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Planning students are entering an increasingly competitive professional labour market. To understand their selfperceived employability and identify the employability-enhancing strategies they engage in to improve their graduate employment prospects, this paper analyses survey data collected from 106 undergraduate students at a large Australian university. Three key themes are identified as important for graduate employability from the perspective of planning students: education; personal attributes and assets; and appropriate professional experience. This study finds that many respondents were critical of the extent to which they believed their university studies were positively positioned for the real world of planning and positively positioned them to succeed in the graduate employment market relative to other planning graduates. To address these limitations, respondents emphasised the importance of developing personal and professional networks with peers and engaging in skills-enhancing activities, and revealed an expectation that they may need to engage in unpaid professional work experience. However, notwithstanding these efforts to actively moderate the impact of self-perceived personal skills and experiential deficits on their employability, there was a nascent acknowledgement that despite investing significant effort into developing networks, getting professional experience, and modelling appropriate attitudes and professional traits, they may become highly employable yet still fail to secure graduate employment as a planner due to structural constraints beyond their control.

Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-epb-10.1177_2399808320951583 for When plans are used to no effect: Considering implementation performance of greater Brisbane’s compact activity centre policies by Mark Limb, Carl Grodach, Paul Donehue and Severine Mayere in Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science

Cities, towns, streets, and urban places are comprised of urban features arranged according to an array of planning rules, economic, political, social and community needs. From a macro scale, they are a patchwork of land uses, roads, and infrastructure integrated, in some ways flawlessly, but at a finer scale the very fabric of this intricate patchwork has a profound impact and influences the lives of people on a daily basis. Often, unbeknownst to the user. Urban places can have positive effects, such as boosting individual happiness, when they are comprised of visually pleasing aesthetic qualities (Seresinhe et al., 2019). Or, they can also have negative effects, such as increasing the likelihood of developing mental illnesses (Kelly et al., 2010, van Os et al., 2010). Since the new millennium studies have increasingly investigated the relationship between environmental factors and mental health, well-being and happiness (Seresinhe et al., 2019, Bratman et al., 2015, Hartig et al., 2003, MacKerron and Mourato, 2013, Van den berg et al., 2010, White et al., 2013, Okulicz-Kozaryn and Mazelis, 2016, Abdullah and Zulkifli, 2016). Some of these studies have found that urban dwelling (Srivastava, 2009, Gruebner et al., 2017) and the actual physical fabric of the environment (urban design) impacts upon mental health (Golembiewski, 2017, Golembiewski, 2016, Gharib et al., 2017). Happiness can also be adversely impacted by urban environments (Pringle and Guaralda, 2018, Samavati and Ranjbar, 2017, Abdullah and Zulkifli, 2016). It is important to understand how these notions of happiness and well-being are impacted by environmental factors, such as the designed environment because they are components of mental health (World Health Organization, 2004, Galderisi et al., 2015, Lamers et al., 2011). The designed environment is where a vast majority of the population, currently, and will continue to live. The rapid increase in urban population is amongst the most important global health issues this century (Srivastava, 2009). Therefore, maintaining public health is increasingly important for developed nations, that are experiencing high rates of population growth within urban areas, because they are exposing more people to urban dwelling, which can adversely impact upon the various components of mental health. Thus, investigating ways in which planning and design could mitigate or reduce such impacts is essential. Whilst that is an aim for future research, within this article, the authors explore an overview of the literature on mental health and environmental factors, the concepts of happiness and well-being, in relation to the environment, including the theories which are referenced in literature from a variety of medical, planning, architecture and design fields, to arrive at an understanding of how these concepts may be applied to the urban context. This is proposed through the development of the theoretical and conceptual framework which is formed as a result of reviewing a range of literature and theories that discuss mental health, happiness, well-being, and the physical environment (both natural and urban). The aim of this paper is to present the theoretical and conceptual framework used to guide the research process, so that reliable, empirical evidence can be developed in subsequent studies.

Planning employment in Australia is undergoing significant change. The importance of planning as a profession is increasing, the number of planners employed in Australia more than doubled between 2000 and 2013, and vacant planning positions are filled with relative ease and attract large numbers of qualified applicants. While this is good news for planning as a profession, it means that employment prospects for graduating planners have weakened in recent years as the labor market has tightened. This chapter explores the changing planning education and employment landscape and what it means to “be” a planner and to “do” planning work in Australia.

Major South-East Asian city-regions have experienced considerable physical, economic and social transformations during the past three decades. The rapid pace of globalisation and economic restructuring has resulted in these city-regions receiving the full impact of urbanisation pressures. In an attempt to ease these pressures, city-regions such as Bangkok, Seoul, Tokyo, Taipei, Hong Kong, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur have advocate growth management approaches giving particular interest to urban sustainability. These approaches promote efforts to achieve the triple bottom line sustainability by balancing economic and social development, and environmental protection, and putting more emphasis on compact and optimum development of urban forms. This paper evaluates the case of two South-East Asian city-regions, Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong, and assesses their experiences in managing their urban forms whilst promoting sustainable patterns of urban development. The findings show that sustainable urban development initiatives employing a top down approach has yielded encouraging results in these case study city-regions. However the need for a more concerted effort towards the overall sustainability agenda still remains vital.