Abstract
A dispersed, fundamental form of human activity and a discrete professional practice, planning, like education, is often invoked as a solution to human problems. And like education, and other ideas repeated with such frequency and conviction that they resist elaboration, planning carries a large freight of ill-assorted meanings. This is perhaps especially true of environmental planning, the variant for solving environmental ills. This diversity is on full display in the edited collection, Australian Environmental Planning, and it gives this book a liveliness unusual in an undergraduate textbook. As I discuss, it also raises unresolved contradictions and begs further inquiry.
The editors, Byrne, Sipe and Dodson, from Griffith University, have pulled together a large group of contributors covering a breadth of academic contexts and career stages, as well as locations within urban Australia. While all but one are based in universities, many contributors have professional and policy links beyond the academy. The extent of cross-referencing between chapters is impressive, enabling readers to navigate issues tangled through the book. This may indicate that contributors engaged directly with each other’s material, but given the dissonance between many chapters I suspect it attests to assiduous editors (as does the overall neatness of the text).
In accord with the current form of this activity in Australia, the editors and most contributors present environmental planning as a part of urban planning, one closely related to land-use planning. Environmental planning has thus had a very different genesis from that of environmental management, which has chiefly emerged out of concerns for protected areas, on the one hand, and natural resource extraction, on the other. Typically focused on non-urban environments, environmental managers have relied on methodologies that carve nature from society. Urban planners have historically done the opposite. Environmental planning is the challenge of bringing urban and environmental epistemologies together.
The chapters vary considerably in approach, sophistication and polish. Some chapters happily convey familiar material in refreshing ways: for example, Freestone on the Australian origins of environmental planning, Foran on energy planning, Byrne and Houston on environmental justice, and Lehmann and John on (an expanded notion of) green urbanism. Many others do the solid if mundane job necessary for a student text of recounting the crucial urban contribution made by plants, animals, water, land and air, as well as the political, legal, regulatory, cultural and technological contexts in which environmental planning takes place. A small number of contributions I found inadequate. An overview of indigenous cultural relationships to ‘country’ did little to explore the interface of environmental planning and post-colonial politics, ignoring urban indigenous lives and the impact of urban Australian economies on non-urban indigenous lives. A chapter on ‘positive development’ used a bewildering array of terminology and acronyms to give abstract flesh to a process of correcting ‘anti-ecological systems biases’ (p. 249), without addressing the fact that the livelihoods of most planners are currently ensnared in the political-economic roots of these biases.
Although it situates environmental planning within urban planning, the welcome ambition that animates much of this book is to reformulate urban planning through recognition that cities are both ‘dynamic “socio-ecological” spaces’ (p. 3) and metabolic processes of circulation. Indeed, the implicit logic of many chapters is that urban planning is rightly a component of environmental planning. Pushed to its conclusion, this ambition potentially makes nonsense of the distinction between environmental planning and urban planning, because the contemporary earth is entirely an interconnected ensemble of socio-ecological spaces, whose boundaries can be fixed only in any given process of inquiry – and metabolic processes – in which events are primary to entities.
There is no such pushing in this book, and no substantive use of the rich theoretical literature on post-dualist or relational geographies (prominent in this journal, for example). The obvious explanation for this is that this is an undergraduate textbook, one seeking to be relevant to students from a range of physical and social science disciplines. In this regard, Australian Environmental Planning does a good deal of covert work in the service of post-dualist possibilities simply by juxtaposing natural and social phenomena, although several contributors seem more equipped to handle the idea that the natural inhabits the social than the corollary. However, more remains to be done to help students develop socio-ecological modes of synthesis and eloquence, especially given that large parts of their undergraduate experience will continue to be defined by dualistic disciplines. More remains to be done to address the global material and political economic complexity of which cities are today a vital part. Given that cities are made by and help to make processes of environmental change at every scale to the global, environmental planning that stops at the edge of the city, or even the regional hinterland, will leave much out of agendas for urban sustainability.