Filtering as a source of low-income housing in Australia: conceptualisation and testing

This study investigated how filtering contributes to market-provided low-income housing in Australia. It critiques the conceptualisation of filtering as a source of housing for low-income households, tests for the presence of filtering dynamics in housing markets (using Melbourne and Sydney as case studies) and considers policy options for enhancing (if so desired) filtering as a policy tool. Filtering is a market-based process whereby the supply of new, higher quality dwellings for higher- and middle-income households may also lead to additional supply of dwellings for lower income households. As properties age and their perceived quality drops, over time they move down the economic hierarchy through successively lower market segments or sub-markets, becoming a supply of ‘naturally occurring affordable housing’. Research into Melbourne and Sydney market dynamics found filtering is incompatible as a reliable source of additional affordable housing for low-income households in Australian cities. To enhance the role that filtering can play in the provision of affordable housing for low-income households, both more supply and more responsiveness of new supply to market signals are needed. In addition, Policy options to better enable filtering to generate a supply of affordable housing for low-income households are likely to be impractical and politically undesirable

Innovating urban governance: a research agenda

Urban governance innovation is being framed as an imperative to address complex urban and global challenges, triggering the adoption of novel institutional forms, approaches and techniques. Urban political geographers are still some way off fully apprehending the dynamics of these innovations and their potential to reconfigure the composition and politics of urban governance. This paper suggests dialogue between urban political geography and public sector innovation literatures as a productive way forward. We build from this engagement to suggest a critical research agenda to drive systematic analysis of innovatory urban governance, its heterogeneous formation, politics and possibilities

Effect of angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor and angiotensin receptor blocker initiation on organ support-free days in patients hospitalized with COVID-19

IMPORTANCE Overactivation of the renin-angiotensin system (RAS) may contribute to poor clinical outcomes in patients with COVID-19. Objective To determine whether angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitor or angiotensin receptor blocker (ARB) initiation improves outcomes in patients hospitalized for COVID-19. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS In an ongoing, adaptive platform randomized clinical trial, 721 critically ill and 58 non–critically ill hospitalized adults were randomized to receive an RAS inhibitor or control between March 16, 2021, and February 25, 2022, at 69 sites in 7 countries (final follow-up on June 1, 2022). INTERVENTIONS Patients were randomized to receive open-label initiation of an ACE inhibitor (n = 257), ARB (n = 248), ARB in combination with DMX-200 (a chemokine receptor-2 inhibitor; n = 10), or no RAS inhibitor (control; n = 264) for up to 10 days. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES The primary outcome was organ support–free days, a composite of hospital survival and days alive without cardiovascular or respiratory organ support through 21 days. The primary analysis was a bayesian cumulative logistic model. Odds ratios (ORs) greater than 1 represent improved outcomes. RESULTS On February 25, 2022, enrollment was discontinued due to safety concerns. Among 679 critically ill patients with available primary outcome data, the median age was 56 years and 239 participants (35.2%) were women. Median (IQR) organ support–free days among critically ill patients was 10 (–1 to 16) in the ACE inhibitor group (n = 231), 8 (–1 to 17) in the ARB group (n = 217), and 12 (0 to 17) in the control group (n = 231) (median adjusted odds ratios of 0.77 [95% bayesian credible interval, 0.58-1.06] for improvement for ACE inhibitor and 0.76 [95% credible interval, 0.56-1.05] for ARB compared with control). The posterior probabilities that ACE inhibitors and ARBs worsened organ support–free days compared with control were 94.9% and 95.4%, respectively. Hospital survival occurred in 166 of 231 critically ill participants (71.9%) in the ACE inhibitor group, 152 of 217 (70.0%) in the ARB group, and 182 of 231 (78.8%) in the control group (posterior probabilities that ACE inhibitor and ARB worsened hospital survival compared with control were 95.3% and 98.1%, respectively). CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE In this trial, among critically ill adults with COVID-19, initiation of an ACE inhibitor or ARB did not improve, and likely worsened, clinical outcomes. TRIAL REGISTRATION ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT0273570

Territorial stigma and territorial struggles in Sydney’s Waterloo estate

This dissertation is about territorial stigmatisation and public housing in Sydney, Australia. It draws on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, much of which was spent working with a resident action group who were contesting the redevelopment of the Waterloo estate, in the city’s inner-south. While public housing in Australia has always been a marginal form of tenure and has been further marginalised and stigmatised in the era of neoliberalisation, the stigmatisation of Waterloo is especially intense. The Waterloo estate is the largest in the country and is located in a gentrifying neighbourhood. The stigma of public housing is also conjugated with the stigma of the Aboriginal community: throughout the 20th century, the neighbourhood of Redfern-Waterloo was home to a large and politically active community of Aboriginal people from across NSW and Australia, particularly during the self-determination movement of the 1960s and 70s. Through interviews and ethnography with tenants and community workers, interviews with public servants and other housing professionals, and discourse analysis of a range of media and policy texts over the 10 years to 2019, I unpack (i) how the territorial stigmatisation of public housing is produced; (ii) how it was deployed and articulated through the redevelopment of the Waterloo estate; and (iii) how tenants contested and resisted the redevelopment, and the stigmatisation that undergirded it, through what I call territorial struggles. I fuse concepts of territory from political geography with the prevailing urban sociological/geographical approach to territorial stigmatisation to argue for the centrality of territory to understanding the production and contestation of territorial stigmatisation. Territory is both the space controlled from above through politico-institutional practices and representations and space that is appropriated physically and symbolically from below through everyday and organised means. Thus, as I explicate through my case study, territorial stigma is not thrust upon its subjects without some form of resistance: inhabitants of stigmatised territories like Redfern-Waterloo engage in territorial struggles over both symbolic classification and physical control

Property speculation, global capital, urban planning and financialisation: Sydney Boom, Sydney Bust redux

In this \u27Thinking Space\u27 essay we revisit Maurie Daly\u27s 1982 book Sydney Boom, Sydney Bust, fuelled by concern for how Australian cities are being transformed by financialised real estate. Daly\u27s insights remain highly relevant to Sydney and other cities around Australia and the world today. Poorly planned densification, inflated property markets, land speculation, and housing poverty are all outcomes of the (global) capitalist intersection of finance and land in Australia. The overwriting of Aboriginal country with colonial-capitalist systems of land ownership set in train a process of land and housing booms, bubbles and busts that are better understood by their circular continuity rather than as a set of ephemeral ruptures. It is the property and finance system itself, rather than any ruptures to it, that reproduces unequal and alienating social relations. Researchers investigating property speculation, global capital, urban planning and financialisation, we argue, ought to revisit this key text to inform their contemporary analyses. Moreover, those wielding power over Australian urban affairs would do well to read it too, lest its lessons be ignored for another generation

Reluctant regulators? Rent regulation in Australia during the COVID-19 pandemic

Rents in the Australian private rental sector (PRS) have long been determined by the market, but during the public health and economic crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic, state and territory governments implemented emergency measures to prevent evictions and regulate rents. This article reviews the rent measures implemented and their outcomes, using survey data and other quantitative evidence, and interviews with PRS stakeholders. We find the rent measures, which relied on negotiations between individual landlords and tenants, had a modest effect–just 8–16% of tenants got a rent variation–and tenants, landlords and agents struggled in unfamiliar roles. The emergency period holds lessons and prompts questions about future directions in policy-making for rental affordability and PRS relations

REINFORCING AND REFRACTING AUTOMOBILITY: Urban experimentation with autonomous vehicles

As part of the infiltration of automation across diverse domains of urban life, autonomous vehicles (AVs), or driverless cars, are traversing cities and regions across the world. This chapter presents a critical analysis of trials of these vehicles, which are being shaped by, and are shaping, the material, political and economic fabric of the city. It takes the burgeoning literature on urban experimentation in a new empirical direction – that of mobility – and deepens understanding of the sense in which such experiments are urban. Its extensive analysis of global experiments with automated vehicles provides an analytical typology of four forms of experimentation – on-road, test bed, precinct and living lab – each with differing relations to the city and differing potentials for political transformation. It illuminates the city as much more than a container for experiments, being multiply implicated in these AV trials through which, we argue, differentiated conditions of possibility emerge for contesting and reconfiguring the city’s ‘automobility.

Overcoming over-research? Reflections from Sydney\u27s ‘Petri dish\u27

This chapter relates ethical and methodological reflections from four respective research projects (though somewhat intertwined) grounded in the study of the Sydney neighbourhood Redfern-Waterloo. This neighbourhood—two contiguous suburbs in the city’s inner-south—has received persistent streams and periodic torrents of scholarly enquiry for nearly 50 years. The area contains large tracts of social housing in an otherwise gentrified landscape and has for decades been a locus of Aboriginal and working-class activism and organising. It has also been a long-term fixation of urban redevelopment strategies and plans, the latest iteration leading each of us to the area. In critically reflecting on our experiences so far, we set out some potentially productive pathways for conducting research in such a place. Over-researched places are often essentialised and studies often recruit many of the same participants and as such we point to the need for engagement with under-researched subjects and agendas within over-researched places and for more comparative analyses of over-researched and under-researched places. Furthermore, we call for more action research and activism within our own institutional structures to shift academic research away from detached enquiry and toward more collaborative and rewarding modes of research participant engagements