Conference

The State of Australian Cities (SOAC) national conferences have been held biennially since 2003 to support interdisciplinary policy-related urban research. SOAC 2017 was jointly hosted in Adelaide by the University of South Australia, the University of Adelaide and Flinders University.

Refereed papers at SOAC 2017 were organized across the seven well-established themes of Economy, Environment, Governance, Structure, Movement and Infrastructure, Housing and Social, and Health. There were also three significant plenary panel sessions on Housing Affordability, Urban Resilience and the continuing challenge of achieving more productive relationships between academic researchers and urban policymakers. 

Papers from all past and subsequent SOAC conferences can be found at the State of Australian Cities Conferences Collection on APO.

Conference paper

The evolution of design excellence policy in the planning of central Sydney 2000-2016


We provide here an overview of the operation and outcomes of the competitive design policy to date within the central business district. While stopping short of a comprehensive evaluation, the tracking though of the policy as it has evolved in practice identifies two key operational phases of the policy reflecting a mix of market, political...
Conference paper

A citizen science approach to obtain quantitative measurements of urban agriculture inputs and outputs in Melbourne


There are many advocates and critics of urban agriculture’s role in a sustainable food system but little quantitative data, potentially due the difficulties in collecting it. Urban food production is an example of a distributed system intrinsically linked to urban farmers and urban lifestyles and therefore cannot be recreated in a lab. Citizen science (CS)...
Conference paper

Family housing opportunity restructuring in Australian cities and regions (1981 - 2016)


Housing is fundamentally important to family wellbeing. Secure, affordable housing assists family members to care for one another through life events and transitions, promotes healthy child development and enables engagement in social and economic spheres beyond and within the home. Yet, while an emerging body of research links housing experience to family wellbeing, what remains...
Conference paper

Full-stack engagement: vertical integration and process-precursors that promote bottom-up urban transformation


Cities are comprised of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of small parcels of individually owned land. The fractured nature of these tenures, combined with the network of administrative and infrastructural bodies governing them, makes any form of significant and coordinated planning change incredibly complicated, if not untenable. This plurality, of both ownership and regulation...
Conference paper

Planning objection governance in Melbourne's local governments: does it create public value?


Objecting to a planning application is one of the most visible and direct methods for the public to participate in the shaping of their urban environment. Unlike many planning systems around the world, Victoria includes rights for third-parties to lodge a submission in favour or against a proposal. This democratic principle is one at the...