Dr Greg Young, MPIA, MICOMOS is an Australian specialist on culture, whose cultural theories and planning models are internationally influential. He was born in Hobart, Tasmania and gained a BA (Hons) from the University of Tasmania, an MA from the University of Sydney, and a PhD from the University of New South Wales; he also holds a Diploma of Urban Studies from Macquarie University, Sydney. He has held executive appointments with Australian governments, senior consulting roles in the private sector and academic appointments at Australian universities. His interdisciplinary career has combined roles as a theorist and strategist, planner, historian and advocate.
From the 1980s, Greg Young contributed to a number of pioneering Australian cultural strategies, including the NSW government's system of heritage studies, the NSW Cultural Tourism Strategy (1991); Australia's first national cultural policy, Creative Nation;[1] and the Australian government's model for cultural mapping published as Mapping Culture – A Guide for Cultural and Economic Development in Communities.[2]
As an academic from the 2000s, Young developed and published new models for the social integration and utilisation of culture in inter-sectoral planning, building on culture's capacity to refer to itself. These ideas was first published in 'The Culturisation of Planning' in Planning Theory in 2008 and then illustrated with global case studies in Reshaping Planning with Culture, Routledge (2016). This was followed by a concept of culturised governance, outlined in chapters in 'The Routledge Research Companion to Planning and Culture' (2016), for which Young was principal editor.
He is currently adjunct professor, School of the Built Environment, University of Technology Sydney (UTS).
Greg Young's cultural theory and cultural models broke new ground in Australia from the 1980s to the 1990s in heritage conservation, cultural tourism, and cultural mapping. In the 2000s he coined the term "culturisation" (Planning Theory, 2008) for an original concept for culturised planning and culturised governance, which can be applied to all sectors. At its most fundamental, culturisation is the positive uptake of the resources of culture, based on a holistic definition of culture and its comprehensive research. Young's paradigm, and the planning models based on it, are used in planning practice, teaching, and research in a number of countries.
Books
Book chapters and articles