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

Skilled workers in Ballarat and Bendigo: why did they choose a regional location and are they likely to stay?


Capital cities like Melbourne continue to attract the majority of State population growth. This can create challenges for attracting skilled workers to, and retaining them in, regional locations. This paper reports on a survey of more than 1200 professional workers in the Victorian regional cities of Bendigo and Ballarat. The survey aimed to better understand...
Conference paper

Roxby Downs: a lost opportunity by urban planning and design


In hegemonic economic theories, base activity, which taps into exogenous capital flows as exports, underpins endogenous activity within urban environments. Historically, urban development in the remote arid and semi-arid interior of Australia has occurred on the back of the exploitation of mineral resources. Major interior towns such as Ballarat, Bendigo, Mt Isa, and Kalgoorlie owe...
Conference paper

Rental vulnerability: a new methodology for measuring and mapping disadvantage in rental housing


This paper presents the outcomes of research undertaken for Tenants Queensland to develop and map a ‘rental vulnerability index’ (RVI) for Queensland. Originally conceived of to help plan the delivery of tenant advice services, the RVI combines various housing system indicators and indicators of disadvantage to produce a composite measure of rental vulnerability.
Conference paper

What constitutes a sustainable urban growth management policy? A Delphi approach to develop alternative policy scenarios


The planning literature, against the backdrop of rapid urbanisation, technological advancement (automated vehicle), and climate change, tells very little about what constitutes a sustainable urban growth management policy. This research aims to address this gap through a two-round of Delphi survey involving 29 experts from six related fields: urban planning, transportation, economic development, environmental planning...
Conference paper

Rational planning reborn? A New Zealand case study


Affordable housing has become a major issue for all Australian and New Zealand cities. A key contributing factor is inadequate land supply. The New Zealand government introduced a National Policy Statement on Urban Development Capacity which seeks to improve housing affordability by increasing land supply. The policy requires the production of various ‘evidences’ that, it...