Progress in Australian planning history: Traditions, themes

and transformations

Robert Freestone *

Faculty of the Built Environment, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2065, Australia

Abstract

Planning history is a distinctive strain in modern planning scholarship that provides dividends in the broader understanding

of planning’s aims, development, impacts, achievements and limitations. Since the 1970s, with the infusion of more critical

social science and creative humanities perspectives, planning history has developed a global reach characterised by cross-

cutting themes and international institutions but research remains largely organised on a national basis. This review of recent

and cutting edge literature deals exclusively with the Australian realm: its origins, governance, preoccupations and potentials.

The major focus is on recent (mainly post-2002) literature and contributions capturing of innovative takes on the historical

development of planning. Like urban history, planning history takes shape primarily within topical clusters and Abbott’s

(2006) threefold characterisation of urban history concerns for planners provides a useful typology. Against this backdrop, the

paper describes the culture, structure and progress of planning history studies from an Australian perspective. It establishes an

interdisciplinary framework with other adjectival histories (architectural, urban, environmental, social), reviews recent path-

breaking research organised around six major themes resonant of wider planning concerns, and reflects on directions for future

research.

# 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Planning history; Literature review; Australia

Contents

1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

2. Why planning history? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

2.1. Concerns and debates in planning history . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

3. An Australian planning history . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

3.1. The development of Australian planning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

3.2. The emergence of planning history writing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

3.3. Stocktaking progress . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

3.4. Developing a theme: a garden city trace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

3.5. Planning history conferences: the uhph series 1993–2012 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

www.elsevier.com/locate/pplann

Progress in Planning 91 (2014) 1–29

* Tel.: +61 293854836.

E-mail address: r.freestone@unsw.edu.au.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.progress.2013.03.005

0305-9006/# 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

4. Interfaces with other histories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

4.1. Architectural history . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

4.2. Urban history. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

4.3. Environmental history . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

4.4. Social history. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

5. Innovative discourses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

5.1. Human encounters with top-down planning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

5.2. Deconstructing the morphology of planned landscapes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

5.3. The gender agenda . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

5.4. Children and planning. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

5.5. Indigeneity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

5.6. New methods, new sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

6. Canvassing the future of the past . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

6.1. Deeper institutional and place-based histories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

6.2. Evaluation of planning outcomes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

6.3. Interdisciplinary collaboration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

6.4. Talking to the community . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

7. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

R. Freestone / Progress in Planning 91 (2014) 1–292

1. Introduction

Planning history is the historical study of all aspects of

urban and regional planning and its variants within their

social, economic, cultural and environmental contexts.

Nominally straddling the interstices between the plan-

ning and history professions, it is most visibly constituted

through scholarly societies (the International Planning

History Society or IPHS) and journals (Planning

Perspectives and Journal of Planning History) but

captures a wider array of critical writing underpinned

by historical sensibility from the general planning

literature and cognate social science and humanities

disciplines. The growing body of work in this field since

the 1980s has been reviewed by various authors, notably

a series of national-based accounts in the 1990s1

1 Burgess, P. (1996). Should planning history hit the road? An

examination of the state of planning history in the United States.

Planning Perspectives, 11(3), 201–224; Cherry, G. E. (1991). Plan-

ning history: Recent developments in Britain. Planning Perspectives,

6(1), 33–45; Hall, T. (1994). Planning history: Recent developments

in the Nordic countries, with special reference to Sweden. Planning

Perspectives, 9(2), 153–179; Miller, C. L. (1998). New Zealand’s

planning history – Quo vadis? Planning Perspectives, 13(3), 257–274;

Monclus, F. J. (1992). Planning and history in Spain. Planning

Perspectives, 7(1), 101–106. Note: Citations to the broader interna-

tional, contextual and theoretical literature are footnoted, with the

references consolidated at the end constituting the main body of recent

Australian work under review.

complemented by Almandoz’s review of Latin American

historiography for this journal.2 Stephen Ward, Chris-

topher Silver and myself have recently surveyed the

‘‘remarkable blossoming of research activity’’ inter-

nationally.3 The present article does likewise for

Australia, a heavily urbanised island-continental nation

with a little over two centuries of European settlement

making it an instructive laboratory of the rise and impacts

of modern urban planning.

Planning history has been portrayed as a regrettable

fragmentation of historical interest in the city.4 Yet the

very process of specialised and critical inquiry

unbounded by strict orthodoxy is in fact one of the

field’s strengths. This paper does not try to review

everything exhaustively. Acknowledging the research

platform established internationally and nationally from

the 1980s, the approach is more selective and intended

to highlight recent diversity and innovation in the field.

This bibliographical essay is effectively the fourth in a

series of reviews covering approximate decadal periods

and dating back to 1983 (Freestone, 1983; Freestone &

2 Almandoz, A. (2006). Urban planning and historiography in Latin

America. Progress in Planning, 65(2), 81–123.3 Ward, S. V., Freestone, R., & Silver, C. (2011). The ‘‘new’’

planning history: Reflections, issues and directions. Town Planning

Review, 82(3), 231–262.4 Daunton, M. J. (1983). Experts and the environment: Approaches

to planning history. Journal of Urban History, 9(2), 233–250.

R. Freestone / Progress in Planning 91 (2014) 1–29 3

8 Freestone, R. (2000). Learning from planning’s histories. In R.

Freestone (Ed.) Urban planning in a changing world: The twentieth

century experience (pp. 1–19). London: E & FN Spon.9 Burgess, Should planning history hit the road? 215.

10 Feiss, C. (1943). History and the modern planner. Journal of the

American Society of Architectural Historians, 3(1–2), 10.

Hutchings, 1993; Freestone, Garnaut, & Hutchings,

2002). The major focus here is thus mainly on

post-2002 Australian (but also some classic and

rediscovered) contributions representative of newer,

edgier perspectives on the historical development of

planning.

Like urban history, planning history takes shape

primarily within clusters of concerns. Carl Abbott’s

characterisation of urban history concerns for planners

provides a useful typology. He identifies three major

domains: civitas (the domain of metropolitan growth

and decline, institutions and civic life), societas (the

sphere of social patterns and human relations, cultural

practices, and community development) and urbs (the

arena of physical development and differentiation,

landscape, cityscape and urban design).5 Similarly

apposite is his argument that some of the more incisive

intellectual breakthroughs emanate from interactions

and tensions between these realms, for example

conflicts between broader policies and social life, and

the contested use and meaning of spaces and places.

This interpretation informs my approach which is

organised into four main sections: the broader pursuit of

planning history as a contextual backdrop for position-

ing the Australian focus, the development and concerns

of this Australian dimension, the interfaces and

interactions with other ‘‘adjectival’’ histories such as

environmental history, and a review of recent innovative

research organised around six major themes. The essay

concludes with reflections for the future.

2. Why planning history?

History comes with caveats; it can be useful but also

abused. Macmillan laments the ideological hijacking of

history to legitimise political ends and as calculated

sophistry for nationalistic, religious and economic

purposes.6 She argues that we should be distrustful of

those who abuse history to justify unreasonable claims

and unconscionable positions. At the same time, an

historical perspective can deliver more positive out-

comes of humility, scepticism, self-awareness and

contextual understanding. Graeme Davison, Australia’s

leading urban historian, similarly warns about the need

to distinguish good from bad history.7 The advice is

5 Abbott, C. (2006). Urban history for planners. Journal of Planning

History, 5(4), 301–313.6 Macmillan, M. (2009). Uses and abuses of history. Sydney: Allen

and Unwin.7 Davison, G. (2000). The use and abuse of Australian history.

Sydney: Allen and Unwin.

particularly telling for planning because history has been

part of planning discourse from the early twentieth

century.8 In part, this intrinsic historicisation of planning

discourse came from the need to develop professional

respectability, quickly establish an intellectual pedigree,

and convey a global outlook open to best practice

precedents and exemplars. The practitioner-driven

‘‘casebook’’ rationale weakened with the infusion of

more academic-centric social science concerns from the

1970s with the focus shifting towards studies of planning

in various historical socio-economic settings.

Nevertheless, for the first half of the twentieth

century, planning history had a relatively seamless

relationship with planning proper. Even into the late

1990s, a mainstream journal like the Journal of the

American Planning Association still ‘‘published more

planning history articles than any other single publica-

tion’’.9 The American planner-preservationist Carl

Feiss was alive to history as a planning tool in the

early 1940s: ‘‘The planner must combine history with

every other element in his [sic] programme, weighing,

balancing, and judging’’, he wrote, particularly for

understanding the history of local communities.10 His

argument was taken further by Abbott and Adler who

elevated history to the status of foundational planning

methodology alongside quantification, survey analysis

and spatial information systems.11

The justification of Sir Peter Hall (trained as an

historical geographer) for the historical turn which

suffuses much of his prodigious output is straightforward:

‘‘As elsewhere in human affairs, we too often fail to realise

that our ideas and actions have been thought and done by

others, long ago; we should be conscious of our roots. I

rest my case’’.12 From a professional competency

standpoint, historical awareness can contribute to over-

coming ignorance and smugness, instilling a healthy

questioning of received wisdoms all too easily uncritically

accepted.13 History can deliver humility rather than

11 Abbott, C., & S. Adler (1989). Historical analysis as a planning

tool. Journal of the American Planning Association, 55(1), 82–84.12 Hall, P. (2002). Cities of tomorrow: An intellectual history of

urban planning and design in the twentieth century (3rd ed.), London:

Blackwell, xiii.13 Hancock, J. (1972). History and the American planning profes-

sion: Introduction to a new biographical series. Journal of the Ameri-

can Institute of Planners, 38(5), 274–275.

R. Freestone / Progress in Planning 91 (2014) 1–294

16 RIBA (2011) The Transactions of the Royal Institute of British

hubris. The late Tony Sutcliffe in asking ‘‘why planning

history?’’ saw the answer in neo-Kondratiev terms as a

cyclical enterprise stimulated by economic downturn and

crisis in a way which enables periodic ‘‘drawing breath’’

to provide a collective taking of bearings and setting of

new objectives for research and practice.14 While not

always explicitly articulated, there is the underlying hope

that learning from history will lead to positive dividends

for planning practice.

The pathway to a more critical understanding of

planning’s goals, achievements, limitations, and failures

is not held tightly by the planning profession alone.

Planning history is by no means the preserve of

planning (or history, for that matter) alone. Just as urban

history in Britain helped crystallise its early mission at a

famous conference organised by H.J. Dyos in 1966 at

the University of Leicester,15 so too might modern

planning history as a semi-institutionalised activity be

dated to September 1977 when the first international

conference on the history of urban and regional

planning was organised by the Planning History Group

for Bedford College, University of London. The

attendance was genuinely multi-disciplinary.

From these beginnings three main institutional

lynchpins have evolved with global reach. First the

Planning History Group transformed itself into the

International Planning History Society (www.plannin-

ghistory.org) hosting a series of biennial meetings, most

recently in Sao Paulo, Brazil in July 2012 on the theme

‘‘cities, nations and regions in planning history’’. (The

16th IPHS conference is set down for St Augustine,

Florida, in July 2014 on the theme ‘‘Past As Guide to

Sustainable Futures’’.) Second, the journal Planning

Perspectives founded by IPHS instigators Gordon

Cherry and Tony Sutcliffe celebrated a quarter century

of publication in 2010. And third, a book series entitled

‘‘Studies in History, Planning and the Environment’’

has become established. The roots of the latter

enterprise came in three volumes published by Mansell

originating from the 1977 conference. With over 40

titles having appeared, a discernible trend is evident in

diversification away from predominantly Anglo-Amer-

ican concerns with planned communities, housing, and

urban development to recent titles on the Middle

East, Latin America and China. A companion book

series launched by Taylor & Francis is ‘‘Studies in

14 Sutcliffe, A. (1981). Why planning history. Built Environment,

7(2), 64–67.15 Frost, L. & O’Hanlon, S. (2009). Urban history and the future of

Australian cities. Australian Economic History Review, 49(1), 1–18.

International Planning History’’, reprinting older classic

works with new critical introductions. This series

commenced in June 2011 with a facsimile edition of the

hefty Transactions of the landmark 1910 Royal Institute

of British Architects Town Planning Conference.16

2.1. Concerns and debates in planning history

There remains an unmistakeable continuity in the

essence of the planning project across time, space and

cultures. Early concerns for more efficient, healthier,

greener, beautiful, and equitable urban places still seem

surprisingly modern.17 Much of the stuff of planning

history is driven by explorations of these continuities as

well as discontinuities, transformations and more

latterly contestations of mainstream theory and

practice. At different junctures the nature of planning

history has differed in its major concerns and

methods.18 In a wide-ranging review of planning

history research, Ward, Silver and the present author

identify five main genres evident in the current state-of-

the-art:

� Studies of planning movements and organisations.

� Biographical studies of individual planners.

� Planning of cities, towns and suburbs.

� National or global regional experiences of planning.

� Specific types of planning intervention.19

The best-selling Cities of Tomorrow (2002) by Peter

Hall singularly expresses this full range of concerns:

developing a driving narrative of planning paradigms

such as the garden city and city beautiful movements;

acknowledging the seers of the past; identifying

pioneering and exemplar developments, teachers,

theorists, practitioners and institutions; recording the

complexification of the planning mission; and candidly

conceding the contradictions, pyrrhic victories and

planning disasters along the way. The early globalisa-

tion of western planning thought is elsewhere illustrated

in numerous ways, especially trans-Atlantic exchanges

facilitated by conferences, publications, study tours and

collaborations. The diffusion and adaptation of plan-

ning ideas has developed as a strong organising theme

Architects, Town Planning Conference, London, October 1910. Lon-

don: Routledge.17 LeGates, R., & Stout, F. (1998). Editors introduction. Early Urban

Planning, Vol 1. Selected Essays (pp. v–vliii). London: Routledge/

Thoemmes Press.18 Freestone, Learning from Planning’s Histories.19 Ward, Freestone, & Silver, The ‘‘new’’ planning history, 240ff.

R. Freestone / Progress in Planning 91 (2014) 1–29 5

for the field20 with direct connections into present-day

interests in policy transfer.21

With strengths come weaknesses. At least three main

research limitations/challenges have been identified:

� research takes a largely empirical approach,

expressed within narrative writing and case study

formats.

� planning forms the subject and planners the main

actors.

� stories are still dominated by a Western modernist

perspective.22

Often the focus seems to be more on things than

themes, with an overfondness for the case study. In a

caustic critique of the planning literature, Steuer damns

the superficiality of planning history in the hands of

planners: ‘‘We have to be honest and acknowledge that

virtually all the work that goes on under the heading of

town planning is amateur when viewed by the standards

of the social science disciplines’’, he concludes, with its

contribution coming more as ‘‘subject matter’’ rather

than disciplinary knowledge.23 Planning history is also

depicted by Larkham, one of its more able exponents, as

arguably too diverse and atheoretical for its own good.24

Huxley remains critical of failures to problematise

planning in ‘‘taken-for-granted’’ narratives.25 Never-

theless, the Marxist insurgency which impacted

mainstream academic planning studies from the

1970s helped frame several notable historical accounts

in the 1980s26 and in its wake even left an influential

text like Cities of Tomorrow accepting ‘‘the Marxian

20 Ward, S. V. (2012). Re-examining the international diffusion of

planning. In S. Fainstein & S. Campbell (Eds.), Critical Readings in

Planning Theory (pp. 479–498). 3rd ed., Chichester: Wiley-Black-

well.21 Healey, P. & Upton, R. (2010). Crossing borders: International

exchange and planning practices. London: Routledge.22 Ward, Freestone, & Silver, The ‘‘new’’ planning history, 244ff.23 Steuer, M. (2000). A hundred years of town planning and the

influence of Ebenezer Howard. British Journal of Sociology, 51(2),

385.24 Larkham, P. (2011). Questioning planning history. Birmingham

City University, Centre for Environment and Society Research, Work-

ing Paper series no. 2.25 Huxley, M. (2010). Problematising planning: Critical and effec-

tive genealogies. In J. Hillier & P. Healey (Eds.), The Ashgate research

companion to planning theory: Conceptual challenges for spatial

planning (pp. 135–157). Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate.26 Boyer, M. C. (1983). Dreaming the rational city: The myth of

American city planning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; Foglesong, R.

E. (1986). Planning the capitalist city: The colonial era to the 1920s.

Princeton: Princeton University Press; Hague, C. (1984). The develop-

ment of planning thought: A critical perspective. London: Hutchinson.

basis of historical events . . . almost as a given’’.27 But

well-meaning attempts to craft some sort of indepen-

dent theoretical dimension for and within planning

history precepts outside the broader contours of the

social sciences and humanities seem doomed.28

Leonie Sandercock’s oft-repeated critique is of a

dominant approach which portrays planning centre-

stage as an heroic and progressive narrative ‘‘on the side

of the angels’’ – a narrowly scripted myth-making

construction of professional identity that expurgates

alternate viewpoints, other actors and the ‘‘noir’’ in

shaping the built environment.29 She singles out Peter

Hall’s work as defining this top-down, professionally

reaffirming, ‘‘malestream’’ approach. There is defi-

nitely evidence for this stance in older studies

unreflexively linked to positivist rationality.30 But it

increasingly reads as a cliched and simplistic critique.

The late Gordon Cherry, one of the founders of modern

planning history, and clearly another in Sandercock’s

sights, wrote as early as 1980 that across the interests

represented in and by the enterprise of planning history:

. . . there is a common ground of preparedness to

challenge inherited assumptions, to question the

social and economic benefit of planned action, to

acknowledge the failure to achieve high expecta-

tions, to recognise that excessive zeal for planned

order can be counterproductive and to have a healthy

distrust of technical objectivity.31

Planning history writing can be weakened by

exclusion, trivialisation and lack of criticality. There

is a legitimate concern, albeit shared with all adjectival

histories as alluded to earlier, that it exemplifies an

‘‘historical tunnel vision’’ by singling out ‘‘one narrow

variable in isolation’’.32 The eclectic proceedings of the

27 Hall, Cities of Tomorrow, 5.28 Watanabe, S. J. (2002). Searching for the framework for a ‘World

History’ of planning. Perspectivas Urbana/Urban Perspectives, 2, 1–

10.29 Sandercock, L. (1998). The twentieth century planning experi-

ence: The official story versus insurgent representations. In Freestone,

R. (Ed.), The Twentieth Century Planning Experience. Proceedings of

the 8th international planning history conference and the 4th Austra-

lian planning/urban history conference (pp. 777–780), University of

New South Wales, 15–18 July 1998. Sydney: University of New South

Wales.30 Wegener, M., Button, K. & Nijkamp, P. (Eds.) (2007) Planning

history and methodology. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.31 Cherry, G. (1980). Introduction: Aspects of twentieth-century

planning. In G. Cherry (Ed.), Shaping an urban world (p. 20). London:

Mansell.32 Daunton, Experts and the Environment, 240.

R. Freestone / Progress in Planning 91 (2014) 1–296

various IPHS conferences may present as a pot pourri

but they nonetheless are a resource which progressively

challenges the intellectual transatlantic hegemony with

numerous forensic investigations of environmental,

governance, social and design antecedents that demon-

strate an ongoing and collective willingness to learn

from historiographical sins such as blindness to

minority interests, ignoring contradictions between

thoughts and actual deeds, and excusing mistakes as

experimentation.33

3. An Australian planning history

3.1. The development of Australian planning

The development of an Australian planning histor-

iography can be set against not only the thumbnail

sketch of the planning history paradigm outlined in

Section 2 but more immediately in relationship to the

broader history of Australian urbanisation (Forster,

2004), land settlement (Powell, 1988) and planning.

The latter is a national story, never comprehensively

told, although a broad chronological-thematic overview

can be assembled from various texts (Freestone, 1989,

2010, 2012a; Sandercock, 1975). Its retelling is usually

fragmented into accounts of particular states and cities.

The Commonwealth Government, established in 1901,

has no constitutional interest in cities (apart from the

national capital of Canberra, founded in 1913) and the

states (former British colonies) are each in turn

dominated economically and demographically by their

capital cities. The colonial era to the eve of the twentieth

century produced a foundational network of urban

places but largely without the integration of functions

(layout, infrastructure, governance), environmental

responsiveness (design, site constraints and opportu-

nities) and foresight (town extension, longer term

vision) characteristic of modern planning. The latter is

essentially a twentieth century phenomenon.

As context for what follows, an interpretation of the

development of planning from the early 1900s can be

briefly sketched. The drivers were the problems

accompanying an accelerating scale of unplanned

urbanisation from the late nineteenth century occa-

sioned by the growth of the mercantile and resource

sectors. The entrepot status, burgeoning populations

and administrative importance of the coastal capital

cities made them a natural focus for improver discourse

33 Krueckeberg, D. (1997). Planning history’s mistakes. Planning

Perspectives, 12(3), 269–279.

centred around slums, transport infrastructure, civic

design and land use zoning. In the first half of the

twentieth century, idealistic social reformers compris-

ing progressive practitioners drawn mainly from the

architecture, engineering and surveying professions,

state and local government figures concerned with

civics, medical men, and anti-slum campaigners,

assembled into various issue-based, city, state and

national alliances to campaign for better urban

management processes and outcomes. Their efforts,

sustained through lectures, conferences, exhibitions,

publications and general lobbying aimed at public

administrators, had limited impacts on policies and

protocols covering building and subdivision. Direct

tangible outcomes were also piecemeal in the form of

planned estates, housing developments, urban renewal

projects, civic improvements, open space, and

improved transport infrastructure. But stop-start pro-

gress of a kind was made and the planning movement

proved resilient.

The second half of the twentieth century saw some

return on the propaganda investment made in the first

few decades although the complexion of the planning

movement assumed a more professionalised character

and structure. The major dividend came in the 1940s

when planning was widely accepted as a legitimate

activity of the state, although the extent of regulation

and control as a break on the market was keenly

debated. The rebuilding of cities and the quality of

urban life after the privations of the Great Depression

and the neglect and damage of World War Two

became nonetheless a cross-political national priority.

Planning became incrementally, unevenly but inex-

orably institutionalised through legislative reforms at

the state government level, and a steady and often

perplexing complexity of government departments,

statutory authorities, advisory panels, commissions

and committees evolved. Planning became ingrained

in the activities of local councils and state govern-

ment across a range of portfolios. The actual

outcomes were often partial and problematic as

planning in practice encountered familiar political

and financial constraints.

Post-war planning systems grew by accretion in

each jurisdiction. The labyrinthine arrangements

which inevitably ensued would again call forth the

need for reform, especially towards the end of the

twentieth century, but this time the critique was of

complexity, confusion and delay rather than the very

idea of government intervention, although that in some

conservative quarters also came under attack. The

modern bureaucratic era divides into different phases,

R. Freestone / Progress in Planning 91 (2014) 1–29 7

34 Hall, Cities of Tomorrow; Ward, S. V. (2002). Planning the

Twentieth-Century City: The advanced capitalist world. Chichester:

John Wiley and Sons.35 Huxley, Problematising Planning, 138.

with a major contrast between the establishment of

technocratic modernist ideals to the late 1960s versus a

more rambunctious and recent phase characterised by

post-modern concerns emanating from different sta-

keholder interests of productivity, privatisation, parti-

cipation, and protest. The essence of the shift might be

characterised as moving from planning as a beneficent

agent of welfare state ideology to a more contested

instrument of neo-liberalism variously called upon to

sanction new ideals of economic development and

employment growth on the one hand, and environ-

mental protection and community amenity on the other.

The drivers of the planning project have thus shifted

with the times. The town planning movement in the

early 1900s targeted health, beauty and economy. ‘‘One

house one family one garden’’ was a refrain of the

antipodean garden city movement. At mid-century

British-style town and country planning focused on land

use zoning was the dominant paradigm, ‘‘a place for

everything and everything in its place’’. From the 1970s

onwards urban and regional planning became ascendant

and juggled a wider set of city and development

problems, some arising as the legacy of earlier rounds of

intervention. Environmental issues assumed more

importance in concert with global crises and activism

but also because of a more critical appreciation of the

distinctiveness of Australian environmental challenges:

water, flood, fire, other natural hazards, and latterly

climate change. Post-Brundtland, a sustainability

discourse has generally held sway but has brought into

sharper relief the challenges of reconciling competing

goals of environmental, economic, and social develop-

ment.

Planning continues to be organised on a state (New

South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania,

Victoria, Western Australia) and territory (Australian

Capital Territory, Northern Territory) basis but appre-

ciation of the significance of cities and strategic

planning at a national level has waxed and waned.

Historically, Labor (centre-left) national governments

have been most sympathetic to urban issues from the

1940s (and the beginnings of public housing and

regional planning), the 1970s (with formation of a

national ministry of urban and regional development),

the 1990s (‘‘better cities’’ projects aimed at inter-

governmental cooperation), and the 2010s (drafting of a

national urban policy and instigation of state-of-

Australian cities reporting) (Freestone, 2012a). The

‘‘triple bottom line’’ agenda of securing productive,

sustainable and liveable cities is the new conventional

wisdom (Australian Government, 2011). Nevertheless

the ascendancy of market liberalisation as ideological

orthodoxy has created new pressures on the social

legitimacy of planning (Gleeson & Low, 2000).

This evolution from the early twentieth century can

be organised into a timeline of sequential phases

(Freestone, 2012a):

� Inventing planning (1900s–1930s).

� Post-war reconstruction (1940s–early 1950s).

� The long boom (1950s–1960s).

� Re-imagining planning (late 1960s–1970s).

� Neo-liberalism and beyond (1980s to date).

Each of these five eras capture not only an

identifiable set of social practices and institutional

arrangements to match successive packages of eco-

nomic, cultural and environmental challenges but an

evolution in attitude towards the role of market forces in

urban and regional development, and a negotiation

towards the status, scale and scope of desired state

intervention. In these terms, the zeitgeist sequence can

be read as attempts to successively correct, combat,

guide, tame and privilege the market. While a gross

simplification, this summary chronology certainly

highlights obvious points of convergence with wider

global experiences and especially English-speaking

countries through the nation’s membership of the

British Commonwealth and political, economic, and

cultural alliances with other western nations, notably

the United States.34

At the same time there remain distinctive elements in

the constitution and development of Australian plan-

ning. The ‘‘diffusional’’ interpretation of Australian

planning ideas35 highlights the early influence of British

town and country planning thought, later American

environmental initiatives, and then selective adaptation

from an increasingly globalised planning toolkit. There

is no one unified planning system but multiple

jurisdictions which have evolved according to their

state and territorial context, but with the state capital

cities as the dominant centres of attention. Indeed they

have enjoyed this primacy as a result of the historical

accidents of mercantile European settlement (Statham,

1989). This path dependency is also evident in the vital

role of state governments in provision of urban

infrastructure and their assumption of the major

responsibilities for metropolitan management (Hamnett

R. Freestone / Progress in Planning 91 (2014) 1–298

& Freestone, 2000). Australian metropolitan planning

from the second half of the twentieth century thus

assumed some distinctive characteristics: a high level of

state control, dependence on a high level of state supply

and coordination of infrastructure, and detailed atten-

tion to spatial planning especially for suburban

development (Searle & Bunker, 2010). In terms of

planned built forms, Searle et al. (2011) identify four

notable features of Australian cities: private motorways,

large casinos, major stadiums, and agricultural show-

grounds.

3.2. The emergence of planning history writing

A recognisable planning history has taken shape

against and been informed by the backdrop sketched

above, and so it too mirrors the sequence of phases. The

‘‘invention’’ of modern planning in Australia saw an

explosion of propagandist literature aimed at winning

hearts and minds to a new reform cause. The more

substantive texts situated the new phenomenon of

planning as the most recent efflorescence of cyclical

forces for good which could be traced back to Greco-

Roman times. George Taylor’s (1914) pioneering text

interspersed a populist treatment of past breakthroughs

with his own stories and lessons for the current era. John

Sulman’s more authoritative treatment in the early

1920s brought together presentations first made at the

University of Sydney and aimed at a sober chronicle of

‘‘the main ideas which influenced town planning at

different periods, and the details affecting modern

cities’’ (Sulman, 1921:15). Both authors were able to

draw from early historical works published in Britain

such as Triggs,36 Haverfield37 and early issues of the

Town Planning Review with their strong historical

orientation under the editorship of Patrick Abercrom-

bie. These treatments established a lineage for modern

thinking and ideas relevant to Australian cities

conceived de novo from Sydney (1788) onwards.

The post-war reconstruction era in the 1940s was

similarly animated by propaganda and reporting of

examples good and bad, in Australia and from abroad,

that could inform the demanding task of establishing a

permanent governance framework for peacetime devel-

opment. As planning education became established

mainly as spin-offs from architecture programmes and

36 Triggs, I. (1909). Town planning past, present and possible.

London: Methuen & Co.37 Haverfield, F. (1913). Ancient town-planning. Oxford: Clarendon

Press.

history lectures were instituted as an obligatory part of

the first curriculums, copy for articles was generated. Of

particular note were contributions by Gavin Walkley on

colonial planning and South Australia (e.g. Walkley,

1952). Walkley coordinated the first tertiary course in

Australia at the South Australian School of Mines and

Industries (now the University of South Australia) in

1949 (Jones, 2012). Brown and Sherrard’s textbook

Town and Country Planning (1951), the successor to

Sulman and used by several generations of Australian

planning students, summed up the treatment of

Australian planning history through the ‘‘long boom’’

as a largely just a footnote to the ancient origins of town

planning. While various Australian pioneering attempts

at town planning were noted briefly such as Light’s

1837 plan of Adelaide, the larger rationale of studying

‘‘historical background’’ was that ‘‘a knowledge of the

growth of towns in past ages is extremely valuable to the

present-day planner in his [sic] approach to contem-

porary problems’’ (Brown & Sherrard, 1951:9). The

genuflection to the British town and country planning

tradition was secured not only by inviting Patrick

Abercrombie to contribute a foreword but have him

observe that the book would ‘‘be considerably useful in

Britain, for I cannot call to mind any existing volume

that quite covers the same ground and is so up-to-date’’

(Abercrombie, 1951:vii). The major product of the

1950s was Denis Winston’s (1957) account of the

County of Cumberland planning scheme, Sydney’s (and

Australia’s) first statutory metropolitan strategy. Writ-

ten in an accessible style and produced by a commercial

publisher, to this day it remains a rare book-length

treatment of a major Australian planning scheme. These

texts helped to legitimise the birth of a bona fide

planning profession in Australia, which was signalled

officially by formation of the Planning Institute of

Australia (PIA) in Canberra in 1951. Nevertheless,

Australian planning schools into the 1970s still relied

heavily on English textbooks and thus English history.

The reimagining of planning through history

commenced in the 1960s as critiques of the standards

of Australian post-war urban development began to

appear, with architects, in particular, caustic in their

appraisals of the quality of urban design in both over-

heated city centres and what they saw as dreary outer

suburbs comprising unappealing low-density housing

estates gashed by wasteful ribbon development. Robin

Boyd’s The Australian Ugliness first published in 1960,

and informed by a solid grasp of design and design

history, captured both the professional and popular

imagination in a rollicking denunciation of the descent

into the chaos caused by, among other things ‘‘a

R. Freestone / Progress in Planning 91 (2014) 1–29 9

confusion of functional requirements and conflicting

economic demands’’ (Boyd, 2011:26). The subtopian

nightmare which Ian Nairn found in post-war Britain

was echoed in 1960s Australia in a search for alternative

models of settlement and design (Gazzard, 1966). This

was a time of rising national interest in urban affairs and

disillusionment with the processes and possibilities of

conventional land use planning systems erected in the

early post-war years. The concern was thus more than

aesthetic and extended into broader issues of govern-

ance (Wilkes, 1966) creating a platform for establish-

ment of an Australian Institute of Urban Studies in 1967

and even a short-lived incursion by the federal

bureaucracy into urban and regional affairs between

1972 and 1975 (Lloyd & Troy, 1981).

Another product of this era was Australia’s first

cross-disciplinary urban research programme estab-

lished at the Australian National University (ANU) in

1967 directed by Max Neutze and then Patrick Troy

(Troy, 1997). A key early appointment was Peter

Harrison who had worked with Denis Winston at the

University of Sydney and served as Chief Town Planner

of Canberra’s National Capital Development Commis-

sion (NCDC). Although at heart a pragmatic architect-

planner, his own work evolved towards critical

institutional history (e.g. Harrison, 1974) in line with

a social science-driven revisionism of planning history

which mirrored what was happening in the planning

profession at large. This turn was exemplified in a

triumvirate of classic 1970s books (the latter two from

ANU doctoral theses) by Hugh Stretton (1970), Peter

Spearritt (1978), and Leonie Sandercock (1975).

Shunned by conventional academic publishers,

Stretton’s Ideas for Australian Cities (1970) is now

considered a classic examination of the history,

processes and aspiration of Australian planning from

a political economy perspective underpinned by faith in

the power of enlightened state interventionism. Spear-

ritt’s (1978, revised edition 2000) urban history of

Sydney since the 1920s was equally flavoured by a

concern with politics and equity. Its skilful husbandry

trawling innovative and lively source materials includ-

ing cartoons and fictional literature opened the way for

others to do likewise. Sandercock’s Cities for Sale

(1975) is an angry historical expose of the failures of

urban planning at the hands of the power of private

capital in three Australian cities – Sydney, Melbourne

and Adelaide – to the early 1970s. This influential text

was political rather than design history, and was

reissued intact fifteen years later in a new international

edition (Sandercock, 1990). Together these three titles,

none of them by a professional planner, helped establish

a critical planning history in Australia, and importantly

decoupled it from narrow architecturally based-town

planning and art history concerns. At the same time, all

were set within a meliorist rather than marxist tradition,

more conspicuously channelling Stretton’s brand of

moderate political Fabianism.

This re-imagining of planning’s past was played out

against the backdrop of two other influential forces. One

was the increasing disillusionment with, and rethinking

of, traditional planning approaches in the wider

community. Second was the connection which could

be made with the British-led planning history initiatives

led by Cherry and Sutcliffe. The publication of the

edited book With Conscious Purpose: A History of Town

Planning in South Australia in 1986, originally co-

edited by Alan Hutchings and Ray Bunker, and reissued

in a second edition some two decades later (Hutchings,

2007) decisively confirmed the value and market for a

new planning history drawing on the concerns and

methods of social science. Through the 1980s Hutch-

ings worked to secure a planning history presence at

professional meetings of the PIA (Hutchings, 1989).

Intellectually, the subsequent development of the

planning history endeavour in Australia is marked by an

enrichment and diversification of aims and objectives,

in particular an enlivening from the cultural turn in the

humanities and social sciences. Over this journey the

legitimacy of planning history has also been asserted in

pedagogic, scholarship and practice terms. Education-

ally, there are both vocational and liberal arts rationales

for teaching planning history; the former injects among

other things an appreciation of time scale; the latter

assists broader appreciation and critical thinking.

History can liberate ‘‘silent voices’’ in planning

constituencies and help ‘‘tie together what may

otherwise appear as a mere smorgasbord of subjects’’

(Auster, Cunningham, & Teather, 1995:10).

3.3. Stocktaking progress

I have undertaken several previous stocktakes of

Australian planning history, in 1983, 1993 and 2002.

They release this latest venture from re-surveying

everything but at the same time now provide

historiographical insights themselves into the evolution

of the field. In addition, several subject bibliographies

have also appeared (Freestone, 1982, 1986; Freestone &

Hutchings, 1988; Nichols, 2007).

In 1983 three major themes were identified: the

emergence of a robust agenda for studying various

aspects of planning’s development from the 1900s, the

importance of British precedent in early Australian

R. Freestone / Progress in Planning 91 (2014) 1–2910

38 Home, R. (2013). Of planting and planning: the making of British

colonial cities (2nd ed.), London: Routledge.

developments, and the shift from idealism to pragma-

tism in planning thought from the 1920s onwards. A

dichotomy in the literature was identified between the

‘‘insider-planner’’ versus the ‘‘outsider-social scientist’’

perspective. The prospect envisaged was a promising

growth in empirical literature unmediated by any formal

institutional apparatus (Freestone, 1983).

A decade later the depiction confirmed the eclecti-

cism foreshadowed earlier but several deeper strains

were apparent, notably colonial town layout, civic

design, housing, planning movements, Canberra,

metropolitan planning, political conflict and federal

urban policy (Freestone & Hutchings, 1993). The

summation pointed to a substantive literature ‘‘diverse

if not fragmented, parochial and sometimes quirky’’ in

nature, its general flavour reflecting ‘‘the spatial

isolationism and parochialism that have been hallmarks

of Australian cultural and political development’’

(Freestone & Hutchings, 1993:72).

A third review in 2002 espied ‘‘a significant growth

in interest with the attendant development of an

impressive body of new work worthy of bringing to

the attention of an international audience’’ (Freestone

et al., 2002:21). The diversity of these offerings, many if

not most emanating from outside the core areas of

academic planning and history, help to delineate a

‘‘crossroads of inter-disciplinary endeavour’’ rather

than a discipline as such (Freestone et al., 2002:23).

Across the suite of publications which have appeared,

the growing core of doctoral dissertations in history,

architecture and planning for the most part and

explicitly linked to the planning history paradigm,

while not so many as to prove impossible to keep tabs

on, is testimony to the intellectual attraction and quality

of scholarship (e.g. Brown, 2008; Byrne, 2000; Free-

stone, et al. 2002:34; Gatley, 2003; Gerner, 2003;

Iwanicki, 2012; Keane, 1993; Llewellyn-Smith, 2010;

Park, 2003a).

Surveying the body of work topically today, and

developing the metaphors borrowed from Australian

city form used by Freestone and Hutchings (1993:83),

there have been significant trends: pockets of ‘‘con-

solidation’’ (e.g. development of planned communities,

issues of professionalisation) to accompany the

continued ‘‘peripheral growth’’ of new topics and with

a ‘‘middle ring’’ of established concerns subject to

growth and renewal (revisiting planning movements;

suburban development etc.). Some of the lacunae

identified in the earlier reviews have been addressed

(greater interest in critical biography, more intensive

exploration of global context and connections),

while other areas remain underdone (rural planning,

development of methodology, planning education,

social groups and places marginalised by planning).

Geographically, metropolitan dominance has been

weakened somewhat by studies moving from the big

state capitals into more peripheral urban centres like

Darwin (Gibson, 1997, 2011), regional cities such as

Albury-Wodonga (Pennay, 2005) and Launceston

(Petrow, 2012a,b), country towns (Nichols & Maudsley,

2012), and remote Australian places like Woomera

(Iwanicki, 2012) and other planned resource settlements

(Hutchings & Garnaut, 2005).

Both Adelaide and Canberra have taken their

planning history more seriously than other cities, a

direct reflection of their distinctive design histories

alongside contemporary threats to those traditions. The

genius loci in Adelaide is the original grid, squares and

parkland template laid out in the 1830s, arguably the

pinnacle of the ‘‘grand model’’ of colonial settlement

which had evolved through the centuries.38 The

integrity of the urban form is firmly etched on the

ground, but its precise authorship is still contested just

as its amenity values are still closely guarded (Garnaut

& Round, 2006). The placing of the Plan of Adelaide in

2010 on the National Heritage List maintained by the

Australian Heritage Council as the first comprehen-

sively town-planned environment to be recognised in

this way testifies to its enduring significance.

Canberra remains the best documented planned

environment in Australia, with much additional knowl-

edge locked up in conservation management plans for

particular sites and precincts. Several recent texts

exemplify its national significance as a planning icon,

the most notable being a book published by the National

Capital Authority on conserving and rejuvenating the

historic legacy of the 1912 plan by Walter Burley and

Marion Mahony Griffin. This is an unusual example of a

major government planning agency formulating policy

on the basis of an historical design analysis (National

Capital Authority, 2004). The celebration of the

centenary of Canberra’s founding in 2013 will be the

catalyst for several new books, among them an updated

and extended edition of Karl Fischer’s seminal planning

history evaluation published nearly thirty years ago

(Fischer, 1984; Fischer & Weirick, 2015). Like

Adelaide, the legacy of history in the city’s planning

makes it a contested site and groups like the Walter

Burley Griffin Society have taken on custodial roles as

R. Freestone / Progress in Planning 91 (2014) 1–29 11

keen watchdogs of government development plans

inimical to the founding vision (Weirick, 2013).

While most planning history research has been

pursued by Australian-based researchers, there is some

overseas interest in Australian theory and practice.

Canberra and the Griffins with their connections to

Frank Lloyd Wright, the American Midwest prairie

school, and more broadly the global network of planned

capital cities, remain of major interest. Apart from

Fischer’s work, the outstanding indicator is John Reps’

authoritative account of the 1911–12 federal capital

competition (Reps, 1997). The compilation of Walter

Burley Griffin’s addresses, lectures, papers and reports

by his grandnephew, a professor of English at New York

University, has produced a tremendous record and

resource for studying his approach to town planning,

campus design, residential communities, landscape

architecture and architecture (Griffin, 2008). More

intriguing is the Japanese interest which seems largely

centred on Adelaide (Sugio, 1997). Another sidebar to

international connections is the rediscovery of work

done on town planning schemes abroad by Australian

designers; one the most exotic stories is the remarkable

intriguing tale of Anatol Kagan who beavered away in

Melbourne then Sydney between 1956 and 1986 on a

plan for Leningrad (Bogle, 2011).

3.4. Developing a theme: a garden city trace

The maturation of Australian planning history since

the 1980s can be traced through various storylines. An

endeavour initially driven to a large extent by the need

to build and then plug gaps in the historical record has

evolved into a multiplicity of more layered and critical

accounts. This metamorphosis is clearly evident in

studies dealing with the impact of the garden city

movement in Australia, a popular theme directly

connecting the local with the global.39 The early

treatment of this planning topic in planning texts and

lectures of the 1950s was informed more by British

literature than local realities. Initial interest in

Australian responses surfaced from the late 1960s in

professional journals (Clark, 1969; Shelton, Giblin, &

Pierce, 1973) and synoptic urban histories (e.g.

Spearritt, 1978). My book Model Communities

(1989) represented a synthesis of scattered professional,

government, architectural history and sundry academic

39 Miller, M. (2002). Garden cities and suburbs: At home and abroad.

Journal of Planning History, 1(1), 6–28; Ward, S. V. (Ed.) (1992). The

garden city: Past, present and future. London: E. & F.N. Spon.

literature, much of the latter residing in unpublished

university theses. This was a book which explicitly

sought connections into the concerns of modern

planning history.

From the early 1990s a diverse literature has been

produced. Gaps and silences were quickly highlighted

(Auster, 1991). Deeper, more satisfying and multi-

faceted explorations of particular places ensued, most

substantively in Christine Garnaut’s Colonel Light

Gardens (Garnaut, 2006a), the first comprehensive

physical and social history of a planned community

alive to broader international currents in planning

thought and now sitting alongside detailed case studies

of landmark garden communities elsewhere.40 This

work has continued into unpacking the distinctiveness

and significance of the landmark Adelaide planned

suburb in other ways, for example its governance

arrangements (Garnaut & Hutchings, 2003). David

Nichols scrutinised other international-style garden

suburb designs by the private sector and some of the key

players including ‘‘town planning surveyors’’ Saxil

Tuxen and Henry Halloran (Nichols, 2001). His

subsequent work has uncovered a wider appreciation

of responses to the garden city idea in Australia beyond

the metropolis (Nichols, 2004a) as well as revisionist

scrutiny of the claimed authorship of some plans

(Nichols, 2008).

The physical patterning and urban design of garden

suburbs has also been more closely scrutinised, from

both local (Hutchings, 2011) and international (Kaku-

hashi, Funo, & Andoh, 2002) standpoints. Conroy’s

(2004) micro-scale study of Haberfield Garden Suburb

in Sydney shows how the original subdivision pattern

was adjusted to accommodate side driveways for motor

vehicles, making it one of the first middle class estates

to plan purposefully for the motor age. The distinctive

internal open spaces of garden suburbs from the 1910s

and 1920s have also attracted interest (Freestone &

Nichols, 2001). At the same time, the lived experience

of residents has belatedly attracted attention (Fletcher,

2002; Freestone, 2000; Garnaut, 2000). What was

everyday life like in a model garden community?

Recovery of such stories inevitably link with broader

aspects of metropolitan life and in turn to wider themes

in Australian history. For example, exploring the nexus

40 For example: Klaus, S. L. (2002). A modern arcadia: Frederick

Law Olmsted Jr. and the plan for Forest Hills Gardens. Amherst:

University of Massachusetts Press; Reid, A. (2000). Brentham: A

history of the pioneer garden suburb 1901–2001. London: The Bren-

tham Society.

R. Freestone / Progress in Planning 91 (2014) 1–2912

between the ideological and human conditions of

repatriation, Ashton shows how the struggles of Great

War diggers continued into their lives in Sydney’s

Matraville Garden Village (Ashton, 1999a).

The garden suburb has also been the vehicle for other

reflective and critical explorations of the interplay

between space, design, social and power relations

(Hoskins, 1994). Using examples from twentieth century

Perth, a more theorised treatment is Stickles’ (2004)

consideration of planned suburban design as ‘‘affective

form’’, meaning the identification and interpretation of

settings wherein ‘‘people are encouraged to define

themselves according to particular socio-political ideas’’

evolving from health and morality to community and

economic stability. A planning history sensibility has

also flowed into local histories (e.g. Gillis, 2008;

Marshall, 2013). Slowly but cumulatively, this body of

work has had impacts on conservation planning practice

through recognition of the heritage status of garden

suburbs like Colonel Light Gardens (Garnaut, 2006b).

3.5. Planning history conferences: the uhph series

1993–2012

A key factor underpinning progress in Australian

planning history since the early 1990s has been the

institution of a biennial conference series on planning

and urban history. These meetings have been

organised independently outside any formal adminis-

trative infrastructure, the governance of planning

history scholarship thus remaining loose and informal.

However they provide an institutional lens on growth

and trends in the field capturing both the widening

array of subjects and depth of scholarship (Freestone

et al., 2002). All have been products of their time,

Table 1

Australian/Australasian planning/urban history conferences 1993–2014.

City Year Host

Sydney 1993 University of New South Wales

Canberra 1995 Australian National University

Melbourne 1996 Monash University

Sydney 1998 University of New South Wales

Adelaide 2000 University of South Australia

Auckland 2002 University of Auckland

Geelong 2004 Deakin University

Wellington 2006 Massey University

Caloundra 2008 University of the Sunshine Coast

Melbourne 2010 University of Melbourne

Perth 2012 University of Western Australia

and State Library of Western Australia

Wellington 2014 Victoria University of Wellington

place and theme to some extent, thus contributing

opportunistically to the advance of scholarship (Table

1). And all have produced some record of proceedings,

variously in the form of printed proceedings, edited

book, or CD-ROM of papers, and, in 1995, the deposit

of three arch files of papers in major Australian

university libraries.

The first conference in Sydney in 1993 attracted

about 70 delegates and was timed to coincide with an

Australian visit by the late Gordon Cherry, co-founder

of the British Planning History Group (Freestone,

1993). He discerned the beginnings of ‘‘a specifically

Australian brand of planning history, distinctive in its

concerns, its insights and its personalia’’ (Cherry,

1993:54). The second gathering in Canberra in 1995

convened by Patrick Troy was more critical in

establishing the idea of a regular conference series

and inclusively sought engagement from urban histor-

ians. The third 1996 Melbourne Conference organised

by Tony Dingle, an economic historian, represented a

coming of age with a significant urban history

contribution (Dingle, 1997). The fourth conference in

Sydney in 1998 was less successful because it lacked

identity through being subsumed within the 8th

International Planning History Society Conference,

and the voluminous proceedings reveal that urban

historians largely stayed away (Freestone, 1998).

Adelaide in 2000 recovered the scale and focus of

the earlier meetings and is noteworthy in introducing for

the first time peer-reviewing of papers (Garnaut &

Hamnett, 2000). When the Australian Research Council

mounted its Excellence in Research Australia (ERA)

evaluation in 2010, the proceedings produced by these

conferences were one of the few officially sanctioned

such events in the planning discipline.

Theme

The Australian Planner

–

The Australian City – Future/Past

The 20th Century Planning Experience

–

Southern Crossings

The 21st Century City – Past/Present/Future

Past Matters

Sea Change – New and Renewed Urban Landscapes

Green Fields, Brown Fields, New Fields

Urban Transformations: Booms, busts and other catastrophes

Landscapes and Ecologies of Urban and Planning History

R. Freestone / Progress in Planning 91 (2014) 1–29 13

The next conference in Auckland in 2002 was the first

Australasian project and featured a significant New

Zealand, Pacific Island, and architectural orientation.

New Zealanders had been part of the conference series

from 1998 and it seemed timely and right to expand the

scope and internationalise the enterprise. So with some

minimal editing and some historical licence this became

the 6th Australasian conference (Haarhof, Brand, &

Aitken-Rose, 2002). Geelong 2004 made a breakthrough

as the first conference in a regional centre and solidified

the urban history/planning history (uhph) marque for

future events (Lehman & Nichols, 2004). The 2006

conference at the Wellington campus of Massey

University introduced a strong heritage theme which

has been sustained (Miller & Roche, 2006). Heritage and

conservation work draws explicitly on historical method;

moreover, American planning historian Robert Fishman

notes that heritage is one of the few planning movements

to really secure broad popular appeal.41 This conference

was also the first to spawn a dedicated book; the contents

were ‘‘grounded on Australia and NZ experiences but

reaching out to include... the wider Pacific rim’’ and

overall were intended ‘‘to chip away at the hegemony of

metropolitan theory’’ (Roche & Miller, 2007:6). Reflect-

ing the conference ‘‘sea change’’ theme addressing the

phenomenon of counterurbanization, the 2008 confer-

ence at Caloundra on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast

stimulated new directions in tourism and regional studies

(Finch, 2008).

The 10th biennial conference held at the University

of Melbourne in February 2010 provides a good

window into the nature and health of recent Australian

planning history (Nichols, Hurlimann, Mouat, &

Pascoe, 2010). Petrow’s (2010) account describes a

diverse programme, with less emphasis on the tradi-

tional staple of biographical research, a more pro-

nounced heritage focus, greater social and cultural

emphases, and a growing interest in rural and regional

Australia. The theme ‘‘Green Fields, Brown Fields,

New Fields’’ produced an eclectic programme ‘‘enli-

vened by papers from the edge on issues such as mental

health and disabilities... and deepened and enriched by

papers on longstanding concerns probing the meaning

of planning and the effect of planning institutions’’

(Petrow, 2010:472).

Multi-scalar and multi-disciplinary perspectives also

predominated at the 2012 conference held in Perth,

41 Fishman, R. (2005). Presentation to Roundtable on ‘Reconciling

Nostalgia and Futurism in Planning’, ACSP Conference, Kansas City,

27–30 October 2005.

Western Australia (Gaynor, Gralton, Gregory, &

McQuade, 2012). The delegate mix seen at Melbourne

was essentially mirrored: predominantly academic

delegates split between built environment disciplines

(planning, architecture, landscape, urban design) and

humanities and social sciences (history, visual arts) plus

a handful of more specialised affiliations (land manage-

ment, demography). Planning history was confirmed as

a meeting place dominated by neither planners nor

historians. Growing participation by postgraduate

students was evident, a strong indicator for sustained

future progress (Bosman & Fazakerley, 2012). A third

New Zealand-hosted conference was held in February

2014 (but is not included in this review) and future

meetings have been pencilled in for the Gold Coast

(2016) and Hobart (2018).

4. Interfaces with other histories

Having introduced the growing interest, organisation,

thematic focus and general trends in Australian planning

history studies against an international context, in this

section of the paper I discuss some of the productive and

developing intellectual linkages with cognate fields. As

an interdisciplinary endeavour, planning history inevi-

tably intersects with other historical approaches, most of

them more firmly established. These encounters have

generally been polite exchanges rather than confronta-

tional, searching for synergies, and invariably have been

forged by specialist disciplines outside planning and

history. Four interfaces evident in recent work can be

identified: with architectural, urban, environmental and

social history. This discussion highlights interdisciplin-

ary tendencies, tensions and trends as prospectively

seeding interesting research departures.42 The develop-

ment of planning history from the 1970s clearly drew

considerable nourishment and stimulation from other

fields such as historical geography, political science,

heritage and cultural studies; here the main focus is on the

past decade.

4.1. Architectural history

Conversations with architectural history have been

surprisingly weak despite a common interest in built

form. Gatley attributes this to divergent institutional

settings – the established conference infrastructure of

the Society of Architectural Historians of Australia and

New Zealand (the SAHANZ network) versus the more

42 Abbott, Urban History for Planners.

R. Freestone / Progress in Planning 91 (2014) 1–2914

informal pass-the-baton arrangements of the planning

historians (Gatley, 2004). Whereas architectural histor-

ians have been traditionally interested in individual

structures and more latterly thematic interpretations and

meanings of design processes and outcomes, planning

history has taken more characteristically a precinct-

wide gaze in which technology and aesthetics are

factors cast within broader environmental, economic,

historical and cultural perspectives.

Nevertheless, there have been three productive

meeting grounds. First has been an interest in the work

of the pioneering architect-planners, those individuals

who moved between the world of design and develop-

ment, particularly during the post-second world war era

(Freestone, 2012b). Second has been the broader

appreciation of architectural ensembles and their

management, notably the regulatory realm such as

building height controls (Farrelly, 1997; Mills, 1997), as

well as the development of planned architectural

precincts and facilities including community centres

and housing estates (Lewi & Nichols, 2010; Mills,

2010). The third important link between architectural

and planning history has been urban design. A major

monograph on urban design policy in post-war Sydney

by British academic John Punter (2005) nicely captures

this space. It focuses on the design dimension of

planning controls, and the movement from what he

terms ‘‘a largely design agnostic’’ set of practices up

until the late 1980s that did irreparable damage to the

city’s nineteenth century architectural legacy to a more

determined pursuit of excellence acknowledging the

dividends of good design commencing in the 1990s.

Hu’s (2012) work overlaps and extends this coverage.

4.2. Urban history

Urban history is more deeply embedded in a

scholarly intellectual tradition than planning history,

with scholars such as British urban historian Asa Briggs

and his American counterpart Richard Wade being

‘‘style setters’’ for Australian urban historians (Davi-

son, 1979). The work of economic historians Noel

Butlin and John McCarty was foundational and

subsequently taken up by a recognisable Melbourne

‘‘school’’ led by Graeme Davison through the 1980s

and 1990s and fixated primarily on nineteenth century

urbanism with Melbourne as the major laboratory. The

years either side of the Australian Bicentennial

commemorating 200 years of European settlement

were a supportive environment for urban history groups

and research in different cities, but the interest has

waned. More than a decade on, Andrew May questions

whether ‘‘urban history’’ carries much recognition as

history has fractured across many foci; the ‘‘urban’’ tag

no longer necessarily connotes an attractive pathway to

professional advancement in academic history (Brown-

May, 2003).

There have been various reviews of Australian urban

history which are revealing for how little they say about

planning history. In the first of them in 1979, Davison

could at least point to ‘‘convergence of interests among

historians and other social scientists on the politics of

urban growth’’, a reference to the work of Sandercock,

Spearritt and Stretton (Davison, 1979:107). In 1984

Kelly depicted planning history as a branch of urban

history with its growth seemingly assured (Kelly, 1984).

Yet later reviews by Frost (1995) and more recently

O’Hanlon (2005) make little mention of planning, either

as a discipline or as an agent in urban debates. These

two authors’ 2009 collaboration in a special issue of the

Australian Economic History Review which genuflects

to a seminal monograph by Boris Schedvin and John

McCarty (1974) on economic history-led urban history

doesn’t say much more. The real drivers of development

canvassed there are migration, employment, economic

restructuring, car ownership, and capital investment.

Strangely, planning and in turn planning history seem

marginalised as major urban variables, even when the

future challenges to securing sustainable cities are said

to lie in more integrative work and learning from the

historical foundations and antecedents of urban

policy.15 This account is revealing of an at times

surprisingly fragile nexus between urban and planning

history in Australia.

Richard Harris, a Canadian historical geographer,

perspicaciously noted a decade ago that there was less

cross-fertilization between planning and urban history

in Australia ‘‘than one might expect’’. Unlike in the

United States, where the distinction has blurred, in

Australia they have followed ‘‘a more separate logic’’

(Harris, 2002:252, 253). While formalised organisa-

tionally through the urban history/planning history

conference series, the linkage arguably originates less

from deep intellectual ties and more in deference to the

historians who were visitors to ANU’s Urban Research

Programme when lead by Patrick Troy and commenced

with his convening of a second national conference in

1995 (Table 1). Troy’s own work remains a model in

signposting ways in which the strands can be bound

intellectually closer (Troy, 2003,2011).

Nevertheless, in subtle and productive ways the

urban history approach, along with the rise of critical

and cultural urban studies generally, undoubtedly has

infused planning history methodology in different ways.

R. Freestone / Progress in Planning 91 (2014) 1–29 15

43 Feiss, C. (1941). The heritage of our planned communities.

Journal of the American Society of Architectural Historians, 1(3–

4), 27–30.44 Taylor, R., Cox, M. & Dickins, I. (1975) Britain’s Planning

Heritage. London: Croom Helm.

For example, this seems evident through more critical

questionings of ‘‘whose history?’’, heightened sensi-

bility to the impossibility of value-free history, more

encounters with the messiness of everyday urbanism,

nuanced sensitivity to the complexities of place, more

awareness of ‘‘the other’’, and greater reflection on the

limitations of planning and the forces of anti-planning.

An arguably distinctive Australian convergence

between urban and planning history revolves around

historic understandings of the suburban environment,

the dominant habitat of most urban Australians

(Davison, 1993), with planning history contributions

often more empathetic than other paradigms (Nichols &

Schoen, 2008).

4.3. Environmental history

Formal connections between planning history and

environmental history are also perhaps not as close as

might be expected. This is surprising given that both are

interdisciplinary areas whose agendas are shaped

significantly by non-historians. They share significant

common ground in sustainability and environmental

management, but for the most part planning history has

been skewed towards the built environment while

environmental history is more preoccupied with the

natural environment and landscape (Dovers, 1995,

2000). Environmental history is also driven by a more

conspicuous commitment to an improved environmen-

tal condition, a far more normative goal than unifies

most planning history.

Yet the obvious synergies are inescapable, and

growing. Sarah McQuade (2009:03.11) argues that

environmental history can not only contribute to

contemporary planning debates but intertwine with

‘‘the political interests and outcomes that are the focus

of planning history’’. Her own work has traced how

broader social, political and economic concerns have

influenced suburban ‘‘imaginaries’’ which in turn have

shaped the suburban landscape according to planning

philosophies evolving from determinism through

amenity to ecology and sustainability (Brown, 2008;

McQuade, 2011). The 2008 urban history/planning

history conference (Table 1) staged in a high amenity

coastal region marked by clashes between growth

advocates and conservation protagonists stimulated the

strongest environmental flavour in the series (e.g.

Thomsen, 2008).

Other work has explored different linkages and eras.

Porter (2007) reveals how colonial era environmental

attitudes in driving early land management practices

(such as land use regulation and classification) have had

long lasting impacts. These have been accompanied by

deep-seated conflicts between stakeholders, for exam-

ple, over utilitarian versus romantic notions of land

resources. Gaynor’s work on enduring yeomanry ideals

in Australian cities also spilling over from the nine-

teenth century but now intersecting with twenty-first

century themes of food security and sustainable living

reveals an ongoing battle between local food production

and traditional suburban regulatory controls (Gaynor,

2006). James has researched the largely untold history

of green discourses in the planning and development of

metropolitan Sydney (James, 2013).

The interface between planning and environmental

history has been negotiated most assuredly to date by

landscape architects. Saniga’s histories (2004, 2012) of

the landscape architecture profession reveal many

points of contact with town planning concerns from

the early twentieth century, at least at the urban design

scale. Firth places the making of Lake Burley Griffin as

the centrepiece of her landscape history of Canberra

(Firth, 2001). Jones’ (2005) narrative of planning in

metropolitan Adelaide confounds the division between

environmental and planning history. He links an

unfolding historical pattern with an environmental

and place-making sensibility wherein a succession of

private and public actors creates, nurtures, modifies and

destroys the landscape. This approach brings to the fore

the scientists, botanists and conservationists, and

agriculturalists often forgotten in more traditional

accounts and reasserts the responsibility of informed

environmental stewardship (Jones, 2005).

The physical landscape heritage of planning is less

well recognised although the importance of this

component to planning was recognised decades ago

by Feiss43 in the United States and by Taylor, Cox and

Dickens44 in the United Kingdom. The history of

Australian planning can be told through the landscape

(Freestone, 2010). This approach poses questions about

developing rigorous and replicable methodologies for

determining the planning history significance of places

(Freestone, Marsden, & Garnaut, 2008). The successful

nomination of the colonial plan of the City of Adelaide

for the National Heritage List satisfactorily resolved the

trickier questions arising for the sustainable manage-

ment of a planned place (as distinct from an

R. Freestone / Progress in Planning 91 (2014) 1–2916

45 Abbott, Urban History for Planners, 311.46 de Certau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life. Berkeley:

University of California Press, 107.

architectural site or engineering artefact) by focusing on

the armature of the public realm (Jones, 2010). Baker’s

(2012) engagingly illustrated and self-published history

of town planning in the state of Queensland culminates

in an inventory of prospective ‘‘heritage’’ places dating

from the 1880s with links to the development of town

planning movement.

4.4. Social history

Finally, comes the interface with broader social

history. Given the significance of urbanisation in

Australian history, it is surprising that plans, planning

and planners of early to mid-twentieth century

suburbia are not better traversed topics. Historians

presumably find their stories either particularly

unglamorous or languishing as a residual of more

arresting economic, political and social narratives.

Remarkably few general Australian histories reach

down to the activities of the town planning movement

in shaping society and space; the major exceptions are

excursions into historical geography (Powell, 1988)

and the interplay through time of tensions between

social justice, economic growth and environmental

resilience (Bolton, 1992).

Histories of social reformism have nevertheless

strongly interconnected with the development of

planning. Ashton reveals the hold of ‘‘euthenic’’ or

environmental determinist principles on early planning

ideology (Ashton, 1999b). Reiger (1985) connects

scientific management ideals for which the planning

movement stood with the routines of daily life. In more

recent work, Felton (2005) links early twentieth century

concerns with inadequate housing with contemporary

homelessness projects in Brisbane. The way in which

early town planners sought to ‘‘ruralise’’ the suburban

environment in both a physical and ideological sense as

a foundation for a progressive and distinctive Australian

urban citizenship is revealed by Murphy (2009). A more

modern exploration of social reform is Oppenheimer’s

study of the Whitlam Government’s Australian Assis-

tance Plan, a short-lived national programme in the

1970s that worked through new regional councils for

social development to rejuvenate the voluntary welfare

sector in Australia (Oppenheimer, 2008). None of these

authors except Ashton have engaged with planning

history as constituted through its conferences and

publications, but all of their works enrich the field in

both expanding and deepening understandings of the

capacities, connections and limitations of planning

interventions.

5. Innovative discourses

The previous section highlights how the interfaces

between disciplinary concerns and methods have

emerge as sources of innovative research in Australian

planning history. This bears out Abbott’s contention that

‘‘interactions on the edges’’ around issues of identity,

competing interests, and implementation can produce

advances in knowledge as they unsettle the linkages

between the three realms of institutions and governance,

physical development and design, and social patterns

and practices.45 This penultimate section of the paper

explores more examples of how planning history is

constantly being progressed and has recently been

refreshed both within the interstices and at the margins,

often by non-planners working in the humanities, social

sciences and creative arts. This by no means exhaustive

discussion is organised into six main dimensions:

human encounters with top-down planning, decon-

structing the morphology of planned landscapes,

dealing with gender, children and planning, indigeneity,

and the influx of new methods to complement the

conventional print sources of libraries and archives.

5.1. Human encounters with top-down planning

A shift in Australian planning history away from a

tacit ‘‘technocratically apologetic’’ stance towards a

deeper appreciation of the human experience has been

evident since the mid-1990s (Freestone et al., 2002:23).

The ethnographic turn in historical studies has further

challenged the ‘‘over-arching’’ approach to city and

suburban history (O’Hanlon, 2005) and the reverbera-

tions have been felt also in planning history studies. If

Marxist structuralism only lightly dusted the course of

Australian planning history studies from the 1980s, the

Foucauldian turn has had greater resonance in high-

lighting the importance of power and knowledge in

spatial planning history. Michel de Certeau’s insights

provide another theoretical touchstone for this work

which essentially explores the relationship between the

totalising view of the planner (spatial practices of

geographical space) and the experience of the indivi-

dual (urban realm as anthropological or sociological

space). The patina of order, asserts de Certeau, is almost

everywhere ‘‘punched and torn open by ellipses, drifts

and leaks of meaning’’.46

R. Freestone / Progress in Planning 91 (2014) 1–29 17

47 Porteous, J. D. (1988). Topocide: The annihilation of place. In J.

Eyles & D. Smith (Eds.) Qualitative methods in human geography

(pp. 260–275). Cambridge: Polity.48 Cherry, G. (1981). Pioneers in British planning. London: Archi-

tectural Press.49 Moudon, A. V. (1997). Urban morphology as an emerging inter-

disciplinary field. Urban Morphology, 1, 3–10.

One response to the critique of a top down planning

history is the exploration of a range of more populist

encounters with authority including lived experiences

of planned historic environments, the emergence of a

‘‘city social’’ planning agenda from women, appreciat-

ing the amateur entries into the federal capital

competition of 1911–12, and revisiting visions for

new communities spawned by the idealism of the post-

war reconstruction era in the 1940s (Freestone, 2006).

Within the structured order of the planned environment

and the planning scheme, life goes on. Mainstream

accounts of the planning and development of Canberra,

for example, usually say little of the construction

process and the human stories involved. Gugler’s work

derives from a local history paradigm but powerfully

documents the workers camps of the 1920s hidden from

causal visitors and suppressed by the official record

(Gugler, 2009). In Perth, Gregory has shown how

ingrained garden city values, their implementation via

by-laws and counter intuitive impacts, all conspired to

create suburban sites of contestation, however polite, in

the 1920s. These ranged from the intrusive disturbances

of pleasure resorts and the conflict between parks as

children spaces and playing fields for rowdy weekend

footballers to policing the design of the family home

and backyard (Gregory, 1995). Peel’s classic albeit

bleak history of Elizabeth, developed by the South

Australian Housing Trust north of Adelaide from the

mid-1950s, raises the stakes in exploring more

fundamental social and economic realities of a planned

new town in the garden city tradition against a bigger

canvas of post-war economic and migration policies

(Peel, 1995). Bringing such bits and pieces together,

Nichols in a study of the Melbourne Metropolitan Town

Planning Commission in the 1920s warns that ‘‘in

failing to countenance the input of the general public

into planning, and planners’ negotiations with the

public’’, planning history can ‘‘deny unique or discrete

aspects of the planning experience’’ (Nichols,

2004b:55).

Winston’s Sydney’s Great Experiment (1957) laid

the platform for a tradition of policy-based analyses of

metropolitan planning impacts (Searle & Bunker, 2010;

Toon & Falk, 2003). This mainstream is challenged by

more recent writing. Strauss reveals the chasm between

the post-war planners’ neat standards of provision for

open space and leisure facilities and the more insurgent

needs of outdoor recreationists in metropolitan Sydney

(Strauss, 2007). Johnson contrasts the struggle for the

community in trying to apprehend the ‘‘god-like’’

synoptic stance of Sydney planners empowered by

statutory planning powers first enacted in 1945. Their

master planning perspective sought an objective and

simplified canvas to work with but the lived experience

and the values attached to particular places impacted by

new planning proposals such as the green belt were

altogether messier. She argues that in the process of plan

development and consultation the true needs of the

population being planned for were ‘‘silenced, margin-

alised’’ (Johnson, 1995:62). The ways in which planned

state intervention can ride roughshod over people’s

attachment to places has been explored in other ways,

none more tellingly than by Read (1996).whose

research raises broader issues about how government

can better react to the very real traumas and suffering of

renewal and relocation. His study of the M2 motorway

development in northwest Sydney records the human

impact of the escalation of a minor county road in the

first post-war plan of the 1940s into a four-lane

privatised tollway by the 1990s through the memories of

the people displaced through compulsory acquisition

(Read, 1998). Place attachments seemingly have no role

in the process of what Porteous so chillingly described

as ‘‘topocide’’ or place destruction.47

5.2. Deconstructing the morphology of planned

landscapes

Morphological analysis with roots in art history was

a formative strand of modern planning history.48 A

productive nexus that remains underexploited is with

the field of urban morphology research. Moudon distills

its concerns into three main dimensions: urban form

(buildings and spaces), resolution (scale) and time

(evolution and transformation) whose interplay in turn

is situated in three main types of study: the descriptive

(city form), the explanatory (city building) and the

normative (city design).49 Siksna (2006) has reviewed

Australian work in this genre, discovering an uncoor-

dinated but nonetheless value-adding endeavour

focused on initial central city, town and suburban

layouts. His own work on early urban patterns of lots,

blocks and streets depicts incremental processes of

subdivision and amalgamation in adjustment to new

circumstances, but mostly through spontaneous and

speculative interventions rather than, until more recent

R. Freestone / Progress in Planning 91 (2014) 1–2918

times, public regulation and initiative. This work carries

lessons for the adaptability of block forms in

redevelopment processes (Siksna, 1990). Cantrill and

Thalis (2005) propose that the physical history of city

development is best understood as an accumulation of

urban projects, meaning site-specific developments

serving as generative models. Re-imagining historic

forms in situ in Sydney, they convey the importance of

design quality and respect for the public realm in the

ongoing re-making of cities, towns and suburbs (Thalis

& Cantrill, 2013).

Recent departures pose new critical questions about

relationships between urban form and social organisa-

tion (Nichols & Maudsley, 2012). The fundamental

importance of imported Eurocentric notions of land-

scape in determining urban form and the regulation of

urban spaces is explored in Launceston in Tasmania by

Blythe (2006). He demonstrates how ‘‘uncertain lace-

work’’ substituting for the strictly codified ‘‘orthogonal

grid’’ of the colonial authorities produced an alignment

of city streets which expressed a clear spatial relation-

ship to the spectacular wilderness of the nearby Cataract

Gorge. The value of digital visual media in speculating

on such historical moments is stimulatingly conveyed

by Lewi (2000) whose multiple re-creations of Perth’s

original grid capture ‘‘ethereal urban beginnings’’

which provocatively blur the boundary between the

real and the unreal. Brisbane’s hosting of ISUF 2013,

the 20th International Seminar on Urban Form and the

first to be held in Australia, may prove a stimulus to

work at the interface of urban morphology and planning

history.

5.3. The gender agenda

When Leonie Sandercock came to revise her classic

Cities for Sale (1975) for a second edition in 1990, she

largely eschewed an engagement with her original

empirical material in favour of a new contextual essay

which in part reconsiders the ‘‘gender-neutral’’ meth-

odology of her original treatment in the light of new

feminist discourses (Sandercock, 1990). This intro-

duced the so-called ‘‘gender agenda’’ into Australian

planning history.50 Her subsequent work would criticise

the perceived dominance of the ‘‘great man’’ approach,

as noted earlier (Sandercock, 2003). These critiques

gained greater purchase in her adopted America, and the

50 Sandercock, L. & A. Forsyth (1992). A gender agenda: New

directions for planning theory. Journal of the American Planning

Association, 58(1), 49–59.

Australian scene was left to others, initially as a brand of

‘‘compensatory’’ history to address the lacunae (Free-

stone, 1995). More substantive treatments have fol-

lowed.

Responding to the overlooked contribution of

women to national town planning conferences in

Adelaide (1917) and Brisbane (1918), Gatley shows

that women’s advocacy of better housing and more

extensive facilities for children were linked closely to a

commitment to an imperial commitment to ‘‘improving

the race’’ (Gatley, 2005). Sydney businesswoman,

planning advocate and journalist Florence Taylor has

been the subject of a biographical study (Freestone &

Hanna, 2008). A conservative reactionary not afraid to

use her feminine charms, Taylor worked in the chill of a

purely constructed environment unlike her contempor-

ary and rival Marion Mahony Griffin, a progressive

conservationist who celebrated the biophysical envir-

onment (Van Zanten, 2011). Whereas Florence seam-

lessly assumed most of the conservative ideological

baggage of her husband George, Marion used her

landscape art to differentiate her contributions from

Walter as town planner (Vernon, 2005). The Griffins

remain a staple of Australian planning history, most

recently the subject of a sympathetic account that

synoptically trawls an extensive accumulated literature

and which won the 2011 National Biography Award

(McGregor, 2009).

While acknowledging the valuable knowledge of

women’s achievements contributed by such studies,

Murphy argues that the major historiographical

imperative is not just to backfill established narratives

but explicate how gender operates ‘‘as an integral aspect

of cultural and historical process’’ (Murphy, 2006:370).

A recent major oral history of women planners in

Victoria moves towards that agenda. Women have

always been active in progress associations and resident

action groups, and they entered the fledgling profession

of planning in small numbers from the 1940s. From

Accidental Planner to Agent Provocateur recovers

many stories from the trailblazers and their successors

in post-war Victoria in negotiating the oftentimes

antagonistic demands of career and family. Collectively,

they contributed to the transformation of planning from

a patriarchal to a more egalitarian profession (Whitz-

man, Nichols, & Perkovic, 2009). Beyond women as

town planning advocates are of course the gendered

experiences of planning. A notable historical explora-

tion is Chambers’ (1997) study of women experiencing

the transition of western Sydney from rural to suburban

life under post-war metropolitan planning in the 1950s

and 1960s. While critical of suburban planning with its

R. Freestone / Progress in Planning 91 (2014) 1–29 19

drift towards social isolation, auto-dependence in a

public transport-poor region and a lessened sense of

personal security, the upside was a grass-roots engage-

ment in the march of progress.

5.4. Children and planning

The health and well-being of vulnerable children

was an early theme and focus for the slum housing

movements with its roots in Victorian era reform

(Davison, 1983). By mid-century Lewis Mumford was

writing about infancy, school children and adolescence

as three of the five crucial phases of life to be

considered by planners.51 Renewed interest connects

with latter day concerns about child obesity, safety,

social exclusion, and transport access.52 Current calls

to reinstate kids into city life provide a challenge for

planning historians.

Children’s playgrounds provide one focus for

analysis. Building on work by Gatley (2001), Collins,

Lustri, Bird, and Garnaut (2010) have charted the

evolution of the movement in South Australia from

beginnings in the supervised era of the 1910s with close

connections to the town planning movement through the

role in promoting national fitness from 1940s and onto

to latter day adventure facilities. Pascoe’s innovative

work on children and Melbourne planning in the 1950s

brought together in a recent book (2011) scans a broader

canvas. It illuminates the gulf between the scientific

plans of planners and the mental maps of the youngest

citizens. Although well intentioned, the idea of

regimented playspaces (when local government could

even afford them) did not necessarily cater for the

interests of children who were often more attracted to

the untamed, unregulated places fast disappearing under

the so-called ‘‘cream brick frontier’’ (Davison, Dingle,

& O’Hanlon, 1995).

5.5. Indigeneity

The need to consider the impacts of land use

planning systems on the Aboriginal population in cities

and non-metropolitan locations is now widely acknowl-

edged (Wensing, 2012). Indigenous Australians have

been virtually scripted out of planning history through

the eurocentrism of the field (Freestone, 2010). Johnson

51 Mumford, L. (1949). Planning for the phases of life. Town Plan-

ning Review, 20(1), 5–16.52 Gleeson, B. & Sipe, N. (Eds.) (2006). Creating child friendly

cities. London: Routledge.

(2010:264) writes angrily of these silences that leave

uncontested the ‘‘idea of planning being a normative

and conservative profession, defining and managing a

land system based on stolen property, oriented primarily

to the needs of metropolitan commerce and operating to

contain and confine racialised social groups’’. None-

theless, there are recent contributions of note.

Porter (2010) argues that modern day environmental

practices are still rooted in culturally-blind colonial

paradigms which appropriated territory from Indigen-

ous people ensuring continuing conflicts over land

tenure, utilisation and value to the present day. Planning

history reflects those biases with little treatment of

indigeneity or recognition of how current planning

systems trend towards a form of ‘‘cognitive imperial-

ism’’ privileging Eurocentric norms of property and

heritage (Fredericks, 2008). There is considerable scope

for exploring the impacts of and interactions with a

history of spatial regulation and other discriminatory

policies often inscripted into the place-geography of

cities, vide, the origins of places like ‘‘Blacktown’’ in

Sydney and various ‘‘Boundary’’ Streets demarcating

inclusion and exclusion in various capital cities.

Gerritsen has contested the prevailing wisdom of

nomadic Aboriginality to show how structures, hamlets,

villages accommodating several hundred people and

‘‘even towns possibly’’ exhibited ‘‘a high degree of

sedentism’’. Early colonists made frequent references to

these ‘‘native townships’’ although few of the commu-

nities survived the European invasion. Recurring

elements show orientation to sun and stars, demarcation

of communal and family space, circular, semi-circular

and often domed forms, dwellings of different size,

ceremonial places, and well beaten paths. If it was not

town planning in European eyes, these habitations were

nevertheless an expression of sophisticated regimes of

place-making, land management, habitation, ownership

and valuation of scared spaces.

Memmott (2007) has documented a broader range

and complexity of Aboriginal-designed structures,

spaces and territorial behaviour. There is evidence that

Aboriginal presence and utilisation influenced the form

and function of the original town grids and early

planning decisions on land reservations and the siting of

roads and infrastructure, however subtly (Greenop &

Memmott, 2007). Colonial governments sought to

isolate Aborigines outside the city (Fredericks, 2008).

As Hollows (1996) has noted, there is a long history of

segregationist policies via rural stations, country town

camps, suburban fringe reserves and other spatial

enclaves as well as temporal restrictions on access

to urban areas which express fears and tensions in

R. Freestone / Progress in Planning 91 (2014) 1–2920

white-black relations. The major source of conflict has

always been when Aboriginal groups have sought to

maintain their traditional rights to the land.

5.6. New methods, new sources

The final category in this section, methodological

innovation, is perforce somewhat of a miscellany, given

the rationale for the grouping is more technique rather

that topic related. The intention is nonetheless to convey

evidence for the importance and relevance of a plurality

of historical method and, increasingly, data sources. A

sample of offerings is reported rather than a systematic

inventory. Historians have always tended to be more

comfortable with trawling and integrating diverse and

sometimes unlikely sources (May, 2009). British

historical geographer Richard Dennis’ Cities in

Modernity is exemplary in that regard in effortlessly

‘‘building bridges’’ not only between qualitative and

quantitative method but culture and economy, theory

and empiricism.53 Spearritt’s Sydney since the Twenties

(1978) was revelatory in moving beyond traditional

archival sources to cartoons, advertisements and

artwork. Notable in Australian scholarship, Duggan’s

(2001) distinctive account of the early planning

movement goes further in drawing upon images –

painted, photographed, drawn and imagined - to link

planning to the wider apparatus of art and cultural

history.

A more deliberative use of art as text is Brand’s

(2000) examination of the urban scenes artistically

depicted by Colonel William Light for what they reveal

about the desired qualities embodied in his plan for

Adelaide. She discerns how his travels through the

Mediterranean engendered a sophisticated appreciation

of the relationship between terrain and urban form. His

Sicilian cityscapes depict a sharpness of divide between

buildings, square, and skylines that can be traced into

the ground plan of central Adelaide. Light’s experience

of Spanish cities also left traces on the city (Brand,

2005). Brand’s analysis illuminates Hutchings’ (1987)

speculations on the influence of the Law of the Indies on

the city plan. Indeed, the ‘‘imaginaries’’ of early

colonial town and garden designers were undoubtedly

influenced by port cities like Rio de Janeiro and

Capetown that were visited by early sailing ships en

route to Australia (Brand, 2009). The power of

53 Dennis, R. (2008). Cities in modernity: Representations and

productions of metropolitan space, 1840–1930. Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press.

hypotheses thrown up by plans themselves is no better

illustrated than by Montgomery’s (2006) forensic

examination of nineteenth century maps. His aim is

not just the reconstruction of physical or social history

but ‘‘cartological’’ in utilising cartography as both

rhetorical device and cultural artefact.

Biography is a methodology which can ‘‘reveal the

myths’’ of planning ‘‘in human terms’’.54 Oral history

comes into play when the subjects are within living

memory. This was said to be ‘‘emerging as a key

research technique’’ in Australian planning history a

decade ago (Freestone et al., 2002:23) and has since

consolidated this presence, underpinning several con-

tributions already discussed (e.g. Read, 1998; Whitz-

man et al., 2009). Two applications are highlighted here,

both laying platforms for more expansive historical

research. The first is Ashton’s Planning Sydney (1992)

which recorded interviews with nine prominent

planners involved in controlling development in the

City of Sydney and was a key step in his writing of The

Accidental City (Ashton, 1993), a history commissioned

for the City Council’s sesquicentenary project. The

second application, emulating the Ashton model, was

Park’s Voices of a Landscape (2001) reporting on a total

of 36 interviews with various planners, residents and

councillors as a lead in to her subsequent history of

North Sydney, Designs on a Landscape (2003b), still

the only book-length general planning history of a local

authority.

Published autobiographies tend to be the preserve of

more famous individuals. They can disappoint, like Sir

John Overall’s (1995) account of his years in Canberra,

which lacks any revealing insights into the decision-

making process of the National Capital Development

Commission (NCDC) of which he was first Commis-

sioner from 1958 to 1972. Gordon Stephenson’s On a

Human Scale (1992) is similarly a measured treatment

but far more revealing of the archetypal modernist

working alongside luminaries like Le Corbusier, Patrick

Abercrombie, Clarence Stein and William Holford

before settling in Perth in the early 1960s. If full

memoirs cannot be secured, the selective recollections

of senior planners remain an invaluable supplement to

the official record; the practice needs to be encouraged

(Cardew, 1998).

Archaeological method has value in seeking to

reconcile the ‘‘experience-near’’ (immediacies of

54 Krueckeberg, D. (1993). Between self and culture or what are

biographies of planners about? Journal of the American Planning

Association, 59(2), 217–220.

R. Freestone / Progress in Planning 91 (2014) 1–29 21

human stories) and the ‘‘experience-distant’’ (contexts

of places in past times) through the lens of material

culture.55 Karskens demonstrates how it allows a

mapping of the process of city making in a physical

sense and can uncover micro-histories to be interpreted

within, if not challenging, the accepted wisdoms of,

broader social history (Karskens & Lawrence, 2003).

The focus to date of urban archaeology in Australia has

been inner city slums through both ‘‘little’’ and ‘‘big’’

digs such as in Melbourne’s Lonsdale Street and the

Sydney’s Rocks respectively. Opportunities might be

taken to go beyond this focus into the outer suburbs and

other urban expeditions. One interesting foray is by

Wong (1999) who reviews evidence of the early

colonial infrastructure of water supply, sewerage and

drainage in Sydney. Key actors were the colonial

engineers whose work alerted authorities to the

importance of forward-looking surveys and integrated

planning. She concludes that their aspirations to

establish a general system in the 1830s reflected a

town planning consciousness in advance of comparable

British initiatives.

Finally, of note is the utilisation of fictional texts as

planning documents and the related fictionalisation of

planning history to generate insights and hypotheses.

While the odd reference is not unusual, more considered

thematic analyses are rarer. Teather’s (1990) compar-

ison of the divergent spatial imaginaries of early post

war inner Sydney evident in the texts of metropolitan

planners and social realist writers like Ruth Park and

Dorothy Hewitt remains a powerful and instructive

critique. Where novels like Park’s Harp in The South

(1948) and Hewitt’s Bobbin Up (1959) provide gritty

yet empathetic portraits of working class inner city life,

the value-laden assumptions, omissions and oversights

in the report on the County of Cumberland Planning

Scheme (1948) paradoxically seem even more fictional.

While some of the planners’ statistics objectively

capture the socio-economic character conveyed by the

novelists prose, their own text is marred by sweeping

generalisations about immorality, crime, and substan-

dard housing devoid of any appreciation of community

or place networks and in that way could build the case

for comprehensive slum clearance.

Fictionalisation (or more accurately ‘‘factionalisa-

tion’’) of planning history enables more creative

reconstruction and conjecture. The celebrated interna-

tional example is Erik Larson’s best-selling tale of

55 Mayne, A. (2008). On the edges of history: Reflections on histori-

cal archaeology’. American Historical Review, 113(1), 93–118.

‘‘murder, magic, and madness’’ at the Worlds Colum-

bian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 which interweaves

the story of the Exhibition, its architect-director Daniel

Burnham, and a serial killer.56 The novelistic account

by planning historian Ray Bunker (2002) of the settling

of Adelaide is less racy, though not without a love

interest sub-plot! It offers a compelling social and

political history which interpolates an interpretation of

how the important planning decisions of the 1830s – the

determination of an initial plan, the selection of a site

for the capital city, and the modification of the plan to fit

the site – played out through the interaction of the

faintly fictionalised characters. The first and third parts

of the book are essentially narrated by John Henderson,

an entirely fictional character. The intermediate part

follows the diary of Surveyor General Colonel William

Grey (aka Light) and covers the laying out of Adelaide.

It portrays disagreements with his deputy over his

‘‘spoiling a classical plan’’ by fragmenting the grid into

parts and serrating its edges, and attributes the tripartite

North Adelaide design to a suggestion by his wife. In a

similar genre is a new novel by leading Australian

writer Frank Moorhouse and set in Canberra in the early

1950s. The story of its ambitious and well-connected

leading lady Edith Campbell Berry is set against the

backdrop of the hallmarks of the era – the work of the

first post-war planner Trevor Gibson, Menzies’ com-

mitment to Canberra, the Australian Planning Institute

Conference of 1951, the visit of William Holford, the

Senate Select Committee of 1955, and the early years of

the National Capital Development Commission (Moor-

house, 2011).

6. Canvassing the future of the past

The pursuit of historical themes in Australian

planning scholarship has contributed to the wider field

of planning history studies through recording both the

universalism of the evolution of the modern planning

project and its antipodean nuances. Over some four

decades an eclectic cast of researchers has filled gaps,

injected new understandings, and generated yet more

avenues for inquiry. Considerable evidence has been

assembled to convey a culturally-specific paradigm at

once akin to yet different in detail from those of other

countries and cultures. Sweeping generalizations are

less powerful than more targeted critiques. For example,

there is evidence, as noted earlier, for a distinctive

56 Larson, E. (2003). The devil in the white city. New York: Vintage

Books.

R. Freestone / Progress in Planning 91 (2014) 1–2922

Australian style of metropolitan planning. The global

distinctiveness of the (continuing) evolution of Aus-

tralian planning theory and practice warrants more

systematic comparative inquiry.

Prescribing a definitive future research agenda is,

however, futile. The field of planning history if it is to

remain engaging, dynamic and relevant will generate its

own pathways. Some of these will come from wrestling

with gaps in the historical record, spillover from the

widening research agenda of the planning profession

generally (e.g. climate change, healthy communities,

high density cities, housing affordability), and from

unpredictable intersections of perspective, place, people

and power in the manner sketched by Abbott for a

planning-infused urban history.57 Others have wrestled

with future needs. For example, Larkham writing about

planning history generally argues that the field requires

both more history and more planning!58 It’s been said

that historians are interested in the past as the past while

planners are interested in the relevance of the past. The

bottom line is that this characteristically invests much

planning history with an innate and distinctive applied

orientation. The desirability of drawing scholarship on

policy processes and urban products closer to public

administration and professional practice has been a

persistent theme of Alan Hutchings’ work (Hutchings,

2002; Hutchings, 2011).

Arising from this fourth decadal review of Australian

planning history, four observations on productively

moving forward are made; these directions are, like all

the genres canvassed in this review, not necessarily

mutually exclusive.

6.1. Deeper institutional and place-based histories

One niche always there to be filled but somewhat

unfashionable in academic terms is deep institutional or

place-based history. Outstanding in this genre is the

planning history of Woden-Weston Creek in Canberra

by the late John Gilchrist, a former senior figure in the

NCDC in Canberra through the 1970s and 1980s.

Alongside the detailed documentation of plan and place

making is a fascinating story of the struggle for

acceptance of modern planning ideas for long term

growth and neighbourhood planning within the NCDC

that pitted the progressives led by Peter Harrison against

more conservative figures like Grenfell Rudduck and

Commissioner John Overall, the latter a consummate

57 Abbott, Urban History for Planners.58 Larkham, Questioning Planning History.

politician only concerned that the right decision be

made, whatever it was (Gilchrist, 1985).

A second more recent study of note is Michael

Llewellyn-Smith’s dissection of a distinctive era in

planning for the City of Adelaide from the early 1970s

to the early 1990s when the City enjoyed its own

bespoke integrated planning system mandated by state

government legislation. Based on his PhD dissertation

(Llewellyn-Smith, 2010), Behind the Scenes (2012)

draws from nearly 50 interviews with key players in

state government, the city council, and the planning

profession. Llewellyn-Smith is the ultimate insider

himself, as City Planner and then Chief Executive

Officer for Adelaide through the period under review.

His account aims at identifying the distinctiveness of

the planning approach evolved and conveys several

underlying factors of significance: the city’s DNA of

planning heritage emanating from the original colonial

template of encircling parklands and strong townscape

values; the leadership of key individuals able to make

things happen from consultants to State Ministers for

Planning; the functional working relationship arrived at

between state and central city (a nexus marred in other

capital cities by political skirmishes and conflicts); and

the integration of strategic (vision-setting) and statutory

(development control) arms of planning to effect an

integrated approach to policy formation and imple-

mentation.

These sorts of studies – drawing from the ‘‘nuts and

bolts of how practice has evolved’’ and the recording of

‘‘primary experiences’’ – are required for planning

history to gain a stronger foothold within mainstream

planning (Hutchings, 2007:217). Such work provides a

lasting resource for later researchers.

6.2. Evaluation of planning outcomes

A second related need is for detailed, systematic

evaluations of planning in practice. These may blur the

boundary between planning history and the call for

evidence-based planning generally (and to some extent

works in the category just discussed) but regardless they

are not all that common yet. This is even more

surprising given the policy-relevant aspirations often

heard from planning historians. Much planning history

of course seeks to do this in a selective, retrospective

way, but it is the holistic evaluations which can deliver

real impact.

Instanced here are several texts: Miles Lewis’

Suburban Backlash (1999) which morphs from a sober

account of colonial urban morphology into an impas-

sioned critique of the implementation of compact city

R. Freestone / Progress in Planning 91 (2014) 1–29 23

59 That of the Colonel Light Gardens Historical Society has devel-

oped into an exceptional resource for both local and planning-the-

matic history; see www.clghs.org.au.60 Sandercock, The Twentieth Century Planning Experience, 779.

goals, the forensic analysis of urban design in central

Sydney by Punter (1995) noted earlier, Pat Troy’s

(2012) expose of the development of housing policy and

its planning connections at the federal level, and the late

Brian McLoughlin’s Shaping Melbourne’s Future?

(1992) which inserts an analytical historical perspective

to evaluate the achievement of planning goals. To quote

McLoughlin, with all the ‘‘confusion and disorder’’ of

cities and urban policy, ‘‘how else are we ever to

improve all this without serious studies of past

performance?’’ (McLoughlin, 1992:x). This direction

works conspicuously to secure a continuing relevance

for planning history as an applied discourse.

6.3. Interdisciplinary collaboration

Third, there needs to be more opportunities seized

and created for collaborative work in the interstices

between planning and other historical frameworks and

methods. The linkages described in Section 5 provide

one foundation for development. One lesson from the

present review is of planning history actively advancing

its project in moments of productive conversation with

other paradigms. Alluded to earlier, Harris has

observed, for example, that planning and urban history

in Australia ‘‘have tended to travel on parallel tracks’’

(Harris, 2002:252). Moreover, there has been little

trans-Tasman dialogue with New Zealand researchers.

The implication is that considerable potential inherent

within the structure of the Australasian urban history/

planning history network needs to be better capitalised.

Current research funding highly values multi-discipli-

narity and a recent joint project on the rise (and fall) of

the early town planning associations in every state from

the 1910s involving planning, urban and public

historians signposts one feasible research model

(Freestone, 2009). The 2012 Australasian conference

of planning and urban historians in Perth closed with

several speakers highlighting both the need and

opportunities ‘‘for more comparative analytical stu-

dies’’ (Bosman & Fazakerley, 2012:639).

6.4. Talking to the community

Finally, Australian planning history, like planning

history generally, needs to be more than just a history of

and for planners. The prospective audience is demon-

strably much wider. Insights and lessons need to be

communicated to and appreciated by government

officials, elected representatives, and the community

at large. These were precisely the challenges addressed

by Burgess (1996) in the United States over a decade

ago before the power of digital media to assist in that

process was fully comprehended. There are a number of

websites that deal with the planned development of

urban space – there should be more.59 To some extent

this fourth theme integrates the analytical power of the

previous three strands. The evidence is also already

demonstrable of spin offs from scholarly research into

both accessible local history publications and local

heritage and conservation discourse. Exemplars of this

fourth cluster of activity to be built upon include

Sinnayah’s (2012) exhibition catalogue on historic

Daceyville Garden Suburb in Sydney compiled largely

from personal memories and images, Jack’s (2010)

history commissioned by the NSW Heritage Council of

the towns planned by Governor Macquarie in the 1810s

in New South Wales, Gibson’s (2011) local history

monograph on the ‘‘events, buildings and town plans’’

in the development of the suburb of Fannie Bay in

Darwin, and Marshall’s (2013) home grown account of

community life in one of the last garden suburbs in

Melbourne designed by Walter Burley Griffin. The

popularisation of planning history provides a pathway

towards advancing community engagement.

7. Conclusion

Sandercock was right in 1998 when she said that

planning history is what you make it, with its

boundaries shifting ‘‘in relation to the definition of

planning... and in relation to the historian’s purpose’’.60

It can generate different perspectives, stories and

conclusions depending on whether it is defined in

regulationist, transformative or indeed other ways. She

was also right about the need for encouraging greater

inclusivity and diversity. This review hopefully conveys

the current health and progress of Australian planning

history precisely in those terms. Several vectors in

planning history research are evident - deepening

understandings through careful documentation and

knowledge generation, challenging conventional

approaches, and widening/enriching understanding

from external injections of creativity from broader

humanities and social science perspectives. Possible

pathways for future research were outlined in Section 6.

For a specialist area, albeit one defined broadly,

planning history remains remarkably vibrant.

R. Freestone / Progress in Planning 91 (2014) 1–2924

The informal model of governance for those

interested in planning history has served the interests

of Australian research well, in both evolving as a

supportive if informal community of scholarship and

through its permeable constitution to ensure that the

quality assurance of the mainstream planning and

history professions apply. The sense that this might be

formalised fractionally to ensure a more sustainable

future with conferences venues mapped out over several

years and a virtual presence established on the web was

widely shared at the 11th national conference in Perth.

Andrew May of the University of Melbourne took the

initiative to setup a website (http://uhphg.com/) with the

aim of ‘‘connecting researchers interested in the history

of cities and towns’’. Whether this is the platform for the

next decade of arresting and collaborative research

remains to be seen. If all else fails, Australian planning

historians, like their peers in other countries, can still

find continuing solace in Sir Peter Hall’s ultimate

justification for producing Cities of Tomorrow. He

simply wrote it, he said, because he ‘‘found the subject

intriguing’’.61

Acknowledgements

This paper is developed from a presentation to the

‘‘Expanding Horizons: The City and the Web’’

Symposium held at the University of South Australia

in Adelaide in May 2010. I am grateful to the convenors

Dr Christine Garnaut and Professor Alan Mayne for the

invitation to speak to the theme ‘‘the scope and focus of

studies in urban and planning history of Australian

cities’’. I also acknowledge the commentaries of two

anonymous referees.

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Robert Freestone is Professor of Planning in the Faculty of the Built Environment at the University of New South

Wales, Sydney, Australia. His research interests span contemporary and historic issues. His recent books include

Urban Nation: Australia’s Planning Heritage (2010), Designing’s Australia’s Cities: Culture, Commerce and the City

Beautiful 1900–1930 (2007), Florence Taylor’s Hats: Designing, Building and Editing Sydney (2007, with Bronwyn

Hanna), and Talking Sydney: Population, community and culture in contemporary Sydney (2006, with Bill Randolph

and Caroline Butler-Bowdon).