This text explores how architectural and urban design values have been co-opted by global cities to enhance their economic competitiveness by creating a superior built environment that is not just aesthetically memorable but more productive and sustainable. It focuses on the experience of central Sydney through its policy commitment to ‘design excellence’ and more particularly to mandatory competitive design processes for major private development. Framed within broader contexts that link it to comparable urban policy and design issues in the Asia-Pacific region and globally, it provides a scholarly but accessible volume that provides a balanced and critical overview of a policy that has changed the design culture, development expectations, public realm and skyline of central Sydney, raising issues surrounding the uneven distribution of benefits and costs, professional practice, representative democracy, and implications of globalization.

This book features a multidisciplinary focus on walking as a mode in the context of transportation, urban planning and health. Breaking down the silos, this book presents a multidisciplinary focus bringing together research from transport, public health and planning to show linkages and the variation in experience around the world.

Since first emerging as an issue of concern in the late 1960s, fear of crime has become one of the most researched topics in contemporary criminology and receives considerable attention in a range of other disciplines including social ecology, social psychology and geography. Researchers looking the subject have consistently uncovered alarming characteristics, primarily relating to the behavioural responses that people adopt in relation to their fear of crime. This book reports on research conducted over the past eight years, in which efforts have been made to pioneer the combination of techniques from behavioural geography with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in order to map the fear of crime. The first part of the book outlines the history of research into fear of crime, with an emphasis on the many approaches that have been used to investigate the problem and the need for a spatially-explicit approach. The second part provides a technical break down of the GIS-based techniques used to map fear of crime and summarises key findings from two separate study sites. The authors describe collective avoidance behaviour in relation to disorder decline models such as the Broken Windows Thesis, the potential to integrate fear mapping with police-community partnerships and emerging avenues for further research. Issues discussed include fear of crime in relation to housing prices and disorder, the use of fear mapping as a means with which to monitor the impact of Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) and fear mapping in transit environments.

Behind the Scenes examines planning in the City of Adelaide from 1972 until 1993 within the historical framework of City/State relations from 1836 when the Province of South Australia was founded. During this 21-year period, the City had its own planning and development control legislation separate from the rest of the State. Dr Llewellyn-Smith examines why this situation came about, why it continued for this particular period and why it ceased in 1993 when the separate legislation was repealed and the City became part of the State system under the new Development Act 1993. Behind the Scenes includes original interviews with many of the key individuals in the City and State who played influential roles during this period. Dr Llewellyn-Smith himself was the City Planner from 1974 until 1981 and then the Town Clerk/Chief Executive Officer of the Adelaide City Council from 1982 until 1993: this book, then, is both a work of scholarship and an insider's account. With a joint foreword by The Hon. Jay Weatherill MP, Premier of South Australia, and The Rt Hon. the Lord Mayor of Adelaide, Mr Stephen Yarwood.

In How to Build a Global City, Michele Acuto considers the rise of a new generation of so-called global cities—Singapore, Sydney, and Dubai—and the power that this concept had in their ascent, in order to analyze the general relationship between global city theory and its urban public policy practice. The global city is often invoked in theory and practice as an ideal model of development and a logic of internationalization for cities the world over. But the global city also creates deep social polarization and challenges how much local planning can achieve in a world economy. Presenting a unique elite ethnography in Singapore, Sydney, and Dubai, Acuto discusses the global urban discourses, aspirations, and strategies vital to the planning and management of such metropolitan growth. The global city, he shows, is not one single idea, but a complex of ways to imagine a place to be global and aspirations to make it so, often deeply steeped in politics. His resulting book is a call to reconcile proponents and critics of the global city toward a more explicit engagement with the politics of this global urban imagination.

This book examines the impacts of tourism-led transformations on the industrial historical waterfront at Darling Harbour and The Rocks in Sydney, Australia in the context of urban restructuring and deindustrialisation. The book also offers an extended reflection on the paradoxes between tourism and heritage. This discussion is not a new concept. However, this book critically explores the significance of the industrial heritage assets of these areas and the implications of the transformation procedures. Although Darling Harbour and The Rocks have generally been considered success stories of transformation with mixed touristic, recreational, residential and commercial activities, this book examines and evaluates how industrial history and heritage values have been affected. It demonstrates that tourism/leisure-led developments create urban landscapes in which cultural identity and historical assets are sacrificed and/or reinvented.