As part of his Winston Churchill Trust Fellowship, Civity Director Martin Garred travelled to the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Denmark, and Sweden in 2022, to learn how other jurisdictions are dealing with the ever-growing housing affordability challenge from a land use perspective.

 

The cities Martin visited as part of his Churchill Fellowship are experiencing many of the housing affordability issues being faced in Australia. In some of the cities, the affordability crisis is arguably worse than current situation in Australia. However, it was the ongoing escalation of the housing affordability issue that led to these cities taking innovative land use planning actions.  

 

The key take out from all of the cities that Martin visited is that the land use planning system must focus on developing responsive land use policies that are actively informed by current trends and market influences, to enable the delivery of diverse and well-located housing that reflects the communities needs and aspirations. 

 

As an outcome of his Churchill Fellowship, Martin developed a framework that provides a land use planning approach to assist in achieving increased housing diversity and affordability. The approach has been developed to enable its broad application, recognising the need for locationally specific responses to the different legislative frameworks that apply across Australia.

 

This framework is now being used by the Civity team as part of our strategic planning work across Australia. It is ensuring that the housing studies and technical planning projects we lead are the forefront of global policy innovation, whilst ensuring our projects deliver tangible land use planning outcomes that can assist improving housing diversity and addressing housing affordability.