Susan Oakley

Public Consultation and Place-Marketing in the Revitalisation of the Port Adelaide Waterfront

The Port Adelaide waterfront redevelopment is a property-led urban venture that is being driven by a logic and ideology of new forms of urban politics that are oriented towards post-industrial capital accumulation. While local residents are in favour of the waterfront being revitalised there is concern about the nature and scale of the redevelopment being proposed. Through a carefully managed ‘place-marketing’ process, the Ports industrial landscape is to be re-conceptualised as a future-oriented landscape of cosmopolitan residential–work–leisure lifestyle as an expression of desire for professional occupancy. The study reveals that local participation and influence in planning decisions of this public–private venture is somewhat marginal to economic considerations.

Re-imagining City Waterfronts: A Comparative Analysis of Governing Renewal in Adelaide, Darwin and Melbourne

Urban waterfront regeneration is one of the largest changes to the structure of Australian and many world cities over the last two decades. There is no comparative research which evaluates their governing with particular attention to the relationship and responsibility of quasi-public agencies and local government. This study advances the competitive-city paradigm from a focus on global cities to an examination of inter-city urban competition between differently located cities in the urban hierarchy by comparing waterfront renewal projects located in Adelaide, Darwin and Melbourne. Through interview, policy and document analysis, the article offers preliminary insights on current and emergent governance arrangements involved in urban waterfront renewal. In an era of increasing inter-urban competition, the study reveals hybrid forms of urban governance are driving the planning and delivery of these three waterfront renewal projects. Further, there exists a ‘knotty’ tension between these models of urban governance and the capacity for meaningful consultation and participation between governments.

Place-taking and Place-making in Waterfront Renewal, Australia

Globally, waterfronts have been used for trade, waste disposal, leisure and most recently for urban spectacle and lifestyle housing. While this has been explored in urban studies research, its relation to imperialism and colonisation has not. Waterfronts were often the entry points of imperial occupancy, trade and industry. Contestation over their value and use is integral to their constitution as landscapes, as place-taking becomes part of their place-making. Drawing on Adelaide and Melbourne, Australia, these sites register culturally specific imprints connected to the colonisation process. For Indigenous Australians, sea country was indistinguishable from land, but subsequent and current imperial transformations of land and water use have rendered benign an Indigenous presence through its symbolic re-presentation. This post-colonial reading will correlate the divide between land and water with those who have the imperial and class power to define this elemental boundary thus adding a new dimension to waterfront research.

The Role of Urban Governance in Re-constructing Place, Economic Function and Social Relations in Urban Waterfront Regeneration: The Case of Port Adelaide, South Australia

Abstract The Port Adelaide waterfront is symbolic of a distinctive form of entrepreneurial urban governance that emphasises specific forms of capital accumulation. As in waterfront projects elsewhere in Australia and overseas, depicting Port Adelaide as an ‘urban problem’ has been critical in legitimating the public–private market-based approach to regenerating the waterfront site. This paper outlines how the ascendancy of urban governance in Australian political sensibility is coinciding with and facilitating a particular urban form in waterfront developments. This involves transforming the Ports disused industrial and maritime landscape from a site of production to one of consumption. This urban makeover signifies a radical reconstitution of place identity, economic function and social relations. This paper also investigates the impact on the pre-existing social structure, built form and economic activity base of the location and suggests that the potential for this significant waterfront project is not confined to the re-imagining of the discursive identity of the place but extends to meeting wider institutional metropolitan and regional planning objectives.

Governing urban waterfront renewal: the politics, opportunities and challenges for the inner harbour of Port Adelaide, Australia

Abstract The redevelopment of the Port Adelaide waterfront is symbolic of a new era in institutional urban planning, one that is being driven by an entrepreneurial logic more commonly associated with a market rationality. Urban entrepreneurialism describes a complex set of discursive orientations, which are evident in the planning, delivery and financing of this waterfront revitalisation. This new urban politic is considered to offer a pragmatic solution to what has been considered a landscape in social and material decline. More often waterfront regeneration is high density and property led, which is geared towards a select housing consumer and investor. Housing is therefore being consumed as an expression of an image of desire and status and as a commodity form that is distinctive. Developments of this nature therefore raise questions regarding the extent to which wealth creation through speculative real estate is favoured over redistribution and equity, especially at a time of global uncertainty in the financial market system.

A Lefebvrian Analysis of Redeveloping Derelict Urban Docklands for High-Density Consumption Living, Australia

In Australia, large-scale residentially driven waterfront redevelopments have taken on a new urgency and their development has increasingly become politically, socially and economically significant as urban populations have burgeoned and governments have sought ways to house, employ and ensure quality urban environments. Through the lens of Henri Lefebvres spatial schema, high-density transit-oriented urbanism in current planning orthodoxy reveals tensions and inconsistency when applied to the retrofitting of derelict urban docklands. Drawing specifically on the Port Adelaide waterfront experience, significant policy failings are evident in terms of the planning, urban design and residential densification aspirations associated with this type of development. Because waterfront redevelopments are promoted as supporting large urban populations, this paper examines the capacity of these projects to provide planning processes that can deliver equitable distributional outcomes in terms of environmentally and socially sustainable spaces of mixed housing tenure, amenity and quality urban design.

The experiences of being a young LGBTIQ and homeless in Australia: Re-thinking policy and practice:

Drawing on the perspectives of young lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer (LGBTIQ) people who have experienced homelessness across metropolitan Adelaide and Sydney, Australia, the article outlines many of the challenges and barriers that confronted them. We argue that traditional views in policy and practice that treat homelessness as a homogeneous category are detrimental to this young cohort. With more young people identifying as LGBTIQ, a greater number of them are seeking services, support and housing assistance. Yet, as we highlight, this has had the effect of a shortage of suitable and safe accommodation and support to assist young LGBTIQ people. This shortfall further entrenches marginalisation and exclusion for this young group.

Feeling safe and comfortable in the urban environment

Safety is recognised as an important goal of urban regeneration projects and implementing the principles of Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) has been proposed as one way of enhancing community safety. Yet there are few critiques of how effective CPTED is in achieving this. This paper reports on a pilot study that explores the link between CPTED principles and people’s feelings of safety and comfort in an urban precinct of Adelaide, South Australia. The research combines a micro-scale analysis of the built environment and a series of interviews with people who live and/or work in the area. The research highlights the importance of some of the CPTED principles including activity, maintenance, sight lines but also reveals the importance of familiarity and personal safety strategies.

Understanding the Planning and Practice of Redeveloping Disused Docklands Using Critical Urban Assemblage as a Lens: A Case Study of Port Adelaide, Australia

The Port Adelaide inner harbour, like other waterfront developments nationally and internationally, reflects the bringing together of a range of elements—ideas, policies, people, capital and strategies—in reconfiguring the built form. This preliminary study investigates the utility of applying a concept of critical urban assemblage to understand the planning, processes and delivery of this Australian waterfront redevelopment. The aim is to go beyond situating the redevelopment as a ‘model’ of success or failure, or the sole result of a neo-liberalized urban regeneration paradigm.

Homelessness amongst young people in rural regions of Australia

Andrew Beer, Paul Delfabbro, Kristin Natalier, Susan Oakley, Jasmin Packer and Fiona Verity1. Introduction: The Hidden Faces of Rural Homelessness 2. Rural Homelessness in the United States 3. Homeless in the Heartland: American Dreams and Nightmares in Indian Country 4. Quasi-Homelessness Among Rural Trailer-Park Households in the United States 5. Homelessness in Rural and Small Town Canada 6. Rural Homelessness in the UK: A National Overview 7. Hidden and Neglected: Homelessness in Rural England 8. Knowing Homelessness in Rural England 9. A Sociological Perspective on Homelessness in Rural Spain 10. Are There Any Homeless People in Rural Finland? 11. Homelessness in Rural Ireland 12. Inhabiting the Margins: A Geography of Rural Homelessness in Australia 13. Homelessness Amongst Young People in Rural Regions of Australia