Suchergebnisse

Underground urban development is rapidly expanding. Like all forms of 'development', utilising the underneath of cities can present a range of possibilities and problems. Much underground urban development, however, has been conceptualised through a technical rather than a broader social lens. This is problematic, not least as these developments are usually financed with public money, while their governance is often realised through complicated and opaque public–private partnerships. In this context, the urban underground is often present as sub terra nullius: an epistemologically blank slate waiting to be exploited with the necessary technology and funding. In this paper, the author presents four analytical strata to help us to rethink how urban undergrounds are conceptualised and developed. Drawing on examples from Australia, she presents how we need to appreciate the more-than-human geographies of the underground (stratum 1); critically understand the dynamics of volumetric dispossession (stratum 2); question who owns the underground and how (stratum 3); and rethink how the underground is accessed (stratum 4). By engaging with these themes, we can explore ways to move subterranean urban development away from a technoscientific tunnelling decision-making process to one that engages with the social, political and economic implications of urban infrastructural projects.

Geographic analyses have centered on how state and capitalist enterprises—often in collaboration with each other—deploy volumetric territorial strategies and processes to achieve their ends, i.e., control in the form of securitization or resource extraction. We invite an exploration of different ways voluminous environments, their flows, and ecosystems can be experienced and represented with analyses of diverse activities of cave explorers in Venezuela, Cuba, and Mexico. These activities call attention to the heterogeneity of volumetric territorial projects. By exploring and mapping subterranean spaces, cavers co-opt some of the techniques of the state and/or capitalist territorialization and commodification. But the experiences of underground exploration and even mapping exceed and sometimes contradict the motivations and effects rightfully associated with these volumetric practices. Not only are these activities deeply affective and embodied, they typically happen beyond state reach. Moreover, following cavers' explorations requires more open conceptions of both territory and voluminous spaces, and the ecological rhythms and flows that constitute them. Doing so leads to the recognition of how cavers experience and enact alternative volumetric territorial projects. In the process, some of these projects forge defiant national imaginaries, literally from below. The possibility and potential of these imaginaries come from the unique quality of subterranean exploration: only those who explore and survey passages underground know their location, extent, and at times, their content. Yet, there are dangers as well: not only are most of these projects far from emancipatory or inclusionary, they can be co-opted by state and/or capitalist enterprises. The implications of this last point are complex and potentially contradictory: while state knowledge and control of caves and karst environments may limit caver access and activities, lack of state knowledge and control may also result in these environments and their contents' lack of protection.

© 2019 Elsevier Ltd 'Participation with publics' has been embraced in both government and academic literatures as a necessary but currently unrealized means of governing socio-environmental challenges. This near-universal embrace carries global significance. Long-standing efforts in the context of disaster risk reduction (DRR) provide an opportunity to consider how experts have positioned participation such that it can only fail to empower publics. Using interviews with risk managers, we demonstrate that they impose boundaries on participation via application of a deficit model (DM). Despite continuous calls to make governance more participatory, we explore how the boundaries imposed on participation persist because of how experts are expected to do risk management, and how experts understand their occupations. As a result, meaningful publics-experts interactions are bounded into impossibility. Following demonstration of the DM as the essence of how experts conceive experts-publics interactions, using experts' own suggestions for improving risk reduction, we suggest relationship building as a way of reinvigorating participation. We explore how disaster risk reduction grounded in relationships could overcome existing boundaries, offering an easily-applied reconceptualization for differentiating meaningful from superficial participation, as well as a viable alternative to prevailing participatory methods. Given the intransigence of countless socio-environmental challenges and the need for improved interactions amongst experts-publics, the findings offer a novel pathway that may open an avenue to realizing the promise of participation.

Historic relationships between communities and waterscapes are complex and often explained solely in technical terms. There is a key need to understand how human-centered developments have shifted the use of river spaces over time, and how these changes reflect on the values of rivers and surrounding cultures. In this paper, we develop a critical analysis of the historically changing relationship between urban communities and water infrastructures using the Georges River catchment in Sydney, Australia. Our focus was on bringing together past and current perspectives, engaging with the formation of diverse hydrosocial behaviors entangled with water infrastructures. Using post-settlement historical documents, maps, journals, and newspaper articles, we trace shifts in hydrosocial perspectives over time, mapping six distinct historic phases. In our study, we offer a shift from the main paradigms currently influencing the development of urban water infrastructures, moving away from the dominant technical propositions of systems designed purely for the management and treatment of stormwater. Drawing on our analysis, we propose a new urban water design concept: Culturally Inclusive Water Urban Design (CIWUD). This presents an advancement on current framework to include a consideration of people's connections and uses of urban waterscapes, as well as a shift towards democratic space design.

Shifts in international investment markets, Australia's demographic profile and 'residential consumer' sentiment have recently combined to enhance the prospects for the emergence of a 'mainstream market' Build-to-Rent (BtR) sector. Antecedents include the corresponding US and UK sectors, of which Australian stakeholders are increasingly aware; Australian commercial property sectors, in which international investors are increasingly active; and forerunners such as Meriton's rental business and purpose-built student accommodation (PBSA). PBSA has already generated over 90,000 newly-built units in Australia's cities over the past 10-15 years.Pipeline BtR projects may presage the emergence of a significant new component within Australia's housing market. Under current Australian housing market conditions and policy settings, however, it remains difficult to envisage any rapid BtR take-off of the kind seen in the UK in recent years, or the establishment of a large and highly embedded purpose-built-for-market-rental industry as in the USA. Although Australian BtR project returns are impaired by both market conditions and policy settings, the industry tends to focus on the latter; highlighting land tax, GST and income tax as it affects overseas investors utilising Managed Investment Trust (MIT) vehicles. Of these policy levers, evidence suggests that the single most significant impact on BtR returns would arise through re-balancing state/territory government land taxes to incentivise purpose-built professionally managed rental (as opposed to small-scale letting of existing properties).Except where supported by some form of public subsidy or under rezoning, BtR will not generate affordable housing. Nor will it significantly ease wider housing affordability. However, it has the potential to fulfil other important public policy goals – including widened housing diversity, higher construction and management standards and a more secure form of private rental housing. It could also beneficially introduce a counter-cyclical economic component into the otherwise volatile residential construction industry. Therefore, a legitimate case can be made for facilitating the establishment and expansion of a BtR sector in Australia. To fulfil the widely-held aspiration for an affordable component within primarily market rental developments, however, additional government support will be essential, such as discounted land grants to Community Housing Providers (CHPs). Without a strategic national framework that integrates tax reform, revenue support, land and planning levers, an emergent BtR sector will fail to generate rental at scale. In this regard Australia will continue to lag comparable countries like US and UK.

Sydney - We Need to Talk! is a collection of short interventions about the politics of urbanisation. This illustrated book is an experiment with collaborative short-form writing.