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High-density development requires large land parcels, but fragmented land ownership can impede redevelopment. While earlier compact city development in Sydney occurred on large-scale brownfield sites, redeveloping and re-amalgamating older strata-titled properties is now integral to further densification. The purpose of this study is to examine collective sales activity in one Sydney suburb where multiple strata-titled redevelopments and re-amalgamations have been attempted. The authors explore how owners navigate the process of selling collectively, focusing on their experience of legislation introduced to facilitate this process, the Strata Schemes Development Act 2015 [New South Wales (NSW)].

By reviewing sales listings, development applications and media coverage, and interviewing owners, lawyers and estate agents, the authors map out collective sale activity in a case study area in Sydney’s northwest.

Strata collective sales are slow and difficult to complete, even when planning and market drivers align. Owners find the Strata Scheme Development Act 2015 (NSW) difficult to navigate and it has not prevented strategic blocking attempts by competing developers. The long timelines required to organise collective sales can result in failure if the market shifts in the interim. Nonetheless, owners remain interested in selling collectively.

This case study is important for understanding the barriers to redevelopment to achieve a more compact city. It highlights lessons for other jurisdictions considering similar legislative changes. It also suggests that legislative change alone is insufficient to resolve the planning challenges created by hyper-fragmentation of land through strata-title development.

Cities are continually built and unbuilt (Hommels, 2005), reflecting cycles of investment and disinvestment across space, the machinations of housing and urban policy interventions, and shifting patterns of household need, demand, choice and constraint. The drivers of change are fluid and reflect shifting political, institutional, technological, environmental and socio-economic contexts. Urban landscapes evolve in concert with these changes, but the built environment tends to be defined more in terms of spatial fixity and the path-dependency of physical fabric. Suburban neighbourhoods register this dynamism in different ways as they have flourished, declined and subsequently revalorised over time. Changes initiated through redevelopment, from large-scale public renewal to alterations and renovations by individual owner-occupiers, are long-standing signifiers of reinvestment (Montgomery, 1992; Munro & Leather, 2000; Whitehand & Carr, 2001). Our concern here relates to a particular form of incremental suburban renewal: the increasing significance of private ‘knockdown rebuild’ (KDR) activity. KDR refers to the wholesale demolition and replacement of single homes on individual lots. We are interested in the scale and manifestations of this under-researched process and, in particular, the new insights offered to debates regarding gentrification, residential mobility and choice, and in turn, potential implications for metropolitan housing and planning policy. Our focus is Sydney, Australia.

The purpose of this paper is to use the example of public housing renewal public‐private partnerships (PPPs) to build knowledge on whether social infrastructure PPPs may appeal to the private sector as a less risky investment in a time of global financial uncertainty.

The research is based on an international literature review and a limited number of semi‐structured interviews with social housing PPP participants in England, the USA and Australia. These interviews were conducted by Dr Gilmour as part of his doctoral research in 2008.

The familiar distinction between social and other forms of infrastructure PPPs has been found to be unhelpful in the case of public housing renewal. This type of PPPs, through their cross‐subsidisation model, face relatively high revenue risk during a recession. However, the commitment of the public sector to the social goals of such projects suggests contract negotiation rather than default is likely if problems occur. PPP risks need to be understood by studying their detailed contract terms, rather than by broad categorisations.

This paper provides a grounded discussion rather than detailed research findings. Only a small number of projects are included and they are not necessarily representative. Cross‐national comparison is challenging because of different housing policies and economic conditions.

This paper fills a gap in the literature by both contrasting approaches to a particular type of social infrastructure PPP in different countries, and by making an early assessment of the likely impact of recent turbulence in financial and property markets.

World population is expected to increase by some 2.6 billion from 6.9 billion in 2010 to more than 9.5 billion by mid-century. Most of this population increase will occur in the developing nations, and most of this increase will be absorbed in the rapidly expanding metropolitan regions of these countries – the so-called megacities of the twenty-first century (United Nations, 2009). And as urban development accelerates across the globe, most of the population increase will occur in the emerging megacities and other metropolitan areas in Africa, Asia and South America. Because the original areas of settlement in the city centre have long been established, much of the population increase in these metropolitan regions will occur in the suburban areas of cities in the Global South – areas of favelas and shanty towns alongside earlier middle-class and upper-class suburbs, newly planned gated communities and garden suburbs, and indigenous models of suburban growth that will emerge in the next century.