Urban 45: New Ideas for Australian cities

2007

Urban vitality and culture and the public realm 51 15. crime and the city 55 www.rmit.edu.au/urban45 ii New Ideas for Australia's Cities Urban '45'

2007

Urban vitality and culture and the public realm 51 15. crime and the city 55 www.rmit.edu.au/urban45 ii New Ideas for Australia's Cities Urban '45'

2015

To-date little research has examined visioning as a practice, including its theoretical underpinnings. In particular, published cases tend to tell high-level positive 'stories' rather than consider the tensions and challenges that must be negotiated during a visioning process and that can constrain the impacts of a visioning exercise. In contrast, this paper presents a critical reflection on two visioning exercises run as part of the Visions and Pathways 2040 projectwhich is funded by the Cooperative Research Centre for Low Carbon Livingfocussed on the key tensions and process challenges that were faced and how we attempted to address them. We identify seven main tensions/process challenges, describe how they manifested during the design and convening of the exercises, and evaluate the strengths and weakness of specific strategies that were used to address them. Whilst strong claims of generalisability are not made, the identified tensions/process challenges and strategies are likely to be of relevance to others convening visioning exercises in urban contexts. Five underlying themes are also identified that visioning practitioners need to be aware of, particularly in urban contexts: (i) the complexity and normativity challenges inherent to envisioning new urban systems and low-carbon transitions; (ii) the barriers to systemic thinking and related process design considerations; (iii) the strong barriers to original or breakthrough ideas; (iv) the need for technical or specialised knowledge and to equip workshop participants, whilst being aware of the limitations of experts; and (v) interactivity challenges (involving stakeholders in the research process).

Australian Economic History Review, 2009

Urban growth is a major theme in economic development and a policy imperative for developed countries that seek to create sustainable cities. We argue that the past weighs heavily on the ability of societies to sustainably manage urban environments. The policy implications of urban history are revealed in comparisons of cities across times and between places. The special issue presents some of the best recent work on the economic and social history of Australian cities. We aim to encourage historians to incorporate urban variables into studies of historical processes and to persuade policymakers to consider historical trends in their analysis.

2018

Governments should tread lightly on people's decisions Stop penalising people for moving house All states and the Northern Territory should phase out stamp duty on the transfer of residential property, and replace it with a broad-based land tax. Stop locking out new residents from their preferred locations Treasurers in all states should introduce a scheme that combines a reduction in zoning restrictions on residential density and business locations with an increase in the clarity and assignment of related parking rights, including a right to trade them. In addition, the federal Treasurer should ask the Productivity Commission to assess the costs, both direct and indirect, and the benefits of heritage protections embedded in planning regulations. Design and implement congestion pricing schemes for Sydney and Melbourne The Victorian and NSW governments should introduce time-of-day congestion pricing in the most congested central areas of each capital city, charging a low rate at peak periods in return for a freer-flowing road. The cost to drivers should be offset by a discount on vehicle registration, with revenue from the congestion charge earmarked to spending on public transport improvements. Governments should spend smarter on infrastructure Only spend public money on infrastructure that has been properly assessed The Commonwealth Government should amend the National Land Transport Act to prohibit the provision of funding to state governments for infrastructure projects unless a full business case has been prepared, and then evaluated by Infrastructure Australia, and the business case and evaluation have been tabled in Parliament. For all projects valued at $50 million or more, the government should also ask Infrastructure Australia to publish a reliability rating of the business cases within a month of their tabling. Devote more resources to identifying modest-sized transport projects State departments of transport should devote more resources to identifying modest-sized transport infrastructure proposals with higher net benefits than large and very large projects. Adopt more realistic assumptions for cost-benefit analysis The Commonwealth Minister for Infrastructure should ask Infrastructure Australia to develop more realistic assumptions for cost-benefit analysis, acknowledging the widespread adaptation that occurs under the base-case scenario used to quantify a project's benefits, particularly arising from changes in land-use. Learn from experience of completed projects The Commonwealth Minister for Infrastructure should ask Infrastructure Australia to review and make public the benefits and costs of each completed project, and the reviews should be made public.

The way we use buildings, the materials and technologies used in construction, and how the buildings themselves are designed and constructed are continually evolving; the built environment evolves with them. It is a commonly held view that this pace of change will accelerate in the foreseeable future. Scenarios are very useful devices for organising a large amount of seemingly unrelated information in a logical manner to stimulate discussion and learning about the choices that lie ahead. As part of long-term forward planning for the building industry of New Zealand, the Built Environment team at the New Zealand Forest Research Institute Ltd has generated a set of three thought-provoking and realistic scenarios to show what the Australasian urban environment might look like in 10–15 years’ time. The scenarios have been built from a very broad information base, and are generic enough to be useful to, amongst others, urban planners, property developers, and strategic planners in the co...

Scenarios are useful devices for stimulating discussion about the choices that lie ahead. In 2001, researchers at Forest Research generated a set of thought-provoking and realistic scenarios of the Australasian built environment in 2010-2015. The primary intentions of these scenarios were to (a) help plan research into future building needs and (b) identify value-adding opportunities for the domestic wood resource. The research involved interviews and workshops with a wide range of specialists in both New Zealand and Australia, plus a detailed analysis of social, technological, environmental, economic and political trends and drivers of change (STEEP analysis). The end result was three distinct but equally plausible scenarios entitled Pining Away, The Industrial Revolution and The Renaissance. These scenarios examine, through the use of narrative, factors that could encourage or discourage various forms of urban growth in Australasia over the next ten to fifteen years.

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 1994

8th State of Australian Cities National Conference, 28-30 November 2017, Adelaide, South Australia Australian Cities Research Network, 2018

That urban growth in Australia is uneven in favor of cities than towns is no news. But that the policy for migration to growth centers in regional areas has also not helped should be of interest to policy-makers and planners. This paper aims at articulating the nature of regional urbanization and urban issues in regional cities/towns using the study of Armidale in New South Wales. The findings are based on the lived experiences of migrants that moved to Armidale under the Regional migration schemes and rely on anecdotal information, informal interviews, and analysis of data from government reports and market trends. The town has indicated negative growth in spite of having city like infrastructure and urban demographics. After spending the mandatory time frames all have left the town for a "better quality of life" in metropolitan areas. Besides economic reasons, the non-availability of social and cultural infrastructure that is necessary for their settling is a reason for most to leave such towns and these points to the failure of strategic urbanization. This amounts to secondary migration and thus needs robust planning strategies that respond to the context and for survival of both towns and cities in Australia.