Town Planners

Paul Norris

Town planners get involved with community needs for space, and work with a variety of people, writes Paul Norris.

AFTER just seven years, Jason Black has built a solid career as an urban and regional planner. Now a consultant planner group representative and vice-president of the Victorian division of the Planning Institute of Australia (PIA), Black is a senior spatial planning consultant at MacroPlan, a private Melbourne-based consultancy.

“Certainly moving up through local government, there are massive opportunities for people who actively participate in the industry. The role I came from before coming to MacroPlan was involved in management at local government level. Within four years of being in the industry, I was able to reach management level,” he says.

Australia’s ageing population, a movement of baby boomers to coastal areas, the pressures of higher density inner-city living and the expectation of environmental sustainability are some of the key issues facing urban and regional planners in the 21st century.

PIA chief executive Di Jay says that by far the most significant employment issue facing the planning profession is labour shortage. `”Most cities and their regions and `sea change’ communities are suffering a critical shortage of planners,” says Jay.

The National Inquiry into Planning Education and Employment undertaken by the Planning Institute of Australia, completed in 2004, found that there has been, on average, a 16 per cent vacancy rate in planning positions over the last three years.

The inquiry’s research shows that over the next 5-10 years there will be a steady increase in the demand for planners. “Local government, as the largest employer of planners, faces the biggest challenge with recruiting and retaining planners. Rural and regional areas suffer from a long-term shortage of planners and find it difficult to recruit planning staff,” says Jay.

Professor of Urban Planning at Melbourne University Ruth Fincher says a planner’s work now involves more participation in mediation and negotiation than perhaps 20 years ago.

“Some of the planning regulations were somewhat less open to interpretation than they are now. Town planning is a role for someone with people skills and a diverse set of skills academically, and awareness of economic change, cultural difference, environmental social change and all those sort of things which come together in making recommendations about changes in the city,” says Fincher.

Black completed a Bachelor of Applied Science in planning at RMIT in Melbourne and took up positions in local government. Within two-and-a-half years, he was working on significant golf course and tourism developments. “When I worked at Mornington Peninsula Shire, I started on basic planning applications. Moving from there to the Shire of Yarra Ranges, I went into a team leader and management role, being responsible for a team of between five and 25 over the past three years,” says Black.

Rosa Zouzoulas, town planner for the City of Kingston, says much of the work in her position involves complex policy and planning issues to be reconciled with community concerns. These demands require balanced and creative solutions to difficult strategic issues. She is also involved in planning issues relating to the preservation of heritage buildings.

“The work is hard, challenging and demanding, but is equally satisfying as you can develop and implement land use strategies, which have an impact on the social, environmental and economic aspects of everyday life and the landscape. You get to see the outcomes of projects you’ve worked on, and the outcomes are rewarding — especially when the net benefit is to the community,” says Zouzoulas.

John T Jackson, associate professor of the environment and planning program at the School of Social Science and Planning at RMIT in Melbourne, says it’s very important for educators to acknowledge that planners are at the coal face.

“They get abused by citizens and developers and by councillors as the meat in the sandwich. Part of the planning education is getting students toughened up. Having the management skills and the personal skills is

important to negotiate because developers are losing money and communities are losing their sunlight, or what they perceive as their neighbourhood,” says Jackson. Black agrees it is important for the planner to learn the skills to deal with a wide range of people in the community.

“Planners need to work with a range of people from the person who is doing the extra bedroom on the house, or something like that, right through to someone who might be building a hotel development. It’s a range of

people who value their projects as important as the next one, and you work with them accordingly,” he says.

“You can issue a planning permit and within 12 months see the results of that on the ground. It’s also interesting just being able to get involved in a range of things, from urban and rural development through to coastal development and environmental protection,” he says.

Jackson says RMIT’s four-year undergraduate degree in urban policy and planning includes a one-year work

placement and an opportunity to study overseas in Canada, Finland, the Netherlands and Scotland. “At one end of a spectrum, at the design end, we now offer an undergraduate program in urban design through physical planning through to social planning and economic planning.

“And the other dimension that’s growing is that — like a lot of professions — it’s a global profession now.

Quite a lot of our students during the program spend time overseas. We have a lot of exchange agreements, mainly with Europe and North America — but a lot of graduates work overseas and some never come back,” says Jackson.

Fincher says one-semester overseas exchange programs for planning students at Melbourne University usually take them to Germany, the Netherlands and the UK.

“That’s a really good learning experience for them to see a different sort of strategic planning, with

statutory planning and a real strength in planning as a form of public policy in those countries that perhaps we haven’t seen here in Australia for a while,” she says. Jackson says in terms of careers in planning overseas there are opportunities for working in developing countries.

“A minority of students come into planning because they’re interested in social planning, and while the dominant outcome for many graduate planners is working as a public servant for government, a nine-to-five job, it does offer alternatives for those who are more interested in social justice.

“As for postgraduate courses in planning, we’ve got a suite running from environment and planning, which is the major one, and international urban and environmental management is the second main one,” says Jackson.

Jay says we need to encourage young people with an interest in how our cities and towns work economically, socially and environmentally, to join this profession.

“Spatial decisions affect every aspect of our lives and we need keen, creative young minds to fill the

enormous demand that exists now and is likely to grow in the future,” she says. Black advises there are a lot of planning jobs that provide new graduate planners with opportunities to work in association with big companies. “As far as that side of the industry goes, the sky’s the limit and anyone who’s willing to have a go generally gets rewarded.”

Planning Institute of Australia
http://www.planning.org.au/