This is not my beautiful street! How did we get here?

Sometimes decisions made in our streets, in our cities and in our nation leave many of us scratching our heads and asking: Who decided that? What were they thinking? And, how on earth did we get to this dumb place?

Economist, Alfred E Kahn, may have a partial answer in what he called "the tyranny of small decisions". While Kahn was talking of market economics, these “small decision effects” apply equally to the wider environment in which we all live.

We see it all around us, from the gradual loss of Moore Park parklands through encroachment by commercial interests to the long-standing malnourishment blighting NSW’s public transport infrastructure. It's death by a thousand cuts.

Likewise, much of the current confusion and distress surrounding the COFA campus construction issues can possibly be traced to decisions that were never consciously made, but simply resulted from a series of small decisions, Kahn’s so-called tyranny.

Broadly, Kahn’s premise goes something like this...

Ideally, problems are resolved and decisions made via nested levels of public decision. At the higher levels experts in local, state and federal government oversee or provide constraints through "rules" for lower level decisions. That’s the theory anyway.

Unfortunately, important decisions are often reached in another way entirely. Individuals, or small groups of them, make a series of seemingly minor, independent decisions. As these little decisions accumulate, a big decision occurs after the fact, but the key question is never properly addressed. Often, this process fails to produce an optimal or desirable solution for the wider society.

This post hoc decision making is perhaps what has happened with UNSW’s redevelopment planning. Even though most people would have preferred to protect residential amenity, UNSW "decided" to do just the opposite, possibly through the cumulative effects of small, independent but nonetheless insidious decisions.

For example: a decision to save money by not relocating students or perhaps a failure to organise the task ahead of time; a decision to enrol more fee-paying students than a construction-primed campus could cope with; decisions to ‘evolve the design’ without due consideration for why the design was made that way in the first place, or to cut costs in one area to add additions in another.

So, when it came to making the big decision – how to responsibly manage the construction impacts – the holistic view was subordinated to UNSW’s natural tendency to short-term egocentric rewards and expediency.

One would hope that nobody purposely planned to destroy the amenity of the area, flatten pocket pedestrian parks, turn one-way streets into two-way truck routes, and rip out landscaping. One would hope.

However, through a series of little decisions – a shortcut here, a stroke of the cost-cutter’s pen there, a she’ll-be-right from a new and uninformed consultancy there – a major decision in favour of wiping out residential amenity was made as careless, small decisions accrued.

Small communities like our own are highly vulnerable to small decision effects. The liveability and integrity of inner-city villages can suffer, not just from one adverse decision, but from a multitude of tiny nicks. These include a series of independent choices to add one more stadium, one more roadway, one more tunnel stack, and one more late-night club.

No one chose to drive children out of inner-city suburbs, to intensify the effects of pollution, or to encourage drunken yobs to take over city streets each night. Yet all of these things have happened, and, in some cases, it’s not clear how the "decision" can be reversed.

A few years back a neighbour felled a huge rubber tree in his yard, and now we rarely see the rosellas that used to flock to its crimson red flowers. I doubt that was his intention. Just as every tree that is cut down brings with it a loss of the area’s wildlife, every demolition truck, every rigid mover, every fleet of concrete mixers brings with it an accumulation of losses for this vulnerable precinct. The tyranny of small decisions, indeed.