Planning for sustainable change: a review of Australian local planning schemes

Sustainable development, defined by the World Commission on Environment and Development as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’, has become a global policy objective with particular resonance for planners (WCED, 1987: p. 43). Many international, national, state and regional policy frameworks emphasise the need to improve the environmental performance of cities and regions and to conserve and renew biodiversity. The increasing prospect of global climatic volatility – hotter temperatures, sea level rise, intense storm events, flooding and bushfires, have added a new urgency for planning and design regulations that build community resilience to withstand impacts of climate change (Hennessy et al., 2007)

Home security: marketisation and the changing face of housing assistance in Australia

The provision of social services in Australia has changed dramatically in recent decades. Governments have expanded social provision without expanding the public sector by directly subsidising private provision, by contracting private agencies, both non-profit and for-profit, to deliver services, and through a number of other subsidies and vouchers. Private actors receive public funds to deliver social services to citizens, raising a range of important questions about financial and democratic accountability: 'who benefits', 'who suffers' and 'who decides'. This book explores these developments through rich case studies of a diverse set of social policy domains. The case studies demonstrate a range of effects of marketisation, including the impact on the experience of consumer engagement with social service systems, on the distribution of social advantage and disadvantage, and on the democratic steering of social policy

Hidden homes? Uncovering Sydney’s informal housing market

Australia faces a chronic shortage of affordable rental housing, as do many other nations in the Global North. Unable to access the formal rental sector, lower-income earners are increasingly resorting to share housing and other informal arrangements, sometimes occupying makeshift accommodation or illegal dwellings. This article examines informality in Sydney’s housing market, an important case because of the explicit policy efforts geared towards supporting diverse and higher density housing supply. It draws on analysis of the regulatory planning framework and primary data derived from interviews and focus groups with housing advocates, support workers and building compliance officers from across the metropolitan region. It seeks to understand the drivers of supply and demand within the informal housing market and constructs a typology of informal tenures and dwelling provision. The article contributes new empirical data on the outcomes of planning policies designed to enable flexible housing responses which legitimise some informal practices, and the wider dimensions of informal housing provision within formal urban systems of the Global North

Climate change adaptation in the rental sector

© 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. All rights reserved. This chapter examines both assets and barriers for climate adaptation in the rental housing sector through a case study of renters and housing managers in regional Australia. The study included in-depth semi-structured interviews with 22 tenants and 17 housing managers in the public and private housing sectors. A wide range of secondary sources including media articles, sustainable renting guides and legislative and policy documents. Private sector tenants believed that negative social and political attitudes to renters in Australia were an obstacle to changing tenancy conditions and improving housing. There was a wide range of views among property managers about the importance or reality of climate change, from belief to some scepticism. Amending tenancy conditions to enhance the active contribution of tenants to climate change adaptation may require innovative legislative frameworks that reflect climate change and equity imperatives as well as protection for landlords and tenants

Germline variants associated with alternative splicing in colonic mucosa

The heritability of colorectal cancer (CRC) has been estimated between 7.4% and 26% from a range of analyses based on family lineages and genetic similarity. Certain rare, high penetrance variants are well characterized, though these are estimated to account for only ~5% of all CRC cases. The majority of GWASidentified risk SNPs for CRC fall within non-coding regions, and the mechanisms by which the majority of these variants contribute to disease predisposition are yet to be elucidated. However, recent studies have highlighted the contribution of alternative splicing to cancer progression, and have linked variants altering splicing patterns to predisposition to other complex traits. This study has analysed RNA-seq from 221 samples of colonic mucosa (the precise tissue of origin of CRC) from a Scottish cohort to identify variants associated with quantitative changes in the splicing patterns of genes (sQTLs). All individuals were genotyped from blood samples via SNP-chips, and imputation increased the number of testable variants to 4 million. Transcript expression was quantified with the alignment-free Salmon algorithm. Two separate approaches with complementary methodologies were used to identify sQTLs: the sQTLseekeR package which analyses whole transcripts, and the Leafcutter package which infers changes in intron usage. Between the two, over 15,000 variants were identified as corresponding to changes in the ratio of expression of transcripts or the ratio of intron excision from over 6,800 protein-coding and lncRNA genes. Effect size and expression thresholds were applied to retain only the top 8% most likely functionally relevant sQTLs. The thresholded sQTLs were found to be enriched in peaks of active chromatin marks, DNase accessible regions and putative regulatory elements, relative to a population of 100,000 non-sQTL SNPs sampled from the same search windows and with the same proportions of minor allele frequencies as the sQTL SNPs. They were similarly enriched within regions predicted to be active from probabilistic deconvolution of signals from multiple histone marks constructed by the Roadmap Epigenetics Consortium. sQTLs were enriched within linkage blocks containing eQTLs (expression quantitative trait loci) identified from the same cohort, and eQTLs identified from GTEx sigmoid and transverse colon tissues; however the lead SNPs associated with sQTLs and eQTLs were different in 97% of cases, implying a strong degree of independence between the two classes of event. Thresholded sQTL variants identified by the Leafcutter package were found to be significantly enriched within a meta-GWAS for CRC consisting of 20,818 cases and 37,822 controls. Between both packages, sQTLs were found for 9 genes associated with CRC in the NHGRI-EBI GWAS catalog, 4 genes curated in the COSMIC database as relevant to CRC progression, and a further 29 oncogenes or tumour suppressors implicated in any cancer. Together these observations imply that the alteration of patterns of transcript expression in the colonic mucosa mediated by germline SNPs is one of the genetic mechanisms underpinning predisposition to CRC. The sQTLs identified herein could be further used in colocalisation analyses to fine-map GWAS causal variants, and in transcriptome wide association studies (TWAS) to identify new CRC predisposition loci

Strategic planning, ‘city deals’ and affordable housing

This study examines how local and international funding interventions focussed on specific regions, such as City Deals, deliver affordable rental housing for low income households to enhance urban productivity. Such strategic policy interventions offer some promise in creating new economic opportunities, however explicit policies are needed to ensure low income households can access affordable housing close to employment opportunities

Australian adaptation of UK dealmaking: towards state rescaling?

Place-based funding deals are inter-governmental contracts focused on boosting economic growth and productivity. Informed by policy adaptation scholarship, we compare the policy and practice of City Deals and dealmaking in the UK and Australia to consider the implications for scalar power relations. In the UK, local government is compelled to engage in dealmaking and the rescaling to the supralocal, city-regional level it incentivises. Thus, central-local state relations have been upscaled whilst city-regional powers are highly constrained. In Australia, deals enable the federal government to engage in the ostensible policy domains of state government, but purposive state rescaling is absent. However, the Australian case indicates an appetite for more formalised forms of supralocal governance, should the state tier concur, revealing that dealmaking has opened up alternative ways of working and that local as well as higher tiers of government play a role in shaping rescaling

Analyzing and predicting the spatial penetration of Airbnb in U.S. cities

In the hospitality industry, the room and apartment sharing platform of Airbnb has been accused of unfair competition. Detractors have pointed out the chronic lack of proper legislation. Unfortunately, there is little quantitative evidence about Airbnb's spatial penetration upon which to base such a legislation. In this study, we analyze Airbnb's spatial distribution in eight U.S. urban areas, in relation to both geographic, socio-demographic, and economic information. We find that, despite being very different in terms of population composition, size, and wealth, all eight cities exhibit the same pattern: that is, areas of high Airbnb presence are those occupied by the \newpart{``talented and creative''} classes, and those that are close to city centers. This result is consistent so much so that the accuracy of predicting Airbnb's spatial penetration is as high as 0.725