Using the example of the Western Australian Government Railway Workshops at Midland, now a State heritage icon, this paper argues that there is significant social and historical value in retaining and reusing industrial sites, appropriately and sensitively interpreting their past.

There is a crisis in the funding of infrastructure backlogs across urban Australia, and nowhere is this more marked than perhaps in the outer metropolitan growth councils of our large cities. This paper looks at the infrastructure challenges facing Perth’s outer metropolitan growth councils.

While the utility of Urban Environmental Groups (UEGs) has been recognized by several environmental policies and programs, the challenges of sustaining UEGs remain under-explored, especially, in Western Australia.

Despite boom times, the people of Perth have been noted for their apparent unwillingness to accept large projects designed to invigorate the city of Perth. In this paper historical evidence is used to examine two of the waterfront schemes and their results.

There is extensive commentary on the role of public, unauthorised art in western cities, but little on the coincidence of heritage value and guerilla art. This paper analyses the relationship of the two in a statue of a 1940s swimmer entitled Eliza which was unveiled in the Swan River in Crawley, Perth in 2007.