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The COVID-19 pandemic brought to the surface the critical qualities of air – airflow, ventilation, particulates etc. – in relation to the well-being of people living in high-rise. Engineering and architectural research has burgeoned in response. However, in focusing on models of airflow, ventilation and particulates as discrete variables, engineering and architectural discourse fails to capture the diverse ways that air enters into and shapes the everyday lived experience of high-rise dwelling. Drawing on research in Sydney's Southwestern suburbs, we reveal high-rise as an assemblage that links apartment dwelling with air, via car-dependent suburbanisation, pollution and climate-change induced temperature extremes in the Anthropocene. In addition to viruses, air teems with carbon, insects, noise and pollutants, while viscerally mediating human encounters with fluctuating temperatures. Multiple relations between people, buildings and air unfold simultaneously, confounding attempts to account for air's elemental milieu through single variables like greenhouse gas or COVID-19. While embedded in relations of power, high-rise assemblages unleash vernacular adaptation that through low-tech and low-cost technologies work to connect suburban high-rise with evolving ecological systems. Recognising the pharmacological quality of air, as both 'poison' and 'cure', we contrast models of high-rise as encapsulated environments with resident (and other) experiments that orient high-rise to the elements, and the interlinked challenges of urban living in the Anthropocene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a comparative study of political activism in Millers Point, Dawes Point, and The Rocks in Sydney from 1971 to 1974 and from 2014 to 2017, this paper examines the more‐than‐human force of bodies and buildings in redemocratising cities. The paper brings theoretical insights from urban assemblage and Deleuzian scholarship into dialogue with post‐political theory. In doing so, it shifts the focus in urban political geography from a concern with diverse social groups to the political potential in more‐than‐human assemblages. Through a re‐reading of Sydney's Green Bans in Millers Point, Dawes Point, and The Rocks, the paper first shows how the withdrawal of labour and stilled building sites comprise informal pathways of planning rejection that centralise social and ecological concerns in decision‐making in urban development. That first case is then contrasted with the contemporary case of privatisation and displacement at the same sites, showing how aged bodies can energise latent deliberative spaces across diverse (if repressed) institutions in liberal democracies. Given the capacities of materials and bodies to produce planning outcomes, the paper conceptualises planning as a more‐than‐human process enhanced by immersion in the experimental materialism of political movements—and this materialism is inherently geographical. The paper concludes with my reflecting on whether the proximity of workers and residents to the materials of the built environment in social movement activism of the 1970s intensified the reach of the event compared with the uncertain struggle over Millers Point today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]