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This project examines international models of metropolitan and regional planning, focusing on governance, spatial organisation, and connectivity, to identify drivers of economic and social outcomes. It identifies lessons for Australian practice through a review of capital city and regional planning frameworks, and interviews with planners across three levels of government.

In this impressively detailed archival study, Kathleen Flanagan traces discursive shifts that underlay the comprehensive recasting of public housing policy and practice over more than half a centur...

In the 25 years since its publication, Housing and Social Theory (Kemeny 1992) has accumulated hundreds of citations, inspired and informed numerous theses (including mine), and stimulated scores o...

Community opposition to locally unwanted development is not inherently problematic, but it can be destructive where conflict between proponents and objectors escalates. This paper relates mixed-methods findings from a Sydney case-study where opposition to planned affordable housing projects was widespread but uneven. Five factors are identified that escalated individual opposition campaigns in this case: public notification procedures; sense of injustice; prejudice; strong campaign leadership; and the involvement of politicians. We argue that these factors will likely also escalate opposition to the planned development of other forms of critical social infrastructure, and that an understanding of them can help minimise destructive conflicts between proponents and host communities.

This article provides an international context to the We Call These Projects Home report by describing how, despite marked differences in form and location of housing and in the socio-cultural makeup of the tenant community, deconcentration and dispersal of public tenants has become a central concern of housing authorities in Australia. This comparison brings into relief several important elements of the deconcentration agenda which help to explain the vigour with which it is pursued despite continuing debate concerning the claimed benefits for tenants. In contrast to the high density, and culturally homogenous US projects, in Australia much of the focus of redevelopment activity has been either in low-density outer-suburban housing estates, or in higher density inner urban areas where land value is high and gentrification pressures are already evident. Nonetheless, a similar cultural theory of ‘neighbourhood effects’ has been deployed to justify intervention. This paper will argue that the diffusion of this policy without regard for actual local conditions exposes the ideological nature of the deconcentration agenda which has the effect of, at once, making former state assets available for private speculation and capital accumulation, and also demonising those who benefit from state subsidised housing but do not participate as private consumers in the housing market. The paper also considers the ways in which conventional policy-driven research on neighbourhood social conditions has effectively excluded the situated knowledge of public housing tenants, compounding their relative powerlessness, and how the political rhetoric associated with deconcentration has added to the stigma of public housing and the cultural exclusion of tenants. More recent attempts to involve tenants in consultation on redevelopment plans serve to illustrate further the political and economic interests at stake, despite some tenant groups’ continued attempts to mount an alternative agenda. A cross-national project currently being undertaken in Australia and the US is described which attempts to provide tenants with the means to develop their own research and policy agenda.

Despite differences in the history, form, and tenant populations, housing authorities in the UK, USA and Australia have embarked on similar redevelopment projects designed to address social exclusion by replacing areas of concentrated public housing with “mixed‐income” developments. Drawing on examples from Australia, this paper analyses the discourse which supports these redevelopment projects. Elements of the discursive strategy revealed include: the construction of public tenancy as a disadvantage in itself; the creation of particular research categories and objects (such as “estates”) based on selective use of statistics and scale; the generation of binary narratives concerning community life; and constrained forms of consultation and participation. The analysis demonstrates that while purporting to be an anti‐poverty measure, policy directed at de‐concentration of public housing and “mixed income” development forms part of a neo‐liberal agenda of housing reform and fails to address the demonstrated c...

The relationship between place and disadvantage, and particularly the question of whether, and how, geographical concentration of disadvantaged households exacerbates disadvantage is of growing concern to social science and urban policy. Despite many calls for a subtle and complex approach to constructing knowledge about these issues, a positivist approach based on statistical indicators, appears to dominate policy making. This approach reifies place and distracts attention from strategies which might effectively address disadvantage at the local level. This article describes two examples of small area redevelopment where such an approach has been used to suggest that redevelopment and dispersal of public housing concentrations are in the interests of current residents, whose lives would be improved through replacement of existing housing forms with more diverse, or at least tenure-mixed, suburbs. Yet the process by which this improvement will occur is yet to be explicated or even adequately theorised by ...

This article presents the findings of a study examining the rationale and practices of stock transfer from state housing authorities to community housing associations in three Australian states--Victoria, New South Wales and Tasmania. It begins with an analysis of the policy context that has informed debates about housing management and supply options in Australia. The main section of the article draws on written documentation and interviews with policy actors and tenants in each of the case studies to highlight the conflicts and tensions that surface in moves to reconfigure the management of public housing. Alongside a brief discussion about the policy themes that emerge from the findings, it is suggested in the conclusion that the continuing contestation and uncertainty about the stock transfer process is symptomatic of the national 'policy vacuum' about the future direction of public housing in Australia.

Recent developments in Australian social housing policy encompass a larger role for non-government housing providers. The new emphasis is mediated and supported by the discourse of 'community' housing. 'Community' is invoked as an ideal by liberal critics of the centralised state, and conversely, by critics of liberalism who pose it as an alternative to individualism and the abstract formalism of the liberal state. Much of the rhetoric of community housing in Australia has emphasised its claimed potential to demonstrate ways in which social housing management can be made more accountable and responsive, as well as more equitable and efficient, but the evident contradictions in the discourse raise questions concerning the reasons for, and likely outcomes of, state sponsorship of community housing. This paper employs 'textually oriented discourse analysis' to examine key policy documents which have informed the development of community housing policy in Australia, and demonstrates linkages between these discourse samples, and the international tendencies in the societal order of discourse identified by Fairclough as 'democratisation', 'commodification' and 'technologisation'.