Tooran Alizadeh

The University of Sydney · Architecture Design and Planning

In February 2010, Google challenged US cities to compete for being the site of its first attempt at building ultra-high-speed fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) network, promising speeds up to one hundred times faster than pre-existing broadband services. More than 1,100 cities applied. Kansas City, however, was announced as the winner of the competition...

In 2010, IBM created the Smarter Cites Challenge to address critical issues of the 21st century through its digital expertise, in collaboration with city governments. Despite questions about the origin and intentions of IBM's involvement, 130 cities from all around the world took up the challenge in the first five years. There is limited case study...

It has been argued that infrastructure unevenness rigidifies into more lasting structures of socio-economic and political privilege and advantage. This paper focuses on telecommunication infrastructure as the backbone of the fast-growing digital economy, and raises important questions about the early National Broadband Network (NBN) rollout in Aust...

A growing number of cities around the world have now realised the need to use digital technology to capitalise on the rapidly growing digitally driven economy. In mid-2013 Brisbane, Australia released its ‘Digital Strategy’ document to strengthen its economy through improved productivity for local businesses. The article is based on a combination o...

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...

The existing landscape of infrastructure governance discourses tends to focus on closing “governance gaps” commonly based on fractured and opaque neoliberal planning and delivery processes, privatisation and financialisation issues, and inequitable distribution and undemocratic decision‐making processes. These gaps represent a deeply troubling eros...

The recent global pandemic renewed the importance of telecommunication infrastructure, as many COVID responses (e.g., working from home, home-schooling, e-commerce) were challenged by the inequity of access to broadband services and its underlying network. This paper examines the geospatial footprint of the National Broadband Network (NBN) in relat...

Infrastructure governance has emerged as a subject of critical interest in the current ‘infrastructure turn’ whereby fragmented governance approaches sit in tension with complex demands for infrastructure transformations within contexts of multiple intersecting crises. To understand the state of the literature and inform ongoing debates, a systemat...

One of the potential positive aspects of spaces designed to support Activity-Based Working (ABW) concept is to allow people to choose to work from zones that suit their Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) preferences. The vast majority of studies reporting findings relevant to IEQ performance of ABW spaces rely on spot measurements and/or subjective...

Planning should deliver urban infrastructures that nurture places and people. However, the misalignment between strategic plans and delivered projects reveals critical governance gaps, with little clarity surrounding for whom and what ends infrastructures serve. This positioning piece proposes an infrastructure governance research agenda focused on...

Currently, the available studies on the prediction of building energy performance and real occupancy data are typically characterized by aggregated and averaged occupancy patterns or large thermal zones of reference. Despite the increasing diffusion of smart energy management systems and the growing availability of longitudinal data regarding occup...

This chapter explores social media's potential to enhance public involvement to pursue sustainable practices on an international scale across planning and development projects. Using a case-study approach, the international institutions of the World Bank, UN-Habitat, Unilever, and World Business Council for Sustainable Development are investigated....

This chapter focuses on the relatively new concept of ‘digital cities’, which has attracted an unprecedented level of attraction in the last decade. Unfolding the popularity of digital city practices and promises, the chapter starts with a discussion of ongoing attempts to plan for digital cities. Then, building on the notion of equality in digital...

The National Broadband Network (NBN) is the largest public infrastructure project in the history of Australia. The goal of the NBN is to provide Australians with broadband internet access by using a mix of technologies, ranging from fibre and hybrid fibre-coaxial to fixed wireless and satellite platforms. Although the NBN is a public project, one o...

Social media and online communication have changed the way citizens engage in all aspects of their lives, from shopping and education to how their communities are planned and developed. It is no longer one-way or two- way communication. Instead, via networked all-to-all communication channels, our citizens engage in urban issues in a more complex a...

We study the scaling of (i) numbers of workers and aggregate incomes by occupational categories against city size, and (ii) total incomes against numbers of workers in different occupations, across the functional metropolitan areas of Australia and the USA. The number of workers and aggregate incomes in specific high-income knowledge economy-relate...

This paper explores social media's potential to improve public involvement and sustainable practices on an international scale across planning and development projects. Using a case-study approach, the international institutions of the World Bank, UN-Habitat, Unilever, and World Business Council for Sustainable Development are investigated. The rel...

Social media and online communication have changed the way citizens engage in all aspects of lives from shopping and education, to how communities are planned and developed. It is no longer one-way or two- way communication. Instead, via networked all-to-all communication channels, our citizens engage on urban issues in a complex and more connected...

We study the scaling of (i) numbers of workers and aggregate incomes by occupational categories against city size, and (ii) total incomes against numbers of workers in different occupations, across the functional metropolitan areas of Australia and the US. The number of workers and aggregate incomes in specific high income knowledge economy related...

There is a paucity of granular, high-resolution broadband data in the United States, which limits the prospects of informed telecommunications policy debates. In the absence of regulation requiring telecommunication providers to accurately report service footprints, pricing, and service quality data, providers refuse to disclose this information, r...

This paper presents an index for measuring experiential qualities (EQs) of urban public spaces through users’ perspective. The index is underpinned by interrelated qualities of comfort, diversity and vitality, inclusiveness, and image and likeability. It is then applied to two public spaces in the Australian city of Brisbane: Queen Street Mall and...

Considering the speedy growth of smart-city promises and practices, there is an urgent need to take a critical approach and offer an integrated vision for an otherwise fragmented and sectoral concept. In particular, the literature warns about a critical deficit around the theorization of the smart city because discussions of relevant smart city the...

The rapid uptake of the sharing economy is disrupting many socially established models of services, especially in the housing and transportation sectors. This paper builds upon the growing critical scholarship examining the urban equity implications of the giant online sharing accommodation platform, Airbnb. It focuses on Airbnb listings in two maj...

This chapter explores social media's potential to enhance public involvement to pursue sustainable practices on an international scale across planning and development projects. Using a case-study approach, the international institutions of the World Bank, UN-Habitat, Unilever, and World Business Council for Sustainable Development are investigated....

A persistent challenge for telecommunications policy is the determination of broadband provision footprints in both space and time. In the United States, Form 477 data from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) provide a valuable snapshot of broadband provision at the block level, but there are often inconsistencies with the underlying data....

Public spaces are the loci of complex interactions among multiple stakeholders whose decisions and activities affect places’ qualities. The paper builds upon governance theory to provide a holistic in-depth approach in understanding the complexity and quality of the place-shaping processes in public spaces. In the absence of adequate conception of...

This paper takes an applied approach to propose a smart city strategy informed by local planning priorities and international best practices. In doing so, it focuses on Gold Coast - a midsized Coastal City in Australia - which has been part of IBM's smarter cities challenge, and open and agile smart cities network. In this paper, local planning con...

A growing number of cities have started to realize the need to be ‘smart', to use digital technology to drive prosperity and capitalize on the rapidly growing digital economy. Some local governments have developed ‘urban digital strategies' to speed up the pace of change, and to move their digital planning from ad-hoc to an integrated and strategic...

In 2009, the Australian government began constructing a National Broadband Network (NBN), which was expected to provide high-speed broadband coverage across the nation. The paper focuses on the early NBN rollout period of 2009–2013 and questions to what extent planning strategies and policies at federal, state and local levels responded to the urba...

A recent decision by the Australian Federal Government to reassess the scale of the National Broadband Network (NBN) will leave the country with a patchwork of different levels of access to the infrastructure. This intensifies the need to investigate and evaluate the implications of telecommunication at the local level. The paper opens a discussion...

A growing number of cities around the world have now developed urban digital strategies to speed up the pace of change, and more importantly to move their digital planning and policymaking from ad-hoc to an integrated and strategic approach. The paper provides a cross-national comparative study, based on recently developed urban digital strategies...

Drawing on data collected from two neighbouring but different domains of public spaces in Brisbane, the South Bank Parklands and the Queen St Mall, this paper argues for characteristics of successful public space management. A combination of interviews with managers, authorities and stakeholders, as well as document analysis of both printed and ele...

A growing number of cities have started to realize the need to be ‘smart’, to use digital technology to drive prosperity and capitalize on the rapidly growing digital economy. Some local governments have developed ‘urban digital strategies’ to speed up the pace of change, and to move their digital planning from ad-hoc to an integrated and strategic...

Planning studios, through learning by doing, introduce students to relevant practical skills. The problem is that not all students, especially in the first-year, spend the required time on task, so they fall behind and fail to catch up. The article is based on the Community of Inquiry framework and proposes an online assessment to ensure that teach...

Purpose This paper examines the impact of urban form on disaster resiliency. The literature shows a complex relationship between urban form factors such as density and diversity and disaster recovery. The empirical analysis in this paper tests the impact of land use mix, population density, building type and diversity on the reconstruction progress...

The introduction of the Australian National Broadband Network (NBN) in 2009 raised questions about the potentials of the telecommunications infrastructure for Australian urban and regional planning. The recent decision by the Australian Federal Government to build the NBN, using a mix of technologies, has intensified the need to investigate the imp...

A growing body of literature suggests that the segregation of infrastructure and urban/regional planning is at the root of contemporary problems facing many of the world's metropolitan areas. More recently, the introduction of new telecommunication infrastructure highlights the invisible borders that exist within critical infrastructure that provid...

This paper explores social media's potential to improve public involvement and sustainable practices on an international scale across planning and development projects. Using a case-study approach, the international institutions of the World Bank, UN-Habitat, Unilever, and World Business Council for Sustainable Development are investigated. The rel...

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the link between resilience attributes and conditions of each neighbourhood on recovery of 26 neighbourhoods of Brisbane after the 2011 flood. A systematic review of literature on urban disaster resilience and recovery was conducted to extract the indicators used to measure and monitor recovery. The requir...

The introduction of the Australian National Broadband Network (NBN) in 2009 posed a range of new questions about the potential of the telecommunication infrastructure for planning at different levels of government. This paper focuses on the local implications of the new infrastructure whether socio-economic, e-governance or otherwise. It reaches ou...

The article examines: 1) how travel behaviour was influenced by urban form in three terrorism-affected Baghdad districts; and 2) how the responses to terrorism in these neighbourhoods affected travel behaviour. The results suggest that urban form can mediate the impacts of terrorism and counter-terrorism with traditional urban form districts being...

A growing number of cities around the world have now realised the need to strategically capitalise on the rapidly growing digital economy. In mid-2013, cities of Brisbane, Australia and Vancouver, Canada both released their 'Digital Strategy' documents to strengthen their economy by enhancing digital connections amongst citizens, business, and the...

Since the formation of the Australian National Broadband Network Company (NBN Co.) in April 2009, the NBN rollout has been gradually announced following a range of engineering and logistic criteria. However, the early rollout gives the release sites a regional competitive advantage against other localities that might have to wait up to a decade to...

Planning studios are taught following ‘learning by doing’ approach to help students with a range of practical skills highly relevant to the planning profession. The problem is that not all students spend the required hours, to work on the hands-on activities, between the weekly studio sessions. They fall behind and it becomes more and more difficul...

Regardless of recent technological advancement in telecommunication, telework adoption rates worldwide are still lower than initially hoped for. The literature relates this to organizational and institutional barriers of all kinds. This paper seeks to identify the aspects of planning systems that hinder telework at the local community scale. It foc...

It was hoped that increased teleworking would reduce traffic congestion leading to lower levels of greenhouse gas emissions, other air pollutants, storm water runoff and noise. However, despite recent technological advancements in telecommunication, telework adoption rates are still lower than initially projected and thus the purported benefits are...

Planning is made-up of borders. As social and political constructs a border divides – be it landscapes, communities or ideas – and legitimizes particular policy activities or approaches. Within urban and regional planning contexts, borders become elements of control as they shape and define how particular territorial issues, spaces and places are u...

Since the formation of the National Broadband Network Company (NBN Co.) in April 2009, the NBN rollout has been gradually announced following a range of engineering and logistic criteria. However, the early rollout gives the release sites a regional competitive advantage against other localities that might have to wait up to a decade to receive the...

This paper refers to the ambiguity that resides in over three decades of telework research and develops the concept of community-based teleworkers as people who work from home or community-based offices using telecommunications. It investigates three case studies of live/work communities in which different levels of collective telework facilities h...

This paper investigates the desired configuration of live/work communities for the growing social group of community-based information workers who work, live and play in the same locality using telecommunication. It starts with a brief review of information workers and their urban preferences in the literature. It then refers to a long-standing deb...

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...

By the turn of the 21st century, the significance of knowledge to be the key factor in urban and regional development is well established. However, it has been only recently that attempts have been made to identify the specific mechanism and institutional relationships, through which knowledge-based development takes place. In this regard, very lit...

To understand the future direction of urban design in the digital age, this paper reviews the relation between telework – as one aspect of telecommunication – and wired residential communities – as one type of new settlement. It begins with a brief review of cities and telecommunication, and focuses on teleworkers' characteristics in the literature...

The digital revolution at the end of 20th century has opened some new doors for local communities to take active parts in the new economy. The growing number of home-based teleworkers, e-entrepreneurs and high-rank information workers and firms who are very selective on their live/work locations heralds a new era with a great emphasis on the produc...

The digital revolution at the end of 20th century has opened some new doors for the communities to take active part in the creation of global knowledge. Telecommunication technologies have transformed how work/knowledge is produced and from where it is being done/distributed. This has led a number of scholars to advocate the concept of knowledge-ba...