Urban History Planning History Conference 2020: Nick Phelps on edge cities and monorails

This Must Be The Place Podcast

In this episode of This Must Be The Place Elizabeth reports from Launceston, Tasmania, from the Urban History Planning History conference. (Listeners should also note the earlier interview with Alysia Bennett at the same conference, offering a very different take on how to pronounce ‘Launceston’). As well as hearing from the UTas historic tram that periodically trundles through the expansive campus car park, (and from some local windiness), in this instalment we hear from Professor Nicholas (Nick) Phelps of the University of Melbourne. Nick describes how he went from being an economic geographer studying Croydon in the UK (“the butt of jokes”) and its attempts to fashion itself as an ‘edge city’; to a general interest in suburban settlement patterns and identities. His talk at UHPH - Centering the Periphery: The Real and Imagined Centres of Casey, Victoria – centred (pun intended) on Casey, a suburban local government area in the south east of Melbourne. Casey is a geographically huge area (which Nick compares in scale to Metro Miami), and Nick and co-authors (including erstwhile TMBTP host David Nichols) were interested in Casey’s efforts at fashioning ‘centres’ in the context of incremental largely residential growth. Part of the presentation included revisiting Casey’s earlier history as the City of Berwick, which in the 1970s pursued what we would now consider ‘futuristic’ (as in, an imagined future we now scoff at) plans for a ‘metro city’ of 100,000 people with its own green belt and (as was the style of the time) monorail. That city-shaping plan was shelved, although similarly huge scales of growth have since nonetheless occurred. Incidentally, some parts of Casey apparently still have a reservation for a monorail. As in Hugh Stretton’s Ideas for Australian Cities, we discuss the idea there are two broad aspects to people’s lives, with one secluded and quiet (the traditional function of a residential suburb – at least for certain people/men), and the other the outward facing connected ‘buzz’ generally the function of a city centre. Nick considers whether and how suburban areas like Casey create the second kind of place. The discussion compares places like Casey to those of British New Towns under Development Corporations. For example Milton-Keynes, designated in the 1960s while passing through phases of mockery, is now the fastest growing city in the UK and an attractor both of new residents and new industries. We also discuss the prevalence of projects like monorails in edge city plans around the world in the 1970s – Nick suggests the ways we now scoff at such plans reflects a larger shift in planning, away from a belief in “thinking about the future in quite grand terms”. Part of the ensuing reticence is an aversion to some of new town planning’s architectural dagginess, implausibility and paternalism. But there are trade-offs: planners have also tended to lose the capacity to have positive, large scale-discussions about the future, as well as some practical mechanisms for timing and delivery of new settlements. These include the use of land values toward supporting some notion of a shared public good, like providing facilities or shaping centres longer term. The episode also ranges from land acquisition and developer contributions, to national settlement patterns, local governments, 1970s economics, TV, Albury-Wodonga, green belts and how to pronounce names like “Launceston”, “Traralgon”, “Leicester” and “Gloucester”.