Australia is a suburban society. It has been since Europeans came. Unlike many other urban societies at the time, there was no existing hard infrastructure to provide the essential needs of human urban life - clean water, food, shelter and waste management. These had to be met by individual residents in the emerging cities and...

Urban waterfronts are liminal zones of heightened sensory experience, particularly haptic experiences: the immediate bodily experiences of touch, proprioception and kinaesthesia (body position and movement). Such experiences are generated through direct contact with natural and built environments, strongly mediated by cultural and historical meanings, and they are crucial to forming physical and emotional understandings of...

The history and contemporary practice of land-use planning and place-making by Indigenous Australians is poorly understood by academics, students and practitioners in the field of urban and regional planning in Australia. This is despite recent high-profile events which have increased the profile of Indigenous peoples’ rights, such as the recognition of native title by the...

Exhibitions played a vital role in promoting the benefits of modern town planning through the first half of the twentieth century. They helped convey the environmental, economic, and social dividends of strategic and statutory planning to the broader community as well as constituting a vehicle for planning advocates themselves to showcase advances and best practice...

The site of European settlement in the Port Phillip region was a place of many swamps. For the Indigenous population these features were essential to their way of life, for the wide diversity of foodstuffs and raw materials they provided. They were the main support for the meetings of large numbers of the Kulin nation...