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This article examines the case of the Forgotten Australians as an opportunity to examine the role of the internet in the presentation of testimony. 'Forgotten Australians' are a group who suffered abuse and neglect after being removed from their parents – either in Australia or in the UK – and placed in Church- and State-run institutions in Australia between 1930 and 1970. The campaign by this profoundly marginalized group coincided with the decade in which the opportunities of Web 2.0 were seen to be diffusing throughout different social groups, and were considered a tool for social inclusion. We outline a conceptual framework that positions the role of the internet as an environment in which the difficult relationships between painful past experiences and contemporary injunctions to remember them, are negotiated. We then apply this framework to the analysis of case examples of posts and interaction on websites with web 2.0 functionality: YouTube and the National Museum of Australia. The analysis points to commonalities and differences in the agency of the internet in these two contexts, arguing that in both cases the websites provided support for the development of a testimony-like narrative and the claiming, sharing and acknowledgement of loss.

While commercial images of "backpacking" emphasise adventure, youth and sightseeing, recent ethnographies of backpackers identify other motivations and rationales that accentuate travel experiences as formative of the self and identity. This raises the question of the basis of this apparently common orientation. This paper investigates, through analysis of postings on an electronic backpacker notice board, "backpacker" as a collaboratively constructed category. We propose that the shared understandings of "backpacker" enabled by these notice boards are consistent with cultural orientations captured in notions of cosmopolitanism (Beck 2000) involving a shift to new forms of sociality across borders: a solidarity with strangers.

Communities of place feature prominently in new urbanism movements and in master-planned inner-city developments that result from urban renewal. This paper's point of departure is the stark contrast between the widespread use of mobile and ubiquitous media and communications technology by urban dwellers on the one hand and endemic forms of urban alienation and the disappearance or non-existence of urban neighbourhood community identity on the other. Networked individualism introduces challenges to conventional understandings of 'place' and 'public places'. It opens up opportunities to build partnerships between architecture, city planning and urban studies in order to re-conceptualise the understanding of community and neighbourhood planning in the light of new media and network ICTs. However, such a re-conceptualisation has not been achieved yet because of a lack of theoretical and practical understandings of the freedom and constraints and the social and cultural meanings that urban dwellers derive from their use of place-based ICT systems. The paper argues that in order to gain a better understanding of the continued purpose and relevance of urban neighbourhood communities in metropolitan areas and their changing role within a network society, the scope and structure of the communicative ecologies and social networks created and maintained by residents in urban residential real estate needs to be investigated empirically to inform city design and planning. The paper discusses a cross-disciplinary research design to build effective partnerships between city planners, developers, government, education and urban neighbourhood communities.

This paper reports on a study of the voluntary provision of inclusive housing. The impetus for the study is the Livable Housing Design initiative, an agreement among Australian housing industry and community leaders in 2010 to a national guideline and voluntary strategy with a target to provide minimum access features in all new housing by 2020. Situated in and around Brisbane, Australia, the study problematises the assumption that the housing industry will respond voluntarily; an assumption which this study concludes is unfounded. The Livable Housing Design initiative asks individual agents to consider the needs of people beyond the initial contract, to proceed with objective reasoning and to do the right thing voluntarily. Instead, the study found that interviewees focused on their immediate contractual obligations, were reluctant to change established practices and saw little reason to do more than was legally required of them. This paper argues that the highly-competitive and risk-averse nature of the industry works against a voluntary approach for inclusive housing and, if the 2020 target of the Livable Housing Design initiative is to be reached, a mandated approach through legislation will be necessary. The Livable Housing Design initiative, however, has an important role to play in preparing the Australian housing industry to accept further regulation.

This paper explores how participative democratic principles, specifically, ideas of community participation in decision-making processes, are framed as community rights and/or responsibilities in sustainable development policy at different levels of government. In doing this, the paper examines the contribution of the governmentality perspective to an understanding of the nature of relationships involved in regulation through community. The paper first briefly reviews key tenets of 'Third Way' politics and the alternative view proffered by critiques from the governmentality perspective. It then turns to an analysis of how techniques of rights and responsibilities are implicit in the language of sustainable development policy at three levels: global (Agenda 21), national (Australian national policy-Australian national strategy for ecologically sustainable development), and regional (Queensland regional policy—Draft South East Queensland Regional Plan). Finally, we consider some implications of our application of a governmentality perspective for how we understand government, community and community participation, and sustainable development. In doing so, we argue that neither community, nor sustainable development, can be separated from the techniques of rights and responsibilities that enable 'government at a distance'.

Research on creative-industries clusters emphasizes both community and network dynamics in cross-organizational linkages and their role in fostering group and individual creativity and innovation. This article turns to an economic sociology framework, examining what is at stake in these collaborations and their embeddedness in broader social relationships. The authors report on a qualitative study of the linking and networking practices and rationales of the design sector collocated in an inner-city area in Brisbane, Australia. The study suggests that not only was the locale important in both community and network-level relationships but also that these should be understood in relation to symbolic representation in the field of design. The article argues that the innovative potential of interorganizational linkages should be understood in terms of layers of symbolic identifications at the level of the field of design, the symbolic community associated with the locale, and the "awareness space" of networks.

Research on the aspirations of people with intellectual disabilities documents the importance of alternative zones of inclusion where they can assert their own definitions of ability and normality. This stands in contrast to assumptions concerning technology and disability that position technology as 'normalizing' the disabled body. This paper reports on the role of a digital music jamming tool in providing access to creative practice by people with intellectual disabilities. The tool contributed to the development of a spatio-temporal zone to enable aesthetic agency within and beyond the contexts of deinstitutionalized care. The research identifies the interactions between tools, individuals and groups that facilitated participants' agency in shaping the form of musical practice. Furthermore, we document the properties of emergent interaction − supported by a tool oriented to enabling music improvisation − as potentially resisting assumptions regarding normalization.

Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to understand the difficulties in implementing models of housing, and to help address the lack of accessible and affordable private housing for people with disability in Australia. In responding to this aim, the study formulated an ecological map of housing models, which are examined in this paper in terms of their underlying assumptions of vulnerability.


Design/methodology/approach
– The study involved explanation building, using a multiple case study approach, informed theoretically by an ecological framework. It included organisations, families and individuals with disability.


Findings
– For the purpose of this paper, the study revealed a direct relationship between the nature of the housing models proposed, and assumptions of vulnerability. In the context of the study findings, the paper suggests that attempts to address individual housing needs are more likely to achieve a positive outcome when they are person driven, from a premise of ability rather than disability. Overall, it invites a "universalistic" way of conceptualising housing issues for people with disability that has international relevance.


Practical implications
– This paper highlights how assumptions of vulnerability shape environmental responses, such as housing, for people with disability.


Originality/value
– This paper is based on a study that reconciled a person-centred philosophy with an ecological appreciation of the external and internal factors impacting housing choice for people with disability.