Architecture, Building and Planning - Theses
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Item‘Leisure, pleasure … rubbish and rats?’: the planned and unplanned reclamation of bluestone quarry sites in urban Melbourne, 1835-2000( 2020)This thesis explores how regulatory mechanisms and community perceptions of urban extractive industry have changed, particularly during the twentieth century. Extractive industries operational in the twenty-first century are now located well outside of the metropolis, obviating the impacts of this deleterious industrial practice. Yet this was not always the case. Australian cities, settled following the industrial revolution, made great use of these extractive resources often accessing them in quite densely settled areas. Such land-use often took place in inner-urban locales, and the infancy of planning practice at that time saw these quarries established in an ad hoc manner. The absence of controls with respect to the location and management of quarries culminated in an uncomfortable closeness with nearby residential areas. As quarrying operations moved towards the urban periphery during the early twentieth-century, the absence of comprehensive planning failed to prevent suburban development from encroaching upon extractive industry, and in some cases this led to conflict between residents, government, planning bodies, and industry. This is especially apparent in Melbourne, the world’s largest metropolitan area atop a basaltic plain, from which the stone has been utilised for construction and roadwork since the city’s inception in 1835. Urban planning for quarries was historically absent until the formation of legislation in the 1960s in response to urban and land-use conflict; additionally, the city’s ongoing reliance on rubbish tips led tipping to be a default after-use for such sites, also raising ire. Improvements in this process encompassed the creation of legislation, planning policies, and the formation of activist groups to agitate for change. These developments were prompted by land-use conflicts, demographic change, and increased environmental awareness, all contributing to a perceived need for better planning. The tipping process was recast through a lens of social justice as undesirable undertakings no longer compatible with residential life. This thesis focuses on the use and after-use of sites of extractive industry in Melbourne, and how these sites and their final outcomes were planned—by government and planning bodies—and ‘unplanned’—left to the market or the community to resolve. It demonstrates that comprehensive urban planning for quarries and their after-uses have been historically absent: this was exacerbated by the city’s reliance upon landfill as a mode of refuse disposal, which could also be harnessed to remediate excavated sites. These findings were revealed in undertaking case study analyses of the western suburbs of Newport and Niddrie. Although communities in both areas were fundamentally successful in limiting or preventing the complete transformation of their local quarry sites into tips, the form and success of quarry remediation was still fundamentally subject to the limitations of the state government’s planning directives. This thesis found that local communities and groups were crucial to the achievement of a compensatory and judicious land-use outcome for urban quarry sites. The investigations within this thesis reveal the importance of local community as ‘watchdogs’ of planning processes and procedures in an instance of legislative and regulatory oversight spanning two centuries.