... because we humans can only work for a world we can imagine.

Peter Atkins
Development Project Coordinator
City of Maribyrnong, Western Melbourne

As told to Merrill Findlay, 27 May 1996, for Painting the future real.

My early training was as a fitter and turner, so it is with some irony that I return to one of Melbourne's major past-industrial regions thirty years later as an urban and environmental planner. After my industrial training, I was fortunate enough to do one of Australia's first environmental design courses at the Tasmanian College of Advanced Education in Hobart and it was there that I became interested in following a multi- and cross-disciplinary, multi-skilled approach to Australia's urban and environmental issues, rather than the usual approach where separate professions and disciplines work in isolation -- which I think just creates more problems.

Since my university days, I've worked in local government and as an advocate for community groups in both Victoria and Tasmania. It gives me great pleasure to be able to contribute my professional skills and knowledge to assist community groups develop strategies to deal with Australia's environmental, social and urban problems. I'm now working with the City of Maribyrnong as the Development Project Coordinator.

Local government has come a long way in the last 10-15 years to be employing people like me who work in this multi-disciplinary way across all departments. And we're working on very large development projects actually putting things on the ground, not just thinking about policy issues! In this municipality, for example, we have what is probably one of Australia's largest urban renewal tasks to turn hundreds of hectares of old industrial land into residential communities and public open space. Over the next five or more years four to five thousand homes will be built here, and that's a lot of physical change that has to occur! Council created the position I now have to ensure that an integrated approach is taken to the whole range of issues associated with that change, including the provision of human services to the new residential developments.

ISSUES I AM MOST CONCERNED ABOUT

I suppose the first issue that concerns me is the balance between providing jobs and protecting the environment . Here in the City of Maribyrnong, which covers the suburbs of Footscray, Braybrook and Maidstone, we have some unique challenges. We're at the confluence of two of Melbourne's large river systems, the Maribyrnong and the Yarra, where there are still significant areas of remnant native vegetation that need protection; we have a long legacy of industrial pollution; we have a lot of vacant industrial land to redevelop; and we have one of the highest levels of unemployment in Australia (the official unemployment figure for Footscray is 18.6%).

Riverside Project concept drawing for Maribyrnong Council: the built environment reflecting the cultural heritage of recent settlers. Photo by Merrill Findlay, 1996.

One of the most interesting things I'm directly involved with that brings together all these issues is the Footscray Riverside Project . This urban renewal project seeks to provide public access to the lower Maribyrnong River adjacent to our Footscray business centre. Within this concept there's a real opportunity to encourage tourism, the arts, and new residential developments on what was previously industrial land around the old wharves.

There's also an existing youth entertainment focus in our wharves area and I think encouraging and supporting entertainment activities for young people is a very important part of our redevelopment of the Maribyrnong. There are a lot of small things we can do to make this area safer for young people, like installing better street lighting and telephones that can be used in the early hours of the morning when they are coming out of their rage parties for example. We can also ensure that taxis can get to the site easily, and that there's safe public transport access.

Because Council owns much of the land in the area we can also assist the artists who already live and work in the wharves precinct by providing buildings for studios, low income housing, galleries and workshop spaces. But we want to do all this without forcing out the existing industries that are centred on the wharf, like the scallop industry and the yachting facilities, or without 'sanitising' what is already an intriguing and historic area.

Another project that is going to make a great difference to the municipality is the $17 million Heavenly Queen of the Ocean Temple which the Chinese and Asian Buddhist community is building. Council has been able to support this project by providing a large tract of land on the river, and access to government funding agencies.

With these two initiatives, the Riverside Project and the Buddhist temple, two to three kilometres of river frontage will be re-developed with Federal, State and local money to provide a real gateway entrance to the western region of Melbourne. The landscaping and much of the building construction work will be carried out by three hundred long-term unemployed people. To me, that employment and training component of these river frontage projects is very exciting.

Digital composite created for Redreaming the plain by Csaba Szamosy, 1996, from images contributed by project partners. One of the virtual 'skins' in ITF's re-interpreted possum skin cloak.

Our rivers have traditionally been major recreational resources, but we need to improve the quality of them. In Victoria, we've begun a proper ecological planning process by focusing on the management of all water catchments (ie all our river and creek systems). We're attempting to ensure that all drainage run-off is contained and filtered naturally so no pollutants or industrial waste enter our water ways. Such an approach contributes to water quality in our recreational spaces downstream, including the Maribyrnong at Footscray.

I guess the great lesson from the environment is that it is a powerful and encompassing system. With this integrated kind of thinking you can start to see how all our activities in society -- recreation, transport, housing etc -- are ultimately interconnected. In the past we've thought about providing transport as separate from providing land-based activities, as separate from providing community services. This old approach has meant, for example, that new housing developments have been allowed to proceed without proper consideration being given to public transport or other services that people require, and this in turn has created major social problems. So integrating and coordinating all these things in a total sense -- which I think the concept of bioregionalism approaches -- is the appropriate way for our planning and governance to be provided into the future. And we're learning how to do this from our ecosystems.

This municipality has traditionally been a host area both to heavy and noxious industries, and to people who have emigrated to Australia. Major decisions that have affected it have, in the past, been made by state and federal government agencies which have been too distant from the people on the ground to either sensitively create new communities, or to improve the environment. So many problems that have been attended to in the wealthier eastern suburbs of Melbourne have been neglected here. However the recent changes to local government (which, not coincidentally, occurred at a time when state and federal agencies were running out of money for infrastructure and major projects), mean that local councils now have opportunities they have never had before. The new City of Maribyrnong Council has realised that it needs to attract higher socio-economic groups to the municipality, not only because they are the managers of the industry here, but also because their resources, power, influence, and education will support the broader community in tackling the big social and environmental issues we now have to face.

This brings me to another issue that concerns me, and that is the way in which middle class people change traditional working class areas. The 'new gentry' mark out their territory and create elite and exclusive residential areas, colonise the human services in the area, and compete for resources more effectively than other groups. So I think Council will have to be very sensitive in the way it allocates resources to the new residential areas we're creating, and finds ways to deal with the pressures of gentrification.

Footscray has a proud and important history as one of Australia's strongest industrial working class communities and many people might see the new residential developments as being inconsistent with that history. And it would be very inconsistent if we were to create elite and exclusive enclaves like you see in other parts of Melbourne. So our challenge will be to harness the resources and power and opportunities the new middle class groups will bring, while protecting and maintaining the strong existing working class characteristics of the community.

We have a whole suite of tools at our disposal to influence the future development of the municipality, including various social planning mechanisms, and careful selection of the kind of investors we attract. I think we can also influence the nature of economic activity in our district centres through policy and planning processes, and so encourage the market to move in a direction that is consistent with the nature and heritage of the local communities. We can influence the kind of industries that relocate here too, and so minimise pollution and other environmental impacts.

The people who already live in the City of Maribyrnong come from very diverse cultural backgrounds. We have some 100 different language and ethnic groups represented here and this contributes an extra level of complexity to running local government and meeting the needs of residents. On top of that, the municipality is going through many changes. Old industries are moving out of the area and new industries are moving in; retailing patterns are shifting; large-scale urban redevelopments are about to commence; and our environmental assets need protecting and enhancing. Trying to develop processes to coordinate all these changes and still be accountable to all the different groups is quite a challenge, especially when you're dealing with people from different cultures with different perceptions of things like the environment, economic growth, progress, and of the role of local government itself!

At present, the municipality's cultural diversity is not reflected in the built form, but once you get into the retail centre you immediately notice all the Chinese, Vietnamese, Italian, Greek and Macedonian influences of recent decades. Hopefully the cultures of these newer arrivals to the area will be reflected increasingly in the buildings themselves. We'll be installing traditional Chinese arches on the main entrance to the Footscray district centre to emphasise the cultural layers.

Another thing I'm passionately concerned about in an urban/environmental sense is the fact that we still have an oil based transport system in Australia. We're down to about 40% self sufficiency in oil and are starting to import it on a massive scale. We were actually exporting oil worth $4,000 million in the late 1980s and now we're importing $4,000 million worth just to support our transport system. So the consumption of oil has created a national balance of payments problem. Our oil dependency also causes most of our pollution problems and, through our car and truck based transport system, leads to urban sprawl.

Digital composite created for Redreaming the plain by Csaba Szamosy, 1996, from images contributed by project partners. One of the virtual 'skins' in ITF's re-interpreted possum skin cloak.

Our low density sprawling suburbs create enormous costs to tax payers in terms of infrastructure and services, and for the residents of these suburbs, human services are often only accessible by car. In many suburbs, neighbours tend not to know one another and this isolation is exacerbated by car based access. So there are many economic and social planning issues that are linked to our mode of transport, which in turn, is linked to our dependence on oil.

At the moment petrol prices are held artificially low by government tariffs, but as the cost of oil becomes more expensive, petrol prices will increase, and the people who will be affected most are those who live in the sprawling outer fringes of the metropolitan area -- because more and more of their household expenditure will go on transport costs. We can already see this trend from studies done the 1980s. On the fringe areas of cities twice as much household income is spent on travel as is spent in the inner urban areas. What that tells us is that our inner urban areas with their relatively public transport-rich infrastructure are going to be increasingly sought after places to live in, simply because the cost of living will be lower. Unless we deal with this issue now, the poor will be left out on the fringe and the upper income groups will be locating closer to the inner city.

Until recently, local government has not looked very seriously at these issues in new urban developments, but we are trying to now. In the City of Maribyrnong, for example, we are planning stronger public transport links to the new residential areas so we can provide an alternative transport option for the people who will live here. We want to reinforce pre-car, pre-Second World War patterns of movement by increasing population densities, providing local recreation and service opportunities, and trying to generally reduce the need for travel. In this way, we are re-focusing on local services and local living, rather than reinforcing car dependency. We want to create urban environments where people feel that walking to their local shops is a safe and sociable and pleasant experience.

There's another issue related to our oil dependency. Adjacent to our municipality is a major container storage facility for a wide range of petrochemical nasties. This is Coode Island on the Maribyrnong river and the risk of another accident endangering people within this municipality is very high. Historically a lot offensive industries have located here so that they could pour their pollution into the river. Fortunately they're not allowed do that any more but we still seem to have more than our fair share of noxious industries. Attempts are being made to find an alternative site for the Coode Island storage facility but the site that is currently under consideration, Point Lillias, is considered unsuitable by many people because it is near important wetlands and fisheries, and is very close to the residential suburbs of Geelong.

Coode Island is situated within Melbourne's Docklands area which attracts an enormous amount of container activity and industrial traffic. Our fish markets and our national flower markets are also situated in this area. Significant restructuring is occurring within the port and associated industries, and the whole area is the focus of major commercial and residential redevelopment. All of this needs to be thought about in a comprehensive way, and a coordinated planning process is required so state agencies and local councils do not make planning decisions in isolation. We can't afford to do that any longer, not only for social reasons, but for environmental reasons as well. So we arrive back at the principles of good environmental planning -- which involves a systemic process with good feedback loops, with biofeedback as the basis of it. Only with such an approach can we design our technical/ economic/industrial processes to be more closely integrated with our ecological and social processes.

If we are going to tackle such large problems in society, we not only need good professionals and good experts in the field, but we also need good governance. The restructuring of the local government system in Victoria provides a good start in addressing big ticket items like urban renewal, new infrastructure, and better linkages between state, federal and local government, as is illustrated by some of the environmental policy agreements that have been made between the state, federal and local authorities in recent years. To continue this process we need a strong, well resourced, locally accountable system of government that works on a regional basis. This regional focus is important because decisions that impact upon job opportunities, the environment, and infrastructure are generally made and implemented at a regional level rather than at a state or national level.

We've 'grown' local government in Victoria to enhance our organisational and political capacity, but state governments are still following a somewhat traditional model of providing services and identifying problems. Our federal government system is also finding it difficult to tackle the big social and environmental challenges we face. So perhaps at federal and state government level we need to think of ways of being more responsive to regions, to bioregions, to the needs of people at a regional level. Local government has changed but now we need to look at changes in state and federal government too. Major coordination processes need to be created to allow the resources of our state and federal governments to be linked with resources and opportunities at the local government level, and this has not yet happened.

As far as other issues that concern me -- well, I think the time bombs of the new millennium will be the environmental problems that have been created this century. Take air pollution, for example. In Melbourne air pollution hangs around because of this city's unique topographical and urban form, and, as I've already noted, is closely associated with our oil dependent transport system. We breathe this polluted air, we have human-induced global warming caused by emissions of CO2 and other Greenhouse gases, and we have ozone depletion caused by the emission of yet more gases. Together these are probably the greatest policy and economic planning time bombs we are yet to face.

The way in which our whole economic system contributes to global warming is something we need to address as part of an international response, but at a local level it will mean loss of ecosystems and increased challenges to people's lives. Residences around Port Phillip Bay will be affected by sea level changes, for example, and I dare say the recent storms in northern Australia are related to climate change. The damage caused by such storms is a major cost to society, both in terms of human life and the amount of money required to rectify the damage. While these concerns are filtering through to the government and corporate sectors, they are not yet being adequately addressed in the way we plan our economies or manage our cities.

The way we organise our cities at the moment is preposterous in terms of environmental standards, there's no question about that, but I don't think that, at their core, cities are inherently environmentally destructive. I'm not one for redeveloping green field sites though, because our cities of the future will have to be developed on the basis of existing resource infrastructure. The real challenge in a highly urbanised country like Australia, where something in the order of 80% of inhabitants live within urban forms, is to think of ways of redesigning, rebuilding and controlling our cities to achieve better environmental standards.

The relationship between environmental degradation, cities and regional development has been addressed at a national policy level and within academic circles, but most of those macro level studies are now gathering dust on shelves. They could not be implemented because they were not linked to local government, nor to what you could call the fourth tier of government, the community networks. Formal recognition of the contribution local community groups can make to the sustainability of a region at the neighbourhood and street level has been missing from nearly all the macro studies I've seen. And there seems to be little understanding of how social energy can be marshaled, directed and supported to influence higher level decisions and activities related to regional infrastructure, regional economics, and state government responsibilities, to achieve sustainability in a natural resource sense.

Professionals and policy makers often say that 'policy is political', but I think that's code for 'we didn't get public support for the policy when we were making it'. While I don't think we can wait for democracy at the local level to produce all our national and state planning strategies, we do need to develop a two edged process that allows community based solutions to emerge and inform regional, state and federal policies. As I've said, it's those micro level plans that have been sorely missed in the last few decades.

Digital composite created for Redreaming the plain by Csaba Szamosy, 1996, from images contributed by project partners. One of the virtual 'skins' in ITF's re-interpreted possum skin cloak.

Within local communities there are many organic processes that can be built on. Look at community gardens where people meet to share their need to recreate and grow things, or the community management of public open space that involves hundreds of people planting indigenous vegetation along our river banks and streams. Or look at the growth of the community centres movement or the Neighbourhood House movement in the '70s and '80s which, in a very broad sense, supports children, families and women at a local level. The increase in the number of single parent families and families in which both parents work outside the home, indicates that we can no longer look to the nuclear family as the primary carer and source of personal support -- which suggests to me that much of the nurturing and caring that once took place within the home should be occurring more and more within local neighbourhoods.

These are important models for the future because they are about local self-sufficiency, which, to me, is central to any notion of sustainability and should therefore be supported ... because the more local support networks people have to draw on the less they have to travel; and the less people have to travel, the less energy is consumed. So you can really start to see the way all these social and environmental issues are linked.

MY VISION OF A SUSTAINABLE CITY

I think one of the main attributes of a sustainable city or bioregion would be that the transport systems use renewable resources. And while it might not be visionary enough, I think that if we can increase the use of our existing public transport systems to get to where we work, consume and play, we would be taking a very major step towards creating a more sustainable city -- even though we'd still be burning brown coal to generate electricity to run our trams and trains.

To me, a sustainable city would be much more self reliant than most communities are at present. In a sustainable city, people would recreate locally and produce their food more locally. We would not be frightened to grow green leaf vegetables in an urban setting, for example, because we'd be dealing with our airborne pollutants. And the natural environment would be reclaimed and enhanced. Our river environs would be treated with greater respect in terms of what drains into them and what's located next to them. We wouldn't put industry hard up against our rivers, for example, and our river banks would be the focus of public open space for recreation. I think a sustainable city would also be more self-sufficient in a social sense. There'd be more opportunities for friendships and personal support, for example. And that again would reduce the need to travel.

In a sustainable city people would also work locally. This is a real issue for the City of Maribyrnong at the moment, because industries that have employed local people in the past are moving to the urban fringes -- and this means fewer jobs within the municipality. I'd like to see these industries being replaced by new industries based on improving the environment. Ironically, the redevelopment of some of the old industrial sites has presented us with an opportunity to skill local people in cleaning up contaminated land -- and so kick start one such new green industry. The work we are doing on the Maribyrnong river frontage to transform it into a major retail, entertainment and recreational precinct, should also produce a greater spread of income generating opportunities for local people in the future.

I guess I've been focusing on some of the social aspects of sustainability because people often forget that there are significant social solutions to environmental problems. We can list any number of ecological outcomes that are necessary if we are to ever create sustainable cities, but what I'm interested in, are the social and economic linkages.

Protected by copyright 1996.

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[Page history: created and first published on www.ecoversity.org.au as part of Painting the future real (1995-97), the prototype for Redreaming the plain (1998-2002); taken off-line in 1998 and re-posted in its original form in July 2004 as a web archive. For more information contact redreaming@rmit.edu.au.]