I reckon two very average house-building jurisdictions have good models for institutions New Zealand should steal. And I reckon that these could be good tools to hurry-up the paradigm shift in planning - from the 'planning judgment' fetishists, to a younger set of pro-housing planners and urban economists.
In New Zealand, we are basking in the afterglow of outrage after Auckland Council appointed a panel of Hearing Commissioners to deny consent for a mid-rise mass timber office block on some gravel-covered site on Karangahape Road. For context, K Road is a major cultural street served by a million bus routes and near a colossally expensive, soon to open train station. One of them was in fact on the Independent Hearings Panel that the entire political spectrum battered relentlessly, like a donkey pinata at a Shrek birthday party. My most sage mutual on planning matters thought this decision was boringly wrong. But boringly wrong in line with the prejudices of a generally NIMBY planning establishment - part senior planners, part influential NIMBYs,
How do you displace such people? You make up new institutions. And we should get institutions that help with plan-making and consenting capacity.
Ideas for professional and pro-housing institutions that we can steal
The Scottish Government (planning being devolved) has the Planning and Architecture Division, and the Directorate of Planning and Environment Appeals. This centralises the role of Planning (and, because its a hyper discretionary system, architecture) in the PAD. And it ensures that there's a level of appeals against local council decisions to the DPEA before courts. This keeps things administrative and ideally efficient. The national government (being a constituent nation of the United Kingdom) has its own independent officials making the big decisions.
The New South Wales Government (planning being a state issue) has the Housing Delivery Authority, a panel constituted under the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979. The panel is not operationally independent, having staff from the (department for planning?). But the panel members may make recommendations to the Minister on declaring residential developments and rezonings to be State Significant Developments, letting the statewide Independent Planning Commission determine them and side-stepping councils. The details are a tad wonky but the design is glorious. The state sifts through major residential applications, focuses explicitly on speeding up applications and prioritises desirable ones. This lets higher level guidance practically encourage sensible basically comply with the rules; not in dumb areas; big.
Scotland is not a great housing performer - the UK is generally pretty piss-poor. It does build slightly more homes than England per capita (which, in fairness, has similar institutions through the Planning Inspectorate). But it does have a certain logical approach to institutions that New Zealand doesn't really have. The Planning and Architecture Division can focus on planning policy and design guidance (so not every council goes around making its own mid-density guide), without being a random part of MfE (a policy shop) or maybe KO (an urban development agency that, admittedly, did 80% state housing). The DPEA means merits appeals on planning decisions don't go to the courts, and there's an institution with specialism and state capacity available nationwide.
New South Wales is a reasonably performer vs NZ historically, but less so recently. It is also builds less than Victoria, with Melbourne growing much faster than Sydney and having more reasonable housing costs. NSW currently builds something like 47,000 houses a year and needs to build 75,000 per year for the next few years to hit its 377,000 new build target under the National Housing Accord. The Minns Government set this up within the past 6 months, it started dropping announcements in January and declared dozens of applications to be State Significant Developments that could build 22,000 units. This shows how the higher state gov can practically incentivise big and sensible applications in a way simply changing substantive rules that councils apply would not. It retains state capacity at the center, in parallel with councils. This is an additional and excellent way to change developer behaviour.
What matters is having capable, independent national or state level bodies that can make decisions. No fast-track is needed. These are ongoing and professional institutions that can build up their capacity, not ad hoc panels addressing ad hoc applications. Ministers can set priorities things, and call-in or designate particular projects as deserving a higher-level institution to make the decision. This appears to be a superior institutional design to address nationally significant applications.
The key linking theme between these two approaches is that these institutions carry out, or assist, a Minister's role in planning. New Zealand mostly minimizes the role of politicians in individual decisions but has a greater judicial role. There may be reasons to think we could make a better trade-off.
Professional, devoted national/state institutions can do good things
There are also other ways that competent, professional institutiona can enhance planning capacity and outcomes. These are to do with
One of the easier ones is standardisation. New South Wales is developing pattern books with designs that will be available and easily consentable, for mid-rise apartments and townhouses. Victoria is following suit with something similar under the Future Homes initiative. Scotland's planning framework has some material on design guidance, but basically leaves these to Local Development Plans.
Scotland's planning framework on design covers street design as well as architecture. It seems to me street design is the more important of the two to micromanage, but I think street design has a much stronger case for regulation. Sausage flats down long driveways are worse for amenity and street vibes than long blocks of flats or terraces down a street that dare to have repetitive facades. And moreover, these engage with having parcels of land that can be efficiently used, and more regular parcels which may assist with standardisation.
Central institutions that provide nationwide guidance on valuable matters would be helpful. This would include building consenting capacity that side-steps over overrides councils when they're being difficult; prioritising how to standardise houses and designs, particular ones that comply with Building Code and future planning laws; and better design of public spaces. These institutions appear particularly effective for merging independent officials with the political direction of ministers, which is admittedly a high risk way of improving state capacity due to the risk of politicisation.
A briefer on paradigms
Thomas Kuhn had an account of the history of science based around the idea of "paradigm shifts", which would lead from one science to another. Paradigms are the sets of core premises, ways of doing things and fundamental knowledge that differentiate one science from another. There is occasionally a collapse in the social and epistemic authority of a paradigm - the whole science changes. People then grasp around in chaos for a replacement. I don't think the reproducibility crisis in social psychology quite got as far as causing a paradigm shift. Kuhn meant things like the difference between pre and post Newton or Einstein in physics. Paradigms are incommensurable - propositions don't really translate between them, and may be incomprehensible from outside the community of scientists.
Incidentally, Kuhn's account of paradigms is a bit undercooked. I have more sympathy for Imre Lakatos's model of science, where a research programme has both a tight inner core which is protected against change, and outer bits which can be tinkered with in response to new findings. This draws in, for the outer layers of knowledge, Karl Popper's famous falsificationism. Popper views science basically as individual claims that can be disproven, but not really proven; Kuhn views science as a mix of epistemic (knowledge-y, as a gloss for people who did practical degrees) and social aspects that a community of scientists buy into. Lakatos views research programmes as progressive if they generate and confirm novel propositions. If they cease doing so and become regressive, the core of the research project may collapse under social and epistemic strain. This has nothing to do with housing or this thesis, I just think people should shout-out Lakatos's notions around science instead of only Kuhn's.
The very important point, with the ring of truth, is that planning ideas may be undergoing a paradigm shift. New schools of thoughts do generally involve upstarts fighting. And these people are usually from the outside of the institutions, educated, with new ideas, and challenging. Most the greats of early modern philosopher were upstarts with dubious politics - David Hume was in his 20s when he wrote the Treatise on Human Understanding; John Locke was a propagandist for revolutionaries that once went into exile; Thomas Hobbes wrote Leviathan partly to justify returning to England after being on the losing side of a civil war. The philosophers in the universities were Aristotelians and clerics.
The Planning Paradigm Shift
To simplify - paradigm shifts are generally old insiders of institutions, panicking as they lose social and epistemic clout, being bulldozed by young outsider radicals, with new ideas. Their ideas shift, and the composition of institutions (certainly internal hierarchies) shift too.
The new-orthodoxy is you can just build things, let them happen, push down housing costs and get better urban outcomes than by micromanaging and procedural complexity and delay. This is a radical, novel notion. Its repeated empirical confirmation renders YIMBY urban economics, and planning, a progressive field. YIMBY policy, procedure and planning is, potentially, a new science drawing on bits of old planning, urban economics, urbanist nerd stuff and the abundance-pilled critique of New Left proceduralism.
This progressive research programme is a threat to the old, entrenched incumbents in the planning world. They probably know Kuhn better than me, but do they know what is coming?
Why would you want both 'hey these institutions seem cool' and stuff on paradigms on the same post? Well, I thought about both of them today and I quite like both ideas. And institutional change can be one way of speeding up the generational changeover. If we have some new agencies carrying out roles akin to these institutions, we can stack them with new-orthodox planners and urban economists. We can have a few new designers who care about street layouts but aren't prescriptive on how many materials houses should have.
We should think more about institutional design (and probably processes too), not just substantive rules. And we should definitely think about who makes the rules, at what level and in which branch of government. The paradigm shift of planning isn't just about what is in the plans.
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