Australia is a settler society where the rural-urban fringe of the major cities and regional centres is a contestable stage. There are a range of actors who compete in place making processes reshaping the cultural landscape when there is collision over the ownership of space and the dominant narrative. This paper examines the proposition that...

Claypits, which primarily produce materials for construction, are often located on the urban fringe – situated to take advantage of cheap land and outside of the stricter regulatory context of town planning boundaries but close enough to efficiently service their market. In Melbourne, the fringe location of claypits has frequently brought them into overlap with...

Quarrying is a noxious industrial activity necessary for the provision of stone and clay, utilised predominately in building activities as the city grows. In post-industrial Melbourne, the extraction of these materials has left a pock-marked landscape, reflecting the fact that the city was settled upon an opportune juncture of sand-and-clay, basalt, and mudstone fields.

Following the decline of manufacturing at the end of the twentieth century, land and infrastructure speculation continued to drive suburban expansion at the edges of the city of Melbourne. Mass transit technologies allowed suburban sprawl in the 1870s through the construction of light and heavy rail, and again in the 1950s with the mass adoption...

Some government policies restrict the supply of housing. Examples include minimum lot sizes, maximum building heights and planning approval processes. Although these restrictions may confer benefits, they also raise the price of housing. This paper attempts to quantify the effect of zoning on housing prices in Australia’s four largest cities.