The Problem with Urban Planning

This experience helped inform YIMBY Melbourne’s initial thesis: that the cause of bad land use regulation was hyperlocal political decision-making. Local governments knock back and cut away at high-quality projects, including social housing, primarily—we figured—because they are politically captured by a small minority of voters. 

But this is not the full story.

While many of the most headline-grabbing and absurd planning decisions are made by elected councillors, the actual restrictiveness of the controls and their broad implementation cannot be attributed to elected representatives alone. Indeed, most councillors barely understand their zoning codes, and their positions on planning matters are held mainly in reaction to what they hear from some loud minority of their voters. 

It is hard to blame councillors for not being across the entirety of their planning systems. These systems are complex, primarily regulatory, and comprise a set of overlapping tools like zones and overlays that, when taken together, dictate what can be legally built on any given piece of land. 

The planning system controls the type of land use—residential, commercial, industrial, and so on—as well as the heights and densities permitted. Planning also controls the built form of our cities in various ways, but it's worth noting that these are not building codes, which are handled comprehensively by the National Construction Code (NCC). Planning codes are ancillary to the NCC's core health and safety requirements. 

The problem with planning controls is that they tend to be restrictive rather than permissive. An example of what we call 'restrictive zoning' is Victoria's Neighbourhood Residential Zone (NRZ), which only permits two storeys of development across almost half the residential land within 15 minutes' drive of Melbourne's CBD. The downstream results of bans on density like these is a scarcity of inner-city housing options, higher housing costs, and a less vibrant city for those who live here.

But it is not just councillors who decide to ban density. Behind elected representatives are teams of professional planners who do understand restrictive zoning policies, and who are applying and enforcing them anyway. 

This became clear to us as YIMBY Melbourne gained prominence within public debate. Online and in person, some members of the planning profession, facing external scrutiny for one of the first times in their careers, began to publicly defend their restrictive planning work.

This sharpened our vision significantly: for these planners, there were no local political incentives, no homevoters, neighbourhood defenders, or city-haters determining their next election outcomes—and yet they earnestly believed in the virtue of banning more diverse housing options in the places where people most wanted to live. 

One way to explain the proliferation of restrictive land use regulations across our country, it turns out, is that many of the people in charge of these rules are well-meaning, and believe that they are doing a good job.

And these people have a great amount of influence over the shapes of our cities. Since the 1980s, that influence has grown enormously. There are almost nine times as many planners today as there were in 1986. But while for every planner in 1986, we built more than 50 homes, we now build fewer than ten homes per planner. In the face of a generational housing shortage, the productivity of planners makes the notoriously struggling construction sector look efficient. 

Meanwhile, the Planning Institute of Australia has declared an emergency planner shortage. But given the sector's monumental growth, it seems much more likely that what we face, rather than a shortage of planners, is an excess of planning. 

To understand this, one needs only to look at the outcomes. 

In the 21st century, planning timelines have mainly lengthened. Housing shortages have grown more dire. In response, planners have invented new, complicated fast tracks—only for projects to still get blocked at the finish line. In the energy space, the Victorian planning system is currently delaying more than $90 billion worth of renewables, and it is becoming more and more likely that we will be forced to subsidise offshore wind—with its similar cost to nuclear power—because the planning system makes it virtually impossible to build enough renewables on land. 

All of this has been allowed to happen because planning policy has been monopolised by a small professional silo, which for decades has been insulated from external input, feedback, and oversight. This isolation has left planners both culturally and operationally out of step with the rest of government, to the detriment of our nation's wellbeing and our governments' capacity to deliver for their constituents. 

This silo is underpinned by a set of unsubstantiated frameworks that are generally ambivalent—or worse, actively hostile—to economic growth, to markets, and to government delivery and national prosperity as key goals of policymaking. From here on, we will refer to this pervasive constellation of old-school norms, beliefs, and practices as 'legacy planning'. 

Not all planning practitioners are legacy planners. Many, of course, are frustrated by the restraining norms of their profession. A younger generation of more progressive planners, trained in the modern age of urbanism, internationalism, and the immense promise of the city—these people should give us some hope for the profession moving forward.

But this new generation of planners will struggle to undertake reform from within. The deep entrenchment of esoteric beliefs and archaic practices within the profession means that the only reliable path to reform will be by shattering the silo altogether. 

Doing so will open land use policymaking to new possibilities. It will enable governments to move away from an onerous system of processes and toward a contemporary model of tradeoffs and delivery. These new forms of planning practice will be faster, more iterative, and oriented by outcomes. Under a new model of 'iterative planning', land use policymakers will be empowered to move beyond the system's current status quo bias and toward a more progressive form of policymaking, which one might call—planning at the speed of cities.

The problem of urban planning begins with its treatment as something unique or separate from other areas of government intervention. The truth, of course, is that urban planning and land use regulation are areas of policy and regulation just like any other, and should be treated as such. But because most people working in planning departments are required to have planning or planning-related qualifications, a siloing has occurred.

Legacy planners may argue that their special treatment is justified. That, given the unique nature of land as an input to all productive human activity, it makes sense that planning should remain isolated from other areas of government policy. Of course, it is just as easy to argue the opposite: that a policy area as significant as land use management should be more open and integrated with the rest of government than it currently is.

The fundamental importance of land use regulation is outlined nicely in Stephen Rowley's 2023 textbook The Victorian Planning System. This is considered the key book on Victorian planning, and the one that all new planners, planning students, and even local councillors are encouraged to read. The following is from the opening chapter:

It is primarily the regulatory planning system that directs and shapes [the] countless smaller acts of city-building. It first seeks to ensure that those decisions at least cause no significant problems, but it will also try to guide and direct those projects to help create better places and achieve policy outcomes… the accumulation of those small regulatory interventions on cities and regions—for good or ill—is potentially immense. The regulatory planning system is therefore of profound importance.

While Rowley and I disagree on almost everything substantive, I recommend reading his work directly to understand the planning system's intentions and processes. But if you want to understand the outcomes, then you'll have to read between the lines. Here, though, he is right: the fundamental business of legacy planning is regulation. 

Crucially, and as legacy planners themselves often acknowledge, their role is regulatory—they do not build anything. In fact, they mostly do the opposite. In her essay Why can't we design our cities? Sydney-based architect Laura Harding wrote that "statutory planning controls are structured as a charter of negatively expressed constraint on future development" responsible for a growing set of "mandatorily enforced errors" that harms new development by yielding constantly to the tyranny of the status quo. 

In her essay, Harding discusses planning's impact in the context of built form and aesthetics¹¹1

, but her core message can be applied more generally: the legacy planning system exists first and foremost to stop things from happening.

What might surprise you is that Harding and Rowley appear to agree. Here's Rowley again (emphasis mine): 

Planners in [the contemporary] era have often tried to make their job sound better by recasting it as “facilitating development”. This sounds good, but as a rhetorical strategy to defend the profession it is doomed to failure. If urban planners define their role as the development facilitation, they will inevitably be seen as terrible at their job. Property developers, for example, will never feel especially “facilitated” by having to comply with planning regulations or apply for planning permission. Indeed, if the core goal of planning is defined as development facilitation, the planning system will be more successful the less it does.

In order to justify its existence, legacy planning is required to be restrictive. For a given regulation to "work", it must constrain development on a given piece of land to a lower level than what the market would have delivered under the planning-free counterfactual.

This is because legacy planners also consider policy that delivers "underdevelopment"—for instance, three storeys in a six storey zone—to be a failure. Developments are regularly rejected on this basis, because planning orthodoxy tells us that regulation is only good if it prescribes and then achieves a single very specific outcome. 

This is not a viable way to build our cities. No single department nor regulator can know the specific optimal outcome for tomorrow's world, let alone the specific optimal outcome for the world one decade from now. Cities, at their best, are dynamic and changing places of creation and growth—and yet the main role of legacy planners is to forestall this natural process with poorly justified and highly prescriptive land use rules with no built-in expiration date.

In his work, Rowley writes regularly about how legacy planning and planners are plagued by "self-doubt". He pins the cause of this self-doubt on a nebulously sketched spectre of deregulatory neoliberalism.²²2

But I have a different theory. I think the self-doubt of the modern planning profession is simply a rational response to the shakiness of its foundations. 

We can neatly synthesise my theory and Rowley's by placing planning policy in the context of Australian history. Specifically, the remarkable late-20th century transformation of our nation's economy under Hawke and Keating. During this period we axed wage and price controls, moved our economy away from many elements of post-war central planning, and developed a more responsive policymaking that takes advantage of data and measurement in order to guide more robust public administration. All of this was done while also building Medicare, the superannuation system, and other various mainstays of the Australia we know today. This new, better world was built by evolving new tools. Legacy planners are today the last remaining policymakers yet to receive a proper update. 

Let's consider a material example of modern policymaking. In the 1990s, the Reserve Bank of Australia began targeting inflation at 2 to 3 percent. Since then, the main role of the RBA has been deciding on one very public number: the cash rate. This monetary policy lever is used to shape and—this second part is important—respond to the material conditions of the Australian and global economies in order to maintain national economic stability. 

This is a great example of modern policymaking. The Bank maintains a highly data-driven policymaking toolkit, taking into account price signals and other economic data, including rigorously debated forecasts that are maintained internally as a method of information-gathering to inform policy decisions.³³3

The Bank regularly updates its macroeconomic models and forecasts with new data sources, and is often transparent about shortcomings and how it might correct them, all while embracing the role of reflexivity in regulatory management. The result of this underlying rigour is that teams of officials at the Bank are able to undertake consistent investigative work for the purposes of informing and updating one single number, eight times per year, to the absolute best of their abilities. And it more or less works.

Legacy planning departments, meanwhile, dictate the utilisation of land with prescriptive regulations that set their time horizons in the decades. The legally prescribed use of any given piece of land in this country is subject to sets of rules potentially written decades ago, and the process required to change any one of these rules typically takes at least two years.

The reality is that the formulation and maintenance of rules that currently govern the use of land across Australian cities are informed not by deep analysis of behavioural and economic signals, but by the tastes and intuitions of individual legacy planners at the time each given rule is written. Urban design regulations that specify materials and forms while mandating strict height limits are not derived from any deep analysis, but from the preferences of senior practitioners.

The legacy planner evidence-base at best consists of submissions made by self-selecting, self-reporting incumbents; a few years of patchy historical datapoints; and maybe a set of figures drawn from the census. If any quantitative housing capacity modelling is undertaken, it is not typically done in-house but instead by a private planning consultancy. Where the RBA and similar institutions build state capacity, planning departments regularly eschew it.

And the plans that result from these processes are not updated often; planning rulesets are regularly set in place for decades at a time. It should concern us that no small number of planning rules dictating land use in Australia at the time of this essay's publication would have been introduced during the era of dial-up internet.

Taking the examples of the Reserve Bank and legacy planning side by side demonstrates the core trouble of legacy planning. On the one hand, the Reserve Bank does not pretend to know what the economy will look like next month—and on the other, planning departments pretend to know the optimal use of not just one lot of land, but all lots of land, decades in advance. 

Indeed, the most likely source of legacy planners' creeping self-doubt is the overextension of their individual predictive powers. 

A closed system will always struggle to self-correct. In the absence of feedback and information drawn from the world writ large, catastrophic errors can proliferate for decades. 

And that is what has happened to legacy planning. Due to a general refusal to engage with markets, economics, and measurements as basic as rents, vacancy rates, and commute times, planners have internalised a set of idiosyncratic and dangerously incorrect beliefs that do not map onto the material world, and which undermine the broader goals of government policy.

Indeed, the problem at the core of planning regulation is that the profession is wrong about a great number of very important things, and has no incentive or ability to correct its errors.

At the core of legacy planners' beliefs is a distrust of markets and an unwillingness to take price signals seriously. A strong encapsulation of this can be found in the Planning Institute of Australia's (PIA) 2021 submission to the Federal Parliament’s Inquiry into housing affordability and supply in Australia (the Falinski Inquiry).

This requires a bit of preamble. In its submission, the peak body for planners in Australia attempts to refute a now-classic 2018 RBA paper on the "cost of zoning". This paper, written by Ross Kendall and Peter Tulip, applies popular American urban economics modelling methods to Australian cities and demonstrates the obvious fact that planning restrictions have costs, and that these costs are higher in the places where housing supply is constrained by height limits, heritage, and other regulations.

We at YIMBY Melbourne made our own contribution to this kind of modelling, iterating on the RBA model and testing changes in development feasibility under less stringent planning regulations. This work can be found in our Missing Middle Housing Targets report,⁴⁴4

the results of which tell the same story as Kendall and Tulip six years prior: that planning regulation is a binding constraint on housing supply, and adds a sizable premium to housing costs across our city. 

Given the broad consensus outside of the legacy planning silo regarding the impact of planning regulation on housing costs, we won't spend any more time litigating it here.⁵⁵5

Instead, I want to focus on what is actually interesting about the PIA's critique of the RBA paper, which has nothing to do with econometric methodology, and everything to do with the Institute's reinterpretation of the price signal itself. In their submission to the Falinski Inquiry, the the Planning Institute writes of Jenner and Tulip's paper:

At best, the ‘costs’ they attribute to a ‘zoning effect’ reflect amenity value and access to jobs and services in a well-planned city.  

The implication here is damning: high house prices, the PIA claims, is not communicating a shortfall in housing supply. Rather, it is communicating that a set of legacy planners have done a very good job.

Indeed, our nation's housing shortage is the direct result of a siloed profession operating with the belief that one sign of successful planning is that housing becomes more expensive.

This is untenable.

Kendall and Tulip estimate that the cost added by planning regulation to the price of a unit in Melbourne was $120,000 in 2018. This aligns with the 2024 YIMBY Melbourne analysis, which found similar results.

In an article for The Fifth Estate, the PIA's National Policy Director covers a University of Sydney debate on the paper. In the article and the debate, one critique made is that the paper ignores "the other side of the balance sheet". ⁶⁶6

So the argument goes, this number—$120,000 per unit—is only one side of the story. By presenting the costs alone you have not accounted for the benefits. But the authors did not write this paper to balance the books: they wrote this paper to present one side of the book measured empirically. Pointing out that a paper about costs is in fact a paper about costs does not really constitute a critique.

But let's engage with the critique anyway. For the other side of the planning balance sheet to stack up, it has to deliver benefits or avoid externalities in excess of $120,000 in per-home housing costs. The degree of amenity that planning delivers has to be worth at least $120,001. Except it needs to be more than that, because it has to also compensate for the lost productivity of sprawl, the spillover impacts on homelessness, the intergenerational inequality brought about by enforcing arbitrary rules on behalf of a land owning gentry—and so on. 

It becomes difficult to imagine that planning's so-called "amenity value" exceeds these costs, and broader research substantiates that it does not.  The fact that no planning academic present at the aforementioned debate has ever gone on to produce a balance sheet that states the opposite should tell you that they understand this implicitly. 

To take a tangible example, in the case of New Zealand's Medium Density Residential Standards (MDRS) reforms, the cost-benefit analysis (CBA) worked out overwhelmingly in favour of planning reform.

The CBA does not shy away from costs, including some loss of sunshine and views for incumbents, but still demonstrates the benefits to be enormous. 

This did not stop one member of our nation's National Housing Supply and Affordability Council from critiquing the CBA by "looking at housing and residential amenity issues alone". But what the linked analysis unhelpfully ignores is that agglomeration benefits are amenity benefits—more cafes, small businesses, and things to do in one's neighbourhood are all benefits brought about by densification for incumbents and new arrivals alike. 

The successful reintegration of land use planning into the broader structure of government will require these sorts of balance sheets to be produced regularly. They will require a reckoning with tradeoffs, and with the realities of opportunity costs and net benefits. They will require a holistic view of what it is that makes cities the most valuable technology in human history, and what it means to manage them. 

The embrace of this view will mark a positive evolution of the profession, though is unlikely to be welcomed by legacy planners for several deep-seated reasons.

Legacy planners are wrong about most things, but they're not misleading us on purpose. Their false beliefs are genuinely held, and because they operate within a silo, they are unable to receive or accept meaningful feedback on their bad thinking.

This is dangerous, and is precisely how the Australian planning profession became captured by its most pernicious central delusion. The central delusion is this: that nothing planners do meaningfully impacts the cost of housing. That no amount of planning regulation can impact the delivery of supply, and nor can it impact the price of the supply that gets delivered. Not only is this wrong, but it is directly responsible for young people, families, and students being priced out of the places in our nation where they most want to live. It is responsible for rising rents and rising homelessness. It is responsible for increased carbon consumption, and for billions in lost prosperity. The great delusion is at the heart of many of our nation's greatest problems. 

To familiarise ourselves with the great delusion, we can return once again to the Planning Institute's submission to the Falinski Inquiry, and the section titled Planning regulation or zoning is not a break on supply. 

The section begins by critiquing a key premise of the Falinski Inquiry:

The Inquiry terms of reference and media release highlight “restrictive planning laws as a major cause of shortages in supply”. This ignores the unresponsiveness of housing price and misunderstands the positive role of planning shaping housing supply. 

This right here is the foundation of the great delusion: that housing prices are unresponsive to regulation, and that therefore any amount of regulation can be justified—because regulation has no impact on affordability. 

Restrictive planning regulations, the PIA argues, are costless, because

while the planning system can create opportunities for desired development, decisions about whether and when to submit applications and construct are ultimately made by the development industry and reflect market factors.

To suggest that the industry responds to market factors is correct—but the convenient sidestepping of planning regulation's impact on that very market is a sleight of hand. We know, for instance, that regulatory complexity is directly correlated with the costs and supply of housing. We know also that height limits and other planning restrictions are directly correlated with development industry firm size and composition. We know that time and time again the loosening of planning restrictions leads to an increase in construction, and a reduction in housing costs.⁷⁷7

The claim that planning regulation "create[s] opportunities" for development ignores the fact that development is very capable of occurring in regulation's absence. Indeed, planning does not create opportunities: it holds opportunities hostage. The stated understanding of the regulatory system is entirely backward.

And yet this stated understanding permeates legacy planner circles. It is not only repeated ad nauseam by the PIA and its members, but also by the planning consultants who make their money developing regulation on governments' behalf. 

In the introduction to the 2024 edition of legacy planning consultancy SGS's Rental Affordability Index, one Executive Director claims that the results of the Index  

provides the evidence that, by itself, the private market cannot meet the needs of many Australians, including ordinary working households.

When that same Executive Director claims as he did in his speech to the 2024 Housing Now! Conference, given on behalf of the National Housing Supply and Affordability Council, that "the predicament we find ourselves today in [sic] might suggest that this market efficiency vision has failed us", he neglects to mention the growing evidence that this "vision" has failed in no small part due to the kind of regulation that legacy planning consultancies have sold to our governments for decades.

This view that planning regulation has little to do with housing unaffordability does not belong to one Executive Director alone, either. Like older units might within a well-functioning housing market, this perspective filters down from the top and into the work produced by these firms and departments writ large. 

In a government-commissioned analysis of the 2016 Victorian regulation that would later be codified as the Better Apartment Design Standards (BADS), one consultancy wrote that:

given the significant supply of greenfield housing opportunities at Melbourne's urban fringe, it is assumed there will be no net loss of dwelling supply to Victoria as a result of the new standards. Temporary reductions in apartment supply would displace households to alternative locations, ultimately accelerating housing supply on the urban fringe (via reverse vacancy chain effects).⁸⁸8

Striking here that while legacy planners remain skeptical of vacancy chains as an affordability mechanism, they are very happy to use its inverse to justify further regulation.

Setting aside the obvious fact that the young family who wants an apartment in Thornbury is not the same as the one who wants a house in Officer, the claims here are demonstrably false. There are at least two immediately obvious reasons why apartment regulation would not perfectly displace housing construction to greenfield areas:

1. Different housing typologies are built by different firms. 
2. Locations are not fungible, and the tradeoffs people make between purchasing, say, a smaller apartment in a convenient location and a townhouse in the greenfield outskirts mean that demand is not perfectly interchangeable.⁹⁹9
   See Infrastructure Victoria’s Our Home Choices and the Grattan Institute’s The Housing We’d Choose.

Other elements of the analysis are also substandard. It is not clear, for instance, how a regulation that sets minimum unit sizes does not trade off against overall housing affordability. Given that housing construction costs are calculated on a per-square-metre basis, large minimum unit sizes definitionally increase the cost of housing, reduce per-project yield, and eliminate the option for people to choose to live in smaller, cheaper dwellings.

But then, a piece of analysis can only be as strong as its assumptions—and legacy planners operate on the assumption that housing prices are fundamentally unresponsive to regulatory factors. They believe, therefore, that any regulatory action can be justified—because it cannot be expected to increase costs, reduce supply, or impact affordability. Time and time again, this is their stated belief. And it is this belief that has underpinned the long lineage of decisions that have made housing unaffordable in this country.

That planners can't make tradeoffs is not my claim but theirs. Throughout planning systems and literature, the opposition to trading off between policy goals is glaring. As a basic example, the Victorian Department of Transport and Planning guide to using their Detached Home Code lists three policy objectives ("respects neighbourhood character", "protects amenity", "is sustainable") and explicitly states that you "can't 'trade off' between objectives". 

And yet it should be obvious that tradeoffs will have to be made no matter what in order to meet these objectives. The perfectly sustainable building—a large box—is likely very different from the building that perfectly "protects amenity"—some sort of pitched-roof colonial. And of course, in formulating the Code itself, tradeoffs would have been made—what the legacy planners are telling us here is that they believe that they have already made the absolute optimal set of tradeoffs on everyone else's behalf.

Returning to the Victorian Planning System textbook, we get insight into how tradeoffs can be considered antithetical to the platonic form of planning regulation:

If a building within an area subject to an eight-storey height control can be approved at 10 storeys if it includes affordable housing, then this surely undermines the original objective of the eight-storey height control. And if it does not, then what was the original justification for limiting buildings to only eight storeys? A height control should not exist merely to artificially create a bargaining chip to achieve another planning objective. Such horse-trading—seen also with incentives to improve the environmental performance of buildings—is a symptom of a failure to impose proper regulatory requirements.

Let's put to one side how close this paragraph comes to figuring out that the bulk of planning regulation is, indeed, arbitrary, and quickly make clear that this is not the esoteric thought of a single Victorian regulator-academic. We can find the same sentiment from the hypocrite-deity of legacy planning herself, Jane Jacobs, in a 1999 interview in Urban Design International: 

You don't need what planners call 'trade-offs'; you can avoid one-win situations. It takes some ingenuity, but if it's going to hurt somebody, there is something wrong with it and you would need to find out how to do it without hurting anybody... If something came up that you couldn't find, a one-win thing, then you don't do it, you leave that, you're better to do nothing.

This status quo bias—the idea that it is better to do nothing than to inconvenience anyone lies at the core of the harm that planning inflicts on the Australian people. This bias toward the past, toward the existing, toward the legacy—this bias has stymied growth across our nation. It explains why planning everywhere is so goddamn slow. To design, get approval for, and then build in full compliance with every single regulation, even when those regulations regularly work against each other, all while being forbidden from making tradeoffs, is a hell of a task. And yet this is the task that legacy planning has set for anyone who wishes to build anything in this country, including the government itself, including things we really want more of, like clean energy and housing.

This is the problem of planning encapsulated: an unaccountable silo built to safeguard bad processes, unsubstantiated practices, and dangerous beliefs. And the cost of this has been paid by the Australian people.

In lieu of understanding regulatory impacts on housing affordability, legacy planners have sought other explanations. Australian housing is expensive, they reason, because the government is not doing enough to subsidise the costs. This is a clever deflection from the fact that they—at least in part by their own admission ("amenity value")—are responsible for a large proportion of these costs.

Setting a two-storey height limit in the inner-city has a cost. At bare minimum, this cost is the preclusion of housing construction in-line with demand. And we know demand is significant, because home prices indicate that for every person who purchases a given dwelling, there are others who would have paid as much—or nearly as much—to live there as well.

But there is a way to avoid the inconvenient reality of market prices: by gesturing toward the broad government provision of non-market housing. Peak legacy planning bodies advocate for taxpayers to pay the costs of regulation, without addressing the regulatory origins of those costs. Don't look at us, they say. Spend more on social housing, because that's the only way to make homes affordable. 

On this, the planners are at least directionally correct: the government does underspend on subsidising housing for the vulnerable. Significant increases to and indexation of Commonwealth Rent Assistance would go a long way to improving security of tenure for a large number of Australians, as would a sizable increase in public housing focused on individuals and families with complex needs.  

Legacy planner calls for non-market housing go well beyond the above prescriptions. But given that they stop short of recommending planning reform that would make building the actual housing easier, it's hard not to conclude that these calls are at least in part made in an attempt to deflect from the externalities of planning regulation. Unless we want to build all our new social housing on the city's fringe—putting all of our society's most in-need as far as possible from the services, amenities, and infrastructure from which they would most benefit—planning reform will be required.

This is an important reminder that planning does not just regulate construction by private homebuilders; it also regulates construction by governments and nonprofits, who incur the same costs as market actors as they navigate the planning system. These costs may come about through compliance fees, holding costs, extraneous requirements, or the well-documented struggles of delivering social housing in affluent communities given the likelihood of litigation and protest. In order for the government to effectively deliver the massive amounts of housing required to meaningfully confront the housing crisis, we would still need to see a reduction in all the costs listed above. Otherwise, the Government will be stuck doing what it does today—spending taxpayer dollars fighting its own planning departments to get things built—but at a magnitudes-greater scale. 

Put simply: in order for an enormous public and community housing spend to be effective, we would still need planning reform to get us there.

Victoria demonstrated this to be true during the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. From my colleague Ethan Gilbert's essay on the subject of planning fastracks:

In the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, to ensure that the bold program of social housing funding from the Commonwealth’s Nation Building Economic Stimulus Plan was actually realised, the Victorian Government amended the planning scheme so that its social housing agency had complete control over permitting. They removed planning approval responsibilities for stimulus-funded projects from local planning departments. Then, they exempted all social housing from objections and third-party appeals to ensure it was built quickly and protected from lengthy VCAT battles. 

The Victorian Government even went as far as delegating planning permitting to Community Housing Providers and State Housing Agencies, allowing them to engage with planning consultants to “pre-approve” their own planning permits.

The result was the approval timeline collapsing to just four weeks from start to finish (the average approval timeline from 2015 to 2020 was around 17 weeks).

This temporary reform underwrote the largest delivery of social housing in the 21st century. Legacy planners will often point to this 2008 moment as evidence that the government is indeed still able to invest in building large amounts of social housing. This is true, but what is regularly and conveniently ignored in these arguments is that the success of the program was underpinned not only by capital investment, but by temporary reform that successfully neutered planning regulations now demonstrably unnecessary.  

The history of the planning system is countless cases like the above: when we are in desperate need of something, we fasttrack it, skipping over as much of the system as possible in order to achieve the outcomes that we want. We do this, for instance, with schools and hospitals, and—fascinatingly—through zoning exemptions for aged care facilities. Increasingly, though not nearly enough, we are doing this with energy.

Rarely, by the way, does anything go wrong when we do this. Indeed, the main and overwhelming outcome of planning fastracks is that we end up with more of the thing we wanted, without incurring any meaningful downside costs. Taking legacy planners out of the equation time and time again produces faster, more positive outcomes. In almost every single case, the outcome of less planning regulation is a greater degree of material progress and abundance for Australian society.

When legacy planners call for greater government housing spends in lieu of meaningful planning reform, they should be treated with suspicion. When an incumbent cottage industry's one and only answer to a supply shortage—for which they themselves are in no small part responsible—is extremely high levels of spending by other parts of government, it should be clear that their proposed solution is incomplete. When legacy planners call for a mass social housing build without meaningful planning reform, they are giving an incomplete answer, and one that serves their industry's interests better than it serves the Australians most in need of safe and secure housing that will enable them to live full and fulfilling lives.

So why hasn't anything changed? Why, for seventy-odd years, have we empowered this insular practice to proliferate in its silo? It's not like no one has tried. But the silo is very well-insulated to critique, not least because it has mostly got away with regulating itself.

Over previous decades, governments have made regular attempts to reform land use planning. Most recently in Victoria, the Auditor General issued a 2017 report titled Managing Victoria's Planning System for Land Use and Development. In the report they outlined a series of failed attempts to reform the planning department since the year 2000.

The key reason for these repeated failures was given in strong terms:

DELWP¹⁰¹⁰10

DELWP no longer exists in Victoria, and the planning function of DELWP is now in the Department of Transport and Planning (DTP).

—as the administrator of the system—does not regularly monitor or evaluate the uptake and effectiveness of reforms as part of its overall performance and evaluation framework… both DELWP and [the Auditor General's] audit team have been unable to accurately assess the effectiveness of successfully implemented reforms.

Where review frameworks were introduced, the Auditor General notes, they were used to assess processes, rather than outcomes. But the point of the system is what it does, and good policymaking should maintain systems that operate in service of improving the real lives of real people.

Of course, the problem with planning regulation begins well before we get to the measurement of outcomes. When a given planning regulation is introduced, it is exempted from the Victorian Government's standardised Regulatory Impact Statement (RIS) process,¹¹¹¹11

meaning that there is no requirement to do any robust cost-benefit analyses of any given rule's potential impact.

A 2013 Legislative Council Inquiry into the Regulatory Impact Statement Process cites the Department of Premier and Cabinet, which argued at the time that subjecting new planning regulations to the RIS would be "cumbersome", because the Planning and Environment Act sets out "comprehensive analytical and public scrutiny processes" for any new rules. Evidence submitted to that same Inquiry notes that these "comprehensive" processes do not include cost-benefit analysis. 

While the above details are specific to the modern day, they are very much representative of long-running problems within the legacy planning sector. Reviewing the 1954 Melbourne Metropolitan Planning Scheme—our city's first full-scale implemented plan—J Brian McLoughlin writes that:

The authors of the [Melbourne Metropolitan Planning Scheme's] Surveys and Analysis volume could note that ‘one of the most striking things that quickly became evident in the course of the work was the lack of information concerning the city as a metropolitan unit… in general there is a lack of coordinated information about the metropolis as a whole’. Yet the study team itself made no written, formal recommendations to remedy this state of affairs, [nor] did they seem to propose a regular process of monitoring actual developments and changes and comparing these with the provisions of the plan, perhaps to provide the basis for reviews.

In the almost 70 years since the plan's gazettal¹²¹²12

, this state of affairs is yet to be remedied, even though legacy planners have been made aware of the issues for decades. Many of the critiques in this essay are echoed in the brilliantly-titled 1976 work A mansion, or no house:

Controls contained in literally dozens of separate Acts and a multitude of regulations, by-laws and administrative practices, overlap and interact to produce results which were neither foreseen nor intended by those who drafted the miscellaneous elements. 

In a 1991 paper on the brief allowance of by-right dual occupancies across Melbourne during the 1980s and 90s,¹³¹³13

Des Eccles, author of the Victorian planning system bible that preceded Rowley's, writes:

Bunker (1987:72) makes the observation that in Australia information and policy generation systems that enable the actual impacts of policy implementation mechanisms to be measured and monitored are unevenly developed. In the case of dual occupancy in Melbourne, such systems seem to [be] entirely absent. The reasons why state and metropolitan planning bureaucracies are reluctant to monitor the impacts of their policy implementation mechanisms has been documented by Reade (1987) and include the potential embarrassment of discovering that those mechanisms do not have the desired effect or even the opposite effect of what is intended. 

Taken on the whole, this constitutes damning evidence that urban planning has a systemic inability to assess its own efficacy. The problem was identified by the planners themselves in 1954, and in the 70 years since there has been no real sign of improvement.  

This is not only a problem in the Victorian context. Similar investigations of urban planning departments have taken place around Australia and the world, and have borne similar results. Commenting on the global nature of this problem in 2018, former principal urban planner at the World Bank Alain Bertaud wrote in Order without Design:

Urban planners are “normative,” that is, they base their decisions on best professional practices that usually rely on rules of thumb transmitted from generation to generation. Urban planners use expressions that are often more qualitative than quantitative. They like to use adjectives like “sustainable,” “livable,” “compact,” “resilient,” and “equitable” to characterise their planning objectives. However, planners seldom feel the need to link these qualitative objectives to measurable indicators. It is therefore impossible to know if the planning strategies used are indeed “sustainable” or “livable.” In the absence of quantitative indicators, one might conclude that these terms are only labels that provide a kind of moral high ground to whatever urban plan is proposed.

Put bluntly: the system of legacy planning cannot be trusted to regulate itself. It lacks the tools, the systems, and the incentives to do so. And until governments at all levels across Australia shatter the legacy planning silo, this is unlikely to change.

By allowing legacy planners to maintain their work in a silo for so long, we have empowered a small number of unaccountable actors to cut away at the Australian housing market until it has come to reflect their underlying beliefs. Right now, housing supply is unresponsive to demand. Things, it appears, are going according to plan.

We can recap the problem of planning as follows:

1. The treatment of planning regulation as separate from the rest of government policy has created a professional silo.
2. The deleterious performance of planning policy is underpinned by a set of false beliefs developed and maintained by the legacy planning silo itself.
3. In the absence of external oversight and internal feedback loops, this professional silo has failed to operate effectively in service of broader government goals.

The problem with planning is that planners have been allowed to operate in a silo. The solution is to shatter the silo altogether, and the second half of this essay will outline how.

There is value in managing our cities. The coordination of public utilities, transport networks, green space, and infrastructure capacity is a role that private actors, uncoordinated, are unlikely to fulfill. These are the main market failures that effective planning should be working to resolve. 

But legacy planning lacks the tools for the task. These practitioners spend much more time micromanaging the activities undertaken on private land than they do coordinating, measuring, and improving connectivity and amenity within the public realm. Some planners are already working iteratively—but rigid systems often prevent them from succeeding.

This is because legacy planning conceives of itself first and foremost as a regulator. As established in the previous section, this leaves the profession ineffective at improving the public realm, because this would require them to recast themselves as facilitators of the connective tissue that enables private action, and enables the emergent energy of our cities.

And so we need new practice. We might call this new, aspirational practice 'planning at the speed of cities', or 'iterative planning'. An iterative planning practice is one that learns by doing—regularly and reliably adjusting rules and updating systems based on whether they actually succeed at delivering homes, jobs, and access to amenities. This contemporary planning should make use of measurement, testing, and other staples of modern policymaking to improve our cities in real-time, delivering better material outcomes for the maximum number of people.

There are three key steps to unlocking iterative planning in the Australian context.

1. Planning departments should be opened to non-planner policy professionals
2. The Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI's) monopoly should be dissolved
3. Planners should embrace iterative policymaking toolkits

These steps all reinforce each other. Broadening the professional mix will inject new skills, reduce ideological capture, and resolve the so-called “planner shortage” overnight. Reforming AHURI will allow new institutions—led by urban economists, technologists, and practitioners—to generate better data and frameworks for Australian practitioners. And those frameworks will then be able to inform the modern policymaking tools that will enable this diverse new cohort of iterative planning professionals to produce policies that actually respond to fast-paced urban realities, not just the aesthetic tastes and slow-moving procedures of those who command power under the status quo.

A better world requires better planning. This second section of the essay lays out how we might get there. 

Reports of a planner shortage have been greatly exaggerated. Because there is no occupational licensing for planners (this is a good thing) there is no legal obligation for planning departments and firms to only hire those with planning degrees. Rather, this is a norm, and one in urgent need of updating, especially as planning courses across the country continue to close. 

Planning departments should resolve any shortages by opening roles to a broader pool of policy professionals, as is the norm in other areas of government. We don’t let only engineers write energy policy. We don't limit health policy to doctors. The Australian Consumer and Competition Commission hires lawyers, economists, and a broad range of experts to build out their work. So why should only accredited planners write planning rules?

This change will require legacy planners to understand and accept that their work is not fundamentally different from policymaking in trade, healthcare, commerce, or any other area of society that requires government intervention. Specifically: legacy planners will need to understand that their role is to facilitate change and development, to regulate only the most serious material externalities, and to wield different regulatory tools to make trade-offs between outcomes in service of broader policy goals. Legacy planners will need to adapt—from being solitary regulators to collaborators in cross-disciplinary teams.

As we enable a broader base of policymakers to enter planning departments, we must ensure that departments on the whole are adequately connected to the rest of government. Land use policymaking should be subject to the same oversight and accountability mechanisms as other areas of government, including thorough modelling and analysis before and after implementation, the utilisation of tradeoffs and rigorous cost-benefit analyses, and the proper utilisation of price signals and other economic data. All land use regulations should be subject to rigorous periodic review, placing the onus on regulators to prove that any given set of restrictions is justified. This would go a long way toward overcoming land use planning's innate status quo bias. 

This will not be a difficult change for governments to make, but it will represent a large shift for legacy planners. And this is as good a tradeoff as any. The goal of planning reform must be to deliver better outcomes for the many—over and above the legacy privileges of the few.

As governments work to open up the Australian planning silo, it will be necessary to reassess government departments' current reliance on private legacy planning firms.

Currently, a select number of planning firms contract with governments to develop regulation, such as strategic plans, minimum dwelling standards, and neighbourhood character guidelines. In many instances, these firms also sell additional services to private landowners, homebuilders, and lower levels of government to navigate the regulations that they themselves create. 

While this might be called efficient, it also might be called something else: the very definition of regulatory capture. 

This issue is particularly explicit in the area of heritage planning. When local councils contract private heritage consultants to do heritage studies, they are creating a perverse incentive: the more properties these consultants recommend for listing through regulation, the more potential future clients they create.

This pattern could be seen as a form of regulatory arbitrage—where complexity creates a market for consultants to navigate it. Any serious planning reform should root out this practice entirely. We should focus on strengthening state capacity, and relocate regulatory practice entirely within the public sector, and end the government's need to utilise private legacy planning firms-for-hire. 

Removing the ability for rent-seeking firms to profit off of regulation will be key to building this new system of iterative planning, and will incentivise the development of a stronger research and informational base—which is what we will talk about next.

In the first half of this essay, we established the 70-year failure of legacy planners to measure both the inputs and outputs of their policy prescriptions. How, then, has the silo been able to maintain any legitimacy in the modern day, given its continual failure to build a quantitative evidence base?

The answer can be found in the outputs of another legacy planning monopoly: the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI). For two decades Australian urban policy research has suffered from the same siloing problem as the broader planning profession. The lion's share of Australia's housing, land-use, and planning research is funded, published, and promoted by one single institution, and this has led to an under-development of the evidence base, and has had a deleterious effect on the ability of Australian planners to undertake reform—because the evidence base is controlled by the proprietors of the status quo.

AHURI receives around $4 million annually from state and federal governments through the National Housing Research Program (NHRP) Funding Agreement. These funds are then distributed exclusively to researchers who are members of AHURI's nine partner universities—who themselves collectively contribute more than $1.2 million to AHURI per annum.¹⁴¹⁴14

In their Strategic Plan 2022–2027, AHURI describes itself as "crucial", because it is "​​the only organisation in Australia dedicated exclusively to housing, homelessness, cities and related urban research". 

What's framed here as intellectual leadership exists only because the Institute has a functional monopoly on our nation's housing research.

The current NHRP arrangement renders AHURI a closed shop. Research that does not meet their narrow agenda has no opportunity to seek funding. The institution is its own peer reviewer. 

The research undertaken by AHURI does not tackle a serious urban agenda. In the past five National Housing Research Program rounds, there has been almost no meaningful opportunity for researchers to undertake any serious exploration of Australian land use regulation and the tradeoffs it might make against overall housing supply. 

Where they have investigated the topic, it has been of verifiably low quality. This is largely due to an overreliance on the findings of a single, flawed 2017 paper. Even this paper, though, does manage to find alignment with consensus:

the sharp fall in the estimates of price elasticities of supply when planning controls are present in model specifications deserves further investigation.

But although they claim this topic deserves further investigation, in the eight years since publishing Housing supply responsiveness in Australia, AHURI has never actually looked into it. This has enabled legacy planners to handwave in submission after submission, advocacy piece after advocacy piece: if our nation's researchers don't think planning reform is important, then it must not be important.

In spite of—or perhaps because of—their lack of meaningful research into land use regulation and housing supply, the AHURI brand is often wielded by its member researchers and executives to dispute mainstream housing economics within the public discourse.

This phenomenon reached its peak when a group of AHURI-affiliated researchers published an article in The Conversation titled The market has failed to give Australians affordable housing, so don’t expect it to solve the crisis. In this letter they dispute the work of the Productivity Commission's 2022 work on the National Housing and Homelessness Agreement—a report that by all measures reflects broad international evidence, and makes recommendations in line with that evidence.

The AHURI response claims that the report's key recommendations rest on faulty assumptions and "outdated economic thinking". The article cites only AHURI research to justify this—specifically, the Institute's 2022 paper on filtering, which is regularly rolled out by legacy planners to dismiss the concept of filtering altogether. Crucially, however, the paper itself does not discredit the idea of filtering, nor demonstrate any particular strain of economic thought to be outdated. Rather, it finds that filtering is real—but also that Australian cities do not build enough new homes for it to be impactful.¹⁵¹⁵15

The cause of our failure to build more homes once again goes broadly unexamined.

Articles that misrepresent evidence can be genuinely damaging—especially when they shape public understanding and policymaking. That these articles are published with names attached to our nation's closed-shop housing research institute, and regularly used to underpin the arguments of legacy planning's peak bodies and voices—including many of those featured in this essay's first half—increases the degree of harm by a magnitude. 

There are several other examples of AHURI researchers, credited as such, pushing spurious claims in the media and wider discourse. According to their annual impact report, AHURI was featured in the media more than 3,000 times in 2023–24.

The two main tasks of a research institute are topic selection and quality control. AHURI struggles at both. The result is an organisation that spends millions of dollars a year on research at odds with the interests and priorities of both policymakers and Australian society at large.

The problem of AHURI is the problem of legacy planning and of all monopolies more broadly: a lack of external input has rendered them stagnant and detached from greater society. Like we do with problematic monopolies, the solution with AHURI is to break it up. 

The Productivity Commission has already recommended this in their review of the National Housing and Homelessness Agreement, in which they recommend that the National Housing Research Project grants be made contestable. To demonstrate the viability of a more contestable NHRP funding pool, we need only take a cursory look at the broader Australian research funding context. 

The National Competitive Grants Program (NCGP) is the main source of research funding Australia-wide, and exists separately from the AHURI carveout in the National Housing and Homelessness Agreement. 

Over the 2021-25 period, the NCGP dispersed an additional $11 million in grants for urban and regional planning research. More than 70% of both individual grants and total funds were awarded to AHURI Research Centres. 

This indicates that AHURI's researchers are more than capable of competing for research funding outside of their silo, and that opening the NHRP grants up to a wider range of researchers will only increase fairness, with limited impacts on incumbents.

However, it is worth noting that over the past five years, the NCGP has also failed to fund projects undertaking meaningful investigations into the stringency of land use regulation. Further work must be done to align land use research priorities with the material and policy contexts of contemporary Australia, and serious engagement with urban economics, labour markets, and land use regulation must be prioritised in future research funding rounds. 

AHURI's current monopoly funding agreement expires in 2026. The government should take full advantage of this window for reform, and investigate options which may include:

• Redirecting NHRP funding toward the establishment of an independent urban policy agency or team within the Productivity Commission
• Establishing a research institute centralised within a single university, utilising a similar model as the Australian National University's Tax and Transfer Policy Institute.

If we are to build the faster land use systems that our nation needs, then it will be necessary to rapidly develop expertise in the fields of urban economics and land use regulation, in order to provide a backbone for the kinds of contemporary policy tools that Australia's planning departments will need in order to deliver more liveable, sustainable, and affordable cities in our nation's highly urbanised future. 

Modern policymaking uses data to track inputs, measure outcomes, and update policies dynamically. Most of planning still doesn’t. Very few planning departments publish objective performance indicators. Fewer still use data to evaluate whether their policies are working. The result is a regime focused on process rather than outcomes—underpinned by an inability and unwillingness to admit or assess when it might have failed. 

To create better cities, we need better planning. Better planning will be concerned predominantly with the public realm, and have much less sway over private land use. It will be faster and more iterative. It will be planning at the speed of cities.

This section is by no means exhaustive, and I explicitly stop short of recommending technical tools. For an introduction to contemporary planning toolkits, I recommend Alain Bertaud's Order Without Design, which is a guide to combining urban economics and urban planning; as well as M Nolan Grey's Arbitrary Lines, for those interested—as I am—in more flexible alternatives to the rigidity of zoning. For examples of implementation, the New Zealand Productivity Commission's Better Urban Planning, and the University of Auckland's A New Approach to Urban Planning both offer robust starts.

For now, though, let's remain at the level of regulatory frameworks, and begin the journey toward a better system of land use planning for all.

Legacy planning has reduced land use policy to social pseudoscience. While practitioners often make claims that use the language of empiricism, most of their assertions rest on an evidence base that lacks measurement, testing, or replicable methodology. Common subjects of planning regulations such as "human-scale", "visual bulk", and "neighbourhood character" are subjective terms that mean very little in the material world. The post-material concerns of legacy planning complicates the process of making tradeoffs within planning practice, because planners assign arbitrary, fuzzy values to the more vague concerns of their profession. Because of this, the vagaries of legacy planning can matter exactly as much or as little as any given practitioner decides on any given day. 

Upper-level setbacks provide a tangible example for discussion. These are a particularly costly and poorly-justified built-form regulation, and were the subject of YIMBY Melbourne's 2024 research note Upper-level Setbacks Delenda Est. After the research was released—alongside an open letter from many of the state's best architects, sustainability consultants, and planners—I began to brief legacy planners on the content.

In one meeting, I was explaining Ha/f Climate Design's excellent Embodied Carbon Study, produced for the City of Toronto in 2024. Ha/f had quantified the costs of upper-level setback regulations pretty clearly: lower housing yields at a greater carbon intensity—and a higher financial cost.

When putting together our research, we looked into the alleged benefits of upper-level setbacks. The evidence for these was scarce, and mostly amounted to an increase in direct direct sunlight on streets, a slight reduction in the potential wind impacts of buildings over 20 storeys, and a reduction in what legacy planners call "visual bulk". 

The tradeoffs, laid out, make it clear: upper-level setbacks are an extremely bad deal. 

At the conclusion of the briefing, the legacy planners told me that they were disappointed that I had not sufficiently accounted for the fact that upper-level setbacks make buildings "human-scale".  

I do not at this point need to tell you: the compound adjective "human-scale" should not be centred within any rigorous analysis of policy that imposes serious material costs to society. And yet, within the framework of legacy planning, it does. 

This is an example of what Sushil Tailor calls "semantic cargo": 

Consider the semantic cargo embedded in common planning concepts. Shadow studies sound objective and scientific, but they encode an assumption that any shadow cast by a new building represents harm to be minimized. Setback requirements ostensibly preserve neighbourhood character, but they guarantee that new buildings will be smaller and house fewer people. Floor area ratio limits appear to balance competing interests, but they systematically bias outcomes toward lower density.
These concepts aren't neutral technical tools—they're weapons forged in the fires of countless community meetings where NIMBYs demanded that everything be smaller, shorter, and further apart. Engaging with them on their own terms means accepting premises designed to favor the status quo.

Successful future planning policy must concern itself exclusively with the material. As legacy planners like to remind us, they do not build anything. They talk about placemaking, but planning regulation does not in fact make places. The masterplan is not the terrain, and where planners use consolidated revenue to deliver parks and other public spaces for residents, this is always a function of productive delivery rather than regulation.¹⁶¹⁶16

Where regulations are made, they should be made only with clear material tradeoffs accounted for through rigorous cost-benefit analysis. The fealty of all regulation should be to a measurable set of outcomes. The Abundant Housing Network Australia, in our submission to the 2024 National Urban Plan, outlined what some of these measurable outcomes might look like—rents, vacancy rates, commute times, air pollution. 

By focusing on externalities, tradeoffs, and outcomes, the quality of planning regulation will improve drastically. Terms like “human-scale” should reflect actual human needs and outcomes—not just abstract design preferences. In an outcomes-oriented planning framework, the human-scale building is the building with humans in it.

Legacy planners currently receive a large amount of the information that informs regulation from the worst possible source: opt-in community consultation. 

It is well-established that community consultation processes are biased toward older, wealthier incumbents. But problems with this process go well beyond who gets a say, and has just as much to do with why they might be saying anything in the first place. 

It is important for planners to understand that people only engage in consultation if they are motivated to achieve a given outcome. This outcome might be the blocking of a social housing project or safe injecting room, or it may be stopping a supermarket from opening within walking distance of an incumbent convenience store. It may be a member of a local YIMBY group trying to get more housing built in their area.

I can make my point very simply: few people who get their way complain about insufficient consultation.

As such, community consultation is unlikely to provide planners with much useful information about the world as it exists. Rather, it will tell them what some number of individuals each think they would like the world to become. This may be valuable, but it is worth noting that people's stated preferences for the future are unreliable; every year, millions of people buy gym memberships that they never use. People oppose supermarkets that they then go on to shop at. They oppose change happening, and then embrace it once it has. 

Revealed preferences are much more useful than stated preferences. No form of community consultation will ever fully overcome its inherent biases, and it should not form the basis of decisionmaking. Successful iterative planners will need to develop and maintain data sources which are of unmotivated origin, of high quality, and regularly updated. Earlier, I gave examples of what planners might measure. To that list we could add: how many people use a given park, how full the trams are, how many bikes use the dedicated bike path versus the road.

Younger planners are much more likely to understand these signals, because they are more likely to be exposed to them in their day to day lives. Young people are more likely to stand in line for rental inspections, more likely to experience longer commutes, more likely to spend an outsized proportion of their income on housing.

This is a hopeful note: younger planning professionals are well-positioned to embrace iterative planning practice. They will be more open to measuring the real world, because they will be more exposed to it, and have a much stronger stake in ensuring their work is having the desired impact. 

In his 2014 paper, Fallibility, Reflexivity, and the Human Uncertainty Principle, George Soros, the great champion of the open society, writes on reflexivity's crucial role in systems of human agency and intervention:

My conceptual framework is built on two relatively simple propositions. The first is that in situations that have thinking participants, the participants’ views of the world never perfectly correspond to the actual state of affairs. [...]

The second proposition is that these imperfect views can influence the situation to which they relate through the actions of the participants. For example, if investors believe that markets are efficient then that belief will change the way they invest, which in turn will change the nature of the markets in which they are participating (though not necessarily making them more efficient). That is the principle of reflexivity.

This concept can be applied with relative neatness to the circular relationship that exists between regulation and the material world. It might be put something like this:

1. Regulation changes the material world;
2. When the material world changes, it must be reexamined; and 
3. The changed world may require different regulation than the world which came before.

A lack of regulatory reflexivity is at the heart of legacy planning's great failures. Land use regulation often intends to directly and explicitly influence land uses and prices—but because legacy planning toolkits and timelines do not measure and adjust in the aftermath of their interventions, there is no ability to iterate. Most legacy planning is done at the speed of set-and-forget. Zoning maps are static documents—but the world is forever in motion. 

Moreover, the very existence of the plan disrupts its own operation. For instance, imagine you are a homebuilder interested in constructing apartments in an area currently zoned for single detached dwellings. But then, you learn that the local council intends to upzone that area to allow six storeys. Upon learning this, you begin looking to purchase some of the land in question. When the council's plans are further along, others may begin doing the same. Just like that, the world has shifted. Land values have increased. Different people are moving in and out. Homebuilders have begun preparing development applications. The council's plan is not even gazetted and it is already out of date.

In war, they say that ​​no plan survives contact with the enemy. Legacy planning barely makes it to the battlefield.

Because all of society operates based on imperfect information, it naturally follows that the outcomes of our actions will often not reflect our intentions. We understand this intuitively in the context of our day-to-day life, but we often neglect this problem in the context of regulatory systems. In her book on the failures of prescriptive top-down policy to deliver desired outcomes, Jennifer Pahlka writes:

Other policy prescriptions have backfired because they are deterministic, assuming that if you do X, you can get Y. [...] [But] doing X often doesn’t result in Y, because we fail to anticipate the ways each subsystem adapts to changes in the others and creates incentives we didn’t intend. Deterministic policy solutions invite unintended consequences.

This is quite right, and policy success within a complex world will be determined by departmental abilities to understand and adjust regularly and accordingly to emerging circumstances. 

Legacy planners always intervene, and only sometimes measure. But the main role of planners should be to always measure, and only sometimes intervene.

Where commute times are lengthening, planners may implement congestion charges to nudge commuter behaviour. Where rental vacancy rates are low, planners may upzone to enable new construction. Where sewerage pipes are nearing capacity, more should be built. Congestion charges can be iteratively raised or lowered to determine outcomes; planning restrictions can be iteratively loosened to enable greater project feasibility; sewerage pipes can be funded through scheduled rates and charges, as well as general revenue. The outcomes of these interventions can be regularly measured, and the exact implementations altered accordingly. 

This is planning at the speed of the city—and it’s the planning our nation needs if we are to prosper in the decades ahead. This new paradigm will breathe fresh life into our urban centres, and enable flourishing not just in written plans, but in the real, material world where people live.

Legacy planners will likely respond to this essay with claims that I have misunderstood the intentions of their work. I will retort that they have misunderstood the outcomes.

And this, of course, is the core of the problem. That intentions and outcomes are so often unaligned, and that as such we need to build systems to bring them closer together. And so it is time for land use planning to become something new, something fit for purpose. It is time to rebuild a planning practice that will facilitate the development of a bigger and better Australia, and will ensure that our nation's land is enabled to serve the needs of our entire population. This is a planning where feedback loops are short, incentives are aligned, and failure leads to learning, rather than paralysis.

We are well-primed to undertake this change. A younger generation of policymakers have for their whole adult lives been exposed through both media and travel to the grand urban possibilities of the East and the West, as well as a more mature understanding of regulatory tradeoffs. These young urbanists are the people ready to remake our cities, mainly because they believe in cities in the first place. And so they are the people best-placed to embrace and implement a system of iterative planning—to manage a system of land use policymaking that moves at the speed of those selfsame cities. 

Shattering the legacy planning silo isn’t just about fixing a broken system. It’s about building cities worthy of the people who live in them. This essay has outlined just how we might begin.

1. Planning department roles should be opened up to non-planning policy professionals
2. Planning policy should be made in service of material, measurable goals, such as rents, vacancy rates, commute times, and air pollution
3. Planning regulation should be subject to standard government oversight such as Regulatory Impact Statements, cost-benefit analyses, and periodic review of policy efficacy
4. Governments should police private firms that sell both planning regulation and its navigation to public and private actors
5. The National Housing Research Project (NHRP) grants pool should no longer be the exclusive purview of the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI). Funding may be redirected to an independent urban policy agency, a new team within the Productivity Commission, or a research institute centralised within a single university.

This essay was supported by significant research assistance by Ethan Gilbert. I am also indebted to the generous input of reviewers representing a variety of planning, economics, architecture, and public policy perspectives. Thank you all for your help.