Kim Dovey

Safety becomes danger: dilemmas of drug-use in public space

This paper provides a socio-spatial analysis of injecting drug-use in public space. It focuses on one urban district in Melbourne, Australia, which has become strongly identified with heroin sale and use in public space. Selling activities are camouflaged within a diverse street life while injecting sites are dispersed through a broad diversity of laneways, car parks and toilets. These injecting zones occupy liminal places which slide between categories of private and public, and which mediate complex and paradoxical relations between safety and danger. Those who inject in public space are caught in a dilemma--needing both privacy and exposure in the event of an overdose, safety from police becomes danger from an overdose. This empirical work, based on interview and spatial analysis, is presented as a basis for theorizing the socio-spatial construction of heroin use and for assessing the prospects for safe injecting.

Becoming places : urbanism/architecture/identity/power

Part 1: Ideas 1. Making Sense of Place 2. Place as Assemblage 3. Silent Complicities 4. Limits of Critical Architecture Part 2: Places 5. Slippery Characters: Defending and Creating Place Identities (with Ian Woodcock and Stephen Wood) 6. Becoming Prosperous: Informal Urbanism in Yogyakarta (with Wiryono Rhajo) 7. Urbanising Architecture: Koolhaas and Spatial Segmentarity 8. Open Court: Transparency and Legitimation in the Courthouse 9. Safety Becomes Danger: Drug-Use in Public Space (with John Fitzgerald) 10. New Orders: Monas and Merdeka Square (with Eka Permanasari) 11. Urban Slippage: Smooth and Striated Streetscapes in Bangkok (with Kasama Polakit)

Pleasure, Politics, and the “Public Interest”: Melbourne's Riverscape Revitalization

Abstract As global forces have reshaped urban landscapes over the past 2 decades, cities have typically responded with a range of “spectacular” developments, the most common of which have been waterfront projects. In this article we describe the transformation of Melbournes urban riverscape from an industrial junkyard into a postindustrial “landscape of desire.” A primary concern is identifying winners and losers in this restructuring. To this end, we resurrect and redefine the concept of the public interest. In Melbourne, the production of signature projects geared to global place marketing coincided with a collapse of democratic public planning. Urban development became design driven, more seductive, and more secretive. Urban planning practice was restructured along with the urban landscape.

A Test of Character: Regulating Place-identity in Inner-city Melbourne

During the 1990s, urban planning in Melbourne changed from prescriptive regulation to a place-based performance framework with a focus on existing or desired ‘urban character’. This paper is a case study of a contentious urban project in the inner-Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy: a highly valued place characterised as an irregular and transgressive mix of differences: between building types, functions, forms, heights and people. Contrasting conceptions, experiences and constructions of ‘character’ are explored from the viewpoints of residents, architect/developer and the state. To what degree does the regulation of ‘character’ open or close the city to creative innovation? Can it become camouflage for creative destruction? How to regulate for irregularity? The paper concludes with a discussion of theories of place (Massey vs Heidegger) and the prospects of concepts such as habitus (Bourdieu) and assemblage (Deleuze) for the interpretation of a progressive sense of place.

Appropriating the spectacle: Play and politics in a leisure landscape

The urban riverfront of Melbourne, Australia, has been transformed over the past 20 years into a popular leisure precinct known as Southbank. This is a postmodern landscape of contrived spectacle, where playful urban life is simulated, choreographed and consumed. Yet it is also the site of many forms of unplanned and unstructured activity. This paper explores the complex uses and meanings which can develop around such a waterfront, and outlines three dialectics which reveal how many new kinds of public life emerge within it. New tensions between global and local, politics and play, representation and embodied action lead to a rethinking of both formularized waterfronts and urban design theories.

Informal Urbanism and the Taste for Slums

Abstract This paper explores the aesthetics and politics of slum tourism – what are the attractions and what are the dangers of aestheticizing poverty? We first present eleven images of slums and informal urbanism in south and Southeast Asia and suggest a complex mix of attractions for Western tourists. On the one hand informal urbanism can be picturesque with elements of nostalgia and a quest for authenticity; on the other is the shock of the real, the spectacle of intensive labyrinthine urbanity and an uneasy voyeurism. We suggest the attraction is more the anxious and awe-filled pleasure of the sublime than any formal beauty. The paper then changes scale to connect such imagery to the political economy and geography of the city where the visibility of slums and urban informality is linked to state and market ideologies. Informal settlements generally have negative symbolic and political capital; the developing state paradoxically needs tourists yet seeks to control the urban image for purposes of branding and to signify law and order. The slum is often hidden from the public gaze in a manner that is complicit with the reproduction of poverty. While the voyeuristic gaze of the Western tourist produces an aestheticization of poverty this does not depoliticize so much as it opens up new connections and potential transformations.

Speculation and Resistance: Constraints on Compact City Policy Implementation in Melbourne

Compact city policies such as Melbourne 2030 have been established in Australia for a range of reasons including climate change. It is now clear that the Melbourne 2030 policy has not been effective—with new development mostly on the urban fringe. This policy failure has often been sheeted home to resident and local government resistance to densification. This article suggests this narrative is insufficient to explain this failure at a metropolitan-wide scale and is clearly mistaken in one suburb, where aspects of the planning system appear to thwart the aims of strategic policy by encouraging speculation and producing vacant sites. Brunswick is an inner-city suburb with good opportunities for intensification adjacent to transit lines and on former industrial sites. In spite of resident resistance, 80 per cent of new dwellings proposed between 2002 and 2007 were approved for construction, and would have increased housing stock by 13 per cent. However, by 2009 just under half of all approved dwellings had been completed or commenced on site, while construction of the taller and higher density projects tended to stall, the sites having been on-sold and permits extended. We suggest developers anticipate that the planning system will ultimately approve significant increases in height and density, using Melbourne 2030 to over-ride local policy via appeals to the Planning Tribunal. Such permits produce significant capital gains that can be cashed without construction. We argue that elements of the Victorian planning system encourage ambit claims, contestation, cynicism and speculation, thwarting negotiations between residents, councils and developers towards a more compact city. The focus on the idea that resident resistance is the problem obscures the role the planning system itself plays in frustrating the goals of compact city policy.

Placing Graffiti: Creating and Contesting Character in Inner-city Melbourne

Debates over definitions of urban graffiti as either ‘street art’ or ‘vandalism’ tend to focus on either contributions to the field of artistic practice or violations of a legal code. This paper explores the place of graffiti as an urban spatial practice—why is graffiti where it is and what is its role in the constructions and experiences of place? Through interviews and mapping in inner-city Melbourne, the paper explores the ways that potential for different types of graffiti is mediated by the micro-morphology of the city and becomes embodied into the urban habitus and field of symbolic capital. From a framework of Deleuzian assemblage theory graffiti negotiates ambiguous territories between public/private, visible/invisible, street/laneway and art/advertising. Graffiti is produced from intersecting and often conflicting desires to create or protect urban character and place identity. It is concluded that desires to write and to erase graffiti are productive urban forces, while desires to promote or pro...

Designing for adaptation: the school as socio-spatial assemblage

Over the last century we have seen a slow transformation of the architecture of school classrooms in response to changing pedagogical theory and practice. A shift from teacher-centred to student-centred learning is accompanied by the move towards a more ‘open’ plan with new spatial types, interconnections and modes of adaptation. This paper seeks to understand this linkage of plans to pedagogies in the case of the middle school. Using an analytic framework of assemblage theory, clusters of learning spaces from a range of recent innovative school plans are analysed in terms of capacity for socio-spatial interconnection and adaptation. Five primary plan types are identified, ranging from the traditional classroom through various degrees of convertibility to permanently open plans. Patterns of spatial structure and segmentarity emerge to enable new forms of teaching and learning on the one hand, but also to camouflage a conservative pedagogy on the other. If traditional classrooms with their corridors and doors can be understood in terms of Foucaultian disciplinary technology, the new learning clusters suggest a use of Deleuzian social theory to understand an architecture of connectivity and flow. Through an analysis that is intended to reveal rather than eliminate ambiguities, architectural capacities for ‘convertibility’ from one pedagogy to another are distinguished from properties of ‘agility’ or ‘fluidity’ that enable continuous adaptation between learning activities. We find that the most popular types have high levels of convertibility and reveal conflicting desires for both discipline and empowerment. We also suggest that the most open of plans, while cheaper to build, are not the most agile or fluid.

Uprooting critical urbanism

This paper engages the debate between assemblage thinking as an emerging body of critical urban theory and the desire to contain it within a framework of urban political economy. I take critical urban theory to mean the broad intellectual engagement with the ways in which cities and urban spaces are implicated in practices of power. Assemblage thinking moves outside a strict political economy framework and embodies different ontologies of power and place, yet this is not a shift away from criticality. Such thinking connects disparate threads of current urban theory as it opens new modes of multi-scalar and multi-disciplinary research geared to urban design and planning practices and therefore to potentials for urban transformation. To contain emerging assemblage theory under political economy is to neuter it and potentially produce conservative forms of practice. The framework of urban political economy brings enormous explanatory power to our understanding of cities and will develop most effectively if it does not consume its offspring.