When you have high-density populations you have to have elaborate social systems to stop people behaving in anti-social ways.
When I was there several years ago we came across a dozen or more people building a house. The whole business of constructing dwellings is a very social event. Everyone is involved in the allocation of land, the size of the dwelling and in the construction itself.
I was reminded of this the other day by the outrage caused in the outer Canberra suburb of Banks. It was caused by the combination of increasing population density and no community involvement in the construction of dwellings.
Ours is a different history. It is more like that of Canada and US. Lots of land (taken from indigenous people) and the common law.
The common law is very black and white. One party is right and the other wrong. It is good for enforcing the rights of individuals.
Further, an underlying principle of common law is that you can do what you like on your own land. You can build as high as you like or as deep as you like. You can engage in any activity you like, but you are liable for anything that escapes from it and directly injures someone else’s property. It was not big on recognising rights of light, quiet and good taste.
In all, the common law as a base for good urban planning is like the Irish (Polish, Queensland etc) man who is asked the directions to Metrotown. “”If I were going to Metrotown, I would not start from here.”
The common law does not recognise the interconnectedness of either the natural environment or human society.
Sure, it has been modified extensively with changing conditions, but it still influences attitudes and the underlying legal ethos influences inappropriately the way planning law is framed and applied.
The common law champions individual rights, equality before the law and the universality of the law. This heritage results in a planning law that says (ital) everyone (end ital) in the ACT has a (ital) right (end ital) to build a dual occupancy _ whether they live in Banks or O’Connor. And, of course, what might be a socially, ecologically and economically desirable better use of infrastructure in O’Connor is socially and ecologically destructive on the city’s margins in Banks.
The common-law approach means everyone in a suburb has a right to build a dual occupancy. There is no stopping point. The common law ethos says if one can do it, all can do it, even if the economic and social rationale becomes self-defeating after a certain point. The common law likes certainty an clearly delineated universally applied rights. It would not like a situation where once one suburb had, say, 20 per cent of the blocks in-filled, the others could not in-fill.
I am not suggesting that planning law is a slave to common law. Rather, that when you look at the parentage of planning law, you can see why the errors have been made.
Rather than a discussion with neighbours with lots of give and take and explanations of why and how, we come from a legal tradition that enforces “”rights”, serves notices and argues formally in a court where one party will be “”right” and the other “”wrong”.
The more compact the city becomes, the more fractious that way of solving things will becomes.
There is a further difficulty in Canberra. It is a young city, for a long time ruled by bureaucrats. It has no great tradition of community democracy. Also it has a high proportion of young, working people with less time to engage in public meetings and the like. Nor does it have long family and social links to permit Nepali-style town planning.
Canberra is not alone. In the past few years, there has been a surge of interest in urban design _ basically because the nation has filled up. Well, certainly its cities have. The nation is no longer under-populated, but over-populated. Habits have to change. Resources used better. At present that change is happening with a great deal of friction.
I don’t know what the solution is, but we will not get a solution without a greater understanding of how we got to problem.