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Residents living in close proximity to contaminated sites may experience adverse effects from financial losses and property devaluation, leading to poor mental health and physical illnesses—effects that may require compensation. The most common legal process of seeking compensation is the toxic tort—litigation pressed on the basis that contamination has harmed the victims. Several recent toxic tort class actions in Australia brought by residents living in areas affected by contamination from per‐ and poly‐fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) exemplify that process. Two such actions, those at Williamtown and Richmond, provide an opportunity to explore how toxic torts currently function as a means to secure compensation, whether they mitigate the harms of the contamination and considering how spatio‐legal manoeuvres may shape the litigation. In this article, we use a legal geography approach to analyse how plaintiffs' bodies, litigants' properties, and the state are constructed and represented by parties involved in these toxic torts. Legal geographers contend that examining the spatio‐legal manoeuvres made via litigation can make visible the effects of legal action on those involved and draw out how the law and its instruments may shape places and communities. Toxic tort class actions have allowed those affected by the contamination to be heard and receive some compensation. However, we argue that they do little to alleviate plaintiffs' concerns about the effects of contamination on their health, properties, and the environment. The findings have significance given that torts will likely play an increasingly prominent role in dealing with such challenges. This article examines a recent series of toxic tort class actions brought by residents living in areas affected by contamination from per‐ and poly‐fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in New South Wales, Australia. It explores in particular how the torts function as a form of compensation for those affected by the contamination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We describe an historical review of planning documents related to a newly developing high-density locality in Sydney, Australia. The review was undertaken to support the translational component of a larger project investigating how best to include knowledge and experience from the health disciplines to ensure a way of living not hitherto commonplace in Australia is also health-supportive. This article presents (i) key findings from the historical data; (ii) associated learnings about practice, developed to assist the wider translational objectives; and (iii) observations on the potential for such historical reviews to inform better planning practice more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the links between contaminated sites and adverse effects on human health and well‐being are being increasingly recognised, some argue that the magnitude of the health problem is inadequately addressed because it is largely invisible. Health geographies literature has sought to highlight this invisibility by focusing on the link between contaminated sites and health. This study adds to health geographies by presenting unique insights into the geography of residents' worry about the disruptive effect of environmental contamination on health and well‐being. It analyses a sample of residents (n = 485) living near 13 contaminated sites across Australia. Ordinal logistic regression analysis of closed‐format survey questions was combined with coding of open‐ended survey questions to reveal the geography of residents' worry about contamination from nearby sites. First, the study explores some of the main relationships between residents, their environs, and contaminants from nearby source sites, which determines their levels of worry: residents' demographics, residents' proximity to sites, contaminant boundaries and borders, and type of contaminant. Second, the study investigates how worry affects residents' health and well‐being, ranging from effects on their personal functioning through to their sense of ontological security, which depends in part upon their perceptions of contaminants' impacts. Despite having identified a range of diverse and negative effects of worry about contamination on residents, we found that worry for contamination can also prompt coping strategies and problem‐solving, reinforcing the need for more research on this subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1995, brothels in New South Wales have been permitted to operate as legitimate businesses regulated by local councils using planning powers. Despite more than 20 years since decriminalisation and widespread support, there remains an urge by some to heavily regulate the sex industry, reflected in the recently submitted report to the NSW Government from the Select Committee on the Regulation of Brothels (2015). Although the Report supports maintaining decriminalisation, it is dominated by concern about the association of brothels with crime and the consequent need for increased policing. This article argues first that there is little to no evidence to support the criminogenic concerns articulated in the Report. Second, even if these concerns existed, there is nothing to suggest that the proposed measures would provide a solution. Moreover, these proposed reforms reflect a worrying trend in criminal law reform of the expansion of police powers modelled on anti-terrorist legislation, despite existing police powers and criminal offences that are not prosecuted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emerging research in sexuality and space outlines the diverse forms of spatial governmentality used to discipline non-normative sexual behaviours, exploring how exclusion, concealment, and repression combines to ensure that 'immoral' sexualities are out of the sight of the 'moral majority'. In this paper, we explore this contention in relation to planning for sex service premises (brothels) in New South Wales, Australia. Though such sex service premises are now legal, our analysis nonetheless considers the way that these premises have been subject to forms of planning constraint that reflect planners' assumptions about the appropriate manifestation of sex premises within the urban landscape. By exposing the assumptions written into planning law that sex premises are legal but potentially disorderly, we demonstrate the evidential power of planning to reinforce dominant moral geographies through instruments which, at first glance, appear to be focused on objective questions of amenity and the 'best use of land'. This paper hence explores the ways in which planners have translated assumptions of disorder into categories of visibility and distance, meaning that brothels have become hidden in plain view so as not to disturb the integrity of residential 'family' spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Law is a powerful influence on people and place. Law both creates and is created by the relationship between people and place, although it rarely acknowledges this. Law frequently operates as if space does not matter. Law and legal processes, therefore, deserve greater attention from geographers. Legal geography is an emerging field of inquiry that facilitates much-needed attention to the interrelationships among the environment, people and social institutions, including formal laws but also informal rules, norms and lore. Legal geographers seek to make the invisible visible: to bring the law into the frame of geography, and space and place into focus for the law. Both critical and applied in approach, legal geography offers descriptive, analytical and normative insight into economics, justice, property, power, geopolitics, governance and scale. As such it can enrich most areas of geographic inquiry as well as contribute to current policy debates about the regulation of space and place. Legal geography is a way for enlarged appreciations of relationality, materiality, multiscalarity and agency to be used to interrogate and reform the law. This introduction to a special 'themed paper' section of Geographical Research provides a window on legal geography scholarship, including its history, contribution and ambition. The papers in the collection explore issues grounded in the legal geographies paradigm, variously analysing matters empirically detailed while engaging in broader, theoretical debates and using both Australian and international case studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy discussions relating to the selling of sex have tended to fixate on two spaces of sex work: the street and the brothel. Such preoccupation has arguably eclipsed discussion of the working environment where most sex is sold, namely, the private home. Redressing this omission, this paper discusses the public health and safety implications of policies that fail to regulate or assist the ‘hidden population’ of sex workers, focusing on the experiences of home-based workers in Sydney, Australia. Considering the inconsistent way that Home Occupation Sex Services Premises (HOSSPs) are regulated in this city, this paper discusses the implications of selling sex beyond the gaze of the state and the law. It is concluded that working from home can allow sex workers to exercise considerable autonomy over their working practices, but that the safety of such premises must be carefully considered in the development of prostitution policy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Questions of property rights are central to the organisation of urban space yet remain weakly theorised in the context of sexuality. Tracing battles over spaces of commercial sex in inner Sydney, this paper argues that particular claims to privacy and property underpin exclusionary actions restricting the boundaries of sexual citizenship. However, the paper also notes the potential for the emergence of ‘sexual commons’ where claims to an enhanced notion of sexual citizenship can be made. The paper concludes that property rights consist of overlapping and complex claims to space in which questions of sexuality and the sanctity of family life are often brought to the fore. In arguing this, the paper demonstrates that property rights constitute a key mechanism in the management and regulation of the (nocturnal) city. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This commentary offers a background to the carbon challenge, carbon offsets, and emissions trading from an Australian perspective. It sets the scene for a more detailed discussion about carbon sequestration rights, which are defined explicitly by some Australian states and territories but not by others. We highlight that the term carbon sequestration right is poorly defined and relies, inappropriately we suggest, on the borrowed term profit à prendre. This terminology is at odds with the notion of a carbon property right, which has yet to be conceptualized fully by the marketplace and the existing legal framework, given the need to fully engage the sociological and ecological dimensions of carbon and climate change. We find that current policy intent, together with evolving public will and corporate responsibility, is ahead of the science and the legal framework for managing property rights in carbon (used broadly to represent the six greenhouse gasses). The Australian Property Institute has taken the lead in its 2007 policy paper Conceiving Property Rights in Carbon and more recently in Sheehan and Kanas's investigation of "Property Rights in Soil." This article takes the discussion to the next stage by offering a framework for property rights in carbon and asking whether such rights should be vested in the state or the nation, rather than merely creating a commodity that can be efficiently allocated and thus speculated upon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The management and remediation of contaminated environments increasingly involves engagement with affected local residents. Of late, risk communication tools and guidelines have drawn attention to the stress and concern of residents as a result of heightened awareness of localised contamination and the need to address these less visible impacts of contamination when engaging with affected communities. Despite this emerging focus, there is an absence of research exploring the factors that predict resident worry about neighbourhood contamination. This paper aims to address this shortcoming by drawing on data from a cross-sectional survey of 2009 adult residents in neighbourhoods near 13 contaminated sites across Australia. Analyses used ordered logistic regression to determine the sociodemographic, environmental, and knowledge-based factors that influence residents' degree of worry. The findings suggest age, gender and income significantly affect residents' degree of worry. Being knowledgeable about the contaminant was associated with lower degrees of worry. Conversely, having a stronger sense of place within a neighbourhood predicted higher degrees of worry. Type of contaminant also impacted resident worry, with residents being less likely to worry about hydrocarbon, asbestos and waste than other types of contaminants. Our analyses suggest resident worry can be reduced through improving access to accurate information and the development of specific risk reduction strategies tailored to each neighbourhood and aimed at the heterogeneous distribution of worry amongst residential populations., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Interview-based research among patrons and proprietors of Sydney's gay bathhouses, asking about experiences of homosexual being from the 1960s to the early 1980s generated intriguing findings. Despite the apparent disconnect between traditional religious affiliation and the outlaw gay lifestyle of the bathhouses, a majority of interviewees asserted that spirituality and self-transformation was as important to them as sexual exploration and liberation from societal restraints (both as motivations for and outcomes of the bathhouse experience). Some of those interviewed adhered to mainstream religion (including Christianity and Judaism), but a significant number expressed a commitment to eclectic, personalized spiritual paths. Interestingly, both groups described the bathhouses as "churches" and "temples," the activities that took place there as both collective and individual "rituals," and attributed their spiritual growth and development to their experiences in the bathhouses.