Landscape Preferences, Amenity, and Bushfire Risk in New South Wales, Australia

This paper examines landscape preferences of residents in amenity-rich bushfire-prone landscapes in New South Wales, Australia. Insights are provided into vegetation preferences in areas where properties neighbor large areas of native vegetation, such as national parks, or exist within a matrix of cleared and vegetated private and public land. In such areas, managing fuel loads in the proximity of houses is likely to reduce the risk of house loss and damage. Preferences for vegetation appearance and structure were related to varying fuel loads, particularly the density of understorey vegetation and larger trees. The study adopted a qualitative visual research approach, which used ranking and photo-elicitation as part of a broader interview. A visual approach aids in focusing on outcomes of fuel management interventions, for example, by using the same photo scenes to firstly derive residents’ perceptions of amenity and secondly, residents’ perceptions of bushfire risk. The results are consistent with existing research on landscape preferences; residents tend to prefer relatively open woodland or forest landscapes with good visual and physical access but with elements that provoke their interest. Overall, residents’ landscape preferences were found to be consistent with vegetation management that reduces bushfire risk to houses. The terms in which preferences were expressed provide scope for agency engagement with residents in order to facilitate management that meets amenity and hazard reduction goals on private land

Using micro-geography to understand the realisation of wellbeing: a qualitative GIS study of three social enterprises

Social enterprises are promoted as a method of welfare reform, to transition people out of disadvantage by addressing poverty, unfulfilled capabilities and social exclusion. This study explores how three Work Integration Social Enterprises (WISEs) in Australia help to realise wellbeing for their employees by mapping their micro-geographical experience of wellbeing. By mapping the sites within a social enterprise where wellbeing is realised, we provide a practical, empirical and replicable methodology that is useful for gaining insights into where and how wellbeing realisation occurs. This situates wellbeing as an upstream place-based resource likely to influence downstream health outcomes

Reappraising the role of suburban workplaces in Darwin\u27s creative economy

Traditionally, suburbs have been conceived as dormitory – in binary opposition to the inner-city (Powell). Supporting this stereotypical view have been gendered binaries between inner and outer city areas; densely populated vs. sprawl; gentrified terraces and apartment culture vs. new estates and first home buyers; zones of (male) production and creativity against (female) sedate, consumer territory. These binaries have for over a decade been thoroughly criticised by urban researchers, who have traced such representations and demonstrated how they are discriminatory and incorrect (see Powell; Mee; Dowling and Mee). And yet, such binaries persist in popular media commentaries and even in academic research (Gibson and Brennan-Horley). In creative city research, inner-city areas have been bestowed with the supposed correct mix of conditions that may lead to successful creative ventures. In part, this discursive positioning has been borne out of prior attempts to mapthe location of creativity in the cit

Finding creativity in a small city:How qualitative mapping methods can reveal new geographies of creativity

This chapter outlines a qualitative mapping approach suitable for uncovering key geographical themes associated with small city creative industries. Until recently, the spatial dynamics underpinning creative economies in small cities and other places that constitute an imagined creative \u27periphery\u27 (Gibson 2010), have been absent from debates about the geography of creative industries. Instead, the focus has settled on case studies from large cities of Europe and North America, and selected ones at that, where stories of creative industry agglomeration and transformation are most obvious. Oft-cited examples include London, New York, Los Angeles, Manchester and Berlin, fuelling generalisations about the spatiality of creativity in the city. Instead, this chapter offers evidence from a small city that displays complex creative industl)\u27 geographies made up of distinct spatial themes that intersected in multifaceted ways. Stories emerge from the data of uniqueness and spatial specificity in a small city setting shaped by geographical location, historical anomaly and a distinct multicultural profile. Such findings were only possible by testing new creative industry mapping methods where orthodox employment measures failed to yield enough data about how this particular city\u27s creative industries were structured and located

Where is creativity in the city? Integrating qualitative and GIS methods

This paper discusses a new blend of methods developed to answer the question of where creativity is in the city. Experimentation with new methods was required because of empirical shortcomings with existing creative city research techniques; but also to respond to increasingly important questions of where nascent economic activities occur outside the formal sector, and governmental spheres of planning and economic development policy. In response we discuss here how qualitative methods can be used to address such concerns, based on experiences from an empirical project charged with the task of documenting creative activity in Darwin—a small city in Australia’s tropical north. Diverse creative practitioners were interviewed about their interactions with the city—and hard-copy maps were used as anchoring devices around spatially orientated interview questions. Results from this interview – mapping process were accumulated and analysed in a geographical information system (GIS). Digital maps produced by this method revealed patterns of concentration and imagined ‘epicentres’ of creativity in Darwin, and showed how types of sites and spaces of the city are imagined as ‘creative’ in different ways. Qualitative mapping of creativity enabled the teasing out of contradictory and divergent stories of the location of creativity in the urban landscape. The opportunities which such methods present for researchers interested in how economic activities are ‘lived’ by workers, situated in social networks, and reproduced in everyday, material, spaces of the city are described.

Geographic Information Technologies for cultural research: cultural mapping and the prospects of colliding epistemologies

This article discusses potential applications of Geographic Information Technologies in cultural research - amidst concern that confusion surrounds what these technologies are, and how they might be used. We discuss the adoption of Geographic Information Technologies in our own cultural research projects, motivated by empirical shortcomings with existing creative industries and cultural planning research methods, coupled with a desire to more fully explore the geography of cultural life within Australian cities. Geographic Information Technologies can comprise a range of technologies (proprietary GIS software systems, GPS, web mapping) that seek to accumulate geographical information for analysis within computer database systems. In our projects, Geographic Information Technologies enabled spatially sensitive questions about creative activity, affective links to city environments and cultural vitality (asked in interviews and focus groups) to be linked to central map databases. "Collisions of epistemologies" (Brown & Knopp, 2008) were made possible, dissolving boundaries between qualitative and quantitative methods, and connecting our philosophical commitment to everyday, vernacular forms of culture to matters of cultural planning. Results showed a refreshing amount of creative activity occurring beyond visible "hubs", in suburbs and the vernacular spaces of everyday life. Moreover, cultural life - and creative activities more specifically - was layered, localized and multifaceted within cities, in ways that preclude singular generalizations. Geographic Information Technologies and maps - with their capacities to capture complexity and layered phenomena - helped communicate such findings in digestible formats, to a range of community and government audiences

Mapping vernacular creativity: The extent and diversity of rural festivals in Australia

The idea that creativity is vital to regional economies has been increasingly debated in Australia, as elsewhere. Although creativity has been taken more seriously by governments, it has often been 'folded into' normative ideas of market-led place competition, with biases towards commodifiable forms of creativity (that produce copyright/content) and urban, middle-class neighbourhoods and aesthetics (see Gibson, 2009 for extended critique). ... In the first part of this chapter we overview the manner in which normative discourses of creativity have infused policy talk. In the second part, the chapter draws on one project which has sought to map the extent and diversity of creativity in rural areas, specifically, community festivals held in rural parts of three Australian states (Tasmania, New South Wales (NSW), Victoria). We discuss in detail one festival: the Elvis Revival festival in the country town of Parkes

City Traces

A mobile app and GIS mapping platform for the Victorian State of Design Festival 2011. Developed in partnership with University of Wollongong and the Creative Industries Innovation Centre, aimed to promote crowd-sourcing of better knowledge of urban environmental transport patterns. “In an age of satellite navigation and Google Maps, we now have the opportunity to show that our cities are as much about everyday events and social life as they are about buildings and streets. By showing these social movements, new maps can be used by urban planners and designers to better understand the workings of cities as social spaces of movement and interaction… New data visualisations can reveal those design aspects of the city that shape our lives: site accessibility, transport links, our favoured places or haunts, our action spaces. But it can also show the mundane or annoying: being stuck in traffic lights or waiting for a tram.