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

At least I don't live in Vegemite Valley : racism and rural public housing spaces

Drawing on a series of interviews conducted with both Indigenous and non-Indigenous public housing tenants in 2005, this paper investigates the way in which racialised discourses were used to construct rural public housing spaces and Indigenous tenants in the inland city of Griffith in south-western New South Wales (NSW). Informed by the literatures on 'old' and 'new' forms of racism, the paper identifies three separate, yet interdependent, discursive strategies used by interviewees. These include discourses that: (1) racialised Griffith's public housing spaces; (2) constructed Indigenous public housing tenants as receiving 'unfair privileges'; and (3) constructed Indigenous public housing tenants as 'ungovernable'. Furthermore, the employment of the 'denial' or 'disclaimer' as a discursive tactic in 'new' forms of racism was found to be used strategically as a means of maintaining such constructions. The paper ultimately seeks to contradict arguments, made by both Australian media outlets and politicians, that racism is an irrelevant factor when more broadly considering the issues facing rural public housing estates. The paper argues instead that 'race' is an integral feature to how some rural public housing estates and tenants are constructed and that racism is often an 'everyday' aspect of many public housing tenants' experiences

Moving home : theorizing housing within a politics of mobility

It has been argued that the social sciences have undergone a "mobility turn" over the last decade: a paradigm shift in which movement is seen to have become increasingly important to our social worlds. For the most part, housing studies is yet to extensively engage with this "paradigm shift". In an attempt to engage with the ideas that the "mobility turn" has thrown up for housing studies this paper grapples with two key questions. First, where does housing studies fit in the new mobilities paradigm in the social sciences? And, second, how can housing studies contribute to this paradigm shift? This paper does this through an examination of how a politics of mobility can be usefully employed and extended by housing researchers. Looking specifically at two current dimensions of this politics: mobility as a right, and mobility as a resource, this paper argues that a third dimension - mobility as governmentality - should be introduced to the mobility turn's politics of mobility

A historical geography of housing crisis in Australia

Much of the current debate on Australian housing affordability suggests that it is a new ‘crisis’. Yet Australia’s housing history is littered with a series of housing crises, and since the early days of white settlement in Australia the availability of housing has been an ongoing governmental concern. The focus of this paper is on the 1940s housing crisis that contributed to housing becoming one of the cornerstones of the federal government’s post-war reconstruction agenda. This paper adopts a governmentality theory perspective to explore how Australia’s housing problems and solutions were constructed during this period, through an in-depth textual analysis of key documents produced at the time. The wider project of post-war reconstruction was understood to have important spatial dimensions. As a consequence, both the problematisation of housing and the design of housing policy as a solution to these challenges were distinctly spatial. While the present debate echoes many of the longer-run discourses characterising housing crises, the current axiom that markets are best placed to mediate housing affordability overlooks key lessons from the past: that affordable housing necessarily entails governmental interventions, and geographically imagined problematisations and solutions

Rural economies in the 'age of migration' : perspectives from OECD countries

An important feature of globalisation processes has been the increased level of immigration. For the most part, this has been considered an urban phenomenon. As a consequence, a less well-known feature of contemporary global immigration patterns is that an increasing proportion of immigrants are now settling in rural locations. Over the last decade, however, there has been a burgeoning of research into the political-economic processes that have produced an increased level of immigration into rural regions in many OECD nation-states. This paper begins by reviewing some of the reasons why this dimension of rural demographic change has gone under the radar of both researchers and policy makers. It then examines how immigration into rural regions is both an important feature of the multifunctional rural transition and a product of the ‘regionalisation’ of immigration policy as a distinct regional development strategy employed regarding rural areas

Housing and home : objects and technologies of neoliberal governmentalities

For some time housing has been an object of government and governance. It is not surprising therefore that housing is an important focus for analyses of neoliberalization, particularly the socio-spatial implications of neoliberal policies, programmes and processes. Indeed, neoliberalism has become an important explanatory tool when examining the changes to how housing is produced and consumed and the policy settings guiding this economic activity in the twenty-first century. From analyses of privatization processes of social housing, to tracing the precursors and fall-out of the global financial crisis (GFC), the connections between neoliberalization and housing have been made by commentators and academics alike. This chapter seeks to untangle some of the many links made by researchers regarding neoliberalization and housing. It does this in two ways. First, it examines how housing has come to be seen as 'neoliberalized ' :- specifically, the way housing has become an object of government: a problem requiring neoliberalized solutions. The second way in which this chapter examines the neoliberalization of housing is as a technology of neoliberal forms of government- in particular, the way in which housing is not only an object of neoliberal governance, but also an important tool employed m the pursuit of wider neoliberal governmentalities. The chapter concludes with some reflections on how housing studies has evaluated the consequences of the neoliberalization of housing and how this field of research could engage with the wider theoretical debates around the concept of neoliberalism in future

Moving home : conceptual and policy implications of the housing-mobility nexus

The Australian population is one of the most mobile in the world. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS 2006), 50.4 per cent of Australians changed their place of usual residence in the 5-year period between 2001 and 2006. While the scale, at which this mobility occurs, ranges from the neighbourhood to the international, the frequency, distance, destinations of, personal motives and structural forces informing these moves have changed dramatically in recent decades. A variety of factors have brought about this change in how population mobility occurs, including technological changes that have facilitated the increase in both virtual and physical movement and the frequency and speed at which both occur. Other changes bringing about an increase in mobility include demographic change (e.g. aging populations and retiree migration, the emerging trend of young Australians to remain in the parental home for a longer period of time), economic (e.g. welfare-led migration as a product of structural economic change, increased mobility of workers such as Fly-In, Fly-Out (FIFO) work associated with mining industries), socio-cultural change (e.g. the role of mobility in the cultural practices of Indigenous Australians, transnationalism and an emerging culture of multiple migrations over an individual’s lifetime). As McIntyre (2006, p.4) explains, housing ‘in the industrialized world, lies at the intersection of a global network of information, product and people flows’. Therefore, it is essential that when we are seeking to understand the issues and implications of the changes to how we move, we also take into account the role of housing in how these mobilities occur. The type, tenure and location of housing can facilitate or impede individuals’ ability to move. The home is therefore a key entity from where we launch a range of mobilities be they temporary or permanent, virtual or corporeal. The link between housing and mobility has been an ongoing concern for policy-makers. This Essay provides an analysis of what contemporary research tells us about the relationship between housing and mobility. It begins with an examination of how social science research has explained the causes and consequences of mobility generally and the housing-mobility nexus specifically. It then goes on to examine contemporary themes and issues in the housing studies literature that are a result of and/or produce mobility. The Essay concludes by advocating for two conceptual shifts in how housing researchers and policy-makers approach the housing-mobility nexus: 1. The need to adopt a broader understanding of mobility. 2. The need to account for a politics of mobility when considering the housing-mobility nexus

Governmentalities of mobility : the role of housing in the governance of Australian rural mobilities

While mobility has long been recognised to be a core dynamic affecting the consumption of rural housing very little is known about the politics that exist around the connections between mobility and rural housing. To investigate how mobility informs policy approaches to rural housing in Australia this paper brings together the concepts of the politics of mobility and governmentality. Through a case study examining housing policy discourses relating to rural and regional Australia from 1985 to 2000, this paper analyses the way in which various governmentalities of mobility have infused Australian rural housing policy. The paper finds that, during this period, mobility was an important governmental rationality informing Australian regional development and rural housing policies. This study contributes to the critical engagement with the mobility turn in contemporary rural studies by showing that a particular dimension of the mobility turn - the politics of mobility - can be augmented through the application of governmentality theory. Such an analytical approach enables a critical assessment of how such governmentalities of mobility contribute to constructions of the rural as problematic and the implications of such representations for rural regions and communities

The career aspirations and expectations of geography doctoral students : establishing academic subjectivities within a shifting landscape

The PhD forms a watershed period where candidates' professional identities are formed, and their career aspirations and expectations are developed. Yet little is known about Australian geography doctoral students' career aspirations and expectations. Drawing on findings from a 2016 survey of those students, the paper establishes that while a majority of students aspire to work in academia, many also feel quite pessimistic about their prospects of being able to do so. The paper argues that the uncertainty and anxiety that many Australian geography doctoral students feel about their future careers is the product of a wider cultural shift that is occurring in relation to the purpose of the research doctorate. Geographers need to critically engage with these changes and the academic subjectivities they are producing to ensure that, as a discipline, geography continues to make a positive contribution to the careers of the individuals who undertake these degrees

Governing the experts : reforming expert governance of rural public housing

Drawing on policy texts and a series of interviews conducted with rural public housing officers in 2005, this paper extends understandings of rural governance by shifting the focus on experts from one of being statically understood as the arbiters of rural government-at-a-distance processes to viewing them as more complex actors in these governmental processes. In particular, as governmentalities change at the centre, rural experts need also to be understood as being vulnerable to becoming targets of governmental problematisations and reforms. The paper does this through analysing how policy discourses during the latter part of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries problematised the delivery of public housing services by housing officers in Australia and New South Wales (NSW). It then provides insight into how resulting reform processes impacted on rural housing officers from four areas in rural NSW. The paper shows that rural governance understandings can be usefully extended to include how governmental change is not only directed towards and affects rural citizenry but also rural experts who perform multiple roles including being administrators, targets, and opponents of rural reform processes