John Minnery

Governing rapidly growing urban regions is one of the key challenges facing planners, policymakers, and politicians today, especially in terms of governance at the local level. Research and practice have mainly been shaped by the differentiated experiences of "more" and "less" developed countries. This study evaluates a comparative urban governance research project that sought to go beyond these confines to explore the synergies and differences between a "developed" and a "less developed" city region (using Brisbane and Southeast Queensland in Australia and metropolitan Semarang in Indonesia). In critically reflecting on the governance lessons learned from both, as well as the project's methods, we identify what can be gained from comparison, which involves learning from both localities' struggle to manage spatially dispersed and fragmented urban-rural interfaces.

This paper discusses the impact of using the computer game SimCity™4 in student assignments to develop city and strategic plans. It is conceptualized around Lobo's (2005) critique of SimCity™ as ‘toying with the city’. Two University of Queensland urban planning classes (one undergraduate, the other postgraduate) were asked to use SimCity™4 to build simulated cities. One class was about building historical urban utopias; the other was about strategic metropolitan planning. The paper evaluates the effectiveness of this use of SimCity™4 to develop students' plan-making skills, and reports on students' assessment of whether and how the game's assumptions forced modifications away from preferred planning outcomes. The paper concludes that, whilst SimCity™4 is indeed based on ‘toying with the city’, city planning practice is increasingly using computer-based simulations (some based on GIS) to toy with future city scenarios to play with and understand the likely outcomes of planning policies. The convergence of the two ideas gives strength to the idea of using computer games like SimCity™4 in planning education.

Public participation is as important at the metropolitan regional scale as it is at the neighborhood scale, yet most of the approaches to participation are grounded in experience or theory appropriate to the smaller scale. At the metropolitan regional scale, three issues—the magnitude of the spatial extent and population; inequalities of power; and the resources needed—demand that approaches to metropolitan regional participation are given special consideration. This paper explores these three issues through two case studies: one in South East Queensland and the other in Metro Vancouver. The examples help identify the difficulties of metropolitan regional public participation and draw attention to issues about effectiveness and capacity that dog debates about participation and democracy.

This paper explores the continuing governance of three important historical industrial company towns that were developed as model settlements: New Lanark and Saltaire in the UK and Pullman in the United States. It explores the changing roles of the private sector, the public sector and civil society in the on-going stewardship of the settlements. This paper concludes that urban governance arrangements are important. In all three cases, the towns were initiated by private entrepreneurs but they are no longer in the ownership of the originating companies and their original economic base has vanished. In all three, public sector action was, at some stage, necessary to retain their integrity, but this action needed strong support from civil society actors. In all three examples, government and community action were supported by additional private sector initiatives. The interactions amongst the private sector, the public sector and civil society in the establishment and continuing stewardship of these settlements demonstrate the clear need for a better understanding of the role of governance arrangements in urban history.

Planning both facilitates the activities of the market and addresses areas of market failure. It can also remain aloof from intervention in either direction. There are potential tensions inherent in these various roles and their expectations, which are exacerbated by the fact that many planning policies rely on the market for their actual implementation. The provision of housing, especially low-cost housing, is a case in point. This paper reports on research in Brisbane, Australia that explored the role of privately-owned caravan parks as providers of low-cost housing. Their vulnerability to redevelopment pressures, partly through market forces and partly as a consequence of public policies, is used to explore the tensions that can arise in urban governance between public goals and private interests.

In the search for better ways to govern cities there has been a shift from an emphasis on the role of ‘urban government’ to an emphasis on ‘urban governance’. Governance is now widely understood as incorporating the role of the state in policy making and implementation but extending beyond that single actor to include the roles of the private sector (market) and community (civil society). The relationships amongst the three are both complex and changing. This article proposes a conceptual framework that structures our understanding of how the actors in urban governance interact, based on relationships where one of the actors has far greater influence than the other two, in other words where one is the ‘star’ or central actor. The framework then addresses the question of the roles of the ‘supporting cast’, or the other two actors. The ‘governance orthodoxy’ is that relationships are collaborative and consensual, expressed through ideas about ‘partnerships’ and ‘networks’. The framework, however, draws attention to the possibility of conflict. The article explores some of the implications for urban governance theory and practice of these complex relationships.