Clive Forster was an Associate Professor at Flinders University and was for several decades a mainstay of the excellent urban geography programme at that university. He was a significant figure in geography and geographical research in Australia for many years and his colleagues in that discipline will doubtless pay appropriate tribute to his work elsewhere. But Clive was also deeply interested in the efforts of planners to shape Australian cities and in 1995 he published the first of three editions of Australian Cities: Continuity and Change which became an important textbook for planning students and for those engaged in planning more generally. At the heart of the book was a meticulous analysis of how Australians live, work and travel in their cities, underpinned by a rigorous interpretation of census data and by a deep understanding and synthesis of the urban research which has burgeoned in Australia since the 1980s. Like a number of other scholars, Clive observed that Australian metropolitan plans tend not to be sufficiently informed by the findings of this research, noting
… the existence of parallel urban universes: one occupied by metropolitan planning authorities and their containment–consolidation – centres consensus; the other by the realities of the increasingly complex, dispersed, residentially differentiated suburban metropolitan areas most Australians live in …
I was editor of Urban Policy and Research for a few years around the turn of the century. The energy and enthusiasm of UPR’s original Board of largely Melbourne-based academics was beginning to fade. Getting urban policy and planning practitioners involved remained an ongoing difficulty. Our first attempt to work with a commercial publisher led to a big drop in subscriptions. Fond hopes of providing an Australasian perspective on city development in the Indo-Pacific region were unfulfilled.
One way of spreading the load, regaining some impetus and breaking UPR’s Melbourne-centric perspective was to involve interstate editors. There was no problem signing them on but having them direct publishable material UPR’s way was another matter. The South Australian state editor, Clive Forster, was one of the exceptions. He was involved with UPR before my time as editor and continued to encourage SA urbanists to think of UPR as a preferred research outlet. He was my Mr. Reliable: understated but effective. He helped UPR through the thin years.
I first knew of Clive as a PhD student at Liverpool University in the 1970s. He had completed his PhD at Hull. It was a meticulous study of that city’s nineteenth-century distinctive courtyard housing, including floor plans and photographs of each court type. These house forms helped him fine-tune his social area analysis. I adapted his research methodology to my study of earlier bylaw housing in Wigan and St Helens, Lancastrian industrial towns close to his native Warrington.
So, it is a double thanks from me to Clive Forster.
Honorary Associate Professor John Jackson
RMIT University