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Despite a legacy of seemingly enlightened non-sectarian provision of sites and space for religious worship, current planning systems appear to create conditions in which many religious development proposals are problematic, conflict-ridden and politicised. Indeed, the planning system is a primary site for community conflicts that are often expressions of broader social anxieties and discord - some of which have violent expression. Planners need to strategically engage with the theory and practice of faith-responsive planning. Historically, communities engaged with religion locally; now, many congregations travel further to attend places of worship that serve larger regions and disparate sectarian communities. These include facilities of different faiths, specific sects within a faith and particular ethno-cultural expressions of a faith amongst other variegations of community, education and religious service. Thus, religious difference, population dynamics and urban growth has created mosques in industrial sites, monasteries in paddocks, and synagogues in old libraries, which have substantial effects on urban form and mobility at the metropolitan scale and planning disputes on the neighbourhood scale. The planning system in Australia is challenged by competing objectives of providing community facilities in established and new areas, while also addressing the consequences of the increasingly complex activities associated with places of worship. Through a thematic analysis, this paper examines 20 years of Victorian planning appeals cases across multiple faiths to explore the ways in which an ostensibly secular, disinterested regulatory framework obscures deep disquiet at the role and place of religion in the urban fabric of multicultural communities.
