Spencer, Michael

From grandeur and monumentalism, through liveability and zoning to private- public conflict over space. Urban planning has evolved influenced by the prevailing narrative of the time. This presentation will reflect on two considerations: the influence of neoliberalism on urban planning and its impacts, and the potential to reimagine urban planning through the lens of commons theory. Instead of a system of managing private rights, can we better manage conflict in urban design through a focus on commons? The presentation will approach these questions from the perspective of Melbourne; Australia’s fastest growing city with a population of five million and in the midst of a housing affordability crisis. Despite Australia being an affluent country, governments with scarce financial resources post-COVID chose to erode and privatise commons in the search for density and housing availability. This reduces or degrades common spaces both on the ground and in the air creating conflict. With no respite on urban growth anticipated, the paper asks whether a clearer understanding of urban commons is required to influence both public discourse and approaches to planning. Opening dialogue about commons spaces, how they are managed and what is important requires collaborative forms of governance that engage a wider range of community actors. Many of these are currently disempowered by planning systems and laws. The presentation will be from the perspective of both a practitioner in a local community and researcher.

This presentation will build on recent research projects examining climate adaptation governance; a comparative study of the United States, China and Australia that provided high-level assessment and two ground-truthing workshops in rural Australia. It is now widely accepted that transformational adaptation will require local, bottom-up drivers of change yet technical expertise, finance and knowledge of climate impacts is generally held at a national level. In addition, top-down initiatives are often short term and channelled through silos of institutions with their own cultures and points of focus. Communities in these circumstances become disillusioned, find it hard to establish priorities and the leadership required to move through a process such as the Global Resilience Framework agreed at COP 28. Polycentric forms of governance offer opportunities to consider different governance arrangements that can engage a wider range of actors in building consensus on adaptation, strengthen collaboration between different levels of government and, government and community. This requires acknowledgement and creation of preconditions by higher levels of government. These preconditions require addressing Institutional blocks to local adaptation governance. Lack of progress on adaptation is widely recognised by the IPCC, UNEP and others yet it becomes more urgent as the Paris Agreement target slips further. This presentation will consider these issues and start to sketch an outline of a path forward based on this combination of top-down and bottom-up research.