Can Growth Be Planned? The Case of Melbourne's Urban Periphery.

This article focuses on the challenges of planning for rapid urban growth at the metropolitan fringe, using Melbourne, Australia, as a primary case study. It identifies four key conditions complicating growth management—uncertainty, irreversibility, indivisibility, and interrelatedness of development decisions—and examines how these factors affect land valuation, infrastructure provision, and the sequencing of development within multi-stakeholder local government systems. The research highlights the tension between public sector planning objectives and private developer interests, the difficulties in capturing land value uplifts to fund infrastructure, and the complexity of coordinating growth across large, fragmented urban peripheries. Despite these challenges, the article notes innovations in planning practice and calls for enhanced planning education and research to better address the scale, speed, and spatial extent of contemporary urban fringe development.