Socially inclusive urban renewal in low value suburbs: a synopsis of issues and an agenda for action

The proposals in the Sydney Metro Strategy for 420,000 new higher density brownfield dwellings represent the most significant planned re-structuring Sydney will have faced in 100 years. Its impact will be long lasting and substantial – and the solution to Sydney’s environmental sustainability will largely lie with the urban renewal of its older areas. This number does not include the numbers of existing homes that will need to be demolished to make way for this targeted new output. The actual target will be in excess of half a million new homes in existing areas. But having made some heroic statements about the numbers needed to meet predicted housing demand for the next 25 years, the lack of any real strategic thinking in Sydney Metro as to how these might be delivered on the ground is beginning to be felt

Governing the compact city: The role and effectiveness of strata management

This research charts the key issues facing the governance and management of strata buildings and is the first major study of the strata sector undertaken in Australia.• An estimated three million people live in strata titled homes in Australia. The state of New South Wales (NSW) has the largest number of strata titled properties of all states and territories in the country and approximately 1.2 million people live in strata titled homes in the state. In the Sydney metropolitan area, almost a quarter of the population live in strata titled homes. This means that for the first time in Australia’s history large numbers of property owners find themselves in a legally binding relationship with their neighbours for the communal upkeep and maintenance of their property. The governance structures that mediate this community-based property ownership represent a new form of civic relationship. With the development of increasing numbers of strata schemes, owners corporations, through their executive committees and the managing agents and other property professionals who support the sector, have become increasingly important in ensuring the maintenance and upkeep of significant parts of our cities. In effect, owners corporations act as a fourth tier of government that is democratically elected, with lawmaking, taxation and enforcement powers. But despite the growing prevalence of strata title in our lives, relatively little is known about how well the strata system works in practice to meet the needs of those people who own and live in strata properties. The Governing the Compact City project1 provides the first comprehensive assessment of how the strata title system is operating in regard to governance and management from the point of view of those who own, live in, and manage strata homes. While it is focused on NSW, the report’s findings have implications for the entire Australian strata market which is based on essentially the same governance and management arrangements. The research project The project had three major aims: 1.    To explore the role, capacity and effectiveness of owners corporations as agencies of property governance and management in contemporary urban Australia. 2.    To explore the capacity and effectiveness of strata managing agents as mediators of outcomes for residents and owners in the sector, and their role and function within the overall structure of management and governance. 3.    To assess how well residential strata works from strata owners’ points of view. The research project focused on residential strata properties with three or more lots in NSW. The research was undertaken between 2009 and 2012 and included surveys and interviews with strata owners, executive committee members and strata managing agents in NSW, as well as analysis of the NSW strata database and NSW strata schemes management legislation and interviews with peak body representatives around Australia. In total, the research consulted 1,550 individuals including 1,020 strata owners, 413 executive committee members, 106 strata managing agents and 11 peak body representatives. Downloads: FINAL REPORT EXECUTIVE SUMMAR

Attitudes to conservation and water consumption

Sydney’s water supply is under great pressure as the demand continues to rise. Demand mitigation strategies have had some success, but domestic consumption remains high. This paper discusses the attitudes of households to their water consumption in a search for ways in which domestic demand for water may be reduced. Evidence on attitudes of households in different kinds of housing was obtained using a telephone interview survey supplemented by information derived from focus groups drawn from households in the same areas. The information was collected in a period when strong water use restrictions were in place and major arguments were being mounted in favour of water pricing as a way of moderating demand. The paper argues that the complexity of the forces shaping demand needs to be understood in the context of the socio-demographic composition of households in different kinds of dwellings, as well as the cultural, behavioural and institutional aspects of consumption, if public policy is to be successful in reducing consumption and/or providing alternative domestic supplies of potable water. &nbsp

Our changing city: Sydney - a census overview 2001-2006

The 2006 Census provides an opportunity to view a snapshot of Sydney in its current state of flux. This report presents the first detailed suburb-by-suburb analysis of social changes in Sydney between 2001 and 2006. A major innovation for the 2006 Census is the ability to chart changes at the suburb level between the two censuses. Before now, the only realistic scale at which change could be analysed and mapped was the local government or Statistical District scale. Arguably, the suburb offers a geographical scale that more people can relate to. Less remote than that of a local government area, and more coherent than the much smaller scale Census Collection District, the suburb is somewhere we can identify as a place where we liv

Defining social exclusion in Western Sydney: exploring the role of housing tenure

Over the past decade social exclusion has increasingly been positioned at the forefront of political, academic and lay discourse as the cause of disadvantage. While the definition, measurement and solutions to social exclusion remain open to debate, housing has progressively been positioned as a central variable creating neighbourhoods of exclusion. Much of this debate has positioned areas of public housing as the most disadvantaged and socially excluded neighbourhoods. However, the multiplicity of social exclusion questions the simple identification of areas of public housing as the most excluded. By exploring six dimensions of exclusion (neighbourhood, social and civic engagement, access, crime and security, community identify and economic disadvantage) we argue that there is relatively little difference between areas dominated by public housing and those characterised by private rental for each of these individual dimensions of exclusion (with a number of exceptions). Rather, it is the experience of multiple dimensions of exclusion which marks areas of public housing as unique

A review of community housing in Australia

The paper has a simple objective: to review the cu"ent state of community housing in Australia. It was written at a time of major change for the sector, following the announcement in August 1992 of a new Community Housing Program with a doubling of funding for the sector. More generally, it comes at a time when the traditional public rented sector is under intense and critical scrutiny. Consequently, much of the discussion about the future role of community housing is set within the context of a changing perception of the need for and structure of social rented housing in Australia. Reflecting this, Section 1 of the paper explores some of these broader issues, including the definitional debate which emerged recently - what is social ho_f!Sing; how do you define community housing? This sets the scene for Section 2 which presents a review of the development and characteristics of community housing as of mid-1992. Section 3 presents case studies of four selected community housing programs in order to explore in more detail how the relationship between rents, funding, subsidies and affordability relate together. These four case studies provide the context for a discussion of a number of issues concerning the funding and subsidy of the sector in the concluding section of the report

Is deteriorating housing affordability reducing lower income central city worker supply and productivity?

The study examines whether the diminishing supply of affordable housing options for lower income central city workers is having an impact on central city businesses and on the overall productivity of those economies

Astrometry with the Keck-Interferometer: the ASTRA project and its science

The sensitivity and astrometry upgrade ASTRA of the Keck Interferometer is introduced. After a brief overview of the underlying interferometric principles, the technology and concepts of the upgrade are presented. The interferometric dual-field technology of ASTRA will provide the KI with the means to observe two objects simultaneously, and measure the distance between them with a precision eventually better than 100 uas. This astrometric functionality of ASTRA will add a unique observing tool to fields of astrophysical research as diverse as exo-planetary kinematics, binary astrometry, and the investigation of stars accelerated by the massive black hole in the center of the Milky Way as discussed in this contribution.Comment: 22 pages, 10 figures (low resolution), contribution to the summerschool "Astrometry and Imaging with the Very Large Telescope Interferometer", 2 - 13 June, 2008, Keszthely, Hungary, corrected authorlis

Automation of Flexible Migration Workflows

Many digital preservation scenarios are based on the migration strategy, which itself is heavily tool-dependent. For popular, well-defined and often open file formats – e.g., digital images, such as PNG, GIF, JPEG – a wide range of tools exist. Migration workflows become more difficult with proprietary formats, as used by the several text processing applications becoming available in the last two decades. If a certain file format can not be rendered with actual software, emulation of the original environment remains a valid option. For instance, with the original Lotus AmiPro or Word Perfect, it is not a problem to save an object of this type in ASCII text or Rich Text Format. In specific environments, it is even possible to send the file to a virtual printer, thereby producing a PDF as a migration output. Such manual migration tasks typically involve human interaction, which may be feasible for a small number of objects, but not for larger batches of files.We propose a novel approach using a software-operated VNC abstraction layer in order to replace humans with machine interaction. Emulators or virtualization tools equipped with a VNC interface are very well suited for this approach. But screen, keyboard and mouse interaction is just part of the setup. Furthermore, digital objects need to be transferred into the original environment in order to be extracted after processing. Nevertheless, the complexity of the new generation of migration services is quickly rising; a preservation workflow is now comprised not only of the migration tool itself, but of a complete software and virtual hardware stack with recorded workflows linked to every supported migration scenario. Thus the requirements of OAIS management must include proper software archiving, emulator selection, system image and recording handling. The concept of view-paths could help either to automatically determine the proper pre-configured virtual environment or to set up system images for certain migration workflows. View-paths may rise in demand, as the generation of PDF output files from Word Perfect input could be cached as pre-fabricated emulator system images. The current groundwork provides several possible optimizations, such as using the automation features of the original environments