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The spatial concentration of recently arrived immigrants in gateway cities and suburbs is usually seen as undesirable by urban academics and policy makers. This paper presents a counter-argument that the concentration of disadvantaged new immigrants in the form of humanitarian refugees and their families can, and does, result in positive outcomes for those groups. In part, our argument is based on making a distinction between people-based disadvantage and place-based disadvantage. The paper examines the changing nature of place-based ‘advantage’ for immigrants in Australian gateway cities through a focus on two metropolitan locations, Auburn (Sydney) and Springvale (Melbourne), known as popular destination suburbs for recent immigrants. While these two cases validate the benefits of such gateway suburbs, they also demonstrate that the capacity of recent migrants to emulate concentrated settlement patterns is now significantly undermined by changes in the labour market and affordability problems in the housing market. The paper concludes with a discussion on the possible future of gateway suburbs and the implications of this shift for the wellbeing of particular groups of disadvantaged residents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cities all over the world have activated policy support for urban consolidation in recent decades. Rationales for urban consolidation focus on its perceived ability to achieve sustainability goals, including decreased automobile dependence, increased social cohesion and greater walkability. Despite this, there are few international examples of urban consolidation policy implementation that has achieved its stated aims. This paper explores the nature and character of perceptions of urban consolidation held by urban planners, developers, architects and local politicians. The perspectives held by these ‘city shapers’ are integral to urban consolidation debates and delivery, yet the nature and character of their specific views are underexplored in urban studies literature. This paper combines the theoretical lens of Social Representations Theory with the methodological approach of Q-methodology to understand the common sense understandings of urban consolidation held by city shapers in Brisbane, Australia. It identifies, synthesises and critically discusses the social representations employed by city shapers to understand, promote and communicate about urban consolidation. Findings indicate that urban consolidation debates and justifications diverge significantly from stated policy intentions and are based on differing views on ‘good’ urban form, the role of planning and community consultation and the value of higher density housing. We conclude that there is utility and value in identifying how urban consolidation strategies are influenced by the shared beliefs, myths and perceptions held by city shapers. Understanding these narratives and their influence is fundamental to understanding the power-laden manipulation of policy definitions and development outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The argument of this paper is that social ties beyond the boardroom matter. At the structural level, social ties from non-profit foundations, cultural organizations, university boards, policy planning organizations, and private social clubs add unique ties to those established by interlocking directorates. In addition, the multiple configurations of these social affiliations increase the centrality and reduce the social distance among the corporate directors. Although visualizations of these social networks underscore the changing roles these extra-corporate ties play in uniting corporate directors, they cannot precisely capture the unique effects of ties created by social affiliations outside the boardroom. Utilizing the concepts of structural redundancy and multiplicity, the paper describes the unique contribution each set of ties makes in constructing the social mosaic of corporate America during the second half of the 20th century. The results indicate a dramatic reduction in the role private clubs play in supplementing corporate ties, and an equally significant rise in the importance of social ties generated by policy planning organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australia has long had a deeply speculative housing property market. Arguably this has been accentuated in recent years as successive governments have privileged private-sector investment in housing property as the key mechanism for delivering housing and a concurrent winding back of direct government support for housing. This has occurred through a period in which urban renewal and flexible planning regulation have become the key focus of urban planning policy to deliver on compact city ambitions in the name of sustainability. There has been a tendency to read many of the higher density housing outcomes as a relatively homogenous component of the housing market. There has been a comparative lack of critical engagement with differentiated spatial, physical and socio-economic outcomes within the higher density housing market. This paper will explore the interactions between flexible design-based planning policies, the local property market and physical outcomes. Different parts of the property development industry produced distinctive social and physical outcomes within the same regulatory space. Each response was infused with similar politics of exclusion and privilege in which capacity to pay regulated both access and standard of housing accessible, opening new socio-economic divisions within Australia’s housing landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the housing sub-market literature has focused on establishing methods that allow the partitioning of data into distinct market segments. This paper seeks to move the focus on to the question of how best to model sub-markets once they have been identified. It focuses on evaluating the effectiveness of multilevel models as a technique for modelling sub-markets. The paper uses data on housing transactions from Perth, Western Australia, to develop and compare three competing sub-market modelling strategies. Model 1 consists of a city-wide ‘benchmark’; model 2 provides a series of sub-market-specific hedonic estimates (this is the ‘industry standard’) and models 3 and 4 provide two variants on the multilevel model (differentiated by variation in the degrees of spatial granularity embedded in the model structure). The results suggest that the more granular multilevel specification enhances empirical performance and reduces the incidence of non-random spatial errors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The interdisciplinary literature demonstrates that the built form constitutes home when people have capacity to exercise control. Consistent with normative ideas of autonomy and freedom, home is a place where we are free from surveillance; at home we expect to live of our own volition. Freedom and autonomy in the home are contrasted with the public realm, and the value of privacy in the home is central for self-determination and identity construction. In line with such reasoning, surveillance in housing is theorised, and indeed widely assumed, as antithetical to home. This paper presents empirical material to examine how surveillance in supportive housing is understood by those with firsthand experiences as tenants and service providers. The research draws on in-depth interviews with tenants (n = 28) and service providers (n = 22) in single-site supportive housing in Australia. The empirical material demonstrates how surveillance is experienced as intrusive, but that surveillance also promotes the conditions for people to feel safe and to exert control over their lives. The research shows how tenants actively used surveillance as a desirable resource, including using surveillance to restrict unwanted visitors. Surveillance achieved functions, particularly safety and security, that individuals were unable to experience as homeless or achieve in housing through informal controls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely recognised that the 21st century is seeing a geopolitical shift in global power relations towards Asia, particularly China. This has led Australia to officially embrace Asia as its regional home. But the neoliberal economic logic underpinning this embrace leads to a narrowly transactional conception of Australia’s relationship to Asia, governed by an opportunity/threat dichotomy. By contrast, this article describes Sydney’s Chinatown today as an increasingly hybrid, porous and transnational space of uneven and mixed-up, embodied Asian-Australianness. Juxtaposing the dynamic on-the-ground reality of this contemporary Chinatown with government discourse on Australia’s relationship to Asia, as exemplified by the 2012 White Paper Australia in the Asian Century, illuminates that Australia is not yet at home in Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the degree of commonalities present in the cyclical behaviour of the eight largest metropolitan housing markets in Australia. Using two techniques originally proposed in the business cycle literature we firstly consider the degree of synchronisation present and secondly decompose the series into their permanent and cyclical components. Both empirical approaches reveal similar results. Sydney and Melbourne are closely related to each other and are relatively segmented from the smaller metropolitan areas. In contrast, there is substantial evidence of commonalities in the cyclical behaviour of the remaining cities, especially those on the eastern and southern coasts of Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Mobility is often overlooked in debates about spatial disadvantage, which tend to focus on place. In this paper, the focus is on residential mobility and the ways in which it derives from, and contributes to, processes of social disadvantage. Building on David Clapham’s concept of ‘housing pathways’, mobility-based disadvantage is analysed with a focus on questions of housing quality, control over residential moves and accumulation of economic, social and cultural capital through such moves. These themes are considered in an empirical study of the housing pathways of sixty low-income households in Australia, through which four typical patterns are identified as ‘mobilities of disadvantage’: hectic private rental pathways; pathways of homelessness; pathways out of homeownership; and, repeat moves in and out of social housing. These pathways represent one neglected aspect of the ‘unfair structure’ of the Australian city, as a network of pathways rather than a mosaic of places. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

New Urbanism has been appropriated in an Australia context and deployed in the marketing of a peri-urban housing development on the far north coast of New South Wales. Mimicking the ‘neo-traditional’ focus in the US, developers offered a resurrection of quintessential Australian beach house architecture ‘lost’ through the suburbanisation of the coast. Symbolic references to a more ‘authentic’ past, represented in the built form, were contemporised using tropes of environmental sustainability and integration with nature. The image of beach housing and a green lifestyle have successfully attracted buyers and housing price premiums. This paper demonstrates that the cultural capitals of ‘heritage’ and ‘greenness’ are valued as distinction to the suburban norm. It is concluded that, while this development appeals to the notion of an enlightened consumer, this new model of development ultimately offers little to challenge issues of environmental degradation associated with other versions of (sub)urban sprawl. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Housing-related financial stress or housing stress is usually measured on the basis of income and direct housing costs such as mortgage repayments and rents. One cost that is not included in calculations of housing stress, but which may be important, is the difference made by transport costs. This paper shows how a measure of housing stress that incorporates transport costs can give a different picture of housing stress from a measure that ignores transport costs. The result shows that, in capital cities, bringing transport costs into a housing stress measure particularly affects households with children. It is also found that the impact of transport costs is even greater outside capital cities and that access to public transport may play a role in determining the spatial pattern of housing stress and hence the impact of transport cost on housing stress. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Housing tenure sits at the heart of much academic and policy literature across many post-industrial countries, and, while debate is often centred on promoting tenure choice, surprisingly little is known of the underlying ways that the tenure chosen can affect health. While population characteristics tend to vary between tenure types, this largely reflects the forces of broader social and economic selection into those tenures. This paper examines what identifiable effect tenure has upon the mental health of individuals, over and above the characteristics of selection. The analysis is based upon 40 828 responses of 10 245 individuals in the Australian working-age population who participated in the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia study between 2001 and 2007. It is found that, while mental health varies significantly between tenure types, once tenure population differences are accounted for there is little evidence of an intrinsic relationship between tenure and mental health. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]