Local Market, Ambon

The Centre for Developing Cities is a self funding, not for profit Centre within the University of Canberra. It was founded in 1997, a result of the Habitat Conference in Istanbul, to service an internationally perceived need to increase capacity for urban governance and management in a rapidly urbanising world. The Centre is an international network of academics and practitioners in the area of urban governance, finance, planning and management, managed through a small administrative and academic core at the University of Canberra.

The Centre's strategic focus is to address the major and rapidly growing shortfall in urban infrastructure in Australasia and the Pacific and to research mechanisms to enable its development and management. The approach is based on identifying and developing systems to leverage key pressure points in the governance, finance and administrative environment to enable governments and the private sector to invest and manage integrated urban infrastructure. It is understood that this will differ from country to country and may even differ from region to region within a country. In doing this the centre will be targeting the major priorities areas in improving the performance of cities, namely to;

• Improve the development of urban policy, strategic planning and coordination for urban systems and its nexus with financing mechanisms.
• Improve the financial viability of city region authorities and associated financing mechanisms for the provision of infrastructure and services.
• Improve the sustainability of cities through an integrated approach involving environment, energy, economics and social systems.
• Improve the capacity of city region governance and administration and of the individual authorities of which it is comprised to develop and manage integrated urban infrastructure.

It will be dependent on and utilise the synergies of cross disciplinary research/consultancy and education.

Values of the Centre:

The Centre seeks to enable the integrated development and management of urban infrastructure

Its values are

• Quality in outputs (consultancy, publications and education)
• Integrated cross disciplinary approach to problem solving
• Enabling sustainable systems and environments rather than developing them
• Responsive to client and communities
• Encouraging team research