Australia S Metropolitan Imperative

Since the early 1990s there has been a global trend towards governmental devolution. However, in Australia, alongside deregulation, public–private partnerships and privatisation, there has been increasing centralisation rather than decentralisation of urban governance. Australian state governments are responsible for the planning, management and much of the funding of the cities, but the Commonwealth government has on occasion asserted much the same role. Disjointed policy and funding priorities between levels of government have compromised metropolitan economies, fairness and the environment. Australia’s Metropolitan Imperative: An Agenda for Governance Reform makes the case that metropolitan governments would promote the economic competitiveness of Australia’s cities and enable more effective and democratic planning and management. The contributors explore the global metropolitan ‘renaissance’, document the history of metropolitan debate in Australia and demonstrate metropolitan governance failures. They then discuss the merits of establishing metropolitan governments, including economic, fiscal, transport, land use, housing and environmental benefits. The book will be a useful resource for those engaged in strategic, transport and land use planning, and a core reference for students and academics of urban governance and government.

How workers fought for municipal socialism to make cities around the globe livable and democratic - and what the lessons are for today. For more than a century, municipal socialism has fired the imaginations of workers fighting to make cities livable and democratic. At every turn propertied elites challenged their right to govern. Prominent US labor historian, Shelton Stromquist, offers the first global account of the origins of this new trans-local socialist politics. He explains how and why cities after 1890 became crucibles for municipal socialism. Drawing on the colorful stories of local activists and their social-democratic movements in cities as diverse as Broken Hill, Christchurch, Malmö, Bradford, Stuttgart, Vienna, and Hamilton, OH, the book shows how this new urban politics arose. Long governed by propertied elites, cities in the nineteenth century were transformed by mass migration and industrialization that tore apart their physical and social fabric. Amidst massive strikes and faced with epidemic disease, fouled streets, unsafe water, decrepit housing, and with little economic security and few public amenities, urban workers invented a local politics that promised to democratize cities they might themselves govern and reclaim the wealth they created. This new politics challenged the class power of urban elites as well as the centralizing tendencies of national social-democratic movements. Municipal socialist ideas have continued to inspire activists in their fight for the right of cities to govern themselves.

Examining urban heritage in twentieth-century Australia, James Lesh reveals how evolving ideas of value and significance shaped cities and places. Over decades, a growing number of sites and areas were found to be valuable by communities and professionals. Places perceived to have value were often conserved. Places perceived to lack value became subject to modernisation, redevelopment, and renewal. From the 1970s, alongside strengthened activism and legislation, with the innovative Burra Charter (1979), the values-based model emerged for managing the aesthetic, historic, scientific, and social significance of historic environments. Values thus transitioned from an implicit to an overt component of urban, architectural, and planning conservation. The field of conservation became a noted profession and discipline. Conservation also had a broader role in celebrating the Australian nation and in reconciling settler colonialism for the twentieth century. Integrating urban history and heritage studies, this book provides the first longitudinal study of the twentieth-century Australian heritage movement. It advocates for innovative and reflexive modes of heritage practice responsive to urban, social, and environmental imperatives. As the values-based model continues to shape conservation worldwide, this book is an essential reference for researchers, students, and practitioners concerned with the past and future of cities and heritage. The Foreword and Chapter 1/Introduction of this book are available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Offering a comprehensive introduction to the comparison of governments and political systems, this new edition helps students to understand not just the institutions and political cultures of their own countries but also those of a wide range of democracies and authoritarian regimes from around the world. This new edition offers: -A revised structure to aid navigation and understanding -New learning features, 'Using Theory' and 'Exploring Problems', designed to help students think comparatively -Empirical global examples, with increased coverage of non-Western scholarship and analyses -Coverage of important contemporary topics including: minorities; LGBTQ+ issues; identity politics; women in politics; political trust; populism; Covid-19. Featuring a wide range of engaging learning features, this book is an essential text for undergraduate and postgraduate courses on Comparative Politics, Comparative Government, Introduction to Politics and Introduction to Political Science.

Sport and war have been closely linked in Australian and New Zealand society since the nineteenth century. Sport has, variously, been advocated as appropriate training for war, lambasted as a distraction from the war effort, and resorted to as an escape from wartime trials and tribulations. War has limited the fortunes of some sporting codes – and some individuals – while others have blossomed in the changed circumstances. The chapters in this book range widely over the broad subject of Australian and New Zealand sport and their relation to the cataclysmic world wars of the first half of the twentieth century. They examine the mythology of the links between sport and war, sporting codes, groups of sporting individuals, and individual sportspeople. Revealing complex and often unpredictable effects of total wars upon individuals and social groups which as always, created chaos, and the sporting field offered no exception. This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

This book focuses on the challenge that Australia faces in transitioning to renewable energy and regenerating its cities via a transformation of its built environment. Both are necessary conditions for low carbon living in the 21st century. This is a global challenge represented by the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals and the IPCC’s Climate Change program and its focus on mitigation and adaptation. All nations must make significant contributions to this transformation. This book highlights the new knowledge and innovation that has emerged from research projects undertaken in the Co-operative Research Centre for Low Carbon Living between 2012 and 2019 – an initiative of the Australian Government’s Department of Industry, Science and Technology that is tasked with responding to the UN challenges. Four principal transition pathways were central to the CRC and provide the thematic structure to this volume. They focus on technology, buildings, precinct and city design, and human behaviour – and their interactions.

Australia’s Unintended Cities identifies and researches housing and housing-related urban outcomes that are unintended consequences of other policies, the structure of incentives and disincentives for the housing market, and governance arrangements for metropolitan areas and planning and service delivery. It is argued that unintended consequences have a greater impact on the housing market and Australia’s cities and their future than policies directly concerned with housing, urban policy and metropolitan strategic planning. The book will inform policy makers, including government officials, consultants and politicians. It will also be used by academics and students in various areas of urban policy, such as housing and urban planning, as well as environment, public policy and economics.

This open access book outlines new concepts, development models, governance and implementation processes capable of addressing the challenges of transformative urban regeneration of cities at precinct scale.