Andrew Butt
RMIT University, Global, Urban and Social Studies, Faculty Member
- La Trobe University, Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences, Faculty Memberadd
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Planning for agricultural land protection is a tricky business. Planners, and communities value rural land (and particularly rural landscapes) highly, yet the continued use of land for productive farming is open to the vagaries of... more
Planning for agricultural land protection is a tricky business. Planners, and communities value rural land (and particularly rural landscapes) highly, yet the continued use of land for productive farming is open to the vagaries of domestic and international commodity markets, local real estate pressures and landowner preferences.
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Planning for farmland protection has a long history in land use planning practices and logics. Increasingly, the processes of agricultural restructuring, revaluing of rural land as places of consumption and market-focused imperatives for... more
Planning for farmland protection has a long history in land use planning practices and logics. Increasingly, the processes of agricultural restructuring, revaluing of rural land as places of consumption and market-focused imperatives for policy and resource allocation have limited the success of this goal. This is particularly apparent in peri-urban Australia where the contest for rural futures is highly evident and operates against a backdrop of urban and exurban expansion, increasing agricultural scale and neoliberal policy directions. In this environment, the narratives and performance of planning for farmland protection are largely unheard and unheeded. This paper utilises the results of interviews with land use planning practitioners in peri-urban Victoria, Australia to consider their narratives of urgency and importance in regard to farmland protection and the contrasting social representations in decision-making and policy. It utilises a programmatic approach to analysing soc...
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The research presented here is the response to a CoGB project brief Place of Our Children in Community Building: Turning Theory into Practice that had a “particular focus on how policy development and the built environment can better... more
The research presented here is the response to a CoGB project brief Place of Our Children in Community Building: Turning Theory into Practice that had a “particular focus on how policy development and the built environment can better respond to the stated needs and aspirations of our children”. The project was conducted through a dual phase approach which consisted of a desktop policy review and the development of an innovative methodology for incorporating children’s and young people’s environmental views, experiences and feelings into planning and urban design processes. This is the second report of the two-stage project commissioned by the CoGB. The brief for the second stage required the project team to “Design and implement two (2) urban case studies, the sites of which are located in the Communities for Children site area. Such experiential case studies … provide the opportunity for children to be actively engaged to determine how best they might contribute to the planning of ...
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The Bachelor of Urban, Rural and Environmental Planning course at La Trobe University Bendigo commenced in 2007 to complement existing postgraduate programs. A strong feature of the program has been to use innovative methods to enable... more
The Bachelor of Urban, Rural and Environmental Planning course at La Trobe University Bendigo commenced in 2007 to complement existing postgraduate programs. A strong feature of the program has been to use innovative methods to enable staff and students to relate to a diverse and ...
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The State of Australian Cities (SOAC) national conferences have been held biennially since 2003 to support interdisciplinary policy-related urban research. This paper was presented at SOAC 5held in Melbourne from 29 November – 2 December... more
The State of Australian Cities (SOAC) national conferences have been held biennially since 2003 to support interdisciplinary policy-related urban research. This paper was presented at SOAC 5held in Melbourne from 29 November – 2 December 2011. SOAC 5 was hosted by the University of Melbourne, RMIT University, Monash University, Swinburne University of Technology and Latrobe University as well as the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute and the Grattan Institute, the Victorian State Government and the City of Melbourne. Three plenary panels brought researchers from across the country to address ‘big issues’: place-based disadvantage, the design and form of Australian cities, and metropolitan governance. Over 175 papers, in 46 themed sessions, cover topics ranging from planning and governance for environmental sustainability, to housing affordability and adequacy in the context of an aging population. Healthy communities, better public transport, high quality open space, participatory planning, and issues affecting the peri-urban fringe are also strong sub-themes within this conference. All published papers have been subject to a peer reviewing process
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Despite a legacy of seemingly enlightened non-sectarian provision of sites and space for religious worship, current planning systems appear to create conditions in which many religious development proposals are problematic,... more
Despite a legacy of seemingly enlightened non-sectarian provision of sites and space for religious worship, current planning systems appear to create conditions in which many religious development proposals are problematic, conflict-ridden and politicised. Indeed, the planning system is a primary site for community conflicts that are often expressions of broader social anxieties and discord - some of which have violent expression. Planners need to strategically engage with the theory and practice of faith-responsive planning. Historically, communities engaged with religion locally; now, many congregations travel further to attend places of worship that serve larger regions and disparate sectarian communities. These include facilities of different faiths, specific sects within a faith and particular ethno-cultural expressions of a faith amongst other variegations of community, education and religious service. Thus, religious difference, population dynamics and urban growth has created mosques in industrial sites, monasteries in paddocks, and synagogues in old libraries, which have substantial effects on urban form and mobility at the metropolitan scale and planning disputes on the neighbourhood scale. The planning system in Australia is challenged by competing objectives of providing community facilities in established and new areas, while also addressing the consequences of the increasingly complex activities associated with places of worship. Through a thematic analysis, this paper examines 20 years of Victorian planning appeals cases across multiple faiths to explore the ways in which an ostensibly secular, disinterested regulatory framework obscures deep disquiet at the role and place of religion in the urban fabric of multicultural communities.
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In Australia, rural land use planning as the concern of spatial planning strategy and local regulation has largely emerged during an era of contrasting decline in state-directed agricultural policies and futures. Despite a long history of... more
In Australia, rural land use planning as the concern of spatial planning strategy and local regulation has largely emerged during an era of contrasting decline in state-directed agricultural policies and futures. Despite a long history of attempts at land use regulation as a nation-building process, success has been muted with a contest between the vision and purpose of agricultural land management extending back into early nineteenth century land use and land release policy. More recently, an era of neoliberalism has resulted in extreme forms of agricultural productivism co-existing with emerging post-agricultural rural landscapes. Consequently, land use planning regulations that have long sought to protect farmland and to maintain viable, commercial farming systems struggle in a context of divided visions for farming futures and for the broader role of the state in directing these. The success of the orthodox rural planning approaches to retaining farmland and ideated farming syst...
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Small cities in Australia are typically home to growing populations and changing economies. Many of the issues central to the politics and planning of metropolitan Australia resonate here, yet these smaller cities also have their own... more
Small cities in Australia are typically home to growing populations and changing economies. Many of the issues central to the politics and planning of metropolitan Australia resonate here, yet these smaller cities also have their own tensions in planning and development. They are important spaces for exploring key planning concepts for the Twenty-First Century. The application of contemporary planning concepts to these cities is not simply a process of downscaling existing metropolitan models. Using the example of "20-minute" neighbourhoods, increased urban density and walkability metrics, (concepts drawn from, among others, metropolitan Portland, Oregon) this paper considers their application as planning concepts in Bendigo Australia. The paper considers the very real limitations to policy acceptance and suitability in locations where the metropolitan diseconomies of scale, including congestion and housing costs, are less evident and where scope for innovative niche devel...
Recently in Planning News (July 2015) Kevin Johnson and Shashi Karunanethy provided a comprehensive reprise of earlier work from Neil Barr looking at agricultural output to land value ratios across Victoria. It was great to see some... more
Recently in Planning News (July 2015) Kevin Johnson and Shashi Karunanethy provided a comprehensive reprise of earlier work from Neil Barr looking at agricultural output to land value ratios across Victoria. It was great to see some detailed analysis of this type, and to see this earlier work repeated after a decade of drought and considerable economic volatility.
Research Interests: Geography and Agriculture
Hot weather not only impacts upon human physical comfort and health, but also impacts the way that people access and experience active travel options such as walking and cycling. By evaluating the street thermal environment of a city... more
Hot weather not only impacts upon human physical comfort and health, but also impacts the way that people access and experience active travel options such as walking and cycling. By evaluating the street thermal environment of a city alongside an assessment of those communities that are the most vulnerable to the effects of heat, we can prioritise areas in which heat mitigation interventions are most needed. In this paper, we propose a new approach for policy makers to determine where to delegate limited resources for heat mitigation with most effective outcomes for the communities. We use eye-level street panorama images and community profiles to provide a bottom-up, human-centred perspective of the city scale assessment, highlighting the situation of urban tree shade provision throughout the streets in comparison with environmental and social-economic status. The approach leverages multiple sources of spatial data including satellite thermal images, Google street view (GSV) images, land use and demographic census data. A deep learning model was developed to automate the classification of streetscape types and percentages at the street- and eye-view level. The methodology is metrics based and scalable which provides a data driven assessment of heat-related vulnerability. The findings of this study first contribute to sustainable development by developing a method to identify geographical areas or neighbourhoods that require heat mitigation; and enforce policies improving tree shade on routes, as a heat adaptation strategy, which will lead to increasing active travel and produce significant health benefits for residents. The approach can be also used to guide post COVID-19 city planning and design.
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This paper presents the outcomes from a joint research project that aims to develop a smartphone application/online platform to model the most thermally comfortable active transport route to a planned destination using heat information... more
This paper presents the outcomes from a joint research project that aims to develop a smartphone application/online platform to model the most thermally comfortable active transport route to a planned destination using heat information and tree shading (Shadeway). Here, we provide a summary of our systematic review of academic literature and applications from the Google Play and Apple App Store, to identify current knowledge about personal adaptation strategies when navigating travel in cities during high temperatures. The review identifies that there is a lack of attention regarding the use of smartphone applications to address urban thermal comfort for active transport by government and private industry. We then present the initial results of original research from three community focus groups and an online survey that elicited participants’ opinions about Shadeways in the City of Greater Bendigo (CoGB), Australia. The results clearly show the need for better management of Shadewa...
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The classification of regions as functionally or socioeconomically identifiable clusters lets us explore and describe geographies of seemingly complex and individualised change. It also improves our understanding of the varied nature of... more
The classification of regions as functionally or socioeconomically identifiable clusters lets us explore and describe geographies of seemingly complex and individualised change. It also improves our understanding of the varied nature of processes such as counter-urbanization and the formation of multi-functional rural regions. Using principal component analysis and subsequent cluster analysis, this study identified five types of regions in regard to characteristics of overall and newly resident communities. The study was undertaken for a broad region of Victoria, Australia that has experienced population growth and the decreasing influence of agriculture; typical conditions of counter-urbanisation. The results suggest that counterurbanisation occurs in a variety of ways that are broadly consistent with explanations of processes such as rural gentrification, retirement mobility, exurbanisation and welfare-led migration. In addition, clustering included some areas where socio-economic...
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ABSTRACT A key challenge for planning the peri-urban internationally derives from the ability of land-use change to outstrip the development of new concepts and understandings. There are few places where this is more apparent than in the... more
ABSTRACT A key challenge for planning the peri-urban internationally derives from the ability of land-use change to outstrip the development of new concepts and understandings. There are few places where this is more apparent than in the peri-urban areas of Melbourne, Australia, where applications to develop technologically sophisticated broiler or poultry farms are fiercely opposed by local residents and amenity migrants with attendant imaginaries of local community and extensive rural agricultural production. This paper presents the results of an analysis of development application appeals to show how the poultry industry negotiates with the planning system and manages community expectations in a broad swath of Melbourne's exurbia. In particular, we question the relevance of the rural–urban duality for planning this space and argue the need for new concepts to lessen the conflict in these hybridized spaces of third nature.
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Nature-based solutions (NBS) are increasingly recognised as a means to address critical urban sustainability problems such as heatwaves, flooding and biodiversity loss. Accordingly, cities around the world have committed to ambitious... more
Nature-based solutions (NBS) are increasingly recognised as a means to address critical urban sustainability problems such as heatwaves, flooding and biodiversity loss. Accordingly, cities around the world have committed to ambitious targets for urban greening. Meeting these targets will require large areas of land to be converted from existing uses to green space. However, finding this land is difficult in established urban areas, where space is already strongly contested. Here we show an approach by which cities can make substantial progress towards a range of sustainability targets: by converting redundant street parking into biodiverse green space. Significant areas of public land in dense cities are currently allocated to street parking, while off-street parking garages in urban areas are typically abundant and have high rates of vacancy. We demonstrate that vacancy in off-street garages is so substantial that up to half of street parking in our case study municipality (The Cit...
Peri-urban landscapes are some of the world’s most vulnerable areas. Although they are often thought of simply as land awaiting development, these landscapes retain important natural resources and make valuable contributions to... more
Peri-urban landscapes are some of the world’s most vulnerable areas. Although they are often thought of simply as land awaiting development, these landscapes retain important natural resources and make valuable contributions to agriculture, water use, biodiversity conservation, landscape preservation and human well-being. Billions of people use them and enjoy their natural values. Their continuing loss threatens to alter our relationships with nature and have a negative impact on the environment. The Future of the Fringe first explores the history of peri-urban areas, international peri-urban policy and practice, and related concepts. It analyses internationally relevant issues such as green belts and urban growth boundaries, regional policy, land supply and price, and the concepts of liveability, attractiveness, well-being and rural amenity. It then examines a range of Australian peri-urban issues, as an extended case study. The book argues for a precautionary approach so that we r...
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The research presented here is the response to a City of Greater Bendigo (CoGB) project brief Place of Our Children in Community Building: Turning Theory into Practice that had a “particular focus on how policy development and the built... more
The research presented here is the response to a City of Greater Bendigo (CoGB) project brief Place of Our Children in Community Building: Turning Theory into Practice that had a “particular focus on how policy development and the built environment can better respond to the stated needs and aspirations of our children”. The project was conducted through a dual phase approach which consisted of a desktop policy review and the development of an innovative methodology for incorporating children’s and young people’s environmental views, experiences and feelings into planning and urban design processes. This is the first report of the two-stage project commissioned by the CoGB. The brief for the first stage required the project team to “review a number of the City of Greater Bendigo’s policies/strategies by applying a range of community indicators to determine how meaningfully the Rights of Children have been considered in various documentations. Such policy review, while having a largel...
Partnerships of learning for planning education Who is learning what from whom? The beautiful messiness of learning partnerships/Experiential learning partnerships in Australian and New Zealand higher education planning programmes/ Res non verba ? rediscovering the social purpose of planning (and...more
The Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004 resulted in over 35,000 deaths and damage to almost 100,000 houses in coastal Sri Lanka. In the aftermath a significant program of international aid resulted in the reconstruction of over 65,000... more
The Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004 resulted in over 35,000 deaths and damage to almost 100,000 houses in coastal Sri Lanka. In the aftermath a significant program of international aid resulted in the reconstruction of over 65,000 housing units-some work is ongoing. The priorities for reconstruction focussed on the immediacy of the post-disaster recovery process, and this has been subject to criticism in relation to the quality and suitability of rebuilding and of newly built housing and the regional priorities for development funding. Less consideration has been given to the longer-term consequences of the settlement systems that have been created – specifically the creation of small settlement clusters that are distant to employment and services, which in some instances have proved unpopular for these reasons. This paper provides analysis of the established housing projects in the tsunami-affected and post-conflict Trincomalee region on Sri Lanka's east coast and conside...
Melbourne's commuter field has expanded considerably in the past decade. Relative housing affordability, housing and lifestyle preferences, transport investment and the dispersal and transformation of employment have each contributed... more
Melbourne's commuter field has expanded considerably in the past decade. Relative housing affordability, housing and lifestyle preferences, transport investment and the dispersal and transformation of employment have each contributed to this growth in peri-urban commuting populations. Melbourne's metropolitan strategy, Melbourne 2030, specifically seeks to develop a viable city network that includes small towns and regional cities, and ties the growth of these centres to the growth of Melbourne as a metropolis. This is consistent with the current and emerging strategies in other Australian and international metropolitan regions. The lived experience of long-distance commuting is, however, a process of personal change, albeit within a changing city-region structure. This paper explores the changing processes of network city formation from the perspective of a community that is increasingly positioned within a ‘network city’ rather than as a ‘country town’. It explores social ...
ABSTRACT This article explores the characteristics of commuting between small towns and regional centres located beyond the sphere of metropolitan influence in an Australian context. In regional Australia there are a number of economic,... more
ABSTRACT This article explores the characteristics of commuting between small towns and regional centres located beyond the sphere of metropolitan influence in an Australian context. In regional Australia there are a number of economic, social and demographic trends affecting small towns and regional areas. In respect to commuting, the majority of analysis has occurred within a metropolitan setting, despite the prevalence of commuting in rural and regional areas. This research used census data to explore socio-economic characteristics of commuters in rural and peri-urban regions in Victoria, Australia. It is suggested that those small towns located within the commuter field or sphere of influence of the nearest regional centre have become part of an economic network and that the role of these small towns is integrated within these functional regions. Within these functional regions it is suggested that mobility has filled a void in employment created by the economic and demographic trends that have affected regional Australia. The research identifies unique characteristics in respect to gender and socio-economic status of commuters from small rural towns. These results demonstrate that commuting is a distinctive phenomenon within regions beyond metropolitan influence, revealing differences to patterns within metropolitan regions.
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The growth of Melbourne's peri-urban region has resulted in significant change to population, housing landscapes, farming systems and transport demands over several decades. Critical environmental consequences include increased fire... more
The growth of Melbourne's peri-urban region has resulted in significant change to population, housing landscapes, farming systems and transport demands over several decades. Critical environmental consequences include increased fire risk for housing, the ...