Reflections on Planning Education and Practices in Melbourne

ABSTRACT

Reflecting on my involvement in planning education at RMIT (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) University since the early 1980s and with Urban Policy and Research, 1982–2003, there was a degree of optimism about what urban planning, through education and publication, might achieve, given the relatively favourable political and institutional circumstances of the time. The normalisation of neoliberal thinking across Australia by 2000, however, stymied such hopes. Looking back, I consider how I, as a teacher and a researcher, and UPR now a commercial journal, adapted to these challenging times.

摘要

回顾我自1980年代初以来在皇家墨尔本理工学院（RMIT）大学和1982至2003年参与《城市政策与研究》（UPR）期刊的教育规划事业，鉴于当时相对有利的政治和制度环境，我对城市规划通过教育和出版可能取得的成就持一定程度的乐观态度。然而，到了2000年，澳大利亚新自由主义思想的正常化扼杀了这种希望。回首往事，我思考了自己作为一名教师和一名研究人员，以及如今已成为商业期刊的UPR如何适应这个充满挑战的时代。

KEYWORDS:

• Urban policy and research
• planning education
• work placements
• young planners
• learning by doing

1. Introduction

Urban Policy and Research (UPR) celebrated forty years of publication at Melbourne University on 23 February 2023, a time span near equivalent to my time as a lecturer in urban planning at RMIT University. Being involved with both – as a UPR founding member – I thought it timely to reflect on my experience of planning education, publication and practice in Melbourne over this period.

The body of the text is focused on my time involved in RMIT’s undergraduate planning (1984–2017) and UPR (1983–2003), ending when I stepped down as editor (1998–2003).

Each have their own distinctive narratives, but these reflections intertwine them to draw out the shift in the contextual settings for education, research and practice of the times: from the early 1980s when, in the context of my own work, there was still a belief in what planning education and publication might achieve in Australia, through to the rise and normalisation of neoliberalism in public affairs, and its institutionalisation in universities, which in my experience devalued the public-centred principles of urban planning.

I reflect below on how I adjusted my teaching and research.

As to my background and values, I am a grateful beneficiary of the postwar British Welfare State, from birth and primary school onwards. I benefitted from free tertiary education, enjoying, for example, weekly one-to-one tutorials with professors, but as an undergraduate at Oxford University I witnessed the countervailing, subtle force of upper-class privilege on people’s life chances. Then as a teacher at one of the two secondary schools for black students in Rhodesia (1967–1968), privilege based on race came into plain sight. Subsequent on-the-job professional training as a building project manager on building sites across the north of England and central London (1969–1972) introduced me to the chicaneries of the commercial world. This led to my decision to pursue an academic career, a return hopefully to realising some of the ideals promised by the welfare state but now, from lived experience, alert to class and market realities.

2. Grounds for Optimism?

The ground-breaking and innovative federal Department of Urban and Regional Development (DURD) (1972–1975) was short-lived¹ Later governments’ interventions addressing the growing inequities across Australian cities were few. But there was a lingering sense of grassroots optimism in the 1980s in Melbourne about what city planning, broadly conceived, might achieve. Seeds for Change, Creatively Confronting the Energy Crisis (1978), the vision of Maurie Crow, Alan Pears and their Melbourne collaborators, remains as relevant now as when it was published. Similarly, self-published, Jenny Wills’ and six other women’s Local Government and Community Services: Fitzroy – a Study in Social Planning (1985) detailed what a socially progressive council could achieve within constraining budgets.² Journals such as Ripple (1977–1983), written and published by first-wave gentrifiers in Fitzroy, championed neighbourhood planning.

Optimism was evident at RMIT too. Urban planning education there began in 1971 at night school in the Department of Surveying, primarily for council engineers and surveyors tasked with operating newly introduced local government planning schemes. With its transfer to the RMIT Department of Architecture and Building in 1983, Urban Planning was retitled Urban Policy and Planning (UPP) to reflect a broader, more questioning remit, reflecting the interests of its new head, David Hain, who had previously worked with DURD. New staff were recruited to improve planning students’ political, economic and social literacies, and statistical skills, to educate rather than just train. Each of these four streams had three subject components. For example, the social planning stream that I taught comprised of Social Planning 1 (Social Justice and the City), Social Planning 2 (Housing) and Social Planning 3 (Community Development). Students’ career options now went beyond local government planning.

UPP’s overall theoretical emphasis was counter-balanced by a sixty-day paid Work Placement, taken in state and local government planning departments, and with planning consultants. Generally, the pay scale set out in industrial agreements for the lowest rung of administrative workers in Victorian local governments was applied and accepted by some employers in the private sector too. Thirty plus placements for third-year students were organised each year, together with weekly classroom debriefings that gave collective shape to individuals’ experiences.

The original planning diploma was converted in 1985 to a three-and-a-half-year undergraduate degree to accommodate the Work Placements. The then Royal Australian Planning Institute (RAPI) required four years of study for professional accreditation. Confident in the balance between the intellectual and practical elements of the new degree, staff agreed that professional accreditation be foregone. A post-graduate diploma was offered to those who wanted professional accreditation, but few took up this option. There was no downward impact on undergraduate student applications, in fact, the reverse occurred. More students with high HES scores applied. As part of the now Department of Planning, Policy and Landscape (PPL), planning students shared elective classes with environmental policy and landscape architecture students, so gaining a broader understanding of the natural and built environments.

Student selection by Higher School Certificate (HSC) scores was replaced by in-house written tests and interviews, involving existing students as joint interviewers. A base HSC score still applied. More mature aged, female, non-metropolitan and non-Anglo-Celtic students were selected. A student body more representative of the people they were to serve was achieved.

There was a welcome degree of unity amongst the teaching staff. Optimism was warranted.

UPR’s goals were like UPP’s: to achieve a better understanding of the political, economic and social forces that underlie urban policy formation and operation across Australian cities, and to encourage better informed urban policy and planning practices.

Many of its founders were involved with the Melbourne University student planning journal, Polis. Some now worked at the Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works (MMBW), then the metropolis's planning authority. They had ambitions beyond fulfilling their immediate office duties. Most soon left the MMBW, two now heading two of Australia’s leading planning consultancies. Establishing UPR was another ambition.

The editorial in UPR’s first issue (1.1, 1982) reads in part: “The editorial committee has four objectives for journal content. First, articles must contribute to the level of debate and knowledge by providing substantiated opinions on urban issues, relating the findings to public policy. We are conscious of the weakness of research for the sake of research. Secondly, the journal will adopt a multi-disciplinary approach to the themes it addresses. We believe that effective planning and policy can only be achieved through a recognition of the inter-relatedness of urban affairs; problems have economic, social and political causes and outcomes. Thirdly, we will try to foster and stimulate innovation within Australia … Fourthly, we intend providing a journal that is written in plain English.”

The optimism and energies of its founders carried UPR for several years. The father of one provided start-up capital. In the 1980s and beyond, Australian Planner (AP), RAPI’s official journal, was not an outlet for refereed publications: there was a ready market for local academic planners’ research papers. Even so, for a time, UPR had to scratch around for well researched and written articles, often struggling to find a third, let alone fourth article to complete an issue. Sourcing copy from those in practice for non-refereed publication was even more problematic. Interstate editors helped improve the flow of submissions and the overall quality of publications improved. The planning department at Melbourne University and PPL provided financial support during the 1980s to keep UPR afloat. But a reliance on volunteers proved insufficient in producing a timely, error-free, quarterly, refereed journal. Basic administrative tasks – posting out new issues, for example – were time-consuming. Australian local governments, the mainstay amongst early subscribers, did not renew. An Urban Services Directory started with gusto but had few renewals. Some Victorian consultancies advertised but this generated little income. There was no money for a marketing manager. Commercial gloom deepened when Oxford University Press, brought in in 1987 partly to boost subscriptions, lost many.

RMIT was UPR’s default home base where meetings took place. It was, to a large degree, the managerial and financial acumen of RMIT administrative staff that kept the journal commercially afloat until 2002, when Taylor and Francis took over. As UPR research articles editor from 1998 to 2003, I became aware of the behind-the-scenes work of Von Eckersley who had a rather ill-defined administrative brief at RMIT, but she had her own office where she quietly did UPR administrative work. She organised printing and mail outs at minimal direct cost to UPR; she chivvied referees to submit their reports on time. Deadlines somehow were met. Without her, UPR would have likely failed.

Taylor and Francis judged UPR to be a suitable journal to bridge urban policy interests of Australasian and East Asian cities. From starting as a Victorian, then an Australian, then an Australasian planning journal, UPR now had the opportunity to build its presence in the Asia-Pacific region. After an enthusiastic start and a near death experience, UPR had cause for renewed optimism.

There was now a reasonable inflow of manuscripts but as a research article editor, I thought too many were housing-centred and from a coterie of established authors. It was pleasing then to publish new authors on themes novel to UPR, for example, Vivienne Hillyer’s study of an Aboriginal heritage site in East Perth being revalued as real estate, published in Issue 2, 2001.

3. Changing External Circumstances

Neoliberalism is a political philosophy that prioritises individuals’ and businesses’ freedoms, so seeks to minimise government control over them. In the 1930s it was a counter argument to Keynesian politico-economic thought. The latter argued, after the experience of the Great Depression (1929–1932), that government intervention in the free-market economy was a good thing if it ensured greater collective wellbeing; thus, urban planning was favoured. Keynesian-based government policies remained ascendant post-World War II in the western world. They failed, however, to avert stagflation in the early 1970s, the supposedly counteracting forces of high unemployment and high inflation occurring together, a result in part because of the sudden and steep rise in oil prices after the Yom Kippur War, 1973, in Palestine. This facilitated the political resurrection of neoliberalism under Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom – “there is no such thing as society, only individuals” – the soon new normal government policy settings applied elsewhere in the world.

1992 proved to be the watershed year in Victoria. The early Keynesian-based policies of the John Cain-led Labor Victorian Government (1982–1990) rubbed uncomfortably against the world’s increasingly more open economy and nation states’ neoliberal political settings. Its switch to a more entrepreneurial approach ended with massive, unsustainable State debts.

For the incoming neoliberal-inspired Kennett Government (1992-1999), planning was viewed as an impediment to much needed development. It jettisoned what flimsy metropolitan planning controls there had been. It introduced the Victoria Planning Provisions (VPPs): simplified, standardised local government planning schemes designed to facilitate development. Planning controls were often referred to as “red tape”. The VPPs remain largely unchanged in 2023.

Nationally, the Federal Labor Government released a report on Australia’s education sector (Department of Employment, Education and Training, Higher Education 1993). Known as the Dawkins Report after the minister responsible, it viewed free university education as middle-class welfare, a cost taxpayers should no longer bear. Australian universities had to become financially more self-reliant. RMIT’s planning academics, as at other Australian universities, were expected to adjust to financially straightened times. Students too were expected to pay their way: debts accumulated through the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS) increased pressure on them to find well-paid employment on graduating.

Studying urban planning at RMIT University in the 2000s became less attractive, when measured by the decreased number of applicants.

4. Responding to Changed Teaching Circumstances

PPL, now Landscape, Environment and Planning (LEAP), did not pay its way. While there were ambitious plans for another progressive revamp under a new Head, LEAP rapidly became, like the Cain government, insolvent. The Environment and Planning elements were absorbed into the financially solvent Social Science Faculty. Staff were made redundant. Collegiality was lost.

The loss of the direct landscape architecture connection was devastating. Efforts to run a double degree in planning and landscape architecture became problematic leading to its eventual closure, so curtailing related urban design possibilities.

Full fee-paying students, both local and international, were to be enrolled in undergraduate planning at RMIT. However, relatively few international students were, at least in the 2000s. The argument we mounted was that the Victorian planning system was culturally and institutionally specific and so, of limited value to them. It held because of the extra revenue generated by the now popular postgraduate planning programme. Applications significantly increased after personalised invitations were posted to all local government planners in Victoria, an upward trend that continued for a decade, one facilitated by online course modules. A post-graduate programme specifically designed for Asian students – more technical, less political – proved less successful.

Undergraduate class sizes were increased. Fifty work placements a year now had to be found. One-on-one contact with individual students decreased. Staff focused more on their own career trajectories.

Universities insisted all professional programmes be accredited. Academic staff autonomy was curtailed. The theoretical emphasis of the RMIT urban policy and planning programme was at odds with new political times.

In 2000 an incoming senior staff member complained the RMIT planning students he had met doing work placements, while familiar with elements of Marxist and feminist theories, had only a bare grasp of Victorian local government planning legislation and procedures. The retort was: “that is why they do work placements: to gain such knowledge and experience”. Their reflective reports of their times on placement were Invariably of a high standard. For the first time, they were writing about their own, not credentialled authors’ experiences. They were critical, both positively and negatively, not only of aspects of their classroom education and the operational aspects of the Victorian planning system, but of themselves and their work placement colleagues. They were often humorous and revelatory of actual Victorian planning practices (Jackson 2018a). Students were learning professionally where they wanted to go, sometimes not as planners. One advantage of planning being thought of as an applied social science, with an emphasis on research-based projects, is those wishing not to be planners on graduation have other career options available.

The three-and-a-half-year programme of the 1980s by then had been archived. The social planning stream of subjects, Social Planning I, II and III, that I had taught were replaced by Planning Theory, Contemporary Local Government and Plan Implementation, all Planning Institute of Australia (PIA) approved. There was now less scope for a critical perspective of planning practices; graduates, reasonably, expected to be “job ready”.

In the manner of Work Placements, Contemporary Local Government (CLG) and Plan Implementation (PI) were modelled on the principle of learning by doing as described by Friedmann (1987). Lectures and set readings gave way to projects close to actual planning practices. In CLG students were asked to respond to a project brief from the Municipal Association of Victoria (MAV) to determine what level of collaboration existed in council offices between local government planners and allied professions, a different one chosen each year. With in-house contacts provided by the MAV, students organised interviews themselves asking classroom-generated questions. Small group reports were individually assessed. An overriding state-wide report was presented each year at the MAV offices.

In PI, a subject offered to Landscape Architecture students, the State (now) Victorian Planning Authority (VPA) provided detailed briefs for small groups of students to draw up precinct structure plans for proposed fringe suburbs. Students were given timely technical support from VPA staff. Their reports, arguing for particular urban designs, were presented at the VPA.

In Planning Theory, students were assessed on their ability to precis different texts each week. Online teaching aides enabled students to submit their precises two hours before class for provisional assessment, to be finalised after their defenses in class. Such pressurised intellectual, writing and speaking engagement translated into “job ready” skills, as students told me: theory and practice as one!

As with Work Placements, students now had more control over and responsibility for their own learning: to learn to work with each other and with other professions. Contemporary ideological and political concerns continued to be raised but now with their own planning practice experience to draw on, they were better able to make their own judgements of the academic literature and lecturers’ opinions. Rather than standing at the front of the class lecturing, I became more of a facilitator and a crisis manager. The 1980s urban studies focus was now closer to urban planning: “job ready” yes, but with graduates having more personal and professional experiences and skills to draw from.

Besides work placements, the other continuing element from the 1980s was student overseas exchanges, pioneered in Australia by Landscape Architecture and Planning at RMIT. Student selection and programmes of study were organised by the academics involved, the accommodation arrangements for incoming students by university administrators. Those with Ryerson University, Toronto, and Strathclyde University, Glasgow were early and successful examples. Like RMIT, both were former technical colleges, located downtown, in city regions seeking new roles in the global economy, in countries with similar institutional arrangements. Thus, what exchange students learnt overseas could be shared on their return. Proposed agreements with Asian universities proved more difficult to achieve.

5. Responding to Changed Research Circumstances

Universities, now operating as quasi businesses, use Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to monitor academics’ research outputs. Their job security and promotion increasingly depend on these. This created a split between research and teaching-orientated staff. Teaching buyouts exacerbated the situation with more teaching done by short-term or casual staff.

Long-term teaching-orientated staff with modest research outputs, like me, had to adjust. Since 2000 I had periodically conducted open-ended interviews with planning practitioners across Glasgow and Toronto, later in Melbourne. Drawing on Giddens’ notion of structure and agency as applied to planning practice by Healey (1997), the underlying question being asked was: what degree of agency do planning practitioners working in comparable jurisdictions have in shaping the environments they have responsibilities for? And from a teaching perspective, how can lecturers better prepare students to be more effective or creative agents? More generally, do we have to plan the way we do?

A series of articles followed. In Jackson (2022a) I concluded “in the case of Glasgow’s planners, there was a sense of moving on but without forgetting who they serve; in Toronto, in the City of Toronto at least, a compromised but lasting belief in the value of planning; while in Melbourne, a continuation of low expectations, neoliberal regime or not” (p. 299).

As to teaching, how might we start to build a more positive and effective planning culture in Melbourne? Many suggestions were made by local practitioners, as quoted in Jackson 2022a, and 2022b:

Political decisions at the metro level should be around infrastructure and financing; once prioritised then built form, public realm, etc. should be delegated down, not so politised.

Land use planning is out of step with taxation on car usage, housing investment etc., city governance needs to be alert to the (unintended) consequences.

But for these concerns to be ever considered:

Government is the key holder of intent: this is crucial in democratic planning.

These commentaries tie back to DURD whose intentions were never fully realised, and in Victoria, to the compromised efforts of the Cain government, and to those of later Victorian governments, beholden as always to property and developer interests.

6. Review and Closing Comments

Having lived and worked on three other continents before deciding to pursue an academic career in Australia, mainly at RMIT University, I had a reasonable range of life experiences to draw upon. In my teaching I sought a balance between conceptual thinking and practice, their interplay hopefully resulting in graduates implementing better-informed planning practices, leading to more prosperous and more equitable Australian cities. This was the aim to UPR too. Alert to my own uncertainties as to early career direction, however, it was also important to me not to narrow the curriculum to that required for professional accreditation, instead, to support students find their own way.

That said, it was recognised planners had a decidedly limited influence in shaping the urban environments they sought to manage (Healey and Underwood 1978, McLoughlin 1992). Encouraging students to think otherwise leads to early career disillusionment (Inch 2010). So, over time I gravitated more to giving students a better grasp of what planning practice involves through project-based learning; to temper what graduates can realistically expect as junior planners (Jackson 2018a).

As “small cogs” in a big system (Tasan-Kok 2016), planners can choose to settle to do the mundane well (Alexander 2016). But by nurturing their critical ethos, when established and influential in the profession, they can speak out fearlessly (Grange 2017). For the majority in between, constantly dealing with frustrating and debilitating experiences, the bitter-sweet advice from Campbell is they should endeavour “to fail better” (2012): to learn from their failures and try to improve matters at their next attempt; to learn by doing.

Such an incremental approach to me makes sense. While not dismissive of the idealised commentaries of the three planners previously quoted, instead it seeks to overcome the hard-bitten mindset of many of the Melbourne planners interviewed (Jackson 2020, 2022b).

We could begin by learning from Toronto’s and Glasgow’s planners.

Toronto planners, surveyed by Filion et al. (2015), acknowledged various obstructions to achieving a more sustainable future there, but went on to speak of counter strategies they were implementing trying to achieve this. Their relatively optimistic outlook, I concluded (Jackson 2018b), stemmed from Canadians’ longstanding support for urban planning as a public service activity (Lemon 1996, McCarthy et al. 2020), in greater Toronto’s case, evident in its metropolitan planning framework, one still to be realised but not compromised by neoliberal provincial governments, in contrast to Victoria (Jackson 2019). Indeed, here the planning portfolio has been moved nine times between state government departments between 1983 and 2018 (Jackson 2019) and again in 2023. One cannot change this history but for Melbourne planners “to fail better”, it would take only a modicum of intent from future state governments to commit to, and hold to, a metropolitan-wide, integrative spatial planning framework of some substance, akin to that across greater Toronto.

Transferable lessons from Glasgow planners relate more to individual planners’ values. Responding to the ongoing daunting task of revitalising vast areas of blighted urban land, it would be understandable if Glasgow’s planners retreated into simply accepting failure. Like Melbourne planners, they spoke of politics, but they chose to focus more on their hard-won successes to improve matters in blighted areas, emphasising the importance of their engagement with other agencies and local communities (Jackson 2019). For example, social service workers in Drumchapel, a rundown overspill estate, spoke affectionately about “their” planner. At the opening of a community centre further up the Clyde River close to redundant dockyards, a Glasgow city councillor said it was the area’s planner who had brought everybody together. Two young planners highlighted their community-centred work in Govan and Glasgow’s East End; both subsequently professional awards for their work.

These stories of pragmatic improvisation at local level (Laws and Forester 2015) are exactly what work placement students, albeit with limited practice experiences, can relate to. Indeed, planning theories grounded in practice (Innes 1983, Forester 2013) emphasise different ways of knowing – tacit knowledge based on personal experience and relationships, as well as technical knowledge (Legacy 2012). Glasgow planners’ “working for our people” was not part of RMIT planning students’ vocabulary, but in their Reflective Reports they wrote about their own backgrounds and the people who had influenced them.

In 2014, 40 RMIT planning graduates who studied there between 1983 and 2003 were asked: if reduced to a single thing what had you learnt at RMIT, 13 nominated “broad overview”, nine “ability to think and analyse”, seven, Work Placements; a further seven cautioned: a “lack of statutory planning”. When then asked to describe themselves professionally as simply as possible, there was a pronounced binary split in responses, a small majority, 21, seeing themselves as “systems managers" (doing the mundane well?) but most of the others – twelve – nominated their “social engagement” (Jackson 2018a, p. 161).

Not as pronounced as their Glaswegian counterparts but in self-centred neoliberal times, such social engagement points to what RMIT planning graduates of that era, even if “small cogs,” seek to achieve, achievements later graduates could be encouraged to emulate.

As to UPR, I have had little involvement since 2003, after Taylor and Francis’s takeover. Fulfilling UPR’s subsequent Asian ambitions is fraught given the cultural, political and institutional divides involved, but there is a growing body of literature making useful comparisons between European-based and developing nations’ planning systems and practices (for example, Zimmerman and Momm 2022). Divides between planning practices in Australia, Scotland and Canada, by contrast, are comparatively small, in effect, meaning certain variables can be held constant, allowing more incisive analysis of others. Their comparative study, however, harkens back to an old, disappearing world order, to Australia’s colonial past and to my own predisposition.

In its early years, UPR was the only Australasian refereed planning journal, its interstate and New Zealand editors siphoning off papers that otherwise would have been published overseas. Since then, though, other planning journals with similar remits to UPR’s have been established, namely International Journal of Planning Studies and Planning, Practice and Research but both are based in the old world. Geography still matters. As such, UPR should embrace Australasia's place within the new world order – the Indo-Pacific world – one that encompasses a wide range of political regimes, multiple cultures and religions, is subject to a range of catastrophic natural disasters, to indigenous land rights issues, to pandemics, to climate change most particularly sea level rises and so, emerging environmental-induced migration: all great challenges to comparative analysis. Concerted coverage of these issues could become what UPR is known for across the world.

The master of ceremonies at UPR’s 40th year celebrations asked those present, including founding editorial members meeting up again, what they had professionally contributed to Australasian urban policy and planning? What agency had they had? No one spoke, perhaps because of their diffidence, until Mike Berry said his influence on housing and planning policies had been muted because relationships he forged with Ministers of Housing and Planning fell away because of their constant turnover: as junior ministers they were soon either promoted or demoted. An UPR’s founding editor, Brian Haratsis, said despondently that planning policy in Victoria was nothing but politics, reinforcing what many of the Melbourne interviewees said.

But there was hope too. Marcus Spiller – at the MMBW when UPR started, now a successful planning consultant – finished the open forum by saying that every three months when UPR is published, his staff read/peruse it, then discuss what they learnt.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Gough Whitlam formally launched UPR in 1984. Tom Uren, DURD’s minister, once retired willingly came from Sydney to be a guest lecturer to RMIT planning students.

2 My first student project in Melbourne tested whether limited funding for age care support across Fitzroy was targeted at those most in need. It focused on Italian and Greek elderly living in Fitzroy. Students were given permission to visit them at home using interpreters if necessary. Funds were found to be directed to those without extended family support.