State of Australasian Cities Special Issue 2: Transport, Livability and Justice Through a Local Lens

1. Just and Local Transitions

This is the second special issue arising from the 10th State of Australasian Cities Conference (SOAC) hosted by a consortium of Melbourne-based universities: RMIT University, the University of Melbourne, Monash University and Swinburne University of Technology. The special issue series comes about through constructive collaboration between the Australasian Cities Research Network (ACRN), which auspices SOAC, the Analysis and Policy Observatory (APO) an open access evidence platform for public policy resources, and the Editorial Board of Urban Policy and Research which draws regularly on the work reported via SOAC.

The two special issues arising from SOAC 2021 comprise the first formal collaboration between these leading venues for Australasian urban scholarship, a welcome advance as our communities of researchers grapple with the problems and questions of just urban transformation in an era of chronic disruption. Alongside invited keynote addresses, such as the Public City lecture, debates and commentaries, the research articles were selected through nomination to the SOAC Peter Harrison Memorial award which is supported by the Fekner School at the Australian National University and recognizes papers which are judged to make a distinctive contribution to knowledge and capacity for the ecologically sustainable development of Australasian cities and regions.

The papers collectively presented in this special issue cover three interrelated themes: sustainable urban transport, urban living, urban greening and the intertwined need for planning practices that support decolonization. In turn, they each contribute a perspective on urban questions that is informed by, or is reflective of, notions of ‘the local’, and how this is co-constituted in relation to the SOAC 2021 theme of just transitions in the COVID recovery era and the social, spatial and economic consequences for equity and inclusion. The local scale is where many urban dwellers observe and experience the multiple effects of urban transitions and change. This is also the scale where international, national and state policies are translated into on-the-ground practices and are thus important sites for urban research practices in a context of unceded Indigenous land and dispossession. This local theme was not required nor demanded of the individual papers, rather this strongly emerged as a cross-cutting thematic link across divergent foci on transport, live ability, greening and Indigenous justice. The remainder of this overview discusses these connections in more detail.

2. Sustainable Transport

Urban research and policy practices are shifting to support local transitions to social and environmental sustainability in the context of diverse communities. Two of the papers address the issue of sustainable transport, a research article by Jennifer Kent, examining family-based automobile travel, and the second a commentary by Carey Curtis, considering the role of walking within a just transition to sustainable transport. These questions sit within a vexed context of urban systems and transport policy. Australasian cities are highly car dependent with around 80 per cent of travel undertaken by automobile. This level of car dependence brings an array of harms to cities, including carbon dioxide and other pollutants, noise, injuries and deaths, sedentary behavior, dispersed land-uses, excessive use of space and fiscal costs for road capacity expansion.

For some decades, researchers have reported on the harms of car-dependent transportation and called for a shift in the share of travel away from the automobile to other more sustainable modes, such as walking, cycling and public transport. While car dependence peaked as a mode of travel for the journey to work in the late-1990s, the recovery of non-car modes over the past two decades has been modest. Kent addresses many of these concerns through an examination of the transport practices of families, or ‘familial travel’ to assess how the primacy of the car in urban travel might be challenged, whether through the use of alternative modes to satisfy travel needs, or by travelling less. Kent’s paper offers an important point of departure for travel research, such that familial travel has been often overlooked as a key multi-occupant trip component of overall travel demand, despite most travel surveys being conducted at the household scale. This in part relates to the tendency for travel research to focus on individual traveler trips as the unit of analysis, which are typically categorized into particular purposes, such as shopping or work. In doing so such approaches overlook the volume and complexity of household group travel, but this insight in turn offers potential to contest the primacy of the private car in travel research and policy.

Reductions in travel also offer prospect for reduced car use, through reduced distances between land-uses that can moderate vehicle kilometers travelled, or such practices as working from home or ‘slowing down’ of children’s participation in structured out-of-home activities. The arguments set out in the paper offer a fruitful avenue of inquiry for travel research, both in terms of possibilities for reducing travel demand, while also transforming concepts and approaches in travel research. Cycling may offer an alternative to car travel for families, as does children’s independent mobility via which local urban travel is undertaken without familial supervision. By reducing car distances travelled, enabling children’s mobility, and working from home, the significance of the local agenda can be discerned in Kent’s work.

The second paper with a clear transport theme in the special issue is Curtis’ commentary on walking as a travel mode. In the paper, Curtis reflects on a long career and experiences in urban transport planning to consider what is ‘just’ in the context of a sustainable transport transition to a decarbonized world. Curtis argues that walking is an underappreciated mode of travel in Australasian cities; it requires little additional equipment for most people and is broadly equitable, affordable and pollution-free. Many trips already incorporate walking, such as between a car park and an activity. Curtis highlights the many overlooked ways in which city planning has failed to recognize and support walking as a travel mode through the design and distribution of land-uses or in the provision of infrastructure, in contrast to the extensive provision made for the automobile.

In turn, Curtis argues that much of the enthusiasm for working-from-home under pandemic restrictions arose from the opportunities this changed arrangement offered for local recreational travel as the time cost of the typical motorized commute was obviated. Thus, Curtis implies, within the new policy focus on local living is a revalorization of walking, for utility, wellbeing and recreation, and not least environmental sustainability. This shift offers potential for communities to transform transport planning and policy at the local scale, but also provides leaders with a moment to apply rapid action.

3. Living Locally

Policy and planning of transportation for local living also intersect with concerns about liveability and urban scale. Over the past decade, there has been growing research and policy interest in land-use planning that enables localization of consumption activities, such as retail and entertainment, as well as amenity such as green open space. This has been represented via notions of ‘15-minute’ or ‘20-minute’ neighborhoods and cities within which residents are able to access most of their basic consumption needs within no more than 20 minutes of travel time, and typically without resort to use of the automobile. This means increased provision and use of walking, cycling and public transport infrastructure rather than cars and roads.

The special issue research article by Gilbert and Woodcock investigates the application of ‘travel time-based urbanism’ to Australian metropolitan planning strategies in an international comparative context. This encompasses planning approaches that refer to 15-minute, 20-minute or 30-minute time framings of cities as walkable (see Curtis this issue) or healthy neighborhoods. These time-based travel models, Gilbert and Woodcock argue, aim to reduce urban dispersion by concentrating activities within the time-frames in contrast to automobile travel which disperses activity through travel speed. Notwithstanding the worthy sustainability and wellbeing objectives of travel-time urbanism models, Gilbert and Woodcock note the many challenges of implementation, not least in delocalizing activity within dispersed car-dependent urban structures.

In their policy analysis, which contrasts travel-time urbanism within Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney plans, with comparators in Portland, Shanghai and Singapore, they find that local living objectives are typically contained within overarching metropolitan goals, but with varying detail about specific designs or implementation approaches. Australian plans emphasize proximity to public transport, as well as schools, but mainly for new rather than existing schools. Gilbert and Woodcock report a wide diversity of implementation approaches across targets, actions and agencies. They also note questions of for whom such policies are oriented can remain unaddressed.

Among their conclusions is the observation that many of the travel time-based policies lack measures to reduce car reliance. This was particularly the case with Australian plans, though international problems were also recognized. Gilbert and Woodcock highlight that while travel time-based urbanism is attractive to policy makers for its simple evocation of a locally oriented living style, the complexity of urban systems mean that achievement in practice is subject to consider­able variation and uncertainty.

Temporal notions of urban life can provide a useful guide to planning policy but also pose new questions for urban research including whether in large metropolitan areas living can be genuinely local and how policy can be adjusted to facilitate such arrangements. Such considerations also depend on methods that can assist us to assess local living conditions, through measurement of pat­terns and development of indicators. Aiming for policy change is one objective but delivering and evaluating is another. How easy is it to access goods and services in a local neighborhood?

The second paper in the special issue addressing local living is by Carl Higgs and colleagues, examining policy-relevant spatial indicators of urban liveability and sustainability. This research article presents challenges and lessons from a half-decade long research program involving a large group of researchers, investigating indicators and measures of urban liveability across Melbourne and within a wider context of 21 Australian cities, and 25 cities internationally. The paper presents methods developed by the authors to indicate urban liveability, through the urban liveability index applied at the land parcel scale. This work is not solely contained in the special issue paper itself, but was developed over multiple research projects and publications since 2016.

The paper details the methodology, including spatial data acquisition and units of analysis, use of software and digital tools, application of scaling approaches, as well as questions of comparative versus absolute indicator assessment. A key focus is on reproducibility, which is a major concern in contemporary social science, as well as software development of analytical tools and procedures to support sustained programs and cycles of research in this domain. This includes ensuring public availability of coding and software, both for transparency of method and approach, but also wider access to the tools and techniques for researchers elsewhere and policy makers.

4. Urban Greening

While local living ambitions often aim to ‘fill in’ urban space through addition of uses into an urban land use mix, the protection and provision of ‘unfilled’ green space is also a key concern. Green space, such as parks and biodiversity reserves are important components of liveability. Yet compact city agendas can risk overlooking the accompanying need to provide additional green space to meet psycho-social needs. Planning for, and the governance of, green space provision within planning regimes becomes an important issue, including for urban research. How then can green space be governed in a way that ensures accessibility among other objectives?

The question of provision and governance of green space in cities is addressed in this special issue by Jenny George, through a study of community governance for green urban infrastructure. George draws on a five-year program of research investigating selected Australian examples of community-led green infrastructure projects, including green corridors and trails. With this focus on trails, walking again emerges as a local consideration. The focus of the study is on governance models, addressing dimensions such as vision leadership, openness, trust, procedural systems and partnerships.

Two local case studies formed the main empirical component of this research article, being the Merri Creek in Victoria and the Bibbulmun Track in Western Australia. George assessed the governance practices in these two examples against the set of best practice approaches identified in the literature. She found that both were community visioned and led, with clear collaboration between the community participants and official bodies, such as local and state governments. Nonetheless, there was institutional complexity to the community efforts, particularly through the uncertainty of state and federal funding and changes to institutional settings over the study period. Overall, George highlights that both projects are effective and efficient in their work and in the reputation they have developed with local and state government collaborators. This in turn was due to their ‘dynamic governing’ approach, with high levels of institutional and social capital combined under a subsidiarity model that recognizes the importance of local volunteers.

5. Indigenous Reconciliation

In the final practice-based paper of the Special Issue, Eric Keys and David Week critically engage with the urban planning profession’s role in advancing reconciliation, amidst calls from Indigenous peoples of Australia for a resetting of settler-colonial relations in ways that recognize their spiritual and ancestral sovereignty and connection to sacred Country. As Keys and Week describe, the destruction of natural resources continues to create distress for Indigenous communities and the wider community, such as the reckless demolition of ancient and sacred Juana Gorge caves in Western Australia by mining company Rio Tinto using outdated settler-colonial legislation.

Reconciliation is a powerful call to action for all Australians to address past and present wrongs and provide a foundation for a productive relationship between cultures. Whilst progress towards reconciliation is happening in many spheres, the Keys and Week practice paper draws attention to the need for academics and practitioners to do far more to bridge the gap between planning and developing practices to build a ‘just’ Indigenous-settler relationship. In doing so they differentiate between: Reconciliation, as a project defined by Indigenous people through their leaders and described by Reconciliation Australia within that broader program; Decolonization, as restorative justice which emphasizes the restoration of Indigenous culture and Country, as reflected in the reconciliation project; and Decolonization of Settler Minds and Institutions, where it is necessary for restorative justice, but where Indigenous healing takes priority.

Their project takes inspiration from the work of Janice Barry and Michelle Thompson-Fawcett (2020) who explore the challenges of planning within an environment with overlapping sovereign regimes such as Canada and New Zealand, which are both nations with existing treaties, and emphasize the need for planners to,

… not only deepen an ongoing conversation about how planning theorists and practitioners conceive and take action in the face of multiple and often overlapping forms of planning authority, but also provide an important point of departure in ongoing conversations about the decolonization of planning and the search for a just planning relationship with Indigenous people.

6. Sustainability and Subsidiarity

This special issue has presented a compilation of distinctive papers delivered at the 2021 State of Australasian Cities conference. While the papers all address different topics – walking, family trans­port, livability metrics, green space governance and Indigenous sovereignty – some common themes emerge, that are relevant to the overall SOAC 2021 conference theme of just transitions in Australasian cities and regions. Among all the papers is a clear focus on the local, whether as a frame for reducing travel distances and shifting mode, as a site for measurement and evaluation of built environment habitability, as a place where governance is enacted, or settler-colonialism is made manifest through planning practices. We can discern across their foci, the clear message that the significance of local living and the concomitant principles of subsidiarity and community, are central elements of just transitions and transformations that can be anticipated in Australasian cities in the coming decades.

This in turn implies the need for much stronger articulation of locally formulated and articulated agendas in meso-level and high-level policy, such as metropolitan plans, state government strategies and national accords. It has been long appreciated that local government is among the weakest and least well-resourced tier within the Australian federation. In Aotearoa New Zealand the capacity of local government is much more varied, with the larger cities governed by stronger manifestations. As the papers in this Special Issue illustrate, local mobilizations in support of just urban transformation are necessary if many of the ambitions of equity, diversity and inclusion are to be realized. Among the urban research community, a sustained interest in the contribution of the local scale persists. This in turn informs policy making and practices both at that scale, and among higher and wider frames, to address the sustainability imperatives that confront Australasian city-regions.