When I was first elected to Wollongong City Council in 1991, David Winterbottom was the City Planner, and later Director of Planning. Back in the 1990’s, there were some good younger planners working for David Winterbottom, who continued to make their mark – like Dorte Eklund and Carla Rogers.

In 2024, The Illawarra Flame published an article by Jeremy Lasek on David’s influence on Wollongong : Looking back at a ‘golden era’ for Wollongong with its former planning guru.

One article by David, during its stint as Director of Planning, has always resonated with me.

Medium/Long Term Vision for Development and Environment Activities

There are three broad strategies which should be articulated more clearly in terms of the direction in which Council should proceed:

1. to give more emphasis to the detailed needs and requirements of very local communities both in terms of developing controls and programs to meet their requirements and getting them involved;
2. to be much more strategic in our approach to the amalgamation of minor elements such that they form a comprehensible identifiable whole in the long term;
3. to move from an emphasis on control of development and environmental degradation to an emphasis on the promotion of development and environmental improvement.

1 Local Issues

Consideration needs to be given to:

• the decentralisation of administration into at least three area-based teams;
• a more flexible user friendly assessment system of development proposals but on the basis that costs are covered;
• the modification of development control plans for residential development such that they operate on a precinct by precinct basis rather than across the whole City;
• a review of these precincts in an attempt to improve both their amenity in landscape terms, safety in traffic terms and accessibility to schools, playgrounds and shopping in pedestrian terms;
• using community groups in planning this and in playing a greater role in the positive improvement of their communities via `Rise and Shine’, tree planting, or pollution reduction, etc programmes;
• detailed planning for west Dapto.

2 Strategic Components

• There needs to be a reinforcement of the Escarpment Park and as the capacity for community planting grows so there ought to be far more activities in acquiring disturbed land on the Escarpment and revegetating it.
• The Escarpment Walking Trail, both along the top and the fire trail with linking tracks, needs to be implemented again essentially using the community to do this.
• A similar trail needs to be established along the hind dune using the existing cycleway for much of it but essentially attempting to generate a series of beachside parks linked by a cycleway/walking trail.
• The Green Corridor concept needs to be reinforced by emphasising hill tops and by linking and elaborating and enlarging our open space system to link the Escarpment Park to the beachside parks. There is no reason why part of the trails through these parks should not use the local road system where necessary.
• The landscape structure of the City needs better articulation particularly along the major roads.
• The shopping centres should each develop a Mainstreet-type program to make them far more user friendly and environmentally pleasant with strong Chamber of Commerce involvement in the planning and in the paying for and facilitation of improvements.
• The road hierarchy needs to be refined to categorise the distributor roads into those which are expected to be relatively high speed/high volume routes and those which of necessity will be low speed/high volume routes.

David Winterbottom
Director of Development