Functional Change and Imagined Place: The Narratives and Performance of Peri-urban Planning in Victoria, Australia

Planning for farmland protection has a long history in land use planning practices and logics. Increasingly, the processes of agricultural restructuring, revaluing of rural land as places of consumption and market-focused imperatives for policy and resource allocation have limited the success of this goal. This is particularly apparent in peri-urban Australia where the contest for rural futures is highly evident and operates against a backdrop of urban and exurban expansion, increasing agricultural scale and neoliberal policy directions. In this environment, the narratives and performance of planning for farmland protection are largely unheard and unheeded. This paper utilises the results of interviews with land use planning practitioners in peri-urban Victoria, Australia to consider their narratives of urgency and importance in regard to farmland protection and the contrasting social representations in decision-making and policy. It utilises a programmatic approach to analysing social performance Alexander (2011) to consider how planning practice, narratives and discourse in relation to agricultural protection operates in this context. It explores the ways in which the performance of planning. For farmland protection, including how it is discussed and legitimised is an important consideration for the understanding capacity and limits of spatial planning action, in addition to instrumental aspects of policy and evidence.