People ask me why I write on my website that “we need vision – not just management – to guide our city forward into the future.” Why is vision so important, over and above management?
I’m not saying management is unimportant, but it’s irrelevant if you don’t have some vision of what you’re aiming for. Your driving ability is irrelevant if you don’t know where you want to go.
Eight years ago, in the Council election of 2008, St Kilda Junction was flagged as a brewing issue, particularly for the Junction ward residents. With development pressures building across St Kilda (and other inner suburbs), it was quite evident that the Junction was a development opportunity waiting to happen -- the logical place, for better or worse, for large-scale residential and commercial densification. Consequently, candidates were elected to develop and pursue a vision to make the best of it.
Yet, by 2011, the Planning Minister Mathew Guy was able to simply step in and plonk an unplanned tower right in the heart of the Junction – which is now the 26-storey ‘STK’ tower on the point of Barkley Street and St Kilda Roads.
He was able to do that because Council could not present a viable and compelling vision for the Junction to forestall it: only planning amendments around the edges.
I had spent a fair bit of the preceding decade working on bolder design visions for the Junction. I would like to share with you a speech I delivered on the steps of Parliament House, in protest, on 12 October 2011. A speech in which vision is central.
"As you’ve heard, the planning minister, Mr Guy, has recently dumped this 26 storey apartment tower right in the middle of St Kilda Junction. This is a very large building, and a completely arbitrary decision, not based on any planning principle, or planning vision for the future. We don’t know where it came from, but it’s run straight over the City of Port Phillip planning scheme, and it’s been made in complete contempt of the local community.
The minister made the decision supposedly as a matter of state significance, but we can see no conceivable justification of that. Only a month before he called it in, he actually signed off the City of Port Phillip’s new planning amendments for the Junction– so it’s really just an act of plain sabotage of proper planning processes.
Now, I’m going to talk enthusiastically for a moment about “development” – which sounds a little out of place at a Green Wedge rally. But inner city development is the other side of the same equation: we should be developing and densifying our cities cleverly, so that we can keep development out of the green wedges.
St Kilda Junction is a fantastic opportunity for development, but it needs to be planned development. Handing out permits to individual developers like this is how you permanently destroy the potential for fantastic development there – how you destroy any new idea of what the Junction could be.
We should be planning for the next generation of St Kilda Junction as a completely reintegrated new hub of transport infrastructure for the sustainable city – underground metro station, express tram and multimodal interchange, and undergrounded through-way traffic. The junction needs to be replanned for this, not just cemented in place in its current state.
A new Junction is a massive opportunity for new higher density urban living, a brilliant new urban and cultural hub, that would link Chapel St right around to Fitzroy St and St Kilda Beach. We should be joining the inner city up with pedestrian street life and public transport, instead of dividing it with traffic sewers, or letting it develop as dead zones like Docklands and parts of Southbank.
St Kilda Junction should be the pendant jewel of Melbourne, the termination point at the end of St Kilda Road – Australia’s grandest boulevard running south from the city. What we’ve got now is St Kilda Road ending in a giant urban pothole, and the minister’s plan is now just to let the pothole fill up with skyscrapers.
The future Junction is an amazing opportunity, on all counts, that Melbourne cannot afford to give away.
St Kilda Junction is in desperate need of redevelopment, but development needs to be guided by an intelligently planned vision for the future – not just a laissez faire free-for-all that will lock in all the dumb mistakes of the past.
The planning minister needs to commit to his job description, and commit to planning, rather than visionless squander.
We call on the minister to step up to the plate, reverse the damage, work with local government and the community, and develop something together that really seizes the Junction opportunity, and really befits the future of Melbourne as a great city.
This tower he’s allowed now at St Kilda Junction is really a terrible planning decision – terrible as a planning process, and terrible in its total lack of vision. St Kilda, and the City of Port Phillip, and the people of Melbourne and Victoria deserve much much better from this planning minister, and from the government he is currently dis-serving."
An effective council should see things earlier and act! Five years have passed since that speech, since Council was caught out napping. Another election is upon us. . . . and yet still, where is the vision?
Fast forward to September 2016. We bemoan yet another St Kilda Junction disaster -- another giant, generic tower development imposed on us by VCAT. I fought this in VCAT, alongside the Junction Area Action Group, who mounted an amazing campaign on our behalf of the community.
I’ll share some of that argument in my next blog.