Nineteen papers were part of the Social City stream, with a fairly even spread between macro, meso and micro analyses of issues confronting cities. Two papers from overseas (Auckland/Johannesburg) were included. Australian cities included: Sydney; Melbourne; Adelaide; Brisbane; Newcastle and Geelong. It was disappointing that there was nothing received from NT, ACT, Tasmania or Western Australia. The major focus of papers was on public housing, although there was a small, but important, component looking at the impact of large scale developments. Little work is being done on ‘elite’ housing or the impact of gated communities in wealthy areas particularly in regard to sustainability in design and planning. There was a reasonable spread between ‘theory’ perspectives and descriptive papers on projects completed. There was also a strong interdisciplinary component – which is important – as the issues facing the social city are complex and should not be assigned to one particular discipline. Having said that, it is important that those researchers moving into an area for the first time make themselves aware of the history of research in that area, and not present their work as something essentially ‘new’ when in fact it has been covered by other disciplines and is simply ‘new’ to the researcher, but not necessarily to the knowledge community. The other positive factor was the number of papers from students that gives hope for the long term research outcomes. There was a comment from the workshop that the Social City was in a state of ‘renaissance’ in terms of research, and it is important that this energy be captured and leveraged into the future.

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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 2 held in Brisbane from 30 November to 2 December 2005.

SOAC 2 was hosted by the Urban Research Program at the South Bank campus, Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University.

The principal intention of the conference was to lead a dialogue between leading researchers on the state of Australian cities and where they might be headed. SOAC 2 was designed to lead to a better understanding of the research needs of Australian cities and to provide those in the public and private sectors with a better appreciation of the current state and capacities of researchers.

SOAC 2 brought together participants from a wide range of fields, including:
academics, researchers, policy makers, private and public sector practitioners, leaders in government, social commentators and the media.

Conference papers published fromSOAC 2 were subject to a peer review process prior to presentation at the conference, with further editing prior to publication.