Positivity Over Punishment.
INTERVIEW WITH JESSIE SUMMONS
Life has given the Northern Rivers nothing but lemons the past few years, but Jessie Summons – a development consultant and chief operating officer from the Byron Shire – sees nothing but organic lemonade.
Built environments are more than the spaces we create for ourselves. They're the physical platforms for living that impact and regulate most aspects of our lives. They mediate our relationship with our communities and impact how we structure our days. They're also monuments to our historical values as a society and the primary local industries at the time they're created.
As complex issues emerge from these environments—challenges of affordability, social isolation, diminishing food bowls, mass transport and fossil-fuel reliance - we have to ask how we want our built environment to shape our experience? And what would we do differently if starting from scratch?
The majority of urban development in Australia occurred in the second half of last century. Unlike the dense and walkable central business districts in our capital cities, most Australians live in surrounding low-density suburbs—similar to the villages and towns of the Northern Rivers which is where we see the rise of what urban design writer Robert Nelson named “misanthropic design” which is a fancy way of saying places that aren't kind to humans.
When Australia’s population boomed with post-war European migrants, lots of new arrivals were fleeing cramped multi-dwelling residences and discovering the dream of wide-open Australian suburbia. It provided new ways of living, offering highly valued privacy, quiet, and separation of work and home. Unfortunately, what we also designed by accident were places that actively hindered our ability to interact with our local communities.
At the same time we were planning mid-century suburbs, there was an extraordinary boom in private car ownership, the ultimate symbol of freedom and status. This was back when the population was tiny and traffic jams were rare, so these sprawling suburbs began enshrining the private motor vehicle in our regulations above public transport and the humble bicycle.
Then we doubled down and boldly declared these suburbs as protected species with terms like “existing neighbourhood character” as a defence against changing the modus operandi of new developments.
That’s how we got the “Australian way of life”—isolated households, in a low-rise single dwelling, behind a fence, on their own “private island”, located in a sprawling town, whose residents rely on private vehicles to access basic amenities, education, employment and social activities with the rest of the community. And everything has to be planned in advance, because it’s impossible to have an unplanned interaction within misanthropic urban design.
Do we dare to put historical planning regulations and sentimental attachments to the suburbs aside, and ask ourselves how we’d like to live in the future?
Do we dare to put historical planning regulations and sentimental attachments to the suburbs aside, and ask ourselves how we'd like to live in the future, if it wasn’t influenced by how we live right now? By focusing on the occasions when our built environment has actively led to positive experiences—like that time you unexpectedly bumped into a friend on the street and had a great conversation—we can reframe our future urban environments.
In the Northern Rivers in particular, we have an incredible opportunity to improve our experience using first principles, not slight iterations, to how it's been done for the past 70 years.
As we, the Northern Rivers community, emerge out of too many “unprecedented” events—fires, a global pandemic, floods, a catastrophic lack of stable housing—this is the perfect opportunity to reflect and ask if we want to change course and place the future inhabitants of our future built-environment, alongside the natural environment, at the centre of our planning process.
A part of the planning process that's particularly odd is that “community consultation” is a synonym for the “existing community only” specifically the ever-shrinking and ageing home-owning class. This effectively ignores the incredible opportunity we have to engage the future community in planning for their future, even those who may not own property, but are affected by planning decisions in exactly the same way. To engage and consult with the group of people who'll be impacted most by our designing, planning and building activities today, specifically younger people who rarely make planning submissions, would be a significant and progressive step towards building a more representative community voice.
We could give equal weight to the views and values of future Northern Rivers communities, evolving past the unproductive “NIMBY vs developer” adversarial dynamic. We might even discover our emerging communities desire urban development that's the opposite of misanthropic—places that encourage interaction, connection and that work with rather than fight the natural habitat.
To enable this, we have to revisit the incentives embedded at the local planning level. As long-term investor Charlie Munger says, “Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.” Our current planning regulations are all oriented towards limiting what's possible (think height controls) to discourage the worst outcomes. By focusing on stopping “bad outcomes” we're missing a huge opportunity to re-imagine the good outcomes that could be driven by positive incentives.
I propose we move beyond simply regulating out the bad, and implement, at least at a local level, strong incentives for outcomes that align with community-identified desires.
Think incentives for the delivery of public space, beautifully landscaped pathways that encourage incidental exercise and social connection, carbon neutral developments future-proofed for changing modes of transport, and developments that enhance, protect and improve the local ecology through initiatives like reforestation.
If we want to ensure that it’s not just the “enlightened developers” who deliver these outcomes, we can choose to design meaningful financial incentives that'll ensure this is achieved by the broader industry. At the end of the day, it's the financial feasibility of a project that dictates many of its outcomes, and that’s good if the right incentives are in place, rather than the singular focus on punitive deterrents like fines for non-compliance. Instead of seeing any new development as an evil that must be stopped, we can reposition it as an opportunity to incentivise the type of places we all want to live and visit in the future.
If we can implement these ideas, we can actively re-engineer the development process to deliver a healthy, connected, socially, financially and environmentally sustainable Northern Rivers. ▲