Urban Planning and the Entrepreneurial State: The View from Victoria, Australia

It is argued that the state in Victoria, Australia, has pursued five key trends in urban planning throughout the 1980s: Privatisation, liberalisation, subsidisation, commercialisation, and elitism. These trends are a response to conditions wrought by global economic restructuring, the dominance of economic fundamentalism as a political discourse in Australia, the institutional structure of federal–State government financial relations, and a resultant perception of fiscal crisis. These developments in urban planning have resulted in financial costs and a loss of democratic accountability to the Victorian community.