Held every two years it is now 20 years since the first conference — then known as the State of Australian Cities — took place in Sydney in 2003.

On top of this 20-year milestone it was the first time that the conference, widely known as SOAC, has been held in Aotearoa New Zealand, and the first to be held with direct input from an Indigenous Caucus.

Within a head-spinning programme that featured the fast-paced delivery of 250 research papers, the event was grounded from day one by a mana whenua panel that opened the door to te ao Māori for the many manuhiri (visitors) from Australia and further afield.

The 2023 edition of SOAC was certainly set apart by what keynote speaker and newly elected Parliamentarian, Tamatha Paul, called a ‘youthquake’ at the conference.

This was constituted in part by Paul herself, as well as conference panels that drew rangatahi speakers from the ambitious Generation Kainga project being run by Pūrangakura, an independent kaupapa research centre based in Tāmaki Makaurau.

The new Green MP spoke about her background as a young person in Tokoroa, as a president of the Victoria University of Wellington Student Association and as a Wellington City Councillor.

“The work you’re all doing in urban planning is powerful mahi,” said Paul.

She urged all present to remember that with power comes responsibility, adding the message that “these are deeply political times we’re living in, so believing you’re non-political is a problem”.

Acknowledging that she has yet to put her recently gained Master of Resource and Environmental Planning from Massey University into practice, Paul challenged her audience to ensure they combine a focus on community organising and activism alongside their formal academic and professional working lives.

“That’s what I intend to do in Parliament,” she said. “I want to be more of an organiser in the way I do things, and less of a politician.”

It was noted during questions from the audience that Paul now joins Green Party colleague Julie-Anne Genter, who holds a Master of Planning Practice degree from the University of Auckland, as one of the few voices in the new Parliament with both sets of expertise.

Another provocative keynote was delivered by public health physician, Dr Rhys Jones, an acclaimed associate professor at University of Auckland, who argued for greater awareness of the need to abandon status-quo, business as usual responses to climate change.

As could be expected, SOAC 2023 had a strong focus on climate change, with up to 18 papers covering issues like the varied impacts of flooding, different forms of managed retreat and ways to mitigate extreme heatwaves.

Papers delivered in parallel sessions during the three-day conference were arranged under nine city-focused themes or tracks: Housing (up to 40 papers), nature and environment (34), governance (31), health and liveability (30), design (25), movement and infrastructure (24), city cultures (24), economies (23) and reckoning with settler colonial cities (12).

Many papers raised questions about, or proposed insights into, lesser known topics (replete with buzzword bingo) such as:

• how the historical and urban form of city-places can shape music.
• a model for measuring sounds in the urban environment in order to create spaces with more enjoyable/accessible soundscapes.
• options for repairing memory and place by daylighting underground streams.
• the demographics of nocturnal workforces.
• the potential co-option of YIMBY groups by developers.
• ways that being a NIMBY are clouded by nostalgia and sense of attachment.
• the phenomenon of philanthro-policymaking spawned by former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomfield
• the opening up of closed cemeteries to new interments.
• the role played by street posters as unacknowledged archives of urban cultures and spatial production in cities.
• the unintended role of old TV programmes — like the Australian TV series ‘Homicide’ — in capturing visual histories of cities.
• development of a Spatial Provocateur Design Ecology to map interventions by artist-architect-activists, utilising the example of US architecture firm Rael San Fratello and their creation the Teeter-Totter Wall.
• elevating the link between the arts and mental wellbeing through facilitating trauma-informed design in the built environment.

A special element of SOAC is that it also includes a 3-day PhD Symposium beforehand. The symposium acts as an incubator where this year’s group of 64 students were paired with mentors. They also took part in workshops on how to make their ‘research voice’ heard — run by popular podcaster Dallas Rogers of the University of Sydney — and one on ways that research generates impact — run by University of Melbourne urban planning academic Crystal Legacy.

Legacy: “I’ve been attending SOAC since 2009 when I was still a PhD candidate. I believe the impact our community of researchers can have is wide-ranging (especially) when it speaks to the complex social, ecological and climate justice challenges of our times.”

Later in the conference Legacy delivered the Pat Troy Memorial Lecture. Carrying the title ‘Infrastructural gaslighting and the crisis of participatory planning’ her lecture was very much in line with advice she had given to students that being “a ‘public scholar’, someone who is publicly engaged and engages in publicly spirited research, brings both privileges and challenges”.

Legacy described the prevalence of gaslighting — experienced, say, when the authority of a researcher is undermined by a dominant person or institution — as “something we need to talk about more.”

She expressed gratitude for being part of “a community of urban scholars speaking truth to power,” adding “I hope more spaces will open for these kinds of conversations into the future.”

The depth and strength of the SOAC community was further demonstrated when a series of awards were presented last Thursday night at the Wharewaka on Wellington’s waterfront.

Two new names were added to recipients of the Australasian Cities Research Network medal which is awarded in recognition of a sustained and outstanding service contribution to the ACRN community and to urban research scholarship and policy. Those new medalists are University of Sydney Professor Nicole Gurran and Professor Claire Freeman, of Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington.

Based on the quality of her studies into mainstreaming nature-based solutions in cities, PhD student Clare Harrison of Swinburne University received a Peter Harrison Award, and a paper by a team of Australian National University researchers on the increase of superdiversity in urban Australia took out the open category of the same award.

The awarding of prizes was rounded out by the first-ever Australasian Early Career Urban Research Network (AECURN) Award, presented equally to Laura Goh of the University of Sydney and to Zheng Chin of Monash University. A tribute paid to Chin, who couldn’t be present, was that “if the future doesn’t include researchers like Zheng Chin then we won’t have a future.”

Conference co-chair Mirjam Schindler, an urban geographer at Victoria University, said being a co-host for the SOAC debut in Aotearoa, along with Waikato University’s Iain White and Te Wānanga o Aotearoa’s Rebecca Kiddle was an immensely rewarding experience.

“This event sets such a great benchmark for the relevance of urban scholarship. It’s something we couldn’t have done without the support of main sponsors like the National Science Challenge Building Better Homes Towns and Cities and Toka Tū Ake EQC, or without our crew of volunteers,” said Schindler.

“As we all know the decisions that are taken every year around city-building and urban planning result in stark social, spatial, environmental and economic choices and consequences. We need to be well informed to debate those choices and consequences in far more depth if we are going to collectively navigate a better future.”

Conference updates can be seen on the SOAC 2023 LinkedIn page, and for a limited time an archive of past research is available to access at Australia’s Analysis & Policy Observatory.

Previous programmes can be accessed on the Australasian Cities Research Network (ACRN) site.