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Projects
Current Research Projects
Enabling inter-agency data sharing to support the spatial analysis of social vulnerability in a transforming region
Researcher(s): Pauline McGuirk, Phillip O'Neill (Unversity of Western Sydney), Kathy Mee, Robert King, Lesley Instone
Addressing social vulnerability requires early identification of vulnerable communities and whole-of-government intervention. This depends upon the availability of meaningful indicators which in turn demands inter-agency data sharing. To date a host of constraints—legal, ethical, organisational—have prevented such data sharing. The primary focus of this research is resolution of these constraints. The project will construct reproducible protocols to overcome constraints and enable agency data to be shared and incorporated into production of enriched indicators. Its outcomes include creation of a Spatial Data Analysis facility, supplying strategic, timely and fine-grained data to inform research-based whole-of-government policy development.
Source: Australian Research Council Linkage Project (with NSW Premier and Cabinet), $215 000 (2007 - 2010)
Privatising neighbourhoods? Governance and social life in master-planned residential estates
Researcher(s): Robyn Dowling (Macquarie University), Pauline McGuirk, Rowland Atkinson (University of Tasmania)
This research investigates a phenomenon profoundly affecting the character of Australian urban life: master-planned residential estates (MPREs) that now dominate new-build development. International research suggests they produce privatised neighbourhood governance and entrench social exclusion. Yet researchers do not know how these processes operate in Australia. We investigate three different types of MPRE to trace empirical and theoretical connections between governance arrangements and patterns of social interaction. The project will produce: unique insights into neighbourhood life; essential feedback for urban policy makers; and new theorisations of private neighbourhoods informed by distinctive Australian perspectives.
Source: Australian Research Council Discovery Project, $184 000 (2007-2008)
McDonald, S., 2006, Social programming or community building, Property Australia, p. 30-31.
McDonald, S., 2006, Planning communities, Property Australia, p. 26-29.
Dowling, R. and McGuirk, P.M., 2005, Master-Planned Estates and Suburban Complexity, paper presented at Post-Suburban Sydney: The City in Transformation Conference, University of Western Sydney
The politics of the anxious city: reordering the public realm in the Australian metropolis
Researcher(s): Pauline McGuirk
Contemporary cities are said to be rife with anxieties about incompatible social diversity, declining social cohesion and the threat of disorder. These anxieties find expression in the growing tendency for middle class 'incubation' in privatised residential, work, and leisure environments. More fundamentally, however, they are felt in a transformation of the urban public realm: a physical and social space historically understood to be critical to the creation of urban and social cohesion, engagement and democratic practice as well as to the liveability and economic competitiveness of cities. Transformation of the urban public realm, is being driven by spatial strategies and social governance policies aimed at asserting particular forms of order and civility in public space. While there is speculation that this transformation is advancing in urban Australia, empirical evidence is sparse and critical analysis and conceptual understandings are poorly developed. Therefore, this project seeks to scope, identify, and categorise the extent and form of techniques and rationales driving urban public realm transformations across metropolitan Australia. Its outcomes will provide foundational empirical data and the development of a conceptual framework to underpin an ARCDP application aimed to develop the first empirically informed analysis of the critical implications of these transformations in a critical dimension of the social fabric of Australia's major cities.
Source: University of Newcastle Strategic Pilot Research Grant, $15 000 (2006-2008)
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Understanding Sydney's changing role as a global city in the Australian urban and regional network Researcher(s): Phillip O’Neill, Pauline McGuirk, Frank Stillwell, Dick Bryan Source:Australian Research Council Discovery Project,$150 000 (2005 -2006) |
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ARC Research Network Spatially Integrated Social Science (ARCRNSISS)
Researcher(s): Hosted by the University of Queensland. CURS is one of four key nodes for the network
The aim of ARCRNSISS is to enhance Australia’s capacity and capability to conduct innovative, cross-disciplinary policy-relevant, research in spatially integrated social science and to provide the evidence base for understanding the issues and challenges facing people and places in coping with changes in contemporary society. It does this through a range of research networking activities including conferences, and workshops, data development and archiving and RHD training events. The network is based at the University of Queensland and is coordinated by Professor Bob Stimson. The Centre for Urban and Regional Studies hosts one of the four key priority areas of the ARCRNSISS: Socio-spatial Theory, which aims to nurture research activity which builds critical reflection and inquiry on the spatial theories, constructs models, metaphors and representations engaged by social scientists.
ARCRNSISS will facilitate Australia’s social scientists to develop and apply spatially integrating research paradigms and approaches in pursuing these objectives:
- Promote and facilitate increased and more effective cross-disciplinary collaboration between researchers in Australia and internationally.
- Engage and nurture young and inexperienced researchers to build research capacity and capability and to ensure future research leadership.
Source: Australian Research Council Research Network, $1 500 000 (2004 – 2009)
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South Pacific Governance: Scale, Transformations and Institutions Researcher(s): Phillip O’Neill, Sarah Wright, Susan Roberts, Pauline McGuirk, Kathy MeeThe project examines the scaled nature of political governance in the South Pacific. Using governance and scale as framing devices, it explores governance as a contested pathway of established and evolving practices. These practices are constituted formally and informally, and are enacted through a multiplicity of sites and scales that work with, or against other social structures such as gender and race. Understood in this way governance can be seen as an exchange among contemporary competing organisational discourses and the structures they confront. In other words, governance is something that is performed, and its structures enacted. And, therefore, it involves enlisting entities from a variety of scales: the body, the office, the parliament, the factory, the regional assembly, the television stations, the political party and the South Pacific Forum. |
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TUNRA Urban Research Development Project Researcher(s): Phillip O’Neill, Pauline McGuirk, Kathy Mee, Sarah Wright, Kevin Markwell, Salim Momtaz Source:TUNRA and McCloy Development, $150 000 (2005 – 2006) |
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Final Report: Urban development and the lower Hunter: understanding context, connections and flows.
Download report by chapter (pdf)
Chapter Two: Demographic trends and projections for the lower Hunter region
Chapter Three: Facilities and flows in the lower Hunter
Chapter Four: Business flows and connections in the lower Hunter
Chapter Five: Lessons learned from residential development
Cultural Geographies of Belonging Project
Researcher(s): Kathy Mee, Sarah Wright and Lesley Instone
Belonging and exclusion are central geographical processes through which identity and entitlement are negotiated and realised. Despite the centrality of belonging to many social processes and to the ways that power and identity are configured in society, it is not a concept that has been well theorised. Rather than exploring belonging, much literature begins instead with an entry point of exclusion and marginalisation. Our aim is to contribute to a theorisation of belonging by exploring practices, meanings and processes of belonging at different scales and spaces: from the body, the house or home, the neighbourhood, the region, the nation and the global. Important issues examined through the project include the construction of belonging and exclusion; the vital role of borders, frontiers and liminal spaces in constituting belonging; attempts at the purification of space; practices of belonging such as care and the contestation of geographies of belonging through processes of transgression and or resistance. As a result of the project, Kathy Mee and Sarah Wright organised a session at the International Geographical Union conference (Brisbane 2006) and are editing our upcoming edition of Environment and Planning A that stems from contributions offered at the conference.
Knowledge, power and intellectual property
Researcher(s): Sarah Wright
This research examines the relationship between globally propagated intellectual property laws and the material experience of farmers in the Philippines. I focus on the politics of knowledge, the way that different knowledges are experienced in place and the ways they have been variously adopted, reworked and contested at different scales including through attempts to defend and (re)construct more collective notions of knowledge and property.
Agrarian reform in the Philippines
Researcher(s): Sarah Wright
This collaborative research project is currently in its final phase. We investigate the sources of land conditions associated with, conflict over land in the Philippines including the role of neoliberal globalization (such as manifested by market-assisted reform programs pushed by the World Bank)and community responses to change. In this project, we focused on the experiences of the agricultural workers of the Philippines to learn how best to respond to the pressures, and to advocate for a more effective agrarian reform program.
Performing and policing borderland identities in Southeast Asia and northern Australia
Researcher(s): Sarah Wright
This research focuses on the geographies of borderlands and their relation to identity and citizenship with particular attention to indigenous constructions of borders in northern Australia. Borderlands, farfrom peripheral, are fundamental to the way that citizenship, identity and the nation are imagined,policed and performed. Central to the research is the need to decentre the idea of borders, draw out the multidimensionality of borderlands and bring a multicultural and multiscalar perspective lacking in the literature. The project will focus on tourism in indigenous communities in northern Australia. Through this research, I hope to explore the notion of borderlands as potential sites for the imagination and realisationof self-determined landscapes.
Trialling procedures and protocols for integrating agency and non-agency data: Cessnock Community Renewal Scheme as a case study
Researcher(s): Phillip O’Neill, Pauline McGuirk, Kathy Mee, Robert King
This project is a collaboration between the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies and the Regional Coordination Management Group (RCMG) and is funded jointly by the RCMG and the University of Newcastle Collaborative Grant Scheme. This project trials techniques and protocols for integrating agency and non-agency data for the purposes of evaluating whole-of-government community development programs. Appropriate techniques and protocols governing data collection, integration, processing and spatial analysis will be trialled in the context of the Cessnock Community Renewal Scheme, as a case study for the Regional Co-ordination Group (NSW Premier's Department, Hunter). The project represents an opportunity to build an on-going relationship with the NSW Premier's Department which drives state government's whole-of-government programs to position CURS as the primary regional supplier of spatial analysis for program evaluation. The research feeds directly into existing Faculty research strengths on the research theme of urban and regional analysis.
Source: Regional Co-ordination Management Group (RCMG), Hunter and the University of Newcastle Collaborative Grant Scheme, $20 000 (2005 - 2006)
Building technologies and engagement processes for using spatialised data to enhance family and community outcomes in a region experiencing major change
Researcher(s): Phillip O’Neill, Pauline McGuirk, Kathy Mee, Robert King
This project is a collaboration between the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies, Families First Initiative and NSW Premiers Department (Hunter Region), funded initially by a University Research Management Committee Collaborative Grant. Additional funds have been awarded though an ARC Linkage Grant (2003-2006). The NSW government's Families First Initiative (FFI) seeks delivery of more effective services to families with children. FFI agencies need information about children's life circumstances, risk of disadvantage, and the effectiveness of intervention programs. The project uses innovative techniques and processes to develop practitioner-friendly, finely-scaled indicators. The collaborators bring professional skills in service delivery to the project. The University researchers bring cross-disciplinary expertise in statistical/spatial modelling and policy analysis. Outcomes include PhD training, inter-agency engagement skills, new indicator techniques, high-impact contributions to literatures on quantification and state theory, and the development of an ongoing socio-spatial analysis and modelling facility.
Source: Australian Research Council Linkage Project and the Families First Initiative and NSW Premiers Department, Hunter Region,$189 000 (2003 – 2006)
Spatial Data Analysis Project (SDAP)
Researcher(s): Phillip O’Neill, Pauline McGuirk, Kathy Mee, Robert King
This project brings together the data collection, processing, analysis and presentation techniques developed from the variety of projects within the Centre. This project has four objectives: first, the assembly of data to enable informed yet relatively rapid appraisal of community, household and personal needs within relatively small geographic zones; second, the provision of analysis showing differences in socio-economic outcomes across geographic districts; third, the provision of analysis showing shifts through time in various socioeconomic variables across geographic districts; and fourth, the development of the capacity for accessing data and undertaking analysis for specific descriptive and analytical purposes.
The project is in advanced stages where its concentration is on data relevant to the Hunter Region in New South Wales.
This involves:
- Building a longitudinal and spatial data base of socioeconomic data from ABS Censuses of Population and Housing 1981-2001;
-Incorporating data from other compatible ABS sources such as the quarterly household survey;
-Investigating the availability and inclusion of other data relevant to the project and its needs and aspirations; and
-Developing protocols for data access including considerations of easy access, privacy and ethics.
Following completion of the initial stage, the project is currently developing a web-based database to enable a delivery facility. Further, it will enable the development of customised data analysis techniques for solution of specific problems.
Past Research Projects
Sydney's master-planned communities: crucibles of urban morphological, social and political transformation
Researcher(s): Pauline McGuirk
Australia's metropolitan regions are currently experiencing dramatic reconfigurations in urban morphology, social and political form which are proceeding in advance of our empirical and theoretical grasp of them. These reconfigurations intersect in a new urban phenomenon: the master-planned community—large scale, privately funded integrated developments of housing with physical, social and commercial infrastructure. As crucibles of urban change, MPCs offer a unique entry-point to investigation. This project undertakes the first extensive study of MPCs, producing a novel empirical charting of the extent and nature of the phenomenon for Australia's primary metropolitan region. It then focuses on MPCs' institutional and governance arrangements, generating much-needed understandings of how they intersect with public governance and service functions to create significant shifts in the nature of the public realm. The project serves as a pilot for a landmark study of the social governance of community life within MPCs.
Source:University of Newcastle Research Management Committee Project Grant, $9 200 (2005)
Exploring the relationships between retail access to tobacco, socio-economic status and tobacco consumption
Researcher(s): Chris Paul, Kathy Mee
Smoking is the single most preventable cause of premature mortality in Australia. It is also a major health risk factor contributing to health inequality, with smoking being much more prevalent in groups with lower socio-economic status. This project brought together behavioural researchers, geographers, demographers and tobacco control advocates to begin exploring the role of tobacco retail outlet density on tobacco consumption and smoking relapse. The project compared outlet density (number of outlets per capita) with the SES of those areas using the socio-economic index for areas (SEIFA). The collaboration has the potential to open up a new area of tobacco research in Australia – the relationship of retail access to tobacco consumption and smoking relapse. This area of research has the potential to identify new avenues, technologies and methodologies for tobacco control research.
Source:NSW Cancer Council, $15 000 (2005)
Effective public housing management strategies for rural and regional Australia
Researcher(s): Phillip O'Neill, Pauline McGuirk, Kathy Mee
Public housing authorities face growing demand for low cost housing from a diversifying range of households. This project addressed three parts of this problem for an emblematic region. It developed robust geographic information systems models to predict low-cost housing demand in rural and regional areas. This major technical advance was situated within studies of institutional behaviours affecting operation of housing authorities. Further the project evaluateed public sector influence on housing markets in rural and regional NSW in order to enhance intervention practices.
Source: Australian Research Council Linkage Project and the NSW Department of Housing, Hunter Region,$169 000 (2002 – 2005)
Industrial Development and Economic Leakage in the Dungog Shire LGA
Researcher(s): Phillip O’Neill, Pauline McGuirk
This report was commissioned by Dungog Shire in 2004. It responds to the need for information and advice about employment and demographic trends, economic leakage, supply and demand for industrial lands and advice on future actions and interventions.
Source:Department of State and Regional Development and Dungog Shire Council, $26 500 (2004)
Neighbourhood resources in inner Newcastle: social mix and neighbourhood networks in Hamilton South
Researcher(s): Kathy Mee
Contemporary public housing policy emphasises the importance of neighbourhood resources in determining the life chances of residents. Thus it priorities the location of tenants in socially mixed areas and by allocating funds to address perceived neighbourhood deficits. Despite these policy developments there is only a weak understanding of (i) how residents access neighbourhood resources; (ii) whether, in socially diverse neighbourhoods, access to resources is unevenly distributed across tenure groups; and (iii) what are the effects of differential access. This project will investigate precisely these questions using a case study of Hamilton South, inner Newcastle - a suburb identified by the NSW Department of Housing as having neighbourhood deficit and, crucially, one undergoing a process of gentrification associated with the enhancement of neighbourhood resources.
Source:University of Newcastle Research Management Committee Project Grant, $5 000 (2004)
Managing Sydney's Prosperity: governing the reterritorialisation of the Sydney economy
Researcher(s): Pauline McGuirk, Phillip O'Neill
Sydney has experienced a prolonged period of prosperity underpinned by dramatic economic transformation and producing major economic reterritorialisation i.e. shifts in the accumulation distributive flows of its economy. Yet the spatial impacts of this economic change have been poorly recognised in public policy settings. The result is a host of management crises in urban and regional development along the eastern seaboard. The project investigated how Sydney's reterritorialisation is positioned in public policy settings and evaluated the capacity of these policies to effectively manage reterritorialisation's accumulations and distributional outcomes.
Source:University of Newcastle Research Management Committee Project Grant, $10 000 (2004)
Sydney Governance Project
Researcher(s): Pauline McGuirk
The overarching purpose of this research was to build more robust understandings of the institutions, practices and politics of emerging urban governance forms and their constitutive geographies. It did so by tracing and theorising the transformation of urban governance in Sydney in the context of globalisation. The research drew on detailed empirical research into the changing structures, styles and practices of urban governance in Sydney as a lens through which to develop theory. It had two aims: (i) to develop a multiscalar approach which examined urban governance as embedded in a series of political and economic processes operating simultaneously across several spatial scales. In other words it explored the geographies of governance; and (ii) to explore the extent to which discourse analysis could provide a methodological tool through which this mulitscalar approach to governance could be advanced. In particular, it aimed to establish the importance of discourse of governance in framing the selectivity of governance participants, preferred policy forms, and scales of organisation. It adopted a neo-Gramscian approach which understands the form of urban governance - its policy paradigms, institutional and coalitional framework - as part of the multiscalar attempt to create and sustain successful hegemonic projects. It also deployed discourse analysis as a means of exploring how the specific urban political formations which generate governance capacity came to be and to tracing their connections to the multiscaled political and economic structures within which they are located.
Source:Australian Research Council,$8 000 (2000)
Public Housing in Inner Newcastle: Gentrifying Neighbourhoods and Social Mix
Researcher(s): Kathy Mee
The project will investigate residents' experiences of living in public housing in inner Newcastle. The project is significant because there are no current published studies that examine public housing in gentrifying suburbs in Australia, and because there are no published studies that examine public housing in areas of social mix. Recent policy changes in relation to public housing have made it imperative to gain a better knowledge of the diverse experiences of tenants in different types of public housing. This project will contribute significantly to one of the major projects of the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies, (the Public Housing Project that includes an ARC Linkage grant held jointly by the CI). In addition the project is part of a collaborative project with A/Profs O'Neill and McGuirk investigating the implications of prosperity.
Source:University of Newcastle Research Management Committee Project Grant,$ 8 000 (2003)
An assessment of new regionalism as an effective policy instrument
Researcher (s): Phillip O'Neill
Australia is experiencing a prolonged period of economic growth alongside growing disparities within its regions. In response, regional development agencies are turning to a paradigm of "new regionalism" to guide policy development. Yet there is widespread academic debate about the appropriateness of new regionalism as a policy device. This project assesses the effectiveness of new regionalism as a policy tool in NSW through case studies of six coastal regions. The research is part of an ARC-Discovery-Grant application. It complements CURS research into urban and regional change in the context of prosperity along Australia's eastern seaboard. Data collection will include document analysis, practitioner survey and interview. It will be the first systematic review of regional policy in NSW in over a decade. Outcomes will include NCG applications by CURS researchers, policy development workshops involving targeted agencies, refereed papers in leading journals and ongoing advancement of policy development capacity in CURS.
Source:University of Newcastle Research Management Committee Project Grant, $12 000 (2003)
Corporate Behaviours Project
Researcher(s): Phillip O'Neill
This project built on work funded by an Australian Research Council Large Grant 1998-2000 (A79802359). The project has received ongoing financial support from the University's Research Management Committee. Research focuses on the analysis of investment behaviours of large corporations including their financial, product and labour market contexts. It included the impacts of shareholder value management strategies on the regional investments of large corporations; new regulatory practices in marginalised labor markets; and the impact of voluntary codes of conduct on corporate behaviour.
Source: Australian Research Council Large Grant, $6000 (1998 - 2000)
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