Metropolitan strategic plans: establishing and delivering a vision for urban regeneration and renewal

The challenges facing Australian cities are diverse, including population growth, economic restructuring, access to services and employment, concerns around housing affordability and dwelling construction, infrastructure funding and provision, socio-economic polarisation and social justice, environmental protection and climate change. The policy responses to these challenges are equally diverse. At an urban scale, Australian cities have mobilised Metropolitan Strategic Plans (MSPs) as a central policy tool for framing urban change. MSPs outline the state-sponsored vision for our future cities, by prioritising key sites of change, establishing frameworks and conditions of development, and advocating the benefits of a consolidated urban form. The underlying goal of urban regeneration is often translated via a complex, diffuse and, sometimes, confusing set of terminology. Terms mobilised in strategic planning policy include infill, densification, compact city, centres and nodes, transit oriented development (TOD) and urban consolidation. All imply a change to the existing urban structure. All seek to regenerate the city in a particular way. In his review of MSPs, Forster (2006) identifies a general consensus within planning policy built on the principles of containment, consolidation and centres. For Bunker (2014), urban consolidation transitioned into the notion of the compact city as the planning orthodoxy driving MSPs from the early 2000s.