Public consultation for ‘Developing a new plan for Victoria’ is currently open. My submission on behalf of Heritage Workshop is published below.
I am making this submission on the relationship between urban and built heritage, including the heritage overlay, for the new Plan for Victoria. I’ve reviewed consultation documents, including the ‘Big Ideas for Victoria’ pamphlet and the ‘Housing Targets’ modelling webinar.
I commend the initiative of the Victorian Government to prepare a new Plan for Victoria, and particularly the focus on housing densification. I also commend the recognition that urban and built heritage is important and should continue to be conserved.
I bring strong expertise to this consultation process. I am a leading expert on the relationship between heritage, planning and development. I am the founder of a boutique conservation firm Heritage Workshop, based in Melbourne. A major recent project I have worked on is the new City of Melbourne Heritage Strategy (2024). I previously spent more than ten years affiliated to tertiary institutions, including Melbourne, Sydney, Deakin and London Universities. I have postgraduate qualifications in cultural heritage, urban history and geography. My academic accomplishments include the first scholarly historical monograph on Australian conservation: Values in Cities: Urban Heritage in Twentieth-Century Australia.
My work identifies the following policy priorities for urban and built heritage:
- Adopting a Whole-Of-Government Approach for Cultural Heritage.
- Updating Heritage Guidelines, Frameworks and Processes.
- Introducing People-Centred Heritage Conservation.
- Placing Sustainability at the Forefront of Heritage Conservation.
To achieve a sustainable heritage system, to ensure our culturally significant places are adequately conserved, and to densify and develop our cities requires reform to cultural heritage in the priority areas listed above.
I provide 5 ideas below to contribute to the ‘big ideas’ raised in the consultation pamphlet.
Idea 1: Commission A Heritage Strategy for Victoria
Victoria has not had a heritage strategy since last century. To ensure our system is robust and up-to-date, a heritage strategy should be commissioned immediately. It should be led by government, industry and academic stakeholders. From a people-centred vantage, this strategy can deal with key planning, design, and development heritage issues. And how to ensure that we can take the best of the past into the future amid rapid development, densification and urban change. It can also engage across the government, because heritage is relevant to a wide range of policy areas.
An outcome-based heritage approach rather than a rules-based heritage approach has the potential to produce better results for heritage places and so the community. As it stands, Victoria’s heritage criteria and historic themes have not been substantively updated since the 1980s. PPN1 Applying the Heritage Overlay could be reformed along similar lines, along with model local heritage planning policies and overlay models.
A Heritage Strategy – like that commissioned recently in New South Wales – can provide recommendations for legislative and policy reforms. And it can ensure Victoria’s heritage is being maximised to positively contribute to development, planning, design, sustainability and community wellbeing.
Idea 2: Update Heritage Guidelines to use Values-Based Heritage Approaches
State and local government heritage guidelines focus on retaining built heritage fabric. We should instead be protecting the values and significance of heritage places as linked to their heritage built fabric. This distinction is nuanced but important.
A design-led and people-centred approach to values-based heritage is best placed to achieve both densification and conservation. Such an approach should be based on the particularities of local neighbourhoods and places, while ensuring significant heritage elements continue to be retained.
By clearly and properly articulating the values and significance of heritage, through rigorous analysis and research, it becomes possible to identify both what must be conserved intact and opportunities for development, design and densification. Best-practice values-based approaches should be included in local planning policies. Case studies can be provided of how development in local heritage contexts has been positively achieved.
Idea 3: Housing Targets Aligned to Heritage Capacity and Context
Heritage is all about the particularity, localness, character, history and community of neighbourhoods and places. Only by understanding the specificity of place, can appropriate conservation policies and development planning for conservation occur.
Some heritage areas, say those replete with post-industrial buildings, can facilitate tremendous densities. We see this in urban renewal and adaptive reuse projects across Melbourne and Geelong. Meanwhile, our nineteenth-century terraced heritage suburbs are already some of the densest in our cities.
Accounting for potential and existing densities from localised spatial mapping of the specificities of heritage overlays will provide appropriate housing targets that can better ensure our heritage is not diminished in the new Plan Victoria. The proposed “targets” could be anywhere from 0% to 100%+ for heritage contexts!
Idea 4: Densifying Low-Density Heritage Overlays
Heritage overlays on low-density suburbs provide a particular challenge for densification imperatives. Highly significant and intact residential overlays might be elevated to the Victorian Heritage Register as a state heritage item, with minimal or no densification targets.
Less significant or intact heritage overlay contexts might remain protected at the local level but be still subject to specific housing targets. To achieve appropriate densification in and around residential heritage areas requires reformed local heritage policies that permit heritage-appropriate, values-based and design-sensitive development responses to them.
Idea 5: Recognise culture and heritage as central to retrofit and sustainability
Retrofit is crucial for ensuring the sustainability of our cities. Yet too often retrofit does not engage with heritage expertise, despite retrofit’s similarities to adaptive reuse, which has been a heritage strategy since the 1970s.
The use of heritage expertise for non-listed, existing buildings will produce more positive development and sustainability outcomes. It will achieve this by foregrounding culture and community; history and authenticity; and utilising technical and design knowledge about existing buildings, already held by heritage professionals.
Victoria will be a better place to live, work and play should its heritage continue to be conserved. Particularly so, if appropriate, incremental, evidence-based reform occurs to heritage planning through the new Plan for Victoria.
Heritage provides tremendous opportunities for strengthening development, design, planning and community, incorporating the history, character, authenticity of neighbourhoods and places. But to achieve the benefits of heritage requires innovative and nuanced approaches.
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