WHY THE RMA HAS FAILED THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT

It is now ten years since the enactment of the Resource Management Act (RMA). The total costs of implementing the Act have been enormous as we have switched from town and country planning to resource management. The big questions are, is the built environment any better, and is it worth the cost?

Planning under the former Town and Country Planning Act was focused on land use activities and development. It directed the physical location of activities and the physical form of development. It presupposed the way urban areas worked socially and economically. It failed dismally to cope with the dynamics of growth and change.

Resource management under the RMA is focused on the sustainable management of resources including the life-supporting capacity of ecosystems and the need to avoid, remedy, or mitigate any adverse effects of activities on the environment. The environment, subject to permitted uses, is the existing environment.

Resource management, as a discipline, has evolved from considerations of the use of natural resources. It deals primarily with the impact of human activities on the natural environment. Such impacts can only be adverse but of varying degree. The natural environment can never be improved and is to be protected from significant adverse effects of human activities. Resource management is therefore primarily a negative, conservative process. It establishes ecological "bottom lines" in respect of potential modification of the natural environment.

However, to this process of managing natural resources, the RMA has tacked on the management of all built physical resources, including consideration of related social and economic aspects of the human environment.

Unfortunately, the RMA imposes the same assessment process to the built environment as it does to the natural environment. Unlike the natural environment, the built environment is created by a positive planning, design and development process. The built environment, because of social, economic, technological and political change, continually requires substantial restructuring and improvement.

Herein lies the basic flaw of the RMA. The built environment requires a positive and creative strategic approach to meet changing circumstances. The negative and conservative resource management approach that focuses on the adverse effects on the existing built environment falls far short of what is required. While the role of design in the resource management process is implicit in avoiding, remedying or mitigating adverse effects, it is certainly not explicit in terms of improving the quality of the built environment.

Curiously, the requirements of the RMA for preparing an assessment of effects on the environment do not distinguish between adverse and beneficial effects. Both should be assessed (Fourth Schedule RMA). When considering an application for resource consent, the consent authority shall have regard to any actual and potential effects on the environment, subject to Part II of the Act (Section 104 RMA). But Part II of the Act clearly focuses on avoiding, remedying or mitigating adverse effects (Section 5 RMA). Nowhere in Part II of the Act is there any inclusion of the consideration of positive effects on the built environment.

Further, despite the inclusion of the management of built resources in the RMA, there appear to be no provisions for district plans to deal with the very important sustainability issues relating to the use of building materials and of the use of energy in buildings which have enormous implications for the natural environment.

To confuse matters further, the RMA is being implemented primarily by land use planners who have suddenly transformed themselves into resource managers. The RMA is an environmental protection act, not a planning act, but some planners tend to distort the legislation, or assume causal effects, to give district plans continuing dubious direction and control over the location and form of development, for example by restricting the location of retail activities to existing centres to protect the water quality of streams.

As a result, we are getting very complicated and confused statutory documents subject to protracted legal challenge and variable judicial interpretation. The plans are so complex that they are out of date well before they are operative. It is becoming increasingly difficult to justify the costs of the RMA process against resultant benefits to the built environment.

Positive planning and urban design is occurring, by default, outside of the legislative framework in an ad hoc manner. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but the RMA should be quite clear about what it is attempting to manage.

In my opinion, the RMA needs to be urgently amended to clarify the purpose and principles of the statutory control of the built environment.

Legislation should recognise that the existing urban environment has to change with continuing social, economic, cultural and technological change. Long-term beneficial effects of development must be taken into account as well as short-term adverse effects. This implies a negotiated trade-off of effects, contrary to existing case law.

However, it is difficult to legislate for creative urban planning and design. Generic design principles and guidelines are of limited value in practice. They have to be general and simplistic, but every encouragement should be given for our built environments to become more diverse and multi-cultural.

Legislative options include stripping the RMA of all environmental considerations other than ecological and providing for the built environment in additional legislation, or changing the RMA to include the consideration of positive effects on the built environment.

Urban amenity values and issues differ from site to site, block to block, neighbourhood to neighbourhood, district to district. We need a positive strategic planning process that can deal with urban design issues on a site-specific basis.

Specific legislative provision for preliminary "outline" consents for major developments is a possible option. Such outline consents could define broad activity "envelopes" and set out, as conditions of preliminary consent, precise site-specific urban design objectives which, when combined with project objectives, will form a comprehensive design brief for subsequent design and full consent. The advantage of this approach is that public design issues can be established before project design is developed, environmental trade-offs can be negotiated and consent can be obtained in principle before developers are committed to costs of detailed design and fixed documentation. Independent urban design panels and design guidelines could assist with this process.

Alternatively, a non-statutory approach to creative urban management would require substantial funding diverted from existing RMA procedures that fail to deal positively with the built environment.

 

Barry Rae
director, Barry Rae Transurban Ltd
e-mail: barryrae@transurban.co.nz

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