Division of Information Technology, Engineering and the Environment
School of Natural and Built Environments
School of Natural and Built Environments
Planning
Education in its Institutional Context
South Australia's first architecture course was established in 1906 at
the South Australian School of Mines and Industries by Louis Laybourne
Smith. By the end of the Second World War in 1945, Laybourne Smith was
65 but it was another six years before the School of Mines and
Industries finally appointed his successor. He was still in charge,
therefore, when the first town planning program was offered in 1949.
Gavin Walkley began teaching part-time on the architecture course at the
School of Mines in 1946. Walkley succeeded Laybourne Smith as Head of
School in 1951 and remained as Head until his retirement in 1976. He was
the driving force behind the establishment of Australia’s first town
planning course in the late 1940s. It was Walkley's ambition to expand
the School so that it would eventually embrace all of the professional
skills relevant to the built environment – architecture, building,
planning, landscape architecture and interior design "so that
architecture should be placed, as it were, in its proper context".
At the end of the war in 1945, with a very extensive program of building
and expansion of metropolitan Adelaide in prospect, South Australia
found itself with no effective planning legislation and no qualified
planners. The SA Institute of Architects therefore asked three of its
members - Roy Wilson, L. C. Dawkins and Walkley - to prepare a draft
constitution for a professional body of Town Planners in South
Australia. After a preliminary public meeting on 3 December 1947, the
TPI of SA was inaugurated on 13 April 1948 and began to lobby a
reluctant government to introduce suitable planning legislation. The
visit to Adelaide by the distinguished English planner, Sir Patrick
Abercrombie, in 1948, was used by the TPI to foster interest in
planning. Abercrombie's advice was to establish a suitable course of
training and Walkley, a member of the TPI Council, was authorised to
investigate the possibilities.
The outcome of the investigation was an agreement between the SA School
of Mines and Industries and the TPI that the School would provide
accommodation and some administrative support for a set of courses to be
prepared with the TPI. The TPI further undertook to reimburse the School
for any shortfall between the fees paid by students and the fees to be
paid to lecturers for their services. The first program was a two-year
part-time program in which the subjects were Australian versions of
those prescribed for the external examinations of the British Town
Planning Institute. The subjects and lecturers assembled at the end of
1948 were as follows:
• History of Town Planning Gavin Walkley
• Town Planning Practice Roy Wilson
• Town Planning in relation to Architecture and Amenities L.C.
Dawkins
• Town Planning in relation to Engineering F.W. Symons
• Town Planning in relation to Surveying R.J. Pauley
• The Law relating to Town Planning W.J.M. Sedgley
The first planning lectures as part of the new post-graduate diploma
took place on 14 February 1949. The lecturers were paid half a guinea
per one hour lecture. The University of Sydney began its first planning
program a month or so later in March 1949, with another course at the
University of Melbourne starting some time after that.
The School of Architecture was originally established in the Brookman
Building on North Terrace but it moved in 1940 to the Bonython Jubilee
Building, facing Frome Road. Despite occasional proposals, more or less
welcome, to relocate the discipline elsewhere - to The Levels (now
Mawson Lakes) in the 1970s, to a new campus on the site of the East End
markets, also in the 1970s, and to the new City West campus at regular
intervals since the early 1990s, it has remained in its original
location ever since. The School of Mines and Industries became the SA
Institute of Technology in 1960 and then the University of South
Australia in 1991. The architecture school was renamed as the Louis
Laybourne Smith School of Architecture and Building in 1963 in honour of
its founder.
The post-graduate program was extended to three years in 1953 to include
additional courses in geography, geology, sociology and economics. For
the first fifteen years or so the bulk of the teaching in planning was
carried out by part-time lecturers, of whom there were usually as many
as 20 at any one time. The first senior full-time staff member took up
his post as Senior Lecturer in 1964. Harry Parsons was a graduate in
architecture and planning from Liverpool in the UK. With Walkley, he
pioneered a new undergraduate program which commenced in February 1965
and produced its first graduates in 1968.
Harry Parsons moved to Adelaide University in 1968. For much of the
post-war period, the University of South Australia and its predecessors
have been the sole providers of professional planning education in South
Australia, but the University of Adelaide offered a Master of Town
Planning from 1962. This became a Master of Urban and Regional Planning
in 1975 but no enrolments were accepted after 1976. (In 2007 the
University of Adelaide re-entered the field of planning education,
offering a suite of postgraduate programs which draw on that
university’s strengths in architecture, urban design, environmental
science and geography).
Parsons was succeeded by Neil Bird and then, in 1971, by Tom McKenna, a
graduate of one of the first undergraduate planning programs in the UK
with experience in Singapore and with the NCDC in Canberra. McKenna led
the planning programs until his death in 1977. He was succeeded, after a
brief interregnum, by Dr Raymond Bunker. Bunker had been an Associate
Professor at the University of Sydney but left In 1975 to head the
Strategy Division of the Department of Urban and Regional Development
under the Whitlam Government. He then became head of the Research
Directorate of the Commonwealth Department of Environment, Housing and
Community Development in 1976. Bunker joined the SA Institute of
Technology in 1978 and was Head of Planning until 1981.
After Dr Bunker stepped down from the position of Head, the affairs of
planning were managed for a while primarily by Brian Harper, a Senior
Lecturer appointed in 1974 and a dedicated servant of the planning
discipline until his retirement in the mid-1990s. Dr Stephen Hamnett
came from Queensland in June 1984 to take up the post of Head of
Planning and became the first Professor of Urban and Regional Planning
in 1990. Hamnett remains as professor of planning but stepped down as
Head in 2007. The current Head of the Planning discipline is Dr Jon
Kellett who joined the university in 2005 from Sheffield Hallam
University in the UK.
Hamnett was instrumental in the change of name in 1985 of the then Louis
Laybourne Smith School of Architecture and Building to the more
inclusive ‘ Louis Laybourne Smith School of the Built Environment’. He
also served as Head of this School for a number of years in the late
1980s and early 1990s. The first course in Australia exploring gender
issues and planning was introduced at this time by Dr Donna Ferretti.
This period also saw a number of international visitors to the School
promoting urban design education, and some progress was made in
restructuring the School’s programs to include a stronger and more
coherent multi-disciplinary focus on sustainable urban design. However,
this came to an abrupt halt when, in 1993, it was decided to reorganize
the new University of South Australia into faculties. Most staff in the
LLS School were generally in favour of the establishment of an enlarged
Faculty of the Built Environment at this time but the University
ultimately opted for other arrangements. Architecture was transferred
instead to a new Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design, while a School
of Building and Planning was established in the Faculty of Engineering.
During 1994 and 1995, the Faculty of Engineering went through a further
process of rationalization and eventually became a Faculty of
Engineering and the Environment. The discipline of ‘geoinformatics’
(formerly an independent School of Surveying) was added to building and
planning to form a school with the title of ‘Geoinformatics, Planning
and Building’. The first head of this new school was Professor John
Gilliland, a geodesist. Professor Michael Taylor, Director of the
Transport Systems Centre (TSC), a significant research centre within the
university, also opted to move this centre from The Levels to the City
East campus at this time, in part to take advantage of the close and
growing links between transport and planning staff. These links remain
strong and productive today. There is an active program of
funded-research in which planning and transport staff collaborate,
including several projects with a particular focus of transit-oriented
development.
The latter part of the 1990s saw further pressures to achieve cost
savings through economies of scale and associated staff redundancies. In
1998 the university changed from a faculty-based organizational
structure to its present structure based on four large divisions. The
Faculty of Engineering and the Environment was amalgamated with the
Faculty of Information Technology as a Division of Information
Technology, Engineering and the Environment (ITEE). Gilliland retired in
1999 and was succeeded as Head of School by Professor Douglas Larden,
Professor of Geoinformatics and Surveying.
In 2004, the Planning discipline was absorbed into a new School of
Natural and Built Environments to form a large and diverse school of
complementary discipines that include civil engineering, building and
construction and geospatial and environmental management. It's first
Head, Professor Patrick James (a geoscientist) took up his position in
the middle of that year, and it remains the home of the Planning
discipline at the time of writing.
Postgraduate Programs
Walkley’s postgraduate Diploma in Town Planning was offered throughout
the 1950s and 1960s. In 1970 the first graduates of the renamed
‘Graduate Diploma in Town Planning’ appeared and this name persisted
until the mid-1980s, overlapping between 1983 and 1985 with a
short-lived Graduate Diploma in Environmental Planning. These earlier
programs were replaced in 1985 with a one-year Graduate Diploma in
Regional and Urban Planning. The Graduate Diploma was amended in 1993 to
include a greater degree of elective choice by drawing on other academic
programs offered within the University of South Australia and in other
universities.
The 1993 course revisions were designed to encourage students from a
wide variety of academic and professional backgrounds to undertake an
advanced planning education program and to provide opportunities for
these students to work together to explore a range of planning issues in
an interdisciplinary way. A Master of Regional and Urban Planning by
coursework was added at this time to form the second year of the
School’s two year postgraduate program in planning. The Masters had its
first intake in 1994. The combined Graduate Diploma/Masters retained a
core set of courses on Planning Law, Planning Policy and Practice,
Contemporary Social Issues, Sustainable Urban Design and Contemporary
Planning Theory for a decade or so. While syllabuses were continually
improved and updated and elective choices expanded, there were no major
changes to the thrust of what was, for the most part, a successful
professional program. In 2003, however, a revised postgraduate planning
program was introduced incorporating a (largely unchanged) two-semester
Graduate Diploma leading on to a three-semester Master of Urban and
Regional Planning (replacing the two-year Master of Regional and Urban
Planning). Some changes made since 2003 reflect the need to make the
planning programs more generic and of relevance to the growing numbers
of international students who now come to UniSA to study planning. There
has also been more emphasis on transport planning, on the economics of
development and on practical skills required for development and
environmental assessment.
Since the mid-1990s the Planning discipline has accepted PhD students
and 11 have graduated over the period. The first PhD graduate, in 1997,
was Dr Mahyar Ardeshiri who is now Dean of Planning at the University of
Shiraz in Iran.
Undergraduate Programs
An undergraduate planning program was introduced in 1965 and had its
first graduates in 1968. This had the name of Associate Diploma in Town
Planning but by 1970 the word ‘associate’ had been dropped and the
title, instead, became Diploma in Technology – Planning. This was the
name until 1980 when the first graduates of a three-year Bachelor of
Arts in Planning received their degrees. There were continuing issues of
program length for a number of years, related to fact that the
undergraduate program was only three years long, while the Royal
Australian Planning Institute required a four year period of study for
purposes of professional recognition. This fourth year was contrived
variously be a series of ad hoc extra courses in the early 1980s and,
later, by allowing students to proceed to the Graduate Diploma year. In
1995 the Bachelor of Arts plus Graduate Diploma (“3+1”) was finally
replaced with a four year Bachelor of Planning.
The four year Bachelor of Planning program addressed a number of
concerns expressed by students and the Program Advisory Committee at the
time. Thus, maximum weekly contact hours were reduced, greater emphasis
was placed on strategic, social, environmental and community planning,
and the nexus between the planning practice stream and other areas of
the program was made more explicit.
Program amendments were approved in 1997 and implemented in 1998 to
provide students with the opportunity to specialise, and to graduate
with a major, in either Social and Community Planning or Environmental
Planning. The 1998 amendments also allowed students to graduate from the
program with Honours. In 1999, the Bachelor of Planning was renamed
Bachelor of Urban and Regional Planning.
The general effect of course changes, and staff appointments, during the
1990s was to provide a stronger theoretical and methodological
underpinning to the undergraduate planning program, while retaining its
relevance to professional practice, its studio-based teaching emphasis
and its role in preparing students for planning careers.
In 2001, a highly significant change was made to the program with the
introduction of a compulsory work experience component. This change was
initiated on the basis of feedback received from students and employers.
A working group of students, staff and planning professionals was set up
to review these arrangements and agreed that there would be considerable
benefits from a longer compulsory period of work placement. All
principal planning employers in South Australia – state government,
local government and consultants – were represented on this working
group, as was the Planning Institute. Third year students now spend the
equivalent of one semester working in planning practice.
In 2004, the Bachelor of Urban and Regional Planning was further
modified to allow more time for the final year individual project or
research study. An annual studio in Penang, Malaysia is also now a
popular part of both the later years of the undergraduate program and
also the postgraduate program. A striking change since the early years
of the present decade has been the virtual doubling of undergraduate
planning numbers, from intakes of 30-35 a year to over 70 a year.
