Planning at the metropolitan scale has two purposes. The first is to provide a framework of public policy to guide and constrain planning decisions made by local government authorities. This ensures that decisions by local authorities are made with reference to wider metropolitan interests, as well as to local concerns. The second purpose is to ensure that the government agencies and private firms that provide urban infrastructure and develop land for various purposes coordinate their actions to support an overarching vision of metropolitan development. Underlying these coordinating functions are the broader purposes of planning that apply at any geographical scale. These are to ensure that cities are spatially structured to maximise their economic productivity and social cohesiveness, as well as minimising their adverse impacts on the biophysical environment.

This chapter discusses the key features of Australian metropolitan planning, as reflected in Australian metropolitan strategies and related policies and processes. First, it elaborates on the notions of vertical and horizontal coordination. Next, it identifies generic elements of metropolitan spatial plans. Finally, it provides a glimpse of future challenges for metropolitan planning. Metropolitan planning is presented as a project in public administration supported by technical knowledge. Although it recognises that politics has a major impact on the effective prosecution of public administration, the chapter is not about the politics of urban governance – in any case, this approach to understanding cities has been well developed by others (for example, Parkin 1982; Stilwell 1993; Gleeson et al. 2004). Neither does the chapter take an historical perspective. Again, others have covered the ground exhaustively; among the many commentaries on the planning of Australian cities are the essays in McLoughlin and Huxley (1986), Freestone (1993) and Hamnett and Freestone (2000).