Planning, property, and positionality: an actant network analysis of 'smart planning' at Wyong, New South Wales

This thesis provides a complex reading of residential development and planning in one of Australia's largest and fastest growing greenfield residential locations - Wyong Shire, New South Wales. In particular this research explores the multiple and divergent actants, interactions, and influences which shape the construction of residential property and associated policy frameworks. Residential property at Wyong is positioned as the product of topological enrolments, interactions, and translations which originate from a multiplicity of actants and locations. By mobilising a theoretical and methodological framework centred on Actant Network Theory, yet drawing upon and integrating theoretical insights of economic sociology, economic geography, institutionalism, and theories of planning and property, this research provides a more nuanced, nevertheless complex reading of the interactions with residential development and planning policy. Using three policy frameworks identified by Wyong Shire Council as the 'Smart Planning' option for the future management of population and development pressures influencing the area - Development Control Plan 100 - Quality Housing, the Wyong Conservation Strategy, and the numerous strategies associated with the Warnervale Town Centre - this research positions planning and residential development as the outcome of strategic logic and conflict between the economic and the non-economic, the state and private sector, the human and nonhuman, the institutional and the discursive, and the ideological and the market. Importantly, while driven by and attempting to direct residential development and building within Wyong, these policy translations highlight the value of ANT analysis in illustrating how economic functioning is mediated by a multiplicity of actants traditionally positioned as outside residential development, planning, and economic theorisation (such as endangered species and environmental concerns as illustrated by DCP 100 [Chapter Five] and the Wyong Conservation Strategy [Chapter Six] and topographical and social service concerns enrolled within the Warnervale Town Centre actant network [Chapter Seven]). In this reading residential property is neither the outcome of market operation nor the product of comprehensive planning translations offered by rationalist planning frameworks, but a hybrid of planning, market, conservation, physical, social and ideological actants which interact in specific and shifting ways, beyond the remit of all-encompassing theory.