Urban infrastructure and metropolitan planning: connection and disconnection

Abstract

In most large Australian cities recent metropolitan strategies have become prominent in state political affairs. At the same time, newly-discovered but long-brewing constraints to economic growth have brought infrastructure issues to national prominence. This might seem propitious for urban affairs. However, there is too little real connection between them. Misfits exist in at least four dimensions: between metropolitan strategies adopted by state (and in Brisbane’s case also local) governments and the often unrelated practices of urban infrastructure procurement, between the national focus on economic and industrial infrastructure and urban infrastructure service backlogs, between older metro-wide infrastructure systems that made them primary instruments for urban management and newer technologically-enabled splintering of infrastructure supply options (after Graham and Marvin 2001), and between a public-sector-centric model of urban growth management made less relevant by private provision and public-private partnerships through which compliance with metropolitan plans and priorities is often absent. At a time of opportunity for integrating infrastructure development with metropolitan planning, these misfits present a huge challenge to urban sector planners and managers. The paper explores these misfits, and their occasional felicitous connections, in the context of greater Sydney, metropolitan Melbourne and SE Queensland, where there are now headline debates about the way we wish to live in those cities and about the standards and modes of procurement of urban infrastructure to support such life.

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