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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]

An exceptionally well-preserved aragonitic coral of the extinct species Goniopora hilli was collected from late Cenozoic sedimentary deposits in the Dominican Republic and dated using U-Pb techniques. Nine coralline subsamples yielded a [sup.238]U/[sup.206]Pb-[sup.207] pb/[sup.206]Pb three-dimensional (3-D) inverse linear concordia age of 5.52 [+ or -] 0.15 (2[sigma]) Ma, which, when coupled with [sup.87] Sr/[sup.86]Sr ratios obtained from the same coral, allows for tighter constraints on temporal variability of marine species diversity prior to closure of the Central American Seaway. The recognition that pre-Quaternary aragonitic corals can be suitable for U-Pb dating creates new possibilities for refining the chronologies of late Cenozoic marine sedimentary sequences. Keywords: coral, U-Pb, Dominican Republic, Miocene, Central American Seaway, Sr chemostratigraphy.

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 article concerns the relationship between architecture, territory and identity within major city-regions, and attempts to unpick notions of cultural and aesthetic meanings stemming from particular mega-projects. Debates over the form and function of major new architectural projects reveal ongoing attempts by territorial elites to re-narrate nations within the context of the re-regulation of sovereignty within Europe. To understand what these processes may mean, we employ Billig's conception of 'banal nationalism', which notes the pervasiveness of nationalism as an ideology through everyday life. We explore the idea practically by considering one example of an urban development project: the (unbuilt) Welsh Opera House in Cardiff Bay and the machinations that occurred politically over the choice of a mega-project to represent the re-branding of both a city and a nation. We conclude the article by suggesting that it is important to identify forms of aesthetics, function and location within cities, since the architectural mega-project is increasingly becoming a key tool in the search for new national brands in Europe's free market of identities. Overall, although it may be worthwhile for culture to play a significant role within debates regarding nationalism and identity within globalization, cultural meanings generated from aesthetic forms may take different modes according to what territorial scale a mega-project is attempting to represent.

This article explores the first 15 months of Ken Livingstone's period as mayor of London, arguing that fears of a politically radical mayoralty remain to be realized. It considers three main areas where Livingstone has focused his efforts - in scale politics, in urban planning and in the 're-imagining' of London and Londoners as a civic identity - and suggests constraints on Livingstone's scope for pursuing centre-left policy options. London Ken Livingstone Mayors World city