People Richard J Evans Award Speech Acceptance from Michael Barlow

May I first start off by thanking Tamara and the VPELA Board for this honour. When I received a phone call from Tamara and she said she wished to talk about the Richard J Evans award I immediately thought of other worthy candidates. Then to be told that no, it was actually me who was receiving this award was quite overwhelming.

I was lucky that I was sitting down when I received the phone call. So thank you to you all for the great honour, it is fully unexpected and potentially a little early in my career.

One of the things I want to do tonight is to share some stories. We often find that we live in the moment. We are always thinking about, ‘What’s on now?’; ‘What’s on tomorrow?’; ‘What is next?’, and we often don’t look back and ask ‘Why did that happen or what did I do that made a change?’

I hope that in sharing these stories with you today it may inspire some of the younger planners and other professionals to know that even though you’re only starting on the journey, there is an immense opportunity awaiting you in whatever you choose to do and, really, it’s up to you. If you take the chance and challenge yourself, it is amazing what you can find and what you can do, even humble planners from the State of Victoria; so where do I start?

I wanted to be an Architect. Unfortunately, I wasn’t very good at maths, and my Uncle who was an engineer said there’s a thing called town planning – it’s very similar to architecture, so I applied to the University to go into town planning. Around Day 2 of the course it was apparent that it really wasn’t about architecture but, nonetheless, there I was at RMIT in a new course.

We were all given the opportunity to be at the University for one year and then had to go out into the workforce – study parttime; work full-time – that was the idea. In 1975, for those of you who either read history books or were around at the time, it was a pretty tough economic time in Australia. We had just come out of the 1974 oil shock that smashed the world economy. The Board of Works ,who used to take all of the younger planners straight into an industry internship said, ‘Sorry, we’re only taking two’, as opposed to the year before when they took 40.

Needless to say, I wasn’t one of the two that they chose. I found work as a technical draftsman. Then I was lucky enough to obtain a job at the City of Doncaster and Templestowe in 1977, and as I remember, my job interview consisted mainly of talking of John Wayne movies with the Chief Engineer, who apparently thought I knew enough about John Wayne to pass, and was offered the job.

What was it like in 1977? Well, Melbourne was about half the size that it is today – 2.7 million people. The ordinance was also quite small. I can still remember Reprint 4, probably about half a centimertre thick and there were only about eight or nine real zones – the others were hardly ever used – and a few clauses.

Michael Barlow

Many developments didn’t need any consent at all. For those of you who are familiar with the eastern suburbs of Melbourne, East Doncaster was basically apple orchards.

I still remember vividly my first day at work as I was handed a very demanding file to look at

– a post and wire fence that required a permit. I can’t understand why it did, but it did. I don’t recall the day because of that, what I do remember was it took me an entire day to write the report, analysing this very important post and wire fence. It wasn’t the fence that was difficult, I didn’t know how to read a Planning Scheme. I really had no idea where to start but by the end of the day, after some help, I had a one page report recommending approval of the fence. That’s how you start your career.

After that, I went to the Shire of Eltham and during that time managed to ‘prang’ the Council car on an adventurous site inspection. I was only with the Shire for a very short while!

I was then very fortunate to secure a job at the City of Melbourne at a time when, again, jobs were reasonably scarce. I’d just graduated after my six years of study, so I was now a fully fledged Planner as opposed to an Assistant Planner. I worked my way up to the role of Planning Appeals Officer. This is in the days when the City of Melbourne had over a hundred Appeals a year, and the Council had been restructured – twice!

At that time we had many active resident Councillors wishing to make their mark on the City of Melbourne. We were defending some interesting decisions of Council over the time and I was a regular attendee at the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, as it was called then. During this time I regularly came up against the great QCs and really smart Juniors, including Richard Evans. One of my abiding memories of Richard is that he always had the time to have a chat. Richard never tried to ‘lord’ it over you that he was a Lawyer and you were a mere Planner; he was a true gentleman.

In 1985, I was very lucky to join AT Cocks and Partners. I say lucky because the job was offered to a very good friend of mine, John Keaney. John turned the job down because he had other ideas about what he wanted to do, so he suggested me to Terry Cocks and I was very fortunate to secure the position in a firm that comprised six people. I was the only planner, though Terry did have a planning qualification from the UK.

This provided me with the opportunity, thanks to Chris Canavan, to turn my ‘Planning Appeals Officer’ experience into a planning witness; I wouldn’t say expert I was a mere 27 years old. I had a little bit of experience, but felt quite out of place providing evidence in front of some very wise and eminent people of the AAT at that time. This is when I had my second experience with Richard.

Richard was then the leading Junior; I’m sure Michael Wright and Chris Canavan would agree that Richard was the most experienced of the three of them at that time – and he was the smiling assassin. He was always courteous, quite unlike the great QC, Garth Buckner, who was ferocious. With Garth, you’d always be trembling before you go into the box, and that was when you were on his side. Whereas with Richard, you were sometimes unnerved, because at the end of the cross-examination, you realised that you’d been ‘comprehensively done’; yet he did it in such a nice way; his cross-examination was calm; it was measured; it was meticulous; there was never an easy question.

Stuart Morris once described cross-examination to me as walking down a corridor, as each question was asked a side door was closed. Then at the end, there was no exit. Richard was the master placing you in the cul de sac and there was no way out.

I should point out that all this occurred at a time when witnesses didn’t have to provide their reports to the Tribunal or the other side before the case started – halcyon days indeed. So the barristers had no idea what you were going to say until you got into the box; there was no preparation. Chris Canavan used to refer to this as ‘ambush by evidence’. I have to hand it to the advocates of the day because they were able to listen to the evidence, quickly read the report and still come up with some absolutely ‘smashing’ cross examination.

Opportunity beckons

I want to reflect on three parts of my career as examples that there is so much that you can achieve.

When I joined AT Cocks we were a valuation firm with one town planner. Today, we’re 650 people; a national company; we have 180 planners. Back in the mid 1990s, in the depth of the Victorian recession we realised that if we didn’t do something, we were going to get overrun by competition from new quarters.

This was in the days when Lend Lease and others were seeking to move into consultancy. So we took the battle to their heartland and established an office in Sydney. At that time I knew little about the New South Wales planning system, but I flew up to Sydney every week met many potential clients, didn’t win very much work – but we persevered.

and good friend, Tim Blythe, and sent him to Sydney; and the rest is history. Our Sydney office is our biggest and most successful office. Sometimes you’ve just got to make the commitment and challenge yourself – it’s amazing what can come out of it.

Once we were established, we were looking for more challenges again and were approached by a firm in Hong Kong about a potential competition for a new town on the outskirts of Shangai. We thought, ‘OK, we’ll have a go’; put our credentials forward and were surprised to learn we were shortlisted to prepare a masterplan for this particular location.

We flew to China, made the presentation, got to know some people and off we went from there.

Working overseas, particularly in different cultures, you quickly learn two things; one, is that you are a product of where you come from – it doesn’t matter how much you consider that you are a free thinker and so forth – what you do, who you are with and where you live have a massive influence on you.

I learnt that in China, because when you spoke to the Germans about how they were going to plan a Chinese new town, they would have the German way; you talk to the Americans, they would have the American way, and so it went on. We had the Australian way.

The second realisation was to really need to understand the culture – not simply acknowledge that it is different.

An excellent example of this arose when we were fortunate to be shortlisted to undertake the design for the new City of Yangshan at Luchuagang, located on the Yellow Sea. The Chinese government was building a new port 20 kilometres out into the ocean in the deep sea. The new city was to be the land-side area where all of the transportation and such took place, and was proposed to accommodate about half a million people.

Our compettors were the Germans and Italians. We had this rather interesting final day when we heard each other’s presentations. The Germans started talking ‘poetically’ to the judging panel about the way that their city was to be designed. We thought it was a reasonably traditional design, but the head architect when describing the large central lake of this new city described how the lake was going to be filled with ‘tears from heaven’. We thought that was rather odd. Is that the way you sell a major city project? The Germans won with their ‘tears of heaven’, and much of the city has been built in 12 years.

We asked one of my good friends and a great Victorian planner, John Wynne to head up Sydney and then we picked another fine planner …continued

So we learnt something from that. Our next competition was on some islands not far from the new Port. We came up with our design and realised we needed to better explain this to our Chinese clients. We described our city design as ‘like a butterfly rising from the sea’.

The Germans again were our opponents. This time we won. So, there’s a lesson for all. You have to listen to the culture that you are dealing with and not simply assume.

It became more difficult to build a business in China in the later 2000s, due to restrictions on capital transfers and many other matters. We decided to retreat from that market and started looking for another. At that time the Middle East economies were starting to boom and we thought, ‘We’ll go and have a look at that’.

Again we were fortunate enough to meet the right people and win a couple of small jobs. Soon after the opportunity to prepare a framework plan, a new planning system and the future vision for the entire Emirate of Dubai was tendered worldwide. This was a very large project!

Everyone who was anyone from around the world bid – Fosters, Price Waterhouse, Calthorpe; the lot. We were shortlisted to five then two, and then we won! The reason that we won was twofold; one that we were not one of the traditional groups that did similar projects around the world and secondly, we demonstrated we had thought about the brief and provided some thoughtful ideas as opposed to simply saying, ‘This is how much it will cost you’

We thought we were going to do most of the project from Australia; well, how wrong were we? After we had landed the project, we were told we had a month to mobilise. We had to have the entire team in Dubai at that time. We weren’t allowed to work in our own office and had to work in an office provided by the Government because of the sensitive nature of the project.

We assembled our team, put them on a plane, arrived in Dubai and ended up at the Police Officers’ Club. This was the only place that the client could put us up due to a shortge of office space! We had three power points and one internet connection. So, welcome to Dubai and you have 12 months to finish your project. After about six months of analysing Dubai, given it had relatively scarce data, we concluded that there was a serious problem. Everyone had a different idea of what Dubai was going to be.

The Road and Transport Authority thought they were building freeways for a city of seven million people by 2020; the Water and Power Company thought they were providing for a city for five million by 2020 and the developers said we can build a city of nine million by 2020.

Our economic advice said on the very, very best hope of (an unreal) 11 per cent real growth per annum, you will get to three million people by 2020. When I presented this to the client advising that they were overinvesting their capital in Dubai and that quite a few of the projects needed to shut down, I was told that was not possible, and each project needed to proceed.

We continued our work and 38 volumes later the project was complete, but in September 2009, when Lehman Brothers went down, every one of the projects we identified that needed to be shut closed down. Dubai, today, has a population of about 1.8 million people.

Our work included many ideas of what was needed to improve the city and quietly over the last 12 years, many of those have been built.

What I have learned through these experiences is to back yourself. Just go and do it. All that people can do is say, ‘No’, and that’s not too much of a problem. If you do back yourself, you’ll be surprised at what you can achieve. Many of these opportunities still exist today and they will exist into the future – you just have to go out and pursue them.

Some reflection on the future planning for Melbourne

I want to return to Melbourne and briefly talk about the future planning of the city and the ture of the planning system. Melbourne now is over 5 million; it’s a big city. Geoffrey West of the Santa Fe Institute did a fascinating piece of work some years ago about US cities. He looked at the way cities grew and developed and formed a number of theories regarding scale; one is that cities are analogous to biological networks.

He also suggested that as cities get larger they become far more complex and that complexity can atrophy the city if you don’t look after it very, very well. Now, Geoffrey, unfortunately, has an opinion that large cities are ultimately doomed to fail. I don’t subscribe to that view, but what he did find is that when cities get to about 5 million or thereabouts, some of the issues that were more readily dealt with by cities of 3 or 4 million of scale become increasingly more difficult to deal with. You can address the problem but the cost of fixing them becomes increasingly greater.

Melbourne is now at that point and it is timely to ask ‘Do we have the right planning system?’; ‘Do we have the planning smarts to address this issue?’. I don’t mean the people, but collectively do we have the desire to truly enquire and decide ‘What do we need to do?’ as we can follow a number of paths.

One is that we could simply make our planning system more complicated in an endeavour to manage the complexity, and you know who’s going to win there; it won’t be the planning system. The planning system will become more and more like many of the cities in Europe, where it will take you anywhere between four and eight years to get a major project approved. We can’t afford that time when the city is growing so quickly.

So we do need to go back and start identifying, with ‘fresh eyes’, what is it we want out of our cities.

Henry Cisneros, who was the Secretary of HUD (Housing and Urban Development) under President Clinton, visited Australia some years ago. Following a speech he gave one evening, he was asked a series of questions. One of the final questions asked was, ‘What makes a good city?” Cisneros, rather than trotting out the latest buzzword or concept, remained silent for about 15 seconds; he thought about it. He answered, ‘What you want is good security for your citizens, access to a wide range of jobs and access to housing for all”. Three simple concepts.

I appreciate there are many other issues in cities – they are complex – but when you really go back to it, isn’t that what we want? We want to house our people; we want to give them good jobs; we want to keep them safe and well. All the other things contribute to that and if you can’t provide the three ‘basics’ you can’t have a great city.

Maybe our ‘planning system’ needs to really address how we achieve those three things. I accept that security is not just a planning issue, as there are other mechanisms available to Government to provide this. Planning doesn’t make jobs but planning can facilitate jobs, and sometimes planning, in the way that it’s run today, can impede the creation of jobs.

The one thing that planning can do, and do a lot better, is help with the housing issue that we have today. This is probably the single largest issue that is constraining us into the future. If you get housing right, you make great cities but I have to say at the moment that, unfortunately, I don’t think we are getting it right.

So that’s the challenge I put to all of you, whether you are a planner, a lawyer or any professional involved in the development of cities; think about this issue. How do we improve our system? How do we actually make things better? – because whilst the system today is good, we should never rest on our laurels; we should always be trying to do better.

Thank you.