Urban fringe residential estates continue to dominate the residential development sector in Australia. Several practice based sustainability assessment tools have recently been developed which acknowledge the impacts of such developments and attempt to improve outcomes. This paper examines how sustainability principles and concepts are presented and applied in such assessment tools, focusing on two Australian based examples, the Sustainable Community Rating Tool and EnviroDevelopment. The paper argues that the increasing use of sustainability rhetoric in the assessment of residential estate development is often tenuously connected to sustainability principles, and that more rigour is required in the adoption and application of sustainability principles in such assessment.

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 4 held in Perth from 24 to 27 November 2009.

SOAC 4 was hosted by the University of Western Australia, Curtin University, Edith Cowan University and Murdoch University and held at The University of Western of Australia’s Crawley campus.SOAC 4 was a collaborative venture between colleagues from the planning, geography and related disciplines across the four public universities.

The meta-theme of this conference - city growth, sustainability, vitality and vulnerability – sought to capture the dynamic and complex nature and contexts in which Australian cities find themselves in the early 21st century.

The last decade or so has seen Australian cities and many of their residents benefit from significant economic prosperity. With this economic prosperity, largely on the back of a resources boom, Australian cities and resources and mineral-rich regions, particularly in Queensland and in WA, have been subjected to profound demographic, social, economic, environmental and political changes. In the wake of the so-called ‘global financial crisis’ we have witnessed the rise of what might be called ‘neo-Keynesianism’ as various liberal democratic nations have pumped billions of dollars into their national economies via ‘bail outs’ or a stimulus package’ in an effort to stave off economic recession. The economic prosperity and more recent uncertainty that has been experienced in the last decade provides a fascinating and dare we say it a timely backdrop to critically reflect on the condition of urban Australia.

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