Handbook

Strategic Spatial Planning explores the principal mechanisms whereby planners understand, create, and care for, places and address the core challenges and opportunities faced by urban environments and their communities – both existing and future. You will consider the key drivers of change within our cities, unpacking issues including housing supply and affordability, urban renewal, urban justice, infrastructure and climate change. You will also engage with the tensions that shape how decisions get made – or not – through the complex lens of urban governance and how planning – and planners – engaged with those we plan for. As planners we are interested in the inherently spatial dimensions of these urban processes, recognising that collective efforts to influence land use change and behaviours of urban stakeholders take place at different geographical scales, and impact on different groups in different ways. This course focuses on the metropolitan and regional scale, where the conditions requiring strategic planning are arguably most evident.