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Occupation of non-compliant temporary dwellings as an informal stage in the achievement of permanent, primarily owner-built suburban housing is a global phenomenon although, until recently, much of the urban planning literature conveyed the notion that this type of informal urbanism existed only in the global south. Yet a number of studies reveal that comparable informal urbanism existed in the global North throughout the twentieth century, in the form of makeshift housing on purchased land surrounding cities and towns in France, Canada, England, Greece, Portugal and Spain, however, these dwellings did not necessarily lead to housing security for their occupants. References to temporary dwellings in the Australian literature indicated that urban informality existed at an appreciable scale on the fringes of towns and cities in Australia following the Second World War. This article highlights the distinctive Australian story. It surveys the international examples and compares them with the phenomenon as it played out in the outer suburbs of metropolitan Sydney. The article concludes by suggesting that a unique conjunction of circumstances, namely wartime legislation, the availability of affordable land, unprecedented household financial security, and communal subsidization of services enabled many low-income Sydney households to successfully transition from temporary dwellings to conventional home-ownership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her lifetime Florence Taylor was celebrated as an advocate of town planning reform in Australia. Based in Sydney, she trained as an architect but spent most of her long professional life as a publisher and trade journalist, developing strong ties with the building industry. Unified by a strong environmental determinist position, early preoccupations with eradicating slums segued into numerous practical suggestions for improving city efficiency, focusing on urban renewal and traffic planning. Taylor was nonetheless often critical of planning in practice. As a businesswoman, she became antagonistic to planning as an activity of the modern state because of its apparent privileging of the public sector and over-regulation of private enterprise and everyday life. This ideological tension became acute in the 1940s as planning moved from its early foundation in propaganda and voluntary advocacy towards statutory oversight. While Taylor's life and career continued to be celebrated by her professional and social peers into the 1950s, her identification with mainstream town planning declined. This paper explores the contradictions in Florence Taylor's encounters with planning in shifting from advocate to antagonist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines the historical relationship between planning legislation, planning practice and planning education in Italy and Australia by identifying the positive and negative roles of institutional influences and the emergence of professional planning communities. The key findings revolve around the gap between plan preparation and plan implementation, and the role of institutions and professional communities in resisting political interference and maintaining a technocratic imperative within planning systems. While the exertion of professional power can be seen to achieve positive planning and development outcomes, it is often at the expense of the democratic traditions that have come to characterize postmodern planning systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Celebrated architect and city planner Daniel Hudson Burnham enjoyed a rise to fame in the aftermath of his widely acclaimed achievement as Director of Works for the World's Columbian Exposition, held in his adopted Chicago in 1893. Roughly in parallel with Burnham's rise, town planning movements were coalescing in Australia, and it would not be long until the Chicagoan's name was circulating in Australian professional circles. This is a pilot study broadly aimed at chronicling and interpreting Australian awareness of Daniel Burnham at the turn of the twentieth century. More specifically, it is concerned with the reception of Burnham's civic design ideals and why some believed them to be of antipodean relevance. Their Australian impact, however, is beyond the present study's scope. Reciprocally, this essay also surveys Burnham's knowledge of Australia. Special emphasis is given to Burnham within the context of the Australia's Federal Capital competition (1912), arguing that although the Chicagoan did not compete, he profoundly, albeit vicariously, impacted the capital's design. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The City of Sydney's urban planning philosophy and practice experienced fundamental changes in the 1980s and 1990s. In the post-World War decades, Sydney's urban planning was characterized by a laissez faire tradition which exempted any attempt to plan and control the city. Furthermore, this laissez faire context was interrelated with the conflicts of planning powers between the New South Wales State Government and its agencies, and the Sydney City Council. However, this ad hoc planning approach and conflict-ridden planning politics between tiers of governments appeared to give way to a converged recognition of the importance of planning intervention and concerted planning actions among major stakeholders in the pursuit of a global Sydney in the 1980s and the 1990s. This article attempts to address two questions of the urban planning transformation in Sydney: (1) how did the transformation occur? and (2) what were the thematic patterns of the transformation? This article describes Sydney's historical planning background, makes a content analysis of benchmark strategic plan documents – The City of Sydney Strategic Plan (1971–1983) and Central Sydney Strategy (1988), and narrates the planning practices in the pre-Olympics 2000 years. This article finally concludes the thematic patterns of urban planning transformations in Sydney in the 1980s and 1990s: the inter-governmental consensus on visioning and planning for a global Sydney, the thematic planning transformations including the emergence of entrepreneurial planning with the prominence of economic planning, the neutralization of the social planning, and the emphasis on urban design in the physical planning. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In Australia, social reformers approached the new century and post-First World War reconstruction with the hope of establishing a 'new social order' based on national efficiency and class harmony. This was to be delivered through the new science of town planning. The would-be reformers posited themselves as an intellectual vanguard which would provide leadership and assist in establishing an enlightened bureaucracy of professional public servants who would also lead the way to social betterment. Their project, however, had collapsed by the end of the war. Lacking collective political clout, the nascent planning professionals' influence declined as the political environment became more conservative in the 1920s. Reformist and radical features of town planning were stripped from suburban agendas. Suburbs, once held up as the cradle of the 'new social order', were to become places for quarantining class and reinvigorating liberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reflects on the complexity of town design established by the pioneers in South Australia and New Zealand. According to the author, town planning in the 20th and 21st century tend to suggest images of grand designs, complex environmental engineering system and even more complicated bureaucratic process. This perception perhaps explains their inclination of how towns being planned in the past and on how they dealt with the issues as colonizers to interact with the indigenous people.

Two national town planning conferences held in 1917 and 1918 were milestone events in the early development of Australian town planning. Their significance was recognized at the time by planning protagonists and has been elaborated upon in subsequent years by planning historians. Women had a visible presence at both conferences. This paper examines the town planning interests and motivations of the women delegates. It reveals the extent to which many of the women were imperialist and win-the-war loyalist. Little scholarly attention has been given to the relationship between gender issues and imperialist sentiment within early twentieth century town planning discourse, yet it is significant in understanding the Australian women’s planning aspirations. The paper shows that the women’s advocacy of better housing and more extensive facilities for children was linked closely to a commitment to ‘improving the race’. It suggests that the objectives were imperialist rather than nationalist: it was the future of the ‘imperial race’ that was deemed to be at stake. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For a century, town and country planning has been an important field of public endeavour. Now more commonly known as urban and regional or urban and rural planning, its names have recognized its concern for non-built-up as much as built-up areas; i.e. the countryside. Notwithstanding, little effort was expended there until about half way through the century. This has changed. Rural planning has burgeoned, barely reflected, however, within planning history in Australia. This article addresses this by examining how land-use planning for the countryside has evolved in South Australia since the introduction of the modern form of statutory planning in 1967. It traces the evolution of statutory policy and how it has been informed by concepts such as nature conservation, landscape maintenance, environmental protection and ecological sustainability. It underlines the tensions inherent in a system created primarily to deal with the slower changing urban conglomerate of built form when applied to the countryside where the dynamism of the seasons requires an ongoing land management approach. Experiments in policy planning and legislation are examined and it is concluded that, as in urban planning, ideas of innovation and diffusion are valid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Metropolitan plans were prepared in Australia from 1948 to 1962 for four of its five biggest cities - the state capitals of Sydney, Melbourne, Perth and Adelaide. They contain the first analyses and proposals for their rural-urban fringes. The earliest, that for Sydney, is the most visionary and radical and defined a Green Belt to contain and shape a slowly growing city; to provide amenities and recreation for citydwellers; and to reconstructa countryside ravaged by 'promiscuous urbanisation'. The next two plans for Melbourne and Perth are much more pragmatic, dealing with the organisation of headlong metropolitan expansion with surrounding rural areas seen as suburbs-in-waiting within servicing and topographical constraints. The last, that for Adelaide is a mixture of trend planning with strong design themes partly expressed in the fringe. These are forthright exercises in the master-plan mould. Developments since the 1950s regarding the fringe are briefly reviewed in the case of Sydney. These show much more complex issues and perceptions arising, particularly regarding natural resource management. There is consequently an absorbing challenge in describing these dynamic images, and also in shaping a policy-making process to reflect and handle them. There is also a possibility, apparent in the metropolitan plans of the 1950s, of cultural differences between the cities in this regard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the 1920s in the United States, the number of cities which had appointed planning commissions or secured comprehensive master plans increased significantly. This was the era of the 'city functional', with planning ideology focused on goals of order, efficiency, and growth through methodologies based on scientific data analysis. Australian cities in the 1920s were amenable to this approach. Though small in population terms, they confronted similar problems of sprawl, uncoordinated infrastructure provision and traffic congestion. Leading planning advocates turned away from small area planning schemes based on British precedents towards an American-style master planning approach. In the wake of the ill-fated Sydney Regional Plan Convention (1922-6), came two notable Town Planning Commissions in Melbourne and Perth. While obviously inspired by American models, the form and functioning of these organizations reflected the influence of distinctive governmental, financial and cultural conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Canberra is the only really modern city in the world. Not that that has been made obvious to the casual glance, but a structure can only be truly modern when the foundations are properly laid for that particular thing. . . . For this science . . . had died out and was no longer practiced." (Marion Mahony Griffin, 'Canberra, its Designer and its Plan', The Centennial Anniversary of the Founding of Australia, Magic of America, Federal Battle, p. 380.). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]