Susan Fainstein has called on planners to resume advocating for disadvantaged communities in their urban plans and policies to create the ‘just city.’ Such an approach would assess land-use policy against the principles of equity, diversity and democracy. However, planning systems strongly influenced by the ‘new public management’ ideology characterised by decentralisation, privatisation, and deregulation...

This paper explores the complexity of suburbs, with a particular focus on the environmental benefits that they offer, to show that in some respects suburbs have been miscast as unsustainable. Suburban infill development in a provincial New Zealand city is then used to quantify the changes in a suburban environment as a result of infill...