Industry short reports : School of Urban Development, QUT Jan, 2010

Management and staff of the spatial science program at QUT. Student numbers discussion, Alumni News, Staff and Laboratories moving, Work Integrated Learning in 2010.

Railways, Urban Development and Town Planning in Britain: 1948–2008, Haywood R. Ashgate (2009). £65.00, ISBN: 9780754673927

This book is a thorough investigation of the relationship between land use planning and the railways in Britain, through review of the factors affecting the two sectors and their integration during the period of public ownership. The rationale behind the book is explained as a timely analysis of the dynamic correlation involving town planning and management of the railway in a period when growing congestion on the road network is forcing people to look for alternative modes and capacity is badly needed to accommodate this increased demand for travel. The book calls for a modal shift from road to rail for passenger and freight traffic.

From social butterfly to urban citizen workshop

Web applications such as blogs, wikis, video and photo sharing sites, and social networking systems have been termed ‘Web 2.0’ to highlight an arguably more open, collaborative, personalisable, and therefore more participatory internet experience than what had previously been possible. Giving rise to a culture of participation, an increasing number of these social applications are now available on mobile phones where they take advantage of device-specific features such as sensors, location and context awareness. This workshop made a contribution towards exploring and better understanding the opportunities and challenges provided by tools, interfaces, methods and practices of social and mobile technology that enable participation and engagement. It brought together a group of academics and practitioners from a diverse range of disciplines such as computing and engineering, social sciences, digital media and human-computer interaction to critically examine a range of applications of social and mobile technology, such as social networking, mobile interaction, wikis (eg., futuremelbourne.com.au), twitter, blogging, virtual worlds (eg, hub2.org), and their impact to foster community activism, civic engagement and cultural citizenship.

Nutrients build-up and wash-off processes in urban land uses

This thesis describes outcomes of a research study conducted to investigate the nutrient build-up and wash-off processes on urban impervious surfaces. The data needed for the study was generated through a series of field investigations and laboratory test procedures. The study sites were selected in urbanised catchments to represent typical characteristics of residential, industrial and commercial land uses. The build-up and wash-off samples were collected from road surfaces in the selected study sites. A specially designed vacuum collection system and a rainfall simulator were used for sample collection. According to the data analysis, the solids build-up on road surfaces was significantly finer with more than 80% of the particles below 150 ìm for all the land uses. Nutrients were mostly associated with the particle size range below 150 ìm in both build-up and wash-off samples irrespective of type of land use. Therefore, the finer fraction of solids was the most important for the nutrient build-up and particulate nutrient wash-off processes. Consequently, the design of stormwater quality mitigation measures should target particles less than 150 ìm for the removal of nutrients irrespective of type of land use. Total kjeldahl nitrogen (TKN) was the most dominant form of nitrogen species in build-up on road surfaces. Phosphorus build-up on road surfaces was mainly in inorganic form and phosphate (PO4 3-) was the most dominant form. The nutrient wash-off process was found to be dependent on rainfall intensity and duration. Concentration of both total nitrogen and phosphorus was higher at the beginning of the rain event and decreased with the increase in rainfall duration. Consequently, in the design of stormwater quality mitigation strategies for nutrients removal, it is important to target the initial period of rain events. The variability of wash-off of nitrogen with rainfall intensity was significantly different to phosphorus wash-off. The concentration of nitrogen was higher in the wash-off for low intensity rain events compared to the wash-off for high intensity rain events. On the other hand, the concentration of phosphorus in the wash-off was high for high intensity rain events compared to low intensity rain events. Consequently, the nitrogen washoff can be defined as a source limiting process and phosphorus wash-off as a transport limiting process. This highlights the importance of taking into consideration the wash-off of low intensity rain events in the design of stormwater quality mitigation strategies targeting the nitrogen removal. All the nitrogen species in wash-off are primarily in dissolved form whereas phosphorus is in particulate form. The differences in the nitrogen and phosphorus wash-off processes is principally due to the degree of solubility, attachment to particulates, composition of total nitrogen and total phosphorus and the degree of adherence of the solids particles to the surface to which nutrients are attached. The particulate nitrogen available for wash-off is removed readily as these are mobilised as free solids particles on the surface. Phosphorus is washed-off mostly with the solids particles which are strongly adhered to the surface or as the fixed solids load. Investigation of the nitrogen wash-off process using bulk wash-off samples was in close agreement with the investigation of dissolved fraction of wash-off solids. This was primarily due to the predominant nature of dissolved nitrogen. However, the investigation of the processes which underpin phosphorus wash-off using bulk washoff samples could lead to loss of information. This is due to the composition of total phosphorus in wash-off solids and the inherent variability of the wash-off process for the different particle size ranges. This variability should preferably be taken into consideration as phosphorus wash-off is predominantly in particulate form. Therefore, care needs to be taken in the investigation of the phosphorus wash-off process using bulk wash-off samples to ensure that there is no loss of information and hence result in misleading outcomes. The investigation of different particle size ranges of wash-off solids is preferable in the interest of designing effective stormwater quality management strategies targeting phosphorus removal.

SCAPE sustainable urban design simulation

SCAPE is an interactive simulation that allows teachers and students to experiment with sustainable urban design. The project is based on the Kelvin Grove Urban Village, Brisbane. Groups of students role play as political, retail, elderly, student, council and builder characters to negotiate on game decisions around land use, density, housing types and transport in order to design a sustainable urban community. As they do so, the 3D simulation reacts in real time to illustrate what the village would look like as well as provide statistical information about the community they are creating. SCAPE brings together education, urban professional and technology expertise, helping it achieve educational outcomes, reflect real-world scenarios and include sophisticated logic and decision making processes and effects.---------- The research methodology was primarily practice led underpinned by action research methods resulting in innovative approaches and techniques in adapting digital games and simulation technologies to create dynamic and engaging experiences in pedagogical contexts. It also illustrates the possibilities for urban designers to engage a variety of communities in the processes, complexities and possibilities of urban development and sustainability.

Teachers and the emotional dimensions of class in resource-affected rural Australia

In recent years, a 'cultural turn' in the study of class has resulted in a rich body of work detailing the ways in which class advantage and disadvantage are emotionally inscribed and embodied in educational settings. To date, however, much of this literature has focused on the urban sphere. In order to address this gap in the literature, this paper focuses on the affective evaluations made by teachers employed in rural and remote Australian schools of students' families, bodies, expectations and practices. The central argument is that moral ascriptions of class by the teachers are powerfully shaped by dominant socio-cultural constructions of rurality that equate 'the rural' with agriculture.

Binjiang urban centre and transport interchange

This project is the result of a collaborative design process involving QUT School of Design, and AREN Consulting and ZIAD (Zheijiang Provincial Institute of Architectural Design and Research). This major urban initiative explores new standards for multi-function urban centres. The sophisticated integration of transit interchange with retail, commercial and residential functions provides a dramatic mix of social activities. The large site is formed into a raised and terraced urban garden, with the transit centre and retail shopping precinct housed below this landscaped roof. Towering above this ‘hill’ are five building blocks housing the commercial and residential accommodations. These environmentally low-impact buildings are topped with a high-tech greenhouse roof or photovoltaic cells.

Conference on urban issues

Personal reflections and opinion on the Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) National Indigenous Studies Conference, Perspectives on Urban life: Connections and Reconnections was held in Canberra from 28 September – 1 October 2009.

Genshanmen Urban Centre and Transport Interchange

This project is the result of a collaborative design process involving QUT School of Design, and AREN Consulting and ZIAD (Zheijiang Provincial Institute of Architectural Design and Research). This project is the submission prepared by the above partnership for an invited international design competition, promoted by Hangzhou City, China. ---------- This major urban design and architecture project is for a large transport oriented development on the new Hangzhou Subway system. The development, covering several city blocks, includes the provision of residential, retail, education, commercial, and transport infrastructure; integrated with rail, bus and ferry systems. ---------- The design strategies are based on the development or artificial land forms; the cutting of new canals, raising of the ground plane, and metaphoric reference to the Yellow Mountains (explored in the detail of the central ‘ridge’ of built form). Further to this, the project explores the integration of sustainable technologies and philosophies with large scale building projects in a subtropical context.

Violence, Spatiality and other Rurals

Occidentalism, which treats the other as the same, can be detected in both the criminological and rural sociological treatment of violence in the sociospatial sites of rural countrysides. Criminology tends to mistakenly assume that violence in the modern world is primarily an urban phenomenon (Baldwin & Bottoms, 1976, p. 1; Braithwaite, 1989, p. 47). If violence in rural settings is encountered it tends to be treated as a smaller scale version of the urban problem, or the importation of an otherwise urban problem - as the corrupting influence of the gesellschaft within the gemeinschaft. Within much rural sociology violence is rendered invisible by the assumption that rural communities conform to the idealised conception of the typical gemeinschaft society, small-scale traditional societies based on strong cohesiveness, intimacy and organic forms of solidarity. What these bonds conceal, rather than reveal - violence within the family - remains invisible to the public gaze. The visibility of violence within Aboriginal families and communities presents a major exception to the spatially ordered social relations which render so much white family violence hidden. The need to take into account the complexity and diversity of these sociospatial relations is concretely highlighted in our research which has taken us out of the urban context and confronted us not only with the phenomenon of the violence of other rurals, but also with fundamentally competing claims on, and conceptions of, space and place in the context of a racially divided Australian interior. This article represents the second installment of conceptual reflections on this research, with the first having been published in this journal in 1998.

Policing the rural crisis

There is a growing sense of crisis in rural ways of life, which manifests itself in economic decline, depopulation, depleted environments, and a crisis of rural identities. Crime is one potent marker of crisis, the more so as it spoils the image of healthy, cohesive community. The social reaction it elicits, the policing of this ‘other rural’, is also a guide to the dimensions of crisis. The social sciences have witnessed a renewed international interest in the study of ‘other rurals’: the neglected, invisible or excluded aspects of country life. This book brings a fresh approach to the study of crime that challenges the urban-centric assumptions of much western criminology and sociology. It explores rural crime and social reactions to it, in relation to processes and patterns of community formation and change in rural Australia, including the social, economic, cultural and political forces shaping the history, structure and everyday life of rural communities. Policing the Rural Crisis is based on five years of extensive original empirical research in rural and regional Australia. It draws on ideas and debates in contemporary social theory across several disciplines, making the analysis relevant to the study of crime and social change elsewhere.