The Challenge of Change

Australian Cities and Urban Planning in the New Millennium

Dados Bibliográficos

ID5877122
AutoresClive Forster (Flinders University, autor correspondente)
Ano2006
Volume44
Fascículo2
Páginas173-182
Data de publicação2006-06-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoGeographical Research (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 1745-5863 • E-ISSN: 1745-5871
EditoraWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/j.1745-5871.2006.00374.x
OpenAlexW2120602010
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas77
Referências citadas48

This paper reviews recent research on the changing spatial structure of Australia's major cities from the early 1990s, concentrating on (a) the location of employment and journey to work patterns, (b) the changing nature of housing, and (c) patterns of residential differentiation and disadvantage. The paper argues that the 1990s was a watershed decade during which some taken-for-granted aspects of Australian urban character experienced significant change. It then examines the latest generation of strategic planning documents for these major metropolitan areas, all published between 2002 and 2005, and argues that there is a mismatch between the strategies' consensus view of desirable future urban structure, based on containment, consolidation and centres, and the complex realities of the evolving urban structures. In particular, the current metropolitan strategies do not come to terms with the dispersed, suburbanised nature of much economic activity and employment and the environmental and social issues that flow from that, and they are unconvincing in their approaches to the emerging issues of housing affordability and new, finer-grained patterns of suburban inequality and disadvantage. Overall, the paper contends that current metropolitan planning strategies suggest an inflexible, over-neat vision for the future that is at odds with the picture of increasing geographical complexity that emerges from recent research on the changing internal structure of our major cities

Civil engineering · Disadvantage · Economic geography · Economic growth · Economics · Environmental planning · Geography · Inequality · Metropolitan area · Odds · Political science · Regional science · Urban planning · Engineering · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Migration, Aging, and Tourism Studies · Rural development and sustainability