Just Transitions: New Urban Research and Policy Perspectives

1. Introduction

This special issue sheds new light on critical questions of justice in transition, whether from settler-colonial relations to just decolonisation, to relationships of care with nature, the mediation of equitable urban foodscapes, or to the creation of technological configurations. This issue is one of two to emerge from the 2021 State of Australasian Cities Conference (SOAC) where the theme focused on how just urban and regional transitions can be mobilised to support more sustainable futures. The SOAC conferences (2003–2021) under the aegis of the Australasian Cities Research Network (ACRN) seeks to promote, foster, champion and disseminate new urban scholarship which is made available and free to access online through the Analysis and Policy Observatory (APO). This is a biennial forum which brings together academics, policy makers and practitioners to report and appraise the social, spatial, and economic consequences for equity, inclusion and justice.

When the Journal of Urban Policy and Research (UPR) was launched by former Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam AC QC in 1983, the focus was on the role of national government in urban development and regional cooperation in areas of critical infrastructure such as power, transport and water. The UPR journal invited researchers, practitioners and “interested persons” to submit policy-relevant articles that highlighted the contributions to contemporary practice. The ambition was to address the need to “take research to the streets” in what was described then, as a critical time for Australian cities characterised by: growing uncertainty, pessimism and inequity; patchwork and uncoordinated government responses; and cynicism about the usefulness of urban research when most needed (see UPR Editorial 1982, p. 1). Sound familiar?

Track forward to the end of the 1990s, and a review article of the state of urban research in Australia by Graeme Davison and Ruth Fincher (1998) emphasised the interdisciplinary nature, intellectual diversity and vibrancy of scholarship that was emerging. In key areas such as gender and feminist inquiry, housing policy, suburbanisation, urban history, socio-spatial equity, environmental planning issues and cultural studies, urban research was successfully pursuing approaches that were ‘open, critical and pluralist’ rather than managerial or ‘narrowly instrumental’. However, they cautioned that as ‘cities become larger and more complex and the need for high-quality urban research grows, creating policy impact through urban research is challenged within a context of rapidly contracting public funding’ (p. 195). Whilst a similar survey was not undertaken for New Zealand research many of the themes identified by Davison and Fincher were also relevant to that context. Still familiar?

Roiling twenty first century crises of the climate emergency, systemic racism, wealth inequalities and global health pandemics such as Covid-19, are putting pressure not just on what urban researchers focus on, but also the conditions within which urban research takes place, requiring urban research to be more explicitly ethical in focus as well as active and financially agile to support sustainable futures. Research impact is already occurring in city and regional policies (ACRN 2022). The critical issue is whether the impact urban researchers are creating is enabling progressive and transformative change, rather than simply reinforcing policies and practices that are more of the same in cities and regions – that is largely unsustainable, maladaptive, wasteful and harmful to people and planet. Urban inequalities have become even more visible during Covid-19, and greater recognition of this forms the basis for just urban transitions. As Crystal Legacy (2021) highlights ‘the point is still to change it’.

The structure of this first SOAC 2021 Special Issue is in four parts. First, we draw attention to the urgent need for new perspectives on just transitions in Australasian cities and regions in climate change. In the second section we introduce critical dialogue and debate around the role of urban research, policy and inequality as part of the 2nd Pat Troy Memorial Lecture by Stephen Dovers along with responses from Kate Shaw and Kurt Iveson. Third, we introduce new research articles on emerging contemporary themes such as rethinking the science-policy interface, planning ecologically just cities, urban environments in and as Country, food infrastructure and artificial intelligence. The fourth section focuses on policy perspectives from the 2022 Australian federal election by the major parties and other contributors. Finally we reflect on the shifting nature of transitions, the critical role of the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (HASS), and the implications for urban policy and research moving forward.

2. The State of Australasian Cities

Urban policy and research practices struggle to keep up with the changes pressing upon and emanating from Australasian cities, both before and during COVID. The ‘paradox of proximity’ as Graeme Davison (2016) describes requires more robust urban research and discussion, as well as more creative ways of reimagining the science-research-policy interface. With vaccinations continuing to be rolled out internationally, the world is looking to the COVID recovery phase, whilst simultaneously grappling with the impacts of the climate crisis and the urgency of a post-carbon transition. This includes finding innovative ways of planning for and with, diverse communities and greater attention to the dynamics of a changing society and climate, and the need for more equitable housing, transport and health systems.

The impacts of urbanised environments on both human and non-human species (e.g., threatened land, freshwater and marine species) – through for example the burning of fossil fuels and land clearing – are not sustainable. Increased urban growth, energy and water consumption, waste and pollution typify large parts of the built environment. Evidence of these and other activities associated with twentieth century industrialisation and extractive settler-colonialism are outlined in detail in the 2021 Australian State of Environment Report (Commonwealth of Australia 2021). The report, which was suppressed until mid-2022, belatedly reinforces the following key issues:

• The growth of cities and the reduction of biodiversity-rich green spaces impacts all species, including human health and well-being

• As a result of land clearing and other urban activities, native species extinction rates are unacceptably high and increasing

• Inaction on climate change is no longer an option and new approaches to urban and environmental policy and management are urgently needed

These “grim findings” (see Johnston et al. 2022) have been reported by the interdisciplinary scientists involved, including co-authorship by Indigenous researchers who emphasise the need to better protect and nurture the health and wellbeing of shared Country. As the report stresses respecting Indigenous knowledge and rights and systems of care in the conduct of collaborative research is critical. “Indigenous knowledge and connections to Country are vital for sustainability and healing Australia” (see https://soe.dcceew.gov.au/indigenous/key-findings).

The release of Environment Aotearoa 2022 similarly found that the ongoing pressures of land use change, pollution and climate change are having dramatic and detrimental effects on the environment. The report draws attention to how mātauranga Māori can inform this agenda in a context where the impact of human activity since colonisation has resulted in New Zealand’s rare ecosystems and indigenous species threatened with extinction or at risk of becoming extinct. The findings emphasise that

the way we view nature, and the subsequent choices in the ways we live and make a living, result in pressures on the environment; [and] these pressures result in the loss of ecosystems and species, negatively impacting different aspects of our wellbeing. (Ministry for the Environment & Stats NZ, 2022, p. 22)

Both the Australian and Aotearoa State of Environment reports build on the findings presented in the IPCC (2022) Climate Change: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability report highlighting that human and ecosystem vulnerability are deeply interdependent. Nature’s prospect is human prospect.

Across Australasian cities and regional areas, private and community sector aspirations are driving new directives that seek to reshape and rescale existing urban settlements and their discontents. While new approaches to questions of sovereignty and biodiversity, housing affordability and transport are publicly debated, there is little recognition of this in public policy where critical urban issues are not addressed in coherent, direct and integrated ways. There is not even any clear agreement that the metropolitan scale requires explicit national policy recognition and attention despite what Freestone et al. (forthcoming) describe as,

The numerous reports, inquiries and manifestos involving government agencies, think tanks and lobby groups which have underscored the critical importance of governments, in factoring urbanisation and urbanism into policy matrices; and no shortage of advice to government from researchers, professional bodies, think tanks and industry groups across many specialised sub-fields and disciplines … The challenge for the urban research-policy nexus is to shift that path dependency that is no longer ‘fit for purpose’ in the current climate of change.

Connecting urban research with public policy deliberations in order to support more sustainable futures in Australasian cities and regions has never been more critical. The State of Australasian cities (SOAC) conference was founded to report on the conditions in Australian (and later New Zealand) cities, suburbs and regions. Alongside other organisations and initiatives such as the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI), the Institute of Australian Geographers (IAG), the New Zealand Geographical Society (NZGS), the Planning Institute of Australia (PIA) Future Earth Sustainable Cities and Regions and the Building Better Homes Towns and Communities (BBHTC) National Science Challenge in New Zealand; the SOAC conferences (2003-2021) and Australasian Cities Research Network (ACRN) activities seek to foster and champion interdisciplinary research and the implications for urban policy.

Key themes within the SOAC conferences include an emphasis on nature and environment, economics and economies, social and housing, governance, movement and infrastructure, and health and liveability. In 2021, a new theme Reckoning with Settler-colonialism was established and jointly chaired as a cross-institutional agenda of solidarity by Libby Porter (RMIT), Lara Daley (University of Newcastle), Michelle Thompson-Fawcett (Otago University), Michele Lobo (Deakin University) and Jamal Nabulsi (Australian National University). The theme draws particular attention to the ongoing nature of racism, coloniality and dispossession as a continuing condition of Australasian cities and regions, but also to the urban spaces and places which reflect Indigenous strength, connection and survival. As they powerfully argue in their inaugural conference track theme description,

If our research and urban interventions continue as if colonialism is not a function of our urban histories and our imagined urban futures, then the silence just keeps getting louder. If urban fields and professions fail to engage more broadly and deeply with urban Indigenous lives and knowledges, we will only continue to sideline and silence Indigenous voices. Choosing to remain silent is a practice of colonial power in and of itself … we refuse that silence and rise to the challenge of a reckoning. (Porter et al. 2021)

New critical research and interdisciplinary perspectives are urgently needed to record, appraise, disrupt and contest the complex processes and dynamics of urban and regional change, as well as the human (and non-human species) experiences of these. Yet traditional modes of collegial exchange remain upended as conference and symposium organisers must grapple with continuing restrictions, varying delegate risk appetites, and the technical complexities of hybrid communion. This includes the challenges of radically discontinuous urban data, conducting fieldwork under distancing regimes and disrupted travel, or simply how to engage effectively and with impact among shifting constraints and uncertainties.

The 2021 State of Australian Cities Conference (SOAC) hosted by a consortium of Melbourne-based Universities – RMIT, the University of Melbourne, Monash University and Swinburne University – was the first in the SOAC conference series since its inception 30 years ago, to face this complexity. Meanwhile scientific questions about what constitutes just and sustainable urban and regional transitions are also posed among profound shocks to the conduct of science within the university sector. This includes staff and funding cuts that have posed fundamental questions about the sustainability of academic inquiry itself, through precarity, security of tenure and threats to academic freedom (see Steele and Rickrds 2021). Each of these factors imperil the quality and quantity of urban research at the policy interface. We may live in scientifically interesting times but under conditions few urban researchers would choose.

3. Still Settling Cities and Regions

Who wins and who loses cities and regions, and in the distribution of urban goods, property values and services? How and in what ways is this distribution influenced by urban policy and planning decisions? These questions lie at the heart of the Patrick Troy Memorial Lecture which offers a critical perspective and/or appraisal of social justice and equity in Australasian cities and regions. One of the founders of SOAC, Troy was Emeritus Professor and Director of the ground-breaking Urban Research Programme at the Australian National University. In recognition of his contributions to just and equitable cities and regions, he was made a Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) for ‘eminent service to urban and regional planning, to environmental sustainability and social justice policy and as a mentor and role model’.

In his work Troy highlighted the need to find new ways to better accommodate diverse and changing urban activities, provide and finance urban services, and manage the transition from the urban form and structure inherited from British colonialism to navigate the new urban spaces required for sustainable futures, including new modes and patterns of urban development. This involves: (1) looking backwards to understand how urban growth and development in Australian cities has brought with it largely unrecognised costs, as well as opportunities; (2) looking at the present to see how collective action is finding ways to work to navigate and mitigate the effects of unsustainable growth in this climate of change; and (3) looking to a future where a real focus on sustainable cities and regions is more clearly reflected in public politics, policy and planning (Troy 2012).

Because cities are the places where most people live, where most goods and services are produced and traded and because they are the primary sources of advanced technology and business innovation, what happens in them and to them is of central importance to society. The better they are planned and developed, the more effective they can be. Their structure, nature and function effects the quality of life, social justice, equity and the natural environment. (Troy 1995, p. ix)

Key to this redistributive agenda are the complex issues that surround housing, transport and the provision of urban infrastructure and services: including improving the quality of urban life; inflation of land and house prices; urban public transport, public housing, sewerage, overdevelopment, and long travel times; and how all these issues are shaped by urban politics. There was a strong emphasis in his work on being compassionate to the needs and ambitions of everyday citizens, and to actively engage with the ‘real world’ of policy and planning. Troy repeatedly called for greater support for research and national debate about urban policy issues.

In 2021, the Patrick Troy Memorial Keynote lecture was delivered by Emeritus Professor Stephen Dovers (ANU), in critical conversation with respondents Dr Kate Shaw (University of Melbourne) and Associate Professor Kurt Iveson (University of Sydney). Drawing on a cross-policy sector analysis of the preconditions of Australian policy reform, Dovers takes up the idea of the ‘fair go’ versus ‘the unfair go’ which he argues underpins questions of inequality in urban policy. In particular, he draws attention to the wealth of data sets which demonstrate that urban inequality across numerous indicators is rising – for example in relation to income, wealth distribution, housing affordability, transport, health, liveability, education etc. Why, he asks, have so many urban policy options designed to reduce urban inequality not proceeded?

Dovers points to the scale of the problem and the seriousness of urban equity issues such as the gender pay gap, the social and economic marginalisation of First Nations people, surging loss of biodiversity, a threateningly changed climate, increasingly mistrusted institutions, locked-in housing inequity, overly concentrated media, and post-COVID debt, to name a few. In response he offers four observations/recommendations: (1) addressing urban inequalities requires an integrated, systemic policy response; (2) more evidenced research and consistent messaging on inequality-busting reforms are needed; (3) this evidence and messaging must be promoted by a broad coalition of advocates; and (4) policy reform is rare and hard, but it is possible (italics added). But for this to be achieved requires that the cognitive dissonance around urban inequality in Australia must be addressed.

Many Australians know that inequality exists and find some degree acceptable but, especially on income and wealth, believe the gaps to be very considerably less than they really are. We think this is the land of the fair go, a reasonably egalitarian society, and perhaps suspect things aren’t quite as equal as we would like, but do not comprehend the magnitude of existing and worsening inequality. Politically, that matters a lot.

In response to Dovers, Kate Shaw draws attention to the ways in which urban researchers (including those of us reading this issue of UPR!) often write and talk using esoteric or inaccessible disciplinary jargon, and largely amongst themselves. In doing so urban research, no matter how well intentioned, often does not reach the policymakers and people who need to hear it (see also Taylor and Hurley 2016, Gurran 2018). However, the even bigger problem she contends, is that even if urban researchers are writing and speaking in a way and language that power-makers find easier to understand, these efforts at ‘evidenced, consistent’ messages may not work. There is no genuine appetite she argues for “inequality-busting” policy reforms, and little prospect for change due to the entrenched nature of current “social, sociopathic policy ideologies”. Hope, she argues is not what we need. Her advice for urban researchers is to ‘live our disciplines and our politics’, and to act with care and integrity anyway – and every day.

Kurt Iveson picks up on these tensions and agrees that the picture around inequality and the role of urban research and policy is desperately grim, e.g., what does it mean to talk about equality and justice on stolen land (see Porter 2018)? However, he argues we must take the reconstruction of urban equality though research, just as seriously as we do the evidencing of the many examples of urban policy failure. For Iveson it is the experiences described by both Dovers and Shaw, which are central to turning the status quo around, moving beyond bleak detachment, outright defeat, or retreat to the self-referential. He points to the incredible work of feminist, queer, anti-racist and anti-capitalist scholars for inspiration and guidance, in rethinking and reconnecting the everyday experiences of inequality to civil social movements.

As messed up and unequal as our cities are, there are people living and enacting new forms of equality in the course of their everyday lives, if we care to look.

4. New (HASS) Perspectives on Urban Transitions

New research to emerge from SOAC 2021 highlights the need for, and importance of, diverse approaches and understandings of just transitions in complex, urban contexts. In part this is a stretching of ideas around what constitutes “urban” research in a climate of change. This includes an emphasis on human-nature relationships, global health pandemics, the relationships between care ethics and Country, the social and spatial practices of urban food infrastructure, and the role of artifical intelligence (AI) as a contemporary urban gender agenda. This is also a focus on the politics of urban research itself within precarious university contexts, and the need to reframe and decolonise the science-policy interface around what constitutes ethical innovation and research impact.

The papers in this section traverse diverse perspectives that were recognised through invitations to keynote presentations by the SOAC Scientific Committee or through the award of the Peter Harrison Memorial Prize (PhD) sponsored by the Fenner School of Society and Environment at the Australian National University (ANU). They bring a a Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (HASS) perspective through research that uses novel qualitative and ethnographic approaches as well as creative arts and co-design collaborations. Together these approaches work to disrupt the conventions used in urban research journals (including Urban Policy and Research) around what constitutes legitimate evidence, science and knowledge – for whom, why, when and in what contexts (see also the Pat Troy dialogue between Dovers, Shaw and Iveson above).

Iain White tackles questions of ‘crisis’ in scholarship and policy, reflecting on the problem that research seemingly reveals everything as in crisis, deteriorating and with little prospect of recovery. White then links this concern to the ongoing failure of research to affect policy direction and offers an assessment of how this could be rectified. He draws on the notion of ‘tiny revolts’ offered by theorist Julia Kristeva as a method by which academics can resist oppressive intellectual and institutional practices of knowledge production. White then argues this view helps us recognise that while academic research often attends to power structures and systems, the academy is itself beset by its own practices of power and privilege. In turn, he proposes reflections on these dynamics and the necessity of elevating otherwise marginalised voices among wider tiny revolts of reflexivity, reconfiguration and advocacy. “Where success is congested and mainstream, the tiny revolt of claiming the right to fail offers value in disrupting the treadmill of activity, to induce that pause that can redirect or refuse”.

White's article, a fuller version of the SOAC 2021 Public City Keynote Lecture, is framed as a critical provocation for urban researchers, policymakers and practitioners, and draws inspiration from Indigenous Māori scholars to challenge existing notions of success in the Academy. Tara McAllister et al. (2019) for example questions Indigenous representation within New Zealand Universities in their paper ‘Why isn’t my Professor Māori? As is the disruptive power and critical work of Māori scholars Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012) and Tahu Kukutai et al. (2021) and their calls to decolonise the science-policy interface in order to achieve more equitable outcomes for First Nations communities.

The second research paper is by Gumbaynggirr Custodian Uncle Bud Marshall a Waambung man of the Baga baga bari in collaborative research with his niece and academic Fabri Blacklock and non-Indigenous geographers, Lara Daley (SOAC 2021 Keynote Panellist) and Sarah Wright from the University of Newcastle. The paper is led by First Nations voices and knowledges, via the investigator team, the methodology and the collection and presentation of research data. Together the authors draw on Indigenous methodologies, critical geography and arts-based practices via case studies of towns in Gaumbayniggirr Country to ask,

• What might it mean for truth, respect and sovereignty to underpin the politics and practices of changing and urban(ising) environments?

• Can we/they be more open to more-than-human messages of Country that might unsettle, teach and tell [urban histories, experiences and futures] differently?

• What might it mean to come into proper relationship with Country led by Elders and Custodians?

A particular focus of the paper is a specifically located work of First Nations sculpture, which serves as both physical and symbolic representation of First Nations enduring presence and the opportunity for settler people’s engagement with this presence and its complex implications for knowledge of how settler-colonial society occupies Country. The paper offers insights into growing intellectual and policy engagement with urban places as points of historical and continuing Indigenous presence ‘as Country’. Through the sharing of stories, the article is a gentle, powerful call for the nourishing and re-membering of Country. The presence of Indigenous spaces and places within cities and regions does not exist as a separate entity from the land/sea/skies/weather, but as an important part of the relationship and connection to Country where, “no place in Australia, no matter how colonised or urbanised, exists outside of, or separate to, Aboriginal relational ontologies and more-than-human sovereignties”.

The 2021 SOAC Peter Harrison Prize for most distinctive paper led by a PhD scholar was awarded to Melissa Pinedo Pinto, at the time a PhD candidate with the Centre for Urban Transitions, Swinburne University, now a post-doctoral researcher with Trinity College, Dublin. This paper investigates and conceptualises hotspots of environmental injustices into a typology that can inform the design and planning of responses to such injustices via an ‘ecologically just cities’ framework. Pinto and international colleagues consider distributional injustice, questions of recognition of individuals and communities, problems of participation of such subjects, and the sustaining of human and ecological capabilities for justice.

Drawing on contemporary debates about human-nature relations, the paper challenges the dominant ecosystem services approach to urban settlements that reinforces utilitarian framings of cities and regions, extractive styles of development and the commoditisation of nature. To achieve change they argue requires a shift from approaching nature as the supply of ‘ecosystem services’ to a relational one of mutual respect and care. The typology they developed demonstrates how the needs of non-human nature can be embedded within urban futures that seek to protect and nurture social-ecological systems. They call for new methods and practices that allow for more equitable ways of including nature in decision-making and urban policy.

Bhavna Middha’s paper investigates the institutional politics and practices of food provision and consumption within an inner-urban University. Urban food spaces are often forgotten and ignored as sites of critical infrastructure, but as Middha highlights they are important to attend to within a just urban transitions framework. Using a practice theory framework, the research focuses on a fine-grained ethnographic approach to how space is produced, space management practices are organised, and how these spatial practices connect to other practices (food provisioning, building design, retail practices). The paper focuses on a single detailed case-study to ventilate critical questions in relation to urban place making and governance, the institutional construction of sustainable consumption practices, and wider issues of power and inclusion in space for inner-city universities as part of a broader urban commons.

Middha argues that the transition to a more corporatised model of university governance and operation has reconceived food provision on-campus as one of consumer demand and market supply. This has resulted in institutional ambivalence to the provision of inclusive spaces, nutritional choice and the control of external providers. Urban food infrastructure and on-campus food provisioning offers an important tool and site of intervention for supporting sustainability in cities and regions. Developing sustainable eating spaces on campus is an opportunity for the city and the University to work more closely together by taking advantage of food provisioning and consumption spaces, but also strengthening them to produce more sustainable outcomes.

In the final research paper in this section of the Special Issue, Yolande Strengers brings questions of digital automation, consumption and transformation to bear on urban questions, particularly as they relate to the sphere of domesticity and the home. Through conversation with the Amazon ‘Alexa’ digital assistant, Strengers considers how the home has been reconstituted from a site of retreat from the wider public sphere into an infrastructural nexus, particularly under the restrictive conditions of pandemic control and subject to an array of ‘solutions’ aimed at resolving manifold social demands and relations. This follows calls from urban researcher Sophia Maalsen (2020) to enlist AI as co-ethnographers in urban research. Through this entry point Strengers turns to the question of who produces digital infrastructures and the ways that wider social fissures are reinscribed in both digital, home and city dynamics.

In this article, Strengers builds on her co-authored book ‘The Smart Wife’ (with Jenny Kennedy, 2020) to draw attention to the ways Alexa’s personality masks the environmental and gendered effects it reproduces. ‘Home’ can be a deeply gendered and insecure place and the friendly feminisation of AI can conceal the potential for harm: racist and sexist algorithms, security and privacy threats, links to surveillance and data sets, and impacts to the planet from the extraction of minerals or generation of e-waste. In response, Strengers calls for ethical principles, frameworks and regulations to be embedded at the heart of the AI industry and advanced technology disciplines. As she emphasises this is a critical urban agenda for cities and regions, “Alexa and her entourage pose serious sociotechnical challenges that we must continue to engage with not just from the margins, but from the centre of this technology’s emergence”.

5. National Urban Policy: Politics as Usual?

The final section of this SOAC Special Issue around just urban transitions is dedicated to a brief review of national policy in the 2022 Australian Federal election. Australia has recently changed the complexion of the federal parliament where after nine years in office the Liberal-National party coalition has departed office in favour of a Labour majority government accompanied by a sizeable cohort of Green and independent members. Policy statements prepared before the election by, then Labour opposition shadow spokesperson on cities, Andrew Giles, Minister for Cities Paul Fletcher, and Greens Party Cities spokesperson Barbara Pocock are included, as well as an invited opinion commentary by Marcus Spiller. This reflects the emphasis in the Journal of Urban Policy and Research first editorial that “effective planning and policy can only be achieved through a recognition of the inter-relatedness of urban affairs; problems have economic, social and political causes and outcomes” (UPR 1982, p. 1).

Given the challenges facing cities reported during SOAC 2021 and previous conferences, it is timely to briefly survey the recent and potential policy directions for cities. In reflecting on the 2022 election platforms a brief retrospective on recent past federal urban policy is merited. Since the 2007 Australian federal election, cities have held largely continuous attention in federal policy, albeit of varying intensity. The main advance was the creation in 2008 of the ongoing Infrastructure Australia advisory agency and the Major Cities Unit, which operated from 2008 to 2013. The period of 2008 to 2013 saw close policy interest in cities, though much of this took the form of reviewing, positioning and reporting rather than substantive policy change.

Following a period of quiescence over 2013–2015, the federal government refreshed its perspective, through a focus on ‘smart’ cities and suburbs, via a digital and technology infrastructure funding programme and later a set of ‘city deals’ coordinating federal, state and local investment in selected outer suburban and regional locations (Pill et al. 2020). A more recent focus was national settlement planning through the national population plan accompanied by highly selective funding allocations to questionable suburban transport projects (ANAO 2021). While scholars of urban policy may welcome the sustained federal interest in cities since 2007, they may also lament the limited ambition of such policy and its systemic extent, and derisory articulation with the research emanating from the Journal of Urban Policy and Research (UPR) and the State of Australasian Cities Conferences (SOAC).

Labour spokesperson Andrew Giles sets out his party’s urban platform drawing on previous statements by leader Anthony Albanese (Giles 2022). Observers may note that Albanese was infrastructure minister from 2007 to 2013. Measures in the 2022 Labour agenda include extending City Deals to ‘City Partnerships’ signalling a more collaborative approach to coordinated urban investment. The commitment to a national urban policy framework reflects the National Urban Policy launched by Labour in 2011 but not substantially implemented. Re-establishment of the Australian Cities and Suburbs unit appears as if a reinstatement of the Major Cities Unit. The promise of an Urban Policy Forum is less clear, but perhaps reflects the recommendation in the Australian Academy of Science’s Decade Plan for Urban Systems Transformation launched at SOAC in 2019 (O’Donnell et al. 2019). The commitment to the State of Australian Cities Report is to be welcomed, though greater collaboration with the UPR and SOAC research community could greatly strengthen this effort compared to the previous reports produced under Labour during 2010–2015. Finally, the commitment to bring local government back into the National Cabinet arrangements (formerly the Council of Australian Governments) is a welcome albeit modest element of the Labour scheme.

The remainder of the Labour statement is largely about position and emphasis including adjustments to the urban consequences of COVID particularly for central city zones as well as 20-minute neighbourhoods, plus improved standards and data. Climate change is identified as a further emphasis, with a role for City Deals in supporting climate and sustainability aims. While welcome, the Labour agenda seems incremental rather than transformative. The partial reformulation of policy it offers does not imply a marked discontinuity from the Coalition agenda. While scholars might urge for a much more ambitious urban agenda, we might also fear that the pattern of distraction by global disruptions that limited the 2007–2013 Labour government’s progress on urban affairs might find its repeat in the emerging crises besetting the incoming 2022 administration.

By contrast to Labour’s scheme, the Coalition’s urban statement largely serves as a retrospective justification for its extant policy programme, focusing on the $19.3 billion in City Deal funding packages. The former Minister Fletcher’s (2022) statement emphasises the latest $1.8 billion contribution to South East Queensland in anticipation of the 2032 Olympic Games hosting and the Western Sydney City Deal comprising a mix of infrastructure, land-use and governance actions structured around the new western Sydney airport. In observing this legacy, we might note that it deserves greater attention from scholars, having only been lightly addressed in the literature which seems inadequate given that it comprises arguably the longest-running and most wide-ranging Coalition urban policy in Australian history. Although the Minister’s statement does not explicitly propose, in the absence of other commitments it can be assumed that his party’s principal urban policy platform is the continuation of the City Deals.

The statement by the Greens from Barbara Pocock (2022) focuses less on the institutional coordination and improvement arrangements and emphasis of both Labour and the Coalition, to commit that party to a platform of substantial operational outcomes focused on equity and sustainability. Specifically, three main concerns are identified: climate action, urban design and transport, and housing. The Greens identify climate as the most important urban policy challenge, to be addressed through mitigation via phase-out of coal and gas, and adaptation through urban greening consistent with the Paris Agreement. On design and transport the party commits to renewably fuelled public affordable and reliable ‘multi-form’ transport, combined with access to education and employment to avoid long commutes. The Greens commit to accelerating the shift to electric vehicles, plus public transport walking and cycling. Finally, they propose tax changes to avoid house price inflation plus construction of a million homes funded by taxation of billionaires, corporations and the removal of polluter subsidies.

When viewed overall the commitments from the parties signal some shared vision but also significant differences in their emphasis and ambition. There is limited detail about the platforms in any of the parties’ statements, reflecting similar patterns in their main platforms. While we might welcome the return to a more visibly positive framing of urban affairs at the federal level following the 2022 election, we might also lament the moderate ambition that this shift offers. In this vein Marcus Spiller’s (2022) normative contribution deserves close reading. Spiller notes the importance of clarity in the role of the Commonwealth in cities which should reflect, he argues, principles of subsidiarity, vertical fiscal responsibility, as well as national agreement on shared urban goals. This latter question, Spiller argues should be the focal dimension, with federal policy responding to issues of clear national importance-or dividend-including where international agreements like the Paris agreement apply, rather than the more quotidian state and local concerns like car parks and lavatories.

Spiller also calls for a national policy focus on urban systems rather than places, and on the use of fiscal incentives to align states and territories with national objectives but leaving them the implementation task. The past nine years of government, including an Australian National Audit Office (2021) report, have shown that this delineation of national urban policy roles has been often blurred where the national interest has been interpreted as identical to party electoral interest. It might be hoped that the new government carefully considers Spiller’s caution. Whether or not this is the case will remain a question of interest to scholars, among a wider need for scholarly attention to the emergent urban policy agenda over the period to the 2025 federal election and beyond. Let us hope that the policy fodder for deliberation at future SOACs in 2023 and 2025 becomes much richer than is currently signalled by the 2022 political party platforms, including insights from across the Australasian cities context such as New Zealand.

6. Conclusion

Critical questions around what constitutes just adaptation, resilience and recovery for Australasian cities and regions are being debated, among economic and environmental transformations that are spatially and socially differentiated. Experiences of climate change, unsettled coloniality, declining housing affordability, employment restructuring, democratic irruption, digital disruption, rewilding nature, contested social and cultural identities, upscaling disasters, and emergent infrastructure fragilities, among other urban and regional reconfigurations, have deepened, and in some cases revealed new urban challenges and fissures. The COVID-19 pandemic has added an additional disruptive dynamic to these changes. The move away from disciplinary silos and efforts to develop a systematic interdisciplinary and evidence-based research agenda around urban policy is vital and needed.

The State of Australasian Cities (SOAC) conference was founded to report on the conditions in Australian (and later New Zealand) cities, suburbs and regions. The papers in this special issue reflect that purpose by addressing contemporary themes and challenges of conducting research under disruptive and transformative historical moments, of speaking to and within policy systems and institutions that operate through logics that are often inattentive or dismissive of evidence. They also reflect current concerns with the unresolved politics of settler-colonial presence on First Nations Country of the need to nurture nature in cities, the problems of consumption relations in place, and on the increasingly complicated negotiations between people as consumers of digital services and just transitions and urban configurations. Debate and commentary are are also needed in urban research and policy.

The papers in this issue are testament to the preparedness of urban scholars to offer new approaches to the investigation of conditions in Australasian cities and regions. The State of Australasian Cities (SOAC) Conference was established with a determined practical aim, to shed light onto the empirical patterns and dynamics of urban change and make these available to inform policy. There is a continuing need for rigorous empirical reporting based on multivariate data sets, but there is a clear contribution to be made by inquiries drawing on Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (HASS) perspectives into specific aspects of the urban that are productive and insightful. That the Journal of Urban Policy and Research is the venue for this rich, interdisciplinary work is a testament to the evolving contribution the journal itself has made to knowledge and understanding of the state of Australasian cities.