Book excerpt: This book places Australian conditions and urban planning centrally within comparative analysis of planning systems and cultures around the world to address issues including urban governance, climate change, transportation planning, regional development and migration planning. Australian urban conditions and their associated planning responses can and often have been seen as unique or exceptional. They are seldom discussed in the same breath as conditions and associated planning systems internationally. Yet, as well as being somewhat different from those elsewhere in the world, Australian urban conditions and planning responses are also somewhat similar. They are uncanny – strangely familiar yet unfamiliar. In this book, Australian urban conditions, and their planning policies and practices are informally compared and contrasted with those existing internationally. If Australian urban planning policy and practice have had limited influence internationally, the partial familiarity of challenges posed by its urban conditions ensure that Australia is a more important global reference point for scholarship and practice than commonly is appreciated. In this book the authors assert the potential and actual originality of urban planning scholarship arising from the Australian context. It will be useful for students and faculty, planners working in Australia, as well as anyone interested in international planning debates.