Why have our planners failed to get an implementable housing diversity plan up for the Missing Middle?

The answer is that most planners do not get the basics. They don't understand the need to win public and industry confidence. Today's housing density and diversity challenges are not a matter to be left in the hands of designers alone. The solution here is not about recording and prescribing the interests of the big end of town. A new era of housing formation is needed and it must be led by doers not patsies. Renowned architect Ken Woolley was a pioneer in quality project housing 40-years ago when he inspired the Pettit and Sevitt housing company that had many lessons for today. So, what's the problem today?

I have accepted a keynote speaker role at the Housing Density and Diversity Conference in Melbourne on the 19th and 20th June. My keynote will not be some whimsical protest. I will be pulling no punches in sharing my views on why planning agencies have the wrong people in the chair and why no-one trusts them. I will be showcasing what happens when planners just don't get it. I will be pointing to pictorial evidence to show that our current crop of planners are incompetently sterilising valuable land in both greenfield and brownfield. I will suggest that many sitting around the design table are elite snobs that have turned their back on the volume housing industry for over 40-years and that the built suburbia they decry, is of their making.

A link to the conference is below. I look forward to some lively exchanges of views.

The making of the built world is undergoing enormous transformation and disruption. Most planners seem to live in a bubble that is immune to how the making of buildings is changing and why traditional approaches to designing and construction is not part of the future. New capabilities are needed to embrace the potential to do better, much better. "Rethinking housing delivery means rethinking housing procurement. And fixating on traditional industry capabilities and practices just because they are in demand now is the construction industry's equivalent of 'fiddling while Rome burns," UK's Mark Farmer.

Fiddling with traditional planning and delivery models is no different. Its time to disrupt business as usual, just as Pettit and Sevitt did 40-years ago.