My first surfboard was a polystyrene ‘Pitty’ board—akin to a food tray. Back then, I did not know who ‘Pitty’ was (Federico ‘Pitty’ Block was one of Peru’s great pioneer surfers) or anything about ...

A global tragedy is unfolding in Tasmania. World heritage forests are burning; 1000-year-old trees and the hoary peat beneath are reduced to char. Fires have already taken stands of King Billy and ...

ABSTRACTAgriculture on the fringes of cities across the Global North is increasingly perceived as making an important contribution to urban sustainability. As Australian cities continue to expand and encroach on their peri-urban peripheries, there is rising concern about loss of farmland to housing. Such concerns are especially urgent in the Sydney Basin, due to population growth, and topographical and land-use constraints. Accounting for the Basin's farmlands, however, remains opaque, not unrelated to difficulties in acquiring reliable data on the area and value of Sydney's agricultural industries. The problem is not simply that there are no data available but rather that the nature of existing data is (often hotly) contested. Critical questions for urban planners therefore remain unanswered, including: is peri-urban agriculture as important as advocates suggest? Are metropolitan food supplies under threat? If peri-urban farmland is important, what should be done to preserve it? In collating and analysing existing Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) and non-ABS data on Sydney agriculture between 1992 and 2011, we outline the need for more reliable and consistent longitudinal data to enable better planning for Sydney's farmland into the future. Notwithstanding limitations of available data sources, our findings reveal trends in Sydney Basin agriculture that invite debate on many assumptions about the nature of peri-urban agriculture. These findings emphasise the importance of geographically specific, evidence-based analysis as a basis for planning for peri-urban agriculture.

Outside country: histories of inland Australia ALAN MAYNE & STEPHEN ATKINSON (EDS), 2011 Wakefield Press, Kent Town 360 pp. ISBN 978-1-86254-960-9, $34.95 (soft)

ABSTRACTPublic policy frequently is utilised as a medium to facilitate or restrict access to public space, and to privilege economic priorities. In this context urban arts festivals are used as a means to generate dominant narratives of place and use of public space. Urban arts festivals generate spaces of spectacle and wonder, and are often used as marketing strategies to revitalise urban economies and differentiate cities one from another on the global stage, engendering a commodification of place. The present paper explores this tension through an examination of the role of urban arts festivals in spatial politics. White Night Melbourne is the first Australian iteration of the Nuit Blanche International, an international network of all-night arts festivals. It is used as a case study to explore the impact of an urban arts festival on the spatial politics of Melbourne. A theoretical basis is established using the frame of Guy Debord's ([1967] 1994) The Society of the Spectacle, as well as the concepts of ‘assemblage’ and ‘expressivity’.

ABSTRACTThe region-building process in Western Australia is examined using Paasi's theoretical framework of ‘regional institutionalisation’. The paper examines the formalisation of the regions in Western Australia from the 1940s with the first attempts to regionalise the State, through to the recent political and policy shifts. A particular focus is given to the pivotal legislation passed in 1993 which created nine Regional Development Commissions, and the implications of the post-2008 Royalties for Regions program. The discussion examines the trajectory of the Western Australia regions through the lens of Paasi's model. The paper shows that the Regional Development Commissions have had a critical role in fulfilling the different stages of the model.

ABSTRACTAs mining expands throughout the world, a growing body of literature is focusing on the relationship between mining and well-being in locations where resource extraction occurs. Although many topics such as employment and migration have been researched, the impacts of mining on income inequality have received less attention from scholars. Income inequality is a highly debated topic and the Gini coefficient (GC) one of the most popular indicators used to measure and discuss it. In this paper we estimate GCs for all sub-State regions of Australia and analyse their changes during the ‘mining boom decade’ (2001–11) across mining and non-mining regions. Our results show that, on average, income inequality increased by around 4.8 per cent in mining regions, compared to 8.7 per cent in the average non-mining region. However, the results also show important variation in changes of GC across mining regions, suggesting that the industry is likely to affect the distribution of local incomes in different ways. The method we propose to estimate GCs for regional areas and the results obtained across mining and non-mining regions provide important insights for future research and for regional policy makers, especially those concerned with the socio-economic impacts of industries such as mining across regions.

A new publishing mode has appeared. Routledge now reprints special issues of journals as books a couple of years later. Disappointingly, this book proved to be a reprint of the February 2013 issue ...

If current global economic trends continue, it is highly probable that the world will face substantial hikes in food prices over the coming decades. These outcomes have crucial significance for poverty and nutrition in the rural global South, where 75–80 per cent of the world’s food-insecure people live. Within the international development community there is an intriguing debate currently taking place on how these prospects will be manifested. The core of the debate is whether higher food prices will impact positively or negatively on rural populations. On the one hand, higher food prices should mean better returns for farmers. Because agricultural-dependent households constitute substantial proportions of the rural population, these processes would be expected to generate significant net benefits in terms of poverty alleviation and food security. On the other hand, substantial proportions of the population of the rural global South have become de-agrarianised, as their livelihoods become detached from farming. For these households, food needs are met from market purchases, and higher food prices will have undeniably negative effects. It is timely to assert a geographic perspective into these debates. The United Nations is sponsoring a new set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which will replace the Millennium Development Goals that expire in 2015. The capacity for food systems to meet the world’s hunger and sustainability needs will figure prominently in the SDGs. The way this debate is arbitrated will shape the ways that the needs of rural populations are presented in the SDG process, and this will flow through into the manner in which it is prioritised (or not) within national and multilateral aid and development strategies. This Thinking Space sets out an agenda for how geographical voices can best be inserted into these debates. It contextualises the issue, and then argues that there is an emergent consensus among (non-geographical) researchers that higher food prices will have highly variegated social and economic outcomes. In these circumstances, space is created for geographical perspectives to assert themselves. To date, debate over the implications of higher food prices on the world’s rural poor has been dominated by disciplines (notably, economics) that are inherently less attuned to the importance of space and place. A greater level of participation by