The COVID-19 pandemic has made many urban policymakers, planners, and scholars, all around the globe, rethink conventional, neoliberal growth strategies of cities. The trend of rapid urbanization, particularly around capital cities, has been questioned, and alternative growth models and locations have been the subjects of countless discussions. This is particularly the case for the Australian context: The COVID-19 pandemic heightened the debates in urban circles on post-pandemic urban growth strategies and boosting the growth of towns and cities across regional Australia is a popular alternative strategy. While some scholars argue that regional Australia poses an invaluable opportunity for post-pandemic growth by ‘taking off the pressure from the capital cities’; others warn us about the risks of growing regional towns and cities without carefully designed national, regional, and local planning, design, and development strategies. Superimposing planning and development policies meant for metropolitan cities could simply result in transferring the ills of capital cities to regions and exacerbate unsustainable development and heightened socioeconomic inequalities. This opinion piece, by keeping both of these perspectives in mind, explores approaches to regional community and economic development of Australia’s towns and cities, along with identifying sustainable urban growth locations in the post-pandemic era. It also offers new insights that could help re-shape the policy debate on regional growth and development.
Major South-East Asian city-regions have experienced considerable physical, econotnic and social transfonnations during the past three decades. The rapid pace of globalisation and econon1ic restructuring has resulted in these city-regions receiving the full in1pact of urbanisation pressures. In an attetnpt to ease these pressures, city-regions such as Bangkok, Seoul, Tokyo, Taipei, Hong Kong, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur have advocate growth 111anagen1ent approaches giving particular interest to urban sustainability. These approaches pro1note efforts to achieve the triple botton1 line sustainability by balancing econon1ic and social develop1nent, and environtnental protection, and putting 1nore etnphasis on con1pact and optitnun1 develop1nent of urban fon11s. This paper evaluates the case of two South-East Asian city-regions, Kuala Lu1npur and Hong Kong, and assesses their experiences in tnanaging their urban fonns whilst pro1noting sustainable patte1ns of urban developn1ent. The findings show that sustainable urban develop1nent initiatives e1nploying a top down approach has yielded encouraging results in these case study city-regions. However the need for a 1nore concerted effo1t towards the overall sustainability agenda still re1nains vital.
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