Melbourne has paid the cost for successive changes to the city’s planning vision and the bipartisan state politics that drove them; leaving tall, poorly designed buildings and sprawling, car-dependent suburbs, according to a leading international urbanist.

But for those who feel this is a grim critique Melbourne has heard before, ex-Vancouver chief city planner Brent Toderian says new planning rules are finally putting the city on the right path.

“You’ve got a problem here with state political parties going this way and that way when it comes to planning,” Mr Toderian said. “You have ideological politics standing in the way of your successful city making [and] certainly the approach to tall buildings has suffered from that.”

Buildings that were too clunky and close together, blocked views, created wind tunnels, left blank walls and did not engage with the street, were some of the hangovers of previous planning regimes, he said.

“My observation is you’ve been paying too much attention to how tall the buildings are and not enough attention to how well the buildings are designed,” he said.

“When I make the point the recent rules are better, the question is, will those rules survive another change in government? You have to stop taking one step forward and one step back.”

Among the raft of new planning rules introduced by the Andrews government are the stricter Better Apartment guidelines and laws around heights and densities for CBD building.

Mr Toderian, in Australia as a guest of the Heart Foundation, said new rules had clearly borrowed inspiration from Vancouver, one of the world’s most livable cities.

“Apparently your planning minister Richard Wynne took a trip to Vancouver — and I look at new rules, I can tell,” he said.

“In the last few years the state government has made some changes to how they do tall buildings, and those are big improvements … I don’t want to come across as critical because Melbourne is doing some things exceptionally well, but the way they’ve been doing tall buildings is not necessarily one of those.

“The current rules are much better than the previous approach, but instead of unravelling them if the government changes, the next government should try to improve them and make them better.”

He said his hometown of Vancouver had benefited from a consistency in approach, although in comparison to Melbourne, could face the criticism that all its tall buildings looked the same.

“When I compare your tall building and ours in Vancouver, in some ways, your tall buildings, your objects, are more visually interesting than ours, but all our objects contribute to a stronger skyline, stronger blocks, and most importantly stronger streets.

“You have more colour, a little more whimsy and architectural adventurism in your tall buildings, which is a good thing, but that is superficial and it doesn’t excuse getting the fundamentals wrong.”

He said more pop up cafes, food carts and trucks, and shipping container retail or restaurants could fill in gaps, address blank walls, and enliven the street.

Melbourne had one of the best downtowns in the world because of its street-level vibrancy along pedestrian routes such as Swanston Street and in its laneways, he said, but given how good the downtown was, it was notable how bad tall buildings were in other parts of the CBD.

He was also critical of the design of the Docklands: “It shouldn’t just be a numbers games [with density] and the Docklands felt to me like, somebody was counting square feet and homes as a measure of success.

“Density and land use are like ingredients for a great chef, the art is in how you combine ingredients [and] the ingredients were combined in a bland way in the Docklands.”

Mr Toderian was relieved of his six-year position of as Vancouver’s director of planning “without cause” in 2012, but has since spent time advising cities around the world, including Australia, on their planning direction.

He said Melbourne also needed to have a conversation about midrise development along all tram and train routes, as well as about what he calls “gentle density” (such as townhouses, duplexes, villas and granny flats) in the suburbs.

“Let’s be clear: there are no planning reasons to prohibit that kind of housing, they are being prohibited for political reasons – the ‘not in my backyard’.”

It shouldn’t be an issue of NIMBY, he said, but rather “QIMBY” – quality in my backyard.

“It should be a conversation about quality, not yes and no, but how well we can build density.”

“The problem with NIMBY is not the residents, the residents are behaving like you would expect them to behave: it’s human nature to fear change and it’s human nature to be self-interested. But it is the job of the elected officials and the planners to look beyond that, because we are burdened with the knowledge of the incredible cost and consequences of doing it wrong.”

It is also very difficult to retrofit the existing suburbs we’ve been building, he said, which were also largely low density and mostly-car dependent, unwalkable and unbikeable. “But we should still do it, while making sure all new suburbs are designed better.”

“While Australians like their backyards, and maybe they do, but nobody has been talking about the costs and consequences … Once you understand the massive consequences you’re paying because of public sprawl, even without the health and climate change aspects, the costs and consequences are massive… We are almost literally killing ourselves.”