This paper looks at how urban over-development can occur even when planning controls to limit development to levels acceptable to the community are in place. This can occur in discretionary development approval systems such as those in Australian cities, where approval can be gained for development exceeding limits under planning controls, under various circumstances. The paper explores the way in which the exercise of power by developers, stemming from superior money-based resources, distorts this process to produce development at scales well beyond those intended by the planning controls. In this, the paper argues that contemporary neoliberal state ideology has exacerbated the relative power held by developers. Inner and middle Sydney residential development is used to provide case studies to support the paper’s arguments.

Central to these arguments is the proposition that the extent to which a planning system balances property rights with the common good is ultimately determined by state ideology. The incorporation of standards constraining the scale of development purports to set limits to the extent to which individual rights can prevail over the common good, reflecting an ideology which desires due consideration of the common good in development (c.f. March 2003). The imposition of a discretionary process within which such standards can be overruled in favour of less transparent considerations shifts the balance back towards developers for the kinds of reasons discussed in this paper. It can, as is shown here, result in outcomes which are very much at variance with those intended by the community in the public process of setting standards as the strongest means of achieving its vision of local place.