Public housing in Australia, stigma, home and opportunity

This discussion paper explores the reasons why public housing has become so stigmatised. The first part of the paper provides an analysis of the problems including under funding and restrictive allocation policies. The second part of the paper makes the case for increased investment and other strategies that can improve the status of public housing

The urban and regional segregation of indigenous Australians: Out of sight, out of mind?

Contrary to popular belief, the majority of Indigenous Australians live in cities and towns rather than remote areas of the country, yet remain segregated and \u27invisible\u27 from the daily lives of non-Indigenous Australians. In 2006, the Australian Indigenous population surpassed half a million. Yet while public and political discourse invariably concentrate on remote Australia, geographically, more than 75% of the Indigenous population is regional or urban and some 31% of Indigenous Australians live in the major cities

Pleasure Zones and Murder Boxes: Online Pornography and Violent Video-Games as Cultural Zones of Exception

New media formats and technologies raise questions about new-found abilities to indulge apparently limitless violent and sadistic curiosity within our culture. In this context the mainstreaming of sex and violence via mobile and screen media systems opens important questions about the degree to which these influences are harmful or indicative of deeper social problems. In this article we offer a preliminary analysis of the consequences of these new media zones, acknowledging their allure, excitement and everyday cultural position. In particular we focus on a distinctive hallmark of much online pornography and massively popular violent videogames - the offer of unchecked encounters with others who can be subordinated to violent and sexual desire. We suggest that a key implication of these zones of cultural exception, in which social rules can be more or less abandoned, is their role in further assisting denials of harm from the perspective of hyper-masculinist and militaristic social value systems

Gentrification and displacement in Greater London: an empirical and theoretical analysis

The thesis involves an inquiry into the little explored nature of the relationship between the processes of gentrification and displacement in the context of the Greater London area. Scant work has been previously undertaken in this country on these processes compared to be the wealth of work conducted already on gentrification. Displacement has barely been acknowledged as a component of the British gentrification experience except through anecdotal evidence and acknowledgement of basic causal association. Three separate but related methodologies were used to piece together evidence to test whether gentrification was a displacing force. First, the 1981 and 1991 censuses were used to examine broad social changes in London at a ward level, second, the Longitudinal Study (LS) was used to examine the linkages between identifiably gentrified areas and the migratory trajectories of gentrifiers and displacees. Finally the use of grounded research was undertaken to look at examples of these processes in situ through interviews with tenant's representatives and local authority officers. The cumulative weight stemming from the use of the three research methods and the view that displacement is a necessary corollary to gentrification is evaluated along with the implications of findings on the need for the retention of affordable housing and the potential costs of urban social restructuring. The evidence suggests a need for a wider set of social and economic costs to be considered in view of the damage that may be done by gentrification. Accurate quantification in the future will not result without the identification and monitoring of gentrification and displacement activity by local authorities via the monitoring of the housing histories of the vulnerable. The work concludes that the study of gentrification and displacement is theoretically and empirically problematic but that the results of the work also form a positive introduction and lever into wider work on such processes in the future and that such research should be continued in the future

Elite formation, power and space in contemporary London

In this paper we examine elite formation in relation to money power within the city of London. Our primary aim is to consider the impact of the massive concentration of such power upon the city’s political life, municipal and shared resources and social equity. We argue that objectives of city success have come to be identified and aligned with the presence of wealth elites while wider goals, of access to essential resources for citizens, have withered. A diverse national and global wealth-elite is drawn to a city with an almost unique cultural infrastructure, fiscal regime and ushering butler class of politicians. We consider how London is being made for money and the monied – in physical, political and cultural terms. We conclude that the conceptualisation of elites as wealth and social power formations operating within urban spatial arenas is important for capturing the nature of new social divisions and changes

Looking for big 'fry': the motives and methods of middle-class international property investors

Anxieties about the effects of international property investment in world cities like London have mainly focused on super-rich investors and corporate vehicles that have generated price inflation of assets and accelerated exclusion from an already expensive market. In fact, many international investors in the city’s housing market are middle-class individuals, and focusing on Hong Kong as an emblematic example of such processes, we examine their motives and the products offered to them by important investment intermediaries. We find that an important rationale for these investments lies in local class-based uncertainties and existential anxieties concerning the future of Hong Kong itself. We focus on the cultural roots of these investor rationalities but also consider the role of investment intermediaries who have helped bolster confidence while shielding investors from the consequences of their aggregated market power - concerns in London over household displacement from foreign investment. We suggest that what may seem to be the predatory search to ‘fry’ property (炒樓), a Hongkonger colloquialism referring to the search for high performing investments, should also be understood as actions anchored in and generated by the habitus of the Hong Kong middle-class whose lives have been moulded by historical geopolitical uncertainty and worries about its longer-term social positioning and security

The politics of gating (A response to Private Security and Public Space by Manzi and Smith-Bowers)

Gated residential developments, neighbourhoods to which public access is restricted, continue to generate academic, policymaker and public curiosity. Why do people want to live in these places and should public interventions be directed towards either their prevention or tacit acceptance? In a recent paper in this journal, Tony Manzi and Bill Smith-Bowers (2006) attempt to provide what they see as a more subtle approach to these developments, arguing, by way of a critique of some of my earlier work (centrally that of Atkinson and Blandy, 2005), that hostility to gated communities is misplaced on several grounds. I argue here, in return, that there are several problems with the positions they adopt, and that these should be considered if we are to effectively discuss how planning practice and housing systems should work with or against these new trends in the built environment. I argue that the key ‘problematic’ raised by gated communities is less one of empirical evidence on their impacts, since much work already points to a range of problems, and rather what these developments forecast for the character and dynamics of the urban spaces and societies we wish to live in. At the heart of my position lies a concern that either bolstering the case for gated communities or seeing them as neutral objects in the landscapes around us risks amplifying the further construction of impermeable boundaries. Critically then the risk is that ignoring the political and normative aspects of gating, as I believe Manzi and Smith-Bowers do, may lead to further and deeper socio-spatial segregation that itself excludes the voice of social groups least able to challenge or, indeed, reside in gated developments and the additional security that they appear to offer

The politics of gating (A response to Private Security and Public Space by Manzi and Smith-Bowers)

Gated residential developments, neighbourhoods to which public access is restricted, continue to generate academic, policymaker and public curiosity. Why do people want to live in these places and should public interventions be directed towards either their prevention or tacit acceptance? In a recent paper in this journal, Tony Manzi and Bill Smith-Bowers (2006) attempt to provide what they see as a more subtle approach to these developments, arguing, by way of a critique of some of my earlier work (centrally that of Atkinson and Blandy, 2005), that hostility to gated communities is misplaced on several grounds. I argue here, in return, that there are several problems with the positions they adopt, and that these should be considered if we are to effectively discuss how planning practice and housing systems should work with or against these new trends in the built environment. I argue that the key ‘problematic’ raised by gated communities is less one of empirical evidence on their impacts, since much work already points to a range of problems, and rather what these developments forecast for the character and dynamics of the urban spaces and societies we wish to live in. At the heart of my position lies a concern that either bolstering the case for gated communities or seeing them as neutral objects in the landscapes around us risks amplifying the further construction of impermeable boundaries. Critically then the risk is that ignoring the political and normative aspects of gating, as I believe Manzi and Smith-Bowers do, may lead to further and deeper socio-spatial segregation that itself excludes the voice of social groups least able to challenge or, indeed, reside in gated developments and the additional security that they appear to offer

The politics of gating (A response to Private Security and Public Space by Manzi and Smith-Bowers)

Gated residential developments, neighbourhoods to which public access is restricted, continue to generate academic, policymaker and public curiosity. Why do people want to live in these places and should public interventions be directed towards either their prevention or tacit acceptance? In a recent paper in this journal, Tony Manzi and Bill Smith-Bowers (2006) attempt to provide what they see as a more subtle approach to these developments, arguing, by way of a critique of some of my earlier work (centrally that of Atkinson and Blandy, 2005), that hostility to gated communities is misplaced on several grounds. I argue here, in return, that there are several problems with the positions they adopt, and that these should be considered if we are to effectively discuss how planning practice and housing systems should work with or against these new trends in the built environment. I argue that the key ‘problematic’ raised by gated communities is less one of empirical evidence on their impacts, since much work already points to a range of problems, and rather what these developments forecast for the character and dynamics of the urban spaces and societies we wish to live in. At the heart of my position lies a concern that either bolstering the case for gated communities or seeing them as neutral objects in the landscapes around us risks amplifying the further construction of impermeable boundaries. Critically then the risk is that ignoring the political and normative aspects of gating, as I believe Manzi and Smith-Bowers do, may lead to further and deeper socio-spatial segregation that itself excludes the voice of social groups least able to challenge or, indeed, reside in gated developments and the additional security that they appear to offer

Welcome to Pikettyville? Mapping London's Alpha Territories

This paper considers the influence of the burgeoning global ‘super-rich’ on contemporary socio-spatialization processes in London in the light of a contemporary re-reading of Pahl’s classic volume, Whose City? It explores if a turn to ‘big data’ – in the form of commercial geodemographic classifications – can offer any additional insights to a sociological approach to the study of the ‘super-rich’ that extends the ‘spatialization of class’ thesis further ‘up’ the class structure