The overlooked role of industrial land in creating equitable cities

Debates around equity and sustainability in Australian suburbs inevitably turn toward the challenges of delivering quality housing with access to essential community services. Urban policymakers seek to enhance suburban liveability while supporting major investment in transport infrastructure to give people better access to the jobs concentrated in our CBDs. Often ignored is the fact that more people spend their day at jobs located outside Australian city centres in suburban industrial zones. Despite this, industrial areas remain a largely overlooked “other” in Australian cities, devoid of amenity, accessibility, and sustainability potential.

The importance of industrial land

Industrial land use planning has important implications for equity in our cities and suburbs. In Melbourne, for example, industrial zones collectively support about 26% of all jobs while the CBD and surrounding areas hold about 15% of the metropolitan workforce [1]. Compared to other employment areas, jobs on industrial lands are also more diverse in terms of income and occupational skill sets (Figs. 1-2). This helps to mitigate the inequity built into the high and low-wage service economy that defines our city centers and metropolitan economies. Industrial zones in Greater Melbourne support a surprising range of activity from manufacturing and construction to creative industries, which guard against economic shocks as we saw most recently during Covid-19 [2]. They also support a range of community enterprises and essential services including auto and household repair, recycling, and workforce development centres for disadvantaged groups.

Industrial land, as much as any other area of a city, can play a critical role in environmental sustainability. However, this potential has been largely ignored to date. Industrial precincts make up about 7% of Australia’s major cities but contribute only 3% of tree canopy cover. The often concentrated nature of industrial land exacerbates vexing issues such as landscape connectivity and urban heat island effect, with large and relatively treeless areas acting as habitat breaks and hot spots. There is significant potential to better support urban biodiversity, and urban greening and cooling in industrial areas. This can enhance environmental sustainability as well as provide local amenity and health benefits for workers. Recent proposals for “rewilding industrial land” show a way forward but implementation has been slow [3].

Alongside this, industrial precincts present opportunities for sustainability improvements via district level energy, water, and waste infrastructure. Cities may adopt what industrial ecologists refer to as “industrial symbiosis” strategies, which seek to establish more sustainable, closed production systems through shared infrastructure, utilities, and waste recycling. Emerging models of multi-story, vertical factories and higher density industrial spaces have potential to reduce sprawling land consumption on urban fringes.

Despite their critical roles in supporting urban equity and sustainability, the planning and development of industrial land focuses largely on the functional needs of industry broadly. While these areas contain a large proportion of the workforce, attention to amenity provision and the transport infrastructure to get people from home to work is limited and lags far behind the investment in white collar employment hubs creating equity disparities. This is partly because planning for industrial land tends to revolve around logistics concerns like land supply and freight transport accessibility for large-scale industry- most recently e-commerce warehouses- rather than approaching them as places where people work and where communities meet their everyday needs. It is also due to standardised zoning for industry - defined largely by use separation and a limited definition of industry- despite significant variations by location in industry mix, land uses, and built environments.

Better planning and development of industrial areas is crucial, especially for suburban areas, with the potential to deliver more and varied jobs, training, and services closer to where people live, and improved amenity and sustainability outcomes for cities.

Lessons from the past, directions for the future of industrial land

Twentieth century land use planning underpins much of today’s industrial landscape [4] and continues to shape thinking about contemporary industrial activity [5]. Prevailing approaches to industrial zones in both Australian and US cities favour the protection of predominately single-use industrial areas concentrated in outer suburban areas [6]. Coupled with this is the continued influence of the late 20th century reaction to the downscaling of certain manufacturing sectors, a post-industrial framing that often saw industrial areas earmarked as declining or redundant. However, ‘post-industrial’ cities still need industrial land to meet basic needs, from food production and processing to waste remediation. Localised industrial activity becomes increasingly important in the face of global supply chain breakdowns and is an opportunity to reduce the effects of climate change.

Because current approaches stem from the planning logic of separation, suburbanisation, and post industrialization, they overlook the diversity of contemporary industrial land users. This includes emerging hybrid production-consumption business models and, with it, the nascent opportunities for higher-amenity and higher-quality job centres close to where people live. For instance, new forms of food and beverage manufacturing have emerged that blend production and consumption on-site. These businesses hold potential for new types of employment and amenity offerings in industrial areas, but this requires careful regulation that allows for innovation without harming the functionality of industrial districts.

Planners respond to economic changes: the challenge is to do so in ways which are not simply reactive or which close off future opportunities. The ways that plans and planners define industrial areas can constrain the availability of land, the capacity for new businesses and changing practices, and the sustainability of employment. Newer, smaller businesses navigate difficult planning categories – some of which apply disproportionately to new industries and to hybrid business models. Legacy approaches to zoning are important as they protect industrial areas. But our research suggests they can also constrain change and diversity within industries [5]. Covid-19 showed how exposed Australian cities and suburbs are to supply chain vulnerabilities. For a host of economic and environmental reasons, we need to support equitable employment areas across our cities and take a more inclusive approach to planning industrial lands. We have begun to explore these opportunities at Monash Urban Planning and Design with our students [7, 8].

Where might this leave the 21st century version of industrial land in Australia?

Protecting and separating areas of high impact industries remains a key facet of how Australian suburbs are planned. However, if we reconfigure the dominant focus on use separation, industrial suburbanisation and inner industrial, we can begin to shift the conversation to recognise the diversity of contemporary and emerging industrial activity and better catalyse the potential sustainability and equity contribution of industrial precincts. Planners and policymakers need to better understand and plan for industrial zones and this includes rethinking current planning and zoning in response to varying contexts and industry needs with attention to their equity and sustainability potential.

Given the crucial role of industrial zones in an equitable and sustainable city, we need public debate on these issues and the will to develop a people-based planning response that accounts for the role and diversity of industrial lands.