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city growth, sustainability, vitality and vulnerability |
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city growth, sustainability, vitality and vulnerability |
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Professor Dani Stehlik (CURTIN) & Sally Paulin (MURDOCH) Cities are under increasing pressure as a result of climate change, increasing demands on resources such as water and energy, demographic restructuring and competing tensions associated with changing land use as our cities continue to suburbanise with the emergence of inner city 'gated' communities, master planned estates and sea-, tree- and now, tee-change communities across Australia. The seemingly continuous geographic expansion of the city through such developments has ostensibly been marketed as places of and for 'real communities'. This seems to imply that older and more established communities and localities are either somehow 'artificial' in nature or 'past their sell by dates'. Ironically, however, these various new developments often lack appropriate access to public transport and other forms of 'hard' and 'soft' infrastructure. Hence, whilst they seem to offer utopian lifestyles issues and questions remain about the 'sense of community' within such new developments. To build on the success of the City Social stream at the Adelaide conference, this stream will continue to make the social aspects of city sustainability and vulnerability an explicit object of investigation. The overall context will be to explore the social city in a time of change and uncertainty. This will be achieved either through the presentation of case studies; through explication of new methodologies and/or through comparisons with international settings. Several key themes are suggested to offer a structure to the stream:
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