Articles in refereed journals by Lisa Law
Town Planning Review, 2024
[Extract] Singapore went through a period of rapid urban renewal and development from the 1960s o... more [Extract] Singapore went through a period of rapid urban renewal and development from the 1960s onwards when it became an independent nation in 1965. Many of the traditional shop houses in the city centre were acquired by the government, demolished, and the sites repackaged for sale to be developed for office buildings, shopping centres, hotels and residential developments. In 1989, the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA), Singapore’s national planning agency, was given the power to gazette areas with historical and social significance as Conservation Areas (Huang, 2013). One such area was Kampong Glam. Originally established as part of Stamford Raffles colonisation for the British Empire in his 1822 town plan, Kampong Glam became one of Singapore’s earliest Muslim Quarters, hosting ‘a cosmopolitan settlement of Muslims from diverse ethnic backgrounds’ (Hack, 2004, 9). To conserve the district and make the area lively and integrated with Singapore’s modern landscape, the URA identified the core area around the Sultan Mosque and Istana Kampong Glam and encouraged trades such as the selling of batiks, sarongs and carpets and disallowed incompatible trades such as bars, pubs and nightclubs. The URA and Singapore Tourism Board also initiated placemaking efforts such as working with local business and community groups to organise activities and festivals to highlight the district’s heritage, traditional arts and crafts (National Heritage Board, 2012). The area around Sultan Mosque was pedestrianised.
JOURNAL OF RESPONSIBLE TOURISM MANAGEMENT, 2022
Trail design and building guidelines are essential tools for influencing the behaviour—and theref... more Trail design and building guidelines are essential tools for influencing the behaviour—and therefore the environmental impact—of users of walking, mountain biking and multi-use recreation trails. Yet, these tools are often not explicitly considered in research that monitors their environmental impact. This is the first study to investigate the role of trail design in shaping how walkers and mountain bikers utilise mountain biking, walking and multi-use trails. The research differentiates trail feature types to examine how they shape user behaviour and, therefore, environmental impact. This observational study uses time-series photographic imagery to examine behaviour and impacts over 12 months. Impacts at each site were examined using current trail building design guidelines. The findings show that shortcuts were commonly employed to avoid long sections on walker-only trails, and to cut across meandering tracks on the multi-use trails in the mountain bike park. Trail spread occurs when walkers use the edges of the trail to avoid rough or uneven surfaces such as stairs and tree roots. Depressions in the trail before technical mountain biking features such as berms and drops were also apparent. Further observations include toilet paper and litter on the walking trails. The research furthermore indicates the unintended environmental impacts when trail users did not adhere to specific trail features or did not use the trails as intended. Unique trail design principles are required where walkers and mountain bikers use the same trails, and this paper provides recommendations for improving trail design.
Australian Planner, Oct 2, 2022
Medium Density Housing (MDH) is advocated for sustainable urban growth while retaining the amenit... more Medium Density Housing (MDH) is advocated for sustainable urban growth while retaining the amenity and liveability of lower-density urban forms. Despite these advantages, affordable and diverse MDH proves challenging to implement in suburbs with access to employment and services. While scholars do explore barriers and solutions to implementing MDH in Australia, regional city contexts are less understood. Stakeholder perspectives on MDH and its implementation are also limited. This research presents a stakeholder analysis in the regional city of Cairns to address these important gaps. The research employs a case study approach including semi-structured interviews with 19 stakeholders across public and private sectors: developers, architects/building designers, government and industry planners and real estate agents. Stakeholders expressed barriers that are well-documented in the literature–such as the risk-averse nature of the finance sector–but also note key regional differences such as land constraints in world heritage areas, poor public transport, distance from supply chains, soaring insurance costs and susceptibility to cyclones. In the face of these challenges, Cairns stakeholders argue for certain forms of MDH alongside strategic planning, leadership, cross-sectoral and community engagement to support effective MDH infill. These insights are pertinent to other regional cities struggling with MDH in low density contexts.
Australian Geographer, 2022
This paper unpacks the notion of ‘region’ in the current COVID-19 migration debate to understand ... more This paper unpacks the notion of ‘region’ in the current COVID-19 migration debate to understand how the city of Cairns, Queensland fits into a wider geography of internal urban-rural migration in Australia. It unpacks different constructions of ‘region’, showing how they often articulate ‘access’, ‘rural’ and ‘remote’ and a general sense of non-urban entities. We discuss the imagined geographies of different Australian regional classification systems such as the Australian Statistical Geography Standard (ASGS), Rural, Remote and Metropolitan Area (RRMA) and Modified Monash Model (MMM). We show how definitions and classifications of ‘region’ are constructed in particular ways to address political and social issues such as economic development, health, immigration and wider policy-making agendas. The analysis deployed develops a framework for understanding key dimensions of regionality relevant to migration to Cairns in the COVID-19 moment. A critical interpretive analysis helps shed light on the importance of place/context in relation to Australia’s recent urban--rural internal
migration debate, but also provides insights to the counterurbanisation debate in terms of displacing notions of the ‘rural idyll’.
Sustainability, 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic has made many urban policymakers, planners, and scholars, all around the gl... more The COVID-19 pandemic has made many urban policymakers, planners, and scholars, all around the globe, rethink conventional, neoliberal growth strategies of cities. The trend of rapid urbanization, particularly around capital cities, has been questioned, and alternative growth models and locations have been the subjects of countless discussions. This is particularly the case for the Australian context: The COVID-19 pandemic heightened the debates in urban circles on post-pandemic urban growth strategies and boosting the growth of towns and cities across regional
Australia is a popular alternative strategy. While some scholars argue that regional Australia poses an invaluable opportunity for post-pandemic growth by ‘taking o the pressure from the capital cities’; others warn us about the risks of growing regional towns and cities without carefully designed national, regional, and local planning, design, and development strategies. Superimposing planning and development policies meant for metropolitan cities could simply result in transferring the ills of capital cities to regions and exacerbate unsustainable development and heightened socioeconomic inequalities. This opinion piece, by keeping both of these perspectives in mind, explores approaches to regional community and economic development of Australia’s towns and cities, along with identifying sustainable urban growth locations in the post-pandemic era. It also offers new insights that could help re-shape the policy debate on regional growth and development.
Town Planning Review: Volume 92, Issue 1, 2021
It is a cliché to say we live in strange times: COVID-19 has focused our attention on schedules o... more It is a cliché to say we live in strange times: COVID-19 has focused our attention on schedules of lockdowns and long-term economic effects, and has even slowed down our experience of time due to increased cognitive loads. But as planners or urban designers it is our urban places that have also become strange: COVID-19 is altering our use of, and behaviour in, public space – from physical and social distancing to staying at home or even leaving the city altogether. We are concerned with how long we will tolerate state encroachments in public space, especially new techniques of surveillance and control, but we also see local governments opening up streets to give more public spaces back to pedestrians. In this Viewpoint we explore these paradoxes of public space in a time of COVID-19, from its temporary disappearance to the potential for temporary changes to underpin lasting strategies for liveable, economically viable and resilient public space. Although some link temporary urbanism to neo-liberal urban development and austerity policies (Stevens et al., 2019), we ponder how the COVID-19 moment critiques the status quo by providing new openings for shifting temporary urbanism into the mainstream planning toolkit. Does COVID-19 present an opportunity to make temporariness more deliberate and programmatic, thereby catalysing long-term change?
Landscape Research, 2022
Urban community gardens are well known as safe and friendly spaces that help shape a sense of com... more Urban community gardens are well known as safe and friendly spaces that help shape a sense of community. Their capacity to reflect these ideals in the higher education policy sector has been less examined, even though students are particularly well-disposed to reaping the healing benefits of gardens. COVID-19 displaced students and shut down campuses globally. With Australian universities reopening, fostering a sense of community and re-establishing campus culture is among top priorities. This paper uses a multiple case-study methodology to explore how a unique policy instrument—the university ‘masterplan’–expresses the benefits of campus community gardens, as green community spaces, and how they might better aid universities in achieving strategic missions. The research compares dominant themes in the community garden literature with the visions of campus masterplans to understand how community gardens might be better positioned as tools for place and community building. The results provide a finer-grained understanding of green infrastructure in campus master planning for a post-COVID-19 moment.
Indoor and Built Environment, 2018
The optimal provision of thermal comfort and energy efficiency for residential housing in the hot... more The optimal provision of thermal comfort and energy efficiency for residential housing in the hot and humid tropics presents challenges and opportunities for housing and subdivision designs. Climatic challenges come in the form of high ambient temperature and humidity, especially during the wet season and transition periods. On the other hand, climatic advantages come in the form of breezes coupled with relatively dry air during the dry season, enabling thermal comfort attainment through natural ventilation that employs prevailing breezes. This paper discusses existing design practices for housing and subdivisions in the hot and humid tropics with particular reference to the city of Darwin in Australia's Northern Territory. This includes several research issues and gaps that have been identified and need to be addressed. The paper also critically assesses how air speed, air temperature and humidity – three of the thermal comfort parameters – play a key role in housing and subdivision design consideration in the hot and humid tropics. In doing so, the paper sheds light on the inadequacy of the current residential energy rating methodology as a tool for assessing tropical housing performance and proposes a new direction for future research to ameliorate these issues for the tropics.
eTropic: Electronic journal of studies in the Tropics, 2020
This paper engages with debates about tropical cities and climate responsive design to consider t... more This paper engages with debates about tropical cities and climate responsive design to consider the emergence of two local government master plans and one planning scheme provision explicitly addressing the tropical climate in Cairns, Australia. The undergirding concept of these initiatives is a terminology of Tropical Urbanism, a simultaneously environmental and social/cultural term that captures issues such as climate, lifestyle and identity in the constitution of the urban fabric. Through a detailed reading of the documents, combined with interviews with local architects and planners, this paper positions Tropical Urbanism as an environmentally aware version of New Urbanism and as a distinctive language of urban design emerging in the regional context of tropical Australia. Place-based initiatives such as these are important to improving the design outcomes and sustainability of regional cities, and we suggest Tropical Urbanism could be further reinforced by the social/cultural a...
eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the Tropics
The Tropics is experiencing the fastest growing urbanisation on the planet and faces serious sust... more The Tropics is experiencing the fastest growing urbanisation on the planet and faces serious sustainability issues. This introduction to the eTropic Special Issue on 'Sustainable Tropical Urbanism' calls for a notion of plural sustainabilities in order to critique how urban sustainability has mainly been developed in temperate zones and transferred to tropical regions;; but also, to recognise shared aspects of the Tropics, including climate change and environmental challenges, as well as histories of colonialism and their continuing postcolonial cultural and socioeconomic effects on peoples of the Tropics and their futures. These threads are drawn together under a conceptual trio of Place, Past, and People in order to further explore these similarities and differences. Narrowing the focus to the monsoonal Asia-Pacific region, this Special Issue presents case studies from Khulna and Chittagong in Bangladesh;; Singapore and the Indonesian city of Semarang in Southeast Asia;; and the regional city of Cairns in tropical northeast Australia. This Special Issue of eTropic brings together research articles, scoping reviews and viewpoints from multiple disciplines and interdisciplines to explore the dynamics of sustainable tropical urbanism.
Indoor and Built Environment, 2017
The optimal provision of thermal comfort and energy efficiency for residential housing in the hot... more The optimal provision of thermal comfort and energy efficiency for residential housing in the hot and humid tropics presents challenges and opportunities for housing and subdivision designs. Climatic challenges come in the form of high ambient temperature and humidity, especially during the wet season and transition periods. On the other hand, climatic advantages come in the form of breezes coupled with relatively dry air during the dry season, enabling thermal comfort attainment through natural ventilation that employs prevailing breezes. This paper discusses existing design practices for housing and subdivisions in the hot and humid tropics with particular reference to the city of Darwin in Australia’s Northern Territory. This includes several research issues and gaps that have been identified and need to be addressed. The paper also critically assesses how air speed, air temperature and humidity – three of the thermal comfort parameters – play a key role in housing and subdivisio...
Geographical Research, 2019
This paper extends debates investigating the importance of domestic yards and gardens in shaping ... more This paper extends debates investigating the importance of domestic yards and gardens in shaping identities and the everyday practices and performances of human-nature interaction in a tropical city. It presents findings from a pilot study investigating backyards in a small but ethnically diverse neighbourhood in Cairns, Australia-a site that raises questions about the normative constructions of "nature" in much of the literature. The paper explores how Cairns residents make sense of their backyards, especially in terms of how they relate to them as "tropical". Living in Cairns means managing excess water during the rainy season, dealing with new kinds of pests, and being critically conscious of the temperate bias of Australian garden retailers and house/garden magazines. The paper frames these experiences within a longer tradition of tropicality or a (western) way of making sense of/imagining tropical regions and environmental difference. In so doing, it opens up a new cultural geography of the suburbs, displaces normative constructions of "nature" and shows how the legacies of European colonialism still play out in a dominant Australian culture.
Journal of Urban Design, 2015
This paper critically considers Carmona's Place-shaping Continuum in the context of Cairns in tro... more This paper critically considers Carmona's Place-shaping Continuum in the context of Cairns in tropical north Australia to explore the model's applicability across different cultures and contexts. Drawing from context analysis and interviews with knowing and unknowing urban designers, this research uses a critical policy lens to consider how the process of designing the city for use might apply in Cairns, a regional, tropical city quite different from where Carmona's model of urban design was developed from. Results indicate that in Cairns, the geopolitical, economic, environmental and cultural contexts continue to influence how things are done in the city; there is little to distinguish knowing and unknowing urban designers from one another; and that whilst urban designers consider themselves to have a role in the urban design process, few assume ownership of the process. The paper concludes that Carmona's context elements of place, polity and power are fundamentally important in the application of the model in research practice. 
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Articles in refereed journals by Lisa Law
migration debate, but also provides insights to the counterurbanisation debate in terms of displacing notions of the ‘rural idyll’.
Australia is a popular alternative strategy. While some scholars argue that regional Australia poses an invaluable opportunity for post-pandemic growth by ‘taking o the pressure from the capital cities’; others warn us about the risks of growing regional towns and cities without carefully designed national, regional, and local planning, design, and development strategies. Superimposing planning and development policies meant for metropolitan cities could simply result in transferring the ills of capital cities to regions and exacerbate unsustainable development and heightened socioeconomic inequalities. This opinion piece, by keeping both of these perspectives in mind, explores approaches to regional community and economic development of Australia’s towns and cities, along with identifying sustainable urban growth locations in the post-pandemic era. It also offers new insights that could help re-shape the policy debate on regional growth and development.