Search

Over the past two decades, research has emphasised a shift from city government to urban governance. Such a shift brings about its very own challenges, namely governance gaps, uncertain configurations in governance and a limited capacity to act. In this paper, we argue that the concurrent rise of strategy documents in city administration addresses these challenges. Our central claim is that strategy documents can be understood as a distinct discursive device through which local governments enact aspired governance configurations. We illustrate our argument empirically using two prominent examples that, while showing similar features and characteristics, are anchored in different administrative traditions and institutional frameworks: the city administrations of Sydney, Australia, and Vienna, Austria. The contribution of the paper is to show how strategy documents enact governance configurations along four core dimensions: the setting in space and time, the definition of the public, the framing of the res publica and legitimacy issues. Moreover, our comparative analysis of Sydney and Vienna gives evidence of differences in governance configurations enacted through strategy documents. [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]

Questions of property rights are central to the organisation of urban space yet remain weakly theorised in the context of sexuality. Tracing battles over spaces of commercial sex in inner Sydney, this paper argues that particular claims to privacy and property underpin exclusionary actions restricting the boundaries of sexual citizenship. However, the paper also notes the potential for the emergence of ‘sexual commons’ where claims to an enhanced notion of sexual citizenship can be made. The paper concludes that property rights consist of overlapping and complex claims to space in which questions of sexuality and the sanctity of family life are often brought to the fore. In arguing this, the paper demonstrates that property rights constitute a key mechanism in the management and regulation of the (nocturnal) city. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Resilience is an increasingly important urban policy discourse that has been taken up at a rapid pace. Yet there is an apparent gap between the advocacy of social-ecological resilience in scientific literature and its take-up in policy discourse on the one hand, and the demonstrated capacity to govern for resilience in practice on the other. This paper explores this gap by developing a performative account of how social-ecological resilience is dealt with in practice through case study analysis of how protection of biodiversity was negotiated in response to Melbourne’s recent metropolitan planning initiative. It is suggested that a performative account expands the possible opportunities for governing for social-ecological resilience beyond the concept’s use as a metaphor, measurement, cognitive frame or programmatic statement of adaptive management/co-management and has the potential to emerge through what has been called the everyday ‘mangle of practice’ in response to social-ecological feedback inherent to policy processes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Across the westernised world, concerns about climate change and resource scarcity point to the need for widescale changes in housing renovation. Through the exploration of social interactions of eco-renovation businesses on the ground, the paper presents evidence for the emergence of an ‘eco-renovation niche’ consisting of both traditional and new types of housing industry businesses. However, this niche is not clearly bounded, stable or homogenous, and so generalised ideas about how it may grow in scale or size are problematic. Niche participants typically wish to stay small. Also, complex household relations are involved, and hands-on experimentation is a feature of the industry participants. For policy purposes, this suggests a need to focus on strategic intermediaries in industry and professional associations, licensing bodies and regulators, who could in turn support programmes that more adequately recognise the modus operandi of the industry, households and civil society organisations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Managing urban growth is inherently contentious. Government policies seek to facilitate and spatially contain growth, while balancing public and private interests. The need for climate adaptation strategies in the urban context is recognised but arguably poorly institutionalised in growth management policies or in urban governance more broadly. This paper considers how debates around urban adaptation and growth management are structured in the discourses of local government, private developers and other actors. A discourse analysis of written submissions and media releases from four urban policy debates in Queensland, Australia, is presented. The analysis highlights the discursive strategies employed by different actors and the way their arguments have been consolidated in the practices of urban policy-making. The analysis suggests a divergence of growth and adaptation storylines, contributing to maintaining the gap between these policy agendas. Progress may be made, however, in the pragmatic discourses of actual policy implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Housing policy has declined in importance relative to other areas of state policy-making in many Western countries. This paper seeks to understand why this has happened at a time when there has been a decline in the level of housing affordability and supply of affordable rental housing. It presents an argument that a way of understanding this policy retrenchment, through a comparative analysis of Australian and Canadian housing systems, is to consider the way in which housing policy problems are defined, how policy-making capacity is institutionalised in state agencies and the form and extent of civil society mobilisation on housing issues. It is not sufficient to ascribe the declining salience of housing policy to the ascendancy of neo-liberal ideas in policy-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]