Louise Crabtree

Sustainability Uptake in Housing in Metropolitan Australia: An Institutional Problem, Not a Technological One

This paper examines the uptake of environmentally sustainable housing in two major cities in Australia. The paper responds to literature that suggests sustainability is not so much a technological problem as an institutional one, and to theories of innovation which focus on innovation diffusion through chains of production. The disaggregation and piecemeal nature of innovation within the building industry is underpinned by unfamiliarity with new technologies, a lack of consistent legislation and pricing and unclear channels of communication. These generate uneven adoption of environmentally sustainable materials and processes within this industry.

Sustainable Housing Development in Urban Australia: exploring obstacles to and opportunities for ecocity efforts

Abstract Basic aspects of sustainable housing design such as increasing density, mixed use and proximity to public transport are being adopted increasingly in Australian cities. Sustainable building codes such as NSWs BASIX and Victorias Green Star rating systems are also being implemented and advanced. More substantial improvements and endeavours such as onsite food production, energy generation and waste treatment, are being seen increasingly as necessary for urban sustainability, yet little is being done to institutionalise or normalise these through Australias housing system. Similarly, concerns about the social sustainability of housing identify the need for mixed, flexible tenure and dwelling types, with again little uptake despite evidence of demand. Given that we seem to know what needs doing to move towards sustainability, this paper investigates two ecologically and socially sound community-based housing developments in Australia, with a view to finding what helped or hindered these efforts and what may further the uptake of sustainable design. Assessment of the uptake of sustainable planning initiatives reveals the prevalence of a decidedly neoliberal agenda which shies away from the more substantial challenges ecocity design and community-based enterprise may represent. Such community-based initiatives must, however, be supported at a broader scale, to avoid possible outsourcing of governmental responsibility or the relegation of sustainable design to the sole realm of the wealthy.

Decolonising Property: Exploring Ethics, Land, and Time, through Housing Interventions in Contemporary Australia

The idea of property is a fundamental and foundational component of modern industrialised economies and yet, as a growing body of work shows, property is far from settled as a concept, or as a set series of relationships—whether between institutions, humans, places, and/or other species. Property systems are part of emergent, complex socioecological systems, reflecting and manifesting social and political phenomena, and asserting particular forms of citizen/self as acceptable, preferable and dominant. Predominant Western understandings of property rely on, enable, and anticipate increases in property value over time, reflecting particular conceptualisations and experiences of time shaped by Judeo—Christian teleological narratives in which time moves towards a perfect state that ironically remains perpetually imminent. This essay is concerned with tracing the ontological baggage of predominant understandings of property and time and exploring the terrain of their Others, as well as exploring the shifts in relationships between these in a decolonising and postmodern Australian context. This paper will reveal some of the diversity of what and how societies think about property and time, to suggest we may be starting—albeit 21—to acknowledge and engage with multiple and complex iterations of these.

Politically Engaged Geographical Research with the Community Sector: Is It Encouraged by Australia's Higher Education and Research Institutions?

With the application of neoliberal thinking to the higher education sector, measures of research quality and utility have proliferated in efforts to increase academic accountability, innovation, and contributions to public policy. We intend to reignite discussion about community activism and the role of the academic in response to trends in higher education policy and recent debate in Australia about research quality assessment and policy relevance. We challenge the common portrayal of the public sector as the sole locus of policy-making and argue the case for greater recognition of the role of the community sector and its research partners in policy development and implementation – one that is not given due attention in the discourse on or in measures of research value and impact. Informed by recent literature on governance and interpretative approaches to policy analysis, we draw on our combined experience conducting research with two Australian movements at the forefront of reforms to property rights institutions, legal standards, and norms relating to social and economic equity to outline the institutional tensions and structural impediments facing researchers working with the non-government sector. The paper documents the progressive roles the academic can play in such work, arguing that institutional change is required within the tertiary sector to support researchers to build closer, more trusting research partnerships in which due attention is given to social impact and relevance.

Self-organised housing in Australia: housing diversity in an age of market heat

While many jurisdictions have seen the recent failure of market and state mechanisms to respond to a crisis of housing provision and to the collapse of markets, Australias housing prices have experienced primarily ongoing growth, amongst persistent concerns regarding a lack of affordable stock across all tenures, and the concentration of ownership of housing assets in an ageing and shrinking demographic. In this context and building on a tradition of self-organised housing through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there exists a range of self-organised efforts for housing provision. However, the sector is poorly known and relatively under-researched. Consequently, this paper presents a review of various forms of direct self-organised housing provision in Australia, and of affiliated advocacy and lobbying efforts. The paper uses community economies and slow housing frameworks to present a dynamic and diverse arena for future research.

Unsettling Impact: Responding to Cultural Complexity

Australian academic research is currently in the midst of a flurry of reporting activity regarding ‘impact’, building on the articulation of impact as a university research metric in the UK. Looming large is the Australian Research Council’s roll-out of its Research Engagement and Impact (REI) framework, itself a response to the current federal government’s directive to universities to demonstrate usefulness to society more broadly (Australian Research Council 2017a). Australia’s universities will increasingly have to prove the impact of their research, with measures on engagement, and case studies of impactful projects submitted to be independently assessed via a process akin to the pre-existing Excellence for Research in Australia (ERA) benchmarking exercise. This Thinking Space piece emerges from within that flurry. In recent weeks I have been involved in the creation of—and experience as the subject of—a research impact ‘case study’ for the ARC’s REI Assessment Pilot (see Australian Research Council 2017b). A sample of disciplines across Australian universities was invited to submit pilot case studies of impactful research, using the ARC’s draft guidelines. Geography was not one of them. (Our discipline’s turn will come in 2018, when the REI assessment is rolled out to all disciplines.) But, as geographers well know, our research is interdisciplinary in nature, meaning that our projects potentially qualify in multiple discplinary field codes. In my case, a suite of team-based projects that I led in partnership with Aboriginal community organisations was selected by my university to be piloted as an impact case study in ‘Indigenous research’. My thoughts here arise from this early experience of how the impact agenda appears to be unfurling, set against considerable debate within and beyond geography about what ‘impact’ means, refracted through concerns with complexity, politics, and ethics.

Transitioning around the elephant in the room

A s we head further into climate change and closer to whatever shifts in energy production and consumption may be coming, ‘transition’ is receiving a flurry of attention as a way to think and act regarding the future of cities and communities in the face of complex challenges. The work of Atkinson (2013; 2014; Atkinson and Viloria 2013) stepped into this space, offering an overview of the Transition Towns movement and its possible relevance for cities (see also Smith 2011). Atkinson’s assertion is that the coming years will see decentralisation from cities with remaining urban residents seeking to establish less materially intensive systems and patterns of sustenance. Consequently, his work focuses on practices such as urban agriculture as part of broader organisational or lifestyle moves, including intentional communities. Thinking about the key objectives of Transition Towns in cities, and hence of Atkinson’s work, raises the immediate question: where is property in all this? Cities are currently centres of intensive capital investment in myriad forms of property, so the systemic overhauls and reorganisations proposed by Atkinson and others leave property as a rather large elephant in the urban living room. If cities are to transition to lower carbon budgets and less resource-intensive configurations—and there is fairly compelling evidence that they need to, such as recent IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) scenarios—what becomes of the legal, and financial, mechanisms through which property has been articulated, and which it upholds? Beyond these recent technical functions of property, what becomes of the ways in which property articulates our relationships and claims to place, or our senses of place? Are there ways that property can help or hinder transition? I have engaged with these questions in the context of ‘Western’, capitaland resourceintensive cities for close to two decades, informed by new ecology, radical democracy and various feminist literatures, and this has led to four issues of concern that this paper will address. First, is what resilience offers to a consideration of cities, particularly with regard to the idea of transition. Second, is whether the current constellation of challenges comprises a tipping point, and what that means for cities. Third, is what commoning, as a form of adaptive co-management, offers to a consideration of cities in transition, if this means navigating a tipping point. Fourth, is where those issues leave property. The paper asks how people might dwell in cities and create relevant, appropriate and workable models of property through the upheavals that might be coming; the undercurrent to that question is whether property has the flexibility to itself survive transition.

Exploring hybridity in housing: Lessons for appropriate tenure choices and policy

Housing for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples is an ongoing focus of public policy, which recently has been oriented towards the twin objectives of transitioning community housing into arrangements mirroring public housing, and the creation of mortgagee home ownership. Within this policy landscape, this contribution reflects on research that is concerned with exploring perpetually affordable housing and community benefit in diverse contexts.