Urban Design and Development Seminar Eight

Ø  The beginning of social equity and economic factors and their impacts – Cities for Sale

Ø  Looks at 5 different focus groups:

1. Political Class

2. Economic Elite and finance

3. Planners and urban designers

4. Developers

5. Residents – ‘the people’

Ø  When looking at the roles that these different ‘actors’ play and go into the interactions and categories of these five – how does this affect your analysis? How does it affect the way we think or act on urban development?

Ø  The whole metropolitan area

The vision comes from planners

Neighbourhoods – developers

Enabling support role – finance

When you construct a category, like the 5 mentioned, the presumption is that everybody in that category acts the same way – same values/attitudes

Ø  The boundaries between them, however, are blurring. These article’s talk of how important place based competition is – for GROWTH

Ø  Presumption is that urban growth is positive

Ø  However, urban growth does not pay for itself. The whole growth machine always has with it in Capitalist societies – spread impacts in terms of social equity

Ø  Stems from above presumption but reality is different

Ø  Urban growth fuels competition i.e. Sydney vs. Melbourne

Ø  ‘Growth is good’ is part of our rhetoric – poses problems

Ø  Boosterism is now ‘city marketing’

Ø  20^th century changed Sydney – harbour bridge and western distributer (Look into Lucy Turnball – urban design change)

Ø  How do the first 4 categories see ‘The people’:

- Roughly they do not have the same interests

- Do they see them as a consumer or a citizen?

- These get to the heart of the problems of urban design today

Ø  More environmental and social impacts – seeing the cost impacts.

Ø  The Australian dream – own home, own car – comes as a package – people see this as a right. A lot is geared towards making this happen.

Ø  There is a CONFLATION now about our rights and responsibilities

Ø  The way of categorising people and seeing them as a group in actual fact causes conflation

Ø  Start looking at people individually – like observational and personally etc. instead of statistically.

Ø  Underlying all this – city is a growth machine – to attract investment to attract people. Nothing wrong with this but we need to change in a way that improves everyone.

Ø  Globalisation and Glocalisation