Search

This chapter reviews urban practices related to street food to begin to map different typologies of street food, their relationship with the built environment, and their strategic value as place activators. Research relating to street food has been an increasingly popular topic within the academic literature in the recent decade, mainly focusing on African and Asian contexts, and typically considering food safety but also availability and consumption patterns. Research primarily explores issues of contamination of the food itself and the practices of the vendors handling the food to understand safety practices, rather than the lived experience of the street food as a phenomenon. Street food has become a self-referential event aimed to attract people for commercial purposes; the authenticity of the food offered and the close link between food and locale is threatened by an over simplistic interpretation of food as a placemaking agent.

Evaluations of plan implementation are typically conceived in terms of plan conformance (the degree to which outcomes align with planning intent) or plan performance (the degree to which decision makers apply the plan). In this research, we consider the relationship between performance–conformance by evaluating the implementation of compact activity centre policy in greater Brisbane. We examine two decades of changes to local land use planning regulations using content analysis, quantifications of permitted development intensity, and comparisons of actual land use changes with planned intent, to identify evidence of the use of metropolitan scale activity centre policy. We find that the activity centre policy performed well and was used as intended across the metropolitan area. However, despite strong performance, the policy conformed poorly in terms of achieving the expected outcomes. These findings highlight the importance of understanding plan implementation from both performance and conformance perspectives. While conformance evaluations are essential to connect planning intent to physical outcomes, understanding plan performance is also necessary to explain the results of conformance evaluations and whether conformance successes or failures were due to deficiencies with the plan itself or how the plan was used by key actors charged with its implementation.

Planning students are entering an increasingly competitive professional labour market. To understand their self-perceived 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.

Vertical schools, relatively new to Australia, are responding to increasing student numbers in central suburbs with limited available land. School facilities and spaces for drama, music, exercise, socialising, craft, play and eating are typically located for potential community use. The analysis within this paper focuses on the traces of community connections that can be discovered from visual analysis of plans and occupied buildings. We compare emerging Australian vertical schools with European precedents. How and why are communities using school spaces? What community spaces do students use and what are their adjacencies with school uses? What are the private, privileged and public spaces of vertical schools? Which schools operate as gated communities and how do the more porous examples address the safety of children? We consider northern European examples where vertical schools have had a longer history. Examples include the influential Danish Hellerup School, Ørestad Gymnasium, Sydhavnen School, the Finnish Saunalahti School and the Swedish Barkaby School. This forms part of a larger analysis of vertical schools in Australia and overseas the authors are proposing to undertake.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made many urban policymakers, planners and scholars, all around the globe, rethink conventional, neoliberal growth strategies of cities. The trend of rapid urbanization, particularly around capital cities, has been questioned, and alternative growth models and locations have been the subjects of countless discussions. This is particularly the case for the Australian context: the COVID-19 pandemic heightened the debates in urban circles on post-pandemic urban growth strategies, and boosting the growth of towns and cities across regional Australia is a popular alternative strategy. While some scholars argue that regional Australia poses an invaluable opportunity for post-pandemic growth by ‘taking off the pressure from the capital cities’; others warn us about the risks of growing regional towns and cities without carefully designed national, regional and local planning, design and development strategies. Superimposing planning and development policies meant for metropolitan cities could simply result in transferring the ills of capital cities to regions and exacerbate unsustainable development and heightened socioeconomic inequalities. This opinion piece, by keeping both of these perspectives in mind, explores approaches to regional community and economic development of Australia’s towns and cities, along with identifying sustainable urban growth locations in the post-pandemic era. It also offers new insights that could help re-shape the policy debate on regional growth and development.

Australian planning authorities have struggled to develop more compact cities for decades, yet empirical explanations for this policy challenge are lacking. This is critical to inform future sustainable planning efforts. In response, we correlate 20 years of change in greater Brisbane’s activity centres against factors related to land use regulations, transport accessibility, property characteristics, and socio-economic status. We find activity centre implementation is most strongly associated with property-based factors and that land use regulations have the weakest relationship. Policymakers should therefore pursue alternative strategies that do not rely on planning mechanisms geared primarily towards creating a market for development.

Unexceptionally all metropolitan areas throughout the world are surrounded by peri-urban areas that are neither urban nor rural in the conventional sense. Peri-urban areas are transition spaces, where the changes in different land uses are incessantly occurring. Determining the boundaries of these areas are critical to develop appropriate policies to manage and preserve them. The perpetual transition in peri-urban landscapes makes the boundary demarcation of these areas highly difficult. This paper aims to answer the question of what the most suitable methodological approach to demarcate peri-urban areas is. In order to address this question, the study undertakes a systematic review of the relevant literature. The findings show that a generic method does not exist to demarcate peri-urban areas as characteristics of peri-urban areas are not uniform across the globe. This paper advocates that techniques for peri-urban demarcation should be geographically specific, and in every case the regional and local contexts—e.g., political system, institutional arrangement, societal characteristic, environmental qualities, and economic drivers that underpin the peri-urban development—should be considered. The study provides insights to policymakers in order to determine peri-urban boundaries by tailoring available peri-urban demarcation techniques to their regional and local contexts.

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

This project is grounded in an awareness of inclusive design and a “design for all” mindset, which aims to “create spaces, buildings, services, products and environments that can be accessed, understood and used to the greatest extent possible by all people, regardless of their age, size, culture, ability or disability” (Cushing & Miller, 2019, p. 138). As Jackson explains, the social model of disability purposefully shifts the onus of responsibility, ‘away from the individual (to be cured) to society (to dismantle barriers that construct disability) (Jackson, 2018). It is not the inability to walk that keeps a person from entering a building independently, but inaccessible stairs. It is not having dementia or autism spectrum disorder or intellectual disability that stops people from doing their grocery shopping; it is the poor signage, confusing store layouts, and the lack of quiet, calm sensory-free spaces for respite. It is not being vision impaired that makes navigating busy urban streets challenging; it is the lack of a Braille trail. The social model of disability seeks to change the surroundings, not the person. The findings of this project can provide guidance to the venue managers and event organisers to assist with inclusive design and with adopting a design for all mindset. Why is this approach needed? A people people-centred design approach can help in delivering a more inclusive and better user’s experience, which also makes the venues accessible to everybody so to build stronger, more democratic, and more inclusive community. Meaningful and inclusive urban design can reduce social isolation and its associated health risks (Negami, Mazumder, Reardon, & Ellard, 2018). To date, however, while there is a significant body of literature documenting the impact that the built environment can have on people with physical impairments – and potential interventions and frameworks (Apelt, Apelt, & Cooperative Research Centre for Construction, 2007), (se

Metropolitan planning policy in Australia has focussed on creating more compact cities for the past twenty years. Yet the multi-nodal expression of Australian compact city policies has, to date, proven difficult to implement (Newton and Glackin 2014; Chhetri et al. 2013; Woodcock et al. 2011; Bunker 2014). Much of the existing research examining progress towards the compact city is based on data that is now 10 years old, thereby omitting the significant growth in infill residential development that has occurred more recently in Australian cities. In this presentation, we outline a new method to investigate longitudinal changes in population, land use, and built form in activity centres. We firstly describe the challenges involved in using common data sources and methods, before showing how the use of Google Street View, aerial imagery, and census data can be combined to overcome these challenges and provide a simple and accessible method to track changes indicative of the compact city. Preliminary findings from the application of this method to nominated activity centres in the Greater Brisbane area reveal signs of significant progress in some centres, however overall progress remains mixed. Future research that examines these results in combination with land use policy, transit accessibility, property valuations, and employment changes may highlight important implications for the planning of future compact city development.

In Australia there is a strong risk adverse culture, in part due to the widely acknowledged conservatism of the population. There is an expectation that the different levels of governments minimise chances of conflicts or accidents with top-down regulations; these generally focus on sanitising some specific aspect of everyday lives dealing with personal liability. As such, many Australian urban environments are highly regulated, zoned, and controlled. Also at social level, children are not only segregated in specific facilities where they can be protected from potential dangers of the broader society, but as users of “youth-friendly spaces” they are also divided according to age groups, gender and vocation. Parks and playground are often planned and designed with a specific demographic in mind; facilities for small children are never co-located with the ones for young adults. The latter often are designed for structured activities such as for sports or learning, with limited considerations about how unstructured playful activities might be encouraged for and enjoyed by older children. This chapter reports on four years of public consultation processes undertaken at different level of government and in different contexts within South-East Queensland, one of the fastest growing regions in Australia. Our findings suggest that the ‘playground’ is seen as the realm of the children, who feel unentitled to comment on the broader urban fabric. The chapter reflects on how South-East Queensland cities are designed in a regimented and perhaps fragmented way which tends to exclude or underrepresent certain categories of residents, including children. It then compares the social segregation and zoning of South-East Queensland cities to intergenerational approaches typical of other cultural contexts and draw some recommendations on how to bridge this segregation gap in Australian cities.

Governments are increasingly using network governance arrangements to engage stakeholders in tackling complex water policy issues. Claims that this involves a shift from government to governance, with associated loss of state authority, are challenged by empirical literature. We draw on governmentality theory to explore the practices and power dynamics of water policy networks in six significant longitudinal case studies in Australia, the United States, and France. Though contexts differ, the analysis highlights the dynamic nature of these complex policy arenas, where governance arrangements and objectives are periodically revised in response to changing pressures. Governments clearly retain decision-making authority despite adopting more deliberative, networked approaches, and implementation remains challenging. Findings suggest that the hybrid and multiscalar nature of water policy governance warrants a more sophisticated understanding of the power dynamics and political dimensions of networked governance employed within hierarchical systems.

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.

The futures of regional communities are a matter of worldwide concern. In Australia, given the rapidly changing nature of rural and regional communities, a futuring program was proposed to explore 'community development' scenarios guided by local stakeholder participation. The venue for our futuring research was the regional city of Toowoomba, in Queensland, Australia. Over the past decade, Toowoomba has reacted to significant change in response to local and global effects, such as the resource boom and shifts in agricultural production. As a consequence there are a number of social, economic and environmental impacts whose cumulative effect could threaten the city's future vitality. An inter-disciplinary research team co-developed a Futuring Tool-Box (FTB) incorporating a comprehensive range of acknowledged tools and methods. A futuring workshop was held to identify the futures issues specific to Toowoomba. Participants were professionals, CEOs and NGOs living in the Toowoomba region, identified as actively futures-aware. This paper focuses on their voices and the future scenarios they co-created, and concludes with a suite of follow-up strategies.

Governments are increasingly using network governance arrangements to engage stakeholders in tackling complex water policy issues. Claims that this involves a shift from government to governance, with associated loss of state authority, are challenged by empirical literature. We draw on governmentality theory to explore the practices and power dynamics of water policy networks in six significant longitudinal case studies in Australia, the United States, and France. Though contexts differ, the analysis highlights the dynamic nature of these complex policy arenas, where governance arrangements and objectives are periodically revised in response to changing pressures. Governments clearly retain decision-making authority despite adopting more deliberative, networked approaches, and implementation remains challenging. Findings suggest that the hybrid and multiscalar nature of water policy governance warrants a more sophisticated understanding of the power dynamics and political dimensions of networked governance employed within hierarchical systems.

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of regional planning in sustainable infrastructure system transitions by examining how and if sustainable transitions storylines are reflected in the case of mobility, as a socio-technical system, in two South East Queensland Regional Plans. Design/methodology/approach - The methodology was qualitative, and the paper presents preliminary research findings from a policy discourse analysis of two versions of the South East Queensland Regional Plan to identify key policy storylines in the plans. It applies the multi-level perspective to analyse the case of mobility in south east Queensland as expressed in the South East Queensland Regional Plan, and to identify whether its dominant storylines reflect transition pathways. Findings - The discourse analysis traces key planning storylines and identifies changes in the two iterations of the plans. The multi-level perspective is used to trace transition and dependence pathways and finds that even with an expressed commitment to and awareness of sustainability, climate change and oil vulnerability, the planning response to mobility is generally entrenched in and affirms a regime of car dependence with minor and incremental innovations, as indicated by the mobility storylines reproduced in the plans. However, it is also found that regional planning is a platform for disseminating localised social innovations implying a policy learning role for regional planning. Research limitations/implications - As a preliminary paper, the research approach is intentionally constrained for testing and refinement before applying to the broader policy discourse context in south east Queensland which includes other regional level policies and policy actors and networks. Practical implications - The paper provides insights into how sustainable transitions and planning can better interrelate to address complex problems and complex socio-technical transit

The Kelvin Grove Principle Body Corporate has commissioned this Report. The objective is to gather a better understanding of the permanent and transient population of KGUV as well as to understand which communication strategies could work better to engage and interact with KGUV city dwellers. There is an additional research component of the project that investigates the lived and perceived space of KGUV and builds on previous research by Guaralda, Yigitcanlar, Caldwell and Houghton about knowledge communities, creative suburbs, placemaking and community engagement.

The InstaBooth is a portable demountable interactive installation for situated community engagement. Its aim is to give a voice to communities who can share their thoughts and ideas in an unstructured and playful way that combines digital technology with tangible materials. It is constructed from standard CNC-cut plywood stock and plans for its construction are available for others to download and use. Its modular design accommodates a range of bespoke interactive technologies, both analogue and digital, designed to facilitate the engagement process by providing means to present different materials and offer different ways to collect feedback. The appearance and interactions of the booth are designed to appeal to different demographics and foster an interactive discussion about a range of different topics such as change management, policy development, and urban planning. Lead Design and Fabricator: Anna Svensdotter