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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

Listening to and learning from some of Melbourne’s younger planning practitioners


This paper investigates the professional experiences of eleven young Melbourne planners, interviewed in late 2016. They were encouraged to speak as they wished about themselves, their careers to date and planning more generally. Initial interpretation is based on themes they raised. Subsequent use of neoliberalism as a conceptual analytical tool promises to be equally revealing.
Conference paper

From rationalism to critical pragmatism: revisiting Arnstein’s ladder of public participation in co-creation and consultation


Governments and cities around Australia and indeed the world have recognised the need to shift toward more inclusive decision making processes, particularly when dealing with issues of the public realm. Despite some significant efforts in this space, including in the creation of urban living laboratories, there is a continued scepticism of consultative processes, and little...
Conference paper

Urban campgrounds as service hubs for the marginally-housed


Although the service hub concept is most commonly associated with deprived areas of the North American inner city, similar clusters of facilities can also be found in other contexts. In this paper, we conceptualise urban campgrounds in Auckland, New Zealand as small-scale service hubs for long-term residents as well as more transient recreational campers, and...
Conference paper

Disrupting the status quo: local government efforts to implement ESD through land-use planning


In the late 1990s a group of Victorian local government councils addressed a sustainability void in the building codes and planning regulations by developing capacity to implement Ecologically Sustainable Development (ESD) via the planning system. What began as a collection of largely independent initiatives progressed to an integrated suite of mechanisms to embed ESD in...