Untapped Talent: Western Sydney's Remarkable but Inequitable Labour Market

This issues paper analyses the 2021 census data, considering the profound but uneven changes to educational attainment, industry mix and labour force participation. Western Sydney has registered a significant increase in its educational attainment over the past decade. The region’s proportion of higher skilled residents now sits on par with the national average. In some areas it exceeds that level. The shift is profound but uneven within the Western Sydney region, producing complex implications. Additionally, the census data reveals persistent socio-spatial polarisation between Western Sydney and the Rest of Sydney when it comes to high productivity jobs. This issues paper produces an analysis of the census data, and considers the implications of the data for policy makers in the State and Federal Governments of Australia

Co-living, gentlemen's clubs, and residential hotels : a long view of shared housing infrastructures for single young professionals

Shared housing is an important infrastructure for young single professionals living and working in the city. Co-living is a contemporary shared housing infrastructure. But it certainly is not the first. We advocate for what Flanagan and Jacobs (2019) call taking a “long view” by drawing connections between early 19th-century gentlemen’s clubs, mid-19th-century residential hotels and contemporary co-living. We argue each have been dynamic infrastructures of mobility, work, and sociality that make certain practices more or less possible and reflect on how the socio-material form of these infrastructures connects with the infrastructural work it does. We draw on our own research study into co-living, connecting our findings with research on the historical housing types. Our findings show that shrinking private spaces, maximizing productive spaces, and integrating services are strategies that animate the infrastructural work of these housing types. By linking co-living with historical housing types, we demonstrate the importance of taking a “long view” when thinking infrastructurally about novel housing practices

Parramatta 2035: Vibrant, Sustainable, Global

This Review, prepared at the request of the NSW Premier, tests the proposition that Greater Parramatta can become a ‘global city’ by 2035. Parramatta, in the past five years, has been the focus of intensive and accelerated urban regeneration. Equally, it has been the recent beneficiary of substantial public infrastructure investments. Ensuring these positive developments work to the city’s benefit, particularly against liveability and sustainability benchmarks is an emphasis of the Review. The city’s elevation into a ‘global’ cohort is conditional on the preservation and enhancement of these attributes, particularly in fundamental areas like housing affordability, cultural expression, and connectivity. Recognising the investment and talent attraction properties of these elements is a vitally important and, ideally, distinctive element of Parramatta’s current and future character. The Review identifies four priorities where government should now focus its efforts for this region over the next decade: 1. Greater Parramatta needs a Strategic Plan and better cross-government cooperation and investment in the region; 2. The development of the Greater Parramatta region needs to balance the goals of liveability and growth and better manage the unequal impacts of change; 3. Greater Parramatta’s economic future needs to be secured through preserving and investing in the region’s industrial and urban services land; and, 4. Sustainability needs to be a priority to ensure Greater Parramatta’s successful transformation into a resilient global city-region. The Review concludes that Parramatta will become a ‘global’ city, and notes that the real question is one of what type of global city it chooses to become. The Review makes twelve recommendations framed thematically across three priorities: 1. Strategic Planning and Governance; 2. Planning and Infrastructure Priorities; and, 3. Liveability and Sustainability

A review of "Shared housing, shared lives : everyday experiences across the lifecourse", edited by Sue Heath, Katherine Davies, Gemma Edwards and Rachel M. Scicluna

Book review of: Shared housing, shared lives: everyday experiences across the lifecourse, By Sue Heath, Katherine Davies, Gemma Edwards and Rachel M. Scicluna, Abingdon, Routledge, 2018, 144 pp., ISBN 9781138673533. Heath and Cleaver’s (2003) seminal text on shared housing in the Global North inspired a burgeoning new area of geographical and sociological inquiry. Returning to this original agenda over 15 year later, Heath along with coauthors Davies, Edwards and Scicluna highlight the renewed importance of research into sharing domestic spaces with non-kin. In the 15 years since ‘Young, free and single?: Twenty-somethings and household change’ drew attention to the new reality that youth in the Global North were often sharing housing – the motivations and demographics of ‘sharers’ have changed in profound ways. An increasingly diverse cohort of people are sharing – reflecting the myriad social, economic, cultural and political challenges that exist around accessing housing in urban contexts in particular. Housing market crises, precarious labour conditions and changing family structures are just some of the factors that have given rise to the ubiquity of shared housing

Care and resistance to neoliberal reform in social housing

Neoliberal ideologies and associated market imperatives are widely identified as the predominant sets of ethics transforming social housing in western liberal welfare states. This paper advances a politics of care in social housing, identifying relational caring as an alternative political ethic operating in this space resisting and reworking governing logics. Bringing governmentality informed conceptualizations of resistance together with feminist care ethics the paper makes two key interventions. First, it expands existing knowledge of how housing managers resist power structures within organizations to show that care also sustains resistance to sectoral transformation. Second, it examines how housing managers vest care in market practices. Asking how “caring qualities” may be extracted from market relations, the paper argues that market-driven transformation can, in some circumstances, bolster caring capacity. These ideas are advanced through analysis of staff practices in not-for-profit housing providers in Sydney, Australia

[In Press] Coliving housing : home cultures of precarity for the new creative class

The economy is entrenched in the domestic and the domestic enables the economy. We consider this dialectical relationship between the economy and ‘home’ through a case study of coliving, a new type of privately delivered shared housing emerging in response to increasingly precarious economic conditions. We examine how the proliferation of coliving signifies shifting meanings and cultures of home for digital nomads, the latest iteration of the creative class. We draw upon a content analysis of twenty websites of coliving organisations located in New York and San Francisco, United States of America. Our analysis uncovers emergent meanings and cultures of home that are strongly associated with economic conditions. We consider how the spatial manifestations of a precarious economy are supported by new homemaking practices and imaginaries of home – what may be termed home cultures of precarity. Coliving challenges conventional meanings of home: a reprieve from work, private, secure and inhabited long term. Instead, home is a capital accumulation technology for this cohort – a site for the active production of capital. The ideal home for the new creative class is a place of work that is mobile and social. The economy, meanings of home and homemaking practices are coproductive and co-emergent