Andrew Butt

Exploring Peri-urbanisation and Agricultural Systems in the Melbourne Region

Processes of peri-urbanisation emerge from a range of drivers that differ according to socio-economic and geographic settings. Using the Melbourne outer peri-urban region, this paper explores these processes using a set of indicator variables for four identified modes of peri-urbanisation: exurbanisation, hidden urbanisation, retiree mobility, and displaced suburbia. This paper considers the relationships between these modes and their locational distribution. It then considers the potential influence of these processes on the characteristics of farming systems in the subject region through regression models. Significant relationships are evident in several instances, specifically the differences that emerge between retiree mobility and exurbanisation or displaced suburbia (processes linked to urban proximity). These latter processes also appear to influence features of local agricultural systems, including farm scale and type.

Making the Blood Broil: Conflicts Over Imagined Rurality in Peri-Urban Australia

A key challenge for planning the peri-urban internationally derives from the ability of land-use change to outstrip the development of new concepts and understandings. There are few places where this is more apparent than in the peri-urban areas of Melbourne, Australia, where applications to develop technologically sophisticated broiler or poultry farms are fiercely opposed by local residents and amenity migrants with attendant imaginaries of local community and extensive rural agricultural production. This paper presents the results of an analysis of development application appeals to show how the poultry industry negotiates with the planning system and manages community expectations in a broad swath of Melbournes exurbia. In particular, we question the relevance of the rural–urban duality for planning this space and argue the need for new concepts to lessen the conflict in these hybridized spaces of third nature.

Motivations for retention and mobility: Pathways of skilled migrants in regional Victoria, Australia

Abstract Since the 1990s, programmes designed to attract international skilled migrants to work and live in regional areas have been a major theme of Australian immigration policy. The success of these programmes depends not only on attracting skilled migrants to regional areas, but also on retaining them within the regions into the longer term. This article argues that residential satisfaction, and specifically economic opportunity, is important in retaining skilled migrants in regional Australia. The research is based on surveys with skilled migrants to regional Victoria who were subject to the State Specific Regional Migration scheme. The satisfaction levels of these immigrants were tested for three satisfaction indices: Community attachment and satisfaction, lifestyle satisfaction and economic and workplace satisfaction. Economic and workplace satisfaction were revealed as being a significant influence on the settlement decision-making process of this study sample. In addition, the opportunities for fulfilling lifestyle and cultural practices and perceptions of secondary and tertiary education facilities emerged as key concerns of the respondents. Finally, this article discusses some policy implications in relation to this programme successfully retaining skilled immigrants.

Functional Change and the Peri-Urban Region: Food Systems and Agricultural Vulnerability

The formation of extensive peri-urban regions around Australias cities as sites of population growth and land use change has resulted in a critical divergence in agricultural production patterns over several decades. Unlike more distant agricultural regions where farm numbers have typically declined, peri-urban areas have experienced a proliferation of small and sub-commercial farm businesses and the continued presence of fewer large operations. Despite this, agricultural production has not collapsed in these regions. This article reviews changes in farm output and structure occurring in some example peri-urban regions with a view to exploring the nature of viability and vulnerability of the agricultural systems in these areas. It concludes that farming in these regions is changing in significantly different ways to other agricultural regions. The key components of peri-urban farming productivity centre on a few high value activities, and some, such as intensive poultry, face significant constraints to growth through population and landscape pressures in an effectively post-productive environment. This presents consequent risks to ongoing food production in the regions closest to our largest cities. The majority of peri-urban farming has the potential to provide important landscape services functions, but is unable to adjust to changing productivity regimes creating vulnerabilities for peri-urban farming systems.

Development, Dilution, and Functional Change in the Peri-Urban Landscape: What Does It Really Mean for Agriculture?

For several decades, patterns of Australia’s population change have included processes of counter-urbanization and dispersal focused on the peri-urban regions around Australia’s cities. Consequent forms of development have included scattered housing in rural landscapes and agricultural restructure reflecting this new role for these regions. By implication this has resulted in new land uses and impacts on previous agricultural activity. However, for agricultural output the consequences are complex. Evidence suggests that despite long-term trends towards multifunctional rural landscapes in peri-urban Australia, the net value of agricultural output has not declined. Yet there is a shift towards a “polarization” of farm structure in peri-urban Australia; a growing number of small farms coupled with fewer, yet larger operations, including intensive farming. While net agricultural output has apparently not changed significantly, the makeup and the long-term status of farming enterprises in these places has altered, resulting in risks for viability at a regional level into the future. The diminished certainty this situation provides suggests risks for future industry structure and output and food production in the rural regions closest to the largest population centers.

The Prevalence and Characteristics of Commuting between Small Towns and Regional Centres in Regional Victoria

Abstract This article explores the characteristics of commuting between small towns and regional centres located beyond the sphere of metropolitan influence in an Australian context. In regional Australia there are a number of economic, social and demographic trends affecting small towns and regional areas. In respect to commuting, the majority of analysis has occurred within a metropolitan setting, despite the prevalence of commuting in rural and regional areas. This research used census data to explore socio-economic characteristics of commuters in rural and peri-urban regions in Victoria, Australia. It is suggested that those small towns located within the commuter field or sphere of influence of the nearest regional centre have become part of an economic network and that the role of these small towns is integrated within these functional regions. Within these functional regions it is suggested that mobility has filled a void in employment created by the economic and demographic trends that have affected regional Australia. The research identifies unique characteristics in respect to gender and socio-economic status of commuters from small rural towns. These results demonstrate that commuting is a distinctive phenomenon within regions beyond metropolitan influence, revealing differences to patterns within metropolitan regions.

Encounters with the unfamiliar: international planning education

ABSTRACT Planning practice and education require consideration of both universal and local norms and methods. It is often firmly embedded in localized issues and practices, yet students need to expand their career horizons and develop more critical, reflective understandings of planning issues in their ‘home’ environment. Internationalized curriculum provides a fertile environment for exploring cross-cultural encounter and reflexive practice using varied planning traditions to situate examples for teaching. The ethical and political implications of working internationally can, however, be masked within the seeming familiarity of shared planning language, concepts and techniques, and the apparent simplicity of comparative frames of reference. Planning is inherently political and contextual, yet the explicit dilemmas of the political and economic setting can, at first, appear hidden during a field project where the apparently universal notions of effective spatial planning are central to the dialogue amongst a diverse student group. Using the example of four joint field/project visits (2010–2014) involving Australian and Sri Lankan planning students in tsunami- and conflict-affected areas of Sri Lanka, this paper draws on student reflections and observations to explore the explicit encounters with ethical dilemmas, political settings, contingent problem-setting and the implications of these for planning practice within the home setting.

Local government perspectives on rural retirement migration and social sustainability

ABSTRACT Within the policy and academic literature, the impact of rural retirement migration (RRM) on community sustainability has been questioned. This qualitative study investigated the perceived impact of retirement migration on rural social sustainability from a local government perspective. Focus groups were conducted with local government senior managers and community services staff (n = 39) across six rural local government areas in one Australian state. Data were analysed against the three components of rural social sustainability (equity, community and rurality) proposed by Jones and Tonts [1995. “Rural Restructuring and Social Sustainability: Some Reflections on the Western Australian Wheatbelt.” Australian Geographer 26: 133–140]. While RRM is perceived to benefit rural community capacity to facilitate or maintain equity, community and rurality, it also presents challenges for local government. Participants suggested that capacity to facilitate equity, community and rurality in contexts of RRM was impacted by uncertainty around future impacts of RRM on population ageing, increasing advocacy and expectations of older in-migrants, and the impact of RRM on rural heterogeneity. These issues required local governments to think critically about how to accommodate and manage the needs and expectations of older in-migrants, while mediating potential impacts associated with RRM.

The politics of land and food scarcity

The critical issues of food scarcity and food pricing instability were revealed starkly in the events of the 2007–2008 food and oil ‘price shocks’. A confluence of natural yet unseasonal events (including Australia’s Millennium Drought), increased commodity speculation, rising input costs and new market entrants such as bio-fuels resulted in the re-emergence of concerns largely ignored at a global scale since the 1970s. The complexity of these events is central to this book, offering a pathway to an effective insight to way in which politics, economics, science and land interact in food systems. Paolo De Castro is one of several authors of a volume of three core themes: the definitions and causes of food insecurity, the global reach and connections at play and the future directions for policy. The volume is punctuated with interviews and excerpts from INGO and EU experts including former Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi. These each indicate a strong European focus, with De Castro himself Chair of the European Parliamentary Committee on Food and Agriculture. This emphasis at times leaves the reader considering how to contextualise these issues to settings outside of Europe. Nonetheless, there is a sufficient international coverage, with consideration of issues arising in commodity export regions, such as Australia, and on those regions where maintaining and improving rural livelihoods to reduce poverty remain the critical land and food issue. The book rightly indicates the wide interplay of contemporary food scarcity concerns, and solutions, through policy, markets, consumer choice, but most readily through land use and ownership in increasingly globalised commodity systems. It is the latter consideration that will be of most direct interest to planners, considering the consequences of land use change, and most particularly land and food sovereignty as they are perceived, described and realised in various parts of the world. From an Australian planning perspective, these issues are significant in two ways. Firstly the nature of change in food systems has resulted in evident conflict in Australian land markets over several decades and these constantly play out in planning systems through contest over land use, whether between scales of agriculture, farming and urban use, or farmland and resource extraction. These local issues reflect the themes of ‘land grabbing’ described in the book, yet also extend them to very local concerns of farmland ‘loss’ which in modern Australia has not typically included concerns about ownership, although recent high-profile examples of foreign investment in agribusiness, mining concerns and pastoral leases indicate a growing public interest in land policy. Secondly, this book describes a set of global processes that are seeing an increasing shift in the locus of agricultural investment and production, for example agribusiness interests securing land in West Africa, as a neo-colonial process with the potential to reshape commodity flows. De Castro et al. rightly indicate the threats of these processes to communities and livelihoods through land grabbing, but this also suggests a shifting balance in production and exports with potential to threaten the stability and growth of Australian agriculture as it continues to aspire to be the foodbowl of Asia. Consequently, while the focus of the book is broad and land use in commodity export economies is but one concern, the lessons for land use change and agricultural systems in Australia are significant, placing them within a global context of change that will likely see a very different agricultural balance in the twenty-first century.

A Sustainability Agenda in Planning Education.

Over the last two decades land use planning in Australia has openly embraced sustainability as a principal tenant. However the core of land use planning has traditionally been the management and construction of urban environments. Land use planning in rural and regional Australia has increasingly had to confront a broadening natural resource management agenda and an environmental planning imperative. This has resulted in a paradigm shift for land use planners from being expected to facilitate development to placing proposals within the context of the sustainability of the resource base. The effect has been to widen the scope for professional practice. Planning education is increasingly filled with competing interests reflecting the growing complexity of built and natural environments. The need for planning to articulate around development, natural resource management and sustainability offers a real opportunity to develop a clear social sciences agenda for sustainability at a secondary and tertiary level. This chapter explores a sustainability agenda as a critical component of planning practice, it utilises two case studies and the response of planning education to this agenda.