A new look at urban land prices
Abstract Estimates of Sydney land prices since 1973 are presented and their policy implications reviewed. They refer to annual average sales' prices of raw land and allotments in two types of fringe locality — one with and one without planned urban development. Prices were similar in both locations, and in real terms, were not rising.
Urban Revolutions
Urban Policy and Research is now over 25 years old and represents what many would think of as a generation of urban research publishing. The list of contributors to the journal reads very much as a rollcall of Australian urban studies scholars over the past two and a half decades. The quarter-century milestone just passed offers a moment to reflect on some of the highlights and other achievements of urban researchers in Australia since the journal was established, and since the inclusion of New Zealand colleagues in the early 1990s. Without doubt there are many. Certainly in my own research interests the journal provides a rich record of scholarly insight into Australian urbanisation. The continuing debate over the extent and quality of new suburban development and infrastructure remains as pertinent today as it did when Chris Maher, Andrew Beer, Blair Badcock and Clive Forster wrestled over this question, in Issue 12 (3), 1994. Urban land prices again are on the policy agenda, much as they were when Joan Vipond and Graham Andrews wrote about them in Issue 2 (4) 1984, home ownership finance continues to raise similar questions to those posed by Maryann Wulff in Issue 8 (1) 1990, while the achievement of sustainable urban transport seems almost as distant as it did when Peter Newman, Jeff Kenworthy and Tom Lyons published their groundbreaking work on suburban automobile dependence in Issue 3 (2) 1985. These reflections are but a brief and highly unrepresentative sample of the important scholarship that Urban Policy and Research has supported since its establishment. In this short commentary I don’t wish to dwell heavily on the past achievements, impressive as they are. With the current focus on assessing the research quality of Australian and New Zealand universities and political haggling over which political party holds the purest revolutionary manifesto for higher education it is perhaps worth taking a moment to look to the future not only for Urban Policy and Research but for urban studies in Australasia more generally. This future looks strong but there are some important questions and points of discussion that must be honestly raised about Australia’s urban studies field and its capacity. First, the experience of the present decade suggests that urban questions will remain close to the fore of public policy thinking in Australia. The challenges of urban management and strategic urban planning have become key elements of state governments’ policy agendas and we have seen a national resurgence of interest in metropolitan planning since Melbourne’s latest strategy was released in 2002. With contemporary planning so degraded as
Recovering the frontier state : war, ethnicity, and state in Afghanistan
Chapter 1 Table of Contents Chapter 2 1 Introduction Chapter 3 2 Ethnicity, Political Power, and Fragmentation Chapter 4 3 Rise of the Taliban and Civil War Chapter 5 4 The United States and War on Terrorism Chapter 6 5 Restructuring the Afghan State Chapter 7 6 Political Economy of Drugs and Warlordism Chapter 8 7 Afghanistan and Neighboring States Chapter 9 8 Conclusion Chapter 10 Bibliography