Kathleen Flanagan

The Geopolitics of Real Estate: Reconfiguring Property, Capital and Rights

Trading in real estate, whether our goal in doing so is to realize its use value or its exchange value, requires a particular way of thinking about land and property and our relationship to them. Whether we call that way of thinking “discourse” or “mentality” or some other term, it functions because we don’t look at it or think about it very often. In this original, compelling and scholarly book, Dallas Rogers pulls it into view through an empirical analysis of 16 of its “semblances”. He refers to these as “vignettes”, which implies the reader could selectively skim them, focussing only on those of particular interest, but this is a book that should be read from beginning to end. Not all the vignettes are equally convincing or successful, but the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and the effect and contribution is cumulative. The theoretical discussion in Chapter 2 is the most complex section of the book. Here, Rogers draws on an impressive range and depth of reading to assemble an analytical framework incorporating three “conceptual registers”, described, respectively, as “organising technics”, “mediating technologies” and “discursive codes”, and two “meta-concepts”, “semblance” and “assemblage”, accounts of which book-end the other chapters, and which sit in constant and unresolved tension throughout. The vignettes make up the body of the book – respectively, Australian Indigenous storylines; enclosure; the Chinese cultural revolution; British colonialism; the colonial joint-stock company; surveying; the colonial nation state; banks and banking; migration; post-war consumerism; real estate “self-help” books; investment visas; the emergence of the internet; its underpinning libertarian “ideological landscape”; and the “uploading” of real estate to Web 2.0. Within and through these vignettes, Rogers lays out the evidence for his main contentions: that “the geopolitical practices of land and real estate are heavily reliant on collective land and real estate mentalities” (156) that are deeply embedded and resistant to change, that these mentalities are not challenged by crisis but reinforced by it, and that geopolitical “moments” (161) – like feudalism, colonialism, war, post-war reconstruction and now the rise of China – are the determining conditions from which temporally and spatially situated real estate assemblages emerge. Rogers’ explicit and confident engagement with theory is the great strength of the book. Housing and urban scholars do excellent empirical work, much of it responding to the demand for “policy relevance”, but one of the privileges and strengths of academia is that empirical analysis can be situated within a theoretical context that lends it greater explanatory power. It is theory that allows Rogers to successfully

A Genealogy of Public Housing Production: Practice, Knowledge and the Broadacre Housing Estate

Abstract The rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s and its consequences for housing policy have long interested researchers. This study treats neoliberalism as a discursive practice that produces knowledge, including our knowledge of the past. Using a Foucauldian approach to the analysis of historical files housed in the archives of one Australian state, I examine the emergence of the “failed” broadacre public housing estate as an object of discourse. I argue that this object emerged as a localized effect of a reconfiguration in what Foucault refers to as the “discursive constellation” which placed neoliberalism at a higher level within that constellation. The effect was to change the conditions of possibility for the production of knowledge within lower discursive levels, and in the case of housing policy, it became difficult to know that broadacre development was anything other than a mistake and a failure. I argue that widespread acceptance of this view within the policy community today arises from a set of relations between knowledge and power predicated upon particular discursive rules and procedures of control. Recognition that our knowledge is conditional is the first step in a process of critique that can transform our responses to locational disadvantage, poverty and stigmatization.

‘Problem families’ in public housing: discourse, commentary and (dis)order

Abstract This article contributes to a chain of literature extending back to the late nineteenth century on the ‘problem family’, particularly when encountered by housing providers as the ‘problem’ tenant. Using archival evidence of the techniques employed by one social housing provider in the mid-1970s to identify a definitive solution to the challenges posed by ‘problem’ households, I trace the patterns and practices in ‘problem family’ discourse more broadly, and their intersection with those of other discursive fields, particularly eugenics and social work. I show how attempts to define, identify and design models of rehabilitation for ‘problem families’ can be understood as forms of a discursive strategy which Foucault identified as ‘commentary’, and argue that such commentary remains intrinsic to welfare state efforts to tackle entrenched disadvantage.