Peri-urban Victoria: proactively changing the future of the region

1. Peri-urban Victoria: proactively changing the future of the region Michael Buxton, RMIT University

2. World urban growth • Peri-urban regions fastest growing regions in many countries • Their fate will affect ability of adjacent urban areas to adapt to radical change and perhaps survive • Collective value to humanity and ecosystems globally significant • Yet their extent and values are being rapidly reduced

3. Peri-urban resilience • Peri-urban areas can be studied:- for their own resilience in the face of change- for their contribution to the resilience of nearby urban areas • As archetypal socio-ecological systems undergoing rapid transformation: can be assessed using analytical framework of Walker et. al (2009) – define key subsystems, identify subsystem elements, potential shocks to them and their capacity to deal with them

4. System elements • Structural elements (ie population density, heterogeneous land uses) • Functional analysis: how the elements work • Changes to a system understood by showing how system components interact – relationships between elements determine the system’s functioning and its capacity to adapt to fundamental change

5. Complex peri-urban systems • Peri-urban systems are examples of Walker and Salt’s (2006) and Alberti and Marzluff’s (2004) socio-ecological systems engaged in dynamic interactions between socio-economic and biophysical processes over multiple scales • Urbanisation ultimately means that peri-urban systems no longer absorb systems shocks and they change to a new state • Debate over whether this change is orderly and predictable (Burnley and Murphy, 1995) or haphazard and discontinuous (Daniels, 1990, Allen, 2003)

7. Where do they live? • Population concentration occurring in transport/commuter settlements • Increasingly attractive to managers and professionals (1/3 – ¼ of employed persons); manufacturing still important with up to 15.6% of employment in LGAs; high % primary industry as sector of employment • Extensive commuting with 42% working outside a local government area and 28% commuting to Melbourne

8. Development pressure on peri-urban region

9. Peri-urban agriculture • Melbourne’s green belt (inner peri-urban area) is second highest producer of agricultural products in Victoria with a gross production in 2001 of $890 million from 4010 farms (underestimate) • Agriculture on 64% of land but declined by 18 per cent between 1986-2001 • Agricultural output per hectare highest in Victoria, at four times the state average

10. Biodiversity – native vegetation • 50% of rare or threatened plants, mammals, birds, reptiles and freshwater fish near major Australian population centres: crucial to the region’s amenity and prosperity • Under increasing threat: 68 animal species and 79 plan species are threatened: similar situations in other states;over 2000 ha cleared 1994-2005 • 44% of remnant native vegetation is on private land • 96% cleared vegetation had a conservation significance rating

11. Average annual gross value of agricultural production Port Phillip & Westernport CMA

12. Biodiversity issues • Pressure from climate change, urban sprawl • Increasing recognition of importance • New tools emerging to identify biodiversity issues for specific developments

14. Elements: land use • Land use and development greatest threat to peri-urban resilience - socio-ecological systems under stress. • Land tenure the key factor in a complex network of interacting variables and reciprocal relationships - 25,000 existing lots without dwellings in outer peri-urban area; 50,000 in inner area • Development incompatible with agriculture, water needs, habitat and landscape protection • Subdivision controls important but do not prevent development on existing small lots: - 75% of the 4181 new rural dwellings in 5 councils 1998-08 built on lots <20ha and 60% on lots <8ha

15. Rural property size – Macedon Ranges

16. Dwelling approvals Murrundindi

17. Planning and Bushfire protection • About 700,000 people live in Melbourne’s peri-urban region • Large area of urban housing in green belt municipalities on urban fringe • Among most fire prone areas in the world: State of Victoria 3% of Australian land mass but 50% of economic damage from bushfire, most in peri-urban area • Increasing risk of catastrophic fires, non-linear effects – ie 7 February, 2009, 173 lives lost

22. Other reciprocal impacts • Land development affects water use • Outer peri-urban S&D farm dams account for between 12 - 47% of water use (exception of Goulburn at 2%)- diverted about 2,800 ML in 10 years to 2009- a further 5,600 ML diverted from dams under current rate of small lot development by 2018 • Some urban water systems to reach limits by 2010-14

23. Policy responses - BAU development • Will lead to costly, fragmented landscapes with serious impacts on economy and natural resources • Doing nothing not an option because of past land fragmentation • Alternative paradigm: decide an alternative future and means to achieve this through: - spatial and institutional integration- cross-sectoral policy measures to achieve alternative vision and regional policies

24. Policy responses • Regulation often contrasted unfavourably with adaptive management, typecast as unresponsive, slow, rigid in the face of change, or market mechanisms (Folke, 2006, Folke et.al, 2002, Nelson et al, 2007). • Lagadec (2009) has called for a paradigm shift in the way we respond to interacting reciprocal elements with non-linear impacts – or hypercomplex crises • Governing for resilience requires anticipating reciprocal impacts, developing cross-sectoral anticipatory policies to maintain system elements or transform systems to different states.

25. Regulation • Regulated planning systems in the past have supported the conditions to allow agriculture and other innovation to flourish so increasing system resilience • Removed urban expectations and so the main threat to resilience - ended land speculation, stabilised land prices, maintained comparative rates of return and led to investment certainty.

26. Median Price/ha by Property Size (Victoria $2006) Source: Barr & McKenzie 2007

27. Policy responses • Requires selection of a desired future and use of measures designed to achieve this alternative future. • But Australian deregulated planning systems are:- enabling and increasingly non-regulatory- based on vertically and horizontally fragmented institutions and sectoral policy- based on incremental, ad hoc approvals towards no defined end • Victorian deregulated governance led to dismantling of integrated metropolitan and regional policy

28. Development control options • Use of minimum lot sizes for dwellings1 dwelling/40 ha in rural lots in proclaimed water supply catchments would reduce possible future dwellings from 7,178 to 343 • Use of tenement control or restructure53,629 lots in 35,348 properties in 8 outer peri-urban municipalities, with 24,827 without dwellingsImpact of use of 25 or 40 ha tenement control

29. Next steps – policy implications Property verses Parcel findings – use of tenement controls

30. Options (contin): Better use of planning provisions • Planning provisions not well matched to land characteristics- RCZ hardly used- Environmental overlays generally poorly matched to environmental needs: little used, wrongly applied • Zones often matched inadequately to lot sizes: most LGAs include large numbers of small lots in FZ and RCZ; some subdivision sizes inadequate

31. Proportion of each zone by LGA

32. Farming Zone Rural Living Zone Rural Conservation Zone Public Land

33. Options (contin): Better use of planning controls Planning controls inadequately matched to remnant vegetation • 90% of land cleared had no VPO or ESO planning overlay • Only 32% is now subject to either overlay: VPO rarely used except for Surf Coast and Macedon • Only 34% of significant vegetation covered by VPO or ESO overlay

34. Use of overlays to protect native vegetation

35. Options (contin): transfer of development rights • Development capacity able to cater for demand to 2040 = 16,250 dwellings- transfer of this demand to townships at 35 dwellings/ha would require 464 additional ha • By 2040 an excess demand for 9,458 rural lots will exist- transfer to townships would require 270 ha at 35 dwellings/ha, 472 ha at 20 d/ha or 756 ha at 12.5 d/ha