Join a public talk, listen to a podcast or come along to a live event
Contact the Head of Discipline, A/Prof Dallas Rogers, if you would like to work with us
Tracking the housing situation, commuting patterns and affordability challenges of essential workers
New report from Dr Catherine Gilbert, Dr Zahra Nasreen and Prof Nicole Gurran on essential workers (also called ‘key’ or ‘frontline’ workers) perform critical public services across healthcare, education, policing, emergency services, transport and community welfare support. However, with low and moderate incomes, essential workers are struggling to attain suitable housing in expensive housing market areas. Following a period of significant housing market change, this report, developed with HOPE Housing, looks at contemporary geographic patterns of housing affordability for essential workers across Sydney, Melbourne and select regional cities and coastal areas. It also tracks how the location, tenure, affordability and suitability of essential workers’ housing has changed in the last five to ten years.
Read the full report here
Planning Institute of Australia (PIA) National Awards Success
Elle Davidson and the Zion Engagement and Planning team took out the National PIA Award for Planning with Country.
The judges were impressed with this comprehensive bespoke built environment industry training fit for a wide range of organisations. The highly praised training is designed to occur over a three-month period, so people have the time to reflect, think and absorb – to then build capacity and action their commitments. The steps taken by Zion are enlightening and the profession is better off for it. The judges comments were “We need more training in this space if we are truly going to make a difference.”
Read more here
Understanding Urbanism, a book for emerging planners, received a Commendation in the National Planning Research Award category
A/Prof Dallas Rogers, Dr Adrienne Keane, A/Prof Tooran Alizadeh and Dr Jacqueline Nelson edited the book. Published in 2020, Understanding Urbanism is a text book and accompanying podcast that has gained national and international traction. Targeting first-year undergraduate students, the text book is written with approachable language, yet founded in research. The content is designed to assist readers to better understand cities, focussing on key ideas that facilitate planning knowledge and debate. The combination of written and audio material, and the way the written text and audio podcast work together, is a first of its kind for bringing urban planning research to the professionals of the future.
Read more here
New The Conversation article on the infrastructure-led planning of Australia’s newest city
Have a read of this new The Conversation piece by A/Prof Tooran Alizadeh, A/Prof Glen Searle and Dr Rebecca Clements on the massive project is unfolding in Sydney’s Western Parkland region. The building of a new city from the ground up is central to an infrastructure-led restructuring of metropolitan Sydney. The catalysts are the Western Sydney City Deal and the Western Sydney Airport being built alongside the new Bradfield City.
Read The Conversation piece here
Urban podcast bringing ideas out of university and into public debate
The City Road Podcast is at the centre of a network of public conversation and academic research conducted by Associate Professor Dallas Rogers. From producing for ABC National Radio to the upcoming Festival of Urbanism, Rogers’ work provides a template for making public impact.
“I’ve had a long interest in the public engagement side of academia,” says Rogers. “The podcast, for example, is not aimed at the technocrat – it’s actually aimed at starting a conversation about challenges in the city, to open up the complexity and sit with the dilemmas that come with not knowing the solution.”
Read more about City Road Podcast in this recent story
Big Urban Data and Remote Sensing Applications: Urban Science Lab @ Sydney Special Seminar
More details here
The Urban Science Lab @ Sydney presents two special lectures on Big Urban Data and Remote Sensing Applications from Dr Arnab Jana and Dr Eswar Rajasekaran, visiting researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.
These talks are hosted as part of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN-SDG) grant awarded by the DVCR, University of Sydney on the USYD- IIT-Bombay strategic partnership on: Big data for sustainable cities: Developing a real-time urban expansion tracker for India using satellite imagery, machine learning and geographic data science.
Date: 25th May 2023
Time: 12 pm to 3 pm
Venue: Tin Sheds Gallery, School of Architecture, Design, and Planning, The University of Sydney.
Sign up here
On the Frontier of Party-state Capitalism: Hong Kong, Guangdong & The Making of the Greater Bay Area
More details here
Sign up here
When: Tuesday 16 May 6:00pm, 2023
Speaker: Jamie Peck, University of British Columbia
China’s Greater Bay Area, comprising nine of Guangdong’s cities and the Special Administrative Regions of Hong Kong and Macau, is one of the world’s most powerful economies, with a GDP exceeding that of Canada, South Korea, and Russia. As a newly inaugurated region-building project, the GBA may be too big to fail, but it may also be too frail to succeed. Institutionally underpowered and internally divided, the GBA straddles (while being defined by) the potentially unstable fault line that separates China’s “two systems,” the socialist market economy of the mainland and the capitalist economies of the offshore SARs. The presentation will consider how to make sense of the GBA, both as a question for political economy and as an epistemological problem.
Speaker Bio
Jamie Peck, FRSC, FBA, FAcSS is Professor of Geography and Distinguished University Scholar at the University of British Columbia, Canada. With long-term research interests in economic geography, urban and regional studies, and institutional political economy, his publications include Variegated economies (Oxford), Urban studies inside/out: theory, method, practice (Sage, coedited with H Leitner & E Sheppard), Market/place: exploring spaces of exchange (Agenda, coedited with C Berndt & NM Rantisi), and Offshore: exploring the worlds of global outsourcing (Oxford).
New Infrastructure Governance Podcast Series
Join us for a series of conversations about transforming infrastructure governance. Our shared futures and community well-being are shaped by urban infrastructure such as for transport, green space, water, social, and digital services.
Listen here
While many public discussions revolve around which infrastructure projects should be prioritised, there is growing recognition that questions of governance are critical to achieving the social, ecological, and place-based transformations we need to address the climate crisis.
In this series, we shine a light on some of the key challenges and opportunities for transforming the way we think about and do infrastructure governance, such as:
- who should be involved in decision making?
- how can we better collaborate with communities?
- how do we address planning on unceded Indigenous land?
The podcast is also available from City Road Podcast