I wonder if it’s a pivotal moment about how we do better cities up here…well, half way up the Pacific coast.
And it has to do with design panels and development assessment…an issue other Australian cities and towns may well have resolved some time ago.
The ground-breaking Urban Land Development Authority, its functions now re-shuffled and absorbed into a government departmental structure (and in some respects recently re-affirmed), had an approval process with:
• no appeal rights for refused applicants or third party objectors to approved projects, and
• guarantees of a swift decision once formally lodged.
So you want to get it right before you lodge.
The lead-up to lodgement time therefore involved external design advice to the Authority, and therefore an often highly interactive design-strong dialogue with the developer, from within a group of rather senior consultants from several disciplines.
That’s not new around Australia and indeed built here much more on the powerful previous work of the South Bank Corporation’s design panel than on the parallel early steps of the much more limited (in scope, operation and resourcing) in the early 2000’s of Brisbane City.
The process of the ULDA (now part of the Queensland DSDIP state agency) often, perhaps usually, worked in enhancing the design quality of projects, in macro and micro scales and many developers agreed their proposals had been improved by the dialogue..
Read the full article at: http://www.udf.org.au/latest-news/from-northern-trenches/
