Town planning in the Yarra Ranges Shire.

Yarra Ranges runs from suburban Lilydale and Mooroolbark up into the Dandenongs villages and out through the Yarra Valley's wine country — a shire where the planning scheme's main job is holding the line between metropolitan Melbourne and the landscapes that define the region.

Each part has its own regime: conventional residential planning around Lilydale and Chirnside Park; the Dandenongs townships under intense vegetation, landscape and bushfire controls; and the valley floor, where green wedge and rural zoning govern agriculture, wineries and the tourism uses that attach to them.

The distinctive Yarra Ranges work is at the edges of the ordinary: hillside dwellings in the Dandenongs where bushfire, landslip and tree controls all bear on one envelope, and rural-land questions in the valley — cellar doors, restaurants and accommodation attached to agriculture, where the green wedge provisions permit more than owners expect but only through the right permit structure.