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

Hidden landscapes: Aboriginal landscapes in contemporary planning and design activities in Melbourne


Throughout the colonial settlement of Australia, Aboriginal people were subject to processes of colonial dispossession that have had a profound effect on their communities, language and culture, and in many places their over-arching tangible and intangible Country.
Conference paper

Rethinking planning policy in an age of limits


Land is a finite resource with highly variable quality. Its rate of creation is negligible on the human scale. Land is also not a commodity as are other tradeable goods. The supply of high quality land, amenity-rich land with high-quality supplies of natural resources, such as clean water, is severely limited. Land is critical to...
Conference paper

Why strategic planning matters: a case study approach to examining industrial land use planning and development in Melbourne


The Victorian economy is transitioning from an industrial economy to one based on knowledge and services. This might suggest that there is no need to plan for industrial uses. However using the measure of land consumption, industrial users across metropolitan Melbourne consume nearly 300 hectares of land per year (which is equivalent to one and...
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)...