Metropolitan Restructuring and Suburban Employment Centers: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on the Australian Experience

A strand of recent American planning literature has been the exploration of “edge city” style suburbanization. Similar outer city landscapes with attendant planning problems have been identified in foreign settings, but a culturally sensitive approach to the relevant comparisons of pattern, process and policy is needed. Focusing on the Sydney experience, this paper provides an Australian perspective. Its discussion of economic, demographic, historical, institutional, and policy factors is centrally concerned with explaining the more muted scale and contrasting forms of commercial suburbanization. The instructiveness of differences as much as of similarities is highlighted in the comparative analysis.