NOTE: The Digest is also available as a PDF file.

Items

Item 1: 50 year plans: Visions or Hallucinations?

Item 2: The High Costs of Central Planning (Pt 2)

Item 3: The Risks of Deferring to Reputation and Authority.

Item 4: Theory in Conflict with Observations – the Perils of Transit Oriented Development.

Item 5: The Threat to Coastlines – lessons from the Netherlands

Item 6: A Note on Feeding Mushrooms – the Special Digest.

Entertainments:

Entertainment 1: The Perfect Martini.

Entertainment 2: Getting Rid of the 'Sustainababblers'.

ITEMS

Item One: 50 Year Plans – Visions or Hallucinations?

The front page of the Northern Advocate (December 16th) carries a story headlined "In the 1960s, we thought Whangarei might look this ..."

The illustration is fascinating but understandably "quaint" as one would expect. The "theme' heading is "the Era of Nuclear Power and Exploitation of the Ocean's Wealth" and the key to the sites dotted around Waipu, Marsden Point, and Whangarei itself, list activities such as:

A Marine Biology University

An Organic Ocean Extractor Plant

A Nuclear Electric Power Plant

A Chemical plant and Ocean Induction Unit

A Nuclear Powered Oil Refinery

A Harbour Tunnel

An Electric Automobile Industry

A Hovercraft manufacturing plant.

The Otaika International Airport.

A National Monorail System Station.

A Heliport.

An International University of Agricutural Technology and Production.

And so on, and so forth.

It's hardly necessary to say that none of these things have come to pass and that the Fifty Year Vision of Fifty Years Ago was hopelessly wrong. And yet, without any reference to the irony, the headline under the illustration reads "But How are we Going to Look another 50 years from now?"

The story opens with some population projections for the year 2061, and explains "These are the estimates contained in a 50-year planning document titled "Sub-Regional Growth Strategy" put together by the Whangarei District Council. The public are about to be consulted on the key issues facing the district and how they will be tackled.

This make-work scheme, and the workers who have made it, do not seem to have learned the lesson from the last attempt to make fifty year forecasts. Presumably the 1960s attempt at fifty year planning was regarded as an entertaining diversion - possible inspired by the Jetsons television series of the time. Sadly, this current exercise is to be taken seriously and by the time it is completed, with all the usual consultation and consultants' reports, will have cost the ratepayers scores, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars.

The nightmare is compounded by the further explanation that "Submitters will be asked to choose between three approaches suggested by the council, named Future One, Future Two and Future Three. Naturally Climate Change, sea level rise and land use patterns will be embodied in the exercise.

The fundamental flaw is that the real-world 'future' does not offer only three choices. There are a multitude of futures and we have no idea what they are because we cannot predict future knowledge. For some reason the Council has decided to consider only three. What about the other thousand or ten thousand or hundred thousand? Or infinity minus 3? Why have all these "futures" been discarded without giving the citizens of Whangarei an equal opportunity to waste their time making submissions on them?

The "Three Futures: simply reflect the planning fads of the present. Nuclear power was a potent fad in the sixties. At least nuclear power existed and still does. Rising sea levels however are a fiction now and will be as far as we can see ahead, and indeed may well fall as tectonic plates rise.

The Council claims that having a fifty year plan will help attract Government Funding.

Well here is one way Government can cut expenditure at both local and central level. Make it clear that fifty year plans and similar make work exercises will attract zero government funding and indeed may attract penalties for promoting such foolishness.

It should be easy to justify such a harsh approach. Rodney Hide can just hold up the illustration of the sixties "Vision" and ask the Council why past experience has taught them nothing.

My colleagues in the United States suggest that Councils should focus on how their cities work rather than on how they look.