海角社区

Effective Planning Regulations

Thursday 2.00pm-3.00pm

• Leanne Bowie
• Tina Maltby-Wells
• Hannah Richardson

Leanne Bowie
Wind farms – From the perspective of landowners and local government

With the recent proliferation of wind farms in Queensland, a variety of issues have arisen for landowners and local government including:

• Liability for decommissioning if the wind farm operator goes into liquidation or abandons the site;
• Interface with other land uses;
• Relationship with local ecology;
• Lack of interface with regional planning interests;
• Potential interface with rehabilitated mining land;
• Concerns regarding lack of transparency.

This paper examines policy options for a path forwards.

Tina Maltby-Wells
A Dwelling house - To be or not to be...

A key regional priority identified in Shaping SEQ 2023 is recognising the housing shortage and facilitating ways to deliver more homes, faster. The SEQ Regional Plan includes strategies for achieving housing diversity including facilitating gentle density by unlocking new housing models and diverse forms of homes. Given the pressure to provide affordable housing options to the market efficiently is opening up an interesting space where the definition of a dwelling house can be investigated and debated. The Queensland Planning Provisions (QPP) define a Dwelling House as “A residential use of premises for one household that contains a single dwelling”. How does this translate to implementation in the gentle density housing delivery space and creating innovative solutions to contribute to this outcome?

Within the SEQ Regional Plan, The City of Moreton Bay has been allocated dwelling targets and dwelling diversity targets of 125,800 new dwellings by 2046. Greenfield development will not deliver this solution alone and other types of housing options including gentle density are already being delivered. The Streamline assessment team at the City of Moreton Bay has been working in this space for the last four years assessing applications that meet the criteria of Fives - less than 5 dwellings, 5 beds, 500m² GFA or 5 lots. The Streamline team was created to recognise the need for a new direction that could respond to the demand for applications that were deemed low rise, low complexity and low risk. What has evolved from this is a new way of working with individuals and community members to create better planning outcomes in the gentle density space. The team functions as more than just an assessment team but provides an interface between small developers and building certifiers to achieve improved outcomes on the ground.

Gentle density, infill development and street tree initiatives have all been actively pursued as part of the Streamline rationale since 2019. The result has been a team that is determining over 2400 applications each year and is actively engaging with home owners and developers to find creative planning solutions for the community. The Streamline team is keen to develop the foundations for how this can be implemented through nurturing a team of planners with a new attitude towards negotiating with small developers and fulfilling targets while producing better outcomes for the community.

New housing models and diverse forms of homes in the gentle density space will contribute towards the goals and targets identified in Shaping SEQ 2023. The Streamline team at The City of Moreton Bay would like to share different housing models and examples that challenge the traditional definition of a dwelling house and gain feedback in an interactive setting.

Hannah Richardson
Why Planners should care about transport safety

Measurement and evidence base is critical in making informed decisions towards the vision of cities and regions. Excitingly, how and what we measure is becoming increasingly broad, however, as we broaden, we run the risk of silos. The result can be a focus on measurements by one discipline that keep a focus on a particular outcome while others may be striving for the same outcome, but through different measurements, methods and often using different language. Some examples of this are liveability, and safety. As a transport engineer / planner, I’ve had plenty of experience in transport and road safety, from road safety audits to development of policy and safety strategies and action plans.

While the obvious goal of a safety plan may be to reduce the impacts of crashes on the transport network to all, including fatalities, serious injuries, those involved in crashes, first responders, and witnesses. Another goal is increased uptake of walking and cycling for the community as a result of an increased perception of safety. The evidence base for crashes are available for injuries, serious injuries and fatalities, but little data is available for perception of safety.

Land use planning is critical to improving outcomes in the safety of our cities and regions in future through many aspects, including planning for consolidation where there is decreased demand for parking, planning for catchments around schools to encourage walking and cycling by the next generation.

One of the biggest levers local governments have in their control is parking management and provision. Through the renewal of transport elements of planning schemes, local governments have opportunity to have significant impact on parking provision, and through this, parking. This provides another area where measurement is different between different disciplines, where transport planners and engineers measure impacts of parking on local networks and mode share changes to sustainable mode share, while planners measure increased dwelling numbers and growth, both of which are needed to successfully grow our cities, with even more positive outcomes to come from both sets of data being reviewed together.

I intend for this walking discussion to talk about the interdisciplinary outcomes we are looking to achieve and the opportunities we have when working together sharing findings and measuring different outcomes for improvements in our cities.