On Incredible … or True?
Michael Yeates is an architect, urban designer and community advocate.
With master's degrees in science (environmental management) and in environmental education, he is currently undertaking research for a PhD in community consultation in transport policy and urban planning. Although well known for his roles in alternative transport advocacy, disabled accessibility and urban amenity, his interests and experience in urban ecology and housing are less well known.
Although involved in urban issues as an architect, Michael's interest in medium density housing and urban ecology was generated by a concern with deteriorating community space: whether backyards being overlooked by “six-packs”, tree removal, or streets where children and the elderly once safely walked, talked and played becoming the sole domain of traffic.
Michael argues that transport policy and land use policy are integrally related, a position confirmed by the SEQ Integrated Regional Transport Plan and other transport and planning rhetoric. Contrary to that rhetoric of integration, practice has seen wider roads (such as Waterworks Road or Coronation Drive) and new roads (the South East Freeway, Inner City Bypass and the Busways) destroying inner and middle ring suburbs, while no attention has been given to their future, let alone “worked through” with the adjoining communities and the residents who live there or nearby.
Michael, with others, was involved in the interesting and challenging BCC project to provide an alternative to the “six-pack”, an experience which clearly demonstrated the failure of development control and land planning processes to address the future of Brisbane. Research undertaken in that period and since suggests a series of endemic procedural problems strikingly similar to those occurring now: apparently illegal buildings and extensive relaxations, with objection and appeal rights reduced or removed.
The idea that community members might “have their say” is initially appealing, but meaningless unless they “have their way”.