Institute of Australian Geographers conference, Melbourne 1-6 July 2007
REMAKING CENTRALITY: THE SHAPE OF CITIES TO COME?
Mark Davidson and Donald McNeill, Urban Research Centre, University of
Western Sydney
Urban geographers have long sought to explain the power of central places
in the constitution of modern economies and societies. However, recent
urban development and change has stimulated new debates and reformulations
of the notion of centrality.
In once industrial cities, central spaces have become conserved ‘urban
villages’, whilst other sections have witnessed a reemphasizing of
centrality through policy initiatives that promote densification, high-
rise building, and infill. However, post-suburban development challenges
any notions that see this as a reaffirmation of historical forms of
centrality. Airports, high-speed rail developments, container ports and IT
campuses have all become key urban features, drastically reshaping urban
morphology, and challenging notions of place-making for architects and
planners alike. Furthermore, as urban processes play out in strikingly
different ways across space, once peripheral urban areas become newly
valorized. National and regional contexts provide further challenges in
terms of developing explanatory theories: what role does centrality play
in North America’s edge cities, China’s urban villages, and Europe’s hub-
and-spoke rail commuter urbanism, for example? How significant is
territorial propinquity, agglomeration and clustering as opposed to a
relational urbanism based on fast network connectivity? And do models and
concepts of these different urban spaces have relevance to Australian
urbanism?
Theorizing ‘urban centrality’ thus poses a number of challenges to
academics and policy-makers. Popular commentators such as Joel Kotkin and
Joel Garreau in the US, and Bernard Salt in Australia, employ a new urban
language of geodemographics and futurist urban scenarios to describe, and
prescribe solutions for, this urbanism. How academics respond to these
popular commentaries is an important interface between policy-focused and
scholarly work.
Papers are sought which provide theoretical and empirical contributions to
this remade centrality, with reference to both Australia and beyond, and
we particularly welcome contributions which seek to place such remade
centralities in a wide context. Historical geographies of the
reconfiguration of central places are also significant, as are accounts
which explore methodological and empirical controversies within the theme.
Abstracts should be sent to [log in to unmask] by 31st March 2007.
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