How different are Australian cities (original) (raw)

The Political Construction of the City-Region: Notes from Sydney

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2007

City-region theory -fuzzy as the boundaries of such a theory may be -centres on the claim that the territorial basis and organizational architecture of the global economy is now a mosaic of globally connected city-regions rather than nations. Despite some intuitive appeal, there is a growing body of critique which targets specific frailties arising from the theoretical reliance in such arguments on a global capitalist-logic and, relatedly, the focus on global exchange relations. In exploring the limits of these theoretical tendencies, this paper provides a critical account of the processual and practical formation of Sydney (NSW, Australia) as a city-regional space of governance. It pays particular attention to the contingent emergence of Sydney's metropolitan policy regionalism through political mediations of the particular and complex politics elicited by the spatial distributional consequences of city-region development. Its concluding argument is that city-region formation must be understood as an ongoing and multiscalar process without autonomy from the national political economy or from its territory.

URBAN HISTORY AND THE FUTURE OF AUSTRALIAN CITIES

Australian Economic History Review, 2009

Urban growth is a major theme in economic development and a policy imperative for developed countries that seek to create sustainable cities. We argue that the past weighs heavily on the ability of societies to sustainably manage urban environments. The policy implications of urban history are revealed in comparisons of cities across times and between places. The special issue presents some of the best recent work on the economic and social history of Australian cities. We aim to encourage historians to incorporate urban variables into studies of historical processes and to persuade policymakers to consider historical trends in their analysis.

Understanding Sydney as a global city

2005

There is an ascendant academic argument that key economic processes are increasingly built at the scale of the city and, in turn, that successful urban economies are increasingly detached from their traditional hinterlands. Cities, in this city-centric global economy, are argued to be immersed in and driven by globalised networks and connections. The process of a city becoming global, then, means that traditional territorial networks and linkages are variously dislodged, transformed and abandoned. While this argument is intuitively persuasive, it has tended to be underpinned by generalised analyses that are thin on their treatment of change drivers and on the new ways that cities now function. The temptation is for the emergence of a post-national metro-centric global economy to be assumed and for this assumption to direct the nature of urban economy inquiry. Drawing on the example of Sydney, in this paper we argue for the need to develop more grounded theoretical understandings of what drives contemporary accumulation and distribution processes in a global city. We sketch what might be learned-theoretically and empirically-from tracing the 'reach' of Sydney's economy through changing patterns of materials, information and financial flows to produce a spatialised political economy of the city. We argue that this grounded understanding will leave us better positioned, first, to understand Sydney's connection to a global urban hierarchy, second, to critically assess claims regarding the nature of that hierarchy and, third, to devise management strategies aimed to produce more efficient, equitable and sustainable urban outcomes.

Making ‘Global Sydney’: Spatial Imaginaries, Worlding and Strategic Plans

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2015

This article critically examines the expression of global spatial imaginaries in urban policy and planning. Following recent calls to understand how the global is 'made up' in and through cities, we argue for the usefulness of Roy and Ong's concept of 'worlding'. By analysing how strategic spatial plans envisage 'Global Sydney', the article reveals a constitutive spatial imaginary informed by the articulation of three interrelated elements: global city standards, comparative techniques and extra-local policy models. Unpacking how cities are selectively worlded through spatial imaginaries, the article advances an approach to urban globality as actively cultivated and differentially produced.