Jago Dodson

• PhD
• Managing Director at RMIT University

This research investigates the rationale for an Australian Housing and Homelessness Strategy. Applying contemporary thinking about the role of governments in complex problem-solving, and lessons from other ‘national approaches’ here and internationally, it sets out options for achieving cohesive, co-ordinated action on housing and homelessness in t...

The research was directed to the following questions: 1 What is the rationale for a national approach to housing and homelessness in Australia? (a) What is it about contemporary housing and homelessness problems that calls for a national approach? (b) How does contemporary thinking about the role governments in solving problems support a national a...

Challenges associated with managing urban water, particularly in rapidly growing cities, have given rise to the visions of Integrated Urban Water Management (IUWM) and Water Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD). Our aim in this chapter is to understand the major barriers to achieving these visions. We begin with a literature review to clarify these vision...

Cost benefit analysis is the economic appraisal of project proposals, it is a tool for assessing and comparing a range of public policy and infrastructure projects to inform decision makers as to their net social benefits and help determine priorities based on marginal costs and benefits. A review of recent cost benefit analyses, supported by Audit...

Melbourne's “Greening the West” (GTW) initiative is a successful example of water utilities actively supporting urban greening through facilitating collaboration between stakeholders. GTW was convened by City West Water in 2011, to bring together 23 partner organisations to protect and enhance urban greening to support community wellbeing. This res...

Water utilities are increasingly looking to water recycling and nature-based/green infrastructure solutions to address challenges such as drought, flooding and sewer overflows. At the same time, urban planning and public health sectors are increasingly emphasising the link between "liveable" built environments and community health, such as the abil...

The Fast Growing Outer Suburbs of Australia’s capital cities are home to nearly 5 million people. Growing at double the national rate, their population will grow to 7.5 million buy 2031. Between 2011 and 2016 these suburbs generated 35% of population growth and 25% of job growth but only 13% of jobs and 11% of GDP. Infrastructure is central to econ...

This chapter investigates the social and spatial equity implications of a transition to high fuel efficiency fossil-fuel vehicles or to non-fossil-fuelled vehicles for urban travel in Australian cities. The chapter draws on empirical work undertaken by the authors that reveals that the advantages of high fuel-efficient vehicles will largely be disp...

Greening the West (GTW) is a regional initiative aimed at increasing urban greening, particularly the number of trees, in Melbourne’s western municipalities of Brimbank, Hobsons Bay, Maribyrnong, Melton, Moonee Valley and Wyndham. Western Melbourne typically has comparatively low socioeconomic and health metrics, coupled with a significant deficit...

Climate change, urban densification and loss of green space are making cities hotter and less pleasant places in which to live. In some developed countries, heat waves now cause more deaths than any other natural disaster, and lack of green space is linked to decreased mental and physical health. Increasing green space, tree canopy cover, water bod...

Transformation of the motor vehicle fleet has been an important feature of the world’s peak car phenomenon. Very few urban transport studies have explored such important changes in large urban cities. Using an innovative green vehicle datasets constructed for 2009 and 2014, this paper investigates the ongoing change in urban private vehicle fleet e...

Increasing global energy prices have created serious pressure on transport and energy in Australian cities. The rising cost of transport and energy, combined with the price of housing in metropolitan areas, has placed households under greater economic pressure. This paper investigates how increased household transport costs interact with housing co...

This paper assesses the emergence of a global ‘infrastructure turn’ and its implications for urban scholarship. The global infrastructure turn involves the emergence of a coordinated effort to stimulated infrastructure development at the national and global level via an array of international frameworks. The key elements of this shift are described...

This book is founded in the recognition that the past decade has been one of the most volatile periods for petroleum markets since WWII. Planners and urbanists need to understand the implications of this new era of volatility for car-dependent, petroleum reliant cities. The large consuming nations remain dependent on readily available petroleum but...

Thepast decade has been one of the most volatile periods in global petroleum markets in living memory, and future oil supply security and price levels remain highly uncertain. This poses many questions for the professional activities of planners and urbanists because contemporary cities are highly dependent on petroleum as a transport fuel. How wil...

Australia's major cities are extremely mono-centric. Government decentralization policies seek to move city's state public servants out of their CBDs. A modeling framework is developed to appraise the likely transport system impacts in Brisbane. Two decentralization scenarios are modeled and compared. The results suggest both decentralization scena...

The separation of Australian housing production from its consumption has long-term consequences for sustainability in the built environment, and for anticipatory adaptation to climate change. This article investigates how the institutional structure of the Australian private housing development industry influences its risk profile and its ability t...

Most Australians live in the suburban areas of the nation's major cities and their interaction with major elements of public policy is suburban. Yet public policy seems inatt entive to suburban conditions, and the spatial consequences of most policy sett ings across suburbs have only been sporadically appraised and addressed by national governments...

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the concept of ‘coworking’ to an academic audience. It argues that coworking is a complex social phenomenon that can be differentiated from other spatial concepts that relate to work, learning and social interactions. The paper provides an historical account of the origins of coworking and reviews the exist...

Full citation: Matthews, T. and Dodson, J. 2016. 'Oil vulnerability and climate change: Institutional responses to a potential convergence of transformative stressors' in Dodson, J. Sipe, N. and Nelson, A. (eds) Planning After Petroleum: Preparing Cities for the Age Beyond Oil. London: Routledge. Pp.37-48. Abstract The twenty-first century will be...

This chapter describes and discusses the problem of combined volatile petroleum prices and varying housing mortgage cost pressures with household socio-economic patterns and urban structure within a large, dispersed city region. The chapter addresses two prominent economic phenomena witnessed in the past decade that have impacted on urban transport...

Urban freight transport is essential to the functioning of cities, but is also an activity that affects the urban environment and communities. Yet, freight is often overlooked in discussions of urban transport, in contrast to passenger modes. Much freight research emphasises questions of operations and network management but is less attentive to th...

Australian cities have seen continued growth in private car travel that has resulted in increasing vehicle energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. While much research has shown that vehicle demand is related to urban spatial structure, very little research has investigated the spatial patterns of private vehicle fuel efficiency (VFE) and i...

The Australian government is constructing a National Broadband Network (NBN), which at an estimated cost of $43 billion will be Australia’s largest ever infrastructure project. The NBN, if its full benefits are to be realized, raises a number of important, but largely unexplored, questions for planning. This paper investigates the implications of t...

Anthropogenic climate change has the potential to severely impact the natural and human environment. The urban environment is particularly exposed to the impacts of climate change because of a range of geographic and social factors. This chapter aims to investigate the institutional capacity of the private urban development sector in South East Que...

This chapter critically reviews the development of national policy initiatives directed at Australian cities over the last century. It explores theoretical and conceptual notions of urbanism and urban policy, especially Keynesian or social democratic and Marxist traditions of analysis. The chapter then reviews attempts to develop metropolitan strat...

This paper assesses the effects on suburbia of an energy transition to less carbon- or petroleum-intensive energy urban forms using a socio-technical theoretical perspective. The paper argues that while suburbia is the predominant form of urbanisation in advanced nations, especially North America and Australia, its socio-technical composition is in...

Australians from all walks of life have begun to realise the nation’s cities cannot sustain profligate growth indefinitely. Dwindling water supplies, failing food bowls, increased energy costs, more severe bushfires, severe storms, flooding, coastal erosion, rising transport expenses, housing shortages and environmental pollution are now daily news...

Queensland has been Australia's fastest growing state over the past 20 years. The rate and scale of development has intensified public debate around planning and sustainability in key areas such as transport infrastructure, housing affordability and economic growth and development. The Queensland Government is not coy about staking out an ambitious...

Introduction: The sequence and critical thresholds typifying super-sizing cities comprise a mode of ‘governance by re-bordering’ that transforms governance, planning, and civic management agendas. Questioning why strategic spatial planning requires and prioritises re-bordering by amalgamating municipalities reveals key similarities and edifying idi...

This chapter investigates the varying intersection of volatile petroleum markets and housing finance pressures with household socioeconomic status and urban structure, using six American cities (Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Portland) as case studies. The chapter responds to two important economic phenomena seen over the past se...

Australian cities have seen continued long-term growth in private motor vehicle travel that has imposed increasing vehicle energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. This paper investigates the spatial patterns of vehicle energy consumption on urban areas through an analysis of vehicle travel and of vehicle fleet efficiency in Brisbane, Austr...

Super city amalgamations are cast as a contemporary solution to the challenges of planning across borders. In 2010, Auckland was ‘super-sized’ into a unitary metropolitan authority to govern, plan, and manage the metropolitan city region. We argue that this super-sizing comprises a mode of ‘governance by re-bordering’, in which urban problems are f...

Children's travel is an integral component of overall transport demand in Australian cities. The mode choices of children and their parents impact not only traffic flows around schools, but also children's mental, physical and social health. Despite cycling being a healthy, safe, affordable and space/energy efficient mode of transport, current bicy...

This article examines the relationship between housing studies and key theoretical standpoints in social science. It discusses the complex and multidimensional status of housing as a social scientific object including how the material character of housing contributes to an empiricist tendency in housing studies. It then presents a structured histor...

Growth management has been a key regional planning task, especially in some of the ‘sunbelt’ zones of the United States and Australia. Regional agencies have often used strategic visioning and scenario testing to evaluate future growth trajectories and their impact on regional communities. Many regions are facing complex, multi-dimensional and pres...

Children's independent mobility (CIM) defined as children's travel without adult accompaniment. Though there is limited data, what is available suggests precipitous declines in CIM have occurred in recent decades in many nations, including Australia. However, CIM matters for a number of reasons; 1. CIM is linked to levels of physical activity in ch...

Access to essential goods and services is increasingly recognized as a key factor influencing household socio-economic disadvantage within cities. Socio-economic status and spatial location partly determine differential accessibility. Spatial variation of these low-socioeconomic status (SES) groups across cities, and their travel patterns, are most...

A resurgence of state-led decentralization activity is occurring in Australia, with governments promising to move 20% of all public servants in the city center to middle and outer suburban locations in two of the country's largest cities, Perth and Brisbane, within a decade. The effects of these policies on transport, however, have not been assesse...

The Australian government is currently constructing a National Broadband Network (NBN), which at an estimated cost of $43 billion will be Australia’s largest ever infrastructure project. The NBN, if its full benefits are to be realized, raises a number of important but to date largely unexplored questions for planning in Australia. This paper inves...

Australia's cities, and in particular the suburban areas, are car dependent and vulnerable to higher oil prices. This paper examines the policy and planning responses to this emerging problem. It does this by reviewing relevant plans and policies at the local, regional/metro, state and national levels. The analysis suggests that there are a number...

This paper reviews and examines the recent evidence on petroleum depletion and liquid energy supply security as a background to the special issue on oil vulnerability. The paper charts a change in the tone of debate about an oil supply shock from possibility to probability as signalled by the growing concerns of global risk assessors. The paper not...

This paper contributes to the understanding of transport disadvantage and the transport dimensions of environmental justice by investigating the travel behavior patterns of socially disadvantaged groups by using household travel survey data. The study described in this paper goes beyond determining the basic descriptive statistics that are commonly...

Climate change and higher transport energy prices are now pressing urban policy issues and increasing attention is being directed to the capacity of metropolitan planning to overcome these challenges. For the past two decades Australian metropolitan plans have focused on urban consolidation as a means of reducing transport energy demand. Transport...

The capacity for suburban households to respond to a changing global energy context by changing their motor vehicle technology is examined. Transforming transport systems will make up a crucial element in policy and planning responses to energy and climate challenges. Government policy appears focused on a transition to more-efficient vehicle types...

Employment decentralisation may be defined as a process by which city-regions increase the proportion of jobs that are located outside of their central business district (CBD) and its immediate frame. The Queensland Government has embarked on a program of targeted program of employment decentralisation, seeking to move 20 per cent of it's office sp...

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Employment decentralisation may be defined as a process by which city-regions increase the proportion of jobs that are located outside of their central business district (CBD) and its immediate frame. Brisbane is actively moving to decentralise, with the Queensland Government embarking on targeted workplace relocations to move 20 per cent of its of...

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While the 'ground zero' of the Global Financial Crisis has been among the metropoles of financial capitalism, the material grounding of the crisis has been in the urban periphery at the intersection of, land, housing, credit, energy and transport. It has been a suburban crisis, with its faultlines fracturing most prominently across the USA but with...

This paper argues that a recent resurgence in Australian spatial planning has been superseded by a resort to infrastructure to address urban problems. The paper uses case studies of the Melbourne and South East Queensland (Brisbane) metropolitan regions to chart the renewal of new spatial planning, after a period of neglect. This paper then shows t...

This paper examines whether the structure of metropolitan housing markets will impede metropolitan policies to improve the greenhouse gas performance and reduce transport energy dependence. With climate change and higher transport energy prices becoming pressing policy issues increasing attention is being directed to the capacity of metropolitan pl...

Access to essential goods and services is increasingly recognised as a key factor influencing household socio-economic vulnerability and disadvantage within cities. Socio-economic status and spatial location partly determine differential accessibility. Previously, the access made available to low socio-economic status (SES) groups via the transport...

This paper examines the Australian experience of a global transition towards less carbon and petroleum intensive energy sources. First the paper sets out Australia's current energy situation and the current patterns of energy use and dependence. The paper then identifies how Australian urban transport systems are highly oil dependent and describes...

This paper investigates oil vulnerability in Australian cities and the implications of this problem for Australian urban planning and planning elsewhere. The paper has four objectives. First, the paper investigates the changing global petroleum supply context and potential future supply trajectories. Second, the paper uses the notion of 'oil vulner...

Energy security is receiving increasing attention from governments and scholars at the global and national scale. Petroleum security and rising fuel prices are a challenge for cities whose housing systems are highly dependent on automobile transport. This study assesses transport and socio-tenurial patterns within Australian cities to identify how...

This paper examines the Australian experience of a global transition towards less carbon and petroleum intensive energy sources. First the paper sets out Australia’s current energy situation and the current patterns of energy use and dependence. The paper then identifies how Australian urban transport systems are highly oil dependent and describes...

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This paper provides an update of a report which was released in 2006 titled 'Shocking the suburbs' - which examined the distribution of household exposure to higher petrol prices, mortgage interest rate rises and general price inflation due to increases in global oil prices. That paper received wide attention from scholars, policy makers and the me...

Low density suburban development and excessive use of automobiles are associated with serious urban and environmental problems. Master planned development suggests itself as a possible palliative for these ills. This study examines the patterns and dynamics of movement in a selection of master planned estates in Australia with the aim of developing...

This article is the second of two papers that review the field of spatially sensitive social scientific research into the links between social status and transport disadvantage. The first paper undertook a comprehensive review of the social scientific and transport planning literature to mark the level of development in the field and identify conce...

Communicative planning has helped to illuminate the role of technical reason in planning processes. Transport planning has had little exposure to the communicative perspective. This paper examines transport planning in Auckland, New Zealand, from a communicative planning perspective. The paper argues that the historical dominance of technical reaso...

Global oil prices have risen markedly over the past 18 months, generating considerable speculation regarding their economic and social impacts. Cities that are highly dependent on petroleum for urban transport are likely to be most adversely affected by rising oil prices. Yet there has been little recent scholarly engagement with the socioeconomic...

This article is the first of two papers that engage critically and productively with the relationship between the socio-economic transformations of cities, the differentiation of vulnerable groups within urban space and the distribution of transport services. This article undertakes a comprehensive review of the major conceptual and methodological...

The neoliberal restructuring of government policies in developed nations since the 1970s has stimulated many observers to observe the “roll back” of the state from social assistance, including housing. Some suggest that the “roll out” of new forms of state activity are occurring. This paper argues that perceptions of “roll back” and “roll out” aris...

Urban mobility is a key determinant of household social status. The capacity to traverse urban space to undertake employment and to obtain the various goods and services that contribute to social wellbeing is dependent upon the transport options available to households. Contemporary planning for urban mobility is overwhelmingly focused on catering...