The reassertion of strategic planning interest in the role that urban infrastructure, including major transport projects, play in ‘city building' are acting to reposition the role of the planner, demand a range of skills that help tie these large financial (and political) commitments more coherently to considerations of city productivity, efficiency and equity. In the first part of City Building: Infrastructure Planning, the policy context and practical aspects of the planning, funding, provision, and maintenance of urban infrastructure are considered. This highlights the complex and often contradictory interplay between different levels of Government in shaping the policy and financing context within which infrastructure requirements are identified, prioritised, funded and delivered. Urban management and governance structures to provide urban infrastructure, along with methods for assessing the feasibility of major projects, are considered. Students will also be challenged to engage with the transformative nature of digital technologies and the rise of ‘smart’ and ‘ubiquitous’ cities, challenging the physicality and form of the types of ‘infrastructure’ that afford the potential for, as well as require, urban planners to think about changing urban environments in innovative ways. In the latter half of the course, recent or live major urban infrastructure projects in metropolitan Sydney act as case studies, enabling more detailed consideration of the interplay between infrastructure provision and land use planning.
