Out with Master Planning, in with Place Making

My wife and I recently renovated our home in West Hobart. I remember a conversation with a family member during the design process. He said, “you can’t knock that wall down, it’s a double brick load-bearing wall”, to which I responded “We can, its just going to cost a lot more!”.

To me this can do attitude is what we need more of from our public servants, bureaucrats and politicians. So often responses to complex questions are “its too hard”, “it can’t be done” or “we’ve already tried and failed” but what if we tried again? What if we did something different to get the best outcome for community?

I recently attended the Mainstreets Australia conference right here in Hobart. There, renown placemaker Ethan Kent (no relation to Clark Kent), said “start with visions not masterplans”. And he’s right. A community vision should always guide the process from the outset, and while we have a community vision for our whole city strategic plan, we don’t typically undertake this type of vision exercise for specific sites.

When planning a site for the future there is typically a range of consultation exercises, a masterplan is developed and then further consultation undertaken with community on the proposed masterplan. Throughout this traditional planning process, the community are never really given the tools or the licence to consider what could be: what is it they really want from their public place? 

Would a community think to say demolish the whole lot and start again in the context of a master plan? I don’t think so.

And usually, when the draft masterplan comes back to the community it really limits the creative thinking of the community to what a single planner created and put in front of them. Do you want the swings over here or over there? Even worse, it rarely considers the environment immediately outside the masterplan boundaries, so connectedness is rarely truly addressed. 

Let’s think bigger and be bolder. So how do we achieve this? 

Engage the community to create their own vision for every public place, including State owned land and buildings. And when you create the vision, let the community do it, don’t try to influence or sway their thinking, it’s their project and their space. Simple. Public institutions could hold workshops with community and stakeholders to draw out community visions for projects. And a key point is that no other work is done until the vision is completed. 

A great place to do this could be St Johns Park, Newtown. What vision do you have for a site that is 10acres of State/council owned land 3km from the CBD? What could we really achieve if we applied blue sky thinking and busted down the silos preventing the best outcome for the community? 

I was dismayed to learn recently that the Department of Health were undertaking a master planning exercise of their small portion of the site but that they hadn’t bothered to pick up the phone to the neighbouring state departments or council to consider how we could all work together and make the most of the wonderful and historic public land for the good of everyone.

It was even more frustrating to be instructed by State bureaucrats not to get involved with State matters, even when they are right next door to major Council facilities. Knocking down silos is another essential change we must all work toward. Departments and institutions must talk to each other, no longer can we have state bureaucrats refusing to work with council, or parks teams not working closely with the roads and footpaths team. If paramedicine has taught me one thing, its that when we work together we always get better results.

The South Hobart Oval/D’Arcy St Park Draft Masterplan will be out for consultation in the coming weeks. I’d encourage you to take a look and feedback to council what you’d like changed, you can be specific or you can provide vision statements. It’s a very heavily used community facility so I’d encourage you to think big about the environment as it currently stands and what it could be in an ideal world.

For the good of this great City, lets ditch the “its too hard attitude” or the “if it ain’t broke, why fix it” mentality and find ways to make great places. Let’s build a future proof, liveable and loveable Hobart.