Putting the public interest back into transport
Panel: Dr. Gary Glazebrook and Prof. Stuart White
Transport is the lifeblood of the city. But do private choices produce useful outcomes, or do we need community acceptance of the public good that comes from an efficient and clean transport network?
How can social justice be achieved in Sydney’s Future?
The release of the Draft State Plan in August 2006 and the recent community consultations providing feedback on the Plan’s priorities, shows that Sydney is becoming a more unequal city, with serious and intensifying social problems, exacerbated by geographic and demographic inequalities. These tendencies with their very real social consequences have called forth a range of responses by government, focusing on the fears expressed by Sydney’s residents about their futures.
The Metro-strategy, which recently announced it was closing its independent e-newsletter, was one such set of responses. In the first of the Sydney Futures Symposia earlier this year, a range of critics argued that the Strategy, while valuable in parts (and they could not of course agree about which bits were the more valuable), was fundamentally flawed by its lack of control of real resources, and its subjection to the imperatives of the private development market.
Can these forces be addressed by the community so the trend lines slow or reverse? Is there a public desire to do so? Or is urban management simply a bureaucratic strategy to contain and control the downside of urban growth while ramping up the profitability of the upside?
Cities can be understood as systems for allocating opportunities among populations: location is thus both an expression of and a contributor to life chances. In this paper I want to explore how Sydney works as an allocator of those scarce resources that are crucial in determining life opportunities, and what the implications of such an analysis are for the longer term “social health” of the city.
Full paper now available !
Sydney’s Global Future – how unequal can it be?
Three distinct but overlapping conceptions of the role of creativity are embedded in public practices designed to promote urban economic development (Murphy 2001). First, the ‘culture industries’ have been targeted as sources of jobs and business opportunities. Second, strategies to attract and retain members of the ‘creative class’ have been advocated as alternatives (or supplements) to attracting firms. Third, ‘community development’ has been coupled with the arts and related areas as a vehicle to underpin economic vitality and thus to promote social cohesiveness. This paper outlines the first two of these distinct but interrelated conceptions of the relationship between creativity and urban economic development and critically evaluates the prospects for mobilising creativity as a basis for development in each context. Given the title of the symposium reference is made to Sydney’s cultural economy using data from a study of which the author was a co-researcher (Gibson, Freestone and Murphy 2002) and other sources such as the recent collection of essays edited by Freestone, Randolph and Butler-Bowdon (2006) that contains a number of essays on Sydney’s cultural economy.
Full paper and powerpoint available now!
Creativity and Urban Economic Development
