Urban Oceania

This website’s primary aim is to track urban social change in Oceania. Urban social change is deserving of academic attention because the ways cities change has implications for the everyday lives of most of the region’s population. It underscores how traditional ways of life are pursued; livelihood activities carried out, conventions of social interaction established, and the way people and goods move across space. Climate change, the presence of political independence movements, international mining projects, and infrastructural development are just a few of the vast array of processes and developments that are changing how urban life is experienced in Oceania. This website, with an urban social change perspective, fundamentally focuses on how these broader developments affect how everyday urban lives are fostered and pursued in the region. In this article, I describe how the study of cities has over time progressively acknowledged how global developments interact with local urban lives. I then provide an overview of the unique context of urban social change in Oceania.