Do Australian cities share a unifying essence that permits us to speak of them collectively as a distinctive constellation within the global urban galaxy? How are Australian cities both similar to each other and different to cities elsewhere? What might it mean to consider and respond to such questions? How might Australian urban scholarship be informed by a nuanced appreciation of Australian cities as having a distinctive character? How can Australian cities speak to an international scholarly audience and what should they say? These rather simple and general questions motivate the present paper. We seek to provoke debate both at SOAC and beyond by querying the status of ‘The Australian City’, accompanied by the offer of some preliminary insights into the nature, character and state of ‘Australian Cities’ as a prospective definite – whether absolute or relative – category within a global array of territorially and nationally defined city assemblies. In doing so we hope also to engage with important questions about the status of comparative urban analysis in relation to the position of ‘the Australian city’ within an international context.

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The State of Australian Cities (SOAC) national conferences have been held biennially since 2003 to support interdisciplinary policy-related urban research.
This paper was presented at SOAC 5held in Melbourne from 29 November – 2 December 2011.

SOAC 5 was hosted by the University of Melbourne, RMIT University, Monash University, Swinburne University of Technology and Latrobe University as well as the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute and the Grattan Institute, the Victorian State Government and the City of Melbourne.

All published papers have been subject to a peer reviewing process.