Robert Stimson

PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION ACCESS

The form of a city has a major impact on the lifestyles of its residents. As urban centers grow, careful strategies are required to ensure that the regional quality of life is not adversely affected by this growth. An important strategic consideration is transportation planning. Questions regarding the sustainability of dispersed car dependent urban forms have led to a renewed interest in public transportation. This paper examines access to public transportation and discusses approaches for improving such access. Examples from the South East Queensland region of Australia will be used for illustration.

A Push – Pull Framework for Modelling the Relocation of Retirees to a Retirement Village: The Australian Experience

Although most older people prefer to age in place, nonetheless many do relocate, with a small proportion moving to retirement villages, which provide a purpose designed and built residential and lifestyle environment. Using factor analyses, path analyses, and a push – pull framework, the authors model the decision process of retirees in Australia in order to identify relationships between push – pull factors and predictor variables, using data from a national survey of retirement village residents. The push factors relate to change in lifestyle, home maintenance, social isolation, and health and mobility, whereas the pull factors relate to built environment and affordability, the locational attributes of villages, and the desire to maintain an existing lifestyle. The survey data also identify village attributes considered desirable or undesirable, or important or unimportant. Overall, resident satisfaction with moving is high.

Fear of crime in Brisbane Individual, social and neighbourhood factors in perspective

Numerous theories apply to fear of crime and each are associated with different kinds of variables. Most studies use only one theory, though this study examines the relative importance of different kinds of variables across a number of theories. The study uses data from a survey of residents in Brisbane, Australia to examine the relative importance of individual attributes, neighbourhood disorder, social processes and neighbourhood structure in predicting fear of crime. Individual attributes and neighbourhood disorder were found to be important predictors of fear of crime, while social processes and neighbourhood structure were found to be far less important. The theoretical implications are that the vulnerability hypothesis and the incivilities thesis are most appropriate for investigating fear of crime, though social disorganization theory does provide conceptual support for the incivilities thesis. Although social processes are less important in predicting fear of crime than neighbourhood incivilities, they are still integrally related to fear of crime: they explain how incivilities arise, they buffer against fear of crime, and they are affected by fear of crime.

Measuring community strength and social capital

Western J., StimsonR., Baum S. and Van Gellecum Y. (2005) Measuring community strength and social capital, Regional Studies 39 , 1095–1109. Five case study communities in both metropolitan and regional urban locations in Australia are used as test sites to develop measures of ‘community strength’ on four domains: Natural Capital; Produced Economic Capital; Human Capital; and Social and Institutional Capital. The paper focuses on the fourth domain. Sample surveys of households in the five case study communities used a survey instrument with scaled items to measure four aspects of social capital – formal norms, informal norms, formal structures and informal structures – that embrace the concepts of trust, reciprocity, bonds, bridges, links and networks in the interaction of individuals with their community inherent in the notion social capital. Exploratory principal components analysis is used to identify factors that measure those aspects of social and institutional capital, while a confirmatory analysis based on Cronbachs α explores the robustness of the measures. Four primary scales and 15 subscales are identified when defining the domain of social and institutional capital. Further analysis reveals that two measures – anomie, and perceived quality of life and wellbeing – relate to certain primary scales of social capital.

Leadership and institutions in regional endogenous development

The authors of this comprehensive book provide a detailed rationale and original theory for the study of leadership and institutional factors, including entrepreneurship, in the growth and development of cities and regions. They demonstrate why leadership, institutions and entrepreneurship can – and indeed do – play a crucial enhancing role as key elements in the process of regional endogenous growth.

The social and economic performance of Australia's large regional cities and towns: implications for rural and regional policy.

Australias large regional cities and towns display wide variation in how they are adjusting to the socio-economic transitions occurring in Australia. That variation is exposed using a multi-variate model analysing performance on a range of socio-economic variables over the decade 1986 to 1996 for 122 cities and towns with populations of 10 000 and above at the 1996 census. Those places are classified into seven clusters of community performance reflecting opportunity/vulnerability, and their spatial patterns are mapped. The resulting framework is then used to show how the recent geography of the socio-economic performance of the large regional cities and towns has a distinctive selectivity and contributes to opportunity in some places and the vulnerable performance of others. The influence of that selectivity can be seen in the mismatched geographic patterns evident from an analysis of shares of national population and employment change, investment in non-residential construction, levels of welfare dependency, and the ratio between household income tax generation and transfer benefits received. The paper uses the insights drawn from that analysis to pose questions suggesting the need to rethink national policy perspectives for addressing change in non-metropolitan Australia.

A typology of community opportunity and vulnerability in metropolitan Australia

Abstract. A multivariate model using hierarchical clustering and discriminant analysis is used to identify clusters of community opportunity and community vulnerability across Australias mega metropolitan regions. Variables used in the model measure aspects of structural economic change, occupational change, human capital, income, unemployment, family/household disadvantage, and housing stress. A nine-cluster solution is used to categorise communities across metropolitan space. Significant between -city variations in the incidence of these clusters of opportunity and vulnerability are apparent, suggesting the emergence of marked differentiation between Australias mega metropolitan regions in their adjustments to changing economic and social conditions.

An Overview of Quality of Urban Life

There is a long history of quality of life (QOL) studies based on two distinctive analytical approaches. One covers objective indicators involving the analysis of spatially aggregated secondary data whereas the other approach focuses on the analysis of subjective measures of QOL domains derived from household surveys. Aided by the use of GIS technology, efforts have been made to integrate the subjective approach with spatial objective data, especially where there is a focus on the analysis and modeling of quality of urban life (QOUL). The chapter presents an overview of the evolution of these approaches in QOL/QOUL studies and sets the stage for subsequent chapters.

The Australia urban research gateway

The

City profile Brisbane

20m Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network (AURIN) project (www.aurin.org.au) began in July 2010. AURIN has been tasked with developing a secure, Web‐based virtual environment (e‐Infrastructure) offering seamless, secure access to diverse, distributed and extremely heterogeneous data sets from numerous agencies with an extensive portfolio of targeted analytical and visualization tools. This is being provisioned for Australia‐wide urban and built environment researchers – itself a highly heterogeneous collection of research communities with diverse demands, through a unified urban research gateway. This paper describes these demands and how the e‐Infrastructure and gateway is being designed and implemented to accommodate this diversity of requirements, both from the user/researcher perspective and from the data provider perspective. The scaling of the infrastructure is presented and the way in which it copes with the spectrum of big data challenges (volume, veracity, variability and velocity) and associated big data analytics. The utility of the e‐Infrastructure is also demonstrated through a range of scenarios illustrating and reflecting the interdisciplinary urban research now possible. Copyright