Urban planning is a relative obscure discipline. Both a system and a practice, and ignored for decades, it has recently gained substantial traction as a remedy to the contemporary housing crisis. Business lobby groups and state governments alike now view planning as both cause and solution to our housing woes.

Today, most cities have run out of market gardens and rural areas to carve up into housing lots. The historic mechanism for delivering housing supply — that is, expanding the urban fringe — is increasingly untenable. The pressure has mounted, and zoning reform aimed at promoting new construction is seen as the panacea.

Urban industrial spaces and “blue chip” suburbs of single-family houses (where the less affluent have been long excluded) are being reimagined as new communities with houses and apartment buildings, parks and shops. Good design is a (political) remedy, with politicians hoping that “soft” density (in New South Wales, not to be confused with the “gentle” density in Queensland) is able to stave off the NIMBYs, while also building more homes where people want to live.

The rationale is simple: allow more dwellings, approve more dwellings, build more dwellings. Yet, as I’m going to put forward, attempting to solve this crisis is a task grounded in futility due to the underlying inequities built-in to the structure of planning, and the layout of our towns and cities.

Urban planning: a brief (antipodean) history

When we think of planning, the colour coded-map is the image that comes mind. These maps divide the land into different uses — generally variations of residential, commercial and industrial “zones”. While the proliferation of zoning maps in Australia did not occur until after World War Two (Sydney in 1951, Melbourne in 1954, Brisbane in 1965), the designating of what use is allowed (and what isn’t) on a particular parcel of land — a key tool of planning — has existed since the British settlement of this continent. It has always been used as a form of regressive social engineering.

Most urban planners subscribe to the narrative that planning emerged as a response to the ills of the industrial city. Proto-zoning separated polluting factories from where people lived, and improved conditions for those living in overcrowded nineteenth-century tenements. This, however, is only part of the story. Preventing factories in residential areas had as much (or more) to do with protecting the property values of wealthy landowners as protecting people from heavy metals. Zoning was about stabilising land prices, which had historically experienced substantial rises and falls. It has become so normalised that we forget it has an origin, and it is, in a relative sense, a very recent invention.

But zoning is only one tool of urban planning. Urban planning refers to processes that seek to shape the built environment — buildings and streets — and the way we use them. On this continent, it  traces its roots to colonial surveyors following the instructions of governors based in Sydney, to lay out regular patterns of streets, parcels and land use on Aboriginal land. The British Empire had embraced capitalism before it expanded its colonial reach — and this would influence every aspect of its governance structures, including the layout of cities.

Very broadly, colonial urban planning was concerned with (1) the export of goods extracted from the colony, (2) the import of labour across the empire, (3) the dispossession and alienation of indigenous peoples and (4) the mobility of military forces. These motivations continue to shape urban form and cannot be disassociated from concepts like “property”.

For (White) settlers, the colony of Australia was “unencumbered by the social relations of aristocracy, by history, by a past”, and provided a break from the confines of political and legal property inheritance in Britain. The primary intention of property law in this country was to begin anew. Land survey and title by registration renders historical interests in property irrelevant. Not only is it extremely effective in erasing First Nations interests in land, but it is perfectly designed for settler endorsement. It was here that even a commoner could buy and sell property (and make a handsome profit). These systems commodified land, transformed it into property — a relatively new idea, even in England. These ideas were tested in the colonies before being imported back to Britain.

The granting of land to settlers was an effective tool at making migrants complicit in the settler-colonial project. Ireland — the oldest British colony — was a testing ground for many ideas, including how to lay out of towns for new settlers, and hundreds of Irish were transported here after 1788. In many instances, the dispossessed become the dispossessor. The removal of my ancestors from their home preceded their settlement of Gundungurra Country. The impact of Ireland’s penal laws — erasing culture, language and ties to land — would be omitted from family narratives in favour of a new story. They became pioneers toiling in the hot, dry sun, sheering wool for export throughout the empire. With anglicised names and a land title in their pocket, Irish peasants could be transformed into the newest servants of the empire. The story is far from unique, and neither is the collective forgetting of these origins.

The zoning map as a tool of racial and class exclusion

Modern town planning became mainstream towards the late nineteenth century. In the “settled” districts, early adopters of the planning movement would be heavily influenced by Victorian ideals. This was an era where men and women’s roles were more sharply defined than in any other time in history. For centuries, women and men had been working alongside one another, in fields or the family business, often co-located with where they slept at night. During the nineteenth century, men increasingly commuted to work at the factory, office or shop. Women who worked would often be confined to domestic service. Entire towns and cities were planned around this premise.

In the nineteenth century, the British were still in the process of colonising Australia. The spatial manifestation of policies grounded in paternalistic racism resulted in the establishment of reserves and missions, segregating Aboriginal peoples beyond town boundaries. Colonial administrators sought to exclude Aboriginal people from colonial towns, except when Aboriginal labour was needed (often with little or no renumeration).

Later, as Australian cities adopted their first modern planning schemes, influence from the United States was high. The transfer of ideas from one settler colonial state to another is common. Arguably, it partly explains why our cities resemble their settler counterparts in the United States, Canada and Aotearoa/New Zealand far more than they resemble London.

As Australia began to adopt American zoning practices, back in the United States explicit racial segregation was deemed unlawful. The same ends could, however, be met by single-family residential zones. These zones prevent apartment buildings, rowhouses, and any other dwelling that is not a detached house from being constructed in parts of the city reserved for houses. If a family cannot afford the price of a detached house, they cannot live in that neighbourhood. These tools were extremely effective at preventing Black Americans — who still experienced economic disparities due to the enduring legacies of slavery, segregation and systemic racism — from entering White neighbourhoods.

Across the settler-zone, gone are the messy, mixed-use, inner-city neighbourhoods where workplaces spilled into dense housing — if they existed at all. While the functional separation of land uses reduces some risk, such as fires spreading from factory to homes, the promotion of low-density, suburban sprawl also facilitates the separation of working people. Arguably, the density of people and ideas that exist in inner city neighbourhoods incubated some society’s most progressive ideas and reforms.

Low-density and car-centric planning, intentionally or not, is very effective at removing spontaneous opportunities for social mixing, which, in turn, reduce opportunities for activism. It is very difficult to organise and take collective action when you and your colleagues spend two hours a day commuting alone in a car, to separate neighbourhoods across the city.

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century Australian cities were already low-density when compared to their overseas counterparts. American zoning ideas were readily adopted and are still widespread today. There is nothing inherently incompatible between apartment buildings and houses, yet most of our cities continue to treat apartments like noxious industry. Apartments are relegated to the more undesirable areas of the city, like former industrial areas and places adjacent to main roads and railway lines. Arguably, this ensures the city’s desirable locations (where most people want to live) are enclaves for the wealthy.

Planning as a practice allows politicians and community members alike to hide behind a complex jargon of complicated codes, with terms like amenity, bulk, scale and character, to avoid scrutiny by appearing objective, when it is anything but. Planning is political, especially in a country where it has been used to facilitate settler frames of land commodification and exclusion.

The assumption of a blank slate

The key tools of urban planning, like master planning, zoning and state acquisition of land, are derivatives of the state’s perceived need for centralised control. Urban planning assumes there is a blank slate ready to imprint the planner’s vision. Terra nullius was the empire’s fiction, but a wilful, collective amnesia continues to permeate throughout the structures of our society — particularly when it comes to land. The utility of settler-colonialism in a land and development system that renders past connection to land void is evident.

Treating a place as empty and devoid of history is a fundamental tenet of the settler-colonial state, and a narrative crucial for the implementation of planning (including its proposed reform). Today, devoid of history, and ignoring pre-existing peoples, meaning is ready to be made throughout our cities through new processes of redevelopment. These schemes engage in settler-colonial practices that generate economic wealth for those that benefit most from the existing structure. In fact, real estate markets are not born, they are made — often at the hands of well-intentioned government officials.

Governments, and their lobbyists, facilitate cycles of devaluing where one land use, like car mechanics or biscuit factories (or social housing), is deemed obsolete or underperforming. It creates a gap between the value of the use, and the value of the land it sits on. By changing the zoning (say, from industrial to high-density residential), the government opens the door for private investment to convert the land to more lucrative use.

Explicit interventions on funding, or indirect assistance through favourable zoning changes or infrastructure upgrades, create the growth conditions required to make redevelopment feasible. The hand might be invisible, but it is attached to a government body, working within the scaffolding of our existing planning, property and social systems, largely unchanged since a British colony was established here two hundred years ago.