Australian urban and regional planning in the Twenty First century

Abstract

In 1914, George Taylor wrote Town Planning for Australia: this was Australia’s first book on urban planning. Written for a new, and highly urbanized Australia, it proposed a case for planning to achieve the ideal city: a more beautiful environment, improved living conditions, a safer city, a better class of individual, and more co-operative and cohesive communities (Taylor, 2015). The diverse interests it raised led into the first university level planning qualification, at Sydney University from 1949 (Freestone, 2015). One hundred years later, planning in Australia has grown substantially and matured as a profession. Australia now has 24 accredited educational programs in place, a steadily increasing number of planning academics, and a growing body of planning research (J. Byrne, Chapter 26). Student enrolments continue to grow and between 2000 and 2013 the number of employed planners had more than doubled across Australia (Mayere and Grantt-Smith, Chapter 25). Planners today work in diverse urban and regional contexts and across fields of planning and the scholarship of urban and regional planning has evolved since its early beginnings with this broadening base (Freestone, Chapter 8 ). It is timely to ask, where is planning today in Australia? What would a snapshot of critical essays on urban planning reveal about the practice of planning and the key challenges it confronts? What would it reveal about the state of planning policy and extent of planning action in urban and regional Australia?