Relational planning and performative sub-regional strategies: Analysing the construction of the Sydney Global City Region through an assemblage framework
- Publication Type:
- Conference Proceeding
- Citation:
- 2018
- Issue Date:
- 2018-01-01
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The construction of ‘Global Cities’ have become contemporary grand projects with a shift from cities to agglomerations of city-regions increasingly prioritised in strategic plans. This has been necessitated by an increasing emphasis on mobilities through network structures of nodes and flows, and has been adopted by the inclusion of relational planning models in parallel with traditional blueprint plans. The complexity of these frameworks that seek to integrate the perspectives of public, private and community actors has been less uniform as constraints of time and resources often maintain overly deterministic strategies. New strategies are essentially refreshed plans without significant resolution of previous guidance nor innovation, instead introducing new sub-regional governing actors without the responsibility for, or accountability of its outcomes. Through analysis of recent metropolitan strategic plans, this paper finds a continued emphasis and placing greater visibility to supporting economic growth through global aspirations and comparisons in lieu of localised spatial conditions that continue to remain less visible in these strategic documents. The paper argues through an assemblage framework for the adoption of a flatter ontology into each scalar level of the strategic framework. This inductive mode of inquiry allows the emergence of innovative strategies to be found through, rather than by the localisation of context, making visible the often tacit or unseen sociospatial issues.
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