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This paper examines the question what kind of ethics prevail in contemporary urban transport planning and what potential does an ethics of care hold for practice? Researchers have given ample attention to the need for better governance and coordination, and despite acknowledging the need to reduce reliance on private cars, little has been said by them about what ethics can or should guide planning to bring about such frameworks for caring. This area of research merits urgent work given our collective need to address the socio‐spatial, climate, and health impacts of car dependence. Taking as our focus transport planning in Victoria, Australia, we consider how an ethics of care could open new ways to redress how transport planning has perpetuated injustices in metropolitan Melbourne. We draw on secondary research to consider both the conditions that cultivated the current transport planning landscape and pathways for possible change that lie ahead. The research highlights opportunities to consider care as an ethical framework for transport planning that could amplify justice and equity claims in urban transport planning for Australian cities and that has salience for other cities elsewhere.

The lack of dystrophin in Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) results in membrane fragility resulting in contraction-induced muscle damage and subsequent inflammation. The impact of inflammation is profound, resulting in fibrosis of skeletal muscle, the diaphragm and heart, which contributes to muscle weakness, reduced quality of life and premature death. To date, the innate immune system has been the major focus in individuals with DMD, and our understanding of the adaptive immune system, specifically T cells, is limited. Targeting the immune system has been the focus of multiple clinical trials for DMD and is considered a vital step in the development of better treatments. However, we must first have a complete picture of the involvement of the immune systems in dystrophic muscle disease to better understand how inflammation influences disease progression and severity. This review focuses on the role of T cells in DMD, highlighting the importance of looking beyond skeletal muscle when considering how the loss of dystrophin impacts disease progression. Finally, we propose that targeting T cells is a potential novel therapeutic in the treatment of DMD.

This study aims to investigate intra-rater reliability and construct validity of the Facioscapulohumeral Dystrophy Composite Outcome Measure (FSHD-COM), in childhood FSHD. Participants included eighteen children with FSHD, and matched healthy controls. Reliability data were collected from 15 participants with FSHD over two testing sessions. Validity data were collected from all participants. Participants with FSHD completed; the FSHD-COM (and modified pediatric version), Motor Function Measure-32 (MFM-32), FSHD Severity Scales, Performance of the Upper Limb 2.0, Pediatric Quality of Life™ Neuromuscular Module and pediatric FSHD Health-Index Questionnaire. Both versions of the FSHD-COM showed excellent intra-rater reliability (ICC1,2 > 0.99, lower 95%CI > 0.98) with a Minimal Detectable Change (MDC95%) of ≤14.5%. The FSHD-COM had robust and widespread correlations with other related outcome measures. The FSHD-COM versions and 6 min walk test effectively discriminated between children with and without FSHD; the MFM-32 and 10 m walk/run test did not. Ceiling effects were not observed on either version of the FSHD-COM. Reliability and validity findings in this childhood FSHD study concord with estimates in adults. Both versions of the FSHD-COM were effective in discriminating disease in children with mild FSHD symptoms. The FSHD-COM has the potential to be a useful measure of function across the life span.

Studies of justice and equity in mobility rarely produce explicit conceptual or practical insights into an ethics of transport and its planning. Discussions focused on equitable outcomes and just process retreat from engaging critically with normative ethical aspirations among practitioners and academics. Thus, we ask, what ought an ethics of transport planning look like? In responding to this question, we focus on Australia, introduced by a brief historical take on socio-political changes over the last century, and the ethical questions these changes raise for scholars of contemporary transport planning. Australian cities, being almost entirely developed after the industrial revolution, benefited from innovations in mass transit that created dispersed urban forms planned and regulated by powerful centralised statutory authorities. Privatisation, government retrenchment and the increasing reliance upon private sector actors have produced modes of governance that are exclusive, managerial and largely shielded from public scrutiny, further entrenching car-based suburbanisation and under-funded, fragmented and privatised transit networks. Our aim is critically to engage with ethical questions for contemporary transport planning generated by worsening conditions of transport disadvantage, rapidly growing cities, high levels of car-dependency and increasingly privatised planning and delivery of infrastructure and services within a largely bipartisan neoliberal political consensus. Within this frame, there is a growing disconnect: evidence from national and international experience and research sits increasingly in tension with the kinds of transport planning and infrastructure projects favoured by Australian governments. In this paper we assert that this tension presents a complex ethical conundrum for transport scholars, and we consider the possibilities and potentials for opening arenas for research, practice and politics in transport planning.

Following World War II, Australia was confronted by a severe shortage of dwellings. In 1944, the Commonwealth Housing Commission Report estimated that Australia needed 750,000 new homes within a decade in order to overcome both the existing deficit and anticipated demand. Initial plans intended that half this requirement would be supplied as public housing for low-income families, but this tenure contributed only one sixth of completions by 1950. With significant barriers to obtaining housing through private treaty, large numbers of families were facing the long-term prospect of inadequate lodging. In this space of need, the construction of small temporary dwellings as a first step on the route to an affordable home proved one feasible strategy. This phenomenon has been neglected both theoretically and empirically. Through a case study of activity at Sydney’s suburban fringe, this paper explores how many home-seekers resorted to what historian Stuart Macintyre has described as ‘an alternative solution’, and acquired an un-serviced residential lot on which to construct an interim shelter. Drawing mainly on archival research, the occupational status of those families that relied on this housing route is surveyed and the financial arrangements which enabled the purchase of land and building materials examined. The paper concludes by suggesting that this method of obtaining a home not only helped ease the post-war housing crisis but enabled self-provisioning in housing to a group which historically had been dependent on others.

This paper examines how housing figured in the development of classical liberal governmentality over the nineteenth century. Liberal reformers in Britain and the Australian colonies formulated ‘the housing question’ in terms of the physical and moral improvement of urban workers and the poor. This was a problem beyond the powers of the traditional landlord-tenant legal relationship and disciplinary houses of the poor; instead, reformers proposed to remake housing – and thereby the conduct of poor and working subjects – through sanitary dwellings that preserved the integrity of the household, and through close supervision and moral instruction for the poor, including through the tenancy relationship. It would take a different, ‘social liberal’ conceptualisation of government and housing to produce the first social housing systems that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, but the problems and imperfect solutions of the earlier reforms helped to shape them.

Over the past two decades, Australian planning policies have supported largely unregulated land speculation and gentrification in relatively well served inner and middle suburbs, leading to displacement of low and moderate income households and growing spatial inequalities. The current Victorian state government signalled a new direction by ‘refreshing’ the third metropolitan strategy in as many decades, Plan Melbourne (2014/2017), with an increased emphasis on ‘diverse housing close to jobs, transport and services. It also established a new independent infrastructure advisory body that defined social housing as an infrastructure priority, and developed a ‘whole of government’ affordable housing strategy. Through a content analysis of Plan Melbourne, along with the two associated recent strategies, this paper asks whether they provide sufficient regulatory, governance and finance mechanisms to address and potentially reverse the trend towards greater social polarisation. We conclude that absence of a coherent vision, strong evidence base, coordinated partnership mechanisms, and ambitious targets combine to make progress towards more just intensification unlikely.

In order to explore the relationships between graffiti and urban character, it is worth revisiting briefly the debates over graffiti’s status as vandalismversus-art. Here, it is worth noting that vandalism and art are commonly defined as opposites (destruction versus creation), yet both can also be seen as different forms of transgression. While vandalism transgresses the law, art transgresses normal ways of seeing the world. With authorised public art serving instrumental roles such as place branding, stimulating consumption or celebrating history, graffiti is often the most transgressive of public arts. The criminality of graffiti is based on a perception of violated property rights and of damage to neighbourhood image or place identity. Yet neither the ownership of blank urban walls nor questions of place identity are stable concepts. The question of vandalism-versus-art calls for an interrogation of conceptions and experiences of place.

The imperative to transform car-dependent cities for a low-carbon future requires that we engage with the challenge of increasing densities along existing road-based transit corridors - within the constraints of existing morphologies. Such corridors are often lined with small lots that are valued for their functional mix and urban character. This paper explores the degree to which small and narrow lots constrain urban intensification through a study of tram corridors in Melbourne. We examine the impact of site area, shape and access conditions as constraints on re-development and increased density. We find that small and narrow lots have not prevented intensification that is substantial in its accumulated effect and contributes more to urban character than large lot re-development. The paper discusses the relations of urban morphology to questions of car-dependency, development capacity and resident resistance.

Everyday urban life involves multiple choices of transport mode, route path and time budgets as individuals seek to move between places and projects in various parts of any city. In this chapter we map the time/space zones of accessibility (isochrones) as a means to understand the ways we make choices between modes - a space/time phenomenology of everyday mobility. Harvesting data from Google Maps and other online sources, we map isochrones for four primary transport modes - car, public transport, walking and cycling - and the inevitable mix between them. We seek to map the morphological and infrastructural conditions under which people may choose public transport and active modes of walking and cycling over the private car. This is also a form of design research in that we test the ways in which designed infrastructural change can transform the accessibility of the city. Our case studies are in the suburbs of Melbourne under conditions of high car-dependency and low public transport provision.

Imperatives to develop more walkable, transit-oriented and low-carbon cities have accentuated the need to understand the performance and possible transformation of urban access networks. Within a framework of complex adaptive systems and assemblage thinking we develop isochrone mapping of urban transport access in four transport modes: walking, cycling, public transport and cars. These isochrones can be used to compare the range and area of urban access for each of these modes, over different time limits and for different times of day. Such mapping gears urban morphology to the phenomenology of urban transport and enables us to better understand mode choice. Through design research we can also test a range of possible design scenarios for infrastructure investment and show their impact on the isochrone maps. We conclude with a focus on the relations between car and public transport isochrones as a means of better understanding car-dependency and what we call the ‘Car/PT assemblage’.

Debates over definitions of urban graffiti as either 'street art' or 'vandalism' tend to focus on either contributions to the field of artistic practice or violations of a legal code. This paper explores the place of graffiti as an urban spatial practice-why is graffiti where it is and what is its role in the constructions and experiences of place? Through interviews and mapping in inner-city Melbourne, the paper explores the ways that potential for different types of graffiti is mediated by the micro-morphology of the city and becomes embodied into the urban habitus and field of symbolic capital. From a framework of Deleuzian assemblage theory graffiti negotiates ambiguous territories between public/private, visible/invisible, street/laneway and art/advertising. Graffiti is produced from intersecting and often conflicting desires to create or protect urban character and place identity. It is concluded that desires to write and to erase graffiti are productive urban forces, while desires to promote or protect it are problematic. © 2012 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.

During the 1990s, urban planning in Melbourne changed from prescriptive regulation to a place-based performance framework with a focus on existing or desired ‘urban character’. This paper is a case study of a contentious urban project in the inner-Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy: a highly valued place characterised as an irregular and transgressive mix of differences: between building types, functions, forms, heights and people. Contrasting conceptions, experiences and constructions of ‘character’ are explored from the viewpoints of residents, architect/developer and the state. To what degree does the regulation of ‘character’ open or close the city to creative innovation? Can it become camouflage for creative destruction? How to regulate for irregularity? The paper concludes with a discussion of theories of place (Massey vs Heidegger) and the prospects of concepts such as habitus (Bourdieu) and assemblage (Deleuze) for the interpretation of a progressive sense of place.