Peggy James

The supervision of environmental risk: the case of HCB waste or Botany/Randwick?

The governance activities of capital and the state include attempts to control the timing and spacing of social activities such as the production of environmental risks and settlement of different social groups. The supervisory activities that have shaped the environmental and social history of the Botany/Randwick area are identified here, to examine how the HCB waste risk developed in that community. The analysis shows that multiple environmental risks and an ethnically diverse, working class community have been brought together in space to create environmental injustice. Analysing the governance of one environmental risk like hexachlorobenzene (HCB) waste may not increase understanding about communities facing multiple environmental risks or the supervisory processes that lead to the unfair accumulation of risks for particular places or social groups. Lessons from the environmental justice movement suggest that reframing problems like HCB waste management at Botany/Randwick as distributive justice issues may contribute to governance arrangements that better manage multiple risks and pollution sources in space affecting marginalised communities.

Exhibition to Implementation: Introducing Democratic Planning for Metropolitan Sydney 1948–51

Public participation in plan-making is now accepted as mainstream at all spatial scales. Decisive moves to inject consultative provisions are usually dated to the 1960s, a decade of worldwide civil unrest marked by the rise of community social movements. However, there is a neglected pre-history. In Australia, the ideology of democratic planning was apparent from the 1940s. Exhibitions played a key role in public information campaigns. When the first major wave of statutory planning reforms accommodated opportunities for citizen comment, planning experienced an immediate reality check when long-held ideals were contested in their translation into specific spatial regulations. The idealistic marketing of, and subsequent political reactions to, the Cumberland County Planning Scheme for metropolitan Sydney from 1948 exemplify this critical transition in modern Australian planning history.

Learning from LA: Australian Responses to Los Angeles Urbanism 1910–1960

From the 1910s to the 1950s, Los Angeles was a surprising exemplar of progressive planning for Australian cities. LA’s planned neighborhoods early captured the garden suburb ideal. Regional planning initiatives attracted increasing interest, then transport planning and management of auto traffic. Mechanisms of urban governance and formal alliances between private and public sectors followed. This learning from abroad is set within the paradigm of urban policy transfer, highlighting the selectivity of borrowing within the dominant ideology of town and country planning. From the 1960s, positive connotations would be extinguished by new representations of a sprawling, divided, and polluted metropolis.