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The AHURI Final Report No. 430 delves into the complex relationship between First Nations peoples in Australia and urban policy, highlighting the challenges faced by Traditional Custodians in engaging with decision-making processes that impact their Country. The report stresses the importance of building genuine, long-term relationships with Traditional Custodians, centering their perspectives and knowledge in urban policy discussions. It also discusses the need for non-Indigenous practitioners to unlearn colonial practices, prioritize power-sharing, and engage in meaningful partnerships with First Nations communities to address historical injustices and systemic barriers. The text underscores the significance of initiatives like the Uluru Statement from the Heart in advocating for substantive change and self-determination for First Nations peoples in the realm of urban policy. [Extracted from the article]

This Progress Report reviews recent literature that rethinks the spatiality of the university. First, it discusses the growing body of work that identifies the agency of universities in producing and shaping urban space, including their role in contributing to social injustice in cities. Second, it reviews understandings of universities as sites of relational knowledge production, linking this to the proliferation of studies of student (im)mobility. Third, it considers how the university works to spatially sort and place bodies – students, staff and non-humans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Romania's 2007 accession into the European Union initiated a surge in foreign direct investment into its capital, Bucharest. New middle classes quickly took shape that pressed against the limits of the city's socialist-era infrastructure. To accommodate the new middle classes, city planners and private developers have invested billions of euros to redesign and expand subterranean transportation, commercial, and residential spaces. This essay takes these subterranean developments as an opportunity to consider what I call the "subject of the underground." This is the person imagined and acted on by the call to move underground. While the subject pressed underground has long been characterized by extreme marginalization, the ethnographic argument here is that projects of middle-class formation drive the assembling of underground urbanism in Bucharest. The imperative for rethinking the subject of the underground is to bring analytical attention to the sagging "place" of the new middle classes, where "place" refers both to a location in space and to a rank in a social order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The centre of major cities is a focus of commuting patterns, and this article sets out how major cities use calculative practices to guide commuters through a complex, multiplanar, volumetric city. It examines how public transport officials, consultants, city planners and property developers interact to move commuters through inter-locking public and private spaces on a journey between underground, surface and high-rise commercial structures. Using a case study of Sydney’s central business district, it presents three areas where the governance of this movement can be observed. First, it considers how underground rail planning has adopted new modes of organising capacity, especially in terms of the use of behavioural psychology in organising platform and escalator crowd behaviour. Second, the article discusses navigation at ground level, where rail commuters emerge onto the pavement to continue their journey. Urban planners, along with specialists in wayfinding and people movement, calculate capacity and make behavioural interventions to influence movement up, down and across surfaces. Third, it explores the relationship between elevator technology, vertical people flow analysis and the floorplate design of offices. The article’s contribution is in its conceptual and empirical illustration of how the rhythms of urban crowds are tracked, calculated and structured by a range of experts; in turn, we can see how these experts have emerged as significant agents in maximising the ability to extract value from the built volume of cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper responds to a recent EPA Exchanges paper by Eric Knight, Andrew Jones and Meric Gertler (Knight et al., 2021). It concurs with their argument for the significance of economic geography for explaining the "local-global" dilemmas facing the university in contemporary society. In response, it will propose three additional optics for understanding the role of the university in the contemporary city. First, as a space of risk, where the neo-liberal university is now undertaking various modes of financing their real estate models, drawing on bond markets to finance future growth, soliciting politically risky philanthropic donations, and betting on future student recruitment trends – including the high-risk international student sector – as being sufficient to fund capital investments in buildings and facilities. Second, as a space of decolonisation, where the university must seek to locate campus development within discussions about the university's responsibilities within systems of settler colonialism, and racially inflected gentrification. Third, as a civic disruptor, where the university campus is seen as more than just a backdrop or context to the university's governance, culture, and business models, but also as a front door to understanding the city and economy within which it is embedded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The underground as an active element of spatiality has started to receive increasing attention in the scholarly literature. This paper describes how a growing interest in the vertical and volumetric within urban geography has started to challenge a prevailing 'horizontalism' within geographical conceptualisations of urban space. The paper has three parts. It identifies: the emergence of new approaches to spatial forms based around verticality and volume; concepts of urban governance that take account of the composite material volumes and non‐human agency of the subterranean sphere; and interpretations of the Anthropocene that offer new perspectives on the constitution of the subterranean of cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sets out a research agenda for the interrogation of urban space as being ontologically constituted by its volumetric properties: that is, the ways in which the arrangement of dimensions and capacities above, below and in relation to the surface of the city are measured. The paper reviews the nascent 'volumetric turn' in explaining the production of urban space, noting the growing interest among scholars in understanding how verticality, surface, and the subterranean relate to the power and political economy of cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a series of commentaries on Transit Life: How Commuting is Transforming Our Cities, published by MIT Press in 2018. Centring on an in—depth case study of Sydney, the book argues the need to attend carefully to the fine—grained detail of the commuting experience. In all sorts of ways, Transit Life presents a way of thinking about urban transportation radically different from that used by mainstream transport planners and geographers. Geographical Research asked six researchers—Tim Edensor, Michele Lobo, Debbie Hopkins, Helen Fitt, Juliana Mansvelt, and Donald McNeill—to reflect on what kind of research vistas might be opened up bring the tools of cultural geography and mobility research to the world of commuting. Here are their responses, rounded out by a reply by David Bissell, Transit Life's author. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]