Drawing on two case studies from the NSW Northern Coalfields, this paper considers economic value, government regulation, public perceptions, and urban development consequences, linking underground materiality with aboveground urban outcomes.

Drawing on recent research aimed to document urban carbon governance across Australia’s capital cities—in particular, an audit of carbon reduction initiatives across government, business and community actors at the urban scale—this paper explores urban local governments as sites of climate change response and experimentation.

Reforms of planning processes in Australia have been prefaced by assertions about what 'the public' wants from a planning system. In this paper, claims about public opinion, collected from media releases, forums, discussion papers, ministerial documents and legislation are analysed.

This paper traces key policy challenges facing Australia’s metropolitan cities as a result of multiscaled shifts in their governance contexts.

The City Economy sessions in the 2005 State of Australian Cities (SOAC) national conference yielded papers that can usefully be grouped under four main strands: theoretically oriented papers; papers focussed on the ‘new economy’; investigations of ‘old chestnut’ issues of the urban economy; and papers...