Wicked Urban Challenges in Western Sydney: Researchers Respond

The purpose of this publication is to provide critical insights and perspectives around how to tackle four of Western Sydney’s wicked urban challenges, and ensure our region is prepared for the future, namely: job/housing imbalances and inadequate infrastructure investment; declining housing affordability; cultural infrastructure disparities; extreme urban heat. Our aim is that this publication continues the debate generated in the online forum, ‘Wicked urban challenges in Western Sydney: researchers respond’, held in October 2021. The event was sponsored by Western Sydney University (WSU). The university is a modern, forward-thinking, research-led university, located at the heart of the Western Sydney region. Boasting 12 campuses (many in CBD locations) and more than 170,000 alumni, 48,000 students and 3,000 staff, the university has 14 Schools with an array of well-designed programs and courses carefully structured to meet the demands of future industry. The event was organised through the University’s Urban Living Futures and Society Research Theme and formed part of the University’s 2021 Research Week, called ‘Bold Research Futures’. This theme had real resonance with what was discussed that day. Over 160 people attended this highly interactive forum, right across the built environment profession and other key professions. The invitation, however, had gone wider, to many people living and working in Western Sydney and beyond. The event brought together our researchers, government, industry, and our local community to challenge conventional policy thinking and offer new ways to solve these four wicked urban challenges in Western Sydney (as outlined above). The remainder of this report provides a summary of four of WSU’s leading urban researchers’ presentations, as delivered on the day. Each of the academics draw from the strategic programs of work being carried out by multi-disciplinary teams across our university. Each brings fresh perspectives and insights to our understanding of the challenges that Western Sydney faces and offers bold policy solutions and initiatives

Where Are the Jobs? Part 1: Western Sydney's Short-lived Jobs Boom

Research for this series of reports was conducted throughout 2019. Our focus back then was on trends in the Western Sydney economy which was showing record levels of economic growth and jobs generation. Had it not been for the impacts of COVID-19, the reports would have concentrated on the reasons for this economic success, with reflections on some of the downsides and some qualifications about its durability. Now, COVID-19 places the reports in a new context. A different and, at this point, unknowable economic pathway for the region is being laid, and new research will be required to map and inform a reconfigured journey. All this said, COVID-19 gives the reports enhanced public importance. The region’s economic strengths and weaknesses coming in to the COVID-19 crisis will not have changed, and knowing more about these strengths and weaknesses will be important for charting the post-COVID-19 journey. In this light, the reports set out the findings from the project’s questions: What was underpinning Western Sydney’s economic boom? How well was the boom driving a transformation of the region towards a prosperous future? How well was the boom creating more sustainable access to jobs for the region’s rapidly growing workforce? How effective were the region’s institutional plans, specifically those with a focus on jobs? This report concentrates on what has been happening in the region’s labour force. It sets the picture through an analysis of the ways population growth generates particular labour force outcomes. It then positions Western Sydney’s labour force growth and change against shifts in the region’s economic structure. Of importance here is the region’s long term struggle with the decline, in both relative and absolute terms, of Western Sydney manufacturing, and the ways Western Sydney has engineered a successful post-manufacturing transformation. Two developments have been important in this transformation. One is the region’s capture of economic opportunities arising from population growth. A booming construction sector has been the standout component, alongside employment growth in other population-driven sectors including health care and social assistance, education and training, retailing, and accommodation and food services. This report assesses the strengths and weaknesses of these growth sectors, identifying the vulnerability of the construction sector to historic boom-bust cycles and of the other population-driven sectors to slowing population growth arising from the impacts of COVID-19. The second development is the surge in the number of highly-qualified Western Sydney workers in professional and knowledge occupations. The issue here, of course, is the deficit in jobs creation within the region for these workers, a matter we pursue in more detail in later reports

Western Sydney Resident Journeys to Work in 2006

Report for NSW Department of Planning. Summary and analysis of the distance, duration, mode of transport and main destinations of travel used by full time workers in Greater Western Sydney

The financialisation of infrastructure : the role of categorisation and property relations

The paper explores the links between the tolling of flows through infrastructure passageways and the nature of financial securities that capture the earnings from these flows. At the heart of this relationship is a distinctive class of property rights that enable the traversal of otherwise discrete private property holdings. The paper tracks the evolution of infrastructure as a category and of its property rights to reveal the peculiar nature of infrastructure privatisation. Important is the role of the state, the only institution capable of creating the property and regulatory conditions for an increasingly private sphere of economic activity

Infrastructure and finance

Infrastructure in advanced nations has been transformed from a sector dominated by state-owned utilities into one characterized by the presence of private capital and diverse non-state organizations. The chapter shows how these changes not only affect the ways infrastructure steers economic relations within cities, but also reconstitutes urban governance in surprising ways. The chapter explores the theoretical challenges that these trends bring to economic geography. On one hand, there is growing redundancy of the historical taxonomy of infrastructure and the idea of infrastructure as a public good. One the other there is normative obsession with the idea of the state-run utilities system as if no other form of infrastructure provision can be just and sustainable. The chapter draws eclectically on economic sources to build a model of analysis that combines capital, organizational, and regulatory structures into a single frame, and demonstrates the theoretical and policy power of such an approach

Infrastructure's contradictions : how private finance is reshaping cities

In 1776 Adam Smith nominated public works as one of only three responsibilities of government. For the next two centuries the administrations of advanced capitalist societies and their citizens accepted this charter. The driver was the need for capitalism to access, on one hand, pools of labour of sufficient size and quality to ensure production of an increasing volume and diversity of goods and services; and, on the other, growing numbers of mass spending households with the aspiration for a good life. The modern city was the spatial instrument that enabled this access – with infrastructure providing the means for a city’s economic and social life to be coordinated and synchronized successfully. By the mid twentieth century successful planning, financing and operation of urban infrastructure were testament to the evolutionary development and importance of the modern state. By then, infrastructure exceeded all other state portfolios, including defence, as the state’s major field of endeavour. Curiously, after such success, especially in underpinning capitalist expansion, this position within the state’s capacity has now been dismantled and a reassembly of responsibility for urban infrastructure is underway across all nations of the world. More curious, perhaps, it is a transformation that coincides with the greatest demand for infrastructure provision the world has ever seen (KPMG 2012a). This record demand has complex origins

Frameworks for the future

Editorial: In this issue we present five more papers from prominent Australian geographers and their collaborators in our celebration of 50 years of Geographical Research. Significant milestones like this incite not just reflection on achievement but also consideration of what the future holds. In this editorial we draw heavily on a presentation at a recent publishing workshop by Mr Philip Carpenter, a Wiley-Blackwell senior executive. Mr Carpenter explored scenarios for academic research publication in coming decades. He posited two axes of change. One involved changes to end-use behaviours and technologies. The other involved changes to the way content might be distributed

Capital projects and infrastructure in urban and economic development

This chapter sketches the issues which seem to defy resolution in the infrastructure debate. It presents a brief history of the take-up of responsibility for major capital works and provides an overview of a theoretical settlement in economics about what infrastructure has become. The chapter explores the absence of the urban circumstances of infrastructure in the theory and point to the vital economic role capital works perform. It explains the politics of funding and financing that pervade the infrastructure sector – largely because of its socio-spatial qualities. The chapter reflects on the range of historical settlements to these politics with a view to identifying opportunities for constructive development of better infrastructure provisioning. It suggests an integrating framework for ongoing research and policy development. The chapter discusses urban infrastructures that enable the transportation of people and freight, the supply of water and energy and the operation of telecommunications

The language of local and regional development

I like the fact that both language and the region are indeterminate devices. Language is a choice among an endless list of words and combinations of words and symbols. Similarly, a region is a choice of the way we represent the world we live in. When we write from a regional perspective we create a way of viewing the world for a particular:- purpose, and there is a tradition in this, Wishart (2004) shows how we have used natural regions to present the world as organised into tracts of land based on physical characteristics such as climate; how we have used nodal regions to show the role of central places in providing commercial services to their hinterlands; administrative regions to show how institutions can divide the world politically or bureaucratically; and vernacular or cultural regions for showing how romantic imaginations of people can coincide with distinct bio-physical landscapes

How infrastructure became a structured investment vehicle

This chapter argues, however, that failure also comes from deficiencies in our conceptual understandings of the nature of infrastructure, such that fresh approaches to what infrastructure is and what it might become could well open up better solutions to infrastructure crisis. Specifically, I want to put a geographic argument that begs for the inclusion of spatialised processes into a post-structuralist urban political economy of infrastructure. Otherwise, I think we will lose the argument that says urban infrastructure provision is crucial to the existence of just, sustainable cities (Graham and Marvin, 2001; Bakker, 2005), to an argument in favour of selective, ongoing privatisation and financialisation of the infrastructure sector where narrow commercial outcomes are unfairly privileged