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This article focuses on the predicament of owner-occupiers and small investors presently liable for the removal of combustible cladding on build-to-sell residential high-rise. We argue that while the proliferation of combustible materials has been shaped by cost-cutting and risk-shifting by construction firms, these practices did not on their own transfer the responsibility of remediation to consumers. Examining the attempts of one densifying nation, Australia, to locate responsibility for combustible cladding through two parliamentary inquiries, we analyse witness testimonies to show how public policies encouraged materials substitution, removed on-site inspection and protected corporations from litigation. Moving beyond neoliberalism, these policy reforms leveraged information asymmetries and the material complexity of residential high-rise to create a climate of "imperceptibility" towards unsafe materials. Together, material, financial and policy dimensions intersected to enable capital accumulation through the expansion of consumer harm in high-rise housing markets. We conclude that construction materials and processes are an overlooked, yet critical domain of governance in financialised housing regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The financialisation of housing is seen to undermine tenants' rights, affordable housing and planning controls in order to make housing and homes more amenable to profit extraction. However, the extent to which owner-occupiers themselves seek to influence urban development and planning processes to protect their housing assets has been less well-considered. Through an online survey of 1122 owner-occupiers in Australia, this article redresses this gap. By identifying the financial values participants attach to their home, and their inclinations to join resident action groups, we reveal that those with the strongest investment values are also most inclined to join resident action groups. Expanding conceptualisations of investors beyond institutional investors, the article reveals the agency of financialised owner-occupiers who, as investor-activists, seek to influence planning processes to secure the profitability of their own housing assets. The article thus reconceptualises resident action as a financial strategy to protect long- and short-term housing investments and, in doing so, charts the urban implications of financialised home ownership and investor subjectivities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As governments encourage circular economy (CE) initiatives, markets for waste recirculation are taking shape. But implementation is in its infancy and material circuits are emergent. Early food waste CEs shaped by commercial players emphasise capital investment, routinised forms of waged labour, processing sites distant from food waste sources, and transactional relationships. Less well understood is the potential for vernacular circularity beyond market-based, transactional frames. This paper reports from a collaborative research exercise with a non-profit community farm in nonmetropolitan Australia, seeking to connect with cafés to access food waste for composting. Cafés are a nexus of production and consumption, ubiquitous in the contemporary multicultural Australian context, and therefore ideal for grassroots CEs. Ten local cafes participated, reviewing existing food waste practices, motivations for circularity, and contextual factors including the regional setting. We found that food waste circularity emerges via divergent pathways related to enterprise type and scale, environmental values of actors, place embeddedness, and local relationships. These pathways reflect the place-based attributes and diverse sustainability values of residents and businesses in the coastal, industrial city of Wollongong, where the study is based. Contrasting distant, transactional circuits, are more-than-transactional food waste pathways, developed by microscale actors shaping vernacular material flows and "hacking" public provision of Food Organic and Garden Organic (FOGO) waste services to mobilise environmental values and community relationships. Overlooked by "big policy" more-than-transactional relationships bind producers, intermediaries and consumers in closer loops and, in so doing, enrich place and facilitate an ethic of care for soil and land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human encounters with waste can trigger reflections on taken-for-granted assumptions about consumption. Taking this observation as its starting point, this paper explores whether and how the introduction of the kitchen caddy and food waste composting at the municipal scale generates new environmental subjectivities in Australian homes. Using visceral research methods, the paper shows that, other than participation in municipal composting, close encounters with food becoming compost do not trigger more experimental or sustainable relationships with food. Rather, they trigger new configurations of cleanliness, tidiness and storage as participants seek to stabilise their home against the disruptive sight, smell and touch of food becoming compost. In unsettling the boundaries between humans and nonhumans, and cleanliness and chaos, food becoming compost produces visceral disgust among residents who are primed through modern home cultures to maintain cleanliness, control and the prevention of nonhuman intrusions at home. The success of municipal composting thus hinges on households' commitment to 'sustainability work' in placing, storing, cleaning and sealing food to reconfigure the modern home for waste recovery. Reconceptualising municipal composting as a co-production of sensory engagement and household practices, we centre a visceral politics of household sustainability at the heart of municipal composting and resource management. [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]

This special section examines the possibility of meaningful debate and contestation over urban decisions and futures in politically constrained contexts. In doing so, it moves with the post-political times: critically examining the proliferation of deliberative mechanisms; identifying the informal assemblages of diverse actors taking on new roles in urban socio-spatial justice; and illuminating the spaces where informal and formal planning processes meet. These questions are particularly pertinent for understanding the processes shaping Australian cities and public participation today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there is widespread consensus in human geography that neoliberalism is achieved through the intersection of multiple scales and states, there has been growing emphasis in recent years on the hybrid qualities of neoliberalist-styles of governance. Because hybrid approaches draw attention to the wide range of actors and contradictory agendas underpinning the always uneven expression of neoliberalist projects, they are particularly suited to the identification of residual state capacities in contexts where neoliberalist forms dominate economic and political life. Drawing on two cases of large-scale residential development in New South Wales, namely Warnervale Town Centre on the New South Wales Central Coast and the Australian Defence Industry site at St Marys in Sydney's west, the present paper adopts an hybrid approach in order to identify current state capacities. Through a comparison of both sites, it identifies the potential for socially and ecologically balanced development in the outer suburban context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special section builds on Planning the Post‐Political City—Part 1 to examine if and how planning is showing signs of a post‐democratic turn taking place in Australian cities. In Part 1, we presented a collection of papers examining Australia as a post‐political landscape, exploring the new ways in which Australian publics are resisting dominant neoliberal practices and logics of growth and, in doing so, are intervening in decision‐making practices to assert new forms of power and participation. In Part 2, we show how participatory practices continue to evolve. We use this brief editorial to ask a foundational question: have those implicated in the governance and management of Australian cities embarked on a post‐democratic path? As they are presented with new exclusionary and managerial governance systems, the public's participation suggests at the very least that post‐political and post‐democratic conditions are neither immutable nor inevitable. However, more democratic forms of governance rely on a rich array of activist types and approaches requiring greater institutional support in order to challenge Australia's post‐political condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]