Glen Searle is Honorary Associate Professor in Planning at the University of Sydney. He was formerly Director of the Planning Programs at the University of Technology Sydney and the University of Queensland. He has held urban policy and planning positions at the UK Department of the Environment and at the New South Wales departments of Decentralisation and Development, Treasury, and Planing, where he was Manager of Policy.
Climate change poses risks of inundation to low-lying coastal cities and may cause residential re... more Climate change poses risks of inundation to low-lying coastal cities and may cause residential relocation and change in housing demand. Taking the City of Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia as a case study, this paper reports on a survey that investigates the potential responses of residents living in the coastal city to flood risks and how the responses may relate to their socio-economic status. Through a combined online and mail-based survey, our data show that people’s perceptions of flooding have an important impact on their relocation choices. Their perceptions and relocation choices are associated with their socio-economic background. Furthermore, residents’ preferences of dwelling types appear to be affected by the level of flood risks we hypothesise in the survey. The findings from this study provide empirical evidence for future residential zoning and urban development.
This paper considers whether existing approaches for quantifying variables in cellular automata (... more This paper considers whether existing approaches for quantifying variables in cellular automata (CA) modelling adequately incorporate all the relevant factors in typical actor decisions underpinning urban development. A survey of developers and planners is used to identify factors they incorporate to allow for or proceed with development, using South East Queensland as a reference region. Three types of decision factors are identified and ranked in order of importance: those that are already modelled in CA applications; those that are not modelled but are quantifiable; and those that are not (easily) quantifiable because they are subjective in nature. Factors identified in the second category include development height/scale, open space supply, and existing infrastructure capacity. Factors identified in the third category include political intent, community opposition, and lifestyle quality. Drawing on our analysis of these factors we suggest how and to what extent survey data might...
We study the scaling of (i) numbers of workers and aggregate incomes by occupational categories a... more We study the scaling of (i) numbers of workers and aggregate incomes by occupational categories against city size, and (ii) total incomes against numbers of workers in different occupations, across the functional metropolitan areas of Australia and the USA. The number of workers and aggregate incomes in specific high-income knowledge economy-related occupations and industries show increasing returns to scale by city size, showing that localization economies within particular industries account for superlinear effects. However, when total urban area incomes and/or gross domestic products are regressed using a generalized Cobb–Douglas function against the number of workers in different occupations as labour inputs, constant returns to scale in productivity against city size are observed. This implies that the urbanization economies at the whole city level show linear scaling or constant returns to scale. Furthermore, industrial and occupational organizations, not population size, larg...
Economic reform in China has resulted in rapid urbanisation over the past three decades, changing... more Economic reform in China has resulted in rapid urbanisation over the past three decades, changing the urban and rural landscape dramatically. A large amount of farmland was developed, leading to conflict between construction demand and farmland protection. In response, the “Link Policy” was proposed in 2005 that seeks to concurrently preserve farmland while providing for urban expansion through land exchange. The effectiveness of the Link Policy has not been systematically investigated. The purpose of this study is to analyse and evaluate outcomes of the Link Policy objectives from both a participant and investigator’s interpretive perspective. Ezhou, the first experimental city to implement the Link Policy in Hubei Province in central China, was selected as a case study area. Eight different communities in Ezhou were visited and 160 semi-structured interviews were conducted with resettled rural residents in March 2016. A combination of interviews and investigator field observations were used to evaluate the Link Policy objectives. The results show that participants recognize and support improving rural living conditions and coordinating urban-rural development, but the Link Policy failed to achieve the objectives of preserving farmland, protecting farmers’ land use rights and interests, and facilitating agricultural production. Participants perceived concentrated resettlement communities to be more efficient in land use compared to more expansive rural settlements, but vacant apartments for commercial use in resettlement areas account for a large proportion of land suggesting inefficiency in the land exchanges. We suggest policy changes to achieve more successful implementation of the Link Policy.
This article describes the characteristics of a distinctively Australian paradigm of metropolitan... more This article describes the characteristics of a distinctively Australian paradigm of metropolitan planning which reflect circumstances of governance, infrastructure provision and concentration on suburban expansion into surrounding countryside. The resultant plans are detailed in their arrangement of land use and communications, comprehensive and long term. There are indications this paradigm may be changing as these dominating influences alter in character. Contemporary metropolitan strategic planning in Europe and America is overviewed to establish the distinctiveness of the Australian paradigm. Changes in plan-shaping forces are leading the emergence of a new European strategic spatial planning paradigm very different to Australia’s. Strategic spatial planning in the United States, while heterogeneous, has examples that reinforce the idea of an Australian paradigm in terms of the influence of governance structure and infrastructure agency on the level of spatial plan detail.
This chapter explores Sydney’s knowledge-based development, surveying reasons for its concentrati... more This chapter explores Sydney’s knowledge-based development, surveying reasons for its concentration of such development including the role of planning. Sydney’s high knowledge industry concentration is seen as the product of the city’s commercial leadership, its high share of transnational corporations associated with Sydney’s global economy role, and its high proportion of skilled immigration. Such factors have resulted in a knowledge sector that is concentrated around central and near northern Sydney, and in the formation of several distinct clusters of knowledge-based industries. Case studies of the information technology and telecommunication industry and the multimedia industry suggest that Sydney’s concentration of corporate headquarters has been a key driver of growth in these industries, while the presence of a large pool of computer-based skills has stimulated and fed multimedia development. Metropolitan planning strategies have lacked firm principles for the development of...
One of the most striking trends in social science research over the last quarter century or so ha... more One of the most striking trends in social science research over the last quarter century or so has been the increasing dominance of cross-disciplinary journals as preferred publication outlets. In the domain covered by Urban Policy and Research, journals such as Urban Studies and the Environment and Planning series have seen a huge increase in the number of articles published each year. The rise of cross-disciplinary research under the ‘urban’ banner reflects several things. A key one is that more than half the world’s population now lives in urban areas, so that global problems and issues now have an increasingly urban context. Contemporaneously, we appear to be in the midst of a wave of academic interest in cities, as overviewed by Gleeson (2011), Harris (2012) and Scott and Storper (2014). As Scott and Storper (2014) set out, the increasing dominance of the urban realm has led to concerns that the urban is now an ‘incoherent’ concept, that urban society now equates with modern society as a whole and that the urban scale is now indistinguishable from the global scale. This is not necessarily entirely negative for urban research and policymaking. Urban issues always need to be seen as located within, and constituted by, politico-socioeconomic flows and networks that are increasingly global in nature. The admonition of E.M. Forster to ‘only connect’ has never beenmore appropriate. However, if contemporary urban research requires us to make connections to everything else, does this mean that the ‘urban’ is no longer really distinguishable as Scott and Storper hypothesise? To paraphrase Wildavsky (1973), if the urban is everything, maybe it’s nothing. Scott and Storper answer such claims by arguing, firstly, that cities are a product of two main processes: the dynamics of agglomeration and polarisation, and the ‘unfolding’ of an associated nexus of locations, land uses and interactions. Secondly, they argue that this framework can be used to distinguish intrinsically urban phenomena from other social phenomena. Implicit in this is the notion that global processes result in uneven local outcomes. These outcomes are increasingly urban in character. Thus, an urban journal continues to have some rationale for its existence. For Urban Policy and Research journal, the rationale for its existence extends beyond the mere demonstration that the urban is a distinct and important field of inquiry. The journal was started to provide a forum to address the dearth of academic research and policy analysis that could provide critical thinking and understanding about Australian city problems and issues, and to provide more wisdom in policy debates about how to address these issues. Therefore, the ‘policy’ dimension of the journal was deliberately set before the ‘research’ dimension of the journal. The urban nature of the journal means that the potential range of articles is vast, threatening the coherence of its offerings. In view of this,
ABSTRACT Under the contemporary compact cities paradigm of sustainability, public spaces have bec... more ABSTRACT Under the contemporary compact cities paradigm of sustainability, public spaces have become increasingly important and are increasingly contested. This article uses real property rights as a lens through which to analyse this contestation in an Australian city, focusing on the Darling Harbour scheme in Sydney as a vehicle for exploration. Applying an analytical hierarchy process (AHP) to test a “mosaic” of property rights, we map Darling Harbour as a heterogeneous urban commons comprising a set of spaces, each with their own distinct perceived (and real) property rights and conditions that potentially constrain who enjoys such spaces in the contemporary city.
The new City of Cities metropolitan strategy (Department of Planning, 2005a) is probably the most... more The new City of Cities metropolitan strategy (Department of Planning, 2005a) is probably the most comprehensive planning strategy that Sydney has had since its first strategy over 50 years ago. And in many ways it reads more like that plan than any of the other ones since then. It has, or has set in motion, an old-fashioned level of planning detail that recent strategic planning outside Australia has forsaken. New employment zone locations, a retail hierarchy that government consultations have extended to 1000 identified centres, new urban sector structures, subregional dwelling targets, and more, give the strategy an almost heroically detailed pathway for the government’s intended future for Sydney. To a significant extent, this detail has been delivered at the behest of the developer sector, which lobbied strongly for a new strategy. The Property Council of Australia document Metro Strategy: A Property Industry Perspective (Property Council of Australia, c.2004) stated that a strategic plan was needed to give direction to private sector investment decisions, and to give a framework for local planning. To achieve this, a new plan needed, inter alia, to set locationand density-specific targets for population and employment, and to set job targets for key centres (Property Council of Australia, c.2004). Indeed, the development industry vision is writ large across the City of Cities strategy and its supporting documents. The strategy’s commitment to a strong centres and corridors employment policy, and structure planning for major new urban release areas in the northwest and south-west sectors, were both central recommendations in the Property Council’s document. Subsequent state government decisions to set up a redevelopment authority for inner city Redfern–Waterloo and to fund more metropolitan infrastructure through government loans also reflect recommendations in that document. This review describes the main elements of the City of Cities strategy. It then nominates key planning issues facing Sydney, and assesses the performance of the strategy in regard to each of these issues.
Climate change poses risks of inundation to low-lying coastal cities and may cause residential re... more Climate change poses risks of inundation to low-lying coastal cities and may cause residential relocation and change in housing demand. Taking the City of Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia as a case study, this paper reports on a survey that investigates the potential responses of residents living in the coastal city to flood risks and how the responses may relate to their socio-economic status. Through a combined online and mail-based survey, our data show that people’s perceptions of flooding have an important impact on their relocation choices. Their perceptions and relocation choices are associated with their socio-economic background. Furthermore, residents’ preferences of dwelling types appear to be affected by the level of flood risks we hypothesise in the survey. The findings from this study provide empirical evidence for future residential zoning and urban development.
This paper considers whether existing approaches for quantifying variables in cellular automata (... more This paper considers whether existing approaches for quantifying variables in cellular automata (CA) modelling adequately incorporate all the relevant factors in typical actor decisions underpinning urban development. A survey of developers and planners is used to identify factors they incorporate to allow for or proceed with development, using South East Queensland as a reference region. Three types of decision factors are identified and ranked in order of importance: those that are already modelled in CA applications; those that are not modelled but are quantifiable; and those that are not (easily) quantifiable because they are subjective in nature. Factors identified in the second category include development height/scale, open space supply, and existing infrastructure capacity. Factors identified in the third category include political intent, community opposition, and lifestyle quality. Drawing on our analysis of these factors we suggest how and to what extent survey data might...
We study the scaling of (i) numbers of workers and aggregate incomes by occupational categories a... more We study the scaling of (i) numbers of workers and aggregate incomes by occupational categories against city size, and (ii) total incomes against numbers of workers in different occupations, across the functional metropolitan areas of Australia and the USA. The number of workers and aggregate incomes in specific high-income knowledge economy-related occupations and industries show increasing returns to scale by city size, showing that localization economies within particular industries account for superlinear effects. However, when total urban area incomes and/or gross domestic products are regressed using a generalized Cobb–Douglas function against the number of workers in different occupations as labour inputs, constant returns to scale in productivity against city size are observed. This implies that the urbanization economies at the whole city level show linear scaling or constant returns to scale. Furthermore, industrial and occupational organizations, not population size, larg...
Economic reform in China has resulted in rapid urbanisation over the past three decades, changing... more Economic reform in China has resulted in rapid urbanisation over the past three decades, changing the urban and rural landscape dramatically. A large amount of farmland was developed, leading to conflict between construction demand and farmland protection. In response, the “Link Policy” was proposed in 2005 that seeks to concurrently preserve farmland while providing for urban expansion through land exchange. The effectiveness of the Link Policy has not been systematically investigated. The purpose of this study is to analyse and evaluate outcomes of the Link Policy objectives from both a participant and investigator’s interpretive perspective. Ezhou, the first experimental city to implement the Link Policy in Hubei Province in central China, was selected as a case study area. Eight different communities in Ezhou were visited and 160 semi-structured interviews were conducted with resettled rural residents in March 2016. A combination of interviews and investigator field observations were used to evaluate the Link Policy objectives. The results show that participants recognize and support improving rural living conditions and coordinating urban-rural development, but the Link Policy failed to achieve the objectives of preserving farmland, protecting farmers’ land use rights and interests, and facilitating agricultural production. Participants perceived concentrated resettlement communities to be more efficient in land use compared to more expansive rural settlements, but vacant apartments for commercial use in resettlement areas account for a large proportion of land suggesting inefficiency in the land exchanges. We suggest policy changes to achieve more successful implementation of the Link Policy.
This article describes the characteristics of a distinctively Australian paradigm of metropolitan... more This article describes the characteristics of a distinctively Australian paradigm of metropolitan planning which reflect circumstances of governance, infrastructure provision and concentration on suburban expansion into surrounding countryside. The resultant plans are detailed in their arrangement of land use and communications, comprehensive and long term. There are indications this paradigm may be changing as these dominating influences alter in character. Contemporary metropolitan strategic planning in Europe and America is overviewed to establish the distinctiveness of the Australian paradigm. Changes in plan-shaping forces are leading the emergence of a new European strategic spatial planning paradigm very different to Australia’s. Strategic spatial planning in the United States, while heterogeneous, has examples that reinforce the idea of an Australian paradigm in terms of the influence of governance structure and infrastructure agency on the level of spatial plan detail.
This chapter explores Sydney’s knowledge-based development, surveying reasons for its concentrati... more This chapter explores Sydney’s knowledge-based development, surveying reasons for its concentration of such development including the role of planning. Sydney’s high knowledge industry concentration is seen as the product of the city’s commercial leadership, its high share of transnational corporations associated with Sydney’s global economy role, and its high proportion of skilled immigration. Such factors have resulted in a knowledge sector that is concentrated around central and near northern Sydney, and in the formation of several distinct clusters of knowledge-based industries. Case studies of the information technology and telecommunication industry and the multimedia industry suggest that Sydney’s concentration of corporate headquarters has been a key driver of growth in these industries, while the presence of a large pool of computer-based skills has stimulated and fed multimedia development. Metropolitan planning strategies have lacked firm principles for the development of...
One of the most striking trends in social science research over the last quarter century or so ha... more One of the most striking trends in social science research over the last quarter century or so has been the increasing dominance of cross-disciplinary journals as preferred publication outlets. In the domain covered by Urban Policy and Research, journals such as Urban Studies and the Environment and Planning series have seen a huge increase in the number of articles published each year. The rise of cross-disciplinary research under the ‘urban’ banner reflects several things. A key one is that more than half the world’s population now lives in urban areas, so that global problems and issues now have an increasingly urban context. Contemporaneously, we appear to be in the midst of a wave of academic interest in cities, as overviewed by Gleeson (2011), Harris (2012) and Scott and Storper (2014). As Scott and Storper (2014) set out, the increasing dominance of the urban realm has led to concerns that the urban is now an ‘incoherent’ concept, that urban society now equates with modern society as a whole and that the urban scale is now indistinguishable from the global scale. This is not necessarily entirely negative for urban research and policymaking. Urban issues always need to be seen as located within, and constituted by, politico-socioeconomic flows and networks that are increasingly global in nature. The admonition of E.M. Forster to ‘only connect’ has never beenmore appropriate. However, if contemporary urban research requires us to make connections to everything else, does this mean that the ‘urban’ is no longer really distinguishable as Scott and Storper hypothesise? To paraphrase Wildavsky (1973), if the urban is everything, maybe it’s nothing. Scott and Storper answer such claims by arguing, firstly, that cities are a product of two main processes: the dynamics of agglomeration and polarisation, and the ‘unfolding’ of an associated nexus of locations, land uses and interactions. Secondly, they argue that this framework can be used to distinguish intrinsically urban phenomena from other social phenomena. Implicit in this is the notion that global processes result in uneven local outcomes. These outcomes are increasingly urban in character. Thus, an urban journal continues to have some rationale for its existence. For Urban Policy and Research journal, the rationale for its existence extends beyond the mere demonstration that the urban is a distinct and important field of inquiry. The journal was started to provide a forum to address the dearth of academic research and policy analysis that could provide critical thinking and understanding about Australian city problems and issues, and to provide more wisdom in policy debates about how to address these issues. Therefore, the ‘policy’ dimension of the journal was deliberately set before the ‘research’ dimension of the journal. The urban nature of the journal means that the potential range of articles is vast, threatening the coherence of its offerings. In view of this,
ABSTRACT Under the contemporary compact cities paradigm of sustainability, public spaces have bec... more ABSTRACT Under the contemporary compact cities paradigm of sustainability, public spaces have become increasingly important and are increasingly contested. This article uses real property rights as a lens through which to analyse this contestation in an Australian city, focusing on the Darling Harbour scheme in Sydney as a vehicle for exploration. Applying an analytical hierarchy process (AHP) to test a “mosaic” of property rights, we map Darling Harbour as a heterogeneous urban commons comprising a set of spaces, each with their own distinct perceived (and real) property rights and conditions that potentially constrain who enjoys such spaces in the contemporary city.
The new City of Cities metropolitan strategy (Department of Planning, 2005a) is probably the most... more The new City of Cities metropolitan strategy (Department of Planning, 2005a) is probably the most comprehensive planning strategy that Sydney has had since its first strategy over 50 years ago. And in many ways it reads more like that plan than any of the other ones since then. It has, or has set in motion, an old-fashioned level of planning detail that recent strategic planning outside Australia has forsaken. New employment zone locations, a retail hierarchy that government consultations have extended to 1000 identified centres, new urban sector structures, subregional dwelling targets, and more, give the strategy an almost heroically detailed pathway for the government’s intended future for Sydney. To a significant extent, this detail has been delivered at the behest of the developer sector, which lobbied strongly for a new strategy. The Property Council of Australia document Metro Strategy: A Property Industry Perspective (Property Council of Australia, c.2004) stated that a strategic plan was needed to give direction to private sector investment decisions, and to give a framework for local planning. To achieve this, a new plan needed, inter alia, to set locationand density-specific targets for population and employment, and to set job targets for key centres (Property Council of Australia, c.2004). Indeed, the development industry vision is writ large across the City of Cities strategy and its supporting documents. The strategy’s commitment to a strong centres and corridors employment policy, and structure planning for major new urban release areas in the northwest and south-west sectors, were both central recommendations in the Property Council’s document. Subsequent state government decisions to set up a redevelopment authority for inner city Redfern–Waterloo and to fund more metropolitan infrastructure through government loans also reflect recommendations in that document. This review describes the main elements of the City of Cities strategy. It then nominates key planning issues facing Sydney, and assesses the performance of the strategy in regard to each of these issues.
Uploads
Papers by Glen Searle