Post-war suburbanisation is a foundational element of the Australian urban experience but brought a balance sheet of social costs alongside material benefits. Most development authorities were slow to acknowledge the need for a more explicit social approach to urban questions until the 1970s, a decade of questioning conventional wisdom, promoting wider community participation, and greater awareness of the importance of place in planning outcomes. This paper explores this narrative in reconstructing the career and contributions of a relatively forgotten figure in the development of Australian planning. Caroline Kelly (1899-1989) pursued a remarkably varied life. Her three core careers: actress-entrepreneur, social anthropologist, and social planner were shaped throughout by her feminist outlook. Kelly's third career for a succession of major planning bodies in Sydney saw her advising on social wellbeing and placemaking activities for relocated suburban populations and receiving communities as the social aspects of urban planning were first being considered as an integral part of the wider planning mission. In an era of great social change, her skills in communication and social research enabled her to appreciate and promote consideration of human issues in the planning process. Kelly's was a resolute voice for qualitative inquiry, and for planners listening to, acknowledging, and addressing the needs of displaced communities, with particular concern for the isolation, loneliness and lack of social infrastructure suffered by women, children and teenagers in suburbia. A place-based perspective provides the interpretive structure to analyse Kelly's activities from the 1940s to the 1980s.

The golden age of the architect-planner was arguably the 1950s-60s, when aspirations of progressive architects rose above standalone edifices and veered towards a more holistic shaping of a better built environment. Certainly in Australia this was the case, as town planning became institutionally established in the post-world war two years. The interface of architecture and planning created a niche for the emergence of urban design. Australian architectural graduates acquired planning training both domestically and internationally, particularly in the UK. There was also a reverse flow and among their number was Gareth Roberts (1928-2009) who arrived quadruply qualified as a University of Liverpool graduate in both architecture and civic design, a confirmed modernist, and working for William Holford, a key adviser for the National Capital Development Commission (NCDC) responsible for overseeing design of the Australian national capital city of Canberra. The latter connection saw him commencing as an NCDC town planner in 1958 and retiring as Director of Architecture a decade later with a special brief for civic design throughout. Between 1968 and 1988, he held senior academic positions at the University of Queensland, University of New South Wales and Macquarie University. This paper surveys and interprets Roberts' career and contributions.

Colin Clark (1905–1989) was foremost an economist and secondly an urban thinker, but in the latter role, based in both Britain and Australia, he made a significant contribution to the early emergence of urban studies as an interdisciplinary field. His interests ranged broadly across planning, transportation, settlement, population and spatial structure. He was suspicious of theory and pragmatically set all his work in real urban settings. This article introduces and seeks to position Clark’s writings – focusing on their impact, strengths and weaknesses – within a critical appreciation of his role in the development of urban studies.

Australian postwar reconstruction in the 1940s saw idealistic synergies between decentralization, regional development, and 'new town' planning. Two architect-planners associated with this modernising impulse were Frank Heath and Ernest Fooks. Collaborating within Heath's eponymous practice they proposed a series of plans for the expansion of 13 regional towns during and immediately after the Second World War. Melbourne-trained Heath and Viennese-educated Fooks drew on a consistent vocabulary of planning and design concepts, notably neighbourhood unit principles or as they sometimes described them 'rayons' following Soviet practice. Their work integrated a blend of decentralization ideology, continental European and British modes of city building, and progressive Soviet planning ideas into an Australian rural context. Their accompanying schemes and reports enhanced planning propaganda and exhibitions throughout the 1940s. Yet for a variety of reasons, the most important of which was the unwillingness of state and federal government to invest in urban decentralization strategies after the fervour of postwar reconstruction quickly receded, none of these plans was comprehensively implemented.

For over 70 issues between 1979 and 2006 the Planning History Bulletin was a key communications initiative of the Planning History Group and sustained by its transformation into the International Planning History Society (IPHS) from 1993. It played a vital role in keeping members, and others who happened upon it, apprized of current happenings in the planning history world through notices of forthcoming events, reports on conferences and workshops, new publications, short research articles, and general group business. Renamed Planning History from 1988, it appeared three times a year in testimony to the diligence of a succession of editors cajoled by Gordon Cherry into the role with several subsequently springboarded into key roles with Planning Perspectives. Remarkably the Bulletin was published alongside Planning Perspectives for two decades until 2006 when financial drivers and a changing academic publishing culture saw it subsumed within what last editor Mark Clapson dubbed 'its larger sibling' as the IPHS Section (now Connexions). This paper briefly recounts the history over nearly three decades of what remains a valuable resource.

Urban theorists and observers have pointed towards a persistent if elusive character of incompleteness within cities. This paper responds to these ideas both theoretically and visually. Building on a definition of incompleteness as encompassing a perceptual absence or missing, the paper addresses a gap in theoretical understanding of how incompleteness can be critically understood and depicted as a temporal urban process. The focus goes beyond a singular state or built quality towards continuums of re-construction, fragmentation and re-imagination. These notions inform a practice-driven interrogation of incompleteness in graphic terms. The case study is a five decade microhistory of ongoing change in a central city block in Sydney, Australia. An approach to analytical and speculative drawing is presented to enable a conceptual and analytical investigation of incompleteness as a regenerative process of city-making.

Smart cities are predominantly framed through a technological lens, with limited attention given to their place-based social dimensions. The latter are especially significant in the Global South where social polarization, unequal access to basic community facilities, and poor infrastructure are everyday realities. Examining the vision and execution of a smart city initiative through the critical framework of social sustainability highlights these problems. Social sustainability goals have been taken up unevenly within India's Smart Cities Mission. This paper provides an on-the-ground perspective of progress and challenges for area-based development under the Mission. The findings reveal significant gaps between policy vision and practical implementation, emphasizing the need for enhanced collaborative planning, meaningful community engagement, and more inclusive governance mechanisms. As an original grounded investigation into the gap between policy and implementation in a Global South setting, this paper calls for a deeper practical commitment to social sustainability to ensure that smart city initiatives more effectively address urban needs.

Endorsement of open spaces internalized within residential blocks was an iconic concept promoted by the British garden city movement in the early twentieth century. Advancing various social goals, they were associated within a gendered ideology of domesticity, child safety, local food production, and community-centeredness. This article examines American responses through theoretical reformulation, endorsement, opposition, and uneven practical experiments situated against the maturing science of planned suburban development. Raymond Unwin included these spaces in a seminal morphological exposition, developing the concept of the quadrangle with a variety of uses including agricultural allotments, tennis courts, and playgrounds. Views of leading American community planners are canvassed, split between those promoting agricultural commons, landscaped gardens and playgrounds, and opponents citing upkeep and security concerns. Evolution of the interior park arguably peaked with Radburn which established a new iconic form and narrative of interior parks at a larger scale.

Unpredictable shock events have disruptive and long-lasting impacts on the aviation industry. However, the scale and type of impact of different shock events on airport operations and planning have been unevenly surveyed. A better understanding can help airports to improve their risk mitigation and develop more resilient operations and management. Through a systematic literature review of peer-reviewed research, we summarise shock events into four categories based on the cause of the shock: economic recessions, infectious disease pandemics, terrorist attacks, and natural disasters. The major impacts are identified as a reduction in air travel demand, interruptions in operations, modified operating procedures, and changes in facilities and infrastructure. We further bring these together into a conceptual typology of event-impact interactions. This longitudinal overview may assist airport managers in better understanding the impacts of shock events and taking further steps in developing more resilient airport infrastructure and associated business models.