Can the impact on health of a government policy designed to create more liveable neighbourhoods be evaluated? an overview of the RESIDential Environment Project

There is growing interest in the impact of community design on the health of residents. In 1998, the Western Australian Government began a trial of new subdivision design codes (i.e. Liveable Neighbourhoods Community Design Code) aimed at creating pedestrian-friendly neighbourhoods to increase walking, cycling and public transport use. The trial provided a unique opportunity for a natural experiment to evaluate the impact of a government planning policy on residents. Nevertheless, evaluations of this kind present a number of methodological challenges in obtaining the highest quality evidence possible. This paper describes the RESIDential Environment Project’s study design and discusses how various methodological challenges were overcome.

The increasing importance of serviced offices as a competing land use in global cities

Once considered a relatively low key land use in central business districts, the number of serviced offices has increased dramatically in recent years. The factors driving the demand for serviced offices have changed, and the suppliers of this service have reacted quickly to meet these needs. This trend has been assisted by the expansion of a select number of multi-national companies that specialise in the provision of serviced offices, available in a flexible range of office types and costs.
This paper considers the reasons behind the rapid growth in the serviced office market, and examines the role of both the user and the provider. Attention is focused on the global marketplace and how these changes have been transformed into the Australian central business districts. The information will be of benefit to property analysts, developers and investors, especially when seeking an alternative use of existing traditional office accommodation.

Healthy cities

Healthy Cities is a worldwide movement developed by the European office of the World Health Organization. It has been implemented formally through WHO in many cities, and others have adopted the model. Grounded in 11 qualities that range from housing to economy and social characteristics such as a supportive community, Healthy Cities goes well beyond the definition of health as an absence of disease. This entry looks at its development and implementation around the world.

Can investors hedge residential price dynamics of Australia's capital cities?

The study described in this paper focuses on testing the short-run and
long-run relationships between house price and consumer price indices in Australia’s capital cities from 1998 to 2008. The autoregressive distributed lag model is adopted to obtain the estimates of the short-run relationships, while the error correction model is used to investigate the long-run relationships. The t-statistic is used to compute the significance of these relationships. The research results give no evidence that house price indices are correlated with consumer price indices in the short run. However, the long-run relationships between house and consumer price indices exist in most of the cities.

Do healthy cities work? A logic of method for assessing impact and outcome of healthy cities

In this article, we discuss an appropriate methodology for assessing complex urban programs such as the WHO European Healthy Cities Network. The basic tenets and parameters for this project are reviewed, and situated in the broader urban health tradition. This leads to a delineation of the types of questions researchers can address when looking at a complex urban health program. Such questions reach appropriately beyond traditional public health concepts involving proximal and distal determinants of health (and associated upstream, midstream, and downstream rhetoric). Espousing a multi-level, reciprocal pathways perspective on Healthy Cities research, we also adopt a distinction between impacts and outcomes of Healthy Cities. The former are value driven, the latter intervention-driven. These approaches lead to the acknowledgment of a logic of method that includes situational and contextual appreciation of unique Healthy City experiences in a Realist Evaluation paradigm. The article concludes with a reflection of evaluation and assessment procedures applied to Phase IV (2003-2008) of the WHO European Healthy Cities Network and an interpretation of response rates to the range of methods that have been adopted.

House price bubble estimations in Australia's capital cities with market fundamentals

This paper investigates the existence of house price bubbles in Australia's eight capital cities in recent years by using quantitative analyses including Johansen cointegration test, Granger causality test, impulse response and Chow forecast test. While interactions between house prices and market fundamentals are discussed in long-run and causal estimations, shocks from the market fundamentals to house prices are investigated in generalized impulse response analyses. Findings from estimating house price bubbles for eight capital cities suggest that there was an obvious house price bubble in Perth, while a slight house price bubble occurred in Sydney. In contrast, house prices in Adelaide and Darwin can be explained very well by market fundamentals, while house prices in Melbourne, Brisbane, Hobart and Canberra were undervalued in the study period.

Architecture, identity and cultural sustainability in contemporary Southeast Asian cities

Distinctive architecture, which once served to identify peoples and places, has now, across the world, been subject to the standardising forces of history. Built environments still reflect the conceptual, spatial and physical construction of communities, though straightforward correlations between particular forms of architecture, places and people can no longer be taken for granted. This article explores these notions through discussion of several Southeast Asian examples, seeing how the relationship between architecture and culture might be framed by each of them, and then how definitions of culture might be differently expressed depending on each context. The first context is the village. Here, recent buildings are produced within a traditional, rural culture, generally without recourse to architects. Indigenous symbolism is overlaid, but not necessarily subsumed, by imported typologies and ideologies. The second context is urban and more formalised and involves self-conscious architectural attempts to straddle tradition and modernity, as well as notions of broader collective identity. The third context is one of a more diffused globalisation. Issues of conservation and heritage are complicated by the imperial or colonial histories of many urban environments, as well as by the pressures of economic development and population growth. In cultural terms, however, it is the life of cities that is foregrounded here. This disparate collection of architectural projects and agendas reflects a region where the forces of essentialism and fragmentation continue to be in creative tension (Ashraf 2005).

Jillong 2030 : mistakes, challenges & urban visions

Geelong has long been a second cousin to Melbourne economically and in development. Whilst historically wishing to capture the role as administrative capital of the new colony of Victoria, it missed out due to the entrepreneurism of Melbourne. Despite this, it embraced contemporary industrialism, particularly automotive, and built upon its port and wool export capacities. Politics, intransigence and lack of economic investment compounded the failure to create quality urban fabric and enable innovative planning. The last 50 years have witnessed attempts to re-chart a robust and co-ordinated urban framework and vision, aided by the former Geelong Regional Commission (GRC) and more recently the amalgamated City of Greater Geelong (CGG), resulting in varying successes and several failures. Urban design has repeatedly, and historically, surfaced as the catalyst for creative and successful growth in Geelong, or Jillong at the Wathaurong described the place. This paper considers the planning, urban design and environmental legacy of Geelong. It critiques its successes and failures, drawing out the salient issues and themes that underpin its opportunities and quality place-making adventures, and considers the key challenges it now faces. Importantly, it sets forth the six planning and design challenges it must confront in the next 10 years to create a robust, creative, healthy and environmentally liveable place, of which urban design regeneration surfaces as a core need, or the city will continue along its haphazard pathway without cohesion and purpose.

A social network analysis model for analysing stakeholder-associated safety risks in infrastructure projects

An important strategy in the long-term blueprint for making Australia's 18 capital and major regional cities more productive, sustainable and liveable is to develop high quality public infrastructure systems to improve civic quality of life. Because of the unique features of construction activities, such as long period, complicated processes, and dynamic organizational structures, infrastructure projects normally involve multiple stakeholders and are subject to various risks, especially safety issues. Any negligence or mismanagement of critical safety risks will have huge impact on achieving project objectives and success. Although many previous studies have identified and assessed various safety risks in construction industry, a main research gap is that these studies ignored a fact that most risks are interrelated and associated with internal and external stakeholders of the projects. The lack of a theoretical foundation and appropriate methods for analysing stakeholder-associated safety risks and their interdependencies in infrastructure projects hinders effective risk management processes and the formulations of decision strategies. This research aims at enabling higher performance in strategic safety risk management in infrastructure projects through the development of a holistic risk analysis model using Stakeholder and Social Network Theories. The outcomes can broaden project managers' awareness of emerging influential safety risks and enhance their ability to perceive, understand, assess, and mitigate safety risks in an effective and efficient way; thereby higher performance in strategic risk management could be achieved in infrastructure projects.