Pauline M McGuirk

Situating Communicative Planning Theory: Context, Power, and Knowledge

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to an emerging body of critique of communicative planning theory (CPT). The critiques in the paper are grounded in analysis of situated planning practice in Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia, where planners were ‘feeling their way towards’ democratising planning practice in line with the normative dimensions of CPT. Two critiques are offered. Both are fundamentally concerned with power and the tendency of CPT to operate as if the workings of power can be temporarily suspended through communicative planning practice to produce new consensual planning discourses. First, it is argued that CPT pays insufficient attention to the practical context of power in which planning is practised, thereby assuming away, rather than engaging with, the politics-laden and power-laden interests that infiltrate planning practice. Second, it is argued that CPT abstracts planners from their positioning in a nexus of power, knowledge, and rationality which validates expert forms of knowing/reasoning/valuing, and thus underestimates the challenges of asserting alternative forms. The paper concludes with a suggestion that any theory aiming at the democratisation of planning practice will need to depart from an orientation to consensus, a defining feature of CPT, and instead account for the irreducible nature of power and difference.

Watering the suburbs: distinction, conformity and the suburban garden

Research on domestic water use has conventionally been confined to understanding the role of physical variables such as rainfall and temperature in influencing patterns of consumption. In limiting research to this narrow focus, the significance of socio‐cultural variables has been largely ignored. This paper seeks to develop socio‐cultural understandings of domestic water use by examining water consumption as part of a broader set of consumption practices associated with suburban space. In particular, the socio‐cultural dimensions are explored on a local scale through an exploration of water‐use patterns associated with the new suburban garden: an important site of home‐making processes, and one associated with a substantial proportion of domestic water consumption. The notion of cultural capital is adopted as a framework for examining these consumption patterns. Water consumption is analysed as a practice through which cultural capital can be accumulated. It is argued that the contrasting notions of social distinction and social conformity in the suburban garden shape the accumulation of cultural capital and influence patterns of water consumption. Understanding these socio‐cultural dimensions of water consumption is important in shaping water‐use management, an issue discussed throughout the paper.

State, strategy, and scale in the competitive city: a neo-Gramscian analysis of the governance of 'global Sydney'

In this paper I argue that a neo-Gramscian strategic relational approach (SRA) offers the relational and constructivist perspectives necessary to enhance our concrete and theoretical understandings of urban governance. Moreover, I argue for the utility of using discourse as a productive entry point for neo-Gramscian analysis. Taking a discursive approach to a case study of the governance of ‘global Sydney’ since the mid-1990s, I explore how engaging a neo-Gramscian SRA can connect theoretically informed explanation of the practical accomplishment of urban governance to its broader politico-economic embeddedness and to the territoriality of the state. I explore how the activation of Sydneys governance via the hegemonic project of producing the ‘competitive city’ is shaping a contingent and scaled state form—with a specific (and scaled) institutional form, regime of representation, and range of interventions. Additionally, I consider how counterhegemonic claims and currents shape this process. The relational and constructivist perspectives of the neo-Gramscian SRA ensure that, at all times, urban governance is understood both as a multiscalar production and as a political construction. The result of neo-Gramscian analysis, then, is more theoretically informed and theoretically informative studies of the situated practice of urban governance.

Power and Policy Networks in Urban Governance: Local Government and Property-led Regeneration in Dublin

Using Dublin as a case study, this paper examines how the locus of power in urban governance is reshaped through the emergence of networked governing practices. Specifically, the paper takes the intersection of central government property-led regeneration initiatives with local government planning regulation in Dublin as a forum in which to explore the multiscaled policy networks constituting urban governance and the role of local government, particularly local government planners, within them. The paper employs a Latourian notion of the social production of power in interactions to analyse the power-flows through the networked practices of urban governance and to suggest strategies for the empowerment of local government within them.

Understanding Master-Planned Estates in Australian Cities: A Framework for Research

Master-planned estates (MPEs) are becoming increasingly important as a part of the urban residential fabric and have recently begun to attract significant research attention. Our purpose in this article is to engage critically with understandings of MPEs in the Australian context and to suggest the need for both empirical and theoretical expansion. We draw on research into MPEs in the greater metropolitan region of Sydney and demonstrate how their diverse form and character exceed the parameters of Blakely and Snyders (Fortress America, Brookings Institution Press, Washington, DC, 1997) influential and widely cited typology of MPEs. In a move towards grounded theory, we build from our findings to suggest three key analytical dimensions needed to equip us with more complex and theory-driven understandings of the dynamic forms and outcomes of MPE development: (i) the nature of governance mechanisms that produce MPEs and govern life within them; (ii) the influence of housing market context on the unfolding of urban social processes; and (iii) the dynamic and lived nature of neighbourhood and community. These dimensions are aimed to capture the empirical multiplicity of the MPE phenomenon and to broaden the scope of the theoretical and analytical frameworks that have characterised their Australian analysis. It is our hope that analysis framed by these expanded dimensions can contribute to the project of enhancing theoretical recognition of urban difference under distinct and unique Australian conditions.

Producing the Capacity to Govern in Global Sydney: A Multiscaled Account

ABSTRACT: Critiques of urban regime theory suggest the need for a more nuanced approach to the tangled scalar geographies that constitute urban governance. This article moves towards such an approach by adopting urban regime theory’s focus on urban politics but conducts its analyses through a multiscalar lens. It demonstrates how processes operating across multiple scales intersect in the production of local governance. The article focuses on the social production of urban governance in Sydney, Australia, specifically examining the city’s changing scalar context and scale politics. It suggests that scale-sensitive regime analyses can make important contributions to theoretical development concerning the multiscalar complexities of governance.

Privatism, Privatisation and Social Distinction in Master-Planned Residential Estates

In Australia, master-planned residential estates (MPREs) are often discussed within an internationalised academic discourse around the privatisation and fortification of residential environments. Yet we know very little about the lifestyles, community forms and ways of living in MPREs. We report on the results of an extensive survey across the Sydney metropolitan area that investigated in detail the attractions of master-planned estate living, the socio-demographic composition of these neighbourhoods and patterns of social interaction within them. These data are analysed in terms of a typology of MPRE that encompasses a spectrum of privatism and securitisation: what we see as their open, symbolically enclosed and gated forms. We find that whilst these estates differ along dimensions such as patterns of neighbouring and use of facilities, strong commonalities exist. From this analysis, conclusions are drawn about the links between built form and processes of social distinction as well as their implications for urban planning.

Reterritorialisation of economies and institutions: The rise of the Sydney basin economy

Abstract This paper is an account of institutional and spatial shifts in the Sydney basin economy that coalesce around Australias current, long period of prosperity. The paper briefly sources this prosperity, noting the key shifts towards the financial and professional services sectors that accompany it. This material is then used to make the argument that two reterritorialisation processes underpin Australias—and Sydneys—contemporary accumulation project. The first reterritorialisation is a spatial reformation of distributional flows. Whereas Australian governments had two parallel purposes in post-war economic management, successful accumulation and sustainable socio-spatial distributions, the latter has been largely abandoned. The assumption now is that successful accumulation processes are per se the most appropriate distributional strategies. The second reterritorialisation, in a Deleuzian sense, is the reformation of institutional structures that regulate economy and promote economic growth. Here we find a tension in Australias state apparatus between, on the one hand, an aggressive neo-liberalist reconstruction of the economic regulatory and production arms of the state, but with an adherence to a Keynesian mood within the nations key spending and human services agencies on the other. The historical reasons for this tension are explained and possibilities for future change are speculated on.

Planning a Prosperous Sydney: The challenges of planning urban development in the new urban context

Since their post-war inception, Sydneys metropolitan plans have tended to be overtaken by the social, economic and environmental conditions they have had to confront. The depth and scope of Sydneys recent urban transformation threatens again to overtake metropolitan planning capacity creating, in the context of competitive globalisation, a potentially significant market disadvantage for the city, not to mention poor urban development outcomes. This paper reviews Sydneys post-war metropolitan planning strategies, examining the social and economic contexts and the policy paradigms in which they have been framed, in order to draw out the lessons to be learned from their successes and failures. We argue that future success in planning urban development will rely on richly informed and fine-grained understanding of the complex spatial outcomes of Sydneys ever-deeper global integration. Only such fine-grained understanding can empower metropolitan planning to be responsive to the evolving challenges of managing development in the contemporary urban context.

Economic Restructuring and the Realignment of the Urban Planning System: The Case of Dublin:

This paper examines the evolving role of urban planning under conditions of economic restructuring. The increasing mobility and scale of capital have resulted in the necessity for local governments to attempt to lure capital into specific locations and the growing subservience of the state to capital. This has given rise to declining local autonomy and a reorientation of the role and policy directions of urban planning. Using in-depth interviews with urban planners and property developers in Dublin, this paper examines the impact of these conditions on plannings operation and the outcomes of increased central state intervention in the former territory of planning. It is concluded that planning is being reoriented to become more directly facilitative of the demands of capital.