Michael Darcy

De‐concentration of Disadvantage and Mixed Income Housing: a Critical Discourse Approach

Despite differences in the history, form, and tenant populations, housing authorities in the UK, USA and Australia have embarked on similar redevelopment projects designed to address social exclusion by replacing areas of concentrated public housing with “mixed‐income” developments. Drawing on examples from Australia, this paper analyses the discourse which supports these redevelopment projects. Elements of the discursive strategy revealed include: the construction of public tenancy as a disadvantage in itself; the creation of particular research categories and objects (such as “estates”) based on selective use of statistics and scale; the generation of binary narratives concerning community life; and constrained forms of consultation and participation. The analysis demonstrates that while purporting to be an anti‐poverty measure, policy directed at de‐concentration of public housing and “mixed income” development forms part of a neo‐liberal agenda of housing reform and fails to address the demonstrated connections between housing and social disadvantage.

Made to Measure: Taming Practices with Results-based Accountability

This paper focuses on what happens when accountability regimes, represented in calculative planning processes, migrate onto situated, sociomaterial practices. Specifically, the article investigates what happens when the practices of results-based accountability (RBA) are translated into the social justice practices of locally-based community organizations. Based on the tenets of contemporary practice theory and a three-year participatory action research project with community organizations in Australia, the study illustrates that performance measurement and accountability frameworks such as RBA are not technologies that peer and measure innocently and disinterestedly from a distance. Rather, RBA, as a bundle of material-discursive practices, is part of the performance measuring apparatus creating differences that include some things and exclude others. We articulate some of the organizing practices of social justice in a locally-based community organization, follow their translation into RBA planning practices and then return to analyse the introduction of RBA practices into the daily work of an organization. In this way, we demonstrate how situated and ongoing practices begin to unravel through intra-action with RBA boundary-making practices and its redrawn relations of accountability.

Inhabitance, place-making and the right to the city: public housing redevelopment in Sydney

This article brings Lefebvres Right to the City thesis into conversation with Baumans notion of the flawed consumer to account for the neoliberal colonisation of public tenant organising in urban redevelopment. Drawing on a case study of public housing redevelopment from Sydney, Australia, we show that neoliberal community building and the emergence of professional community builders obviate the self-organising efforts of tenants. In this case tenants’ rights were attenuated when the housing authority invited private capital to not only rebuild the physical fabric but also remake the social relations around public tenancy within the trope of consumerism. We argue for a revival of tenant self-organising as a collective political project that might counteract the individualisation of tenants’ rights under neoliberal community building regimes. Such a political project needs to be extended beyond the boundaries of the local neighbourhood or ‘housing estate’ to expose the strategies at work in public housing redevelopment projects. Drawing on Right to the City we argue that inhabitance should confer the right to participate in place-making. We conclude that tenant self-organising is one way that tenants imagine, collectively construct and inhabit lived space; it is a process of meaning- and place-making amongst a community with a shared experience of contemporary urban transformation.

Place and Disadvantage: The Need for Reflexive Epistemology in Spatial Social Science

The relationship between place and disadvantage, and particularly the question of whether, and how, geographical concentration of disadvantaged households exacerbates disadvantage is of growing concern to social science and urban policy. Despite many calls for a subtle and complex approach to constructing knowledge about these issues, a positivist approach based on statistical indicators, appears to dominate policy making. This approach reifies place and distracts attention from strategies which might effectively address disadvantage at the local level. This article describes two examples of small area redevelopment where such an approach has been used to suggest that redevelopment and dispersal of public housing concentrations are in the interests of current residents, whose lives would be improved through replacement of existing housing forms with more diverse, or at least tenure-mixed, suburbs. Yet the process by which this improvement will occur is yet to be explicated or even adequately theorised by spatial social science. The indicators used to measure the ‘success’ of redevelopment, such as small area employment, education and crime statistics, are likely to reveal little about the impact of such projects on the lives of the individuals most affected. A more reflexive and ‘deeply engaged’ research methodology is called for.

Global city aspirations, graduated citizenship and public housing: analysing the consumer citizenships of neoliberalism

Global city discourses rearticulate the relationships between the state, urban space and the global economy. At the local level, global city reconfigurations stamp the mark of a global economic order onto local citizenship practices. Public housing is a legacy of specific national (welfare) states where citizenship rights arose from territorially bound constitutional discourses, and is incompatible in its current form with the consumer-based rights and responsibilities of a global economic order. At the same time, property markets in high-value areas of cities like Sydney, Australia, see not only increasing presence of international investment but fundamental changes in planning and governance processes in order to facilitate it. Global market-oriented discourses of urban governance promote consumer “performances of citizenship” and a graduated approach to the distribution of rights, including the right to housing. In this article we explore what is new about neoliberal approaches to public and social housing policy, and how public tenants respond to and negotiate it. In Australia tenants’ right to participate in local-level democracy, and in housing management, must be reconsidered in light of the broader discourses of consumer citizenship that are now enforced on tenants as a set of “responsibilities” to the market and state.

Working together? : the Salvation Army and the Job Network

This article explores the changing relationship between government and The Salvation Army, as manifested in the development and implementation of employment policy in Australia between 1998 and 2007. This exploration focuses on the introduction of market discourse throughout the contracting process, in particular how this discourse seeks to reconstruct service users as ‘consumers’, and the Salvation Army’s response to this. By studying the ways in which this religiously and socially motivated non-profit organization sought to mediate neo-liberal discourses of competition and consumerism, we seek to shed light on the processes and pressures affecting faith-based and other non-profit organizations that increasingly find themselves acting as agents of government policy under the principles of New Public Management (NPM).

Recasting Research on ‘Neighbourhood effects’: A Collaborative, Participatory, Trans-National Approach

This chapter critiques some of the dominant discourses of place and disadvantage as well as their epistemology. The current attention given to neighbourhood effects is seen as part of a larger ‘spatial turn’ in social science, which attempts to explain the disadvantage of poor households concentrated in poor neighbourhoods. The chapter critiques the ‘culture of poverty explanation’ of disadvantage and the associated policy response of de-concentrating poverty through the creation of mixed income neighbourhoods. It is argued that if there is little evidence in support of neighbourhood effects in the first place, then creating mixed neighbourhoods will lead to little benefit for the neighbourhood residents, a large proportion of who will be displaced as a result of the policy. The chapter further critiques quantitative research for ignoring the voice and perspectives of neighbourhood residents. It distances itself completely from positivist epistemology by proposing an alternative approach based on phenomenological epistemology and participatory action research. This alternative approach is based on a ‘collaborative university – community research’ design to understand residents’ perspectives of their neighbourhood and concentrated public housing and the policy proposals for mixed housing in Australia.

The Factors Driving the Escalation of Community Opposition to Affordable Housing Development

Abstract Community opposition to locally unwanted development is not inherently problematic, but it can be destructive where conflict between proponents and objectors escalates. This paper relates mixed-methods findings from a Sydney case-study where opposition to planned affordable housing projects was widespread but uneven. Five factors are identified that escalated individual opposition campaigns in this case: public notification procedures; sense of injustice; prejudice; strong campaign leadership; and the involvement of politicians. We argue that these factors will likely also escalate opposition to the planned development of other forms of critical social infrastructure, and that an understanding of them can help minimise destructive conflicts between proponents and host communities.