PLANNING FOR OPEN SPACE AND RECREATION

Recent decades have seen efforts by open space/recreation planners to provide an alternative to traditional population-ratio and area-percentage planning standards. Traditional standards have been criticised for their ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach and their failure to take account of increasing residential densities. This paper evaluates two of the alternatives which have emerged: the catchment access based standard (CABS) and demand-based planning. The CABS is found to be just a variation on traditional standards. Published demand-based approaches are found to lack methodological detail and are based on a relatively passive policy stance. In contrast, state and federal governments have begun to adopt a more active stance in setting targets to increase community sport/recreation participation levels, based particularly on health-based criteria. It is argued that participation targets could also form the focus of local planning, especially in the context of a proposed coordinated local-state-federal planning framework.