Cities and urban settlements in Australia exist on lands that are the traditional lands of Australia’s Indigenous peoples. Yet the fact of continued Indigenous presence, ownership and stewardship of Australian territory remains unrecognised in Australian planning. As a result, the profession is yet to grapple in a just and meaningful way with the fact of Indigeneity in Australian cities. Indeed, planning persistently renders Indigenous people invisible. It consequently marginalises Indigenous people, and perpetuates colonial dispossession. In this paper, we argue that planning in Australia must urgently shift to appreciate these issues, and begin to make amends. This involves understanding how Australian cities and towns can be understood as Indigenous places, and the contemporary ways Aboriginal people are seeking recognition of their rights in cities and towns through processes like native title claims and determinations. We analyse urban native title applications as a key example of the challenges of recognition and the responsibility this lays down to planning.

Biography – Ed Wensing (PhD Scholar, National Centre for Indigenous Studies, The Australian National University, Canberra)

Ed Wensing FPIA is an experienced urban and regional planner and policy analyst with over 40 years’ experience.  Ed holds a Bachelor of Arts from the ANU and technical qualifications from the Canberra Institute of Technology in Cartography, Surveying and Civil Engineering.  Ed has held many positions in government, the private sector and academia, and over the last 18 years he has worked extensively with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and communities, principally on native title, land tenure and urban and regional and environmental planning matters.  

Ed is currently a PhD Scholar at the National Centre for Indigenous Studies at the ANU and a Visiting Fellow at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies.  His research interests are in the just accommodation of customary land rights in conventional land tenure and contemporary land use planning systems.  Ed is an Associate with SGS Economics and Planning, an urban economics and planning consultancy firm with offices in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra, and is a Director of his own consultancy firm, Planning Integration Consultants Pty Ltd.  

Ed also holds Visiting Lecturer posts in the Urban and Regional Planning Program, University of Canberra and in the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Faculty of Science and Engineering, James Cook University, where he teaches a unit on Native Title and Land Use Planning as part of the Graduate Certificate in Planning and Indigenous Communities which Dr Harwood convenes.

 Biography – Libby Porter (Associate Professor and VC's Principal Research Fellow, Centre for Urban Research, RMIT University, Melbourne)

Libby Porter is a scholar in planning and urban geography, based at the Centre for Urban Research, RMIT University where she is Vice Chancellor’s Principal Research Fellow. She has an undergraduate degree in planning from RMIT University, and a PhD in planning from the University of Melbourne. Before joining the academic community, Libby was Senior Researcher with the Victorian State Government in strategic metropolitan and regional planning. Since then, she has taught planning, public policy and geography at the University of Birmingham, the University of Sheffield, the University of Glasgow, and Monash University. 

Libby’s work is principally about dispossession and displacement and the urban processes and effects that produce this. This addresses settler-colonial contexts and the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples, as well as the displacement effects of urban regeneration, the impacts of major sporting events on host cities, and the politics of urban informality. She is author of Unlearning the Colonial Cultures of Planning (Ashgate 2010), and co-editor with Kate Shaw of Whose Urban Renaissance? An international comparison of urban regeneration policies (Routledge 2009). Her new book with Janice Barry is Planning for Co-Existence: Recognising Indigenous Rights through Land Use Planning in Australia and Canada, forthcoming with Ashgate. 

Libby is Assistant Editor of the journal Planning Theory and Practice, and coordinator of the ‘Interface’ section of that journal. She co-founded Planners Network UK, a progressive voice for radical planning in northern Europe and is an active member of Planners Network (North America) and the International Network of Urban Research and Action.