BA (Hons) Town Planning, South Bank; PhD (Bristol)
Professor of Urban Management and Planning
Deputy Director(Gold Coast), Urban Research Program
Director Griffith Climate Change Response Program
Contact details for Professor Paul Burton
Research Expertise
My research interests and experience span a number of fields:
- Planning ethnographies: identity, purpose and performance among Australian planners
- Theory and practice of public participation and community engagement: the development and application of more robust measures of the costs and benefits of engagement.
- Gold Coast urbanisation: the emergence of a distinctive form of urbanisation and related planning regimes for the Gold Coast.
- Planning and climate change adaptation: relations between citizens and local political institutions in situations of multi-level governance.
- Policy research: how research informs policy processes & how we understand and explain policymaking.
- Evaluation theory and methodologies: developing robust and focussed evaluation designs.
- Local government and local politics: the relations between citizens and their representatives, the challenges of civic leadership, new practices of local democracy, multi-level governance.
- Spaces for democracy: how interior and exterior spaces shape the practices of democratic politics.
Current Teaching
- Convenor of Honours program for final year planning students
- Understanding Australian Cities (1st year course)
Selected Publications
- 2010 Burton, P & Bosman, C. Gerotopia: the rise of master planned communities for retiring Baby Boomers, Queensland Planner, Vol 50, No. 4
- 2010 Smith, I., Dodson, J., Gleeson, B., Burton, P. Growing adaptively? Responding to climate change through spatial planning in England and Australia, Urban Research Program Research Paper 31.
- 2010 Business as usual? Responding to the GFC on the Gold Coast Journal of Australian Political Economy, no 64, Summer 2009/10, pp188-198.
- 2010 Burton, P. and Johnson, L. 'Getting on and getting around: transport, mobility and disadvantage'. in A Climate for Growth, eds B. Gleeson & W. Steele. University of Queensland Press, Brisbane. pp 220-237.
- 2009 'Growing Pains: Adolescent Urbanism on the Gold Coast (PDF 30k)', Paper presented at 2009 State of Australian Cities Conference, Perth.
- 2009 'Conceptual, theoretical and practical issues in measuring the benefits of public participation' Evaluation, vol 15, no 3, pp 263-284.
- 2006 Modernising the Policy Process, Making policy research more significant? Policy Studies, Vol 27, No 3, pp 173-195.
- 2006 How would we know what works? Context and complexity in the evaluation of community involvement (Burton, Goodlad and Croft) Evaluation vol 12 no 3, pp 294-312
- 2005 Effectiveness at what? The processes and impact of community involvement in area-based initiatives, (Goodlad, Burton and Croft) Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy, vol 23, pp 923-938.
- 2004 Power to the people: how to judge public participation, Local Economy, vol 19 no 3, pp 193-198
Current Supervised PhD Projects:
- Johanna Mustelin
- Victor Pires
- Bixia Xu
- Greg Laves
- Rukuh Setiadi
- Sue Kyte
- Kiran Sandhu
- Dale Dickson