Wendy Elizabeth Steele

Australian Urban Planners: Hybrid Roles and Professional Dilemmas?

This article argues that a hybrid role for urban planners has emerged within the largely neoliberalised spaces of contemporary Australian governance. This role is one that transcends previously rigid or clearly defined sectoral positions to blend public, private and community responsibilities in novel and complex ways. The first section of the article briefly sketches the historical shifts that have led to this hitherto unseen hybrid role. The second section explores the notion of hybridity as a paradoxical professional ‘third space’ where dominant ideological discourses shaping planning practices such as neoliberalism can be both resisted and/or reinforced. Whilst the third section of the article shifts to ground the hybridity metaphor in real people and places through selected narratives from case study research into the shift to performance-based planning in Queensland under the ‘Integrated Planning Act 1997’. Finally, the future of this hybrid professional role is considered within the context of an uncertain global financial climate.

Strategy-making for Sustainability: An Institutional Learning Approach to Transformative Planning Practice

This paper develops and applies a framework for analysing transformative institutional change in the name of sustainability. It argues that institutional leaning tools afford a useful heuristic lens that can distil important insights from the complexities of an organisation, and subsequently disseminate those findings to wider practice. The new institutional researcher emerges as a reflexive bricoleur, attentive to the politics of situated inquiry amidst complex webs of knowledge production and learning. The paper concludes by emphasising that the institutional learning approach is not a panacea, but does provide a valuable window into strategic efforts to “see” urban areas in different—that is, more sustainable—ways. Ultimately, it is the quality of these democratic deliberations that will make attempts at transformative change for sustainability over the long-term both substantive and worthwhile.

Planning the climate-just city

Issues of urban equity have long been linked to urban planning. Yet in practice the quest for the ‘just city’, defined in terms of democracy, diversity, difference and sustainability, has proven to be highly problematic. Drawing on examples from the Australian urban context, we argue that the imperative of climate change adds urgency to the longstanding equity agenda of planning in cities. In our normative quest for the climate-just city we offer a conceptual and analytical framework for integrating the principles of climate justice and equity into urban planning thinking and practice.

Keywords in planning: what do we mean by ‘community resilience’?

ABSTRACT In this paper, we critically explore the combination of a dynamic, multilayered understanding of community with an open-ended, ‘emergent’ understanding of resilience, and highlight the relevance for planners. We argue prevailing planning policies and practices on community resilience tend to work with rather simplistic, one-dimensional understandings of both ‘community’ and ‘resilience’. The multiple layers of meaning that are embedded in the word community are ignored when it is treated as an add-on intended to give underlying ideas about resilience planning greater public appeal. Apart and together the concepts of community and resilience bring into play a host of tensions between, for example, continuity and change, resistance and adaptation, inclusion and exclusion. This paper offers a framework for ensuring that these important considerations are openly negotiated within transparent normative frameworks of planning policy and practice.

Mind the governance gap: oil vulnerability and urban resilience in Australian cities

Abstract Australian cities currently face high levels of oil vulnerability, which is often unevenly distributed, particularly within the middle and outer suburbs of the greater metropolitan areas (Dodson and Sipe, 2006). New urban policies and planning practices are needed to avoid, remedy or mitigate the impacts of oil price rises and create urban resilience (Newman et al. 2009). Whilst the lack of scholarship around oil vulnerability is slowly beginning to be addressed within the Australian urban planning context, an emphasis on the links between urban governance and urban resilience is still largely marginalised despite its acknowledged central role in the quest of urban resilience. Our main point of departure is the re-conceptualisation of oil vulnerability as a planning and governance deficit within Australian cities. We identify a number of gaps that combine to inhibit the capacity for the development of urban resilience in the face of oil vulnerability and depletion scenarios.

Make kin, not cities! Multispecies entanglements and ‘becoming-world’ in planning theory:

Much planning theory has been undergirded by an ontological exceptionalism of humans. Yet, city planning does not sit outside of the eco-social realities co-producing the Anthropocene. Urban planners and scholars, therefore, need to think carefully and critically about who speaks for (and with) the nonhuman in place making. In this article, we identify two fruitful directions for planning theory to better engage with the imbricated nature of humans and nonhumans is recognised as characteristic of the Anthropocene – multispecies entanglements and becoming-world. Drawing on the more-than-human literature in urban and cultural geography and the environmental humanities, we consider how these terms offer new possibilities for productively rethinking the ontological exceptionalism of humans in planning theory. We critically explore how planning theory might develop inclusive, ethical relationships that can nurture possibilities for multispecies flourishing in diverse urban futures, the futures that are increasingly recognised as co-produced by nonhuman agents in the context of climate variability and change. This, we argue, is critical for developing climate-adaptive planning tools and narratives for the creation of socially and environmentally just multispecies cities.

Whither Justice? An Analysis of Local Climate Change Responses from South East Queensland, Australia

Climate change is a highly contested policy issue in Australia, generating fierce debate at every level of governance. In this paper we explore a crucial tension in both the policy and the public debate: a seeming lack of attention to social inclusion and broader equity implications. We pay special attention to the municipal scale, where concerns about social difference and democratic participation are often foregrounded in political discourse, using South East Queensland—a recognised climate change ‘hotspot’—as a case study. Mobilising critical discourse analysis techniques, we interrogate three local government climate change response strategies, and place these in the context of transscalar discourse networks which appear to sustain a technocratic, ‘ecological modernisation’ approach to the issue. Finally, we suggest a broad strategy for reimagining this approach to embed a notion of climate justice in our policy thinking about climate change.

Learning from cross-border arrangements to support climate change adaptation in Australia

This paper focuses on learning from existing cross-border governance arrangements with a view to strengthening and improving climate change adaptation within the Australian context. Using an institutional learning framework, the research offers a critical analysis of two Australian cross-border cases: (1) the Murray-Darling Basin, and (2) the Australian Alps. The research findings focus on the issues of geographic (place), administrative (space) and political (territory) fragmentation as key concepts that underpin integrated environmental planning and management in practice. There are significant implications for climate change adaptation in evolving cross-border regions at scale that this paper highlights.

Do We Need a ‘Slow Housing’ Movement?

Abstract This paper critically explores the counter-intuitive case for a “slow housing movement” by drawing on insights from alternatives to the status quo such as the “slow food movement” and the “slow city movement – cittaslow”. The empirical context is the fluctuating national ambitions for a “big” Australia and pressure to provide homes to support the anticipated population growth by 2050. The now all too familiar (neoliberal) reform mantra is the need to get housing developments into the market quicker by reducing bureaucracy and regulatory processes. But is this (as is often portrayed) the only option available? The paper emphasizes the role of theory in creatively challenging and informing the housing policy and practice status quo as a means by which to further more socially just and sustainable urban outcomes. This involves probing the silences in housing research and starting new debates around how this intersects with housing policy reform, progressive theory and democratic housing outcomes more broadly.

Global City Challenges

This volume gathers a forum that integrates the extensive set of disciplinary dimensions to which the interdisciplinary concept of the global city can help to tackle the policy challenges of todays globalising metropolises.