Further details of how Perth and Peel will make room for 800,000 new homes within 30 years without further urban sprawl were revealed on Wednesday by the state planning system's top public servant.
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The government has formed an implementation plan for the Perth and Peel@3.5 Million plan's four frameworks – Central, North-west, North-east and South Metropolitan Peel.
These include targets for the number and location of jobs to be delivered in each local government area, while protecting amenity and the environment, as the population reaches a projected 3.5 million by 2050.
The final frameworks don’t quite set “boundaries” for Perth but permit only half the homes to be “greenfield”, the rest being infilled as high and medium density in established areas.
The final plan was revealed recently after being in the making many years. The drafts released by the former state government in 2015 had received more than 1100 submissions from the public, government and developers.
These final frameworks include a new element, 15 “planning investigation areas” whose futures will not be decided until further investigations are completed. The WA Planning Commission intends to investigate these three at a time, and is considering whether to allow private sector involvement in these “investigations”, with its decision to be made in coming months.
Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage director general Gail McGowan acknowledged she had released these frameworks with “a measure of relief” after their long gestation.
The director general was addressing an Urban Design Institute of Australia WA event on Wednesday, where developers and other industry professionals had gathered, keen to hear more about the implementation.
“It means greater certainty for where homes, jobs and amenities will be located and for our natural environment,” she said.
She said the frameworks were "dynamic documents" and would be regularly reviewed. The first review would start in three years but changes would in reality begin sooner as the emerging priorities of Metronet and the coming Infrastructure WA body were incorporated.
Planners were also “eagerly awaiting” the result of the planning system reform process being headed by Planning Minister Rita Saffioti, with public submissions having now closed on the initial Green discussion paper.
Implementation was a high priority for the WA Planning Commission and plans were already underway.
The implementation team had been established. It was already working with the Metronet team and a private sector reference group to identify land development opportunities in future train station precincts.
Their tasks had been divided into three broad areas:
- “actions”, or a logical program of works
- Staging and sequencing (timing of works, guided by demand, service agreements and local government planning)
- infrastructure coordination Related article Development
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She said the government had considered the 1100 public submissions carefully and developed the frameworks against key principles including the environment, providing housing close to places of employment, protecting the balance of existing areas, and maximising the use of existing infrastructure.
Public servants had physically piled into buses and toured the sites in question all over the metropolitan area in an attempt to understand the implications of the planning as well as possible.
“Balancing needs can be a vexed task,” she said. “Land use planning is both a science and an art.”
She said planners also considered much of the work done for the Green Growth Plan, which the government had recently announced it had paused, pending a review.
Another high-level plan drafted by the previous state government, it had been supposed to accompany these plans and streamline environmental approvals processes but turned out highly complex and problematic.
“We don’t underestimate for a moment the work already done on those areas,” she said. “The decision was not taken lightly.”
Urban Design Institute of Australia WA chief executive Allison Hailes said a lot of further work was required to interpret and translate the documents into more detailed plans and policies to be used at a local level to guide future decisionmaking.
This might be through local town planning schemes, precinct planning, or strategic pulling together of land in priority areas.
“Perth’s growth, the need to attract more people here and the idea of creating a new ‘brand’ for Perth have all been hot topics of discussion over the past few weeks,” Ms Hailes said. “These documents are critical in providing the basis for how we move forward.
“For example, the outer metropolitan Shire of Murray is earmarked to accommodate 61,180 additional dwellings in the next 30 years, and Rockingham is expected to increase by 51,130.
“You’ve also got more central areas such as Stirling, which is allocated an extra 60,330 dwellings, Canning an extra 19,530 dwellings and Melville 18,480 dwellings.”
“These areas and many more are expected to provide a significant number of new dwellings and jobs so it is important that each local government puts a plan in place as to how those targets will be achieved,” Ms Hailes said.
“Another critical aspect is infrastructure planning and coordination and ensuring these areas have the infrastructure capacity to accommodate more dwellings in a very practical sense,” Ms Hailes said. “We are talking basic services such as water, sewer and electricity networks that need to be up to the task.”
She hoped for better community engagement from both state and local governments going forward, so that attempts at urban infill would start resulting in better outcomes for Perth and Peel communities.
