Lou Wilson

The Boomerang Effect: A Case Study of the Murray‐Darling Basin Plan

In the period from 1997 to 2009 Australia experienced a severe drought, which significantly affected the Murray-Darling Basin. The drought has broken but state governments are still in conflict over water allocations. The establishment of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority (MDBA) in 2007 was intended to address these issues but the management of the Basin remains complicated by constitutional ambiguity. This paper addresses the question of whether it is possible to implement effective policies for the health of the Murray-Darling Basin without the present danger of a drought. We suggest that the MDBA has encountered what Beck refers to as the ‘boomerang effect’. The MDBAs plans seem to have produced new challenges and the Authority might find the Basin is exposed to risks it has created.

Assessing urban sustainability from a social democratic perspective: a thematic approach

Conventional typologies that seek to categorise indicators of urban sustainability tend to draw upon the neoliberal, silo approach for conceptualising sustainability, which positions sustainability as having economic, social and environmental dimensions. This approach has been critiqued for its inability to account for challenges to sustainability arising from interactions between social, economic and environmental variables. Models that are incapable of assessing dimensional interactions and their collective outcomes are also incapable of providing critiques that address entrenched structural challenges to sustainability. This paper proposes a new thematic approach based on Australian research to classify indicators for urban sustainability. The proposed approach shifts the categorisation of indicators from a neoliberal ontology to a social democratic foundation by proposing a model for assessing urban development relational to themes of amenity, accessibility, equity and environmental performance relative to resource conservation. The proposed approach is intended to be sensitive to integrating social, economic and environmental considerations with land use planning to improve the natural and built environments of communities.

The civic and neighbourhood commons as complex adaptive systems: The economic vitality of the centre:

The metropolis can be understood as a complex adaptive system made up of complex adaptive subsystems that agglomerated to help create the city’s strength, resilience and dynamism. In particular, the accumulated strength and dynamism of the individual neighbourhoods that form and evolve its districts and the districts that form its regions have major impacts on the organisation and evolution of the metropolis. This article discusses the subsystems of the city, in particular its regional, district and neighbourhood transaction places or activity centres. While all metropolitan areas are complex adaptive systems, many urban subsystems constructed in the post–World War II period are not. They are instead chaotic or controlled by mechanical order. It will be argued that only the traditional ‘commons’ has the principles required of complex adaptive systems and that being such confers many benefits to the communities they serve.