Just Transitions: New Urban Research and Policy Perspectives

Abstract

This special issue sheds new light on critical questions of justice in transition, whether from settlercolonial relations to just decolonisation, to relationships of care with nature, the mediation of equitable urban foodscapes, or to the creation of technological configurations. This issue is one of two to emerge from the 2021 State of Australasian Cities Conference (SOAC) where the theme focused on how just urban and regional transitions can be mobilised to support more sustainable futures. The SOAC conferences (2003–2021) under the aegis of the Australasian Cities Research Network (ACRN) seeks to promote, foster, champion and disseminate new urban scholarship which is made available and free to access online through the Analysis and Policy Observatory (APO). This is a biennial forum which brings together academics, policy makers and practitioners to report and appraise the social, spatial, and economic consequences for equity, inclusion and justice. When the Journal of Urban Policy and Research (UPR) was launched by former Australian Prime Minister GoughWhitlamACQC in 1983, the focus was on the role of national government in urban development and regional cooperation in areas of critical infrastructure such as power, transport and water. The UPR journal invited researchers, practitioners and “interested persons” to submit policyrelevant articles that highlighted the contributions to contemporary practice. The ambition was to address the need to “take research to the streets” in what was described then, as a critical time for Australian cities characterised by: growing uncertainty, pessimism and inequity; patchwork and uncoordinated government responses; and cynicism about the usefulness of urban research when most needed (see UPR Editorial 1982, p. 1). Sound familiar? Track forward to the end of the 1990s, and a review article of the state of urban research inAustralia by Graeme Davison and Ruth Fincher (1998) emphasised the interdisciplinary nature, intellectual diversity and vibrancy of scholarship that was emerging. In key areas such as gender and feminist inquiry, housing policy, suburbanisation, urban history, socio-spatial equity, environmental planning issues and cultural studies, urban research was successfully pursuing approaches that were ‘open, critical and pluralist’ rather than managerial or ‘narrowly instrumental’. However, they cautioned that as ‘cities become larger and more complex and the need for high-quality urban research grows, creating policy impact through urban research is challengedwithin a context of rapidly contracting public funding’ (p. 195).Whilst a similar surveywas not undertaken forNewZealand researchmany of the themes identified by Davison and Fincher were also relevant to that context. Still familiar? Roiling twentyfirst century crises of the climate emergency, systemic racism,wealth inequalities and global health pandemics such as Covid-19, are putting pressure not just on what urban researchers focus on, but also the conditions within which urban research takes place, requiring urban research to bemore explicitly ethical in focus aswell as active andfinancially agile to support sustainable futures. Research impact is already occurring in city and regional policies (ACRN 2022). The critical issue is whether the impact urban researchers are creating is enabling progressive and transformative change, rather than simply reinforcing policies and practices that are more of the same in cities and regions – that is largely unsustainable, maladaptive, wasteful and harmful to people and planet. Urban inequalities have become evenmore visible duringCovid-19, and greater recognition of this forms the basis for just urban transitions. As Crystal Legacy (2021) highlights ‘the point is still to change it’.