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Australian cities cannot plan well for climate hazards, housing pressure, pollution or infrastructure vulnerability without a strong evidence base. A 2018 analysis by Dorina Pojani, Jaime Olvera Garcia, Neil Sipe and Jason Byrne argued that the country’s urban-planning research base was not receiving funding commensurate with those challenges.
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Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteDriver Scan →Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsFix Now →Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesFind Drivers →The analysis examined Australian Research Council (ARC) projects awarded from 2010 to 2018. It counted A$31.7 million for 91 urban and regional planning projects and found that 59% of planning academics received no ARC grant during that period. Those figures describe the authors’ historical analysis, not ARC funding today, but they show why the article became a warning about the capacity to make evidence-led urban decisions.
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What the 2018 article actually argues
The article, published by The Conversation on 23 February 2018, starts from a practical premise: Australian cities are being asked to solve problems that require long-term, place-specific knowledge, while the academic field that studies planning is comparatively small and unevenly supported.
Pojani, Olvera Garcia, Sipe and Byrne did not present a new audit of every source of urban-policy funding. They analysed ARC awards listed for 2010–2018 and compared planning with several neighbouring disciplines. Their central claim is about capacity. If planning departments have too few funded projects, researchers have less opportunity to test what works, collect local data, train researchers and translate findings into decisions about land, transport, housing and public space.
The authors also connected funding to a reluctance to confront what Professor Patrick Troy called “too many inconvenient truths”. The phrase is included as a short attribution; the article does not provide enough context to treat it as a detailed account of Troy’s position.
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Why planning research matters to Australian cities
The article uses several urban risks to explain why planning research is a public capability rather than an academic luxury. These are motivating issues in the 2018 argument, not a current measurement of how large each risk is.
Climate-related disaster risk
Floods, bushfires, heat and coastal hazards expose the limits of one-size-fits-all planning. Research can examine where development is occurring, how evacuation and transport networks function, which neighbourhoods face compounded disadvantage and how rebuilding decisions alter future exposure. Without credible local evidence, governments may rely on rules that look consistent but perform differently across landscapes and communities.
Air pollution and health
Planning decisions determine the distance between homes, workplaces, schools and major traffic corridors. They also shape walking, cycling and public-transport access. Studying those relationships helps policy-makers distinguish a problem that can be reduced through land-use design from one that requires a different intervention. The article cites air pollution as a reason to support this type of work; it does not claim that a particular Australian city has solved or worsened the problem since 2018.
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Housing affordability
Housing costs are affected by more than the number of dwellings. Planning research can test how zoning, infrastructure sequencing, development contributions, transport access and neighbourhood services interact. Evidence is especially important when a policy increases supply in one location but shifts costs, displacement or congestion elsewhere.
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Urban form influences how much households depend on private vehicles and how resilient daily life is when energy prices or supplies change. Research can compare compact and dispersed development, assess access to jobs and services, and identify which households bear the greatest transition costs.
Food and water security
Metropolitan growth changes farmland, catchments, logistics and demand for water. Planning studies can make those connections visible before a crisis, rather than treating food and water as issues separate from urban development.
What the ARC comparison found for 2010–2018
The authors’ project counts and dollar totals are set out below. Every figure refers to ARC projects identified in their analysis for the eight-year period and should not be read as a current annual budget.
| Field | Projects | ARC funding |
|---|---|---|
| Urban and regional planning | 91 | A$31.7 million |
| Human geography | 151 | A$58.8 million |
| Demography | 76 | A$88.7 million |
| Political science | 229 | A$88.7 million |
On the authors’ accounting, planning received the smallest total and the fewest projects among the four fields shown. The comparison is descriptive: it does not adjust for differences in discipline size, average project duration, success rates, eligibility, or the kinds of grants available. It therefore demonstrates a funding gap in the dataset, not a controlled test that one field is more deserving than another.
How widely was funding distributed?
The headline total masks a second issue: many planning academics did not receive an ARC award. Pojani and colleagues report that 59% of planning academics in their analysis received no ARC grant between 2010 and 2018. In other words, the field’s A$31.7 million was concentrated among a minority of academics rather than spread evenly across everyone working in planning.
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The authors also report 59 male-led and 32 female-led planning grants in the period. They calculate that male professors held 6.4 times as many ARC grants as female professors. These are counts and a ratio from the authors’ planning analysis, not a claim that every male professor was funded or that every female professor was excluded.
Because the article does not publish a controlled model of applications, eligibility, career interruptions, institutional resources or review scores, the figures cannot identify a single cause. They do establish that receipt was uneven by career seniority and gender in the set of grants the authors examined.
Why awards may cluster in a small field
The authors offer several possible explanations for the concentration. They describe Australian planning programs as small and note that larger departments tend to win more grants, partly because researchers can submit proposals as teams. A department with several experienced investigators can divide literature reviews, data work, community engagement and administration across a proposal group. A small program may have to do all of that with fewer people and less protected time.
Seniority and experience
Researchers who have already managed grants may know how to frame an ARC proposal, assemble partners, budget fieldwork and respond to reviewer concerns. They may also have a publication record that makes future applications more competitive. The article treats this as a mechanism that can reinforce itself, not as proof that senior researchers are intrinsically better at planning research.
Networks and collaboration
Collaborative networks provide access to specialists, comparative sites and institutional support. They can also make it easier to form a credible team for a large project. When those networks are concentrated in a few universities, the same institutions may appear repeatedly among successful applicants.
Grant-writing capacity and snowballing
The authors discuss a possible “snowballing” effect: an initial award supplies money, experience, preliminary data and visibility that improve the odds of later awards. This is a hypothesis about how cumulative advantage might operate. The 2018 article does not prove that snowballing caused the observed distribution.
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How to read the gender disparity responsibly
The reported 59-to-32 split and the 6.4-times ratio are important equity signals, but they do not by themselves show what happened during peer review. Differences could reflect the composition of the professoriate, who applied, project size, career stage, institutional resources, caring responsibilities, disciplinary boundaries or other factors. The article raises the possibility of broader gender bias, including how review committees operate, but it does not establish discriminatory review as the cause of the outcome.
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A useful policy response is therefore to treat the figures as a reason to examine the whole funding pathway: who is eligible, who submits, who receives mentoring, whose projects obtain internal support, how career breaks are handled and whether assessment criteria reward particular forms of collaboration. Those checks can be undertaken without claiming that the 2018 analysis answered them.
What the article’s cost estimates mean
The article gives an average of A$17,970 per planning academic per year. That is an estimate reported in the 2018 argument, derived from the authors’ funding analysis; it is not a current salary, operating budget or standard grant amount.
It also estimates that a travel survey of 500 people would cost about A$50,000. The figure illustrates why even modest empirical projects need funding for recruitment, fieldwork, travel, data processing and analysis. It is not a price quotation for every survey in Australia. Costs vary with geography, sampling design, incentives, accessibility requirements and whether interviews are conducted face to face or online.
These estimates help explain the practical consequence of a thin funding base. A project may be able to support a narrowly scoped study, yet lack the resources for repeated measurements, multiple cities or meaningful follow-up with communities. That limits what planners can learn about change over time.
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Planning evidence is used at several points in a city’s decision cycle. Early research can identify a risk or inequity before it becomes expensive to fix. Applied studies can compare options for a corridor, neighbourhood or growth area. Evaluation can show whether a policy delivered the expected housing, transport, environmental or social outcomes. If any of those stages is missing, decisions may be guided by short-term indicators or anecdote.
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Small projects also make it harder to build shared datasets and methods. A university team that cannot maintain a longitudinal survey may be unable to tell whether a policy changed travel behaviour. A local study that is never repeated elsewhere may not reveal which findings are transferable. The article’s argument is that a stronger pipeline of planning research would improve the evidence available to governments, practitioners and communities; it does not claim that research alone can resolve political trade-offs.
What funders and universities could examine
The 2018 analysis is not an evaluation of a specific reform, so the following are decision options rather than proven prescriptions. They follow from the problems the authors identify.
- Track planning as a visible category. Publish project counts and funding totals with consistent definitions so that planning is not obscured within broader social-science classifications.
- Support early-career and small-team applicants. Seed grants, proposal development time and mentoring can help researchers who lack a large departmental network, while still subjecting final proposals to independent review.
- Fund data and replication. Small awards for maintaining surveys, open datasets and repeat measurements can make larger projects more useful and allow findings to be tested across cities.
- Audit participation and outcomes. Record applications, success rates, career stage, gender and institution, then publish privacy-protected summaries. This distinguishes a problem of application access from a problem in assessment.
- Build practitioner partnerships carefully. Councils, state agencies and community organisations can improve the relevance of research questions and help translate results, provided independence and publication rights are protected.
- Evaluate the effects of any change. A new scheme should specify what would count as improvement—more eligible applicants, broader institutional participation, better geographic coverage or stronger use of findings—and measure those outcomes over time.
What the figures can—and cannot—tell readers in 2026
The article remains useful as a dated baseline for understanding a funding argument, but it should not be presented as a current report on ARC spending. Its figures stop at 2018 and come from the authors’ classification of projects. ARC rules, grant schemes, university structures, city populations and research priorities may all have changed since then.
Nothing in the analysis supports a claim that planning now receives exactly A$31.7 million, that 59% of today’s planning academics are unfunded, or that the reported gender ratio still has the same value. To assess the present, a reader would need a new, transparent extraction of current ARC data using definitions that can be compared with the earlier work.
The historical evidence does support a narrower conclusion: during 2010–2018, the authors found substantially less ARC funding for urban and regional planning than for the comparison fields they selected, and they found that awards were unevenly distributed within planning. Those findings justify asking how urban research is funded, without pretending that one article settles the question for every year or institution.
A checklist for evaluating claims about planning funding
- Check the period. Identify the first and last year covered before comparing a figure with a current budget.
- Check the unit. Determine whether the number refers to projects, grants, academics, dollars awarded or dollars spent.
- Check the field definition. Planning may be classified separately or embedded in geography, design, transport, public health or another category.
- Check attribution. If a number comes from a published analysis rather than an original funding database, name the analysts and the publication date.
- Check distribution. A field-wide total can rise while most academics remain unfunded if awards are concentrated.
- Separate disparity from cause. An observed difference by gender, seniority or institution is a finding to investigate, not proof of why it occurred.
- Check what is missing. ARC awards are only one funding stream; a comparison may exclude state, local, industry and philanthropic support.
Conclusion
Australian cities need planning evidence that matches the scale and complexity of the decisions they face. The 2018 analysis by Pojani, Olvera Garcia, Sipe and Byrne shows how a relatively small ARC commitment to urban and regional planning, combined with concentrated grant receipt, can leave the field with limited capacity. Its numbers are historical and its explanations are hypotheses, but the underlying question remains precise: whether funding systems give researchers enough opportunity to produce, test and share the knowledge on which better city planning depends.
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