However, in this article, MATTHEW PAETZ, planning manager Babbage Consultants Limited, disagrees.
I begin this article with a quote from a magazine published in Auckland : “I don’t think planning should exist. Ever. Not anywhere…I think we’re all past planning now. Planners were an offshoot of architecture, they slithered off to organise the great dream.
“It was a great 20th century idea but the world’s too complicated for planning now. What planning tries to do is regulate human endeavour…by sets of rules which fit most situations but not specifically any. I have a hunch that they should either transform into urban design or just fold their tents”.
Phew! That quote was from Auckland architect Pip Cheshire, in the November 2007 issue of Metro magazine. To say that Mr Cheshire is ‘pipped with planning’ would be an understatement.
As a planner my initial reaction was that here was your typical ego-centric architect, a prima donna having a bitter rant about a profession he might have banged his head against a few times.
Perhaps there was also a degree of jealousy in that a professor of planning was heading the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of Auckland. Perhaps there was also an element of the provocateur about it.
The rant also seemed philosophically confused. Earlier in the article Mr Cheshire had been critical of Rogernomics. He then seemed to be saying planning should not exist and therefore by implication the design and development of our cities should be left to the invisible hand of the market.
He also seemed to be ignoring the fact that planning is rooted in modern democracy, that many of our planning rules and regulations are not necessarily the creation of planners, but a result of the robust public statutory process that is fundamental to planning.
I must confess that it stirred me up. How could he suggest, I thought, that planning shouldn‘t exist? After all, surely one of the reasons our city looks so ugly is a direct result of the generally laissez-faire approach of planning in Auckland through the 1990s up until recent times.
Just look at the hordes of ugly apartment buildings that were erected, as council’s planning officers looked on, helpless to turn away the developers.
And look at our roads and motorways – surely their chaotic inefficiency is a result of a lack of planning?
I also wondered whether Mr Cheshire might suddenly value the planning process the moment a developer proposed building a 5-storey commercial development on the northern boundary of his beloved home.
But as the days passed, I began to value Mr Cheshire’s rant. It had provoked me and other planners and architects to think about whether, and why, we actually need planning. It has encouraged debate. It has made me think. And it has also dawned on me that there may even be a grain of truth or wisdom in what Mr Cheshire had to say.
This is not to say that I now agree whole-heartedly with him. I don’t. But like many things in life the truth often lies somewhere in the middle of the extreme views. Perhaps planning has in recent times become too zealous - too inflexible and unresponsive to modern human requirements and endeavours. And sometimes, self-defeating.
I think of a recent example where a client wanted to build a duplex (two attached units) on a site technically only allowing for one dwelling. One unit would have comprised two bedrooms, for the client and his wife, and the other a one bedroom unit for his elderly frail mother, allowing her some independence but also allowing her to live close to the support of her family. Despite the fact that the overall bulk and scale of the two attached units, and their overall impact on infrastructure, would be almost identical to a standard four bedroom dwelling, we were advised in no uncertain terms by a council at the outset of the project that the resource consent application would be publicly notified and probably declined.
In my view, such planning controls, which are common throughout the country, are archaic, are inflexible, and do not respond to modern human needs and the pressing needs of an ageing society, as well as a society where housing affordability is at a crisis point.
So, in some ways I do agree with Mr Cheshire. But I do also strongly believe, in contrast to Mr Cheshire, that there is very much an essential place for planning in New Zealand in the twenty-first century. I think the question is therefore not whether planning is still relevant and necessary, but rather how can planning necessarily evolve to reflect and respond to the growing complexities of modern life.
(Contact Matthew Paetz: matthew.paetz@babbage.co.nz)