Australia emphasises necessity to protect environment and economy

Planning, 16 May 2008

You may wonder what your president was up to last month. On your behalf I travelled to Sydney to speak at the Planning Institute of Australia National Congress. The congress theme was Climate for Change - Things are Hotting Up.

An impressive range of speakers, from federal and state ministers and international experts to state specialists and the city's mayor, illustrated that the topic is taken very seriously by those genuinely concerned about their planet.

One speaker, Professor Stephen Schneider of California's Stanford University, stood out. He is involved in climate change science and specifically the integrated assessment of the ecological and economic impact of human-induced climate change, including identifying viable climate policies and technolog ical solutions.

As a scientist, Schneider asked whether we can define, let alone fix, "dangerous" climate change. He said that evaluating the consequences of climate change outcomes to determine those that may be considered dangerous is a complex undertaking, involving substantial uncertainties and value judgements. The task involves a mix of objective and subjective probability measures.

Merging the expertise of planners, other built environment and design professionals, development industry leaders and elected representatives versed in managing risk with the academic community's capacity to assess risk is essential for a sustainable environment and healthy economy, he maintained.

A presentation given by Bernard Salt of KPMG New South Wales, entitled Boomers, Xers and Ys - How Generational Change Shapes Planning Issues, offered a departure from the conference's main theme. He suggested that it is the values rather than the volume of a generation that have an impact on the planning process.

The arrival of the baby boomers in the post-war period - people who were in household formation stage of the life cycle in the 1970s and 1980s - heightened demand for suburban sprawl. For all their radical chest-beating, the boomers were really rather conservative, even suburban people.

It is the Generation Xers, now aged 30-plus, and the Ys, up to age 30, who have truly reshaped Australian cities, he said. The push into inner city living has been embraced as a lifestyle by the Generation Ys whose green values have been behind the drive towards water efficiency and urban consolidation across metropolitan Australia. Now the boomers have jumped on board the green bandwagon to oppose urban sprawl.

The Australian community has, over the past 30 years, been marked by a generational tribalness that simply did not exist previously, Salt claimed. The frugal pre-boomer generations born prior to the Second World War may have laid the groundwork for modern Australian cities, but it is the generation born after 1950 that has made these places liveable and socially and environmentally responsible.

In the UK, recent government policy on concentrating development in existing urban areas at higher densities and the introduction of the sequential tests has, I imagine, gone most of the way to changing the character of our towns and cities. We also have baby boomers and Xers and Ys. Perhaps we would have got there on our own without the need for these levels of intervention.

Salt went on to illustrate the reducing number of Generation Ys. Boomers are more likely to be one of four or five children but have only one or two children themselves. This is leading to a depleted workforce, not least in the planning profession. Japan, he assured us, has the same problem and Japanese companies now regularly attend university careers fairs to attract the brightest and best of Australian graduates.

Generation Ys in demand are less likely to commit long-term to an employer in favour of going walkabout globally, as we see in the UK. Great for the Ys but less impressive for the Xers and boomers trying to carry on with the job.

- Janet O'Neill is RTPI president.