Australia is in the midst of a housing crisis. But amidst the political and media debate about the fixes to our housing woes, public housing has slipped from view. There's concern that funding commitments are a far cry from the broad based approach to public rental housing which has supported so many Australians in the past, including Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. So where does Australia go from here? Join Rebecca Pinkstone, Chief Executive of Homes NSW, Alistair Sisson of Macquarie Universit...
Jul 22, 2025•57 min
What is ‘public’ about our urban and regional transport systems - and how public should they be? Are our leaders actually serving public interests and values around public transport? Should a stick in the ground really count as a bus stop? And what the heck is a 'beg button'? In this episode of City Road a rich panel of speakers delve into the big questions surrounding public transport at the recent Festival of Urbanism, including Dr Ian Woodcock, Emma Bacon, Neill Miller, David Babineau, Dr Reb...
Jul 02, 2025•53 min
With housing *the* hot topic this election, a panel of experts at the recent Festival of Urbanism battled to convince a live audience that the private market could (or could not) solve Australia's housing crisis. This debate features: - The Hon Doug Cameron, Former Senator - Sharath Mahendran, Urban Planner and creator of YouTube channel Building Beautifully - Emily Sims, Uralla Shire Council - Stephanie Barker, Executive Director, Strategy and Engagement, Willowtree Planning - Luke Cass, editor...
Apr 29, 2025•51 min
Welcome back to City Road. In this episode, we reflect on 2024's Festival of 'Public' Urbanism and its panel discussion on how the public life of great cities takes place in our cultural buildings and civic spaces – from libraries to museums, town halls, streets, parks and playgrounds. This special Denis Winston memorial lecture, delivered by Dr Caroline Butler-Bowdon, State Librarian and award-winning author and curator, celebrates our crucial public infrastructure as the cornerstone of public ...
Apr 28, 2025•1 hr 16 min
This final episode of the Infrastructure Governance Incubator series focuses on a plenary discussion centred around the findings of the ‘Infrastructure Governance Incubator’ - a multidisciplinary collaborative research project across three universities – which took place at the State of Australasian Cities conference in December 2023. This discussion sought to contribute to a renewed research agenda for Australasian infrastructure governance, considering the current state of governance challenge...
Mar 14, 2024•1 hr 19 min
Infrastructure planning is intrinsically political – but are there significant differences between how we expect infrastructure planning to occur and the reality of how it plays out? Are our current approaches to the relationship between planning and power working? In this fifth episode, we build on learnings from Victoria and consider the politics behind infrastructure decisions with Dr James Murphy, drawing on the latest book, ‘The Making and Unmaking of East-West Link’. We consider the roles ...
Mar 14, 2024•46 min
The evidence shows that increasing new housing production alone won’t solve the affordability crisis. At this special event, the NSW Minister for Housing and Homelessness, the Hon. Rose Jackson MLC and a panel of experts from industry, academia, and community sectors, will outline strategies for unlocking affordable supply, from social housing to the ‘missing middle’. KEYNOTE ADDRESS The Hon. Rose Jackson MLC, Minister for Housing, Homelessness, Mental Health, Youth, the North Coast, and Water P...
Dec 08, 2023•1 hr 3 min
Water security is one of the most contested issues facing urban and regional communities across Australia. For growing inland cities like Canberra, conventional assumptions and approaches to water supply, catchment management, and urban planning must be reimagined in the context of climate change. This special event hosted in partnership with the Planning Institute of Australia examines the increasingly complex debates surrounding water security and asks whether and how inland cities can ever ac...
Dec 08, 2023•1 hr 24 min
We know we must end sprawl and densify our cities, but are tall towers the answer? Can the skyscraper solve our affordable housing problem? Does high density necessarily mean high-rise, and do such developments stack up environmentally – or do they exacerbate issues such as urban heat? What are the wider benefits or disbenefits of hyper-density in terms of urban design, street making, community cohesion or accessibility? Join Saving Sydney author Dr Elizabeth Farrelly and a panel of experts for ...
Dec 06, 2023•57 min
How are Australia’s Indigenous and settler histories recognised and confronted in cultural heritage conservation and urban planning practice, alongside wider struggles for native title, land rights, and spatial justice? Join this conversation with a panel of experts across Indigenous history, archaeology, heritage conservation, urban planning and design. SPEAKERS Professor Bronwyn Carlson, Head of Department of Indigenous Studies, Macquarie University Stephen Gapps, Senior Associate Historian, A...
Dec 06, 2023•1 hr 7 min
In recent years a new movement known as ‘YIMBY’ (‘Yes In My Backyard’) has emerged. ‘YIMBIES’ argue that planning and regulatory barriers serving local ‘NIMBY’ (‘Not In My Backyard’ property owners) block new and higher density housing, causing affordability pressures across the market. By contrast, many so called ‘NIMBIES’ reject the proposition that ‘supply’ is the only solution to high cost housing. In this session, housing advocates and experts debate the proposition that supply side barrier...
Dec 06, 2023•1 hr 10 min
Episode 3: Innovating urban governance: the Creative Bureaucrat Does creativity have a place in City Hall? The idea that bureaucracy should or can be creative certainly runs counter to common ideas we have of city government. But recently, that has begun to change. Innovation in city governance is being recast as ‘creative problem solving’. Drawing on stories from city governments around the world, in this third episode of ‘Innovating Cities’, Tom Baker and Pauline McGuirk discuss what it takes ...
Dec 04, 2023•36 min
With rising recognition of the health and environmental benefits of active transport, there are increasing struggles between users of footpaths, roads and curbs. Not only are streets important transportation routes, as demonstrated over the Pandemic period, they have also become recognised as important public spaces for social activities, from dining to market stalls or food production. This session interrogates the emerging struggles over street spaces still dominated by roads and parking. SPEA...
Nov 28, 2023•1 hr 1 min
Australia’s legal frameworks for biodiversity conservation and environmental protection are intended to preserve and enhance the nation’s natural and cultural heritage while enabling appropriate forms of urban development and infrastructure. Yet Commonwealth Environmental Protection & Biodiversity Conservation law has been deemed unfit for purpose, while the states pledge ongoing reforms to make land use systems faster and more responsive to enable residential development and major projects....
Nov 28, 2023•59 min
Meaningful public accountability in infrastructure governance This episode considers the challenges of, and possibilities for, meaningful accountability in infrastructure governance. Public accountability is often publicly demanded or politically signalled, but much more rarely unpacked or discussed in depth. This episode discusses the importance of accountability in infrastructure and planning governance, and its multiple intersecting social understandings. We discuss the importance of scrutini...
Nov 27, 2023•30 min
Episode 2: Innovating urban governance: Design Thinking What is design thinking and how might it be useful for city governments? In this second episode of ‘Innovating Cities’, Robyn Dowling and Sophia Maalsen discuss how design thinking is being conceptualised and operationalised in city governance innovation. Drawing from examples internationally and in Australia, they ask what design thinking means to those who use it, what it is used for, and how using design thinking may open up new opportun...
Nov 27, 2023•26 min
There is ongoing concern about the localised impacts of globally owned platforms on the ways in which we use our homes and cities. From the housing market and neighbourhood impacts of Airbnb style platforms through to the less visible implications of automated urban systems, this session asks how communities can best understand and harness digitalisation to create positive opportunities, while managing risks. PANEL Professor Simon Marvin, the University of Sydney and the Director of the Urban In...
Nov 27, 2023•56 min
From preserving heritage to defining flood planning levels or calculating open space requirements, planning processes, and decisions are inherently bound by assumptions and practices from the past. In this inaugural lecture, Dr Robert Stokes, former minister for Planning, Public Spaces, and Cities, will reflect on how these ‘wicked’ assumptions shape contemporary cities and define their future trajectory. Following Dr Stoke’s lecture, an eminent panel of policy and industry leaders will discuss ...
Nov 27, 2023•1 hr 22 min
Episode 1: Innovating urban governance: the work of Innovation Units In this first episode in the Innovating Cities Series, Pauline McGuirk and Tom Baker discuss what innovating city governance means and explore one key example of urban governance innovation in practice: innovation units. Drawing from research on innovation units in the United States, Europe and Australia, the team tackles questions around how these innovation units work, what they hope to achieve, and the challenges they encoun...
Nov 20, 2023•33 min
New Orleans and Australia's Northern Rivers are miles apart but share similarities when it comes to natural disasters. This session shines a light on the difficult questions confronting communities as they seek to rebuild more resilient settlements in the wake of devastating natural disasters. Drawing on the experiences of flood urbanist Professor Elizabeth Mossop, and community leader Dan Etheridge, both of whom were at the front line of the New Orleans Hurricane Katrina response and rebuilding...
Oct 17, 2023•1 hr 17 min
From fragmentation to integration: Building collaborative governance Different types of infrastructure need to work together to build and support great places and communities. Most of us can recognise the kinds of siloed and fragmented planning we see around us, but what do we mean when we make demands for, or promises of, “integrated governance”? This episode looks at the diverse challenges of trying to understand and enact integrated infrastructure governance within our highly fractured system...
Oct 13, 2023•32 min
We're talking with Professor Kate Fullagar about her new book on Bennelong and Phillip. Grab the book here: https://www.simonandschuster.com.au/books/Bennelong-and-Phillip/Kate-Fullagar/9781761108174 This book provides the first joint biography of Bennelong and Governor Arthur Phillip, two pivotal figures in Australian history – the colonised and coloniser – and a bold and innovative new portrait of both. Bennelong and Phillip were leaders of their two sides in the first encounters between Brita...
Oct 03, 2023•42 min
Jamie Peck talks with Gareth Bryant and Sophie Webber about their new book Climate Finance: Taking a Position on Climate Futures. Responding to climate change is commonly understood as a financial challenge: What are the expected costs of the impacts of climate change? How much money is needed to reduce emissions to a safe level and to help people live in a changing climate? Who should pay? While these questions reflect the big issues of climate politics - about historical responsibility, unequa...
Sep 15, 2023•35 min
Dallas Rogers talks with Stephen Gapps about his new book, Gudyarra: The First Wiradyuri War of Resistance — The Bathurst War, 1822–1824 ‘In May 1824, what can only be described as a period of all-out, total gudyarra (‘war’ in the Wiradyuri language) had begun west of the Blue Mountains. Relations between Wiradyuri people and the colonists in the country around Bathurst had completely broken down, and the number of raids and killings occurring across isolated stock stations in the district had i...
Sep 15, 2023•30 min
Adam David Morton, Professor of Political Economy in the Discipline of Political Economy at the University of Sydney, talks with Mark Steven about his new book, Class War: A Literary History. This book is a thrilling and vivid work of history, Class War weaves together literature and politics to chart the making and unmaking of social class through revolutionary combat. In a narrative that spans the globe and more than two centuries of history, Mark Steven traces the history of class war from th...
Sep 13, 2023•29 min
Joe Penny, Lecturer in Global Urbanism at the UCL Urban Laboratory in London, talks with Álvaro Sevilla-Buitrago about his alternative history of capitalist urbanization through the lens of the commons. Against the Commons underscores how urbanization shapes the social fabric of places and territories, lending awareness to the impact of planning and design initiatives on working-class communities and popular strata. Projecting history into the future, it outlines an alternative vision for a post...
Sep 12, 2023•56 min
Dallas talks with A/Prof Dinesh Wadiwel about his new book on the industrial production of animals for food, and where cities fit into this process. This book provides the first systematic application of Marx’s value theory to animal labour within the context of capitalist food systems. Dinesh applies Marx’s value theory which builds on and adapts recent work in animal studies, posthumanities, critical race theory and feminist theory to provide new insights into human-animal relations under capi...
Sep 12, 2023•42 min
How is infrastructure entangled with the legacies and ongoing processes of settler-coloniality? How might we give more meaningful attention to planning for Country and with Indigenous sovereignties?Cities in so-called Australia are built on unceded First Nations land. We talk about what this means for the way we understand and do infrastructure planning, and the responsibilities of planning professions. Asking these types of questions unsettles many governance assumptions, and prompts infrastruc...
Aug 07, 2023•31 min
Interview with Anne Lacaton & Jean-Philippe Vassal, 2021 Pritzker Prize Laureates and the Rothwell Program Co-Chairs at the University of Sydney’s School of Architecture, Design and Planning. Architecture is about freedom, generosity, pleasure. Large spaces generate an essential feeling of escape and freedom. Large spaces facilitate appropriation, foster relationships within spaces, to allow for pleasurable situations, to encourage relations between people and promote social life. Enlarging ...
Jul 26, 2023•33 min
Some claim the pandemic has ushered in a "post work" era when the concepts of work, workplace, and commute are being remade. Digital technologies, artificial intelligence, co-creation and multi-locational work sites are creating new spaces for work and encouraging the merging of work and non-work spaces like never before. These changes are also hastening the development of unequal labour landscapes across our cities. This panel explores the impact of the "post-work" condition on how we work in, ...
May 13, 2023•1 hr 13 min
