BETTER CITIES: BETTER LIVES 

Presentation by Brian Howe, then-Deputy Prime Minister of Australia and Minister responsible for the Better Cities Program, at the forum, Enhancing community life, November 2, 1994, part of the Ecoversity's Spring season, Imagining the future: our cities.

I'm very pleased to be able to speak here at the Ecoversity where people take a more holistic view of things. I want to talk mainly about the Better Cities program because that's something I have been responsible for since the program was initiated.

The Better Cities program is an attempt to demonstrate that we can go about the development of cities in a different way than we have done in the past. It's a kind of living experiment in which the Commonwealth Government is trying to come to terms with the reality of urbanisation and suburbanisation and the growth of cities. Through Better Cities, we're looking at ways in which we can help to shape the growth of our communities, be sensitive to the environment and go about urban development in a way that emphasises economic values, such as efficiency and making the best use of the resources.

This, of course, is not an easy process and I always like to quote Stretton's line about civil visions and complicated programs and how change is a very complicated process. It's not so complicated in terms of imagining what changes would be good ,because I think we can all imagine what we think a good society might look like. I look back to Eltham where I lived for a while for example. I thought Eltham was a wonderful community at the time and very strong in terms of environmental values. It was a community that still had an element of the village about it, so in a sense it was still an urban village - even though it had been caught up in the urban sprawl of the 60's and was changing quite rapidly.

A lot of that urban sprawl was ribbon development and as we now recognise, that sort of development is not very economic in terms of the infrastructure. But at that time, no-one was seriously thinking about the sort of infrastructure we needed for the future. In Melbourne in the nineteenth century, people really did see infrastructure as being very important and quite fundamental to urban development. Perhaps they also made excellent profits out of the whole process as well and maybe you can learn something from the land boom in terms of the relationship between changing values of land and the provision of infrastructure.

In the mid 60's I went from Eltham to Chicago to do some post-graduate work in sociology and it seemed like the most exciting thing anyone could do, because Chicago was a very great and very exciting city. I was in Shanghai just a few weeks ago and I was interested to see that Shanghai's density is many times the density of Chicago - and yet I remember thinking just how dense Chicago was compared to Melbourne! But I think in Chicago one got a sense of what it meant to be urban - in terms of the density and the complexity of social life and the enormous pressures on the natural environment. Just maintaining the supply of water in Chicago is always an enormous challenge, for example.

But Chicago was a city rather than a suburb and ever since my time there, I've been very interested in cities. Chicago is the home of the Chicago School of Economics as well as the Chicago School of Sociology - and when I was the Chairman of the Economics Committee, I had to introduce that very famous Chicago economist Friedman to the Federal Caucus. I remember saying that I was very pleased to introduce him because he was from Chicago and I knew about the Chicago School of Sociology, but I'd always felt that what was true in Sociology got a little too close to Social Darwinism in Economics! He laughed and we managed to get through the meeting!

As far as Ecology goes, I've always had a somewhat detached view. I think of it in the sense of the struggle for existence within geographic space. And I can say that in Chicago, the struggle was pretty intense, particularly at that time when parts of the city were moving from being white to being black, almost on a block by block basis. I witnessed this struggle for space myself when I went out to the Western Suburbs and the Polish neighbourhoods on Civil Rights Movement demonstrations, and saw rocks and things being thrown at nuns. So I suppose I felt that cities were about trying to hold together values that didn't necessarily sit together terribly easily.

I moved to Fitzroy in 1969/70 on the eve of the Whitlam Government. In the 1970s Australia was in a period of intense debate about a wide range of issues - which Australians in general were very ignorant about. I remember talking about poverty with Janet Patterson, a senior researcher with the Brotherhood of St Laurence at the time, for example. I'd worked on the War on Poverty in America and the poverty program of the Johnson period and I said I was interested in catching up on what was happening in Australia. She told me about the work Professor Henderson was doing, so I went over to Melbourne University and looked up the catalogue. I found one article by Harper and Henderson on poverty, and one I think, by Downing or some name like that. And that was it! I mean there was virtually nothing else. There was a book by John Stubbs, which I suppose was influenced by Harrington's Other America or Galbraith's Affluent Society, but it was a very pale shadow of the American works.

The period of the Whitlam Government was to me very exciting because it was a time in which issues I'd been thinking about in America - like the causes of poverty and the future of our cities - were very much on the political agenda. I was also teaching Urban Sociology at Swinburne, but that, in a way, was a part-time job because I was spending so much time here in Fitzroy working on a Centre For Urban Research and Action - which was an attempt to combine a reflective approach (the research) with a commitment to change and action.

The politics of the period presented opportunities for us to tackle a range of issues that Darwin would have seen more as environmental issues. The impact of freeways for example - and some of you might recall what was a pretty tough struggle on the picket lines over what is now Alexandra Parade. I suppose this goes back to what this forum is about tonight - about enhancing community life. Because community is about shared space or location. Location is very important, because location is about identity.

It always surprises me how strongly committed people can be to a space that outsiders might see as not being very significant, or even very friendly. I experienced this even before the Better Cities program had been initiated, when I was talking to residents of East Preston about the possibilities of change in their neighbourhood. They were telling me that the most important thing for them was to stay in that place. They wanted to live there, but they were also conscious that they were not the same people they'd been in the Fifties. They were older now and needed a neighbourhood with some changes. They certainly needed a different kind of housing, they said. Something that wasn't so cold in the winter, or so hot in the summer, and they needed a smaller block so they didn't have so much land to look after.

For these people, staying in East Preston was very important - even though Preston was one of the poorest communities in Melbourne at the time. Here in Fitzroy there was a big battle about the so-called Brooks Crescent area to halt the Housing Commission's program to replace medium-density Victorian terrace housing with high-rise flats. Again what was interesting was how committed people were to that space and how they were prepared to hang on even when life had become extremely difficult for them.

I think governments in the Eighties were not really conscious of these kinds of values about space and about protecting communities. Few people were even thinking about the way people lived in larger communities.

In the Eighties, politics was very much about the macro. About a different model of the Australian economy which was more outward looking, more conscious of the need for this country to survive in economic terms. I don't want to talk about that tonight - except to say that I think people felt that they were subject to change rather than being able to control and shape and give direction to change themselves, at least as it affected them on the smaller scale level. It seemed to me that at some point we would need to come back to the issues that had been there in the Seventies. Issues about cities, about communities and the things that were important in those contexts. But as the political agenda increasingly moved towards privatisation, the debate became more about capital and where capital should be invested. It seemed to me that if we were going to debate those issues, we should certainly seek to emphasise the importance of capital, but also to think about it in terms of communities and community values.

Many of these discussions took place in the context of the Premiers Conferences, because the premiers were increasingly seeing that, as their budgets were squeezed, they needed to use available capital resources and infrastructure more efficiently and more effectively. They used the term 'urban consolidation' which, at its crudest, was seen as the way of using infrastructure more efficiently by lifting population densities in inner cities. A less crude way of doing the same thing was to identify sites and obsolete land-use zones and change the land-use to achieve higher population densities and more efficient use of what was seen as 'the sunk capital' of the infrastructure that was already there.

So the Premiers were in a sense setting the framework in which I was to develop my ideas. But this presented some exciting opportunities, because if you could get the use of capital, then you might be able to demonstrate in different contexts, how you could use that capital more effectively within cities. What that amounted to was a recognition that you need cooperation between the different levels of Government- which meant that the Commonwealth had to be persuaded there was a role for it in terms of enabling the States to use their infrastructure more effectively. That then became the basis on which it was possible to put the program to the Commonwealth Government.

Of course, when you're talking about cities you are not simply talking about inner urban areas. We needed to develop a construct that would enable us to put in place demonstration programs that also dealt with using infrastructure more efficiently in outer suburbs, as well as protecting social values and the natural environment. So the aims of the program we developed were centred around three values: Equity, Efficiency, and Environmental Sustainability. Those values were explicitly recognised in the agreements between the Commonwealth and the States and the Premiers and they were more explicitly outlined in the Cabinet submission and ultimately in the Better Cities program.

Better Cities was, of course, initiated at the time of the so-called 'New Federalism' when the States were essentially saying they didn't want any tied funding. They didn't want us telling them what to do. And more specifically, they didn't want the Commonwealth to nominate the projects. So we reached an agreement which was essentially about working together on area strategies, rather than defining specific projects. Those area strategies would be nominated by the States, but they would need to conform with the aims of the program, which was about demonstrating how we could use capital more effectively in terms of efficiency, equity and environmental values.

The program was funded to the extent of eight hundred million dollars over five years. Richo (Graham Richardson) may think that it didn't have a lot of depth to it, but at the time it was a choice, really, between going into a research-type program, or getting out there and doing things. And for various reasons I had the capacity to insist that we had to get out there and do things - so we went for a program that was about demonstration.

This was influenced I suppose by what I'd learned in America. I'd become aware of the Model Cities program for example and there was a lot of talk then about models and demonstration. I guess I wouldn't have gone for demonstrations if I'd had a choice, but at the time it seemed like that philosophy was quite good. We went for the demonstration model so people could see in a tangible sense what you might do in various situations. As it turned out, the States were not particularly preoccupied with the inner city. Some people think the Better Cities program is about housing, but they weren't particularly preoccupied with housing either. I think what they were interested in were opportunities to demonstrate the Better Cities principles in a range of situations.

Now let me just talk about some of the specific Better Cities projects. In Brisbane for example, the railway line between the city and the Gold Coast had been ripped up, I think in the 1950s or early 60s, and the Queensland Government had talked for a long time about putting that line back. Better Cities gave them the impetus do develop a new 46 kilometre railway line (which probably is the most extensive railway line built in Australia since World War II) and so shape the development of a large part of Southeast Queensland around public transport.

In another Better Cities project, we were able to persuade the City of Brisbane to join with us in a demonstration project to reorient the city towards the river and put in light rail to link the development around Fortitude Valley with the city. The Light Rail is about to go for tender and that in itself is quite an important development.

Very interestingly Australian cities turn their backs on what you might think are the predominant environmental features. For example in Launceston, the Teyne River is hardly used at all by the city, but through Better Cities we completed a quite complicated deal to reoriented that city so the Teyne becomes the centre of development. In Newcastle the development on the Honeysuckle Good Yards site is enabling the City of Newcastle to be reoriented towards the port and towards the harbour.

In South Australia there are two projects that have an environmental emphasise. One is the so-called Virginia Pipeline to capture and treat sewerage and waste water and pipe it to a vegetable growing area in the Northern part of the city. As a result of this small but significant piece of infrastructure, vegetable production will be tripled and an export industry will be created. Another South Australian project is centred on an incredibly polluted river and creek system in the City of Glenelg called the Padawoolonga. People talk about the Padawoolonga Lake as a lake they used to water-ski on. Now they think that if you fell in the water you'd be in mortal danger. The recovery of that lake involves the cooperation of sixteen councils, as well as the State government and the Commonwealth to control what goes in to the creek system, to monitor and price it in terms of charges and so on, so the system is protected.

In Western Australia, a third of the City of Perth is not sewered, and one of the reasons for this is that conventional methods were considered too expensive. But with, I think, $20 million of funding, we are able to demonstrate that by using new technology and modern treatment plants, you can go a long way towards dealing with those issues much more efficiently and effectively than with a large scale trunk sewer system. As a result of that project, I believe Perth is now talking about sewering the remainder of the city.

And in Melbourne, we have the Lynch's Bridge redevelopment, which gives people the opportunity of living very close to the city.

I think I've probably exceeded my time by now, but I guess what I wanted to do was to give you a sense of my sort of background, and why I'm so interested in urban development. And a glimpse of the Better Cities program through which 25 strategies have now been put in place across Australia. Many of these are, I think, very significant for the states and territories concerned, but they also provide precedents for much larger scale projects and development to occur within the more effective principles of integrated planning -- so that ultimately the entire community can benefit socially, economically and environmentally.

back to the 1994 Spring season on cities.