Miriam Williams

Renting Over Troubled Waters: An Urban Political Ecology of Rental Housing

Urban political ecology emphasises the hybrid nature of cities and the flows of people and materials that constitute the built environment. Climate change introduces a profound dimension of uncertainty in the socio-material relations of urban life, raising questions for urban residents of how to act, what sort of actions might make a ‘difference’ and ‘matter’. For renters this uncertainty is amplified by limited access to ‘resources for adaption’ such as gardens, water efficiency and alternative energy, and exacerbated by poor communication and unresponsiveness from landlords. The built environment, and housing in particular, is recognized as both a significant site of greenhouse gas emissions and a site where adaptation to climate change will need to occur. However, the capacity of urban residents to make changes to their housing is uneven. This paper draws on a case study of rental property managers and tenants in Newcastle, NSW to explore social and cultural processes that are both shaped by and shape rental housing provision. In this paper we explore the urban political ecologies of rental housing through the lens of water, revealing a suite of practices, materials and discourses that assemble to make resources for adaptation, and simultaneously render water as useful, troubled and troublesome. The socionatural relations of tenure are shaped by regulatory practices including leases, insurance and capital investment alongside human and non-human actors. In particular the paper draws attention to the different conditions of access to ‘resources for adaptation’ in the material relations of public and private rental housing provision.

Searching for actually existing justice in the city

Locating justice in the city can be a difficult task. Urban theory has focused on exposing injustice and critiquing the multiple occurrences of injustice in cities. But what role could uncovering practices of actually existing justice in the city play in critical theory? How would we begin to look for actually existing justice in the here and now? By adopting a performative ontology and a politics of possibility, I argue that it is possible to expose, propose and amplify (Iveson, 2010) actually existing justice practices in the everyday city. A shift in thinking and research approach may be needed to make theoretical and ontological space for justice. In this paper I discuss research approaches that assist in locating justice in the city. Theorisations of a politics of possibility, performative ontological politics, weak theory and reading for difference are a suite of research practices that make space for the presence of justice. I argue that cities can be sites of actually existing justice practiced as a response to situated injustices or as a way of doing/being/thinking the city differently and demonstrate this with the example of Alfalfa House Organic Food Cooperative, Sydney, Australia. Documenting how justice is expressed in our cities is essential for work that seeks to grow and nurture justice projects.

Green tenants: practicing a sustainability ethics for the rental housing sector

The shift towards social, government and corporate ethics which value environmental sustainability has also embraced householders in a plethora of educational guides, policies, regulations and consumer information about green home improvements, purchasing choices and household practices. In this paper, we make the claim that the rental housing sector, and in particular the private rental sector, has yet to participate, structurally, culturally and materially, in this shift to an ethics of sustainability. We argue, however, that even on such otherwise arid ground, an alternative ethic is developing, a sustainability ethic practiced by green tenants whose activities inside and outside their homes go beyond the considerable material constraints of their dwellings and incomes, and beyond the purely transactional utility of the rental contract. These activities, relational, interconnected and resilient, offer both glimpses of a greening rental housing sector, and a clearer picture of the areas where work remains to be done. Based on a research study, we conducted of the rental sector in regional Australia, and in particular of the everyday sustainability practices of tenants, we suggest that these activities are a practice-based form of care for the world, in many ways similar to Maria Puig de la Bellacasas practice-based, human-decentred ethics which she suggests is exemplified in the permaculture movement. The stories of the tenants we interviewed for our study also point the way to other changes which are needed to enable a practice-based sustainability ethic to flourish across the rental housing sector as a whole.