In the wake of London’s catastrophic Grenfell Towers fire, and of local incidents including a balcony fire at Melbourne Dockland’s LaCrosse Tower, governments are increasingly acting to limit the use of Aluminium Composite Panels (ACP) and Expanded Polystyrene (EPS) cladding. Also referred to as flammable or combustible cladding, use of these materials – especially in buildings over 3 levels – is now presumed non-compliant with building and construction codes in Victoria. In its 2017 report the ...
Oct 20, 2018•40 min
In this episode of This Must Be The Place Elizabeth speaks with Michael O’Neill, one of the volunteer organisers of the group “Yarra Pools”. Yarra Pools are a community-led proposal to reintroduce recreational swimming to the lower reaches of the Yarra. While swimming in the upper Yarra – Laughing Waters, Pound Bend, Warburton – is popular, swimming in the lower urban reaches is now not only rare but technically illegal (due to boating regulations). Not that, as is noted, many people are being h...
Oct 19, 2018•33 min
In this special episode from the Planning Institute of Australia national congress, UBC co-founder and National Award Winner for Planning Excellence, Tony Matthews (@drtonymatthews), chats with fellow award winner, Thomas Gardiner, Young Planner of the Year. Thomas, a graduate of the Griffith University planning program, reflects on his success on the national stage, life in regional Australia and how it accelerated his career. He talks about the exciting projects he’s currently spearheading and...
Oct 03, 2018•16 min
Podcasts from Perth: A UBC Special Edition from the Planning Institute of Australia National Congress 2018. In this special episode from the 2018 Planning Institute of Australia national congress, UBC co-founders Paul Maginn (@planographer) and Tony Matthews (@drtonymatthews) were fortunate to sit down and chat with Peter Tinley, Minister for Housing, Veterans Issues and Youth and member for Willagee in Perth’s southern suburbs in the Western Australian parliament. Peter Tinley entered WA state ...
Sep 30, 2018•17 min
Podcasts from Perth: A UBC Special Edition from the Planning Institute of Australia National Congress 2018. In this special episode from the Planning Institute of Australia national congress, UBC co-founder Tony Matthews (@drtonymatthews) chats with Chris O’Connor, an Australian planner who took his career to the USA, where he now runs a successful planning consultancy. Chris discusses his experiences of working in planning in America, including his time working in both San Francisco and Austin,...
Sep 26, 2018•30 min
Podcasts from Perth: A UBC Special Edition from the Planning Institute of Australia National Congress 2018. In this special episode from the Planning Institute of Australia national congress, UBC co-founders Paul Maginn (@planographer) and Tony Matthews (@drtonymatthews) chat with keynote speaker Stephanus Cecil Barnard. Having seen grinding poverty, ineffective government and a lack basic services in rural Africa, Cecil decided to pursue a career as a planner to make a real difference to the li...
Sep 23, 2018•21 min
Podcasts from Perth: A UBC Special Edition from the Planning Institute of Australia National Congress 2018. As the share of Australia’s ageing population increases this points to an increasing number of people with dementia. Dementia is the greatest cause of disability amongst Australian senior citizens. In this special episode from the Planning Institute of Australia national congress, UBC co-founders Paul Maginn (@planographer) and Tony Matthews (@drtonymatthews) chat with Jason Burton, Head o...
Sep 19, 2018•25 min
Podcasts from Perth: A UBC Special Edition from the Planning Institute of Australia National Congress 2018. (@drtonymatthews) put on their bicycle helmets and clips and take a ride with James Thoem and Michael Wexler, from Copenhagenize Design Co in the first of a series of special podcasts from the 2018 Planning Institute of Australia’s National Congress held in Perth from 9-11th May. James and Michael outline the philosophy of the Copenhagenize Design Co, what bicycle urbanism is, and its role...
Sep 16, 2018•28 min
Musicians, memoirs and maps: a bookish Curtin-side chat with Sarah Taylor and Sam Whiting. In this episode of This Must be The Place Elizabeth is joined by Sam Whiting, a PhD candidate and lecturer in popular culture in the school of Media and Communications at RMIT; and by Dr Sarah Taylor (Elizabeth’s sister), who recently completed a PhD on the historical geography of live music in Sydney and Melbourne and who is now a data scientist, also at RMIT. Sam’s PhD explores small live music venues: h...
Aug 15, 2018•1 hr 2 min
What role does the government play in facilitating displacement through transit-led development? We often hear about the role of the private sector, private landlords, and the purchasing power of individual real estate buyers in urban renewal, gentrification and displacement debates. The planning of new transit systems and overheating housing markets has renewed interest in understanding the role of government in neighbourhood change, specifically in the context of gentrification and displacemen...
Aug 14, 2018•26 min
Outdoor advertising & cities: In this installment of PlanningxChange Jess Noonan and Peter Jewell interview Ged Hart manager of TOM P/L (Total Outdoor Media). Outdoor advertising is a prominent and sometimes derided feature of cities. Ged talks about the role of outdoor in 'public messaging' and suggests that traditional views of outdoor are outdated. This is because in some instances Government takes 60 - 70% of the available space for public messaging campaigns. He talks of new technologie...
Aug 13, 2018•30 min
Research on cars, parking, & travel planning in Melbourne apartment buildings: With Chris De Gruyter. How do people in Melbourne apartments travel? How often do they drive cars, or use public transport? How much parking is enough? Can planning influence this? Such questions are often debated in the planning system (and beyond). However, there is little data available on the observed travel behavior of people living in apartments. Instead, most discussions are based on rough demand estimates,...
Aug 12, 2018•31 min
In New York, where anything’s possible, the privatisation of Manhattan's Central Park is even stranger than fiction. I imagine that few people would choose to travel back in time to visit the run down and quite frankly often dangerous Central Park of 1970s Manhattan. But many people don't realise that a casual and relatively safe stroll through Central Park today has come at significant cost to the park’s maintenance workers. "My dream is to have the park system privatised and run entirely for p...
Aug 11, 2018•24 min
On changing rooms, changing boundaries, and change makers: Retirement thoughts with Michael Buxton. In this episode of This Must Be The Place Elizabeth corners son-to-be Emeritus Professor Michael Buxton just before his retirement from RMIT after around 20 years. Michael describes his move to academia from state government, and as someone who has been closely involved in local government politics. Change is a recurring theme in the discussion, including changes to university management and admin...
Aug 10, 2018•41 min
The utopian visions of architects, planners, philosophers and sociologists are important speculative projects. We take a deep dive into the idea of utopia with Professor Danilo Palazzo, who calls on us to become utopians. “We are all utopians, as soon as we wish for something different and stop playing the part of the faithful performer or watchdog”, argued Henri Lefebvre. Cities have often been used as the laboratory for the imaginations of better futures. Such thinking recognises that the buil...
Aug 09, 2018•20 min
Contemporary Landscape Architecture: in this episode of new UBC members PlanningxChange, Jess Noonan and Peter Jewell interview landscape architect Tim Vernon of the CDA Design Group. Tim talks about the changes in the profession since he started in the mid 1980's, the influence of travel, sources of inspiration and the contemporary challenges (and joys) of landscape architecture. For more details: www.planningxchange.org.
Aug 08, 2018•37 min
What do planning podcast people do all day? This Must be the Place meets Planning Xchange. This episode of This Must Be The Place is a four-way conversation between David and Elizabeth; and the hosts of another Melbourne planning-related podcast – Planning Xchange (or ‘PX’). PX is a new member of the Urban Broadcast Collective. PX hosts Jess Noonan and Peter Jewell are both practicing planners, and their podcast features interviews with people employed across different roles in planning related ...
Aug 07, 2018•1 hr 1 min
Kiki Daire started her career in the porn industry in 1998, prior to this she worked as a stripper in Memphis, Tennessee where she is from. Kiki is of French and Cherokee descent. She has over 300 film credits, including featuring in a number of documentaries on pornography, and worked for companies including Evil Angel, Girlfriends Films and Adam and Eve. She is the host of Karaoke 2.0 X-Rated, a weekly social event for members of the adult entertainment scene and fans. This interview took plac...
Apr 23, 2018•16 min
Cities are vulnerable to climate change because they concentrate many people and buildings into a relatively small area. Consequently, even a relatively contained weather event can affect a large number of people. Cities are also very dependent on their “lifelines” – transportation systems to move people and goods, communications systems, water and energy distribution, sewers and waste removal systems. The concentration of people and wealth in cities, and their dependence on these infrastructure...
Apr 23, 2018•19 min
In this episode of This Must Be the Place Elizabeth and David present a double whammy re: screen representation. David talks to Nigel Giles, author of the new book on the groundbreaking 70s TV show Number 96, set in a mixed use block of flats in bohemian Paddington, Sydney. (“Number 96, Australian TV's Most Notorious Address” by Nigel Giles, Melbourne Books). Then, in what promises to be a compelling regular feature looking at cities in film (specifically films found on DVD in op shops), Elizab...
Apr 23, 2018•1 hr 13 min
Hayley Saul and Emma Waterton were doing ethnographic and anthropological fieldwork in the Langtang valley in Nepal when a 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit in 2015. The earthquake killed more than 9,000 people. At the time of the quake, they were with several local guides from the village of Langtang, one of the worst affected areas in Nepal. Emma and Hayley were recording local oral histories. Their ethnographic research was recording how local stories are written into the Himalayan landscape. Litt...
Apr 23, 2018•15 min
Australia has a long history of natural hazards. The famous Dorothy MacKellar poem about a sunburned country is replete with references to a whole bunch of them. In this episode of The Urban Squeeze, Jason Byrne asks just how vulnerable are our cities to natural hazards and what can we do about it? As well as discussing the types of natural hazards facing cities now and into the future, Jason discusses how cities respond to disasters in the immediate aftermath, in the medium term and the longer ...
Apr 22, 2018•17 min
“Basically if you thought of it, someone Japanese had thought of it before you and catered for it in some way” – three travelling planners discuss their initial impressions of Japanese cities. In this episode of This Must be the Place Elizabeth chats with two traveling companions - Helen Rowe, a transport planner, and Nicole Cook, a lecturer in urban geography – at the tail end of their short trip through Japan. They debrief in a tapas bar at Tokyo main station, amidst one of the many glistening...
Apr 22, 2018•26 min
In this episode of Radio Reversal, Nat, Amelia & Hannah explore new, messy imaginaries of what it means to be human and more-than-human in the Anthropocene and beyond. We tackle human exceptionalism, monism and vibrant matter, posthumanism, transhumanism, the Capitalocene and the Chthulucene and we try our hand (tentacles?) at what it would mean to Stay with the Trouble, as Donna Haraway implores. We consider what kinds of theories, politics, and practices are necessary for ethical lifeways ...
Apr 22, 2018•1 hr 2 min
This is a story about how the financial industry and governments turned a housing foreclosure crisis for everyday Americans into a financial opportunity for institutional real estate investors. And like all good stories, it involves the management of the new post-GFC housing asset class with digital technologies and algorithms. Say hello to The Automated Landlord. We talk to Desiree Fields about a new housing asset class that emerged from other side of the GFC in the United States. The period le...
Apr 22, 2018•24 min
There are many negative effects from a lack of physical activity and much to gain from regular exercise. Walking is a basic form of exercise but we have only recently begun to understand how important the potential to walk is in our cities. Walkability is a concept which measures how friendly an area is to walking. In this episode of The Urban Squeeze, Tony and Jason discuss how important it is for cities to be walkable. They consider the pressure points inspiring planning to think about walkabi...
Apr 22, 2018•22 min
This is the first ever episode of “This Must Be the Place”: a documentary style visit to the remains of Cocoroc, inside the Western Treatment Plant. If you live in Melbourne, chances are you don’t give too much thought to where what you flush down the toilet goes to. The important part is it just goes ‘away’. But the chances are – as with 80% of Melbourne’s sewage - it travels to the Western Treatment Plant in Werribee. For much of its history, from the 1890s, the Plant was known as the ‘Metropo...
Apr 22, 2018•27 min
CarPoolXXX is a special series of podcasts and vodcasts (hosted by Paul Maginn) that explores the issue of Porn Performers as a Migrant Community. Los Angeles has been the epicentre of global porn production since the 1980s and as such thousands of people from across the US and internationally - especially Europe - have migrated to California in order to be in the porn industry. Academic studies of migrant communities tend to focus on people who come from certain countries, nationalities, or rel...
Mar 28, 2018•1 hr 6 min
Many cities around the world pride themselves on their live music scenes. But music cities don’t generally happen by accident - they are planned for, organised, marketed and protected. In this episode of the The Urban Squeeze, Tony and Jason examine how music cities are regulated and what good and bad regulations involve. They discuss the role for planning in promoting music as a cultural driver in cities. They also reflect on the question of whether good planning can leverage music as a way to ...
Mar 28, 2018•18 min
This episode of This Must be the Place is the first of our ‘walking tours’ – we are revisiting the walks of the 1980 book “Melbourne on Foot: 15 Walks Through Historic Melbourne”. This episode starts with David speaking with one of the authors of that book, Professor Graeme Davison of Monash University, about the genesis of the book in general. They are then joined by Elizabeth to discuss the Richmond tour specifically. (Confusingly this all takes place in St Kilda, ahead of a walking tour inclu...
Mar 28, 2018•59 min
