Architecture, Building and Planning - Theses
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ItemPublic perceptions of Victorian freshwater wetlands: preference, health and cultural sustainability( 2009)Victorian freshwater wetlands are managed for ecological values. However, successful management depends also on positive public attitudes and perceptions, of which little is known. Wetlands must be culturally sustainable, whereby ecologically healthy wetlands are found attractive and preferred. It is a common belief that wetlands are perceived negatively, despite the presence of water and trees, known to favour preference. Meaning might be an important influence on preference, mediated by the biophysical attributes of a wetland and cultural and personal attitudes. Familiarity might also be important, favouring appreciation with a cognitive aesthetic that includes health as a landscape attribute. Therefore, public perceptions of Victorian freshwater wetlands were studied, including wetland meanings and values and attitudes towards them, relationships between wetland preferences and ecological health, and the influence of familiarity. From these studies, the cultural sustainability of the wetlands was inferred. Management and design guidelines were then developed to enhance cultural sustainability of wetlands to complement their management for ecological sustainability. The project comprised three inter-related studies. Within a landscape assessment framework, adopting a transactional perspective, mixed methods were applied to study objective biophysical attributes of the wetlands and subjective perceptually mediated attributes, or connotative constructs. Using photographic surrogates as stimuli, similarity photo-sorting, open-ended interviews and rating tasks generated numeric and categorical data, which were analysed both qualitatively and quantitatively by content analysis and various statistical techniques. Data-reduction analyses, such as factor analysis, cluster analysis and multidimensional scaling, simplified the rich data set, and categorical principal component analysis with optimal scaling graphically displayed the relationships between perception, preference and health and underlying perceptual constructs. Victorian freshwater wetlands were not perceived as an homogeneous group but rather as distinct categories. Meaning lay in the amount of water visible, the presence of trees, water quality and habitat value. Associated values were predominantly ecologistic-scientific and aesthetic, and attitudes were predominantly positive. Preference for wetlands was generally high, influenced by water visibility, presence of trees, and health, which was indicated by water quality and vegetation lushness, and by complexity and orderliness. It increased with increased familiarity. Although preference varied between the five preferential categories, only preferences between ‘dry wetlands’, ‘open wetlands’ and ‘treed wetlands’ differed significantly. From these results, it was concluded that Victorian freshwater wetlands can be culturally sustainable, whereby ecological and aesthetic values converge. A cognitive aesthetic seemed to operate in the appreciation of wetlands, in which health is important. Managers and designers can draw on the aesthetically relevant attributes to produce ecologically sustainable wetlands that meet aesthetic preferences. They can also implement education programs to enhance familiarity, for knowledge can change preferences.
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ItemThe structure of suburban employment in Melbourne( 2009)A popular view of the suburbs is that they are 'commuter' or 'dormitory' locations that provide workers for the city centre but lack good jobs themselves. An extension of this view — embodied in the epithet 'suburban sprawl' — is the perception that the suburbs lack a visible sense of order or economic structure. However the reality is that the suburbs now host most metropolitan jobs. Economic models commonly assume that this growth is driven by firms looking for lower cost locations than the increasingly congested CBD — and that they can instead obtain some measure of agglomeration economies either in suburban centres or, because of lower transport costs, in scattered suburban locations. Empirical studies have shown that the number of centres in most metropolitan suburbs has increased significantly, however the proportion of suburban jobs located in them has generally fallen. This thesis explores these ideas via analysis of the structure of employment in Melbourne over the 25 year period from 1981 to 2006. It differs from other studies by focussing specifically on the suburbs, using a methodology pitched at the suburban scale. It found that jobs growth occurred overwhelmingly in the suburbs and that both the number of suburban centres and their level of sectoral specialisation increased significantly, indicating that the suburbs were not formless but displayed spatial and economic structure. The research offers two important insights. First, suburban jobs growth was driven primarily by suburban population growth, rather than by firms that would prefer a CBD location. Indeed, suburban jobs eschew a CBD location. Second, while the proportion of jobs located in suburban centres declined, this trend was driven largely by the decline of concentration in the Manufacturing sector and was essentially confined to one region. For the greater part of Melbourne, the proportion of jobs located in suburban centres remained constant and increased in most of the non-goods related sectors. Thus if the decline of Manufacturing is allowed for, the density of employment in centres is still a significant aspect of suburban employment development.