Phillip O'Neill

The business of place: networks of property, partnership and produce.

Abstract The paper examines one of Australia’s most successful luxury hospitality businesses, Peppers Hotel Trust. It focuses on the Trust’s flagship property The Convent at Peppertree a hotel, restaurant and winery complex located in the heart of Pokolbin in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales, Australia’s most visited wine-tourism district. Against the familiar economic accounts which frame Peppertree as a valuable piece of real estate and the product of an unerring entrepreneurial vision, it is recast here as a more precarious network in which the complex threads from which it is woven are simultaneously social and material; configured by the intimate social relations of marriage, friendship and business partnerships and the material fabric of buildings and gardens, wines and foodstuffs through which these relations take and hold their shape. We trace three pathways through the Peppertree network – the social relations of the business ‘partnership’, the ‘Convent’ building which anchors the business in place; and the ‘gastronomic landscape’ from which the restaurant at Peppertree sources local produce. These pathways open up some of the multifarious ways in which knowledge and agency are distributed through the network and enable us to admit new possibilities for financial story-telling; the spatial complications of production and consumption and the situatedness of our own research practice and account.

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.

An argument with neoliberalism Australia’s place in a global imaginary

This article argues that the uncritical application of the lens of neoliberalism closes off opportunities for more rigorous analysis of actually existing socio-economic change. We ask whether Australia’s developmental trajectory over the last three decades can be described as neoliberalization and whether the outcome is a variety of neoliberalism. Instead of stitching together a story about variegated neoliberalism, we find an alternative narrative based around the notion of a developmental project more compelling. We document the spatial and political realities that have inhibited the roll-out of neoliberal ideas and practices in the Australian context. We think that instead of expanding the varieties of variegated neoliberalism to accommodate all manner of events and processes in all sorts of places, our task should be to recognize those instances where social, political, cultural or economic changes settle capitalism’s contradictions in ways that diverge from neoliberal frameworks and expectations. Our central point is that the role of academic research is to explain the lived world and to develop abstractions to aid that explanation, rather than to design an abstraction (neoliberalism) and then fit the lived world to its contours.

Neither here nor there or always here and there? Antipodean reflections on economic geography

This paper emerged from discussions held over a two-day symposium hosted by the University of Western Sydney and the Institute of Australian Geographers in December 2011. Drawing on contemporary themes in economic geography around postcolonial theory and a concern with the histories of the sub-discipline, the symposium sought to triangulate these discourses using Raewyn Connell’s (2006, 2007a, 2007b) concept of ‘Southern Theory’ as a means of beginning a process of critical reflection about the types of economic geographies that are produced from and in the ‘Antipodes’. After introducing these debates and presenting a critical reflection on how Connell’s Southern Theory potentially provides a useful means of bringing them into conversation, the paper presents five considerations from geographers who have made significant contributions to contemporary economic geography understandings, drawing on, in various ways, their Antipodean positionality. The paper assesses to what extent are Antipodean economic geography knowledges: (i) unique and embedded in specific conditions and events, (ii) inexorably tied to other economic geographical knowledges produced elsewhere and (iii) how Antipodean economic geography knowledges have been exported and assembled within and beyond the discipline of geography.

Planning for Peri-urban Agriculture: a geographically-specific, evidence-based approach from Sydney

ABSTRACT Agriculture on the fringes of cities across the Global North is increasingly perceived as making an important contribution to urban sustainability. As Australian cities continue to expand and encroach on their peri-urban peripheries, there is rising concern about loss of farmland to housing. Such concerns are especially urgent in the Sydney Basin, due to population growth, and topographical and land-use constraints. Accounting for the Basins farmlands, however, remains opaque, not unrelated to difficulties in acquiring reliable data on the area and value of Sydneys agricultural industries. The problem is not simply that there are no data available but rather that the nature of existing data is (often hotly) contested. Critical questions for urban planners therefore remain unanswered, including: is peri-urban agriculture as important as advocates suggest? Are metropolitan food supplies under threat? If peri-urban farmland is important, what should be done to preserve it? In collating and analysing existing Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) and non-ABS data on Sydney agriculture between 1992 and 2011, we outline the need for more reliable and consistent longitudinal data to enable better planning for Sydneys farmland into the future. Notwithstanding limitations of available data sources, our findings reveal trends in Sydney Basin agriculture that invite debate on many assumptions about the nature of peri-urban agriculture. These findings emphasise the importance of geographically specific, evidence-based analysis as a basis for planning for peri-urban agriculture.

The Density Debate in Urban Research: An Alternative Approach to Representing Urban Structure and Form

Global aspirations for urban sustainability coincide with debate over urban form. Much of the debate centres on the merit of increasing residential densities across metropolitan areas. We argue that this focus on density is problematic. Specifically, we question whether urban density is a sufficient proxy for representing urban structure and form across large metropolitan areas, as was promulgated famously by Newman and Kenworthy some time ago. Our concern is that density tells us little about a neighbourhoods location, accessibility and design characters. Moreover, the focus on density may well be contributing to poorly located and designed development across metropolitan areas. Here we offer an alternative approach using a typology of urban structure and form to explore urban sustainability potential, specifically through three variables: transport mode choice, energy consumption, and water consumption. Our results are significant and suggest new approaches to urban form and structure in urban planning frameworks.

Infrastructure's Stubborn Spatiality and its Maturing Financialisation

The paper reports on an Australia Research Council funded project which examines the ways private infrastructure finance is structured within infrastructure deals. This paper draws on a series of interviews with investors and service providers in North America, the UK and Australia. It charts the development of private infrastructure financing post-GFC and examines the ways organisational, capital and regulatory structures have evolved and been transformed. The argument uses a Chamberlinian monopolistic approach to the rise of the infrastructure financing market and argues the proposition that the sector has now arrived at a relatively mature market structure position. That said, the article reveals that the sector’s regulatory regime remains heavily informalised with its nature and direction determined largely by private and non-disclosed arrangements.

Effective Practices for Interagency Data Sharing: Insights from Collaborative Research in a Regional Intervention

Data sharing adds considerable value to interagency programs that seek to tackle complex social problems. Yet data sharing is not easily enacted either technically or as a governance practice, especially considering the multiple forms of risk involved. This article presents insights from a successful data sharing project in a major region in east coast Australia involving a federally funded research partnership between two universities and a number of human services agencies. The Spatial Data Analysis Project sought to establish a community of practice for devising data sharing protocols and embedding data sharing into agency practices. Close dialogue between the project partners and mobilizing the authority of extant regulatory and legal frameworks proved effective in confronting risks and barriers. The article reveals effective practices for data sharing and derives lessons for other policy and governance contexts.

Capital Projects and Infrastructure in Urban and Economic Development

The paper examines the politics of infrastructure in the post-privatisation era. It shows the tensions between the interests of private investors and the expectations of the citizenry for the assembly of a raft of capital assets that collectively underpin the operation of liveable sustainable cities. The paper traces the intrinsic role of infrastructure as a generator of urban economies and then of the state as a mediator of often conflicting demands in relation to economic outcomes, the availability and distribution of positive externalities and, crucially, of assignment of responsibility for infrastructure funding. Implications are drawn for urban planning and design.