James Whitten
Doctor of Philosophy candidate
Transport Governance, Urban and Regional Planning
Biography
James Whitten is a registered architect and urban designer with 20-years of experience working on professional and academic projects in Australia, North and South America, and South Asia. James’ Ph.D. research investigates the relationship between regional politics, transport planning and urban governance in Australia, using recent proposals for high-speed rail as case studies. He also tutors in urban design, urban governance and participatory planning at The University of Melbourne and, in recent years, has worked as a research assistant at the RMIT Centre for Urban Research and the Swinburne Centre for Urban Transitions.
Thesis
Transforming spatial governance: high-speed rail planning and the regional integration of Hume
Australian governments and private consortiums have been planning high-speed rail since the early-1980s, exploring various corridor alignments and technology options to connect major cities along the eastern seaboard. Despite the introduction of integrated planning policies during this time, high-speed rail proposals developed in recent years envisaged weak connectivity between station infrastructure and regional settlement systems. Justification for weak connectivity in non-metropolitan regions is typically based on a combination of transport planning and urban design considerations, but recent studies of high-speed rail development overseas suggest that this problem has its origins in national systems of multilevel governance.
Taking the Hume Region in northeast Victoria as an illuminative case study, this doctoral thesis aims to understand how networks of local and regional-level actors have organised around the project for high-speed rail to promote an integrated approach to spatial planning. To analyse the relationship between high-speed rail planning and regional governance, spatial governance is conceptualised as a ‘hybridity’ of planning practices enacted through the formal and informal structures of multilevel governance. This framework understands high-speed rail planning as a hybrid spatial politics through which regional communities pursue their development needs and central governments affect programs of economic and political reform by cultivating regional subjects.