Peri-urban Victoria:

proactively changing the

future of the region

Michael Buxton, RMIT University

 World urban growth
• Peri-urban regions fastest growing regions in
many countries
• Their fate will affect ability of adjacent urban
areas to adapt to radical change and perhaps
survive
• Collective value to humanity and ecosystems
globally significant
• Yet their extent and values are being rapidly
reduced
 Peri-urban resilience
• Peri-urban areas can be studied:
- for their own resilience in the face of change
- for their contribution to the resilience of
nearby urban areas
• As archetypal socio-ecological systems
undergoing rapid transformation: can be
assessed using analytical framework of
Walker et. al (2009) – define key subsystems,
identify subsystem elements, potential shocks
to them and their capacity to deal with them
 System elements
• Structural elements (ie population density,
heterogeneous land uses)
• Functional analysis: how the elements work
• Changes to a system understood by showing
how system components interact –
relationships between elements determine
the system’s functioning and its capacity to
adapt to fundamental change
 Complex peri-urban systems
• Peri-urban systems are examples of Walker and
Salt’s (2006) and Alberti and Marzluff’s (2004)
socio-ecological systems engaged in dynamic
interactions between socio-economic and
biophysical processes over multiple scales
• Urbanisation ultimately means that peri-urban
systems no longer absorb systems shocks and they
change to a new state
• Debate over whether this change is orderly and
predictable (Burnley and Murphy, 1995) or
haphazard and discontinuous (Daniels, 1990, Allen,
2003)
 Where do they live?
• Population concentration occurring in
transport/commuter settlements
• Increasingly attractive to managers and
professionals (1/3 – ¼ of employed persons);
manufacturing still important with up to 15.6%
of employment in LGAs; high % primary
industry as sector of employment
• Extensive commuting with 42% working
outside a local government area and 28%
commuting to Melbourne
Development pressure on peri-urban
region
 Peri-urban agriculture
• Melbourne’s green belt (inner peri-urban area)
is second highest producer of agricultural
products in Victoria with a gross production in
2001 of $890 million from 4010 farms
(underestimate)
• Agriculture on 64% of land but declined by 18
per cent between 1986-2001
• Agricultural output per hectare highest in
Victoria, at four times the state average
 Biodiversity – native vegetation

• 50% of rare or threatened plants, mammals,

birds, reptiles and freshwater fish near major
Australian population centres: crucial to the
region’s amenity and prosperity
• Under increasing threat: 68 animal species and
79 plan species are threatened: similar
situations in other states; over 2000 ha cleared
1994-2005
• 44% of remnant native vegetation is on private
land
• 96% cleared vegetation had a conservation
significance rating
 Average annual gross value of
agricultural production

Whittles ea
Hum e Nillum bik
Melton
Yar r a Ranges Average Annual Gros s
Melbour ne Value of Agricultural Production
> $5000 / ha
Wyndham Knox > $2000 & < $ 5000 / ha
> $1000 & < $ 2000 / ha
> $500 & < $1000 / ha
Gr eater Dandenong < $500 / ha
Local
Cas ey Car dinia
Fr anks ton
Urban Growth Boundary
Port Phillip &
Mor nington Penins ula PPWCMABoundary
Westernport
CMA
Biodiversity issues
• Pressure from
climate change,
urban sprawl
• Increasing
recognition of
importance
• New tools
emerging to
identify
biodiversity
issues for
specific
developments
 Elements: land use
• Land use and development greatest threat to peri-
urban resilience - socio-ecological systems under
stress.
• Land tenure the key factor in a complex network of
interacting variables and reciprocal relationships
- 25,000 existing lots without dwellings in outer peri-
urban area; 50,000 in inner area
• Development incompatible with agriculture, water
needs, habitat and landscape protection
• Subdivision controls important but do not prevent
development on existing small lots:
- 75% of the 4181 new rural dwellings in 5 councils
1998-08 built on lots <20ha and 60% on lots <8ha
Rural property size – Macedon Ranges

Kyneton

Romsey

Gisborne
Dwelling approvals Murrundindi
 Planning and Bushfire protection
• About 700,000 people live in Melbourne’s peri-
urban region
• Large area of urban housing in green belt
municipalities on urban fringe
• Among most fire prone areas in the world: State
of Victoria 3% of Australian land mass but 50%
of economic damage from bushfire, most in
peri-urban area
• Increasing risk of catastrophic fires, non-linear
effects – ie 7 February, 2009, 173 lives lost
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 Other reciprocal impacts
• Land development affects water use
• Outer peri-urban S&D farm dams account for
between 12 - 47% of water use (exception of
Goulburn at 2%)
- diverted about 2,800 ML in 10 years
to 2009
- a further 5,600 ML diverted from dams under
current rate of small lot development by 2018
• Some urban water systems to reach limits by
2010-14
 Policy responses - BAU
development
• Will lead to costly, fragmented landscapes
with serious impacts on economy and natural
resources
• Doing nothing not an option because of past
land fragmentation
• Alternative paradigm: decide an alternative
future and means to achieve this through:
- spatial and institutional integration
- cross-sectoral policy measures to achieve
alternative vision and regional policies
 Policy responses
• Regulation often contrasted unfavourably with
adaptive management, typecast as unresponsive,
slow, rigid in the face of change, or market
mechanisms (Folke, 2006, Folke et.al, 2002, Nelson
et al, 2007).
• Lagadec (2009) has called for a paradigm shift in the
way we respond to interacting reciprocal elements
with non-linear impacts – or hypercomplex crises
• Governing for resilience requires anticipating
reciprocal impacts, developing cross-sectoral
anticipatory policies to maintain system elements or
transform systems to different states.
 Regulation
• Regulated planning systems in the past have
supported the conditions to allow agriculture
and other innovation to flourish so increasing
system resilience
• Removed urban expectations and so the
main threat to resilience
- ended land speculation, stabilised land
prices, maintained comparative rates of
return and led to investment certainty.
Median Price/ha by Property Size (Victoria
$2006)

Source: Barr & McKenzie 2007

 Policy responses
• Requires selection of a desired future and use of
measures designed to achieve this alternative future.
• But Australian deregulated planning systems are:
- enabling and increasingly non-regulatory
- based on vertically and horizontally fragmented
institutions and sectoral policy
- based on incremental, ad hoc approvals towards
no defined end
• Victorian deregulated governance led to dismantling
of integrated metropolitan and regional policy
 Development control options

• Use of minimum lot sizes for dwellings

1 dwelling/40 ha in rural lots in proclaimed
water supply catchments would reduce possible
future dwellings from 7,178 to 343
• Use of tenement control or restructure
53,629 lots in 35,348 properties in 8 outer peri-
urban municipalities, with 24,827 without
dwellings
Impact of use of 25 or 40 ha tenement control
 Next steps – policy
implications

Property verses Parcel findings – use of tenement controls

 Options (contin): Better use of
planning provisions
• Planning provisions not well matched to land
characteristics
- RCZ hardly used
- Environmental overlays generally poorly
matched to environmental needs: little used,
wrongly applied
• Zones often matched inadequately to lot
sizes: most LGAs include large numbers of
small lots in FZ and RCZ; some subdivision
sizes inadequate
Proportion of each zone by LGA
100%

80%

RCZ

60%

RLZ

40%
FZ

20%

0%
Moorabool Macedon Murrinidindi Mitchell Surf Coast
Ranges
Farming Zone

Rural Living Zone

Rural Conservation Zone

Public Land
 Options (contin): Better use of
planning controls

Planning controls inadequately matched to

remnant vegetation
• 90% of land cleared had no VPO or ESO
planning overlay
• Only 32% is now subject to either overlay:
VPO rarely used except for Surf Coast and
Macedon
• Only 34% of significant vegetation covered
by VPO or ESO overlay
 Use of overlays to protect
native vegetation
Peri-Urban LGA - Protection of Native Vegetation on Private land

100%

90%
Planning overly category as % total native vegetation area

80%

70%
Both VPO and ESO planning
overlays

60% VPO planning overlay only

50% ESO planning overlay only

40%
No ESO or VPO planning
overlay
30%

20%

10%

0%
BASS COAST MACEDON MITCHELL MOORABOOL MURRINDINDI SURF COAST
RANGES
 Options (contin): transfer of
development rights
• Development capacity able to cater for
demand to 2040 = 16,250 dwellings
- transfer of this demand to townships at 35
dwellings/ha would require 464 additional ha
• By 2040 an excess demand for 9,458 rural lots
will exist
- transfer to townships would require 270 ha
at 35 dwellings/ha, 472 ha at 20 d/ha or 756
ha at 12.5 d/ha