Designing Equity: Inclusive Urban Planning for a Diverse Australia
Scroll
By Nikki Stefanoff
The experience of living through the Covid-19 pandemic is one Australians are unlikely to forget, particularly in Melbourne – forever known as the city with the longest cumulative time in lockdown in the world.
As with any life-altering event, what tends to follow is a period of adjustment, reflection and a desire to get things back to normal — the problem being that a pre-2020 ‘normal’ no longer exists.
We were shown that it is possible, and sometimes preferable, to work from home and skip the (sometimes arduous) commute.
We got to know our neighbours, became well-acquainted with our suburbs and learned that, for a lot of us, what we need is much closer to home than we thought.
As the dust began to settle, we emerged from our homes with new perspectives on how we could live our lives well, and what we might need from our cities to make that possible.
The power of equitable and inclusive cities
An event like a pandemic brings change, and as federal, state and local governments look to rebuild our communities, there’s an opportunity for them to work with urban planners, architects and communities to make improvements.
The first step is to include a diverse range of voices in the design or planning process. Before starting any urban design project, developers, architects, planners, local councils and state policymakers need to hear from all corners of a community: wheelchair users, First Nations people, women, youth, the elderly, LGBTQIA+ folks, the neurodiverse and beyond.
At the end of an equitable and inclusive design process, everyone should be able to see themselves, and their needs, reflected in their homes, communities and outside spaces.
Using gender equity as a framework to benefit everyone
Francesca Birks, foresight and innovation leader for global sustainable development firm Arup, recently spoke about how gender equity can act as a useful framework when thinking about inclusive design.
“Most architects, planners, and public agencies are still primarily led by men, so the investment priorities and what they identify as pervasive problems differ from what women would consider,” Birks said.
“The difference is in the filter they’re applying. Their filters are, naturally, driven by their experiences as men. A lot of things are scaled for men or are designed to be used by people in traditionally male attire — think overhead bins on planes, the height of water fountains, or staircases with transparent steps.”
Birks also spoke about how badly designed areas tend to disproportionately affect women. “[Pavements can be] too narrow for wheelchairs or strollers — which are still primarily operated by women, although that is changing.
“Women might also feel more at risk while walking on poorly lit streets or waiting for unreliable transportation, which inhibits our mobility,” she added.
Women make up half the global population and so to design living and working environments without a female voice in the room seems to be nothing short of madness.
Wider pavements and better street lighting, for example, won’t just benefit women. No one wants to feel unsafe or be unable to get from A to B — when something changes for the better the whole community benefits.
Community-driven solutions start with engagement
Designing with people at the forefront has to be a well-planned and meaningful process rather than simply a box-ticking exercise for equality.
To do it well, partnerships with community groups should be organised to help connect planners and designers with people who don’t have the time, or sometimes the language skills, needed to communicate their needs.
It’s these people who tend to be left behind in the process and it’s these groups who are the most important in helping designers, architects and planners define the problems to be fixed.
When looking at wider community issues that can only be addressed through policy change, community engagement can often be done through collaboration, something the City of Melbourne and Melbourne University’s Melbourne Disability Institute did while looking to improve accessibility in the city of Melbourne for people with disability.
Teams worked to bring people with disabilities together with local government, advocacy groups and academics in a series of five workshops, each focused on a different type of disability: physical and mobility, sensory, intellectual and psychosocial.
Throughout the workshops, which would go on to generate over 240 unique ideas, participants brought up the need to consult people with disability in policy decisions time and time again.
The role government plays in making our cities equitable
After finishing their research, the team from Melbourne University learned that local government would have difficulty implementing their findings and recommendations.
This was because a high proportion of the city’s issues related to the accessibility of tram stops. The issue? While the stops themselves are located in local government areas, local government has limited influence over how they are designed.
It’s another example of how Australia’s top-down approach to political decision-making and governance continues to play a role in slowing down meaningful change.
Joanne Taylor is the Principal of Cities at WSP and has talked about the value of including marginalised and vulnerable people in decision-making and recognising that they have an equal role in responsibilities for their spaces.
Taylor also believes that community-led governance models can play a significant role in creating and maintaining inclusive spaces.
In an interview with Parlour, Taylor said that while many councils undertake community engagement to capture diverse voices and ensure their representation in public outcomes, community-led governance models take it a step further by addressing who makes decisions and how places are planned, designed and managed.
Governance models can help drive inclusive cities forward
Taylor sees the ideal scenario as having an independent body, potentially financed at the federal level, providing the necessary structure and supporting the administration of new innovative governance models while remaining detached from the ownership of the space.
“A good example is By & Havn, a commercial organisation that oversees the coordinated development and delivery of holistic city outcomes for Orestad and the port of Copenhagen through the Copenhagen City and Port Development Association,” Taylor said.
“It is owned by both Copenhagen Municipality and the Danish Government, but runs commercially and feeds the profits back into social outcomes.”
Innovative design models closer to home include the privately funded Salt District in New Zealand, the Town Team Movement that prioritises community involvement in shaping, designing and planning their places and Wentworth Point in the City of Parramatta, which was developed under a model known as Community Titles. This model sees the community come together to create a title for the land and then assume responsibility for specific assets such as roads or lighting.
It seems that to create truly inclusive and equitable spaces it should always start with the community living there. “Places have a whole range of assets including community skills, talents, knowledge, stories, memories and networks,” Taylor adds.
“The ownership and responsibility of [those] places are crucial. When we solely focus on asset ownership, we overlook the concept of people’s ownership and the fact that public assets are owned by the public [and should always be] maintained and developed for the people’s benefit.”
And who better to do that than the people themselves?
