A few weeks back, Sadiq Khan was elected Mayor of London. He has committed to a target of 50% affordable housing in new housing developments in London. That's a stark contrast to what's going on here in Sydney, where the affordable housing target is ... well, there isn't one.
Out of some frustration with that situation, I banged out an opinion piece that got a run in the Sydney Morning Herald, making the case for mandatory targets for affordable housing in new developments in Sydney - a policy known as inclusionary zoning. The article's copied in below, with links to further information about some of the points made along the way.
(The SMH ran the article with the title "Sydney needs to catch up to other global cities with affordable housing" ... which will be a nice anecdote for next year's lecture about the 'global city' concept as a hegemonic concept through which all sensible claims have to be articulated! But I guess I was playing that game in the article, so fair cop. Anyways, I digress...)
Inclusionary zoning is no longer especially 'radical' in many parts of the world. And, as Peter Marcuse pointed out in a recent blog post, if inclusionary zoning is used in the re-development of existing social housing or low income housing areas, it can actually reduce the proportion of affordable housing and contribute to gentrification. That's certainly a risk were it to be applied in some parts of Sydney -- the proposed redevelopment of Redfern-Waterloo, currently an area with substantial public housing, is a case in point. But setting a mandatory minimum target in a situation where such redevelopments are going ahead without any legislated requirements for housing affordability would be better than nothing!
Since the article was published, I've spoken at a very interesting forum on affordable housing hosted by Vinnies, and made an appearance on Channel 9 news for a story about NSW Labor's proposal for an affordable housing target (I don't think they've quite embraced a numerical target at this point). Here's hoping that through the hard work of lots of different actors in the city, the tide might slowly be turning on this issue...
***
We might poke fun at Malcolm Turnbull’s recent remark that wealthy parents should shell out to assist their adult kidsfind their way into the housing market. But his quip reflects the reality that is taking hold in Sydney today.
Housing has become unaffordable to all but the highest paid. Help from our parents is certainly the only way that my
partner and I could afford the house we’re living in now – and we’re on higher wages than most. As Tim Williams from the Committee for Sydney recently argued, inheritance is becoming the main road to home ownership in Sydney.
The statistics on this situation keep on coming. Last year, one study reported in the Sydney Morning Herald showed that a nurse could not afford to purchase a home in 95% of Sydney’s suburbs. Another showed that in financial year 2014-15, there were 64 suburbs where not a single dwelling sold for less than $1 million.
Things get even worse for those on lower incomes. An Anglicare report showed less than 1% of available rentals wereaffordable for people on government income support payments.
There are so many reasons not to tolerate this situation – not least the injustice of intergenerational inequity and
widening inequality, and the economic unsustainability of pricing key workers like nurses and teachers out of the city.
The reasons for the high cost of housing have roots in the changing economic structure of our city. Politicians of all stripes like to brag about Sydney being a ‘global city’. That’s all well and good. But as our city has made the transition to becoming ‘global’, the cost of housing relative to wages has skyrocketed. This is not a coincidence. Indeed, it is a global phenomenon in cities similar to ours.In global cities where employment is increasingly polarized between those in high-paid professions working for globally-oriented corporate services sector, and those in the lower paid consumer services sector, there has been tremendous upward pressure on house prices, especially in parts of the city close to major employment centres.
Left to their own devices, housing markets in these cities do not deliver affordability. Housing is not like the
fictitious markets in high school economics textbooks, where increasing supply can cause prices to fall.
So, what are other ‘global cities’ doing about this problem? In many, Governments are setting enforceable targets for affordable housing in new housing developments. This policy is called inclusionary zoning. In London over the weekend, Labour’s Sadiq Khan was elected Mayor. Part of his platform was to require that a full 50% of all dwellings in new developments are affordable. This would represent an increase from the percentage achieved by his Conservative predecessor Boris Johnson. His administration set a three year target of 55,000 affordable homes, with an
average 34% of new dwellings being affordable in the 2012-2015 period.
What is the mandatory minimum for affordable housing in new housing developments in Sydney?
We don’t have one. We don’t even have an aspirational target.
Inclusionary zoning is by now a mainstream idea in many major cities, and is supported across the political spectrum. In cities like London, the debate has moved on from whether it is a good idea – the argument is now about the proportion of housing that should be made affordable.
This widespread embrace of inclusionary zoning is reflected here in Sydney, where a diverse cross-section of society
supports inclusionary zoning in new developments as an effective means to provide affordable housing. Civil society peak groups like the NSW Council of Social Service and coalitions like the Sydney Alliance are calling for inclusionary zoning. Academics who have been funded by Governments from across Australia to look into solutions for housing affordability are calling for inclusionary zoning. The Committee for Sydney, whose membership is made up of dozens of major national and international corporations located in Sydney – including several prominent developers like Lend Lease, Meriton and Mirvac – is calling for inclusionary zoning.
But for some reason, the NSW State Government won’t get with the program.
Earlier this year, Premier Baird announced a $1 billion fund designed to ‘encourage’ investment in affordable and social housing. It was reported that this might generate an extra 3000 affordable homes – that’s a start, but it’s certainly not enough to transform our situation.
We need much more from Government than polite ‘encouragement’. We need enforcement.
As we stare down the barrel at several major redevelopments across Sydney – like the Central to Eveleigh corridor, the Bays Precinct, the train stations along the soon-to-be transformed Bankstown line, Parramatta Road, the areas around the proposed Parramatta light rail, and many more besides – we must set substantial mandatory requirements for affordable housing.
Aspirational targets have been set for some of these developments, but we know from past experience that this won’t do. Enforceable requirements that apply across the city are the only way to ensure that all developers involved in the planning and construction of new housing – including the State Government’s own Urban Growth – can’t trade away affordable housing aspirations once developments get underway.
Showing posts with label Sydney Alliance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sydney Alliance. Show all posts
Saturday, June 25, 2016
Thursday, June 13, 2013
The green bans, the people, and the right to the city - for Frank Stilwell
A while ago, I mentioned that I had been conducting archival research on the green ban movement -- an extraordinary alliance of building workers and resident action groups that imposed bans on various forms of development that threatened low-income housing and urban environmental amenity in Sydney during the 1970s.
I've now presented an initial paper based on that research in a few places - at an annual meeting of the Institute of Australian Geographers, at a seminar at UCLA, and recently at a conference in honour of Frank Stilwell, a Professor of Political Economy at the University of Sydney who has recently retired (not that retirement seems to be slowing him down!).
There's a longer version of this work in preparation for publication, but in the mean time, I thought I would post this most recent presentation that I gave at the Australian Political Economy conference in Frank's honour.
A few caveats. It's the script of a talk, so there are few explicit references to other work on the green bans and urban politics that I've used to develop these ideas. Apologies to those folks, of course the references will be in the longer publication!
Also, I've left in a little story I told about Frank -- it's nice to be able to post something about him here, as well as saying something at the conference, because he has been such an inspiration to me and countless others.
If anyone reads this, feedback would be very gratefully received!
I've now presented an initial paper based on that research in a few places - at an annual meeting of the Institute of Australian Geographers, at a seminar at UCLA, and recently at a conference in honour of Frank Stilwell, a Professor of Political Economy at the University of Sydney who has recently retired (not that retirement seems to be slowing him down!).
There's a longer version of this work in preparation for publication, but in the mean time, I thought I would post this most recent presentation that I gave at the Australian Political Economy conference in Frank's honour.
A few caveats. It's the script of a talk, so there are few explicit references to other work on the green bans and urban politics that I've used to develop these ideas. Apologies to those folks, of course the references will be in the longer publication!
Also, I've left in a little story I told about Frank -- it's nice to be able to post something about him here, as well as saying something at the conference, because he has been such an inspiration to me and countless others.
If anyone reads this, feedback would be very gratefully received!
Sunday, November 11, 2012
Mapping public transport accessibility in Sydney
Back in November last year, I blogged here about the first Sydney Alliance Transport Assembly, where we launched our campaign for improvements to public transport in Sydney.
It's not surprising that transport is one of the issues that the 52 partner organisations of the Sydney Alliance have chosen to work on together. Being able to get around is so fundamental to just about every aspect of urban life.
Our vision for an integrated and effective transport network focuses on addressing the key accessibility gaps with the following standards:
400 (everyone should be within 400 metres of public transport)
15 (that transport should come at least every fifteen minutes throughout the day)
1 (you should only need to pay once for any journey, no matter how many transfers you make)
S (you should feel safe)
C (it oughta be clean)
A (it oughta be accessible to all, regardless of who you are)
A (it should be affordable)
Since that Assembly, the Alliance's Transport Research Action Team has been very busy working on the 'S' in the formula, to take some first steps on the path to making this formula a reality. We've negotiated with councils to improve lighting in council car parks in several suburbs. We're also building a campaign on night-time staffing of key interchange train stations around the city.
Meanwhile, as part of the preparation for our work in 2013, Laurence Troy and I (both members of the National Tertiary Education Union) have been working together with members of the Sydney Alliance Transport Research Action Team to map the city on the '400' and '15' elements of the formula.
The map on the left shows which bits of Sydney have access to some form of public transport within 400 metres walk. The map on the right shows which bits of Sydney have access to some form of public transport within 400 metres that comes at least every 15 minutes during the day. As you can see, there's a lot less purple in that second map.
This weekend, an article based on the maps was published in the Sun Herald with some follow up stories on ABC Radio and Channel 7 news. Today Amanda Tattersall (Sydney Alliance Coalition Director) has an opinion piece published in the Sydney Morning Herald.
You can also interact with the maps on the Herald website, which has produced an interactive version on a Google Map layer.
Big props to Laurence Troy, for his fantastic mapping skills. And also to all my fellow Transport Research Action Team members ... yay team!
Anyways, just in case anyone is interested in a little more detail about how and why the maps were made, here's a bit of an 'FAQ' ...
-->
It's not surprising that transport is one of the issues that the 52 partner organisations of the Sydney Alliance have chosen to work on together. Being able to get around is so fundamental to just about every aspect of urban life.
Our vision for an integrated and effective transport network focuses on addressing the key accessibility gaps with the following standards:
400 (everyone should be within 400 metres of public transport)
15 (that transport should come at least every fifteen minutes throughout the day)
1 (you should only need to pay once for any journey, no matter how many transfers you make)
S (you should feel safe)
C (it oughta be clean)
A (it oughta be accessible to all, regardless of who you are)
A (it should be affordable)
Since that Assembly, the Alliance's Transport Research Action Team has been very busy working on the 'S' in the formula, to take some first steps on the path to making this formula a reality. We've negotiated with councils to improve lighting in council car parks in several suburbs. We're also building a campaign on night-time staffing of key interchange train stations around the city.
Meanwhile, as part of the preparation for our work in 2013, Laurence Troy and I (both members of the National Tertiary Education Union) have been working together with members of the Sydney Alliance Transport Research Action Team to map the city on the '400' and '15' elements of the formula.
This weekend, an article based on the maps was published in the Sun Herald with some follow up stories on ABC Radio and Channel 7 news. Today Amanda Tattersall (Sydney Alliance Coalition Director) has an opinion piece published in the Sydney Morning Herald.
You can also interact with the maps on the Herald website, which has produced an interactive version on a Google Map layer.
Big props to Laurence Troy, for his fantastic mapping skills. And also to all my fellow Transport Research Action Team members ... yay team!
Anyways, just in case anyone is interested in a little more detail about how and why the maps were made, here's a bit of an 'FAQ' ...
-->
Thursday, April 26, 2012
Who stands for Sydney? On the construction of 'the city' as a subject...
In writing about the Founding Assembly of the Sydney Alliance a while back, I said that Alliance was an attempt to "create a new political subject in and of the city of Sydney". I'm really interested in the formation of groups who claim to stand for the interests of 'the city' ... and in the case of Sydney, the Sydney Alliance is not the only group currently claiming to stand for the interests of Sydney. In the last month, we have seen the launch of two separate campaigns in the name of Sydney. What do these claims to the city look like, and how should we judge them?
The Daily Telegraph's "People's Plan"
The Daily Telegraph, a daily newspaper in Sydney, has recently published a special series of articles on planning for Sydney under the banner of The People's Plan. The notion of 'people's plans' has an interesting history in Sydney, not least as a term that was used by green ban activists for their alternative plans in the 1970s. So, what does the Tele's People's Plan involve? First, the Tele surveyed their readers to identify a set of big issues they believed to be facing Sydney today. Having identified these issues with the input of their readers, the newspaper then assembled a 'cabinet' of experts in these various fields to write opinion pieces, which take the form of proposals for planning and policy. Editor Paul Whittaker asked these experts for "fresh thinking" and "practical and workable solutions".
In explaining the People's Plan concept, Whittaker referred back to the Sydney masterplan devised almost a century ago by engineer John Bradfield (most famous as designer of the Sydney Harbour Bridge). Bradfield's plan, says Whittaker, was bold and visionary, but never came to be implemented due to a combination of war, depression and the usual "political wrangling and bureaucratic inertia". Where are the visionaries today, he asks? Only a bold and coherent vision for the city will "give people of Sydney the truly global city that they deserve". (His short video launching the series can be found here). To date, the Tele has published articles by experts on a wide range of topics which include: health; safety; affordability; transport; youth; driving; tourism; education; environment; ageing; families; commerce and; western Sydney. These articles by experts are accompanied by another dozen or so articles written by people on the 'front lines' of some of these issues - such as commuters, carers, pensioners and homeless young people. Many of these contributions are fascinating reading, and I think the Tele's People's Plan has attempted to put a range of very important issues on the public agenda through this campaign.
The Property Council of Australia's "Make My Sydney Work"
At around the same as the Tele launched its People's Plan, the Property Council of Australia launched a national campaign called Make My City Work. It describes the campaign as a "call to action" designed to "direct attention to cities and engage the community on growth". Material has been produced for each major Australian city, including a Make My Sydney Work campaign devoted to "fixing Australia's global city". There's a set of materials under five campaign headings: housing; jobs; lifestyle; infrastructure, and; sustainability. At present, these materials are much briefer than those in the People's Plan. But Peter Verwer, CEO of the Property Council, launched the campaign with a lunchtime address to the National Press Club at which he spoke about the need for a 'New Deal' for cities in Australia.
Alongside these two claims to stand for Sydney, and the Sydney Alliance, we also have the Committee for Sydney, Ten Thousand Friends of Greater Sydney, and most recently Occupy Sydney, to name a few.
Standing for the city: some critical questions...
How should we critically interrogate these different attempts to stand for the interests of the city of Sydney? We could ask several kinds of questions...
The Daily Telegraph's "People's Plan"
The Daily Telegraph, a daily newspaper in Sydney, has recently published a special series of articles on planning for Sydney under the banner of The People's Plan. The notion of 'people's plans' has an interesting history in Sydney, not least as a term that was used by green ban activists for their alternative plans in the 1970s. So, what does the Tele's People's Plan involve? First, the Tele surveyed their readers to identify a set of big issues they believed to be facing Sydney today. Having identified these issues with the input of their readers, the newspaper then assembled a 'cabinet' of experts in these various fields to write opinion pieces, which take the form of proposals for planning and policy. Editor Paul Whittaker asked these experts for "fresh thinking" and "practical and workable solutions".
In explaining the People's Plan concept, Whittaker referred back to the Sydney masterplan devised almost a century ago by engineer John Bradfield (most famous as designer of the Sydney Harbour Bridge). Bradfield's plan, says Whittaker, was bold and visionary, but never came to be implemented due to a combination of war, depression and the usual "political wrangling and bureaucratic inertia". Where are the visionaries today, he asks? Only a bold and coherent vision for the city will "give people of Sydney the truly global city that they deserve". (His short video launching the series can be found here). To date, the Tele has published articles by experts on a wide range of topics which include: health; safety; affordability; transport; youth; driving; tourism; education; environment; ageing; families; commerce and; western Sydney. These articles by experts are accompanied by another dozen or so articles written by people on the 'front lines' of some of these issues - such as commuters, carers, pensioners and homeless young people. Many of these contributions are fascinating reading, and I think the Tele's People's Plan has attempted to put a range of very important issues on the public agenda through this campaign.
 |
| Screen grab from the Daily Telegraph's "People's Plan" website |
The Property Council of Australia's "Make My Sydney Work"
At around the same as the Tele launched its People's Plan, the Property Council of Australia launched a national campaign called Make My City Work. It describes the campaign as a "call to action" designed to "direct attention to cities and engage the community on growth". Material has been produced for each major Australian city, including a Make My Sydney Work campaign devoted to "fixing Australia's global city". There's a set of materials under five campaign headings: housing; jobs; lifestyle; infrastructure, and; sustainability. At present, these materials are much briefer than those in the People's Plan. But Peter Verwer, CEO of the Property Council, launched the campaign with a lunchtime address to the National Press Club at which he spoke about the need for a 'New Deal' for cities in Australia.
 |
| Screen grab from the Property Council of Australia's Make My Sydney Work website |
Alongside these two claims to stand for Sydney, and the Sydney Alliance, we also have the Committee for Sydney, Ten Thousand Friends of Greater Sydney, and most recently Occupy Sydney, to name a few.
Standing for the city: some critical questions...
How should we critically interrogate these different attempts to stand for the interests of the city of Sydney? We could ask several kinds of questions...
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
The Sydney Alliance Transport Assembly
A couple of posts back, I offered up some reflections on the Founding Assembly of the Sydney Alliance, a coalition of unions, community organisations and faith groups working together to "advance the common good and achieve a fair, just and sustainable Sydney". A short couple of months after that event, I was involved in launching the Sydney Alliance's campaign on transport at the Transport Assembly in Penrith, one of the outer-western suburbs of Sydney.
The Transport Assembly was the culmination of six months of action-research by the Alliance's Transport Research Action Team. In May of this year, when the Alliance decided that Transport would be one of the three key issues on which it would work, the Research Action Team was formed. It's a loose, diverse group, comprised of people from across the member organisations of the Alliance who were prepared to commit to working on transport. There's been quite a bit of learning-as-we-go here. One of the first issues to confront the group was that it was difficult to find a time and place to meet that would work for everyone across the city -- especially given some of the very transport issues that the group is trying to address! To get around this, we ended up with two groups, one that has been meeting in the Central Business District and the other that has been meeting in Penrith.
Since May, Transport Team participants have been busy talking to people across the member organisations of the Alliance about their transport issues, as well as reading up on the latest research on transport and meeting with a range of transport experts based in Sydney and beyond. Personally, I've found this really interesting. I've never conducted research on transport before, so compared to some of the other participants in the group, I've had a lot of catching up to do. Those involved in the team include transport workers and advocates in community organisations like the Western Sydney Community Forum and the Cancer Council, folks from various unions and community groups who've had a long involvement in transport campaigns dating back as far as the anti-freeway green bans in the 1970s (and sometimes further!), bus drivers and railway staff who have intimate knowledge of how public transport works and how it might run better, and people like me who are new to transport but fired up to make a change, among many others.
The event started with small groups of people making their way to Penrith on public transport from various parts of the city. These groups conducted some research on the trip, surveying commuters about their experiences of public transport and telling them about the Sydney Alliance. They also chaperoned some members of NSW Parliament who were attending the Assembly. On arrival at Penrith Station, there were bagpipes playing (seriously!!!), and a march to the Q Theatre in Penrith. After the surveys were handed in and some food was consumed, the formalities began...
One of the main purposes of the night was to launch and explain the Sydney Alliance's formula for public transport in Sydney:
400:15:1 SCA2.
This formula addresses the different dimensions of accessibility to public transport which have emerged as Alliance priorities through the initial phase of action research.
The 400 is for 400 metres -- meaning that everyone in Sydney should have some form of public transport within 400 metres of where they're at and where they want to go.
The 15 is for 15 minutes -- meaning that public transport services should come at least every fifteen minutes all day, across the entire network
The 1 is for 1 ticket -- meaning that if your trip requires you to change modes of transport, you should not need to buy separate tickets, as is currently the case. 1 ticket should buy you access to the network, not just a single line.
The S is for Safe. The C is for Clean. The first A is for Accessible. And the second A is for Affordable.
Adding all of this up, the formula addresses the different 'accessibility gaps' that characterise the existing public transport system (see Corinne Mulley and Rhonda Daniel's work on accessibility gaps in public transport). The Alliance formula also recognises that Sydney-siders' travel needs are complicated -- we don't simply travel from the suburbs to the city centre for work, although the system tends to be planned with that kind of trip in mind. Rather, in our day-to-day lives we travel to lots of places, for lots of different reasons, at all times of the day and night (only about 16% of trips in Sydney are commuting to work, which constitutes about 28% of the distance we travel -- a large chunk of our travel is much shorter trips for other purposes like shopping, recreation, and services like health and education. See the most recent stats on transport in Sydney here). As such, for public transport to facilitate universal access to a range of activities and services which are central to our lives, it has to provide a network which enables us to access the whole metropolitan area.
Here, our thinking broadly fits with some of the work done by folks like Gustav Nielsen, Jarrett Walker and Paul Mees on the so-called 'network effect' in public transport. As Paul Mees puts it, you want the public transport network to be similar to the road network. The road network is not planned to enable all possible car trips to be taken on a single road. Rather, the roads form a network which provides a kind of mesh that enable car drivers to get anywhere they want to go. The same should be true of the public transport network. But in Sydney, public transport tends to be planned and provided as a series of distinct routes feeding into the CBD rather than as an integrated network which enables trips across the entire city.
To illustrate the '400' and '15' parts of the formula, a group of us produced a series of maps of public transport accessibility and frequency in Sydney. First, we mapped every train station and bus routes across the Metropolitan Area, to come up with an approximate representation of which parts of the city had access to public transport within 400 metres. Then we calculated the average frequency of each bus and train route between 5am and midnight on an average weekday. (Lots of member organisations in the Alliance represent shift workers, so looking at frequencies across the whole day was vital to adequately address their transport needs.) The result was the maps below, which show the extent of public transport coverage at different average frequencies.
As you can see, while Sydney is relatively well-covered by public transport routes, not many of those routes have adequate frequencies to provide decent public transport for people across the city.
There are no doubt those who would suggest that lower density residential suburbs in the north, south and west of the city can't sustain frequent, comprehensive public transport and that densification is the answer. But like Paul Mees, we're not convinced of this. As the Public Transport Users Association in Melbourne puts it
Of course, the point of the Alliance is not just to raise a series of issues and toss around ideas for solutions, it is to build power and take effective political action. To that end, at the conclusion of the Assembly participants were provided with maps of their region of Sydney, and reps from the Sydney Alliance regional groups were on hand outside the theatre to sign people up who were ready to start taking action to address the gaps in the network.
Reflecting back on the Assembly and the work of the Transport Research Action Team so far, I think we've got at least two big challenges as we continue to develop the campaign... (beyond public transport being, like, a big issue!!)
First, I've found it really interesting that the issues of safety and cleanliness have emerged as very significant issues both to members of the Alliance and to members of the public who we surveyed. When we first presented the idea of a formula for transport at the Founding Assembly in September, it was '400:15:1'. But when we went back to member organisations across the Alliance with this formula, many told us that it didn't effectively capture all of their major concerns. This shouldn't have surprised me, given it has also emerged from previous research on transport accessibility. But I do think it's going to be a real challenge for the Alliance to find ways to address issues like safety and cleanliness that don't resort to the typical punitive 'law-and-order' responses. This is going to be especially important given that one of the other issues on which the Alliance is working is social inclusion. Indeed, the harassment of young people by police and security guards in public spaces and on public transport has emerged as one of the key issues for the Social Inclusion Research Action Team. I'm really excited about the potential for the Alliance to come up with something progressive rather than exclusionary on this issue...
Second, finding ways to build power and take action on public transport presents a particular set of geographical challenges for the Alliance in Sydney. To build an effective campaign on public transport, it's essential that people can connect with the issue and take action 'locally', in their neighbourhoods and workplaces. And yet, we've got to ensure that local actions add up to more than the sum of their parts. After all, a big part of the problem with public transport in Sydney is the fact that local services are not effectively co-ordinated into a network that provides integrated and comprehensive access to the entire metropolitan area. Inevitably, confronting network-wide issues like route structures, ticketing and safety will push us all beyond our localities. For instance, a 'local' safety campaign to get train stations staffed at night would have budgetary implications, and change to local bus routes and timetables would mean changes to procurement contracts between the State Government and public and private bus operators. So, we absolutely need to go local and build genuine citizen participation in transport planning -- that's a crucial ingredient that's been missing from all the expert-driven plans for improving the system which are now sitting on a shelf somewhere gathering dust, never to be implemented. And yet, we also have to make sure that local action is itself co-ordinated across the city -- you could say our organising challenge is to build a campaign that is as integrated and comprehensive as the transport network we want to create...
I'll be presenting a paper reflecting on the Sydney Alliance transport research-action process at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers later this month in New York, at a session on 'Placing Justice and Struggle in Transport Studies'. It's going to be crazy cold I'm sure ... but I'm not complaining!! I just hope that the transport heads go easy on me...
Meanwhile, if you're in Sydney and you'd like to know more or get involved, further details about the on-going activities of the Transport Research Action Team can be found here.
[Note: the ideas above are the product of collective research-action by lots of people involved in the Transport Research Action Team, but it's my write-up, so blame me for any mistakes or misinterpretations!]
The Transport Assembly was the culmination of six months of action-research by the Alliance's Transport Research Action Team. In May of this year, when the Alliance decided that Transport would be one of the three key issues on which it would work, the Research Action Team was formed. It's a loose, diverse group, comprised of people from across the member organisations of the Alliance who were prepared to commit to working on transport. There's been quite a bit of learning-as-we-go here. One of the first issues to confront the group was that it was difficult to find a time and place to meet that would work for everyone across the city -- especially given some of the very transport issues that the group is trying to address! To get around this, we ended up with two groups, one that has been meeting in the Central Business District and the other that has been meeting in Penrith.
Since May, Transport Team participants have been busy talking to people across the member organisations of the Alliance about their transport issues, as well as reading up on the latest research on transport and meeting with a range of transport experts based in Sydney and beyond. Personally, I've found this really interesting. I've never conducted research on transport before, so compared to some of the other participants in the group, I've had a lot of catching up to do. Those involved in the team include transport workers and advocates in community organisations like the Western Sydney Community Forum and the Cancer Council, folks from various unions and community groups who've had a long involvement in transport campaigns dating back as far as the anti-freeway green bans in the 1970s (and sometimes further!), bus drivers and railway staff who have intimate knowledge of how public transport works and how it might run better, and people like me who are new to transport but fired up to make a change, among many others.
 |
| Sydney Alliance Transport Assembly, Q Theatre, Penrith, November 2011 |
The event started with small groups of people making their way to Penrith on public transport from various parts of the city. These groups conducted some research on the trip, surveying commuters about their experiences of public transport and telling them about the Sydney Alliance. They also chaperoned some members of NSW Parliament who were attending the Assembly. On arrival at Penrith Station, there were bagpipes playing (seriously!!!), and a march to the Q Theatre in Penrith. After the surveys were handed in and some food was consumed, the formalities began...
One of the main purposes of the night was to launch and explain the Sydney Alliance's formula for public transport in Sydney:
400:15:1 SCA2.
This formula addresses the different dimensions of accessibility to public transport which have emerged as Alliance priorities through the initial phase of action research.
The 400 is for 400 metres -- meaning that everyone in Sydney should have some form of public transport within 400 metres of where they're at and where they want to go.
The 15 is for 15 minutes -- meaning that public transport services should come at least every fifteen minutes all day, across the entire network
The 1 is for 1 ticket -- meaning that if your trip requires you to change modes of transport, you should not need to buy separate tickets, as is currently the case. 1 ticket should buy you access to the network, not just a single line.
The S is for Safe. The C is for Clean. The first A is for Accessible. And the second A is for Affordable.
Adding all of this up, the formula addresses the different 'accessibility gaps' that characterise the existing public transport system (see Corinne Mulley and Rhonda Daniel's work on accessibility gaps in public transport). The Alliance formula also recognises that Sydney-siders' travel needs are complicated -- we don't simply travel from the suburbs to the city centre for work, although the system tends to be planned with that kind of trip in mind. Rather, in our day-to-day lives we travel to lots of places, for lots of different reasons, at all times of the day and night (only about 16% of trips in Sydney are commuting to work, which constitutes about 28% of the distance we travel -- a large chunk of our travel is much shorter trips for other purposes like shopping, recreation, and services like health and education. See the most recent stats on transport in Sydney here). As such, for public transport to facilitate universal access to a range of activities and services which are central to our lives, it has to provide a network which enables us to access the whole metropolitan area.
Here, our thinking broadly fits with some of the work done by folks like Gustav Nielsen, Jarrett Walker and Paul Mees on the so-called 'network effect' in public transport. As Paul Mees puts it, you want the public transport network to be similar to the road network. The road network is not planned to enable all possible car trips to be taken on a single road. Rather, the roads form a network which provides a kind of mesh that enable car drivers to get anywhere they want to go. The same should be true of the public transport network. But in Sydney, public transport tends to be planned and provided as a series of distinct routes feeding into the CBD rather than as an integrated network which enables trips across the entire city.
To illustrate the '400' and '15' parts of the formula, a group of us produced a series of maps of public transport accessibility and frequency in Sydney. First, we mapped every train station and bus routes across the Metropolitan Area, to come up with an approximate representation of which parts of the city had access to public transport within 400 metres. Then we calculated the average frequency of each bus and train route between 5am and midnight on an average weekday. (Lots of member organisations in the Alliance represent shift workers, so looking at frequencies across the whole day was vital to adequately address their transport needs.) The result was the maps below, which show the extent of public transport coverage at different average frequencies.
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| In this map, those who live within the yellow shaded areas have some form of public transport within 400m |
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| In this map, those who live within the yellow shaded areas have some form of public transport within 400m that comes at least every 30 minutes during the day |
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| In this map, those who live within the yellow shaded areas have some form of public transport within 400m that comes at least every 15 minutes during the day |
As you can see, while Sydney is relatively well-covered by public transport routes, not many of those routes have adequate frequencies to provide decent public transport for people across the city.
There are no doubt those who would suggest that lower density residential suburbs in the north, south and west of the city can't sustain frequent, comprehensive public transport and that densification is the answer. But like Paul Mees, we're not convinced of this. As the Public Transport Users Association in Melbourne puts it
Any city with sufficient population density to cause traffic congestion has sufficient population to support a first-rate public transport alternative.
Of course, the point of the Alliance is not just to raise a series of issues and toss around ideas for solutions, it is to build power and take effective political action. To that end, at the conclusion of the Assembly participants were provided with maps of their region of Sydney, and reps from the Sydney Alliance regional groups were on hand outside the theatre to sign people up who were ready to start taking action to address the gaps in the network.
Reflecting back on the Assembly and the work of the Transport Research Action Team so far, I think we've got at least two big challenges as we continue to develop the campaign... (beyond public transport being, like, a big issue!!)
First, I've found it really interesting that the issues of safety and cleanliness have emerged as very significant issues both to members of the Alliance and to members of the public who we surveyed. When we first presented the idea of a formula for transport at the Founding Assembly in September, it was '400:15:1'. But when we went back to member organisations across the Alliance with this formula, many told us that it didn't effectively capture all of their major concerns. This shouldn't have surprised me, given it has also emerged from previous research on transport accessibility. But I do think it's going to be a real challenge for the Alliance to find ways to address issues like safety and cleanliness that don't resort to the typical punitive 'law-and-order' responses. This is going to be especially important given that one of the other issues on which the Alliance is working is social inclusion. Indeed, the harassment of young people by police and security guards in public spaces and on public transport has emerged as one of the key issues for the Social Inclusion Research Action Team. I'm really excited about the potential for the Alliance to come up with something progressive rather than exclusionary on this issue...
Second, finding ways to build power and take action on public transport presents a particular set of geographical challenges for the Alliance in Sydney. To build an effective campaign on public transport, it's essential that people can connect with the issue and take action 'locally', in their neighbourhoods and workplaces. And yet, we've got to ensure that local actions add up to more than the sum of their parts. After all, a big part of the problem with public transport in Sydney is the fact that local services are not effectively co-ordinated into a network that provides integrated and comprehensive access to the entire metropolitan area. Inevitably, confronting network-wide issues like route structures, ticketing and safety will push us all beyond our localities. For instance, a 'local' safety campaign to get train stations staffed at night would have budgetary implications, and change to local bus routes and timetables would mean changes to procurement contracts between the State Government and public and private bus operators. So, we absolutely need to go local and build genuine citizen participation in transport planning -- that's a crucial ingredient that's been missing from all the expert-driven plans for improving the system which are now sitting on a shelf somewhere gathering dust, never to be implemented. And yet, we also have to make sure that local action is itself co-ordinated across the city -- you could say our organising challenge is to build a campaign that is as integrated and comprehensive as the transport network we want to create...
I'll be presenting a paper reflecting on the Sydney Alliance transport research-action process at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers later this month in New York, at a session on 'Placing Justice and Struggle in Transport Studies'. It's going to be crazy cold I'm sure ... but I'm not complaining!! I just hope that the transport heads go easy on me...
Meanwhile, if you're in Sydney and you'd like to know more or get involved, further details about the on-going activities of the Transport Research Action Team can be found here.
[Note: the ideas above are the product of collective research-action by lots of people involved in the Transport Research Action Team, but it's my write-up, so blame me for any mistakes or misinterpretations!]
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Coalition-Building in the City: the Sydney Alliance Founding Assembly
On the 15th of September, the Sydney Alliance had its Founding Assembly. Over 2000 people packed the Sydney Town Hall for the occasion, drawn from the ranks of the 45 member organisations made up of non-government organisations, trade unions and religious organisations.
The stated goal of the Alliance is to "bring together diverse community organisations, unions and religious organisations to advance the common good and achieve a fair, just and sustainable city." It's part of the wider international network of citizen coalitions affilliated with the Industrial Areas Foundation, which includes coalitions such as the Seattle Sound Alliance and Citizens UK. It was seed-funded in 2007 by Unions NSW, the peak body for trade unions in NSW. With its strong trade union involvement, the Sydney Alliance also explicitly positions itself within an Australian tradition of community-union alliances such as the green ban movement of the 1970s.
The Founding Assembly was an exciting night for me, on lots of levels. The National Tertiary Education Union has joined the Alliance, and I was one of several NTEU members there on the night. I've also been actively involved in the Alliance's Research-Action Team on public transport for a few months now, and had a small speaking role in the Assembly on behalf of that Team. They are a fantastic bunch of people, and it was a real thrill to represent them on the night and watch the whole thing go down from up on the stage. (Yay Team Transport!!)
More broadly, I think it was also an exciting night for the city. The Assembly very publicly staged the Alliance in all its diversity and ambition. In this regard, two moments stood out for me. The first was the opening "roll-call" in which someone from each of the 45 member organisations stood up to deliver a brief message about their organisation and why it had joined the Alliance. As members of each organisation stood and spoke to cheers and applause from the crowd, I actually got chills ... it was a powerful display of unity and common purpose across difference, and a real highlight of the night.
The second moment was the speech given by Amanda Tattersall, the Alliance's Director. At one point, she noted that we the people had been "sliced and diced and categorised" in various ways by political parties and the media and corporate interests --- as 'Howard's Battlers', as 'working families', as 'consumers', etc. "But from tonight," she concluded, "we go by a new name. We are the Sydney Alliance!" I think this part of Amanda's speech spoke to one of most important aspects of what the Alliance is all about -- the creation of a new political subject in and of this city.
All of which brings me to the subject of coalition-building in the city more generally. This issue has re-emerged as a central concern of recent urban activism and theory concerned with rights to the city and/or spatial justice. So, in what follows I want to offer a few thoughts on the on-going work of the Sydney Alliance through a dialogue with two recent books by Ed Soja and Mark Purcell. Both of these books strive to move beyond critique of neoliberal urbanisms by thinking about the kinds of movements that might articulate (and hopefully even realise!) visions of a more just and democratic city.
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