The greenhouse and metropolitan planning: preliminary approaches

Little attention has been given in Australia to the implications for urban planning of global warming. This paper examines some of the problems facing social and economic planning generally in the late 1980s, exemplified by the metropolitan strategy released in 1988 for Sydney, Australia's largest city. What role could metropolitan planning play in helping society adjust to greenhouse scenarios? Can planning foster more environmentally- and socially-acceptable alternatives rather than simply those of response and adjustment? How can planning be raised on the political agenda when government intervention has become almost a dirty word in prevailing political ideologies? This is part of a more general issue of how a more acute grasp of global processes can be translated into local political practice. -from Author