Competing Philosophical Rationales and Processes

Urban Studies, Vol. 36, No. 11, 1891± 1906, 1999

Searching for the Sustainable City: Competing Philosophical Rationales and Processes of Ìdeological Capture’ in Adelaide, South Australia Graham Haughton [Paper ® rst received, February, 1998; in ® nal form, October 1998]

Summary. The growing debate around sustainable cities has generated a substantial academic and policy literature. It is becoming increasingly clear that there are a number of different approaches being considered. This article develops four models of sustainable urban development from this literature, ranging from light green to deep green in their underlying environmental philosophy. The models are then used as the framework for analysing four different experiments in sustainable urban development in the city of Adelaide, South Australia, which broadly ® t into the four models. Overall, the models are useful in highlighting the different underlying rationales of the four approaches, although they also show that in the process of trying to gain political favour there is a fair amount of ìdeological capture’ in respect of the rhetorics and the practice of sustainable urban development.

Introduction The urgency of the need to move towards the `sustainable city’ has become a rallying call for many environmental activists, professionals and politicians in recent years (Commission of the European Communities, 1990; OECD, 1990; Haughton and Hunter, 1994; Burgess et al., 1997; Roseland, 1997, 1998; Satterthwaite, 1997a, 1997b). As this movement grows, it is possible to begin to disentangle a number of radically different views on how processes of sustainable urban development need to be brought about, from deepgreen attempts to foster the self-reliant city, to more neo-liberal attempts to use the market to foster sustainability by changing pricing and regulatory systems. Of particular interest here is a recent attempt to identify

four competing models of sustainable urban development (see Haughton 1997, 1999), which are reviewed brie¯ y below and summarised in Table 1. In this paper, it will be argued that, in very broad outline, it is possible to see that in recent years proponents for each of these four approaches have been active in the city of Adelaide, South Australia, leading to some local debate about how best to move towards sustainable urban development. In practice, the differences between the models are clouded by the considerable overlap in respect of actual policy directions. In effect, considerable consensus has been achieved in respect of Western cities around many policy goals, such as improving energy conser-

Graham Haughton is in CUDEM, School of Built Environment, Leeds Metropolitan University, Leeds LS1 3HE, UK. Fax: 0113 283 3190. Email: [email protected]. Particular thanks to the Department of Geography, Flinders University of South Australia, where the author was visiting research fellow, during early 1997, when this research was undertaken. 0042-0980 Print/1360-063X On-line/99/111891-16

Ó 1999 The Editors of Urban Studies

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vation, reducing car dependence and a shift towards more compact city forms, with higher residential densities and mixed land uses. The areas of difference over policy tools are often ones of degree rather than fundamental disagreement. Instead, the grand battles are essentially ones of philosophy and strategy, aspects which this paper seeks to begin to unpack. Competing Visions of the Processes of Sustainable City Building Models of the ideal city have a long and well-charted history in land-use planning, something which the recent interest in sustainable forms of urban development has tended to highlight (see Hill, 1992; Basiago, 1996). In this section, a series of contemporary alternative models for sustainable urban development (see Table 1 for a summary) is brie¯ y outlined as a potentially useful theoretical framework against which to investigate the rhetoric and reality of attempts to move towards more sustainable patterns of urban development in the city of Adelaide, Australia. The free-market model, or the externally dependent city as it is termed here, centres on the largely non-spatial views of economists seeking to address urban environmental problems through altering market mechanisms. Very brie¯ y, this form of analysis interprets the problems of cities as being largely ones of market and regulatory failure (World Bank, 1991; see also Burgess et al., 1997). In the free-trade world of the externally dependent city, the assumption is that trading with distant places is essentially unproblematic, provided that major market externalities are addressed. In this `lightgreen’ approach to sustainable development, both environmental damage and the social justice aspects of the sustainable development debates emerge as effectively subordinate goals to greater economic ef® ciency, with greater wealth capable of being spread to those most in need through trickle-down mechanisms. The redesigning the city model has its

roots in architectural and land-use planning perspectives, where a central theme is that redesigning the physical fabric of the existing city in various ways can encourage greater resource ef® ciency. Contemporary Western cities are viewed as having engaged in a low-density sprawling type of growth, which has increasingly separated where people live from where they work, shop, go to school or engage in leisure pursuits, requiring considerable consumption of land and also energy for travel. Added in to this analysis of urban problems is a view that land-use zoning practices within Western cities which sought to separate places of residence away from polluting factories went too far, leading to a general policy tendency towards monofunctional zoning. When combined with the tendency towards large-scale service provision, from retailing to schools and hospitals, exclusionary zoning has tended to lead to an increased separation between where people live, work and use urban services, adding impetus to the tendency towards heavy car-reliance. In effect, our growing dependence on a particular set of technologies, for instance energy-inef® cient cars, homes and of® ces, and water-hungry industrial and domestic appliances, has led to the development of city forms which assume continued supplies of cheap and plentiful natural resources. The main policy prescriptions for these interrelated problems have been interpreted by many planners and architects as requiring a fundamental redesign of the physical fabric of the city, working towards enabling people to become less car-dependent, in particular through attempts to increase urban residential densities, to concentrate development around key public transport routes and nodes, and to encourage a reversion in favour of mixed land uses within the city (Owens, 1986; Haughton and Hunter, 1994). In addition to improved energy ef® ciency, it is argued that moving towards greater urban compaction, can be an important ingredient in encouraging people to use the land resource more sparingly. The redesigning the city approach also lays much emphasis on improving the

Global, marketdriven; unrestricted hinterland

Go for it

Market regulation; create markets; deregulate; reduce inappropriate subsidies

Consumer/producer pays; no directed redistribution

Market supremacy; neoliberalism; very light green; price signals

Information and individual choice; consumer sovereignty

Smart/high-technology

`Conquer’ or price nature

Main trade orientation

Economic growth

Regulation

Externality costs

Value system

Engagement

Technology

Nature

Externally dependent cities

Control, measure and manage nature

Environmentally ef® cient technologies

Consultation, linked to democratic mandate of local, regional, national state

Anthropocentric, light green, modify human behaviour by planning

Consumer/producer pays; infrastructure subsidies removed

State regulation; land-use planning and design control; reduce inappropriate subsidies

Accommodate it

Market-led economic development; implicit to reduce negative external impacts

Redesigning cities

Work with/ integrate nature

Low/appropriate technology

Participation; collective decision-making

Ecocentric; deep green; moral sanction

Alter production and consumer systems to internalise costs within bioregion

Self-regulation; alternative markets (e.g. LETS); decentralised control

Selective growth, based on environmental desirability

Bioregion; local capacity-driven; restricted-hinterland ecological footprint

Self-reliant cities

Attention to environmental tolerances and use of precautionary principle

Mixture of technologies

Mixture of roles; strong state role in redistributive policies

Nature-sensitive; market modi® cation; `deep’ green

Consumer and producer pay, or state redistributive; targeted redistribution to where costs borne

Major market regulation for trade plus concern to establish and respect regional carrying capacities

Guide it

Global-local; restricted by carrying capacity and guided by equity concerns; attempts to manage hinterland trading

Fair shares cities

Table 1. Main features of the four models of sustainable urban development

THE SUSTAINABLE CITY

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individual components of the physical infrastructure of the city, in particular the energy ef® ciency of buildings, green spaces and public open spaces. Whilst the arguments are far from clear-cut in favour of urban compaction (see Breheny, 1992, 1995), it is important to emphasise that this is a popular policy approach, endorsed by the European Commission in its Green Paper on the Urban Environment (Commission of the European Communities, 1990) and by others. For Harvey (1995, see also 1992) this raises concerns about the activities of planners who, he argues, privilege physical `things’ and urban form over social processes, leading to unsuccessful attempts at social engineering based on changing the physical fabric of the city (Harvey, 1995, see also 1992). The third model, referred to here as the self-reliant city, derives from what is in reality a rich and highly varied ecocity literature from a deep-green perspective (Roseland, 1997). With particular debts to the work of Bookchin (1974, 1995) and Register (1987), the emphasis is on combining a more sensitive approach to nature with a decentralised, grass-roots politics, emphasising community activism over state-led bureaucracies. Embracing most of the key tenets of the deep-green approach to sustainable development, the preservation of natural assets is a central concern, in particular designing cities in ways that best integrate with nature. This is usually seen as involving small decentralised communities, which it is intended will lead to a more `nature-centred’ lifestyle, raising ecological consciousness through proximity (see Harvey, 1995, pp. 56±58, for a critique of this approach). The preservationist stance to natural resources is interpreted as minimising urban impacts on natural assets of all kinds, including a general commitment to reduce impacts on external areas, that is reducing the ècological footprint’ of the city (Wackernagel and Rees, 1996). In this sense, the bioregion (for instance a river-catchment area or distinctive ecosystem type) becomes the building block for the sustainable city-region, with inhabitants geared to using the bioregion’ s

resource rather than importing materials and to absorbing (recycling, reusing, etc.) wastes within the bioregion, rather than transferring wastes externally as pollution. In terms of hinterland engagement, then, the key is to reduce the level of external exchanges, instead building up local economies as far as possible based upon local resources. The emphasis tends to be on small-scale production systems for local need, rather than large-scale production for global export markets and using locally produced appropriate technologies, rather than imported, expensive, high-technology, capital-intensive production systems. Growth is focused on environmentally benign products and services, whilst efforts are made to reduce or phase out environmentally damaging types of economic development. Some forms of exchange with external areas are accepted as necessary, but the clear goal is to minimise these, raising fears of regional autarky linked to technological, cultural and other forms of stagnation (Haughton, 1997). The ® nal model, here termed fair shares, involves greater attention to the conditions of trading between a city-region and its hinterland, again focusing around concerns about the ecological footprint of cities. This model is best envisaged as taking many of the features of the redesigning the city and the self-reliant city modelsÐ such as increased regional autarky, greater urban compaction and improved use of market toolsÐ whilst adding to these the speci® c tools for engaging in more equitable trading relationships with other areas. In addition, as the model centres on altering trading relationships, almost a form of externality pricing at the international scale, there are potentially close links to the market-led model of the externally dependent city. The fundamental difference is that the fair-shares model envisages a world which is less an open market for exchange of global assets, and instead one where trading in environmental assets and capacities is permitted only where damage is not irreversible, and where adequate compensation mechanisms are put in place between exchanging areas. Essentially the


fair-shares-city approach is one of quasiautarky, rather than the regional autarky of the self-reliant city, where some trading of environmental assets is seen as essential to improving the global well-being of humans, whilst adding in conditions to ensure that this trade does not undermine regional or global ecosystem integrity, or contribute to inequitable trading relationships which widen the gaps between poor and rich areas. Based in particular on the work of White and Whitney (1992) and Ravetz (1994), the argument is that it should be possible to engage in fair trading of environmental resources and pollution in ways which bene® t both sides of the trading relationship without breaching local or global environmental-tolerance levels. The essential feature of this model is that cities become more closely tied to their hinterland areas, in contrast to the self-reliant-city approach of withdrawing from most hinterland `trade’ , the attempts to reduce dependence of the redesigning the city approach and the general geographical blindness of the externally dependent city, where the market is expected to provide direct compensation for all individual decisions. This is perhaps the least articulated within the environmental literature and also the least developed in policy terms. It is perhaps regarded as a pragmatic blend of aspects of other models, linked to an ideological concern that cities `pay their way’ Ð that is, that their development is not at the expense of other areas, be they regional hinterlands or part of distant global markets. In practice, this mixture of the pragmatic and ideological makes it the most dif® cult to understand this model, not least as it challenges so many basics of current social relations and seems so far from achieving policy acceptance. It is precisely because of this that the fair-shares approach of the Halifax EcoCity, outlined below, is so welcome in providing some indications of how such thinking is beginning to impact on verydeep-green thinking in some quarters. Inevitably, these brief summaries of the four `models’ tend to caricature complex approaches to resolving environmental prob-

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lems, but nonetheless they do provide some insights into some of the assumptions which underpin the work of different sets of proponents. Initially, the four models were regarded as overarching philosophical positions informing the work of deep-green ecologists, planners, the World Bank and others, acting at a general society-wide level, where competition for ideological supremacy was being fought out on national and international stages which would then ® lter down to policy-makers on the ground (Haughton, 1997). In practice, as the following case study of Adelaide begins to reveal, the oppositional tendencies of the different approaches are less clear-cut than the models suggest; whilst, on the ground, many of the differences can be seen as much at the level of individual small-scale projects as at the level of broader national debates. Adelaide Surges towards Sustainability? Since the mid 1980s, Adelaide has seen a remarkable diversity of plans ostensibly geared towards making the city more sustainable (see Figure 1): the much remarked upon multifunctional polis (MFP), a high-tech, market-oriented, would-be urban prototype, initially based in the north of the city; a redesigning the city approach spread across the whole city (the Green Street and Building Better Cities programmes of federal government); a self-reliant city type development, based on permaculture principles in the Hindmarsh area to the north-west of the city centre; and most recently the proposed Halifax EcoCity development, based in the city centre, but with an outlier in rural south Australia, which has very strong resonances with the fair-shares model outlined above. 1 It is valuable to add a bit of contextual information at this stage about Adelaide, its economy, its environment and its land-use planning tradition. Adelaide is a city of 1 070 000 people, based in South Australia, frequently described as the driest state in the driest continent in the world. Politically, there are three main tiers of elected governmentÐ federal, state and local. The South

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MFP core Brompton/Bowden City centre Gulf St. Vincent

Halifax Street

low-density residential sprawl, fuelled in the post World War II years by a massive increase in personal car ownership and associated road-building programmes, plus state subsidy of key urban infrastructure in the shape of roads, water, electricity and gas connections in particular. This has led in recent years to considerable policy interest in promoting urban consolidation, initially in an attempt to reduce the costs to the state of urban sprawl, with the sustainable urban development agenda subsequently adding impetus to this policy direction (Birrell, 1991; Unwin and Searle, 1991). Externally Dependent City, Multifunctionpolis Style

0

5

10 15 20km

N

Figure 1. Metropolitan Adelaide, South Australia.

Australian state government retains strong economic development and environmental powers, complemented by additional powers devolved to local government. At the urban level, local government is shared across a range of bodies, with no single metropolitan organisation for Adelaide as a whole. Inhabited for just over 150 years by white settlers, much of the original vegetation in the Adelaide area has been removed or transformed. The recent massive rise in population of the city has been built around massive water imports from the River Murray to the east of the city, used for household consumption, industry and agriculture. In many senses, this is a fragile, highly arti® cial and delicately balanced ecological system, with inherent stresses and tendencies to crisis, not least periodic droughts. The urban form has followed a fairly typical pattern for Australian cities, with initial medium-density residential development close to the city centre superseded for the past 100 years by a pattern of

Since ® rst mooted in the late 1980s, the joint Australian±Japanese plans for a multifunctionpolis (MFP) based in Australia have attracted considerable academic interest and also considerable initial local opposition. Re¯ ecting the increasing tendency to open up urban policy to competitive bidding, the Gillman site in northern Adelaide was selected following a national competition. The site designs focused on turning a degraded industrial wasteland into a new urban utopia which, according to its supporters, would combine high-technology, quality of life and environmental management, creating a world centre of excellence in all these ® elds. The reality was to be rather different from the initial hype, in fairness changing in some part to re¯ ect widespread concerns about the proposals, including fears of creating a technocratic eÂ lite within the city and destroying valuable mangrove habitat (Inkster, 1991; Haughton, 1994). The changes, however, also re¯ ected a diminished Japanese interest, as the Japanese economy lost its former buoyancy. Whilst the MFP attracted considerable political support at federal and state government levels, it has made very slow progress in building local grassroots support (Mouer and Sugimoto, 1990; McCormack, 1991; Downton, 1997). On environmental grounds, local critics have accused the MFP of simply being


a glori® ed exercise in creating development opportunities to be subsidised by the state, with early proposals for the Gillman site seen as part of a typical `conquering nature’ approach to urban development, rather than a genuine environmental initiative: The whole thing [reclaiming the Gillman site] was a terri® c engineering challenge. It’ d need lots of construction, lots of concrete ¼ which was what the MFP was all about originally ¼ their environment mindset was this energy-ef® ciency thing. So you put energy-ef® cient buildings on these concrete rafts. It was not holistic. They brought all of that in bit by bit, almost grudgingly (Halifax EcoCity supporter). To an extent, the MFP now seems to accept some of these criticisms of its earlier activities. Certainly developments at Gillman were rapidly changed away from the initial commercial development, as the anticipated ¯ ows of overseas investment failed to materialise, the state government hit major ® nancial problems of its own and the local property market entered a major slump. Given these changed circumstances, the initial plans for draining and building on the land quickly came to be seen as costly and ecologically insensitive. The preferred solution has been to work on building a series of arti® cial wetlands which would help to hold urban run-off, addressing storm-water concerns and allowing heavy metals to be absorbed naturally by the vegetation, with cleaner water discharged out to sea. The 337 ha of wetlands are now `marketed’ as the largest urban wetlands in the world, improving water quality and ¯ ood protection for surrounding areas as well as upgrading the aesthetic appeal of the site itself. The wetlands project has drawn heavily on the existing work of the local council at Salisbury, which had been working on wetlands for 15 years, whilst pulling in additional expertise from the MFP itself, consultants and academics. This is seen as central to the project, building a body of intellectual capital which can then be used

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elsewhere, including a current contract to provide wetlands-creation advice to the Malaysian government. The intellectual property is growing. But it isn’ t something which is entirely captured within the organisation; it is developed in a consortium of the public, private and academic community ¼ It is a good example of what the MFP was set up to achieve ¼ create intellectual property, use that intellectual property either for economic development or environmental outcomes (MFP of® cial). This marriage of economic development and environmental objectives is important, involving claims that the ecological restoration of the area has provided a focus for ecotourism, for commercial development more generally and speci® cally for the sale of water and wetland design-related expertise (MFP Web siteÐ http://www.mfp.com.au; accessed on 4 April 1997).2 In other words, ® ne though environmental improvements are, the commercial potential is absolutely central to the work. With the election of a new cost-cutting Liberal federal government in 1996 the MFP ® nally lost its federal government funding support that year. This political turn of events created the opportunity for a major restructuring, with the MFP formally absorbed into the State Government for South Australia (also Liberal-controlled during the mid 1990s) and combined with the state land authority and major projects division. These extended activities have all been re-labelled MFP Development Corporation (MFPDC), giving the enlarged body an extended regeneration remit, plus a clear mandate to undertake development across the whole of metropolitan Adelaide. Although it is driven by a private-sectorled board of directors, the MFPDC is perhaps best seen as an organ of the state, especially in its recent reincarnation, in which direct political links for accountability have been strengthened. As such, it represents not so much a pure market-driven approach to urban environmental management as an

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attempt by the state to engage more productively with market forces in pursuing economic development and sustainable development. The MFP’ s support for sustainable development is seen as central to its mission, a form of support which is clearly in the `light-green’ mould, linked inextricably to its parallel mandate to pursue new and emerging technologies in support of state economic development. The Virginia pipeline project helps to illustrate the MFP’ s distinctive approach and philosophy in respect of environmental change. This project, now being built, involves redirecting treated sewage from a coastal sewage treatment works inland to the Virginia market garden area. The economic and environmental advantages of this development are potentially substantial. The current practice of disposing of nutrient-rich outfall into the Gulf of St Vincent is destroying sea grasses and mangrove, and in the process is damaging local ® sh-breeding grounds. At the receiving end, the Virginia area is currently facing water supply restrictions due to overdrawing from the local aquifer, which is already experiencing seawater intrusion and increasing salinity as a result. The new source of water supply will not only alleviate such problems but will also allow an expansion of market gardening activity. Apparently local growers predict that this will lead to between 1300 and 3100 new jobs in horticultural production, plus another 1600±2700 jobs in related areas such as packaging and export services, with independent analysts predicting that agricultural production will double in value, adding up to $168 million a year to the local economy (MFP Web site, 4 April 1997). The pipeline is being built at a cost of A$29 million, a third of which is coming from the federal government under its Building Better Cities (BBC) initiative. The development involves a complex deal, brokered by the MFPDC, involving the Virginia Irrigation Association and the local water utility, SA Water, plus a private-sector construction consortium. The project proved dif® cult to get off the ground, in part because it required that irrigators

accept that in future their water would be more costly, re¯ ecting the true supply costs of its provision. That the MFPDC persevered, indicates how well the project ® ts in with its twin environmental and economic development goals. The interesting thing is that we do this for two reasons. One because there is a major environmental problem, both at the discharge point and where the farmers are drawing down water, but there is also a major economic development imperative ¼ by producing more [vegetables] we can now encourage the production and shipment by air of a lot of these products to south-east Asia (MFP of® cer). Reusing waste water, recharging aquifers, innovative R&D in treating ef¯ uentÐ the list of achievements indeed is noteworthy. If there are doubts about the environmental credentials of the project, these stem largely from the envisaged contribution to Australia’ s new role as the `supermarket for Asia’ , with cauli¯ owers regularly ¯ owing through the airport for export to south-east Asia. To the deep-green environmentalist, the environmental costs of air transport would appear to be enormous. In terms of its approach to ecological hinterland issues, clearly the MFP has a radically different world-view from those who advocate moving towards greater local self-reliance rather than opening up new global markets. In terms of the ideological con¯ icts noted earlier, it is noteworthy that the MFP has been accused of selective `borrowing’ of ideas and rhetoric, with one EcoCity supporter arguing that ª they’ ve been borrowing our rhetoric ¼ . it’ s been lifted over the yearsº (interview; Halifax EcoCity activist). Whilst imitation may be the sincerest form of ¯ attery, the alleged selective nature of this clearly rankles because, although ª you can ® nd some nice ideas lurking in it, it always comes through half-baked and not very well integratedº . In summary then, MFP suffered from a particularly traumatic birth-period, when mistakes were made, in terms of approach to


community consultation, the environment and its emphasis on achieving hightechnology solutions to urban development problems. Over time, even most of its detractors now admit that the MFP is backing some worthwhile projects in an increasingly holistic way, whilst its substantial investments in environmental improvements have helped to improve its local reputation. It is also noteworthy that where originally the MFP vision was very much centred on the commercial development of one contaminated area, of® cers soon came to the conclusion that to effect the required ecological transformation it would have to extend its work to look at, for instance, its broader water-catchment area, moving towards a more regional perspective, as exempli® ed in its wetlands restoration work, the Virginia pipeline and even its attempts to encourage demonstration housing projects to consume less water and become self-suf® cient in terms of wastewater treatment. So whilst the MFPDC has a fairly typical `capture global markets’ and `conquer nature with technology’ ring to its rhetoric, it is still an approach which has considerable merit in terms of its approach to certain hinterland issues, and also in its attempts to marry environmental considerations with the political pressures to create more local jobs for the state of South Australia. Redesigning the City, Using the Green Street and Building Better Cities Programmes The redesigning the city approach has been very strong in Australia in recent years, led by a powerful combination of planners, architects and politicians determined to stem the tide of low-density urban sprawl. This concern with the physical form of the city can also be traced to long-standing social justice concerns about how distance from community facilities can impose further costs on disadvantaged groups, most evident under the Whitlam Labour government in the early 1970s. During the 1990s, two schemes have been particularly notable in this respect, the Green Street programme and the Building

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Better Cities initiative. The Green Street programme was an umbrella scheme for trying to promote higher residential densities, with very small amounts of money used to allow each state to employ just one person to identify and promote examples of good practice, with a small amount of money also available to facilitate the development of new demonstration projects. In practice, much of the motivation for the Green Street programme came from a desire to save on infrastructure costs for the state, rather than pressing environmental concerns. The most notable Green Street initiative in Adelaide was to fund the design work (A$50 000) for the New Brompton estate development in Hindmarsh, which was used as an in¯ uential pilot for a variety of approaches to medium-density design. The development took place on a brown® eld site, formerly a clay pit and a speedway area, covering 3.4 ha, located about 4 km out of the central-district area of the city. In environmental terms, the project is signi® cant in promoting development at densities of 27 houses per hectare (92 houses in total), well above the norm for Adelaide, with road layout designed to minimise the amount of space devoted to cars and to discourage all but local traf® c. A further innovation of the site was the introduction of an underground-membrane system for stormwater retention, allowing water reuse for on-site irrigation of public open spaces and aquifer recharge. Demonstration projects such as Green Street are seen by their backers as valuable in that they can help to break down the conventionality of house-builders, house-buyers and also local councillors who set down local by-laws on housing densities, which generally tended to preclude higher-density developments in urban areas. Judged in this light, the New Brompton project was ª just incredibly successful ¼ it was very in¯ uential in changing the minds of politiciansº whilst apparently ª post-occupancy studies have shown that people are very happyº (of® cial, State Department of Environment and Planning).

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The Building Better Cities (BBC) initiative was announced in 1991, with a ® veyear budget of $816 million to back 26 local area strategies, selected by the states as supporting the main programme objectives of achieving social-justice goals combined with a concern about the costs of urban expansion and resulting infrastructure inef® ciencies, environmental degradation and uneven social costs. As such, many of the projects selected contained demonstration models to bring about improved conditions in fringe urban-growth areas. In Adelaide, the now-abandoned BBC programme was used to encourage a wide range of projects with environmental dimensions, including the MFPDC work noted earlier on wetlands-creation and building the Virginia pipeline. In fact, water-related projects were a dominant feature of Adelaide’ s BBC projects, including large infrastructure projects to improve drainage, ¯ ood control and aquifer recharge to the north of the city, seen as essential to allow further fringe residential development, albeit development more in line with the contemporary urban consolidation debate than hitherto. In many senses, BBC has been the least controversial of the approaches examined here, if anything almost too unchallenging for some, provoking as one response ª it’ s good, responsible mainstream planningÐ why wouldn’ t you do it?º (Halifax EcoCity activist). It almost emerges as the technically neutral, politically acceptable common ground. The main approaches are acceptable to free-marketeers, as in the Australian case it has come to be essentially about increasing residential investment opportunities for developers, whilst addressing some community concerns about environmental issues, and pressing government concerns to reduce their ® nancial obligations in respect of urban residential expansion, essentially basic physical and social infrastructure costs. Similarly, those with more `deep-green’ views see little to quibble about in policies which seek to limit the rate of future outward urban expansion.

Self-reliant City, Permaculture Style This section focuses on a locally in¯ uential plan produced by Urban Permaculture Consultants for residents in the inner-urban Hindmarsh area of the city, covering Bowden, Brompton and Ridleyton (Bull et al., 1985). This area lies within the local government area of the City of Charles Sturt. Although the plan for an urban-permaculture approach is now essentially historical, vestiges of its impact remain within the area, albeit in a much diluted form relative to that envisaged in the original plan. From the start the Urban Permaculture Consultants’ (UPC) plan was very much an oppositional tool. It represented an attempt by a variety of resident groups, under the umbrella of a Community Planning Group, to in¯ uence development proposals for a large area of inner-urban industrial and residential land which in 1983 was suddenly removed from the shadow of planning blight, relating to an abandoned roadbuilding proposal (dating from 1968). In order to help the area overcome the legacy of this planning blight, the state government of South Australia and the then local government of Hindmarsh created an independent Inner Western Metropolitan Programme Steering Committee, which ran until 1991, and which was charged with the objective of improving the area. The new body assumed considerable planning powers, plus a budget of around A$7 million, involving representatives from state and local government, plus the private sector. The Hindmarsh area itself is heavily industrialised and also one of the most environmentally degraded parts of the city, supporting a largely working-class population. The new steering committee for the area started with a broad mandate, which was initially intended to focus on stimulating a residential repopulation of the area, requiring the removal of industrial polluters as part of a programme for raising the local quality of life. After a period of consultation, attempts to move industry out of the area met with strong opposition from local


business interests, which resulted in a compromise around mixed-use zoning. Using its state ® nancial assistance, the Committee bought up industrial land as it became available, sought to rezone industrial areas in an attempt to address noise pollution in particular, and also introduced mixed-use zoning, known as Neighbourhood Zones. From the 1960s onwards, the very processes of planning blight, which suppressed property and rental values, helped to attract into the area a wide range of àlternative’ lifestyle groups, living alongside the rich multicultural range of existing residents. As such, the social ambience of this part of Hindmarsh is different from those of most other parts of the city, strongly in¯ uenced by a grouping of radically minded, articulate and often artistic individuals. This has strongly in¯ uenced the development politics of the area, creating the policy space in which it has been possible to attempt radical initiatives, relative to most other Adelaide suburbs. It was this atmosphere, combined with the opportunities opened up by the consultation processes of the Steering Committee, which in the early 1980s paved the way for Urban Permaculture Consultants to propose their alternative plan for the area. In many senses, the permaculture plan’ s proposals represent a pulling together of approaches which no longer necessarily appear all that radical in themselves. Key proposals involved community self-reliance, low-energy-design architecture, a permaculture approach to greenspace (urban forestry, èdible landscapes’ , city farms), environmental education and potential for recycling waste (community composting and Recycling Depot) and sustainable employment (community needs, co-operatives). What is still radical about the overall plan is the way in which it pulled together all these strands into one uni® ed plan and the emphasis on community self-reliance, involving Local action that decentralises production, distribution and services, and spreads the decision making process to a greater pro-

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portion of the community (Bull et al., 1985, p. 15). Even more optimistically, the plan argued that it was essential to alter market systems to promote ª human needs in the community as primary over private pro® tº . So whilst the strong bioregionalist emphasis of some versions of the ecocity is not strongly highlighted in the UPC plan, many other aspects are there, including the notion of greater local self-reliance, community-based action and politics, and a call to modify market forces in radical ways. Although the scale of the initial vision for radical change has not been achieved, some tangible products of the permaculture plan’ s vision have come into being. More than this, general national policy towards urban consolidation in the intervening period in effect absorbed many of the innovations put forward by the permaculture plan, such as higher residential densities, restricted roads and capturing natural solar energy. Seen in retrospect, much that had been deemed radical in the mid 1980s, was now seen locally as mainstream planning: A lot of the stuff is very obvious now, but at the time we were trying to impose residential densities that people simply hadn’ t dreamt of in Adelaide (local planning of® cer A). The most notable development to emerge out of the UPC plan involved setting up a city farm, next-door to a new, active community centre, also advocated in the plan. The city farm was initially set up on permaculture principles, but following a change in leadership abandoned this approach in the early 1990s, with the current farm working largely on organic principles, providing small allotments, selling horticultural products, and supervising people working out communityservice orders. Whilst a successful node of activity, the development remains small in scale, in effect representing an attempt to pacify a potentially powerful lobby group. For some of those involved in the Steering Committee, the decision to support the com-

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munity farm was seen as essentially political, buying in local support in a charged local political atmosphere Basically we had a sympathy for the permaculture movement, since because of the higher densities people weren’ t going to have the opportunity to carry out their gardening desires and alternative lifestyles ¼ To be perfectly blunt, it [setting up the city farm] was also a means of placating a rising, active residential movement ¼ (local government of® cer B). In summary, the permaculture plan was itself a product of the existence of a mobilised, articulate base of local residents willing to support radical housing experiments, including two housing co-operatives. This was important in creating an atmosphere in which it was possible to introduce medium-density residential development into a fairly heavily industrialised district. So, whilst the radical edge of permaculture never materialised, in terms of developing alternative localised patterns of economic control and social organisation, it did help to pave the way for a major change in approach to mainstream residential developments, led by a combination of landuse planners and private-sector developers. Fair Shares, Eco-city-style The ® nal project dealt with here, the Halifax EcoCity, remains embryonic, with an of® ce on-site, ® rm plans for a pilot project of ® ve houses, but major stumbling blocks still to achieving the ® nal go-ahead for the proposed much larger development. Where possible, the approach here is to use the published works of Paul Downton, the joint instigator (with Cherie Hoyle) of the Halifax EcoCity proposal, plus interview material as appropriate. For the sake of brevity, the main focus here is on those aspects of the proposal which most clearly differentiate it from other projects in the city, in particular its emphasis on community engagement and hinterland reparations. The proposed Halifax EcoCity site is in the central area of Adelaide, involving a 2.4

ha block of derelict land, formerly occupied by the local authority works department. There are a number of land-contamination problems on-site, so that despite some support from the city council it has not yet sold the land to the proposed community developers, in part due to unresolved liability problems. In design terms, the proposal is for high-density residential development, using green technologies as appropriate, roof gardens, open spaces and climate-responsive building layouts. The design incorporates features such as considerable community infrastructure, stabilised earth walls, which will help in temperature stabilisation and sound proo® ng, and layouts which seek to balance privacy and public surveillance/safety for children. Cars will be parked underground and no provision made for through-traf® c. A central feature of the project approach is its attempts to build a strong community base, re¯ ected in over 600 people registering an interest by 1996 (Downton, 1997). Particularly notable are the efforts to engage potential residents with the design of their new homes and the site more generally through what is termed a programme of `barefoot architecture’ . To one of the EcoCity activists, this represented one of the two key strands to the project’ s approach (the other being ecological restoration, on-site and off-site). ¼

You had to start with people. You couldn’ t just chuck together a whole stack of technologies ¼ yes, you can recycle water and capture the sun, and all of that, but you’ re not going to do any of that until the community wants it to actually happen. So the ® rst place to start isn’ t researching the technologies or tools, but to get out there and build a community base so that people turn around and say ª well we want a city which runs on sunº and then you go out and ® nd out how to do it, or call in the people who have the techniques. The EcoCity approach to technology is refreshingly open in this senseÐ high technology or low technology, whatever best ® ts the nature of the problem in the light of community aspirations, capacities and priorities.


The Halifax EcoCity is very much rooted in a sense of planning and urban design history, with at least one of its founders clearly and explicitly in¯ uenced by the works of Mumford, Geddes, Lynch, Alexander and others (Downton, 1996, 1997). It is very much this pedigree which helps to account for the keen interest in the cityregion within the project design, ® nding its expression in the possibly unique proposals for linking urban and rural regeneration. To counteract the perceived tendency of cities to exploit their hinterlands in conventional development processes, the Eco-City approach is in part at least based on moving the city away from being a source of hinterland degradation to being part of a process of healing. It is for this reason that the Halifax EcoCity has a clearly stated intention of buying and restoring at least one hectare of degraded land for each resident in the rural hinterland of Adelaide (Downton, 1996, 1997). This ® gure is seen as very approximate, with one project leader when interviewed suggesting that in this particularly arid part of the continent a ® gure of nearer 8 ha per resident might be a better approximation of the area required to provide basic services for urban residents. The ® rst steps towards this goal have already been taken with the purchase of 17 ha (42 acres) of degraded land at Monarto, around 60 km to the east of Adelaide. The aim is to regrade erosion gullies on site. It is envisaged that this will leave excess, relatively infertile earth, which will be brought to the Halifax Street site in central Adelaide and put to use in creating the earthbank walls noted earlier. This is a very practical way of addressing the concern with ecological footprints found in both the self-reliant and fair-shares city models, but where the self-reliant city tends to focus solely on reducing demand and pollution as a means of reducing a city’ s ecological footprint, the fair-shares city seeks to blend this with a concern to `compensate’ for the inevitability of some negative external impacts. The envisaged processes of rural ecological restoration are currently seen as encom-

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passing attempts to bring land to a fertile state, suitable for horticulture, rather than a reversion to the original ecosystem, on the basis that ª just putting the mallee back is not going to be a fat lot of use to city-dwellers, you’ re not going to get the food that you needº (EcoCity activist). In terms of the future, it is hoped that at some stage the land might turn into a market-garden venture, creating jobs as well as providing food. The current intention is to add the cost of the rural land to that of the urban home You don’ t just buy the house ¼ you’ re buying into a whole community infrastructure and sharing responsibility for that, and also sharing what’ s out there ¼ the idea of the ownership or involvement of the urban dweller with the rural sector is actually inherent in the concept (EcoCity activist). The group has also started to discuss the possibility of extending the concept to ecological restoration in a developing country, but has yet to ® nd a satisfactory way of building this into the project. Many people outside the project seemed unaware of this aspect of its intentions, and to the extent that people are aware, there is some scepticism about its wider relevance: That’ s a nice idea, but its not a model on which our whole societal-economic model can be based, or is likely to be based in the foreseeable terms ¼ I applaud what they’ re doing in environmental terms, but it goes beyond what the market would legitimately accept (MFPDC of® cial). This links to a critique of the ecopolis’ approach to community engagement. For this MFPDC of® cial, important though grassroots approaches to building support were, they remained marginal in terms of the broader community acceptance of the project and its approach: Planners should try to be one step ahead of the community. If they’ re one step ahead of the community they’ re visionary. If they’ re two steps ahead of the community, they’ re a nutter ¼ If I have one criticism

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of what [the EcoCity] is doing, it’ s they’ re going this next step. They’ ll bring a small part of the community along behind them, and they’ ll be nice little icons of how you can do some really interesting stuff at Halifax Street, but the broad community will say they’ re so far out of the mainstream that they’ re not relevant. So, whilst community building is absolutely critical to the EcoCity approach, and in many senses already a considerable success at the local level, there may be issues about its broader community acceptance within South Australia. In of® cial circles, there appear to be widespread misconceptions about what the current project proposals look like, including a belief that the project was aiming for on-site self-reliance in the permaculture mode. For instance, at least one major state government of® cial argued that What we saw was an incredibly ambitious idea of having extremely high density but producing all their own food on this one site, and it’ s a badly contaminated site anyway. It just seemed totally unrealistic. This highlights one of the key concerns of EcoCity proponents, which is that people equate the project with self-reliance and permaculture, yet the vision is actually signi® cantly different, much more in the fairshares model than in the self-reliant city model. In summary, the Halifax EcoCity is very much at the leading edge of deep-green thinking, embracing radical ideas about the way in which the existing city can be renewed in order to improve its links to its hinterland areas, as part of a new ethical awareness. Conclusions Adelaide’ s rich and varied experience of experimenting with different ways of addressing the challenges of sustainable urban development provides a valuable testing-ground for assessing the usefulness of the four different models proposed in the

opening sections. In some respects, it can be seen that the four models do each embrace unique sets of rationales and that to some extent these were re¯ ected in four very varied sets of on-the-ground policy proposals and, perhaps most importantly, proposed policy processes, implying radical differences in how broader social, economic and political relations would need to be reconstituted. But having said that, there was also a considerable degree of overlap in policy directions, notably in attempts to curb motor vehicle usage, promote energy-ef® cient buildings, encourage greater water recycling, increase residential densities and move away from single-function, land-use zoning in favour of mixed uses. So how valuable are the models? Like most models, they only go so far in representing reality. Nonetheless, they do point to some interesting concerns. At one level, they demonstrate that, in many instances, major differences in ideological stance relate at least as much to process as they do to end-goals. That is to say, we can often agree about what society needs, but not about how to get there, with disagreements about the appropriate mixture of state regulation, community engagement and market forces, over what geographical areas it is feasible and necessary to plan for, and over what time-periods we should be working towards for sustainable development. In effect, the areas of convergence between the different approaches re¯ ect the same processes by which previous innovative and laudable attempts by people like Ebenezer Howard were ª subsequently coopted and routinized into real estate practices oriented to the middle classesº (Harvey, 1995, p. 57). The Adelaide experience reveals a process of ìdeological capture’ at work, where the rhetorics of sustainable development can be captured and used to promote each set of distinctive positions, as each appeals to the need for social justice, consideration for future generations, and so on. Yet there are also signi® cant ideological battles going on in the city, most notably between the MFP approach and the EcoCity approach, with each tending to caricature what are seen as


the failings of the other, in order to assert the value of their own approach. What we begin to see in these acrimonious rumblings is that, despite the seeming coming together around certain approaches towards the sustainable city, there remain signi® cant underlying differences in approach between some of the projects, which result in some amount of rancour and recrimination, favouring those projects and approaches backed by those in positions of power and with access to state and market capital, whilst approaches without this backing stall, get bought off with tokenistic àlternative’ developments, or simply get marginalised and denied state support or resources. Notes 1.

2.

The research involved detailed review of the considerable documentation about each approach, plus 14 face-to-face interviews with key actors associated with each set of proposals. Con® dentiality was assured, so the quotes used here are attributed anonymously. Hard copies of all WWW-cited materials are available from the author

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