The practice of participatory planning at Mapoon Aboriginal settlement: Towards community control, ownership and autonomy

The practice of participatory planning in discrete Indigenous settlements has been established since the early 1990s. In addition to technical and economic goals, participatory planning also seeks community development outcomes, including community control, ownership and autonomy. This paper presents an evaluation of one such planning project, conducted at Mapoon in 1995. The Plan successfully improved physical infrastructure and housing, but had mixed success in terms of community development. Despite various efforts to follow participatory processes, the Plan was essentially a passing event, community control progressively diminished after its completion, and outcomes fell short of notions of ownership and autonomy. This suggests some misunderstandings between the practice of participatory planning and the workings of governance.

On bridging the gap: The relevance of theory to the practice of conflict resolution

It is often claimed that policy makers and scholars inhabit different worlds and have little for each other. We challenge this perception and claim that there is a strong symbiotic relationship between the two. This relationship is particularly strong in the field of conflict where policy makers may be in desperate need of guidelines, advice and analysis on how to transform complex conflict situations into more peaceful ones. We suggest that policy makers may think in terms of macro and micro-level theories and ideas if they wish to embrace better strategies of conflict resolution.

Introduction to the practice of telemedicine

Telemedicine is the delivery of health care and the exchange of health-care information across distances. It is not a technology or a separate or new branch of medicine. Telemedicine episodes may be classified on the basis of: (I) the interaction between the client and the expert (i.e. realtime or prerecorded), and (2) the type of information being transmitted (e.g. text, audio, video). Much of the telemedicine which is now practised is performed in industrialized countries, such as the USA, but there is increasing interest in the use of telemedicine in developing countries. There are basically two conditions under which telemedicine should be considered: (I) when there is no alternative (e.g. in emergencies in remote environments), and (2) when it is better than existing conventional services (e.g. teleradiology for rural hospitals). For example, telemedicine can be expected to improve equity of access to health care, the quality of that care, and the efficiency by which it is delivered. Research in telemedicine increased steadily in the late 1990s, although the quality of the research could be improved - there have been few randomized controlled trials to date.

The Pedagogical Practice of Locative Experience

We work collectively with varied locative-type projects and look to integrate our students into contemporary experience design culture. Students experience the ‘how and what’ of locative by becoming participant users, being exposed to contemporary works, and placing themselves in the role of the designer producing their own located works.