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State processes of land dispossession rely on multiple modes of power such as domination, legitimisation, pacification, and deceit to achieve their aims. This article analyses how governments in Australia have drawn on these varied forms to redevelop inner city areas in Sydney which are important to Indigenous communities. It analyses three redevelopment practices that targeted the suburbs of Redfern and Waterloo between 2005 and 2019. First, domineering planning structures used to marginalise Indigenous housing in Redfern. Second, racist tropes that have worked to legitimise this authoritarian approach and the resulting dispossession. Third, community consultations, that attempted to placate residents impacted by redevelopment, with culturally inclusive participation, but that maintained a deceitful silence on the question of colonisation. The article shows how authoritarian state planning, racialised legitimisation, and colonial pacification and deceit wielded in Redfern and Waterloo, are directly inherited from and/or reproduce historic colonial nation and city building agendas. On this basis, the article claims that settler colonialism can be understood as a self-perpetuating process, where practices of dispossession, developed at a given time, can set precedent for and be reworked into later programmes of land dispossession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Clear-cut definitions of strategic spatial planning are rather exceptional. Therefore in this paper I use building blocks from literature (planning and business) and my experience in practice to construct a workable normative definition of the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of strategic spatial planning. Five main characteristics (selective, relational annex inclusive, integrative, visioning, and action orientated) that constitute the hard core of the ‘strategic’ in the normative view are confronted, in a first broad scan, with nine so-called strategic plans from different planning traditions in Europe (Italy, France, Spain, the Czech Republic, Belgium, and the Netherlands) and in Australia (Perth). The confrontation highlights some hesitant shifts towards the normative view but also makes it clear that there is still a long way to go. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]