Laurence Troy

‘It depends what you mean by the term rights’: strata termination and housing rights

Abstract Strata title was introduced in Australia over 50 years ago and offered a legal mechanism for space to be vertically subdivided and traded. Importantly, it allowed individualised property rights to be applied to multi-unit housing. In New South Wales, recent changes to the Strata Scheme Development Act allow termination of strata schemes with less than unanimous support of owners. A central feature of the discussion surrounding the implementation of these changes was to question the rights associated with ownership of strata. This paper presents findings from key-informant interviews undertaken in the lead up to the reforms to the NSW legislation governing strata termination. Analysis of these interviews demonstrates the complex ways in which property rights are understood in relation to strata termination within the broader context of housing. This paper argues that successful implementation of the new legislation impacting upon property rights in strata will require concerted engagement with wider social concepts and understanding of housing within the Australian community.

Managing the transition to a more compact city in Australia

ABSTRACT This paper explores the transition towards the compact city model in Australia, which has become the orthodoxy of metropolitan planning in the last two decades. This transition is aligned with neoliberal policies through which private investment and the marketplace have become dominant in driving urban growth and change. However, an intensive review of the experience of Sydney and Perth shows that a metanarrative of transition from a social-democratic to a neoliberal form in metropolitan planning is an oversimplification, and blurs the redeployment of state powers, processes and institutions to address new challenges. The paper explores two related points. First, it demonstrates how a methodical examination of the eclectic mixture of policies designed to drive the compact city transition can enable the identification and analysis of shared policy trends across the two cities. These trends relate to metropolitan strategies, transport planning, infrastructure funding, centralization and local input. Second, it demonstrates how such a review can also provide broader insights into the contours of the political economy of the compact city, and the potential significance for its citizenry. Key insights relate to who has a say in development control, growing executive power, increased government engagement with lobby groups and growing inequality.

Re)Producing Nature in Pyrmont and Ultimo

Urban political ecology (UPE), as articulated by Heynen et al., is premised on the refusal to ontologically separate nature and society. The urban becomes representative of an unbounded process of ‘urbanisation’, a complex interplay between ecological, political, and economic processes that produce historically and geographically contingent outcomes. Importantly, it advances a historical conception of nature, and problems in and of nature, that necessarily encompasses the socio-economic conditions of its production. This paper presents research into the formation of urban sustainability policy in Australia that draws on the theoretical insights offered by the UPE approach. Using one of Australias largest urban regeneration projects as a focus, Pyrmont and Ultimo in Sydney, this paper discusses how the politics and economics of urban change and development framed possibilities of how urban environmental problems were firstly understood and, secondly, how they could be addressed. In doing so, this foreclosed alternative visions of urban policy that do not align with hegemonic forms of socio-economic regulation.

Planning perspectives from Western Australia: a reader in theory and practice

easily the intentions behind these approaches can be diverted (or perhaps, in some cases, perverted). CBC is supposed to be better for people affected by conservation than coercive approaches to conservation, but it is not always clear that it is much better in practice. Rather than advocating ‘throwing out the baby with the bath water’, Dressler stresses the importance of a careful understanding of social relations and social differences to implementing CBC. A major implication is that CBC-associated livelihoods programs need to focus on the specific needs and characteristics of various target groups rather than generalised programs aimed at income generation for an undifferentiated constituency.

As compact city planning rolls on, a look back: lessons from Sydney and Perth

ABSTRACT This paper categorises and compares the policy frameworks that have encouraged higher density urban renewal in Sydney and Perth since the mid-2000s, which reflect the ‘compact city’ model that has become international urban planning orthodoxy. The policies can be grouped into four broad categories: (i) metropolitan strategies; (ii) transport and infrastructure plans; (iii) legislation creating development corporations; and (iv) planning system reforms. By comparing these policies, the paper identifies some key similarities and differences in how the compact city model has been adopted in Sydney and Perth. The most significant similarities are the changing power relationships reshaping urban planning and governance, and the ongoing challenges of integrating land-use and transport planning. The paper concludes with some brief commentary on the challenge these two issues pose for the next decade of compact planning, particularly for strategic planning bodies like the Greater Sydney Commission and the Western Australian Planning Commission.

The politics of urban renewal in Sydney’s residential apartment market:

Australia has long had a deeply speculative housing property market. Arguably this has been accentuated in recent years as successive governments have privileged private-sector investment in housing property as the key mechanism for delivering housing and a concurrent winding back of direct government support for housing. This has occurred through a period in which urban renewal and flexible planning regulation have become the key focus of urban planning policy to deliver on compact city ambitions in the name of sustainability. There has been a tendency to read many of the higher density housing outcomes as a relatively homogenous component of the housing market. There has been a comparative lack of critical engagement with differentiated spatial, physical and socio-economic outcomes within the higher density housing market. This paper will explore the interactions between flexible design-based planning policies, the local property market and physical outcomes. Different parts of the property development industry produced distinctive social and physical outcomes within the same regulatory space. Each response was infused with similar politics of exclusion and privilege in which capacity to pay regulated both access and standard of housing accessible, opening new socio-economic divisions within Australia’s housing landscape.

Is Airbnb a sharing economy superstar? Evidence from five global cities

Abstract The “sharing economy” concept has been embraced by governments, entrepreneurs and commentators as delivering new forms of opportunity for local and national economies. Accommodation-sharing platform Airbnb is often considered a sharing economy exemplar, and has promoted itself as helping middle-class residents to gain and retain a foothold in expensive housing markets. This narrative is particularly salient in “global cities”, where poor housing affordability and high tourist demand inevitably coexist. However, critics claim many Airbnb listings are actually permanent short-term rentals. Thus, instead of enabling new efficiencies in the use of housing assets and providing financial security for existing residents, Airbnb may be a variation on an old theme: removing properties from the market for long-term rental or purchase. This paper has three aims: it critically interrogates the sharing economy concept in relation to Airbnb; it reviews the regulatory responses to Airbnb in five global cities; and it examines Airbnb listing data in each city. Ultimately, the paper argues that while some Airbnb listings do fit the sharing economy narrative, others are part of the traditional economy of short term letting. Policy makers need to recognise the different impacts of these uses in their responses to Airbnb and the sharing economy.

Planning and citizenship

Home Microfinance (HMF). Onyemaechi envisages a housing microfinance system operating in a context where the private sector develops low-cost houses, and finance is facilitated in partnership with cooperatives and the third sector. The establishment of HMF is ambitious, and the case made for it in Within Their Reach not conclusive. One key question is whether such an initiative would be able to address housing problems in cities where well-located housing for the poor is only possible through dense neighbourhoods with multi-storey dwellings. Can microfinance facilitate this scale of housing development, which is difficult to self-build? Interestingly, the author briefly acknowledges the contribution of self-built housing as part of the solution to Nigeria’s housing problem in chapter four. Given that currently close to 90% of Nigerians are housed through self-built housing in neighbourhoods developed and managed through self-help, this topic deserved rather more attention than mass housing, which serves as the focus of Within Their Reach in the form of the author’s proposed reformation of the PPP model. Within Their Reach proposes significant policy, regulatory and institutional reforms if PPPs are to be pursued as the housing solution for the urban poor, including: a review of legal provisions concerning access to land; the establishment of a specialized housing development bank and Social and Affordable Housing Development Company; encouraging ‘sweat equity’; and inclusion of the third sector and local government in PPP processes. Some of these are in fact provided for in the present PPP framework, which raises the questions of why these provisions have not worked out in practice and how they will within a reformed PPP, questions that Onyemaechi could have explored further in this book. The author’s vision of a reformed housing sector that caters for low-income households in Nigeria is very welcome. The socio-economic benefits associated with addressing the country’s housing challenges, which are presented in the last chapter, are wide-ranging and include job creation, growth in Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and Gross Domestic Product (GDP), harnessing opportunities within the third sector, including sweat equity. Successful implementation of the excellent – albeit not always fully worked-through – proposals in this book is not impossible, but the challenges to all stakeholders of doing so should not be underestimated. Policy experts, scholars across different disciplines, real estate developers and civil society in the field of housing in Nigeria would find Onyemaechi’s proposals in Within Their Reach useful.