A contemporary geography of prosperity along Australia's eastern seaboard (Guest editorial)

Since the early 1990s recession, Australia has experienced the second longest period of economic growth in its recorded history. Research published in this special issue shows that this economic growth has generated remarkable social conditions of prosperity along Australia’s eastern seaboard centred on Sydney. Just as remarkable is the lack of public and political attention that this prosperity and its spatialised outcomes have generated. One contributor to this deficiency is a longstanding preoccupation by social scientists with economic crisis and social disadvantage. Yet a better understanding of what contemporary prosperity looks like and how it is spatially manifest would provide opportunities for fairer distributional outcomes. We want to stress that we use the term 'prosperity' somewhat fretfully. National accounts point to more than a decade of economic growth in Australia at a rate and consistency equalled by few Western nations. Certainly, this growth is manifest, in some areas, in astonishing rates of house and other asset price increases and, in certain occupations, handsome increases in remunerations. So, economic growth can be observed as yielding rewards in some places and for some people. Yet we know too well that economy is a socio-spatial process and that when prosperity comes around there is selective participation in its enactment and unequal sharing of its rewards. Mostly, there are winners because there are losers. An analytical problem, however, is that we lack the tools for examination of the generation and consequences of prosperity