Accessible and comprehensive, written by the current President of the International Planning History Society, this volume provides readers with a highly visual account of historical, contemporary and international projects. Looking at the ways in which the City Beautiful movement influenced the design and development of Australian cities, this pioneering national study surveys the ruling ideas, influences, outcomes and enduring legacies of the early artistic turn in Australian urban design. With the return of the American City Beautiful movement to the forefront of urban design, Designing Australia’s Cities is a relevant account of the ways in which this movement influenced and shaped Australian city design, but more importantly sheds light on a planning culture that stretches far beyond Australia and is of increasing relevance worldwide today. Laying bare an important design and reform movement, whose under-appreciated legacy is clearly evident in urban landscapes today, this book is ideal for students of planning, architecture, urban design and the history of planning.
Past Matters brings together a group of largely Australian and New Zealand academics who in a series of case studies consider how planning concepts were adopted, adjusted, adapted and extended in a Pacific Rim setting. The early chapters explore the interplay between British and American planning models and local circumstances in Australia, Japan, and New Zealand. The main body of chapters recount difficulties faced by indigenous peoples with respect to housing needs and more generally re-asserting themselves in what began as colonial urban areas as well as others that look at community meanings, liberalism and exclusion on the street, and the power of sectional interests. The latter chapters also pose questions about urban heritage in terms of what and whose interests are at stake in these debates. The volume concludes with two convergent chapters that outline some practices by which ‘heritage’ of a more day to day suburban sort can be protected within a planning system. The collection centres on Australia and New Zealand but extends to include chapters on Canada and Japan. The viewpoints offered serve as a gentle reminder of the limitations of ‘Metropolitian Theory’.