Sophie Sturup

Using an Online Data Portal and Prototype Analysis Tools in an Investigation of Spatial Livability Planning

This paper introduces an online spatial data portal with advanced data access, analytical and visualisation capabilities which can be used for evidence based city planning and supporting data driven research. Through a case study approach, focused in the city of Melbourne, the authors show how the Australian Urban Infrastructure Network AURIN portal can be used to investigate a multi-facetted approach to understanding the various spatial dimension of livability. While the tools explore separate facets of livability employment, housing, health service and walkability, their outputs flow through to the other tools showing the benefits of integrated systems.

Being and planning, world formation and authenticity in Heideggerian analysis:

The theory of being helps us understand the condition of planning in an evanescent, shape-shifting world and how to be a strategic planner in such a world. Martin Heidegger’s investigation of being reveals important and sometimes disconcerting insights into humans and the worlds they inhabit and generate. In this article, we use Heidegger’s framework of thought to reveal what being means for planners and planning. In our investigation, we focus on one theme that seems fundamental to the practice of planning, the transformative impulse, and we reflect on how Heidegger’s thought provides insights into that element. We show how Heidegger, the philosopher of the everyday, overturned the Cartesian dualistic ontology of subject–object, replacing it with the holistic being-in-the-world. We explore how this holistic ontology helps reinterpret transformative practice. We argue that effective transformation of society involves a transformation of being.

Storylines, leadership and risk: some findings from Australian case studies of urban transport megaprojects

This article is about how storylines are interwoven with mega transport project success. It examines the animating stories that inspire support for a project, the leadership that carries forward and expresses these stories and in turn becomes defined by them, and one particular impact this has on the management of risk. In developing this article we have used data collected on three Australian mega urban transport projects (MUTPs) for OMEGA Project 2, an international project on MUTPs. Framing the discussion also are some wider questions of political ethics which the expenditure of large amounts of public funds entails. In this article we first discuss our interpretive theoretical framework. We adduce evidence on the three elements (storylines, leadership and risk) before reaching our conclusion that whether or not a project is subsequently judged a ‘success’ depends on the combination of a persuasive storyline, strong leadership and the effective management of risk. Finally, we turn to the wider normative ambitions of the OMEGA project and question whether these can be achieved in an Australian context in which infrastructure planning is so highly politicised.

Editorial: Planning, ‘Program’ and ‘Project’

Although practitioners of urban policy and planning might feel that things have always been this way, the programmification of government is actually a relatively recent phenomenon, and it is deeply indebted to planning. In their recent book Miller and Rose (2008, p. 75) point to the origins of the current programmatic form of government in the 1960s when “the notion that efficiency and rationality could be achieved through mechanisms of planning crossed the boundaries of economic and social policy and the bounds of political party”. Thus planning reached beyond its traditional function of map drawing and physical planning, into the domain of urban policy, social and economic strategy. This required considerable and ongoing adjustment in both planning and urban policy, and has included the development of an array of technologies for strategic planning. The adjustment can be seen in the ongoing discussion of the role of the planner in community consultation (Hopkins, 2007). The planner has, with the policy maker, become a programmer. There are however issues with this form of government. “Programmers presuppose that the real is programmable, that it is a domain subject to certain determinants, rules, norms and processes that can be acted upon and improved by authorities” (Miller & Rose, 2008, p. 63). Government has thus been characterised by the advent of a multitude of programs all designed to work through problems as an evolving process without end. It is no wonder that urban planning, with its direct relationship to the development of infrastructure, has struggled with this. Massive built forms, road and infrastructure systems, are not easily given to mutability. They are deterministic in themselves, and not easily rendered programmatic. As Miller and Rose (2008, p. 35) point out “the real always insists in the form of resistance to programming; and the programmers’ world is one of constant experiment, invention, failure, critique and adjustment”. It is far easier to imagine urban development as a progress to somewhere, with the right, necessary objects built, rather than a never-ending cycle of failure, evaluation and rearticulation. In this environment, it is perhaps not surprising to see the development of a new technology of government. This technology, the technology of project management, offers a powerful tool for the delivery of change. The logic of project, with its clear articulation of intent, its finite ending, resolves many of the issues of program. The question for planning though is “how does this affect the gains made in strategic planning, in the domains of social and economic planning, and even in the programmatic approach to urban planning?”

Swimming or Drowning in the Depths of Partnership

This exploratory research paper seeks to consider the problems that may arise in the process of creating deep and lasting partnerships in public-private partnerships (PPPs). It does this by contrasting two case studies of very different PPPs, Copenhagens metro project and Melbourne City Link. The paper puts forward the case for the authors concern that a deep partnership could lead either to mercantile government or quasi-governmental private parties and thus lead to a diminution of the benefits of PPPs. The paper concludes that these concerns are relevant and need to be considered and guarded against no matter the contract conditions.

Next Generation Infrastructure: Principles for Post-industrial Public Works

Next Generation Infrastructure is a book about the potential and possibility in the massive infrastructure investment and renewal which is needed in America and indeed elsewhere. It seeks to present possible ways to “decouple carbon-intensive and ecologically harmful technologies from critical infrastructure systems” (p. 3) and presents cases where systems thinking, innovative scientific knowhow and design have been used to do that. The central premise of the book is that human engineered energy, water and waste infrastructure systems are tightly coupled. For a range of reasons, including climate change, the author posits that a post-industrial future must ask the question “How can we capitalise on the connectedness of our critical systems with nature and each other” rather than “How can we direct nature” (p. 7). The suggestion is that thinking about industrial symbiosis calls for systems which are diversified, distributed and interconnected. Such systems, it is posited, would be based on five key principles: