Master Planned Estates and Collective Private Assets in Australia: Research into the Attitudes of Planners and Developers

Abstract

Master planned estates have grown in number Australia and internationally as a favoured form of development in new and infill estates. This paper explores the use of legal entities known in the state of Victoria as owners' corporations to hold communal assets in private ownership for the exclusive use of those living in master planned estates. The privatization of assets that would normally be held by municipal government has been associated by some with heightened conflict in estates, greater costs for residents and increased separation from the larger community. This paper seeks to investigate the motivations and attitudes of both local government planners and developers in utilizing forms of private collective ownership in residential estates in a major city of Australia, Melbourne. This empirical investigation demonstrates that developers generally utilize these ownership structures in order to provide a different, but not necessarily better, standard of facilities as a means of market differentiation. Planners, on the other hand, are more diffident in their endorsement of privatized community ownership and demonstrate a degree of concern about their changed relationship to residents in such estates. The research suggests that issues relating to this choice of ownership of community assets have not been fully considered by local government, particularly in terms of protecting the long-term interests of residents.