It’s World Town Planning Day. Here’s to the people whose best work goes unnoticed.
Think about how you got to work this morning. If it was boring, someone did their job.
The footpath went where you needed it to. The bus turned up (maybe slightly late but it did turn up). The crossing signal gave you just enough time. The truck delivering your café’s milk didn’t get stuck behind the school drop-off. None of it was exciting and none of it was an accident.
That’s the odd thing about planning. When it works, nobody notices. We only talk about it when it’s missing: the new estate with no bus, the school with nowhere safe to cross, the industrial precinct you can only reach by car.
8 November is World Town Planning Day, and this year’s theme is Great Communities Are Built on Planning. We are planners and we work alongside planners every week at Avandra, so we thought we’d say it out loud.
The work you can’t see
At Avandra, some of our most valuable work will never get built. On transport strategy projects, we spend months understanding how people move, where the constraints and opportunities are, and where investment will create the greatest benefit. Sometimes the outcome is a new piece of infrastructure. More often, it’s a smarter sequence of decisions that create healthier places, improve access to services, expand travel choices and prevent future congestion.
This is the approach we are taking on the Southern Beaches Structure Plan for the growing coastal communities on Hobart’s far southeastern fringe. We’re not proposing a big new highway or shiny new car park. Instead, the focus is on improving travel choices today while supporting future growth. Success won’t be measured by a ribbon cutting. It will be measured by whether people can continue to move around the area safely, efficiently and with more choices as the community grows. Years from now, residents won’t know why a journey feels easier or why a new neighbourhood functions well. They will simply expect it to work. That’s planning doing its job.
Planning is everywhere
Planning influences far more than where buildings are located or where buffers are required.
It helps determine how communities grow, where homes are built, how people access jobs and services, how freight moves, where parks are provided, and how transport networks connect people with the opportunities that matter most.
The best planning is often invisible. When communities function well, people rarely stop to think about the strategic decisions, technical studies and long-term vision that helped make those outcomes possible.
Sometimes planning is the “no”
Some of the best planning outcomes are things that didn’t happen. The employment land that remains available for future jobs. The bypass that isn’t needed because growth is managed differently. The extra traffic lane that looks sensible in the traffic model but would make the town centre less walkable, less vibrant and less attractive.
Good planners are trained to look beyond the immediate problem and ask whether a proposed solution actually delivers the outcome a community wants, and future communities need. Sometimes the answer is to build something. Sometimes it’s to do something differently. And sometimes the answer is not to build at all.
At Avandra, we see real value being able to provide independent strategic planning advice, regardless of whether a project ultimately proceeds to design and construction. If the evidence shows that a different approach will create a better outcome for the community, we’re prepared to say so. The measure of success isn’t how much infrastructure gets built. It’s whether communities function better because of the decisions that were made.
It’s a team sport
Transport planning doesn’t work in isolation. In our experience, the best outcomes come when transport and land use planners are in the same room early; rather than the transport team being brought in after key decisions have already been made and asked to make the pieces fit together and operate smoothly. Planners, engineers, councils, developers and communities all pull in the same direction, usually after some healthy debate.
Planners make it happen
Planning is ultimately about people. It’s about creating communities that are accessible, inclusive, prosperous and resilient. It's about making decisions today that will continue to benefit communities for decades to come.
This World Town Planning Day, we celebrate the planners and planning professionals helping shape Australia's towns, cities and regions, and the many people working alongside them to create better places for future generations.
Because when planning works, nobody notices. And that’s exactly the point.
What’s one piece of planning you rely on every day without noticing? Tell us on Linkedin, and tag the planner behind it if you know who it is.