuals. The emphasis is on the metropolitan areas which today house the vast bulk of the Australian urban population.

The treatment in this first chapter is basically chronological and sectionalised into phases, subjectively determined. An initial appreciation of the development of planning theory and practice in Australia might recognise four extended periods:

Early history focused on the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, covering the establishment of the colonial capitals and spread of settlement, largely through the proliferation of gridiron towns. This defines the period prior to the foundation of the nation and emergence of a genuine national perspective and institutions.

1901–1945 represents the arrival of modern planning thought, encompassing the first initiatives in planning legislation, administrative reforms, planned communities, establishment of a planned national capital, and the development of the state capitals as cities of metropolitan significance.

Post-war planning covering the institutionalisation of planning at local state and more cyclically federal levels, marked also by the formation of a national planning institute, metropolitan planning strategies, regional development initiatives, and competing notions of both good planning and the good city.

New Millennium planning from the late twentieth century marks the most recent era during which new administrative and legislative structures have evolved to address a complexity of contemporary concerns, with oftentimes conflicting issues of sustainability and economic development.

The sectionalisation adopted in this chapter develops this sequence by elaborating a finer grain of chronological-thematic phases (Table 1.1), drawing from previous research.¹ In general terms, the Australian experience, while distinctive in detail, has parallels with overseas narratives, especially in Great Britain and the United States. This broader international backdrop is taken up more explicitly in the next chapter with reference to design influences, but more extensive treatments of the development of planning globally are provided elsewhere.²

Table 1.1 Basic chronological framework of Australian planning

Source: Adapted and developed from Hamnett and Freestone eds. 2000.

COLONIAL FOUNDATIONS

The earliest manifestation of planning in Australia was as ‘a process of conquest’.³ An authoritarian model of town planning predominated from the late eighteenth century through to the turn of the twentieth century. Two distinct sets of relationships are evident through this period.⁴ The first was through the period of administration by British-appointed governors, which lasted from the foundation of each colony (between 1788 and 1836) to the 1850s. The jurisdiction of the NSW Governor until 1851 included all of eastern Australia. The decision-making processes were hierarchical, with the British Government having a key plan approval role. The second phase dated from the 1850s when, following the Australian Colonies Act of 1850, each colony, except Western Australia, became separate and self-governing. The major theme throughout is a conception of planning limited to initial town layout.

This British Colonial Office/powerful British Governor phase commenced with the military-style order of the first encampments at Sydney Cove in 1788. Sydney is usually portrayed as a failure because Governor Arthur Phillip’s first plan was ignored and the Australian penchant for property speculation was established early. But a major achievement – eventually repeated in the other colonial capitals via different processes – was the reservation of government domains of parkland and botanic gardens. The tenure of Governor Lachlan Macquarie (1810–21) – who came from a military background in contrast to his predecessors, who were naval officers – saw the imposition of a more ordered sense of spatial organisation on the growth of Sydney, and in the initial expansion of the urban frontier through the colony.⁵ The ‘chief rule’ of town planning was ‘the control of population through the appropriate location of power’.⁶

Surveyors in either the field or head office were the main town planners of the colonial era. They faced arduous conditions in the bush. The three greatest dangers were said to be black snakes, hostile Aboriginal people and bushrangers.⁷ Surveyors created the geometric foundations for capital cities and country centres, purposefully pegging out cities, towns and villages with the expansion of settlement. The time-honoured rectangular gridiron plan ruled. It matched the primitivism of early survey equipment, but was also widely accepted by those in power as the most economical, efficient and flexible form of physical plan-making. Within the grid, the aim was to give a frontage on the main streets to as many allotments as possible. But there was little realistic appreciation of long-term growth needs in the modern sense. The grid plan was sometimes displaced from alignment to the cardinal compass points (north–south–east–west) to make the best use of site and situation, but frequently the process was arbitrary with little sympathetic response to the nature of the site.

In 1829 Ralph Darling, Governor of New South Wales, with an eye to regulation and standardisation during a major expansion of urban settlement, codified the big square blocks and wide streets that characterise the typical Australian country town today. With the emphasis on uniformity, regularity, and rectangularity, urban settlement was to be limited and controlled. In the largest town, Sydney, the problem of ‘squaring the lands’ had already arisen where private habitation had taken place without reference to government controls.⁸ Once early restrictions on the location of settlement were breached, rural town formation could be a stand-off between spontaneous settlement and government decree, often with both surviving as twin towns.

The colonial bureaucratic decision-making structure for early land settlement and town surveys.

J.M. Powell and M. Williams, eds. Australian Space, Australian Time: Geographic Perspectives (1975). Courtesy of Dennis Jeans

The early progress of physical planning is captured in an historical lecture by the twentieth-century Australian planning pioneer Charles Reade to a London audience in 1925. He said that from the 1800s in Sydney, Hobart and other towns in Tasmania:

Numerous reserves for town sites, together with sites for public and ecclesiastic purposes, had been made. Leading towns had been equipped with squares, crescents and park areas, under the influence of British ideas and possibly early developments in the American colonies and other possessions. The laying down of important streets from 60 to 99 ft in width in place of earlier standards, based on 40 and 50 ft, had also been accomplished, but with only partial success.⁹

Town planning in the bush: Surveyors at work on the layout of Palmerston, later Darwin (1869).

SLSA: B 11603 – Government Surveying Party, Palmerston (Darwin), 1869

South Australia was a distinctive experiment in planned land settlement and the Adelaide plan of 1837 was the major achievement of colonial urban design, with parklands framing and encasing urban spaces sited with sensitivity to the natural landscape.¹⁰ Debate has raged as to who was responsible, but the template was set for ‘little Adelaides’ to be later stamped throughout South Australia, including what is now the Northern Territory. This orderly patchwork of ‘parkland towns’ neatly demarcated urban, suburban and parkland.

But town planning through to the late nineteenth century remained largely an exercise in surveying. The process was standardised into the marking out of allotments (usually of the same size), each fronting an area reserved as a street: ‘sites for major public buildings were nominated, but what private buyers might develop on the other parcels of land – shop, house