One of the great frustrations of my life is trying to convince people the history of land use planning is a topic of great interest. I’m told I make it sound wilfully boring; that no one wants to hear about Robert Hooke’s regulatory reforms or the origins of the Plumbing Code. By contrast, it’s comparatively… Continue reading American Pentimento by Patricia Seed
Tag: Terra Nullius
W.E.H Stanner’s ‘The Yirrkala Land Case: A Dress Rehearsal’: Common Law, Terra Nullius and the Gove Land Rights Case
Born in 1905, William Stanner was an anthropologist who spent his career critiquing what he called “the great Australian silence” around Aboriginal culture and land rights. He’s worth reading as one of the first white people who saw the British presence in Australia as invasive rather than civilizing, and this anthology includes most of his… Continue reading W.E.H Stanner’s ‘The Yirrkala Land Case: A Dress Rehearsal’: Common Law, Terra Nullius and the Gove Land Rights Case
A Brief History of Terrible Planning Law: The Batman Treaty
Every so often someone will bail me up at the pub and ask why their miniscule little gallery gets weekly visits from every bureaucrat with a badge, yet its possible to get approval to build terrible apartment blocks everywhere/mine national forests/demolish public housing etc etc. The short answer is that Australian planning and building laws… Continue reading A Brief History of Terrible Planning Law: The Batman Treaty
Cultural Political Economy of Small Cities, edited by Bas van Heur and Anne Lorentzen
I’ve become a big fan of Bas van Heur lately. Asides from heading Cosmopolis, he writes a lot about small and regional cities. He’s got a great chapter on “Small Cities and the Sociospatial Specificity of Economic Development” in a book he’s co-edited with Anne Lorentzen called Cultural Political Economy of Small Cities (2011). For… Continue reading Cultural Political Economy of Small Cities, edited by Bas van Heur and Anne Lorentzen