ABSTRACT Auckland’s rapid urban growth into greenfield areas presents significant challenges for sustainable stormwater planning, particularly in terms of impeding the integration of natural hydrological processes. This study investigates the barriers to comprehending the potential of catchment-based solutions within Auckland’s strategic planning framework, focusing on two greenfield development projects as case studies. Using a qualitative research methodology that incorporates thematic and document analysis, this study identifies key barriers to implementing catchment-based stormwater planning in urban greenfield development. These barriers significantly hinder aligning urban development objectives with sustainable catchment-based stormwater management practices. The findings highlight the need for a more integrated approach – encompassing regulatory, governance, and technical dimensions – to effectively address these challenges and mitigate risks to natural hydrological processes. This research contributes to advancing urban stormwater planning by offering transferable insights and actionable recommendations to enhance the sustainability of greenfield developments in Auckland and other comparable international contexts.

ABSTRACT Each year, the Planning Institute of Australia (PIA) hosts the National Congress, the biggest gathering of planners in the country. This article provides a review of the 2025 National Congress held in Garramilla/Darwin.

ABSTRACT This article shares my journey as a migrant town planner in NSW, Australia, highlighting my initial challenges and how I overcame them. It discusses how skilled migration can contribute to making up the shortfall of planners nationally, however this requires support and resources. It also highlights planning’s role in addressing the acute housing crisis. I hope this can contribute to a broader discussion of how Australian planners can best recognise and utilise planning skills developed overseas.

ABSTRACT The Australian built environment adjoining rail infrastructure and rail corridors is undergoing significant transformation following government tender for several unprecedented over-station developments such as the developments along the metro in Sydney. This has led State governments to consider innovative strategies to activate railway tracks such as the mooted deck over the rail yards of Sydney's Central Station to expand the city's evolving Tech Central precinct and, more recently, exploration of a three-hectare deck to connect Flinders St with the Yarra River in Melbourne to deliver a public park, an events space, and improved pedestrian access to the Melbourne CBD. Over-rail projects provide an exciting opportunity to deliver well-located developments which re-activate underutilised public spaces and yield outstanding placemaking outcomes for the community. This article canvases some of the key considerations for these projects including the heritage aspects, public realm and ground level activation opportunities, planning risks, operational requirements, contractor and interface risks and the appropriate investment structures. The observations suggest that there are a number of gateway issues that governments and developers should address proactively to secure project objectives and public outcomes, and ultimately there is sufficient merit to re-activating these well-located sites provided the parties adopt appropriate mitigation strategies. Practitioner pointers Over-rail developments require careful consideration of the heritage and public realm aspects of the project in order to achieve appropriate and sustainable outcomes for all key stakeholders. It is important to establish robust and flexible governance arrangements, decision making protocols and a stakeholder engagement strategy prior to bidding for any over-rail development given the level of complexity involved and the long-term operational requirements of the project. An interface agreement is also required to ensure cooperation, integration, compliance and limitations of liability between all key interfacing parties. Capital partners should be aware of the current contracting landscape for development projects which has seen developers walking away from risky projects, the reintroduction of rise and fall mechanisms, and the inclusion of incentive mechanisms tied to agreed objectives. Given the trend for developers and capital partners to form consortiums for these developments, the parties must establish appropriate investment structures which cater for entering and exiting partners, and provide sufficient comfort to existing partners that any conflicts regarding capital and operational investment requirements can be adequately resolved.

ABSTRACT The article examines the situation of international students living in Brisbane during COVID lockdowns, through a social justice lens. Despite the significant economic contribution of tertiary international students towards the Australian economy, they were excluded from government pandemic support. Help provided by other organisations was limited. International students felt undervalued and excluded, facing challenges due to their lack of income from part-time jobs, mental health issues, constraints in relation to home arrangements, online study, and lack of sense of belonging. Our findings further show that although place was a determinant in the wellbeing of students, social attachment (either spatially or a-spatially) was the most valued support to students. While there has been research on the needs of international students in Australia during lockdowns, no studies yet link these three variables: COVID lockdowns, their effects on international students left in Australia, and considerations of city scale, in a mutually influencing relationship. We followed a qualitative research design, using interviews and focus group discussions with international students and support providers in Brisbane during COVID times. We argue that both distributive and institutional dimensions of justice are important to understand the disadvantaged situation experienced by international students: the institutional COVID restrictions greatly affected students ‘trapped’ in the country, while there was a very limited distribution of resources that did not match the needs of students. We conclude with some recommendations as a result of our research. Practitioner pointers During a global pandemic, government needs to ensure that all people stranded in the country, including international students, are entitled to the same financial assistance. International students should have been consulted about, and appropriately informed through effective ways of communication about the services provided to them during the pandemic. All levels of government and educational institutions dealing with international students, need to fully consult with students and listen to their concerns.

ABSTRACT The compact city agenda aims to deliver sustainable future urban form. However, as with all planning, there is contestation. While built form and housing have primacy, cities need space for hard and soft infrastructural systems, including natural systems that, until recently, have been taken for granted but are diminishing through poorly planned densification. Nowhere is this more evident than in the suburbs, where lot-by-lot redevelopment is significantly reducing open space and tree canopy. Infill developments are not producing the benefits expected from compact cities; they are increasing strain on the grey, blue, and green infrastructure. This paper highlights limited intent in local planning regulations to promote anything other than business as usual, which, in the Australian context, is single lots becoming 2–4 subdivisions. While planning schemes can regulate negative externalities, they do not consider this when taken as a whole, across a redeveloped neighbourhood predominantly consisting of housing, and are not using the redevelopment opportunities to build a more resilient future for local areas. This paper builds on the Australian greyfield literature by showing how statutory amendments can promote precinct scale development, working across multiple lots to deliver housing concurrently with greater levels of amenity for existing and future residents. KEY POINTS Infill housing development on single lots is reducing local amenity while not making the fullest use of the land for housing supply. Site assembly precincts are critical for higher yield, higher amenity, urban redevelopment. Strategic policy alone will not deliver the solutions; statutory mechanisms for doing so are critical. This paper presents a fully worked statutory response to the issue, highlighting the method for developing the scheme and the future work necessary for delivering site-assembly precincts at council level.

ABSTRACT Veal and Piracha propose an alternate approach to planning recreation provision in new high-density residential areas (NHDA’s) of Australian cities: the RAB or ‘Recreation Activity Benchmark’ (Veal and Piracha 2022). Sydney is used as a case study. This paper contends that the methodology has a range of substantive deficiencies and ignores other well-established planning approaches that have been developed, tested and refined through hundreds of plans prepared by in-house and consulting leisure planners over the past 50 years in Australia and detailed in a range of texts and planning manuals. In applying the Recreation Activities Benchmark (RAB), provision of physical leisure resources is made on the basis of ‘averaging’ the recreation activities that people pursue to determine what facilities they need in the wider city in which the NHDA occurs. The averages are then applied to a projected NHDA population. This review questions the lack of a philosophical and planning basis of the RAB; the need for the RAB methodology; what ‘average’ means in terms of recreation participation; how the average is ‘adjusted’ if sufficient space is not available; the fact that the average used in the methodology has been selected solely to avoid possible legal action by developers, and the fact that the RAB is no different to a provision ‘standard’, given the reliance on data that has inherent shortcomings. The rebuttal concludes by questioning the need for the methodology.

ABSTRACT This note is a response to comments by Ken Marriott on our recent Australian Planner article on open space and recreation planning in new high density areas (NHDAs). We reject the claim that our work ignores existing open space and recreation planning methodologies and cite sources which present our extensive reviews and evaluations of those methodologies. We also provide further explanation of the planning challenges of NHDAs, notably land constraints and the absence of a resident population during the planning process, and re-emphasise the flexible nature of the recreation activity benchmark as a planning tool.