The disclosure draft of the Natural and Built Environment Act is out for comment. What does it mean for urban design and urban environments?
In short: the natural environment gets ‘environmental limits’; the urban environment gets ‘flexibility’?
The new Act will all be about positive outcomes, backed up by a monolithic sounding National Planning Framework.
Outcome (k) of the draft Act is:
Urban areas that are well functioning and responsive to growth and other changes including by enabling a range of economic, social and cultural activities and ensuring a resilient urban form with good transport links within and beyond the urban area.
How will this outcome be translated into the required National Planning Framework? What is a well functioning urban area - one with lots of choice and lots of competition between developers, landlords and owners? Good transport links - something big and fast with lots of capacity? A motorway for one city and a rapid transit system for another? As for resilient urban form, resilient to what?
Top of the head comment would be that urban design has not found its way into the outcomes, despite the Randerson report seeking quality urban environments. Previous communication had said urban design would be pursued. Well, no sight of it in the disclosure draft.
Perhaps the National Planning Framework? But clause 13 does not list the quality of the built environment in its list of compulsory matters.
The Parliamentary Paper that accompanies the exposure draft mutters darkly about ‘subjective' amenity assessments. Such matters will be banished!
The new world order is about clear and defined 'limits' (and by implication clear and defined 'no limits'). Wishy washy urban design doesnt fit this mould.
Setting limits
The bill and the associated commentary feels very reactive - “the RMA failed to deliver a better natural environment and made urban environments worse and this is how we think we can patch up the failures of the last 30 years: We will set limits!
But environmental limits could be set under the RMA and have slowly crept in. Section 6 of the RMA tried to set a bunch of 'limits', as did the Coastal Policy Statement. You could say that the National Policy Statement on Urban Development set another type of limit - a limit on low density development near rapid transit. So limits are not necessarily a new concept.
The real questions are how to set the limit - where to draw the lines - and how strong will the limit be? Does the new act help in defining limits? Apart from saying that the National Planning Framework may sort things out, there is a dearth of guidance on how to set limits and who is going to be involved in this process. Where do the incentives to set limits lie?
Under the RMA it was mostly a regional council function to set environmental limits - regional councils were supposed to be the environmental watchdogs. But very few did set limits because most regional councils are dominated by rural interests who had limited interest in setting limits. Furthermore, new stressors on the environment are often not easy to anticipate. Was the ‘dairy conversion’ boom of the early 2000s anticipated by any plan? So limits often come in after the fact when it is hard to claw back lost ground.
Limits may be set by the national planning framework or (more likely) left to regional planning committees. Will a Combined Plan prepared by a regional committee better support limit setting? One theory might say a combined plan is more likely to see limits watered down as room is made for necessary development and economic change. The old Auckland Regional Council had an urban base and it tried to set an environmental limit in the form of the Metropolitan Urban Limit. The limit soon got turned into a stretchy rubber band. Much will depend upon the final make up of the regional planning committees that will formulate the new plans. Where will the balance of power lie? Perhaps the membership of the committee should be on a population weighted basis. Does there need to be some form of independent public good defender in the mix? And how to represent future generations?
And what about restoration and enhancement of degraded environments? The stronger call these days is to fix up inherited problems, rather thsn just stop new ones developing. What are the mechanisms to restore environments?
Where is urban design?
The absence of any reference to the quality of the urban environment is a stunning (but deliberate?) omission. Given 85% of us live in towns and cities, and the built environment is so important to people’s health and well being and sense of safety you would have thought that the government would be worried not just about the stability of the financial sector from skyrocketing house prices, but also the impact of urban environments on police, education, health and social welfare budgets.
We have come a long way in a few years. Dial back to a National lead government and a 2010 discussion document on building competitive towns and cities. The following was stated:
If poorly managed, economic growth and our responses to it can have negative impacts. This poses a challenge for growing towns and cities: that is, how to enhance the positive outcomes that come from a high quality, liveable, economically productive natural and built urban environment, while mitigating or avoiding negative consequences, such as congestion or adverse impacts on the natural environment.
Good planning and urban design can play a significant role in delivering and maintaining the high quality urban services and amenities, including public space, which are crucial to cities’ long-term attractiveness and competitiveness and quality of life.
However, the environmental effects-based nature of the RMA, as the primary land-use planning legislation, does not easily allow this. In an urban context, the RMA has limited capacity to adequately consider the value created by urban development and good urban design compared to what already exists, or to support positive impacts of development on the built environment, beyond effects on amenity values. In particular, RMA practice emphasises the management of the effects on the natural environment. Creating and managing an urban environment which may not already exist, or is in the process of being created, is assessed in the same way as the existing natural environment. This tends to encourage a reactive, risk-averse approach that seeks to maintain the status quo, regardless of wider benefits which may be achieved from what is proposed. As such, the RMA does not effectively facilitate the achievement of long-term, efficient and integrated planning and urban design outcomes.
So we have shifted from good planning and urban design helping to support liveability and economic development to no planning and no urban design being the best way of supporting liveability and economic growth? And this under a Labour government?
The fear of the political power of the NIMBY to block any growth or change seems to have spooked the writers of the bill. Best to go around them, rather than try to placate them with vague references to good design. So much for public participation as a corner stone in any environmental management system. But perhaps more importantly, references to more choices and good transport links between cities could just generate a whole new round of sprawl, big boxes and haphazard apartments, rather than the hoped for clean, green compact city that supports greenhouse gas emissions and reduces per capita demands on infrastructure spend. How does the NPS-UD match up with outcome (K) and (L)?
Too many outcomes?
As many have noted, the list of outcomes in section 8 of the exposure draft is long. There is no hierarchy as there is with sections 6 and 7 of the RMA. No guidance is provided on the resolution of conflicts. What gives when one outcome butts up against another - infrastructure needs to cross a significant natural area; an urban area wants to push out into good soils? Limits will be breached. Supporting more choices for consumers in the range and type of housing to be enabled is a good thing, provided it occurs within a solid framework Okura didn’t get urbanised because of the landscape values present and the Plan (and the Act) saying that the landscape values were important enough to keep. Would the new section 8 ‘protect’ Okura, given landscapes are a human construct not a bio physical thing and will not be subject to a limit?
Section 8 feels like an attempt to sell the Act to both sides of the debate as a win-win. Under the RMA the narrative was that for the environmentalist, adverse effects on the environment will have to be mitigated; for the developer, you can go anywhere provided you mitigate your effects. The language may have changed to limits rather than mitigation but the message seems the same: resource users will be limited by limits, but limits will be limited in their scope.
Setting aside the big conflicts between development and protection, what about the nitty gritty of a new taller building being inserted into a low rise suburb? Any guidance on how to address this, what effects to take into account or discount, how to rate and evaluate different effects? Rather than simplify things by trying to say most ‘urban’ effects are no longer relevant, I get the feeling that the absence of direction will just amplify debate and discourse, rather than resolve conflicts.
Plans will never be able to resolve all conflicts. The hope that many activities will be permitted or prohibited is unlikely to play out. There will always be a larger middle ground of probably/possible activities. The mechanics of consent decision making will be critical.
