Can mid-sized cities play a greater role in accommodating population growth and if so, under which conditions and what policy settings? Drawing on debates about economic growth and optimal city size as they frame policy preferences, we use census data, policy reports and media, and interviews with policymakers in Australia to examine the opportunities offered by mid-sized metropolitan areas. Such locations have enough services and facilities to be attractive as urban places along with benefits in terms of affordability and an alternative quality of life. Yet they vary in character, from regional centres and small capitals to lifestyle centres and satellite cities. Key areas for policy attention include addressing trade-offs in the transportation/housing connection, lifestyle, employment, and governance. Policies developed for larger urban areas and a narrow range of industrial sectors will need modification to respond to the distinct opportunities and constraints characterizing mid-sized cities. While drawing on the specific Australian case, the paper has wider relevance to locations where residents need to choose between large and expensive cities with economic opportunity and smaller, more affordable locales. There are both equity and efficiency arguments for providing people with greater choices between different-sized urban centres so people can trade-off different economic benefits and lifestyle opportunities. Coordinated ongoing policies that draw on local understanding of opportunities for medium-sized urban centres to grow can assist in expanding these choices.

This study examines the place-based factors (i.e. that may be specific to a place) that influence people moving to and from Australian regional and rural areas and considers policy solutions for managing the impacts of this change.People moving to regional cities and towns favour being close to the coast and having easy access to larger cities while also having a warmer and wetter climate. New AHURI research examines the place-based factors (i.e. that may be specific to a place) that influence people moving to and from Australian regional areas and considers policy solutions for managing the impacts of these changes.Growth is positively related to connectivity, such as by being close to major railways, roads, airports and larger cities and employment centres. Internet connection speeds may also be a factor in migration to certain non-metropolitan areas, with technological advancements and favourable economic conditions enabling former city dwellers to telecommute from smaller regional locations. Access to hospitals and available health infrastructure can be significant considerations for people considering moving to a regional city.A key challenge in regional areas is that for vacancies in key employment sectors, local residents may not have requisite skills and attracting key workers from city locations can be challenging as housing challenges, reduced services (i.e. childcare) and other factors of liveability, and lack of job opportunities for a spouse, can be a disincentive.The liveability of each regional location is very important in creating a healthy and ‘deep’ population, i.e. one that stays and thrives in the region. Overcoming blockages to liveability, such as childcare; housing needs and supply; and transport infrastructure, as well as increasing local education and training opportunities for local workers, requires creative solutions.

Within infrastructure governance research, conceptual gaps remain in how to understand public accountability's manifestations in complex collaborative planning projects. Contrasted with literature, this case study of infrastructure governance in the Western Parkland City project in Sydney, Australia explores social understandings of accountability drawn from 56 stakeholder interviews. Multiple intersecting accountability conceptions are revealed, including institutional transparency, clear communication, social legitimacy and community engagement, governance coherence, and effective implementation capacities. In seeking meaningful accountability approaches, we emphasise the need for multidimensional, and contextually and collaboratively developed understandings of accountability towards rebuilding public trust foundations and embracing relational and systemic approaches.

Recent scholarship on how cities come to adopt new policies has focused on the notion of mobile policy. This incorporates the idea that policy actors create mental maps of ‘ best cities ’ (McCann & Ward, 2011, xiv) or “ powerful centres ” (Peck & Theodore, 2015, 23) for the latest policies to inform future strategies, which are then converted into locally appropriate solutions. This scholarship recognises that policies thus identi fi ed will need to be adjusted to make them work in new locations (McCann & Ward, 2011, xiv). The overall picture is of an urban policy landscape of sporadic new policies that offer new approaches to urban problems and that are then picked up by cities around the globe and incorporated in their strategies. This scholarship suggests that most really innovative urban policies are borrowed by cities rather than developed locally across a range of urban areas. Mobile policies have assumed promin-ence in an era of heightened inter-city competition amidst social and environmental challenges. The mobility of policies is further intensi fi ed through the existence of international networks of scholars and policy-makers that transmit knowledge of initiatives that have proven successful somewhere in meeting these challenges. Nevertheless, existing scholarship does not adequately interrogate the ways in which innovative new urban policies are generated in the fi rst place. What kinds of factors should we look for to explain the emergence of such policies? Are there certain kinds of policy challenges that are less susceptible to being adopted from somewhere else and that are more likely to need local innovation? This short paper attempts to open debate on these questions. In doing so, we draw on a recent survey of innovative urban sustainability policies implemented across the globe after developing insights suggested by the theoretical concepts of Deleuze. The particular Deleuzian concepts we draw on start with the notion of the rhizome, and the way it can be used to understand how new policies emerge. Next, Deleuze ’ s emphasis on the importance of context and contingency is used in conjunction with his concept of multiplicity to understand the characteristics that new policies might have. In addition, Deleuze ’ s concept of the fold

The existing landscape of infrastructure governance discourses tends to focus on closing "governance gaps" commonly based on fractured and opaque neoliberal planning and delivery processes, privatisation and financialisation issues, and inequitable distribution and undemocratic decision-making processes. These gaps represent a deeply troubling erosion of infrastructure's capacity to serve public interests or confront crises of climate injustice. However, the literature rarely confronts the uncomfortable politics of decolonising infrastructure or acknowledges ongoing permutations of settler-coloniality, implicating infrastructural framings of land, development, property, ownership, and decision-making power. This paper reflects on the current state of infrastructure governance literature about ongoing settler-colonial legacies in urban planning and development. Explaining some of the ways unceded Indigenous land has been exploited to facilitate settler state infrastructure development in major Australian cities, we then draw a line to the complicities of contemporary infrastructure governance. This foundation is considered using a systematic method to review infrastructure governance literature and reveal stark gaps in engagement with settler-coloniality and the politics of decolonisation. In light of these silences, we reflect on disciplinary responsibilities to redress research practices and suggest two reflexive approaches centred on to truth-telling and deep listening.

Infrastructure governance has emerged as a subject of critical interest in the current 'infrastructure turn' whereby fragmented governance approaches sit in tension with complex demands for infrastructure transformations within contexts of multiple intersecting crises. To understand the state of the literature and inform ongoing debates, a systematic review method is used to interrogate a large body of infrastructure governance literature across sectoral boundaries. This review identifies a range of literature gaps prevailing in the areas of infrastructure governance on unceded First Nations land, the societal end goals of infrastructure, and understandings and applications of integrated governance.

Planning should deliver urban infrastructures that nurture places and people. However, the misalignment between strategic plans and delivered projects reveals critical governance gaps, with little clarity surrounding for whom and what ends infrastructures serve. This positioning piece proposes an infrastructure governance research agenda focused on the integration of planning, funding, and social legitimacy of projects, and the reality of multiple ongoing crises. Most importantly, the proposed research agenda calls for a First Nation voice at the heart of infrastructure decision-making as part of the planning profession's contribution to the Treaty process that Australia desperately needs to move forward.

This paper considers whether existing approaches for quantifying variables in cellular automata (CA) modelling adequately incorporate all the relevant factors in typical actor decisions underpinning urban development. A survey of developers and planners is used to identify factors they incorporate to allow for or proceed with development, using South East Queensland as a reference region. Three types of decision factors are identified and ranked in order of importance: those that are already modelled in CA applications; those that are not modelled but are quantifiable; and those that are not (easily) quantifiable because they are subjective in nature. Factors identified in the second category include development height/scale, open space supply, and existing infrastructure capacity. Factors identified in the third category include political intent, community opposition, and lifestyle quality. Drawing on our analysis of these factors we suggest how and to what extent survey data might be used to address the challenges of incorporating actor variables into the CA modelling of urban change. The paper represents the first attempt to review what decision factors should be included in CA modelling, and how this might be enabled.

This paper demonstrates how the national urban hierarchies can be understood through the lens of connectivity within globally scaled economic networks. We first examine the global city network structure using a k-core decomposition method. Values of k-coreness are then used to understand the distribution of global connectivity within national urban systems. This is observed through a measure of statistical dispersion applied to a novel global dataset of 68,602 weighted headquarter-subsidiary relations of 31,371 firms linking 4181 cities collected in 2019. Our results confirm the existence of a hierarchical core-periphery structure at a global scale, yet reveal varying degrees of hierarchy at a national scale. At a national scale, single-core, double-core or multi-core network structures characterize the way in which national and global city networks intersect, indicating that there is a distinction between global cities as the core and urban-systems-as-networks that connect nations to the global economy.

The paper critically assesses the 2018 Greater Sydney Region Plan which proposes a polycentric metropolis of three cities, one a new city around the second airport. In implementing the polycentric form as a metropolitan structure, transport priority given to promoting the new western city's self-containment has reduced the emerging potential of the existing second centre. In responding to climate change, the strategy's new rail lines and transit-oriented development are compromised by a major inner/middle suburb motorway program and extensive greenfield expansion into the hottest part of the Sydney basin. Weak housing affordability measures conflict with high income knowledge job proposals.

In Western liberal democracies the planning of mega transport infrastructure projects is guided by public interest claims typically expressed through legislation and political mandates. But with the infrastructure boom being observed in many cities since the Global Financial Crisis, and the need to address unprecedented levels of urbanisation, the level of politicisation directed at infrastructure projects draws attention to how the public interest is treated in the planning and management of complex mega transport infrastructure projects in diverse local contexts. Looking to Sydney, an advanced neoliberal city building the largest transport infrastructure project in Australian history, we examine how public interest is asserted in a way that reinforces legitimacy of the process and consensus for the project. Under these conditions, planners fail or are unwilling to raise additional or new public interest issues. The vagaries of public interest mean that in being open to interpretation the public interest can be easily captured by the interests of capital and of ruling politicians. This raises important questions for urban studies about the role governments and, in particular, public-sector planners can play in advocating for actually existing public interest issues such as environmental sustainability without it amounting to just rhetoric with no follow through.

This project examines international models of metropolitan and regional planning, focusing on governance, spatial organisation, and connectivity, to identify drivers of economic and social outcomes. It identifies lessons for Australian practice through a review of capital city and regional planning frameworks, and interviews with planners across three levels of government.

This research investigated the potential for Australia’s regional areas to attract and sustain population and economic growth, examining whether particular international strategies and Australian models for supporting development have been effective.

Climate change poses risks of inundation to low-lying coastal cities and may cause residential relocation and change in housing demand. Taking the City of Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia as a case study, this paper reports on a survey that investigates the potential responses of residents living in the coastal city to flood risks and how the responses may relate to their socio-economic status. Through a combined online and mail-based survey, our data show that people’s perceptions of flooding have an important impact on their relocation choices. Their perceptions and relocation choices are associated with their socio-economic background. Furthermore, residents' preferences of dwelling types appear to be affected by the level of flood risks we hypothesise in the survey. The findings from this study provide empirical evidence for future residential zoning and urban development.

The central argument of the article is that Sydney's rapid population growth drives key decisions at national and state government levels, particularly decisions that support the development industry. At the national level, population growth is largely set by the Australian government through immigration levels, with Treasury support because it generates taxation revenue. The infrastructure costs of population growth are largely borne by the state government without adequate national government funding, but the state government supports population growth because it creates jobs and is regarded as a key marker of successful government. Under prevailing neoliberal ideology, private sector financing of necessary infrastructure is emphasised. This results in an increasing reliance on developer contributions, and on private sector funding where user-pays revenue is available, such as with motorways. In turn, Sydney's forecast population increase means the state government attempts to facilitate dwelling construction as much as possible. This is done through restricting otherwise desirable developer obligations outside state infrastructure contributions, reducing development controls, and restricting community opposition to new development.

We study the scaling of (i) numbers of workers and aggregate incomes by occupational categories against city size, and (ii) total incomes against numbers of workers in different occupations, across the functional metropolitan areas of Australia and the USA. The number of workers and aggregate incomes in specific high-income knowledge economy-related occupations and industries show increasing returns to scale by city size, showing that localization economies within particular industries account for superlinear effects. However, when total urban area incomes and/or gross domestic products are regressed using a generalized Cobb–Douglas function against the number of workers in different occupations as labour inputs, constant returns to scale in productivity against city size are observed. This implies that the urbanization economies at the whole city level show linear scaling or constant returns to scale. Furthermore, industrial and occupational organizations, not population size, largely explain the observed productivity variable. The results show that some very specific industries and occupations contribute to the observed overall superlinearity. The findings suggest that it is not just size but also that it is the diversity of specific intra-city organization of economic and social activity and physical infrastructure that should be used to understand urban scaling behaviours.

This article reflects on the nature of strategic planning in the contemporary world after modernism. It focuses on aspects that contrast with features that distinguished modernist strategic plannin...

This chapter explores the economy of cities in greater detail. First, it gives a summary of the growth and development of cities over time with respect to their economic function. One of the most important trends over the past century has been rapid urbanisation tied to industrialisation. In some parts of the world, there has been subsequent deindustrialisation. Next, this chapter focusses on the spatial implications of economic change in cities. As urban economies shift over time, so do the characteristics of the built environment, including employment nodes and residential housing. Suburbanisation driven by increasing car ownership has been an important process, but has occurred unevenly in different contexts. The chapter concludes by considering how cities have changed in the recent past, and how economic functions tied to the information age continue to transform cities and urban spatial structure.

Sydney’s increasing densification policies emerge from several factors, including prevailing low density residential development, high infrastructure costs, limited housing choices, and rapid population growth. The state government has had constitutional control of densification policies, leading to reduced municipal and community influence over policy outcomes. Neoliberal policies increased the imperative to save infrastructure costs through densification, but also meant a near absence of affordable housing requirements and other rezoning value capture. Ineffectual 1980s policies to increase housing densities were replaced by a contested policy of rezoning low density areas to allow medium density housing and increase greenfield densities by 50 per cent. In the 1990s the focus shifted to redevelopment of old industrial precincts, overriding municipalities with state rezoning and development corporations. After 2000, continuing community opposition shifted the focus to state-controlled high density development around rail stations. Overall, greenfield infrastructure costs have been saved, but resulted in inadequate infrastructure in the new higher density precincts.