Architecture, Building and Planning - Theses

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    Comparison of measured and perceived fundamental characteristics to identify strategies for increasing the rate of daily walking in suburban areas
    Panawannage, Thanuja Dilrucshi Nandapala ( 2020-07)
    Future cities will increasingly face health, socio-economic and environmental problems, including disease, social isolation, economic breakdown, excessive carbon dioxide emissions, climate change, and fossil fuel depletion. The planning and design of neighbourhoods which provide high levels of pedestrian accessibility to daily needs destinations such as schools, grocery shops, greenspaces and public transport could contribute to solutions to these problems by the reduction of car-based travel. Future cities need to be walkable based on solutions that can be achieved through better planning and design which takes into consideration accessibility as well as Key Urban Place Characteristics (KUPCs). The author considers walkability to be formed by two factors: the first, accessibility, is the distance to daily needs destinations, and the second is KUPCs, the safety and security, comfort, and attractiveness of the walk to those daily needs’ destinations. Although many suburban neighbourhoods in Melbourne have good access to daily needs, people who live in these areas often choose to drive to their destinations rather than walk. This may be due to negative perceptions of the place and the lack of fundamental place characteristics. The aim of this research is to identify strategies to increase rates of daily walking based on an understanding of the relationship between urban place characteristics and accessibility in suburban neighbourhoods. Therefore, the author has chosen four case studies; two international best practice case studies to validate a theoretical framework obtained from the best practice literature, and an in-depth examination of two local case studies in Melbourne using the validated theoretical framework to assess the scale of walkability in the most accessible areas in selected suburban samples. Both quantitative and qualitative methods are used in this study, in keeping with a sequential explanatory design mixed-method approach. Data collection was conducted using mapping, urban informatics, desktop analysis, field observations of KUPCs, and face-to-face interviews with residents. The analysis of walking-related values using key research studies provided opportunities to reveal the most important characteristics needed for walking to daily needs in the case studies. These results were used to identify strategies for increasing the rate of daily walking in suburban areas.
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    Transformative processes for architectural design: a heuristic study of regenerative practices
    Rojas Gracia, Angelica ( 2020)
    This research investigates the role of design processes in nurturing initiatives and outcomes beyond the provision of physical infrastructure. Intertwining theory and practice, the research approach combines Heuristic Inquiry, Case Study and Design Research methods. Building on the literature and two case studies in Australia and Colombia, this thesis proposes the Enabling Design Process approach (EDP). The EDP recognises the ‘regenerative’ and ‘transformational’ capacity of design processes to nurturing collective and individual actions towards more inclusive, resilient and beneficial interactions in the creation of a project. The thesis starts by exploring literature that provides a planetary context to design processes, such as the concept of Transitions, the Ecological Worldview and the Social-Ecological System. Then it examines existing and emerging approaches in design, including literature that argues for the need to expand both the accessibility and agency of architectural design practice. The case studies provide demonstrations about how the different concepts in the literature work in practice allowing the emergence of the creative synthesis - The Enabling Design Process approach. The creative synthesis brings literature and case studies together to propose principles, capabilities and activities to apply to the design process of projects. The design process to rebuild a school project in Nepal offered a learning opportunity to put the creative synthesis into practice, providing insights into the potential and challenges of its application. The thesis concludes by discussing the possibilities of applying Enabling Design Processes in future projects and the ability of these processes to enable agency (individual and collective), support communities through significant change and to increase living systems awareness while designing built environments. This thesis offers four main contributions. The first is linking different theories through practice and, by doing so, contributing to various bodies of literature. The second is a methodological contribution to research in design and creative practices. The third is highlighting close connections between design and the social context, making design a process of ongoing dialogue able to raise levels of mutual understanding. The fourth is a design approach that enables designers and stakeholders of built environments to nurture social, ecological and personal development. By providing an intersection between different bodies of literature through practice, the thesis contributes to Transition theory, Regenerative Design and Development and Agency in design practice literature.
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    INDONESIAN ARCHITECTS AND BEING INDONESIAN: Contemporary Context of Nusantaran Architecture in Architectural Design and Theory
    Purwaningrum, Diah Asih ( 2020)
    Architecture has played a central role in the imagining and construction of national identity in many postcolonial nations, including Indonesia. The construction of a certain architectural identity for Indonesia has accompanied the rise of succession of political regimes through the last seven decades. This process, which involves the participation of generations of Indonesian architects, is an unfinished and contested endeavour. In the 1980s, when the conception of ‘Indonesian Architecture’ was problematised by Indonesian architects and architecture scholars for its vagueness and unclarity, a new conception of ‘Nusantaran Architecture’ was launched. It was promoted as an ‘alternative’ direction in representing the country’s national identity. It situates Indonesia’s diverse traditional architecture as the ‘authentic’ source of ideas for contemporary architectural development. However, despite being driven by the aim to locate the nation’s unique architectural identity and to free itself from the shadow of colonial hegemony, this imagining of national identity is still governed by the hegemonic binary thinking of the East versus West comparison. The imagining of the nation’s architectural identity has instead unfolded as a creation of an ‘exotic’ architectural maker of the country, an attempt to distinguished the nation as being the non-Western ‘Other’. Many studies have come to investigate the construction and contestation of Indonesia’s architectural identity as a field of political practices where power relations are enforced and legitimated, an unfinished internal dispute of dominance among the country’s multifaceted society (e.g. Achmadi (2006, 2007); Kusno (2000, 2010a, 2013); Permanasari (2007)). In this case, not only that Nusantaran Architecture has been adopted by the national government as both slogan, conception, and eventually an architectural representation of the country’s identity and as jargon for the country’s national tourism agenda, but it has also become a narrative to separate and distinguish what is perceived to be the ‘authentic’ culture from the ‘contaminated’. With the inclination to focus solely on ‘culture’, and with the glorification of a certain distant past as the official state narrative of the country’s national history to which the country has to reorient itself, contemporary development of the national identity discussion has put Nusantaran Architecture as the pristine, exotic, pre-existing and apolitical. This becomes a problematic predisposition that calls for debates among different actors and stakeholders in the country. Nusantaran Architecture thus becomes an object of a dispute through which its meaning is both fortified and challenged by its diverse proponents and opponents, between the academic scholars, the architects, and the national government. This thesis mainly explores the perspective of Indonesia’s professional architects and academic scholars in seeing Nusantaran Architecture as part of the discussion of architectural identity. Not only that this thesis intends to compare the practical stance to the theoretical perspective of this debate, but it also aims to scrutinise the contrasting views, to see the gap in the knowledge production of this conception. On one side of the groups, some architects and academic scholars support the conception of Nusantaran Architecture in a somewhat dogmatic way, by idealising a certain cultural ‘other’ while incorporating a narrative of Indonesia’s certain glorious past to legitimate the standpoint. On the other side, the opposing group questions the definition of Nusantaran Architecture and how it would sit in the discussion of Indonesia’s national identity, and further problematises the conception amidst the social, political, historical and economic complexities that need beyond formalist and essentialist approach in solving the problem. By analysing both the pros and the cons, this thesis tries to examine the arguments that each group puts forward, to map how the debate develops among different actors with different backgrounds in different cities, and to understand better the conception of Nusantaran Architecture from different perspectives. This thesis further demonstrates how architecture has become a manifestation in maintaining certain assumptions regarding the country’s cultural otherness, that helps to perpetuate a specific framing in directing contemporary development of the built environment. Interestingly, the glorified narrative of Nusantaran Architecture falls flat in the process of designing contemporary architecture, as the conception, in the end, is merely translated no further than its connection to the local context and remains in the level of metaphor sphere. It hence leaves no particularity in the translation of Nusantaran Architecture into built form. Deconstructing the canonical conceptions of Nusantaran Architecture within its continuous social and political challenges provides a space in which the dynamic imagining of the country’s architectural identity can be reclaimed. Attempting to transcend the debates on Indonesia’s architectural identity construction, this thesis offers a constructive rereading from the perspective of the field of critical studies of architecture in the 21st century postcolonial context. Beyond the claim of being pre-existing, there is power domination plays in orchestrating the construction of Nusantaran Architecture that has created a significant distance to the people, as identity representation is crafted to serve a certain group of people with power. The highlight over an officially selected authenticity and the indigeneity represent the legacy of Orientalism in the postcolonial world, paradoxical to the claim of an inherent anti-colonial spirit within the conception of Nusantaran Architecture. With an appropriation to conform with the need of the cultural tourism industry, Nusantaran Architecture has turned to be an instrument of capitalistic business.
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    The instruments of transitional urbanism: The mobilisation of temporary-use projects in state- and market-led urban development
    Moore, Timothy John ( 2020)
    Research in “temporary-use” urbanism — the interim use of vacant land and buildings — has identified a shift from a citizen-driven process to one enabled and managed by the state and the market. Amid this colossal pantomime of actors, projects, plans and capital, however, the field lacks studies of the value in co-opting this short-term activity for larger-scale urban development. These values, or useful benefits of temporary-use projects, impact a range of areas including urban design, architecture, planning, policy and property development. This dissertation argues that the longer-term value of temporary-use projects for urban development are embedded in knowledge hidden within organisations and actors. Through a comparative research framework, this dissertation examines how specific value can be transferred to larger-scale urban development via people and projects.
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    Organisations’ and employees’ acceptance of activity based working (ABW) offices: an examination on the throughput and outputs
    Sim, Eileen ( 2020)
    This thesis revealed the role of organisations’ acceptance and employees’ acceptance of Activity Based Working offices (ABW) in employees’ take up of opportunities for action within the ABW. These opportunities are better known as “affordances” and those taken up by employees within the ABW offices includes activities that employees conduct at the worksettings provided. ABW is a form of innovative Third Generation workplace that consists of a large variety of unassigned worksettings occupied exclusively by a single organisation. ABW is purported to achieve several Corporate Real Estate (CRE) strategies due to worksetting sharing and worksettings that better support the affordances that employees take up. The existing literature has identified that there is inconsistent achievement of certain CRE strategies due to the inconsistent take up of affordances, a form of behavioural acceptance. Several drivers causing inconsistent acceptance of the ABW were influenced by the ABW Implementation Process that has been under-researched. There has also been limited in-depth studies on ABW Outputs based on employees’ affective, behavioural and cognitive acceptance of the ABW as existing studies are largely quantitative evaluations of organisations’ achievement of their CRE strategies. Many of the inconsistencies found in the literature were fragmented as they were gathered from several studies with a lack of in-depth holistic studies to identify the links between the inconsistencies found. This thesis argued that inconsistent achievement of ABW CRE strategies is traceable to limitations in organisations’ acceptance of, employees’ acceptance of, and employees’ take up of these innovative workplace affordances. Organisations’ acceptance is the ABW Throughput that includes the ABW Implementation Process and the implementation strategies pursued. Employees’ acceptance, a form of ABW Output, was redefined in the Employee Acceptance Model in terms of their affective, cognitive and behavioural acceptance towards the various worksettings and the workplace guidelines. Both forms of ABW acceptance were studied in-depth through a multiple case study research methodology using three cases of financial institutions from Australia and New Zealand. The results support that employees’ take up of affordances within the ABW were attributable to the organisation’s and employees’ acceptance of the ABW. Business-driven implementation strategies were superior to Process-Solution-oriented strategies as the implementation steps were conducted more extensively. The Implementation Process impacted employees’ acceptance of the ABW through the extent of employee engagement or involvement that educated them about the ABW; and it determined the organisation’s success in translating employees’ needs into the affordances designed within the ABW. Organisations’ acceptance resulted in different interpretations of ABW with low visual resemblance across those ABWs but they are still identifiable through their defining principles. With employees’ acceptance of the various worksettings, employees formed affective responses towards the worksetting features designed. More positive affective responses led to positive behavioural responses, that is higher take up of affordances that resulted in higher utilisation. This increased space pressure for highly demanded worksettings. Affective responses were also subject to change over time indicating the importance of Phase 3 of the Implementation Process to maintain the affective responses towards the workplace. From studying the intended and emergent affordances offered by the worksetting variety, it was found that employees took up affordances that scored positively, moderately and negatively in terms of their cognitive responses; whilst some intended affordances were not taken up. Overall, space pressure was a common contributor in employees’ affective and cognitive responses. Whilst highly positive affective and cognitive responses led to high take up of affordances, it led to high space pressure that contributed to unavailable worksettings for employees to take up their desired affordances that led employees to take up affordances at worksettings that received negative affective responses and emergent affordances that poorly supported their activities. This reinforced the importance of Phase 3 of the Implementation Process to monitor and actively manage space pressure within the workplace. Lastly, employees’ acceptance of the workplace guidelines affected their take up of affordances because workplace guidelines promote and restrict employees’ affordance take up. Several drivers that affected acceptance of the workplace guidelines were found. The research made several contributions to knowledge. The primary contribution was the defragmentation of explanators driving employees’ take up of affordances through identifying the role of the physical and functional ABW features, organisations’ ABW acceptance and employees’ ABW acceptance in that take up. Inconsistencies in take up of affordances found in the literature was also found in this study but previous findings have been fragmented across several studies as there has been no previous study that studied the physical and functional ABW features, organisational and employees’ acceptance in such detail within the same study. Therefore, this was the first holistic in-depth study of its kind that provided explanations towards a better understanding of employees’ inconsistent take up of affordances, confirmation and extension to the existing theories. This contribution was supported by testing the Employee Acceptance Model designed and the application of the Theory of Affordance as the theoretical lens. These contributions fall under the domain of innovative workplace change management under CRE Management, Facilities Management and Workplace Change. The implications of COVID-19 on workplaces and the applicability of the learnings from this research that was conducted pre-COVID-19 were addressed at the end of the thesis.
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    Learning environment affordances: Bridging the gap between potential, perception and practice
    Young, Fiona ( 2020)
    Over the past decade, there has been significant investment into new school buildings in Australia. This period of educational facility growth has given rise to the emergence of innovative learning environments (ILEs), spaces which exhibit a wider range of affordances for learning than traditional classrooms. Whilst ILEs are intended to offer more pedagogical opportunities for teachers and students, little is known about how the affordances of ILEs are being used. This study clarifies the concept of affordances within the context of physical learning environments, identifies how affordances are perceived by architects and teachers, and synthesises a range of strategies to support teachers to take advantage of ILE affordances to enhance deeper learning. The research is embedded within an Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Project called Innovative Learning Environments and Teacher Change (ILETC), which investigates how teachers across Australia and New Zealand can be supported to use ILEs to achieve deep learning goals for their students. This qualitative research project was conducted as two distinct studies. The first study involved investigating teachers’ and architects’ perceptions of affordances for learning across traditional and ILE spaces in five educational facilities. The second study investigated teachers’ understandings and use of affordances in support of pedagogies for deep learning. An innovative methodological pairing of participatory action research (PAR) and co-design was employed to work with teachers from two secondary schools to develop understandings of the processes by which new learning spaces can be actioned for deep learning. Data were collected through workshops, semi-structured interviews and teacher reflections. Findings show differences in the perceptions of teachers and architects with respect to learning environment affordances, with teachers found to perceive more affordances for learning than architects. A taxonomy of affordances for varied teaching and learning approaches was also identified. Furthermore, strategies were developed to support teachers to take advantage of the affordances of ILEs. These strategies related to connections between infrastructure, school organisation and teacher practice.
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    The Architecture of China's Christian Universities: A Semiotic Study
    Xie, Yinrui ( 2020)
    Architecture carries meanings, especially in the case of cultural and religious buildings when architecture is often intended to overtly demonstrate symbolic meanings. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, thirteen Christian universities were built in China by British and American missionaries to facilitate religious propoganda. In the quasi-colonial context of China, the university buildings, designed by Western architects, imitated local Chinese architecture in order to pacify local resistance. Chinese architectural elements were carefully adopted and combined with Western ones to express abundant meanings: the universities’ respectful attitude towards Chinese culture and Chinese people, the educational ideal of the universities to synthesise Western and Chinese education systems, and so on. But were the architectural meanings interpreted in the same way as envisioned by the designers? How efficacious was this architectural communication? The cross-cultural context made the situation even more complicated. The meanings embedded in the university buildings were interpreted by various groups of people from different cultural backgrounds: the Western missionaries and architects, Western media, staff from both China and the West, the Chinese students, the local government, and ordinary Chinese people. Each of them derived different meanings from the buildings with their own encyclopaedic knowledge. This leads to another question: How should the meaning of architecture be studied in cross-cultural contexts? This thesis explores the architectural history of China’s Christian universities constructed by Western missionaries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Focusing on the interaction between architecture, politics, and culture, the thesis analyses how the Christian campuses were constructed against the complex socio-cultural context of modern China. Informed by semiotic theories, cross-cultural architectural “communication” between various groups at the campuses is examined, with a model describing architectural communication in cross-cultural contexts constructed and tested through analysis of case studies.
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    Public Rental Housing Provision for Migrant Workers in Chongqing, China: A Case Study from an Urban Justice Perspective
    Cheung, Ka Ling ( 2020)
    This thesis examines the experience of Chongqing’s public rental housing (PRH) provision and the expanding access to public housing by migrant workers from an urban justice perspective. Over the past several decades, China’s urban housing provision has experienced significant changes, transforming from a socialist welfare- to a more market-oriented housing system and more recently, a return to the public housing resurgence. The city of Chongqing, the largest southwestern Chinese city, has launched China’s largest PRH programme which is accessible to migrant workers following the removal of the hukou residence restriction against them. The new model of Chongqing’s PRH provision demonstrates the potential of making transformative urban changes to reduce inequality and improve social welfare of urban disadvantaged groups such as migrant workers. This thesis investigates the seeking of urban justice in China’s transitional context through a large-scale public housing programme in Chongqing. Building upon Fainstein’s (2010) Just City theory, this thesis develops a conceptual framework to evaluate the role of public housing provision using equity, diversity, and democracy as core criteria. To operationalise the evaluation, the proposed conceptual framework brings different analytical approaches at interfaces between Jessop, Brenner and Jones’ (2008) multi-dimensional socio-spatiality and the capabilities approach to explore the impact of state policy on citizens’ well-being. The framework is applied to Chongqing’s case to analyse the multiple forms of socio-spatial intervention into public housing and the capabilities enhancement of migrant workers in Chongqing. The findings show that Chongqing’s large-scale and progressive PRH programme has been implemented within an exceptionally short period of time under a powerful state intervention and control through mobilising different socio-spatial strategies. The provision of PRH has transformed urban living conditions that the migrant workers have experienced substantial capabilities enhancement after moving to PRH. Chongqing’s PRH policy has contributed to greater urban justice through redistributive public endeavours and recognition of migrant workers’ housing right. However, this thesis reveals the lack of democratic norms in urban policy-making that progressive urban change is likely to hang on state initiatives and benevolent leadership in China’s Party-state context. Chongqing’s transforming housing justice is derived from the Chinese contextual specificity. The findings shed lights on the theoretical concern of urban justice in China’s transitional context. This thesis also provides a more nuanced understanding of China’s public housing provision and its influences on welfare distribution and citizens’ well-being at the current stage of the housing reform.
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    Spatial planning to promote settlements’ resilience to bushfires
    Gonzalez Mathiesen, Maria Constanza ( 2020)
    Bushfire hazards can pose significant risks at bushfire-prone urban-rural interfaces and peri-urban areas, highlighting the need to manage bushfire risk in relation to settlements’ planning and governance. Settlements’ resilience to bushfires can be purposively facilitated by the development and application of bushfire risk management knowledge. Spatial planning has the potential to support learning about and acting upon changing conditions and new bushfire information to promote settlements’ resilience to bushfires. However, the translation of new bushfire knowledge into meaningful spatial planning practices has been limited and spatial planning systems often struggle to integrate bushfire risk management. Thus, this research aims to contribute to understandings of spatial planning ability to improve its practices by identifying, reframing, and putting into action new considerations about bushfire risk management to promote settlements’ resilience to bushfires. This research used an inductive qualitative research approach employing two case studies: the spatial planning systems of Chile and Victoria (Australia). Qualitative data was collected from documentation, archival records, and semi-structured interviews. The data was analysed using time-series analysis, qualitative content analysis, and cross-case synthesis techniques. The research was divided into four stages, two stages correspond to the individual case study analysis and the remaining two to cross-case synthesis and discussion. The research concludes that the Chilean and Victorian spatial planning systems are still constrained in their promotion of settlements’ resilience to bushfires due to internal and external complexities that frame and limit their ability for bushfire risk management. In Chile, there have been several mostly unsuccessful attempts to integrate bushfire considerations into the spatial planning system, thus the current system only outlines spatial planning mechanisms for bushfire risk management generically and inapplicably. In Victoria, the spatial planning system has partially and progressively improved its ways for dealing with bushfires, however, the current system still considers bushfire risk management partially and sometimes ambiguously. In practice, this implies that both spatial planning systems are sometimes allowing and even promoting settlements patterns that perpetuate bushfire risks. Based on a cross-case synthesis, the research concludes that spatial planning instruments that comprehensively address bushfires are necessary, suggesting an integrated approach that undertakes bushfire risk management at the strategic, tactical, and operational levels of planning mechanisms and processes. This approach establishes the instruments’ role in bushfire risk management and other factors that provide directions for improving their ability to promote settlements’ resilience to bushfire. Furthermore, the research also concludes that reflexive processes are not always conducive to the development and improvement of spatial planning systems for bushfire risk management, due to the variance of willingness, understanding, and capacity issues within the system and in the wider context. Accordingly, thesis propositions about the barriers and facilitators that influence spatial planning progressing from the identification, to the reframing and implementation of change about bushfire risk management were suggested.
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    Scalar politics and the planning of high-speed rail stations in Wuhan, China
    Yang, Yuelong ( 2020)
    High-speed rail (HSR) stations are nodes and places that involve multi-sector and multi-scalar decision-making in their planning and development. Nevertheless, the current literature has focused much on the inter-sector interplays but is lopsided by a lack of understanding of the multi-scalar interactions. It leaves several theoretical gaps in the study of scalar politics and empirical gaps in interrogating how scalar politics have unfolded around HSR station planning and development. A scale-sensitive analytical framework and empirical evidence are needed to develop a ‘balanced theorisation’ of the interlocking relationships between HSR station area planning, development and the scalar structure as well as the inter-scalar interactions. This research seeks to address the theoretical and empirical research gaps by exploring the multi-scalar decision-making in the planning and development of HSR stations in China, where the relationships between multilevel governments have been transformed profoundly and the HSR network has been built rapidly. The thesis uses a scale-sensitive framework to investigate inter-scalar interactions among multilevel governments and authorities, especially concerning the strategies and policies crossing the rigid and inherited territorial scale of governments. Three inter-related questions are in focus: (a) what kinds of institutional/policy settings are responsible for the complicated relationships alternating between confliction and cooperation among the various stakeholders in decision-making associated with HSR station planning and development? (b) how do stakeholders manage their resources, opportunities, and interests for cooperation with and competition against each other in the multi-scalar setting? (c) what planning outcomes are observed, and to what extent have the inter-scalar interactions impacted the existing scalar structure? The research is conducted in the context of metropolitan Wuhan, where rapid changes in the urban built-up area, metropolitan boundary, government jurisdictions and responsibilities are prominent. Three HSR stations in Wuhan are used as case studies to probe into the decision-making processes. Conceptually, the research draws on insights from the existing literature about HSR planning, multi-level governance and scalar theories in planning, including indigenous Chinese governance concepts to which many Western ideas about scale are applied. The analyses focused on both primary and secondary information, including face-to-face interview data gathered from key informants selected from multilevel governments, planning institutions, universities, and the private sector, field reconnaissance data (observation notes and field photographs), planning and policy documents, minutes of meetings, maps, published works, and press articles. The research findings reveal that the planning and development of the three case study HSR stations are products of scalar politics centred on Wuhan. The scalar structure does not only define the scalar division of resources, responsibilities and power among multi-scalar actors but also raises different expectations towards the station projects. Multi-scalar actors deploy different strategies (competition, cooperation, or inactions) to effectively manipulate the discursive and material dimensions of scale in pursuit of their place-dependent interests. The interactions and inactions between them finally lead to the planning and development outcomes (i.e., site selection, land use planning and transport connections). The fast-evolving nature of the scalar structure in the HSR planning regime results in both inter-scalar tensions and cooperation opportunities between stakeholders in the multi-scalar context. Not only the tensions but also the shared interests between them can lead to inter-scalar interactions, which shape the planning and development outcome and further trigger scalar restructuring. Unlike the intensive interplay that unfolded between multi-scalar governments in site selection where overlaps of institutional responsibilities exist, the governments chose not to engage with each other in the integrated development proposal but cooperated in intraurban transport connections. The out-of-date institutions, or the lack thereof, combined with the lack of appropriate incentives, hampered the implementation of integrated station area planning and development. Strong government hands at multiple scales have shaped HSR station area planning and development in China. In contrast, the absence of non-state sector participation, including that from the civil society, in station site selection and station area development, is remarkable. The de facto roles of government agencies played out, in reality, may not accord with the de jure roles defined by their institutional mandate. It is not only because of the outdated institutions (or the lack thereof) but also the institutional overlaps between multi-scalar actors. Within the state sector, the reshuffle of responsibilities, power and resources among institutions at different scales of government over the past couple of decades has provided opportunities for negotiated arrangements either to complement or to replace legalistic, hierarchical institutional relationships. However, the inertia of sectoral behaviour to protect their own interests undermines those integration opportunities.