129 129 In the Shadow of Metropolitan Planning Local Plan Making in Melbourne, 1946 to 1976 Dr Benno Engels School of Global, Urban and Social Studies RMIT University Victoria, Australia benno.engels@rmit.edu.au Melbourne has evolved and changed over time in response to the many challenges that this city has faced over the last century and a half. Some of this change was due to forces that lay beyond the control of those who governed it whereas other changes had been guided by local government acts and a handful of metropolitan level strategic plans. Largely absent from the historical narratives that have been written about the planning of Melbourne is what had happened to urban planning at the local level. This is a serious gap in our understanding of Melbourne’s historical urban development when it is remembered that local councils and shires had been charged with enforcing metropolitan strategy since 1955. It was at the local government level that the detailed strategic and statutory planning was undertaken but it was also here at the local level that a city’s capacity to respond to any newly emerging challenges were either expedited or stymied. In an attempt to shed some light on this much neglected facet of Melbourne’s urban planning history this paper proposes to investigate how much urban planning took place at the local level and what forms it took between 1944 to 1976, plus what factors may have impacted upon the local plan making process. Keywords — Local planning schemes; Town and Country Planning Board, Melbourne. IntroductIon Daniel Burnham, the famous American architect and urban planner of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, has been quoted as saying, ‘…make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die’ (Peterson, 2003, p.189). This was a very narrow and dismissive claim to have made about local plan making. Local or municipal level plans may be small in scale when compared to the metropolitan-wide plans that had become the preoccupation of Burnham when this remark was made but they have and continue to be the basis for so much urban planning activity in Melbourne. In fact, local plan making in Melbourne dates back to the mid 1940s and our understanding of urban planning practice at this level remains a seriously neglected facet of this city, essentially because the metropolitan level has received virtually all the attention from Australian urban planning historians (see Buxton, et al., 2016; Freestone, 2000, 2010; Freestone & Grubb, 1998; Grubb, 1976; Logan, 1981; McLoughlin, 1992; Sandercock, 1975; Spencer, 1985). As a consequence, a standard textbook account of the urban planning of Melbourne will make mention of the ill-fated 1929 Metropolitan Town Planning Commission – hereafter MTPC - fnal report for Melbourne or the master-blue print plan completed in 1954 for the metropolitan region by the now defunct Melbourne Metropolitan Board of Works – hereafter MMBW. More recently, Melbourne 2030, released in 2002 with its contentious urban growth boundary, would