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AUSTRALIAN URBAN LAND USE PLANNING Sydney, Australia The University of Sydney Press, Sydney, Australia 2007, 309 pp. ISBN 9781920898595 Paperback
Nicole Gurran
Urban and Regional Planning Program
The University of Sydney
Sydney, Australia
Land use planning produces predictably polarized political responses. On the one hand, right-wing libertarians and narrowly self-interested property owners see it as an unwarranted restriction on people's ability to use their own property as they wish. On the other hand, social democrats see it as an essential means of bridging between those self-interests and broader community concerns. From the latter perspective, it is integral to creating "the good city" in which there is adequate supply of affordable housing, public services and infrastructure, environmental amenity, and due regard to the need for ecological sustainability.
These concerns about land-use planning and its capacity for creating more efficient, equitable, and sustainable patterns of urban developments apply in all countries. Nicole Gurran's book focuses on the Australian case. As such, it needs to be understood in the context of this particular country's geographic character and historical experience. Australia is a huge continent with a relatively small population of about 22 million, mainly clustered in coastal regions, particularly, in metropolitan areas such as Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, and Adelaide. Its historical experience is as a set of former British colonies that captured the land from the indigenous people and imposed legal, economic, and political arrangements adapted from the UK. Unlike in Europe, there was no well-developed feudal structure of land tenure, economic organization, and settlement preceding capitalist development and urbanization. State institutions played a central coordinating role right from the start of European settlement "down under" and continue to be crucial in regulating both population inflow and the...