Stewart Williams

The temporary city

This is essential reading for all those struggling to address the current problems of urban renewal in an era of great change.

Rethinking the Nature of Disaster: From Failed Instruments of Learning to a Post-Social Understanding

Recent disasters have been of such scale and complexity that both the common assumptions made about learning from them, and the traditional approaches distinguishing natural from technological disasters (and now terrorism) are thus challenged. Becks risk thesis likewise signals the need for a paradigmatic change. Despite sociological inflections in disaster research and management, however, an examination of the risk management practices deployed during Hurricane Katrina and the Indian Ocean tsunami reveals attendant problems with a persistent instrumental rationality and disjuncture between society and environment. Therefore, an alternative, post-social understanding is proposed. It includes relational (rather than instrumental) approaches which reinstate the importance of nonhuman nature, but it also recognizes that disasters are post-normal problems, and that disaster research and management increasingly deal with phenomena beyond the limits of current know-how.

Legal geography: An Australian perspective

Law is a powerful influence on people and place. Law both creates and is created by the relationship between people and place, although it rarely acknowledges this. Law frequently operates as if space does not matter. Law and legal processes, therefore, deserve greater attention from geographers. Legal geography is an emerging field of inquiry that facilitates much-needed attention to the interrelationships among the environment, people and social institutions, including formal laws but also informal rules, norms and lore. Legal geographers seek to make the invisible visible: to bring the law into the frame of geography, and space and place into focus for the law. Both critical and applied in approach, legal geography offers descriptive, analytical and normative insight into economics, justice, property, power, geopolitics, governance and scale. As such it can enrich most areas of geographic inquiry as well as contribute to current policy debates about the regulation of space and place. Legal geography is a way for enlarged appreciations of relationality, materiality, multiscalarity and agency to be used to interrogate and reform the law. This introduction to a special ‘themed paper’ section of Geographical Research provides a window on legal geography scholarship, including its history, contribution and ambition. The papers in the collection explore issues grounded in the legal geographies paradigm, variously analysing matters empirically detailed while engaging in broader, theoretical debates and using both Australian and international case studies.

Scales, Lines and Minor Geographies: Whither King Island?

These are exciting times for geographers, with stimulating possibilities being offered to the discipline by various bodies of poststructural, especially deleuzian, theory. There is, however, a dearth of empirical studies utilising these opportunities, particularly in Australian geography. King Island, located in Bass Strait, is used in this article to broach some theoretical potentials. First, we introduce deleuzian theory. Second, we view King Island through three geographic representations and respective mappings. Third, we discuss the implications of lived practices, which constitute various (major and minor) geographies on and of King Island, for existing perspectives on spatial relations and linear flows between local and global scales. Lastly, we explore some recent treatments of space inflected through the work of Deleuze and Guattari, consolidating some spatial concepts and relations gleaned from King Islands cartographic moments and movements.

Introduction: Disasters, Housing, Actuarialism and the Securitisation of Risk

Increasingly complex and severe disasters continue to occur, and housing remains a major part of the infrastructure impacted but is also central to recovery and resilience. This special issue of Housing Studies brings together papers that consider how disasters and disaster management are conceived in relation to housing. This introduction sets the scene by drawing upon the work of Beck and Foucault to show how the governance of risk society is constituted through particular ways of knowing and not-knowing, the enactment of safety, insecurity and the methods associated with actuarialism.

On Islands, Insularity, and Opium Poppies: Australia's Secret Pharmacy

Islands embody a contradictory geography. Although insularity has negative connotations, the related aspects of uniqueness, smallness, secrecy, security, isolation, and remoteness all have strategic roles in situating Australias production of licit narcotics as an international success with poppy cultivation confined to the island state of Tasmania. Through the boundaries and dualisms inscribed in the discourses of islandness and drug rhetoric, the states ultramodern manufacture of pharmaceuticals is contrasted with others elsewhere, including opium and illegal drug production. Their representations simplify the more intricate and challenging geopolitical realities that link this industry to transnational corporations, state and federal governments, their agencies, and various UN organisations. In a poststructural reading, the secrets of islands and drugs are suggested to comprise what Derrida terms aporia or impossible situations: Tasmania and its poppy industry are isolated from a global otherness yet entwine different peoples and places in connecting complex material practices both licit and illicit at multiple scales all around the world. However, these aporia also present new political and ethical openings with significance for island studies as well as for narcotics production and its regulation.

Licit Narcotics Production in Australia: Legal Geographies Nomospheric and Topological

Licit narcotics production in Australia is based on the cultivation of a poppy crop restricted to Tasmania under local, national, and international regulation. Its legal geographical analysis is advanced by drawing on the thinking about ‘the nomosphere’ and ‘topology’ developed by David Delaney and John Allen, respectively. Australia continues to lead global production of licit narcotics as distinct new entities, relationships, and capacities have been enabled by differentiating between the constituent alkaloids morphine and thebaine with a loophole identified in US legislation of the 80/20 rule. Nomospheric and topological lenses are used to focus on the intensive, emergent qualities of the industry in addition to the traditional topography revealed in its scalar, networked territorialisation. A renewed understanding of the spatial workings and power plays relevant can inform possible transformation around narcotics production.

What to do now? Tensions and dilemmas in responding to natural disasters: a study of three Australian State Housing Authorities

Abstract The floods that spread across Queensland, Australia in 2011 provided a salutary reminder of the appalling consequences of disasters. In Australia, all tiers of government have put in place protocols to minimise adverse consequences and response strategies for when disasters occur. While there is a considerable body of literature on disaster management, there has not been any single study that examines the role of housing authorities and the way that key actors involved engage and negotiate the complex array of tasks required. In many ways, this omission is surprising since housing authorities play a significant role in many recovery operations that require temporary accommodation for residents, repairs to damaged property and welfare support for householders affected. To address this lacuna, this paper reports on research that explored how Australian state housing authorities respond to disasters. It draws upon interviews with individuals who had practical experience of disasters and public housing tenants who were affected in the Canberra bushfires 2003, Cyclone Larry in far north Queensland in 2006 and the coastal storms and floods affecting NSW in 2007. Among the findings are the tensions that arise when agencies seek to enable locally based decision-making arrangements while also attempting to maintain control from the centre. Even when meticulous planning has been put in train, there is often a sense of confusion accentuated by the complexity of the competing tasks required of response teams. Bureaucratic control systems, although well intentioned, can actually impede agencies’ ability to manage the aftermath of a disaster. There are implications for researchers as well as practitioners in disaster management.

A more-than-human political moment (and other natural catastrophes)

Catastrophic events such as wildfires are predicted to increase and intensify because of climate change. This paper speculates on how politics may look within such a context by deploying Rancières political theorisations. We examine how a posthumanist re-configuration of this humanist notion of politics contributes to thinking about, acting for, and living within a rapidly changing climate. Specifically, we make a case for “more-than-human” political moments using the illustration of wildness – in the form of a wildfire – breaking free of wilderness and burning the settled lands of human habitation. In doing so, we draw on a relational ontology that re-configures agency and speech as “more-than-human”.

Space, scale and jurisdiction in health service provision for drug users: the legal geography of a supervised injecting facility

Sydneys Medically Supervised Injecting Centre delivers the significant benefits of harm reduction, but has been controversial regards the law. Its contested history is examined here through the lens of legal geography. Narrative analysis reveals that the arguments for and against the centres establishment referenced matters ranging from international treaties through to municipal governance. These arguments and their outcome were variously shaped by the different spaces and scales of jurisdiction but not simply in a zero sum game of law played out through the hierarchically ordered nesting of container-like territories. The implications for legal geography and for public health are discussed.