With the recent and welcome focus on liveable and prosperous cities in Australia – let’s not forget our many thriving regional communities – you could be forgiven for thinking we are on the cusp of rolling out great visions and strategies for green urban corridors, urban habitats and canopy.
Well, while we adore and sometimes bemoan them, we are some way off giving these visions and strategies a dollar value.
Ironically of course you can capitalise everything needed to take care of a tree, but not the masterpiece itself. Trees are becoming a symbol of what we are looking for in our liveable cities, just look at the protests about their removal in the South East of Sydney. On the flip side, I struggle with trees being planted and left to die because there was not thought to how they would be watered. So it’s good to see industry associations such as the Australian Institute for Landscape Architecture, led by Shahana McKenzie showing leadership in this area by developing a Living Cities agenda.
The Prime Minister called a Cities Summit last week to bring together responsible Ministers: Hon Greg Hunt MP, Hon Angus Taylor MP and Hon Paul Fletcher MP together with business leaders, researchers and a few of us association types. After dropping on and off the agenda it was good to see some refocussing in this area. As you would imagine transport dominates the debates, however within the Liveable Cities round table chaired by Minister Hunt, we managed to escape into another world where people mattered, urban canopy was not a dream, and community voices were actively sought for decision making. That was the major theme together with integration of infrastructure, essential services and land use planning.
In the other sessions ‘value capture’, the new buzz word, was the focus of transport discussions. Here at WSAA, through the Liveable Communities Committee and the Board, we’ve been doing some thinking about how that value capture could be broadened past transport to value the uniqueness of Australia (and our NZ friends too): clean, healthy and safe water ways and drinking water and beautiful areas for recreation? We’ve also been thinking about the mental and physical health benefits of urban habitat and talking to the CRC Water Sensitive Cities about research in this space.
So what is water’s role in liveability? With a plethora of indexes out there we decided it would be valuable to put a stake in the ground and suggest water specific liveability indicators for the benefit of everyone from the Prime Minister to our local council partners. Importantly though it’s for our members to help them start their own journey with their customers and stakeholders. As part of the process we developed a definition for Liveability:
‘Liveability is all of those things that make a place somewhere people want to live, communities flourish and businesses choose to invest. To be long lasting and resilient, a liveable city or region must consider the needs of future generations and use systems thinking to understand and respond to shocks and long-term change.’
WSAA recognises the growing contribution water utilities make towards liveability. Delivery of essential services to safeguard the health of community and the environment are a given, even regrettably taken for granted. Less recognised services include water for cooling and greening cities, contributing to healthy waterways, water security and more.
Based on the premise of ‘what gets measured, gets managed’, these indicators measure and build on waters contribution to liveability. Occasional Paper No. 31: Liveability Indicators provides a ‘menu’ of indicators to choose from, covering amenity and well-being, productivity, sustainability and future focus.
So what’s a tree worth? Some are making a start like Melbourne City Council which has a tree valuation system based on four criteria, including amenity value. Let’s give trees some tangible, monetised value, it can only help us to progress our understanding of the value of liveable cities.
5 May 2016
