Robert Freestone

The Australian metropolis : a planning history

FiguresTablesContributorsIntroduction - Stephen Hamnett and Robert Freestone1 Founding cities in nineteenth-century AustraliaHelen Proudfoot2 From city improvement to the city beautifulRobert Freestone3 Towards metropolitan organisation: town planning and the garden city ideaChristine Garnaut4 From theory to practice: the inter-war yearsAlan Hutchings5 A new paradigm: planning and reconstruction in the 1940sRenate Howe6 The post-war cityIan Alexander7 The corridor city: planning for growth in the 1960sIan Morison8 Administrative coordination, urban management and strategic planning in the 1970sMargo Huxley9 The revival of metropolitan planningMichael Lennon10 The late 1990s: competitive versus sustainable citiesStephen HamnettNotesIndex

Metropolitan Restructuring and Suburban Employment Centers: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on the Australian Experience

Abstract A strand of recent American planning literature has been the exploration of “edge city” style suburbanization. Similar outer city landscapes with attendant planning problems have been identified in foreign settings, but a culturally sensitive approach to the relevant comparisons of pattern, process and policy is needed. Focusing on the Sydney experience, this paper provides an Australian perspective. Its discussion of economic, demographic, historical, institutional, and policy factors is centrally concerned with explaining the more muted scale and contrasting forms of commercial suburbanization. The instructiveness of differences as much as of similarities is highlighted in the comparative analysis.

Planning, Sustainability and Airport-Led Urban Development

Airports are no longer places where planes just take off and land but have evolved into major business enterprises with spatial impacts and functional implications that extend deep into metropolitan areas. They are vital hubs in the global space of flows. Airport-led urban development, notwithstanding its employment and income generating capabilities and potentials, comes with costs and risks: economic, environmental, and cultural. A host of planning issues are raised. Traditional NIMBY reactions against airport expansion are evolving into more fundamental critiques of aviation around issues such as climate change. Mediating the conflict between the aviation industrys pro-growth stance and more sceptical perspectives is the concept of sustainable aviation. This may prove an oxymoron but it remains vital to link airport planning to the broader planning of sustainable communities and regions.

POLYCENTRICITY OR DISPERSION?: CHANGES IN CENTER EMPLOYMENT IN METROPOLITAN SYDNEY, 1981 TO 1996

Much recent literature in urban studies, geography, and planning portrays an inexorable evolution toward polycentricity as a new “postmodern” metropolitan form. However, detailed and comparable empirical investigations, at once both comprehensive and disaggregated, are more elusive. A study by Gordon and Richardson (1996) of employment trends in Los Angeles—the archetypal polycentric metropolis—produced the surprising conclusion that a process of generalized dispersion rather than a clustering in major suburban subcenters seemed well established for the period 1970 to 1990. This paper adapts the Gordon-Richardson methodology to an investigation of centered versus noncentered employment trends in Sydney, Australia, between 1981 and 1996. Based on a detailed statistical analysis, the study suggests some parallels to the Los Angeles experience in the 1980s but uncovers a recentralization trend in the 1990s. The findings underline the importance of locality-specific factors and the need for further systematic and comparative research.

Student Experiences of Work-Based Learning in Planning Education

Of various approaches to teaching planning in practice, work-based or integrated learning retains vital relevance in many planning programs. There are strong rationales in pedagogic, professional development, employment, and personal terms. But what of student experiences of work experience? How do student planners approach, experience, and reflect on workplace engagements? This article explores these experiential dimensions through a survey of a cohort of Australian students involved in a yearlong paid placement as part of an accredited undergraduate planning degree. It discusses the changing expectations of students and whether these were realized, their major learning experiences, and an overall evaluation of off-campus learning. The findings have wider relevance for evaluating student assessments of work-based learning in planning education.

Fly Buy Cities: Some Planning Aspects of Airport Privatisation in Australia

Neo-liberalism has been a dominant economic and political paradigm for several decades, legitimising the privatisation, deregulation and marketisation of many public services. The leasing of Australias capital city airports by the Commonwealth Government to private operators exemplifies this trend. Since the late 1990s, airport companies have moved to commodify uncommitted land assets for diverse commercial developments. These trends raise important planning issues through impacts on property markets, infrastructure provision, traffic and the environment. Yet under the relevant legislation, ultimate development approval remains solely with the Commonwealth Government, with both local and state planning authorities excluded. This article presents preliminary findings on an investigation into planning aspects of non-aeronautical commercial development of major airports in Australia.

A Quantitative Approach to Assessment of Work-Based Learning Outcomes: An Urban Planning Application.

Assessing student perceptions and opinions of their university education is now standard in quality assurance processes for learning and teaching. In Australia, the Course Experience Questionnaire (CEQ) has been institutionalised as a national survey of graduand opinion and is used as the key indicator of tertiary teaching quality. A little‐used variant called the Work Experience Questionnaire (WEQ) provides an adaptation to the specific case of work‐based learning. Work‐based learning is a vital component of many professional degrees. It is a staple of urban planning education and yet there are few reported evaluations of specific student learning experiences. This paper illustrates the utility of the WEQ methodology when applied to codify the views of undergraduate urban planning students following a ‘sandwich year’ of industry training. The specific results are discussed and the wider implications of the model are assessed. a Formerly Institutional Analysis and Reporting, University of New South Wales.

Provision of child care facilities in Sydney

Summary The spatial allocation of resources to child care services in Sydney is examined. Significant differences in standards of provision between local government areas are found. Correlation techniques establish the importance of income and the much lesser significance of need as predictors of ‘resource richness’. The gap between need and provision is interpreted as territorial injustice. Redistributive efforts are properly focused on those areas where the gap is maximal.

Housing Differentiation and Renewal in Middle-ring Suburbs: The Experience of Sydney, Australia

Many suburban areas in Australian cities built between the 1930s and 1960s are facing major challenges from socio-demographic change, ageing housing, long-term disinvestment and entrenched pockets of social disadvantage. Yet despite emerging relative disadvantages, these middle ring or ‘third city’ suburbs are experiencing locally generated piecemeal market-led reinvestment and renewal. This paper explores housing, household and housing investment characteristics and trends in the older parts of Sydney’s western suburbs drawing on analyses of socio-demographic and development application data. Policy options to achieve more appropriate urban renewal outcomes under broad social sustainability criteria are canvassed. Similarities and differences to the American ‘first suburb’ phenomenon are noted.

Suburban reinvestment through ‘knockdown rebuild’ in Sydney

Cities are continually built and unbuilt (Hommels, 2005), reflecting cycles of investment and disinvestment across space, the machinations of housing and urban policy interventions, and shifting patterns of household need, demand, choice and constraint. The drivers of change are fluid and reflect shifting political, institutional, technological, environmental and socio-economic contexts. Urban landscapes evolve in concert with these changes, but the built environment tends to be defined more in terms of spatial fixity and the path-dependency of physical fabric. Suburban neighbourhoods register this dynamism in different ways as they have flourished, declined and subsequently revalorised over time. Changes initiated through redevelopment, from large-scale public renewal to alterations and renovations by individual owner-occupiers, are long-standing signifiers of reinvestment (Montgomery, 1992; Munro & Leather, 2000; Whitehand & Carr, 2001). Our concern here relates to a particular form of incremental suburban renewal: the increasing significance of private ‘knockdown rebuild’ (KDR) activity. KDR refers to the wholesale demolition and replacement of single homes on individual lots. We are interested in the scale and manifestations of this under-researched process and, in particular, the new insights offered to debates regarding gentrification, residential mobility and choice, and in turn, potential implications for metropolitan housing and planning policy. Our focus is Sydney, Australia.