Urban Broadcast Collective

In this episode Jess Noonan and Peter Jewell of PlanningxChange interview one of Melbourne's most inspirational urban designers, Orlando Harrison. A professional with a good knowledge of the past and an over the horizon view of future opportunities. Inspired by classical thinkers such as Aristotle and on the other extreme the science fiction writer Phillip K Dick, Orlando blends a nod to tradition with a view that 'the future is our friend'.

McIntyre Australia was founded in 2016 by husband and wife team Ned Scholfield & Racquel Boedo. The pair first started to think about creating their own fashion wool label after spending a year working together on Ned's family farm 'Glenoe' in western Victoria. A compelling story of farming, passion and fashion. There are unusual links between fashion and city development; this PlanningxChange podcast interview provides clues on how dynamic forces can create better products, environments and places. It also makes a compelling case that old traditional industries can be reborn and that such fresh changes have highly beneficial outcomes for rural and regional areas. As an aside the pair also talk about urbanism in Europe and how this can be transferred to Australia.

"In every instance ... the user is paying. They're either paying by getting up early, by walking much further, or they're paying in frustration in looking for the perfect park and there's a time penalty you can translate directly into dollars”. Who pays for transport, and who benefits from it? In this episode of This Must Be The Place, Liz is joined over lunch by transport researchers Laura Aston, Nicholas Fournier and Knowles Tivendale to discuss equity in transport pricing. Lunch isn’t free, but getting around sometimes is – or at least it seems to be, for some people. Talking tickets, tolls and time are Laura Aston (http://publictransportresearchgroup.info/our-team/research-students/laura-aston/): a PhD Candidate from Monash’s Public Transport Research Group. Nick Fournier (http://publictransportresearchgroup.info/our-team/staff/nick-fournier/) is a research fellow at PTRG who recently moved to Melbourne after finishing his PhD at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, on multi-model travel decision making and equity. Knowles Tivendale is Director of consulting firm Movement & Place (https://www.movementandplace.com.au/), and a lecturer and associate of PTRG. Why was congestion charging successful in London but not Manchester? Why was congestion pricing so appealing in Stockholm that the public voted for it at a referendum after a successful trial? Why do Melbourne’s toll-roads differ in their model of who pays? Are transit users the only beneficiaries of public transport infrastructure? The episode ponders the principles and practicalities of how mobility costs and benefits are distributed, and what this might mean for Colac (a town that, for some reason, comes up a lot). Re: parking, Knowles suggests “there are times when the demand is so light that free access is fine…but when things get very congested, that’s clearly a time to ration the resource”. He questions whether rationing parking based on availability in time (rewarding those who get up early) is the best way to ensure fair access to the train network. Regarding CBD congestion, Nick suggests “you can move 1000 cars per hour per lane..if you’ve got more people than that moving through, then they probably shouldn’t be in cars, they should be walking”. Nick also brings a US perspective, highlighting some surprising differences in the way the US funds highways, contracts public transport, manages congestion and deals with commercial vehicles. Nick argues transport pricing needs to be nuanced, offer alternatives and “not just gouge people”.

Design with confidence (Koos de Keijzer). Melbourne based architect, Koos de Keijzer talks with PX of the changing professional environment for architects and the challenges to create better citzen and residential outcomes within urban areas. He talks as a practising architect with offices in Australia, New Zealand and Vietnam. The interview discusses the golden rules of architecture, the benefits of experimentation and lessons learnt from past large scale urban design projects. An internationalist, Koos draws experience from both European and Asian urban places.

Clarksdale Blues & Resurrection (John Henshall). Melbourne economist John Henshall has a long term romance with the Mississippi delta town of Clarksdale. The birthplace and inspiration for many blues legends (and playwright Tennessee Williams), Clarksdale fell on very hard times, its great blues heritage all but forgotten. The resurrection of the town as a focal point of blues heritage, the associated pride in place and economic revitalistauon is detailed in Hensall’s recently released book 'Downtown Revitalisation and Delta Blues in Clarksdale, Mississippi: Lessons for Small Cities and Towns’. The book and the events leading up to the author’s romance with Clarksdale are outlined in the podcast interview.

In this episode of This Must Be The Place Elizabeth chats with Professor Carolyn Whitzman, on the eve of Carolyn winding up her 16 years at the University of Melbourne. Carolyn will now be heading back to Canada, specifically to Ottowa (“like a Canadian Adelaide”). In the episode she explains how being an academic was her second career, after working as an activist and ‘femocrat’ on violence prevention programs in Toronto. While her early contacts with Melbourne were as part of a campaign against an Olympic bid (“Bread not Circuses”), after completing her PhD and morphing into ‘pracademic’, Carolyn eventually moved to Melbourne to take up an academic position. Here she reflects on some of the themes in her research, teaching and projects in that time - which have been broad ranging but which have tended to centre on ideas of rights, marginality, and inclusivity. This episode focuses more on Carolyn’s work on affordable housing: on reasserting housing as a basic need or right, versus its role in wealth creation and inequality. She discusses working with housing developers and with their perceptions of how to adapt different models of affordable housing provision to the local context. There have been some projects and innovations that have cut through – for example a recent Launch Housing project of modular housing on a road allowance, and developments using airspace above parking lots. There is a slowly expanding understanding of what “good intensification” might mean. The challenge, Carolyn suggests, is how to scale affordable housing up – this an area where Canada offers some precedents, for example in Vancouver’s not for profit alliances, and the federal-level Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. Carolyn hopes that her move to (and third career reinvention in) Ottawa, as it expands both its light rail system and its affordable housing sector, might mean “getting a little bit closer to the ideal of what an equitable and inclusive city would be like”. But there’s also much to take back from Melbourne, perhaps more so its public spaces and design culture, than its often-absurd transport and housing inequalities. Carolyn suggests that Melbourne doesn’t necessarily meet (and indeed sometimes is losing), “the preconditions for a decent life” but says that “I’d love everyone to be able to benefit from this beautiful city”. As well as being about rights to the city for diverse groups, more broadly the episode is about the challenges of change, and the fear that goes along with it. Also discussed: community participation, matching growth with planning and infrastructure, trust in government (lack thereof), cat fud and the far side, parking (versus football ovals = clash of titans?), Vancouver (Canada-lite), the idealism and motivation of students (versus the realities of exploitation and politicians that usually awaits them), public transport, Point Cook, federal government roles, planning schools, expertise, and generalisations about national anxieties. Note/apology: the episode is recorded in Carlton’s Kathleen Symes Library and Community Centre and has a fair bit of community background noise in it.

In this episode PlanningxChange interview Cazz Redding, Director of Red Ink Planning. Cazz is based in Bright, North East Victoria. She discusses her career progression, starting a business and working 'in the bush'.

An episode about a faceless man, and irrigation history. In April 1905, a man’s mutilated body was found in a bag in an irrigation channel in Girgarre East, northern Victoria. The channel was not far from where hundreds of men were constructing the Waranga Basin– a formative irrigation project storing water from the Goulburn River for distribution through channels that parceled up land for orchards, dairy farms and new towns. The body in the channel had been disemboweled, its head cut off, its legs missing, and its face sliced off in an apparent attempt to avoid identification. The find was dubbed The Tatura Tragedy, for the nearby irrigation town, and while investigators took weeks to identify the body, they quickly speculated on a connection to workers at the Waranga camp. This “rowdy township” housed “the usual navy class, neither better nor worse, prone to quarrel or to be hilarious and enjoy themselves on pay nights”, who “come and go without any notice being taken of them”. They typically travelled in pairs laboring, shearing or rabbiting. The Tatura Tragedy 1905 story was selected at random from the National Library of Australia’s Trove archive of digitized historical newspapers by Digital Death Trip, a custom bot coded by Sarah. The code uses Trove’s API to randomly select a Victorian town, then a random so-called Tragedy from it, then compile a case file. In the pilot run, DDT picked 2 stories from irrigation towns in Victoria, including The Tatura Tragedy. In this episode, Elizabeth has dug up more about the incident, its place and time. One theme is the nature of work, particularly itinerant work for men. When the victim, William Skinner (!) was finally identified, and killer James Edwards apprehended, speculation proved correct: the pair were workers and had been travelling together. A police description said Edwards was “fond of using the expression, ‘there’s no crawfish about me’, a shearer, a gambler, and two-up player; frequents country racecourses, drinks heavy when able, talks fighting, quiet when sober”. Edwards said he tramped the rivers of Victoria his whole life “like a book to me”, doing “any kind of work that comes my way”. Another theme is irrigation (which is interesting, at least in “Chinatown”). The Waranga wall is a 7km long, 12m high barrier built over a decade with horses, shovels and picks. It was Australia’s first major dam. Visiting Waranga Shores caravan park, maybe site of the workers’ camp, the basin looks like the sea but also like a flooded field. It’s popular for boating. Beneath the water lie remains of old grazing stations; and of the longer history of indigenous Taungurung people. Massive early 20th century irrigation and Closer Settlement projects were stages in the displacement embodied in settler colonialism: through which land, waterways, and rights to them, were carved out anew. Waranga still feeds Victoria’s irrigation system and its politics of water rights, environment, and the economic viability of farming and small towns. We also drove back roads of Girgarre East, searching for where Skinner’s body was dropped. Near where we narrowed it down to, someone had strung up bodies of dead hares, foxes and kangaroos along a barbed wire fence – including a fox’s decapitated decaying head. Very “In the Pines”. Edwards was found guilty of manslaughter: the defense argued the victim, Skinner, a comparatively privileged man, was bad-tempered and the killing was provoked. Edwards blamed drinking and working: “I’ve worked hard, lived hard, drunk hard and fought hard; but hard work has brought hard drink…”. Public fascination waned as Edwards seemed ‘ordinary’ back-blocks brawler. Today, there are rumors of unknown bodies from the camp buried in the Waranga wall. There are also tales of giant 2m waves coursing across the otherwise glassy surface of the basin, spooking workers and anglers. Like 70s song the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, “the lake, it is said, never gives up her dead”.

In this ‘mini’ (read: no guests) episode of This Must Be the Place Elizabeth visits the Murray River town of Koondrook, once the terminus of the Koondrook-Kerang private tramway. This country tram venture was started by the Shire of Swan Hill 1887, making use of private finance but also of Victorian funding from the “Tramways in Country Districts Act 1886”. While we might reasonably assume that the intention of this latter scheme was to subsidise tramways in middling regional cities, the Koondrook-Kerang venture instead built a 22km long tramway through the countryside to meet the state railway in Kerang. This was a kind of ‘feeder tram’ to connect goods and people to the public railway through to Melbourne. Railway construction in Victoria was at its peak at this period via the so-called “Octopus Acts”. The Kerang-Koondrook tramway ran privately until the 1950s, when it was taken over (or surrendered to?) Victoria Railways. It then continued as a publicly run passenger service and later as transport for school children, until either 1976 or 1981 (reports vary). The 1970s were a peak time for closing down train lines in Victoria and especially those in country areas - reflecting declining fortunes in some places but also improvements in roads. In this mini-installment Elizabeth reports from the quiet centre of Koondrook where there’s an old tram station (train enthusiasts can confirm the actual difference between a tram and a train, because this one looks a lot like an old train station); plus the old reserve for the tramway and some bits of track. Apparently down through the irrigated countryside there’s some more remnants near former tram stops at Yeoburn, Hinksons, Teal Point and Gannawarra. The remnants of the tramway are heritage listed. Elizabeth speculates on what the story means for the historically intermingled declines of small towns and of railways; what we might learn from history in terms of local and private initiatives today; and for how we price and assess transport projects. Also discussed (with herself) are the current local politics of dairy farms, water allocations, sawmills, and the legacy of gaming machine tourism (which was a big thing for border towns up until the 1990s). Plus there’s a visit to the local swimming pool (Koondrook still has a community-run pool). If Elizabeth were a real journalist she’d find some people who used to catch the country tram to school etc. and interview them – next time. There may well be a next time as Koondrook is very nice to visit – big trees, river, sculptures, walks, old trams, a nice pub, pool. You can’t get the tram there but you can, if so inclined, like Elizabeth, get the Vline bus (it’s the Barmah bus – not to be confused with the Barham bus even though they leave around the same time and let’s be honest they sound the same). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerang%E2%8…oondrook_Tramway www.slv.vic.gov.au/pictoria/gid/slv-pic-aab45791 www.victorianplaces.com.au/koondrook

In this episode PlanningxChange interview Aaron Organ, Director and Principal Ecologist at Ecology and Heritage Partners. Aaron outlines current ecological issues, technological advancements and how we are better understanding the world around us. He talks to the link between town planning regulations and better ecological outcomes. In the podcast interview, new ideas are discussed on how to better help the natural world. A wide-ranging discussion on a subject not widely understood. Aaron also makes a plea for us to get out into the natural world and experience its delights.