Victories and disasters in planning.

Chamberlain’s municipal programs inspired NSW’s leaders to build the services which would enable working families to move out of slums into suburbs. The opening of the Paris Metro in 1900 and of Berlin’s in 1902 further inspired the city underground electric railway; the Bridge was a railways-plan which had no road tolls in its initial calculations; and rail electrification overall was based on the eugenics thinking. (Melbourne took many decades to replicate that inner metro.)

All initial road, rail, tram and water networks were built on a radial basis - strongly centred on the initial suburbs. The first planning inquiry, the Improvement Commission of 1908-09, reinforced that idea; but its primary motivation was to argue for Greater Sydney. In 1910 Sydney had over 40 municipal bodies; it still has.

The second inquiry and report, the Cumberland County Council’s Scheme in 1948, was inspired by London, to constrain development rather than spread over the plains, while transport bureaucrats were then proposing the transplantation of the tram system from the railway-serviced zones into railway-feeder zones (in the spirit of Zurich).

Land development was largely laissez-faire and privately-driven, limited more by the availability of water and sewerage. It was not until the Wran Government from 1976 that “planning” became based on “planning” as a legal and philosophical direction. Major land releases had happened throughout the century but intensified from the 1960s.

The later “necessity” elements included the Snowy hydro scheme; the expansion of Mascot Airport; the relocation of coal handling to Port Kembla and of containers to Botany Bay; the Ord River scheme; the construction of various universities and of various waste and nuclear facilities; and the redevelopment of old railway yards and workshops. Currently the national NBN expenditure of more than $40 billion is being justified as essential and necessary.

Planning to inspire

The “improvement” mentality of the early 1900s enraptured cities whose citizens were suffering the effects of industrialisation and municipal ineptitude. More than 50 million people attended the 1900 Paris Exhibition. Monumental schemes were developed in England, France, Germany, Russia, Japan and America, and elsewhere.

Royal Commissions in 1890 and 1896 and an independent inquiry in 1898 showed that while tram congestion was a critical concern, steam trains were unsuitable to run into the Sydney CBD.

The great Australian scheme was Sydney’s Improvement Commission with its parks, housing plans, transport schemes and the rest that pushed that city into world leadership. The planning focus became the provision of a modern electric train service in the suburbs and under the CBD and to the North Shore. Governments in the 1910s and especially Jack Lang’s in the 1920s committed to building the improvement scheme to the tune of £27 million (the Bridge accounting for just £10 million).

There was a land speculation boom in the 1920s which led to thousands of unsold houses in the 1930s. Tram patronage collapsed in the 1930s as the city changed.

Postwar Reconstruction brought a bloom of enthusiasm, driven by a belief in “planning” and the need for more suburbs and motor cars. Sydney City was campaigning for a “master plan”.

The Cumberland County Council scheme and the concurrent Main Roads Development Plan presaged a transport-driven metropolitan plan. Home ownership started to rise, producing Australia’s character statement of the quarter-acre block - based on the car. The nature of politics started to change, based on mortgages and consumer debt.

The scheme also produced major losers such as developers and fringe councils. The short-term demographic projections were too low. There was great pressure to drop the Green Belt and some land on the fringe was released between 1951 and 1959, with the sewerage backlog already growing by 6,500 homes a year. The 50-odd local councils were supposed to prepare planning schemes but only 3 did.