ABSTRACT
A stage has been reached in the development process of the world's cities where transformational change is required if liveable and sustainable built environments are to be realised, particularly for the fast-growing urban populations projected to occupy a resource and carbon constrained world. A scan of contemporary metropolitan planning and development policies in North America, Western Europe and Australasia indicates that a vast majority of plans continue to be ‘conventional’ (after Giradet 2010). They operate within the constraints of existing urban governance tools (e.g. zoning systems, building codes; see Talen 2012; Ben-Joseph 2005); as well as policies, incentives and subsidies that can have perverse and unintended consequences on land uses and associated urban activity (Blais 2010; Tomlinson 2012). They exhibit path dependency to well established regimes of property and infrastructure development, all of which significantly inhibit opportunities for urban innovation capable of regenerating cities and their neighbourhoods (Grin et al. 2010). Strategic plans for twenty-first-century cities cannot afford to perpetuate the supply-side paradigms of urban planning that have created metropolitan forms with unsustainable ecological footprints (Newton 2012).
