Guest editorial Loren Adams

Architecture and planning: The vibe of the thing

Guest editor, Loren Adams

In a fictional courtroom in the beloved late-90s Australian film The Castle, an ill-equipped local conveyancing lawyer, Dennis Denuto, makes an impassioned but clumsy defence for his clients’ constitutional right to keep their family home. Darryl and Sal Kerrigan’s home is one of four residential properties along Highview Crescent in Coolaroo that is under threat of compulsory acquisition by an ominous public-private conglomerate hoping to expand the Melbourne airport.

In this oft-quoted scene, a federal judge askes Denuto which section of the Constitution, specifically, the conglomerate has allegedly breached. And Denuto – who appears to know neither the contents of the Constitution nor how to read Roman numerals – replies, “There is no one section, Your Honour. It’s just the vibe of the thing.” That the law has a vibe is a curious and perplexing suggestion. In The Castle, the vibe of the law is offered as a nonsensical proposition for comedic effect. But in this issue of Architect Victoria, I invite you to temporarily take seriously Denuto’s nonsensical lawyerly ramblings and join me in asking: what is the vibe of the law? More specifically, what is the vibe of planning legislation and regulation? And, what does this mean for architecture? As a formalised statutory system, planning is a bundle of bureaucratic processes and documents that systematically interact to control the ways that land may (or may not) be used or developed. It is, of course, a settler-colonial construct. In Victoria, foundational rules and objectives for statutory planning are set out in the Planning and Environment Act 1987 (the Act). Across 600 pages of dense legalese, the Act meticulously invents and then delegates power between proper nouns, along the way pointing to other clauses and sections within and outside of itself. Of this tendency, the writer and urban planner Timmah Ball laments that the Act “is lengthy and just as I grasp one section there is always another clause to the paragraph, which is disorienting” (Ball, 2019). Under the Act, each of the 79 municipalities in Victoria has a singular instrument of planning control: a planning scheme. There are also two additional planning schemes for areas of high strategic importance that straddle or puncture across multiple municipalities, as well as a separate scheme for a curious cluster of three unincorporated islands that do not have any municipal government at all. The Victoria Planning Provisions (VPP) is a 1040-page siteless template for the creation of these planning schemes, which are required to be both performance based and discretionary. When the VPP gestates into a location-specific planning scheme, it swallows up other municipally relevant documents, too: policies, frameworks, strategies. The result is a family of 82 planning schemes bound to specific map-regions of Victoria and each calibrated to align with the strategic

land use and development objectives of its location. But read together they are recognisably kin: 92,052 pages of familial likeness. All these documents, of course, must then be accompanied by other documents to help us correctly interpret and implement the documents and all their incorporated documents. And so, there is a 150-page Practitioners Guide to Victoria’s Planning Schemes (2022) to assist planners; a 278-page technical guide, instructionally titled, Using Victoria’s Planning System (2015); a running total of 59 planning practice notes (PPNs) and 52 advisory notes (ANs) offering supplementary up-to-date guidance on specific topics; and a two-sided Planning on a Page cheatsheet. All these documents, conveniently colourcoded and sprinkled with three-letter acronyms to help us distinguish our MPS from our PPFs. All these documents, but what of the vibe? Where, amongst all these pages and clauses and acronyms, can we find the vibe of our planning system? Alas, the vibe of planning cannot be located through a systematic unpicking of these proliferating documents. We must set down our forensic toolkits, temporarily suspend our solutionist tendencies, resist the urge to outsmart the system. The vibe is slippery and elusive. It is not contained neatly within the normative objects of planning in front of us, but drifts in and out of our periphery. It cannot be explicitly defined in a glossary of terms. And so, for this issue, I have pulled together a metanarrative of nine deviations and digressions, loosely bundled around the themes of planning and architecture. Along the way, perhaps we will discover the vibe of the thing. Or perhaps we won’t. Planner Matt Novacevski kickstarts the conversation with a necessary reminder that both planning and architecture are settler-colonial constructs. This is the irreconcilable reality of our built environment professions. Architectural theorist and planner Helen Runting then takes us on a thoroughly entertaining romp through Melbourne’s inner north, gawking at that “odd form of decorative, diminutive, regulatory property fetishism” known as facade articulation. Along the way, she laments the conspicuous absence of architecture in Victoria’s planning system, noting “definite break-up vibes.” On this point, practicing architectural designers Allan Burrows and Arj Benson disagree. They cite both the Better Apartment Design Standards and the subsequent Apartment Design Guidelines of Victoria to argue that planning now contains so much architectural content that there is very little left for architects to design. From here, I coax you further away from the normative objects, subjects, and issues of planning, deeper into the periphery. I offer a glimpse at a possible world where an artificial amalgam of ecofeminists and poets co-author our building and planning regulations. Architect and educator Charity Edwards launches us into outer space, where privately owned satellites evade earthly planning controls and wreak havoc on Sky Country. Emerging designers Yuchen Gao and Yiling Shen are swept up in a conversation about populism, aesthetics, and the role of expertise in decisionmaking with Frank Lloyd Wrong, the anonymous pseudonym of a Melbourne-based architect and creator of the @uglymelbournehouses Instagram account. Then, Los Angeles-based writer and educator Anthony Carfello takes us on a tour of another Ronald McDonald arts district, where cookie-cutter creative precincts offer little more than “counterfeit culture designed in the C-suite.” And a handful of local spatial practitioners gather around a student project by Caleb Lee to enact a seven-episode, collaborative written performance of the heritage policymaking process that asks: What is worth keeping, and who decides? Michael McMahon and Jack Isles conclude the issue by generously inviting us into Beyond Heritage – an Indigenous future building project, which pulls together emergent sensing and geospatial information systems with more than 60,000 years of First Nations data and knowledge. Is it here, amid the unfathomable complexity and interconnectedness of Country, that I encourage you to pause before returning to that proliferating mess of clauses, codes, controls, standards, schemes, sections, provisions, policies, guidelines, regulations, legislation, and half-done planning applications on your own desks, wherever that may be. Just for today, try to resist the urge to unpick and outsmart and understand the slippery, elusive character of planning. Just for today, try instead to channel your inner Dennis Denuto. Sometimes there is no one section, you see. Sometimes it’s just the vibe of the thing.

Loren Adams RAIA Grad. is a disciplinary promiscuous spatial practitioner. Trained in architecture and public policy, she is currently a Doctoral Fellow with the University of Melbourne Centre for Cities and teaches at RMIT. Previously, Loren led the Australian computational design team at Grimshaw Architects and was the inaugural coordinator of the Melbourne School of Design Robotics Lab. She began her career working as a fabrication specialist for blue-chip artists in Los Angeles.