Australian cities fail because they are planned that way. Post WW2, city building in Australia followed a simple formula: growth is pushed to the edge, roads are built, and detached houses follow. Employment, education and services are zoned off. The model is familiar, politically convenient and easy to administer.

It functions smoothly at the level of individual decisions whilst failing at the scale that actually matters.

This approach worked tolerably well when land was cheap, fuel was cheaper, and expectations were modest. It delivered home ownership on a massive scale and underpinned decades of economic growth.

It also locked in a metropolitan structure that now dominates almost every housing, transport and infrastructure debate.

It wasn’t a failure of coordination, capacity, or goodwill but the result of decades of consistent decisions made by council planners focusing on the local, whilst responsibility for city-wide organisation was quietly diluted across three levels of government until it disappeared altogether.

We are left with cities of very low-density suburbia, too far spread out, car-dependent and increasingly expensive to service. We had a virtual monoculture of housing, large houses on individual land sites, increasingly expensive and valuable within themselves, but taken together, needing the subsidy of government-supplied infrastructure.

The social consequences of these choices are well known. Access to jobs, education and services is shaped increasingly by distance. Commutes lengthen. Transport costs rise. Outer suburban households carry a disproportionate share of the burden. These outcomes are often described as unintended.

They have been produced with remarkable regularity.

In the last twenty years a radically different idea of an Australian city was proffered. Compact. Higher density. Housing around transport corridors. Better integration between land use and infrastructure. Diffusion of services and employment in polycentric nodes.

Strategic planning documents told an optimistic story, with sensible ideas, diagrams, and ambitions. Widely accepted academically, endlessly recycled at conferences. But the planning systems continued to deliver the opposite.

This gap between strategy and performance is the defining feature of Australian planning. Councils sit at the centre of this contradiction.

Councils continue to make decisions with metropolitan consequences while operating at a local scale, under intense political pressure and with limited strategic capacity. Strategic planning is treated as an aspiration. Assessment is treated as risk management.

They write plans they do not implement and assess applications in ways that actively undermine them.

Councillors are often elected on platforms to stop things happening. Some are eyeing the next rung on the political ladder. Few are rewarded for thinking beyond the next meeting. Planning becomes a process of managing the overwhelming objections of NIMBYs, rather than shaping cities.

The result is a patchwork nightmare. Large areas of established suburbs remain effectively frozen by heritage overlays, protecting low-density ordinariness.

Almost nowhere in Australian cities is the most sustainable form of housing, the traditional ‘starter’ apartment in a three-storey walk-up (3SWUF), allowed. Nor the six-storey shop-top housing on main transport routes, known as ‘transport-oriented design’ (TOD).

In a small number of locations where resistance can be contained, very high-density housing is permitted, often aimed at the wealthy, or expensive micro-apartments for overseas students are.

New suburbia continues unabated; growth is accommodated, but not coordinated.

Infrastructure lags behind development, particularly in outer growth areas where road investment outpaces public transport provision, reinforcing car dependence even as densities increase. Where roads arrive early and public transport arrives later, behaviour has already adapted, and travel patterns are entrenched.

Separately, the states are responsible for schools, health facilities, rail and rapid transit projects announced, debated and delivered slowly, if at all, often after housing development has occurred. Tragically independent of local council input.

The persistence of these patterns points to an uncomfortable conclusion. Australia’s urban outcomes are not the result of planning failure but planning success, measured against the priorities that have guided city growth for decades.

As long as that structure remains unchanged, housing outcomes will continue to look exactly as expected.

If housing outcomes are to change, metropolitan planning will need to confront this desultory history directly. Macro-scale planning must be revolutionised because it sets the conditions within which all other housing decisions occur.

Design, construction and development will all respond to the structure that planning creates.

Big changes are needed.

Planning for cities must be holistic, with states making urban plans for whole cities. Strategy must become independent of administration, which is handled by councils.

The federal government must establish demographic plans, leading directly to national strategic plans for housing.

The rubric of supply must be related to housing the population growth, not property profit.

Peripheral greenfield suburban developments in the big five cities must end. All future housing in the cities' ‘missing middle’ should have two scales: six storeys in TODs and 3SWUF in the suburbs.

Higher rise should be quarantined to a few major nodes or the CBD.

Revive the idea of decentralisation by identifying regional towns as growth areas where desired suburbia can build populations in a sustainable way.

All this means fewer small plans and a bigger overview. Fewer councils, more strategic capacity. Less fiddling, more certainty.

‘Housing Australia – Noun + Verb' is a forthcoming book by Tone Wheeler, collecting fifty years of work on philosophy, policies, projects, planning, processes and the practice of housing.

Tone Wheeler

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