» Queensland Town Planning Thread «

[KJBrissy]

The council have planners, engineers, architects and a whole heap of other professions that asses every DA, however it is the planner that is the assessment manager. The application is Impact assessable as it breaks the height limits in this area and as it is a material change of use for an improvement that includes a heritage building. In saying that the council assessment team have to ascertain if it meets all of the criteria (shouldn't be an issue IMO) and to if it should be approved and with what conditions of development.

In saying this, the elected council has the ability and the right to approve or knock back any proposal regardless of what the assessment team has reccommended/stated.

In saying this, if the assessment team has approved the application for good reasons, then the council knocks it back, they would most probably easily win an appeal in court.

Hope this helps.

[SoulVision]

Good, yeah there's always the courts if things go pear shaped.
Cheers thanks.

[ggm]

having had a proposal for an aged care facility dropped into my street, I'm learning what the other side feels like. The Qld process encourages developers to over-scale proposals because you MAY get lucky, and get approval outside what in a proscriptive planning regime would normally have been rejected. So in my case, the development proposes 400+ beds in a very small block, and a 7+ story tower. Without getting overly NIMBY about it, it seems very large, and dense, for the site, and the developers claims that its the minimum financially viable scale is very .. implausible (were it true, then no smaller aged care facilities would exist.)

its hard to understand how the common infrastructure elements on the town plan (road scales, sewerage, water pressure) can be sustained if the "plan" is not clear bout the scope of future growth at any location. Sure, I bet there are models which even this out across the entire suburb, but once you are down at the street level, this methodology seems very arbitrary.

I think that in the main, we get the town planning we deserve. If more people thought about the built environment, we'd care more about the long term consequences of how it emerges.

-G

[SoulVision]

The long term consequences of not densifying our suburbs will cause South East Queensland to become the urban sprawl capital of Australia. Mirroring LA's unplanned mess of spaghetti freeways and endless suburbia.

I'm not saying that this aged care place on your street is good, I'm just saying people need to get use to a denser Brisbane. Otherwise, LA here we come. If you live near a train line close to bus stops, then the government/planners are doing their job well. If not, then it should probably be built near a transit hub.

[ggm]

You got it. We have to live with denser planning. No disagree. I think what we need is clarity on what limits we'll place on 'denser' at this time.

The downside of the Qld DA process remains: it invites overclaim on the proposal because there is no objective criteria visible in the process to set limits, and it invites NIMBYism because the shared experience is "if you don't complain, they get away with anything"