Cities, citizens and environmental reform: histories of Australian town planning associations,

摘要

Although its extent and effectiveness are always open to question, we tend to take public participation in planning for granted, at least in contemporary western(ized) democracies. The histories of town planning associations presented in this volume describe a civil society endeavour which surely helped make that presumption the case in Australia. Between 1913 and 1916, citizens from the 'middle-upper classes', predominantly professionals - notably architects and engineers - but also politicians and businessmen, banded together to form town planning associations in each of Australia's state capital cities. Rather than sharing a specific programme, in the face of hostile business interests and a wider lack of awareness and apathy, their unifying theme was simply the need for urban planning. Conceptually, the associations drew on the Garden City utopianism of Ebenezer Howard and his founding of the British Town and County Planning Association.