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Most students acknowledge shared responsibility, with the university, for their employability development. Many academics use assessments as the main driver for motivating students to learn. At the intersection between employability, assessment and learning, the emergent research question is -- what are the mechanisms by which course-based employability is fostered? Prior research reveals that although academics identified course-based assessment as the key employability mechanism, neither students nor employers registered this conceptualisation, and thus purpose of assessment. The aim of this research was to stimulate and communicate the direct connection between assessment and employability to students and interpret their response. Over 100 first-year students, across a metropolitan and regional Australian university, participated. Students were directed to use a simple reflective tool, dubbed iASK by the researchers, that probed employability elements of identity, Attributes, Skills, and Knowledge. The research revealed the resulting student view that regular course-based assessment can develop their employability skills in communication and independence, but not in critical thinking and global citizenship.

This article explores the concept of love and its revolutionary possibilities through the lens of wayfinding and the author's personal experiences. It discusses the significance of New Zealand's Matariki public holiday, which celebrates the Māori new year, and the author's homecoming to New Zealand. The article emphasizes the importance of rest, repair, awakening, and articulating a "next normal" in the process of futuring. It also highlights the need for decolonization and regeneration in geography and society. The author proposes the use of radical empathy and tracing love as a way to navigate and understand our relationships and the world around us. [Extracted from the article]

Representations of love appear across many disciplines and discursive fields that are and should be in conversation with geography. It is imperative that geographers engage in formidable but worthy tasks to distil diverse renderings of love into the regenerative interventions we urgently need. Those interventions require geographically minded interpretations of love to drive radical research, pedagogies, policies, and practices in ways that have direct and indirect effects across the life course and life worlds. Such labours are mediated by state and law, by intersectional relations, or by neuroscience, and involve asking how love underwrites critical infrastructures—of place (making), care and entanglements, colonialism, and human‐nature relations in the Anthropocene and posthuman—that lead to the flourishing futures we seek. Rich geographical studies oriented to those tasks still face charges of flattening difference. This commentary picks up one aspect of this agenda: a blind spot in geographical research relating to the ethical imperative to love based on benevolence. Instead, I champion the revolutionary possibilities for geography to inform policies, pedagogies, and practices by using a love based on alterity aligned with social weight, reasserting accessible science as an effective driver of social and system transformative changes. Specifically, I argue for a regenerative socio‐political analytic of love in a time of disaster, decolonisation, and diffraction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 outbreak in Australia led to a period of economic crisis. In response, Commonwealth and State Governments targeted the construction sector for concentrated economic stimulation. Planning systems, and their reform, were identified as levers to stimulate economic activity. This paper explores early COVID-19-initiated planning system reforms in New South Wales and Western Australia. It explores key reforms in each state and provides a comparative analysis of reform objectives, the influence of key stakeholders, reform innovations and possibilities for future reform. COVID-19-induced reforms emerge as both the continuation of the long-term reform agenda and reactionary interventions to immediate economic challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conditions for studentification are changing with increasing numbers of students living in high-rise – and high-quality – micro-apartment-style accommodation provided through purpose-built student accommodation (PBSA) blocks. This 'verticalisation' of studentification is a global phenomenon, with Australia representing a frontier with distinctive geographies that result from its rapid ascension to the second-ranked global destination for international students. Yet, despite rising student numbers being recognised as positively impacting national and state economies, little is understood of how student accommodation development fits within the broader scheme of Australian urban revitalisation. To address this, we combine concepts relating to condo-ism and condo-isation to offer an original analytical framework that examines how PBSA has created new conditions through which vertical studentification can be produced in and of cities. We therefore ask how vertical studentification relates to wider Australian housing and urban development trends in ways that differentiate PBSA development and trajectories from other forms of accommodation. We also question how vertical studentification relates to the realities and regulation expressed as intra-urban geographies of Australian university cities and their resident-host communities. We argue that deliberately recognising and dovetailing several self-reinforcing and contradicting urban development dimensions invites a foundation for further interrogating vertical studentification in existing and emerging sites in Australia and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The continuous rescaling of metropolitan governance has been a prominent feature of the neoliberal state. Metropolitan coalitions are one variant of governance in which disparate actors are brought together around a common agenda or platform. Drawing upon the example of Australia's Committees for Cities and Regions (CCRs), this article applies urban governance theory to better understand the effectiveness of networked metropolitan governance coalitions. We find that such coalitions derive political legitimacy from the externalities produced by their network relations, which we theorize as a three-dimensional nexus of vertical (between levels of government), horizontal (between local actors), and diagonal (with CCR counterparts) components. Although the CCR model is distinctive to Australia and New Zealand, it reflects similar networked and multiscalar processes at work elsewhere, serving as a template for political landscapes in which in-built legacy political arrangements largely preclude metropolitan-scale issues from being addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – This paper aims to advance best practice by gaining insights into key multi-owned property (MOP) issues challenging policymakers and communities. Ontario (Canada) and Victoria (Australia) are internationally recognised for best practice in MOP living and law. Yet, both jurisdictions struggle with the emerging urbanism related to condominium MOP. Design/methodology/approach – Different ways of recognising community in MOP urbanism will be examined against public policy and political theory perspectives promoting social sustainability. A rich mixed-data and content analysis method is relied upon which synthesises three pillars of MOP community governance: harmonious high-rise living; residential-neighbourhood interface; and metropolitan community engagement. The article cross-examines Canadian policy and law reform documents and Australian dispute case law from the state of Victoria to explore and showcase critical MOP management, residential and policy issues. Findings – A theory-building typology formally recognises “community” as an affective performance across MOP governance contexts: cosmopolitan, civic-citizen and neighbourly. These ideal types differentiate community affects in and beyond (case) law and land-use planning: from determining alternative dispute resolution remedies; addressing neighbourhood and metropolitan NIMBY-ism in urban consolidation to bridging the critical policy and civic gap between the limits and aims of socially sustainable MOP vertical-tenured community affects. Research limitations/implications – Strong cross-jurisdictional MOP community lessons exist, as other cities follow best practice in legal and governance structures to effect change at the frontiers of twenty-first century urbanism. Originality/value – Past studies emphasise classifying dispute issues, single-issue concerns or historical and life cycle evaluations. This theory-building article advances why and how community must be better understood holistically across community contexts to inform cutting-edge governance practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital urbanism recasts suburban and regional geographies within national and global urban systems by transforming communities and workplaces. This paper explores the planning and policy implications of activating smart work hubs across South-East Queensland during 2012–2014. It demonstrates key evidence of the nature, approach and priorities of smart work hub projects previously untested in Australia and pioneered by Regional Development Australia. The paper reorientates attention to the networked interplay of agglomeration, collaborative consumption and coworking towards urban revitalisation challenges for suburban and regional development that strengthen local communities: specifically potential demand assessment; commuter and knowledge worker patterns; and assessing public–private benefits of smart work hubs. Importantly the paper concludes with critical factors needed to advance research and the extensive engagement undertaken into wider and sustainable practice. By outlining a research agenda and practical implications, the empirical insights will find traction within and beyond Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Planning practice requires ongoing interaction between regulatory “facts” and deliberative “norms”. Played out in local and strategic developments, “norms” are the agreed values and positions developed by advancing deliberative engagement of residents; while “facts” are the more rigid statutory procedures through which planning decisions are typically made. However, conflict arises between residents' groups and local government decision-makers when deliberative norms, now a key tenet of strategic planning processes, struggle to gain traction in the factual spaces provided by statutory planning regulations. A contentious planning process in St Kilda, Melbourne, Australia (concerning the redevelopment of a car park into a commercial and public space) highlights the challenges to deliberative engagement in highly-regulatory planning systems. Drawing on this contested case, this paper examines how the broader formal and relatively fixed framework of regulatory-based decision-making fails to support participatory principles, undermining both the desired communicative ethos and enduring collaborative outcomes and norm development. Specifically, the paper problematises tensions between residents' growing expectations for greater transparency and participation in planning, arising from a growing regard for deliberation in strategic planning, and the hegemonic nature of statutory planning that preserves planning control within the formal domain of government and the private sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]