Sydney Dispossessions: Accounts of Property and Time in the City
Pratichi Chatterjee School of Geosciences, Faculty of Science, University of Sydney A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2020
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Statement of originality
This is to certify that to the best of my knowledge, the content of this thesis is my own work. This thesis has not been submitted for any degree or other purposes. I certify that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work and that all the assistance received in preparing this thesis and sources have been acknowledged.
Pratichi Chatterjee
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Abstract
In recent years urban scholarship has shown a keen interest in the processes and experiences of dispossession unfolding in cities of the Global North and South. Inspired by this work this thesis develops a framework to analyse dispossession within a settler colonial city that does not fall into these neat binaries. In my analysis I bring a political economy lens of state power into dialogue with critical legal geographies of property, identifying diverse forms of dispossession that unfold in the wake of state force, via the dismantling and attenuation of urban dwellers’ official and unofficial property relations.
I apply this conceptual framework to two cases of state-sponsored dispossession in contemporary Sydney – the first involving the privatisation and redevelopment of public land and Aboriginal owned land in the inner-city, while the second entails the compulsory acquisition of private land from individual property owners for a large infrastructure project. Firstly, I identify the different legal forms of state authority through which dispossession is implemented, the cultural and economic logics of improvement used to justify dispossession or make a political case for the projects, and the bureaucratic forms of compensation, domination and coercion used to pacify and generate compliance. Secondly, I analyse dispossession in the weakening and extinguishing of property relations of mastery and membership, where the character of state force in concert with the varied legal, social and cultural arrangements that ‘hold up’ property, shape urban dwellers experiences and anticipations of dispossession. While both cases involve the expropriation of formal legal property, my analysis adopts a relational approach that ‘opens’ up the concept of property.
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Acknowledgements
The ideas in this thesis have been developed in conversation with my supervisor Kurt Iveson, my associate supervisor Marilu Melo and colleagues in the School of Geosciences at the University of Sydney. I am particularly grateful to Kurt for his enthusiasm for my work, his intellectual insights, and the significant support he has shown, especially in the later stages of my doctoral research, without which it would not have been possible. His down-to-earth way of being, approachability and political integrity are refreshing in academia.
Marilu Melo, has been extremely supportive. She has critically engaged with my ideas and challenged my thinking. Her intellectual creativity, immense generosity and empathy have been vital in supporting me through the PhD.
I also want to acknowledge Alistair Sisson, a colleague and fellow PhD student with whom I have done significant amounts of work in Sydney. Conversations with him have been productive and helpful in developing the research.
I owe much to residents across Sydney, especially those in Redfern, Waterloo, St Peters, Newtown and Homebush, who have been generous enough to speak with me and engage with my research. Their resilience, warmth and humour in testing times has been inspiring.
I have been fortunate enough to have had the support of great friends, whose encouragement and warmth has been an important source of sustenance even when they are far away. I am extremely grateful to Zach McKenzie for his care, patience and calm, especially towards the chaotic end. That gratitude extends to Riz, Sonia, Rene, JC and MM for being angry, faithful and always keeping it real.
Finally, I want to acknowledge the Australian Government’s Department of Education and Training for their generous funding of my doctoral work.
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Table of Contents
List of Tables and Figures ...... 2
Chapter 1 Introduction: Dispossession Through Property and Time ...... 4
Chapter 2 Dispossession, Property and Time ...... 20
Chapter 3 Methodology ...... 46
Chapter 4 Redeveloping Waterloo and Redfern: Planning Power and Rule by Difference ...... 61
Chapter 5 Dispossession: Redfern and Waterloo ...... 92
Chapter 6 Driving Through the WestConnex ...... 134
Chapter 7 Compulsory Acquisitions and Contestation – a Propertied and Temporal Lens ...... 163
Chapter 8 Conclusions ...... 203
Bibliography ...... 221
1 List of Tables and Figures
Figure 1. 1 The Waterloo Public Housing Estate (Source: We Live Here 2017, 2018 Matthew Venables) ...... 5 Figure 1. 2 The Block Before and During Construction (Source: Patricia Baillie n.d.; South Sydney Herald 2019, Lyn Turnbull) ...... 7 Figure 1. 3 WestConnex New M5 Interchange Construction and Single Housing Standing on Campbell Street (Source: The Guardian 2017, Mike Bowers) ...... 8 Figure 4. 1 Waterloo State Significant Precinct (Source: NSW Department of Planning and Environment 2017) 62
Figure 4. 2 Queen pictured with crowd after unveiling a plaque outside the Matavai and Turanga Towers on the Waterloo Estate (Source: Sydney Morning Herald, Scott Whitehair) ...... 71 Figure 4. 3 Greater Sydney Liveability Framework Outcomes (Source: Arup 2017) ...... 83 Figure 4. 4 Waterloo Preferred Masterplan (Source: Waterloo Connect 2019) ...... 84 Figure 4. 5 Community Facilities in Waterloo and Redfern (Source: Authors Adaptation from Google Maps 2019) ...... 89 Figure 5. 1 Redfern Tent Embassy Protests (Source: Vice 2014, Nicole Verges) 97
Figure 5. 2 View of the Block from Deicorp Apartment (Source: Author 2017) ...... 101 Figure 5. 3 Waterloo Estate residents’ place of birth (Source: Land and Housing Corporation 2017) ...... 107 Figure 5. 4 Waterloo Residents’ Primary Source of Income (Source: Land and Housing Corporation 2017) ...... 109 Figure 5. 5 Waterloo Estate’s Visioning Process schedule (Source: Waterloo Connect 2017b) ...... 124 Figure 6. 1 Overview of the WestConnex route (Source: Roads and Maritime Services 2018) 136
Figure 6. 2 Non-User Benefits of WestConnex (Source: KPMG 2015) ...... 145 Figure 6. 3 Non-User Benefits of WestConnex (Source: KPMG 2015) ...... 146 Figure 6. 4 Wider Economic Impacts of WestConnex (Source: KPMG 2015) ...... 146 Figure 6. 5 Value of Travel Time Savings (VTTS) parameters (Source KPMG 2015) ...... 146 Figure 6. 6 Voluntary Acquisition Process & Official Compulsory Acquisition (Source: Figure adapted from Roads and Maritime Services, 2014) ...... 155 Figure 6. 7 Extract of a Letter, Senior Acquisitions Officer with RMS (Source: Desane Properties Pty Limited v State of New South Wales. [2018] NSWSC 553 ...... 157 Figure 7. 1 Median House Prices Sydney, Three Month Moving Average (Source: Heath 2018 Adapted from CoreLogic, RBA 2018) 165
2 Figure 7. 2 Sydney suburbs Impacted by WestConnex Acquisitions, Language, Country of Birth, Ancestry, and Educational Attainments (Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics 2016) ...... 167 Figure 7. 3 Sydney suburbs Impacted by WestConnex Acquisitions, Median Household Income (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2016) ...... 168 Figure 7. 4 New M5 Property Acquisitions (Source: Author’s Adaptation from NSW Government Spatial Services n.d.) ...... 172 Figure 7. 5 Sydney Park (Source: Google Earth 2019) ...... 184 Figure 7. 6 Sydney Park Camp 1 (Source: WestConnex Action Group 2016) ...... 185 Figure 7. 7 Campaigners at Sydney Park Attempt to Block Tree Felling 7 October 2016 (Source: Sydney Morning Herald 08 October 2016) ...... 188
3 Chapter 1 Introduction: Dispossession Through Property and Time
A lecturer of mine once told me that two broad themes animate questions in the social sciences – ‘how things are’ and ‘how things change’. This thesis is about change. As someone who studies cities, processes of urban change have fascinated, excited and disturbed me. In the city that I have lived for the last four years, Sydney, I have witnessed the physical and social make up of neighbourhoods and suburbs transformed as redevelopment, gentrification and infrastructure projects unfold, creating new spaces and new subjectivities. My interests in these processes are not only intellectual. I have participated in housing and anti-racist activism to contest the dispossession and displacement of low- income communities and communities of colour from urban neighbourhoods and streets. This has exposed me to the unevenness of processes of spatial change. The consequences have included the loss of housing, of important social spaces, of access to crucial services and infrastructures, of ecological resources, and of relationships which produced tangible and intangible benefits for residents. My frustration about such losses has been exacerbated by how these processes unfold and are implemented. They are justified through logics of improvement which privilege economic productivity and racialised and class betterment. While a lucky few might be ‘compensated’ for their loss, dispossession is ultimately carried out through domination. These frustrations motivated the research elaborated in this thesis. Broadly, I analyse the kinds of dispossession that are produced by major urban change projects: how they are implemented, who is affected, and what is sacrificed.
1.1 Thinking Through Dispossession
Sydney, as a settler colonial city, is built on a process of Aboriginal dispossession, that is on-going. Throughout my research Aboriginal and settler residents impacted by redevelopment and infrastructure projects across the city have reminded me that Sydney is Aboriginal land. I keep that context with me in my writing, by linking present-day capitalist dispossession with this foundational dispossession, where colonial registers of property and time are reproduced in the expropriation of land for urbanisation. The physical possession of Aboriginal Country continues in such processes, even in the resistance set up to oppose them.
My analysis of dispossession weaves across two case studies of large transformation projects that are unfolding across the city as I write. The first is that of gentrifying redevelopments in the city’s inner south suburbs of Waterloo and Redfern directed at public housing and Aboriginal owned housing. The second is the case of a large urban toll road, the WestConnex, that will connect western parts of the city to eastern inner-city areas on completion. At first glance, the two cases appear very different. One explores gentrification that dispossesses low income and Aboriginal residents through state actions to privatise publicly owned land and housing, and that apply pressure to deconcentrate Aboriginal
4 housing. The second is of an urban infrastructure project where the state has engaged in the compulsory acquisition of private land to construct a road, predominantly affecting middle class neighbourhoods. My work connects these two projects by developing an analytical framework of dispossession that is guided by the following questions:
RQ1 - What different mechanisms of state extra-economic force are used to implement dispossession?
RQ2 - What light does such analysis of dispossession shed on the political economy of a place?
RQ3 - What official and unofficial property relations are dismantled in the course of dispossession? What insights does a relational and performative approach to property offer in understanding of dispossession? Specifically, what does it reveal about the spatial and temporal dimensions of dispossession, and the differentiated experiences of the process?
In the rest of this section, I first provide a brief background to the case studies (1.1.1), before setting out the key themes of my research in more detail (1.1.2).
1.1.1 Waterloo and Redfern
If you visited inner south Sydney today and alighted at Redfern train station, a short walk across Redfern Street and south onto Cope Street would bring you to a group of concrete towers sitting on a patch of green. This is the Waterloo Public Housing Estate (Figure 1.1).
Figure 1. 1 The Waterloo Public Housing Estate (Source: We Live Here 2017, 2018 Matthew Venables)
5 Its 2012 dwellings are slated for redevelopment as part of the New South Wales (NSW) Liberal National Coalition Government’s Communities Plus programme, comprising a push to transform public housing estates in New South Wales into a mix of private, state-owned and NGO managed housing. The redevelopment contributes to the ongoing gentrification of the suburb of Waterloo and has been enabled through a process of value capture. The State Infrastructure Committee’s positioning of a new metro stop opposite the Estate raised its land value, bolstering the project’s attractiveness for private sector investment and developers. In light of these processes and impending changes, I explore the project’s justifications that rely on socio-cultural narratives of improvement, positing a social mix of private and public housing as a superior spatial organisation to the current dense gathering of low- income tenants. I frame dispossession as a loss, or a weakening of public housing tenants’ membership of a low-income community based on the Estate. I bring a temporal lens to dispossession, and discuss tenants’ experiences of the consultation process part of the slow violence of redevelopment. My discussions of the Waterloo project are linked with the wider threats to Aboriginal property, in the suburb and neighbouring Redfern. Aboriginal dispossession is seen as a process unfolding across both the suburbs, which have historically been home to low income and politically active Aboriginal communities. The Aboriginal presence was particularly bolstered in the 1960s and ‘70s following Aboriginal migration to urban areas across Australia (Goodall 2008). The proliferation of Aboriginal-owned medical, legal and cultural facilities created a presence that today spills across both suburbs, making them sites of immense importance for Aboriginal Australia. Their ‘urbanness’ is particularly significant, an act of defiance directed at settler colonial power structures that have attempted to remove Aboriginal communities from urban areas, viewing them as unfit for urban life (Jacobs 2002 ; Anderson 1993; Morgan 2006; Shaw 2007; Prout Quicke and Green 2017; Porter 2018). Gentrification that threatens the Aboriginal presence in the suburbs has consequently been framed as a continuation of settler colonialism (Survival Guide 2018). Just a short walk from the Waterloo Estate, opposite Redfern station is the site of the former Aboriginal housing cooperative, the Block, that is under redevelopment as I write (Figure 1.2).
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Figure 1. 2 The Block Before and During Construction (Source: Patricia Baillie n.d.; South Sydney Herald 2019, Lyn Turnbull)
The Pemulwuy project on The Block, managed by the landowners the Aboriginal Housing Company, will transform the site into a mix of student and Aboriginal housing, and commercial facilities. For some, it is the sharpest embodiment of gentrification in the suburb. While the project is led by the Housing Company, the Block has been subject to longstanding state pressure calling for its demolition. I analyse the historical justifications for redevelopment, which like in the case of the Waterloo Estate follow a theme of improvement through de-concentration, but are more explicitly racialised in their call for change. These narratives deemed Aboriginal gathering on land as productive of problematic behaviours, and even the cause of 2004 anti-police ‘rioting’ in the suburb. While the contemporary Housing Company led redevelopment aims to keep a small amount of residential land use on the Block, and has promised that former ‘good tenants’ will be allowed to return on the project’s completion, it still dilutes an urban Aboriginal presence by crowding it with commercial development and student housing. The de-concentration of Aboriginal housing and public housing in Redfern and Waterloo is a form of dispossession that unfolds in a weakening of a collective Aboriginal property relation across the area, which had been enabled by the dense social gathering of Aboriginal people, and the physical and social spaces of the suburbs. The temporality of dispossession, described in Aboriginal narratives of Redfern and Waterloo, is not restricted to the gentrification of the Block or of public housing, but is rather situated in a longer time period of colonisation, marked by continual settler expropriation of Aboriginal land.
7 1.1.2 The WestConnex Project
Turning to the second case study of the thesis. If you continued the train journey from Redfern heading south, in a few minutes you would arrive at St Peters station. A short walk down Princess Highway behind the station is Campbell Street, (Figure 1.3), which now adjoins the site of a large interchange being constructed as part of a 33 kilometre toll road that will span across Sydney.
Figure 1. 3 WestConnex New M5 Interchange Construction and Single Housing Standing on Campbell Street (Source: The Guardian 2017, Mike Bowers)
The WestConnex extends existing tracts of the M4 and M5 motorways connecting the north west and south west suburbs of the city with the metropolitan areas that lie to the east. Its name symbolises the connection it makes. The project is the centrepiece of the NSW Liberal National Coalition Government’s ambitious promise of infrastructure building that saw them come to power in the 2011 state elections, and re-elected again in 2015 and 2019. At a cost of over $16 billion, WestConnex is among Australia’s most expensive infrastructure schemes. The scale of the road has resulted in the overhaul of large swathes of urban space, causing damage and destruction of urban park land and forestland, the felling of thousands of trees and the compulsory acquisition of hundreds of private properties in its path. It has incensed many locals living in the predominantly middle-class suburbs that lie in the projects’ wake, as well as critics of Sydney’s on-going car dependence. The neighbourhoods it traverses are now subject to years of construction work, further fuelling resident outrage. I explore the justifications for WestConnex on the grounds of economic productivity – justifications, it must be said, that have failed to win over large segments of the impacted communities. My discussion of dispossession focuses on the state’s compulsory acquisition of private property. I also examine an incident of community contestation, in which I participated, to protest the roads’ engulfing of a popular public park. The occupation we set up took the form of a collective
8 property claim, which challenged the state’s taking of public land. Whilst its adopted progressive social and environmental politics, it was shaped by the uneven distribution of property powers between different contingents of the occupation, and left unquestioned the colonial possession of Aboriginal land in which it participated.
I have approached these two case studies through the development of several key themes that constitute a conceptual framework for understanding dispossession.
1.1.3 Theme 1– Implementing dispossession: Justifications, Extra-economic Force and Pacification
In both Redfern and Waterloo, and in the case of the WestConnex, dispossession is a consequence of direct political intervention, primarily executed by different state agencies who use legal mechanisms to expropriate and alienate land for different urbanisation projects. Among the mechanisms at the disposal of state actors are compulsory acquisition, the power to sell public resources and centralised planning capacities. Such actions are not part and parcel of regular market transactions in land, in that sense they are ‘extra-economic’. A standard market landholder’s sale of private land and the eviction of tenants, or the exclusionary displacement of low income communities from gentrifying suburbs may infuriate those who are committed to social justice, but the lack of widespread social outrage, of media coverage and political commentary on such operations indicates that they are predominantly seen as part of the every-day, accepted operation of the market dispossession (De Angelis 2000; Ghertner 2014; Glassman 2006; Levien 2015). The cases discussed in this thesis have a different status, in that dispossession is not mystified by the hegemony and normalisation of market transactions. Domination is clear in the absence of the illusion of choice, that the market provides. Residents in Redfern and Waterloo, and those impacted by the WestConnex could clearly see the ongoing and imminent loss of land, housing and of belonging through acquisition, privatisation and the de-concentration of their presence as a political strategy of change.
If dispossession is ‘crystal clear’ (Glassman 2006), then public reaction and contestation needs managing. The success of implementing dispossession consequently becomes a question of compliance (Levien 2015). State extra-economic force does not operate in isolation, but is part of an apparatus of compliance, which includes forms of justification, pacification and coercion.
Justifications of urbanisation and dispossession discussed in this thesis take the form of social and economic narratives of improvement. One example that stands out is from the late 2018 public hearings of the Parliamentary Inquiry into WestConnex which I attended. Ken Kanofski, CEO of the Roads and Maritime Services, the state proponents of the WestConnex emphasised the necessity of the road project for Sydney’s development (Public Accountability Committee, 2018a):
9 With any project of this size there will be disruption. We acknowledge that the WestConnex project has impacted members of the community and local areas. These impacts are taken very seriously. This is one of the realities of delivering major projects, particularly in a densely populated city…If we are to meet the needs of the growing city of Sydney in the future, investment in projects such as WestConnex is absolutely necessary.
Justification through economic and social narratives of improvement, such as the one voiced in Kanofski’s championing of urban development, form a critical part of a compliance apparatus used to make dispossession happen. They took a somewhat different form in the case of the redevelopment of public and Aboriginal housing in Waterloo and Redfern. A call for socially mixed housing, which avoids an excess ‘concentration’ of low-income and Aboriginal people in order to create better living environments, were among the key narratives used over a period of decades to legitimise the transformation of the areas.
In the case of the WestConnex justifications were accompanied with monetary compensation for owners’ whose properties were compulsorily acquired for the project. Such compensation was calculated on the basis of market value. Whilst being a legal requirement of the process, from the compliance perspective developed in this thesis, compensation is also a form of pacification. An appeal is made to the material interests of dispossessed individuals, which effectively acts to generate compliance. Whilst aiming to pacify residents, this compensation, in fact, also fuelled disputes with the state. The process was defined by bureaucratic coercion, where the duration and financial costs of legal proceedings acted to deter individuals from challenging state action, provoking resident anger. While justification, compensation, and coercion were not all together successful in generating compliance, the state extra-economic force that accompanied the Waterloo and Redfern and WestConnex projects, created a certainty about them.
In analysing the use of state power, justifications, coercions and compensations my writing is informed by a political economy approach to understanding the social change. I supplement and modify this approach by engaging with the lived experience of dispossession, looking at the political economy ‘from the ground up’, so to speak. Doing so also reveals community refusals of government justifications that seek to legitimise their dispossession, and illuminates the disputes arising over compensation and residents’ difficult dealings with bureaucratic pressure.
10 1.1.4 Theme 2 – Propertied Dispossessions
This second theme, which adopts a propertied understanding of dispossession, enables me to build an analysis of the lived experience of the process. My analysis construes dispossession as a loss of belonging or possession, constituting both official and unofficial property relations. Property has been a useful way of framing the relations that the Sydney residents I interacted with and interviewed held with their housing and their suburbs. I take this approach whilst bearing in mind that Sydney is a settler colonial city, and such property relations are themselves products and instruments of Aboriginal dispossession – an issue that I particularly hone in on in discussions of contestation. It is also important to acknowledge here that Aboriginal academics and communities have conceptualised and viewed colonial dispossession as a more expansive process than a loss of property alone. For them, such dispossession represents an attack on sovereignty that has damaged and wrought destruction on entire life worlds and knowledge systems (Pascoe 2014; L.B. Simpson 2014; Moreton Robinson 2015; Burrawanga et al. 2013). While my work is primarily concerned with viewing dispossession through a propertied lens, I link it with ongoing settler colonialism in my discussions of the redevelopment in Waterloo and Redfern, and of a public occupation of parkland to contest the WestConnex.
Taking inspiration from critical legal studies and critical legal geography (Blomley 2004; Cooper 2007; Graham 2010; Blomley 2013; Keenan 2015) I see property as a relationship of ownership and/or membership. Ownership corresponds with the notion of mastery over a thing, which might be a concrete object such as a house, or a more diffuse object-like entity such as a place. By membership I mean belonging to a group or a social whole by virtue of sharing particular characteristics and socio- cultural practices (Cooper 2007; Keenan 2015). While ownership is a more intuitively understood as property, membership is not typically seen in such a light. Among the examples of membership as property provided in Davina Cooper (2007) and Sarah Keenan’s (2015) scholarship are a person’s belonging to a wider social entity such as whiteness, or on a smaller scale belonging to the community of a neighbourhood or institution, by virtue of particular characteristics, practices and ways of life that are shared, and that identify members as part of the group. Both ownership and membership then, are forms of belonging – belonging over a thing and belonging to a group.
My conceptualisation of property is relational, that is, property is an ‘effect’, (Blomley 2013 p. 38, 2016 b), that comes into the world through relationships with other things (Keenan 2015). I highlight that a heterogenous combination of legislation, economic practices, social and cultural histories and norms are ‘enrolled’ into performances of property as ownership and membership. In other words, this arrangement of ideas, things and practices (Blomley 2013, p. 39), or ‘structures, networks and processes’ ‘hold up’ property (Keenan 2015, p.7). Of particular significance, is that such enrolments or holding up that enable and set conditions on what property is and how it is performed, also shape
11 the course of dispossession. In other words, different arrangements of holding up make for different experiences of dispossession. For example, the loss of community and housing experienced by Waterloo public housing tenants – held up by rental legislation and the authority and values of their state landlord – constitutes a different experience of dispossession to the loss of private property over the course of the WestConnex project, where, in the latter case, ownership in Australia is held up through legislation and by a culture that valorises property ownership as a source of finance.
My analysis of dispossession is complemented with an analysis of contestation which, in turn, continues the theoretical focus on property as a relational effect that comes into being through its holding up by varied ideas, things and practices, (Blomley 2013; Keenan 2015). The relational approach sheds light on the work done by an occupation of public land in which I participated, and the internal dynamics of resistance. I use this approach to analyse how planning conditions that held up the state’s ownership of land, were wielded, unsuccessfully, in a politics of postponement to stall the felling of trees. It also illuminates how unofficial property relations were brought into being over the course of the occupation, with membership and mastery unevenly held up as they were shaped by participants’ subject positions, of which class and race were particularly significant.
Using the notion of property to conceptualise dispossession and contestation raises questions about the other relationships that exist between people and things, and between people and broader social ‘wholes’ that do not fall neatly into conceptualisations of property, but that are also lost or damaged in the course of large urban transformations. The literature on gentrification that conceptualises displacement as a loss of place or a rupture of people-place relationships (Davidson 2009; Atkinson 2015; Elliot-Cooper et al. 2019) identifies relations of attachment and of connection borne out of inhabitance. While this thesis discusses some of these attachments and connections through a propertied lens of mastery and membership, there is no doubt that other relations expand beyond such conceptualisations. This points to the need for geographical scholarship to critically and sensitively reflect on this wide variety of relations that residents hold with their housing, suburbs, cities and broader localities that are threatened by processes of urban transformation.
1.1.5 Theme 3 – Temporalities
A third theme that runs through my work is an attention to temporality, I look at dispossession as a process with a time length and a qualitative aspect constituted of the social dynamics of events and emotions. Whilst the temporality of dispossession quantitatively and qualitatively varied across the cases I examined, how property is/was held up had a significant bearing on the unfolding of dispossession.
12 The housing tenants in Waterloo experienced a period of waiting and chasing the government for information following the announcement of the redevelopment. As tenants, their property rights were not legally upheld in a way that allowed them a substantive influence over decisions, such as whether their estate should be redeveloped and what the nature of the project should be. However, the NSW state government agencies responsible for public housing, the Land and Housing Corporation and Family and Community Services, are obliged to house tenants. This obligation is part of a complex arrangement of things, processes and ideas that hold up public housing tenancy (Keenan 2015); in other words, these are enrolled in making tenants’ property happen (Blomley 2013). As such, tenants cannot simply be evicted in the course of redevelopment, as would happen with private tenancies. Consequently, the particular process of dispossession in Waterloo was accompanied by periods of uncertainty and anxiety given tenants’ lack of control over the project. The process was further inflected by the state’s paternalistic ethos towards public housing tenants, making for a process marked by the latter’s frustrations and anger.
Abeyance was a strong feature of property owners’ dealing with the acquisitions made by WestConnex, in that residents were left for months with no information as to when the acquisitions might commence or their implications. However, unlike in the case of Waterloo, owners were forced into hostile negotiations over money with the state, creating financial stress for some, and adding to the uncertainty of not knowing what the future held. The negotiation of dispossession thus had its own distinct temporality, guided by legislation that established a process for compulsory property acquisition, and was shaped by a culture and by economic practices such as valuation, that had made property ownership into a source of wealth, as previously mentioned.
A temporal analysis has also been particularly helpful in paying attention to settler colonial continuities. Looking across Australia’s history makes evident a pattern of Aboriginal dispossession, or rather attempts at dispossession. One of the Waterloo tenants who occupied the Green outside the housing estate in protest of the redevelopment claimed:
we living it over and over again. When they gonna turn the page?... but this is what they do to every Aboriginal person they are trying to make us fringe dwellers again.
Her comments regarding the ‘living it over and over’ positions redevelopment in an Aboriginal temporal narrative of colonisation. Taking such a narrative seriously illuminates disparate events and processes, which when seen together constitute a chain. There are similarities here with recent
13 conceptualisations of slow violence (Kern 2016; Pain 2019) in gentrification studies, where it infolds slowly over a period of time and its specific iterations go unnoticed.
The attention to temporality continues in my discussions of resistance through an exploration of the aforementioned parkland occupation protesting WestConnex. As in the case of the redevelopments in Waterloo and Redfern, I find such an angle to be a useful tool for eliciting settler colonial dynamics, this time of resistance. In occupying an urban park that was going to be surrounded by the WestConnex, we employed, among other things, temporal narratives of the park’s history to hold up our collective property claim over its land. Such narratives held up our enactment of property through occupation, by bestowing it with moral legitimacy. It also, however, maintained a relative silence on Aboriginal sovereignty and colonialism, inadvertently re- enforcing settler possession of land in the process of contesting dispossession. Evelyn Araluen’s (2019) recent writing inspired some of my reflections here (author’s own emphasis):
I look over to Prospect Hill as I pass through the M4 roadworks. In the way I know all times are capable of being, Tench’s gaze is still there – but so is ours, staring back…. Twenty minutes or so on the old Koori road they keep paving over and I’m back on the M4
Here, Araluen hints at the different times in Aboriginal and settler narratives of place. The above quote from a longer essay weaves together references to colonisation and important Aboriginal sites, with descriptions of seemingly mundane ‘present-day’ activities like driving down the M4 in Sydney (part of the WestConnex). Prospect Hill that she refers to, is the site that Watkin Tench, a Marine Officer with the First English Fleet that arrived in Australia, arrived at by following a track laid by the Dharug people. The site is important to Aboriginal communities and is likely to have been used by Pemulwuy, the prominent resistance leader whose Bidgigal clan played a central role in the frontier conflict triggered by the first settler arrivals (NSW Office of Environment and Heritage 2018). Heeding her words, that ‘all times are capable of being’, means acknowledging a different temporal narrative to the settler one that held up our occupation against WestConnex. Settlers contesting dispossession do so on land that is colonised, and they are already implicated in a much wider process of dispossession. My intention in undertaking such an analysis is to suggest that non-Aboriginal people take seriously Aboriginal narratives of time and place in the course of resistance. This may be seen as a useful starting point for rotating claims against dispossession so that they are not only
14 concerned with halting damaging urban change, but also move towards a politics of decolonisation and co-existence.
1.2 Chapter Overview
In chapter 2 I lay out the theoretical framework that informs my research and underpins my research questions. The first part of the chapter reviews literature on dispossession, drawing especially on Michael Levien’s (2013; 2015) theoretical interventions and reformulations of David Harvey’s concept of ‘accumulation by dispossession’. I see his attention to the role of political authority in dispossession, particularly that of the state, as a useful starting point with which to analyse the dispossessions in Sydney that I write about. The transparency of dispossession necessitates the use of tactics of compliance which make dispossession happen. Justifications, compensations and domination are ways of convincing, pacifying and forcing people and their supporters to comply with the mandates of dispossessory urban projects. I also make the case that justifications play an important role, not only in legitimising dispossession, but also in creating a political basis for the projects, which is especially important in cases where the state leads them. I argue that such a framework that looks at change, by centring the political economy and a ‘top-down approach’ can be complemented with analysis from critical legal geography that theorises the relationships between people and the social and physical constitution of places – relationships that are dismantled in the course of change. Property is a useful means of conceptualising these relationships. Drawing on works from Davina Cooper (2007), Nicholas Blomley (2013) and Sarah Keenan (2015) that see property as an ‘effect’ which comes into being through complex social dynamics that ‘hold up’ or are ‘enrolled’ into defining how it is performed, I argue that such holding up shapes the course of dispossession. How property is ‘held up’ in some ways influences how dispossession unfolds and is framed by the people and communities experiencing it.
Chapter 3 is a methodological chapter. I provide a brief overview of the ethical, ontological and epistemological underpinnings of the thesis. Here I draw out the challenges I faced in doing research in communities whilst being politically active in their struggles. I discuss ethical frameworks proposed by Aboriginal academics, whose principles I was only partially able to take on board, given my position as a non-Aboriginal person but also because of the nature of university based academic research. I also emphasise my stance, that knowledge is situated and produced in the interaction between researchers and research participants. That does not however foreclose the importance of rigour, and I bring this to my work through methods of triangulation, by looking for patterns in interview transcripts and ‘interpreting empirical ‘data’ through relevant theoretical frameworks.
15 The Waterloo and Redfern, and WestConnex case studies are discussed in Chapters 4 to 7. Each case study is split across two chapters, in a pairing that is informed by the conceptual and methodological approaches established in Chapters 2-3. The first half of each pair takes a political-economy approach that focuses on the state’s justifications and methods of implementing dispossessory projects through its authority as a landholder, its planning and acquisition powers, as well via monetary compensation in the case of WestConnex. My analysis speaks to and hints at resident and community scepticism and frustrations at these methods. The second chapter however, brings in a fuller analysis of the lived experience of dispossession and contestation on the ground, where I argue that dispossession is shaped by the things, ideas and practices that hold up property relations, that are dismantled in the course of redevelopment and infrastructure building.
Chapters 4 and 5 discuss the case of gentrifying housing redevelopments in Waterloo and Redfern. Chapter 4 adopts a political economy framework to analyse the different forms of state extra- economic force and justifications used to implement the redevelopment of Aboriginal housing and public housing in Redfern and Waterloo. It identifies the privatisation of land and state power to re- scale statutory planning approval from the local- authority level to that of the state-level Government as forms of extra-economic force. The use of such force to implement redevelopment and its consequent dispossession was justified with different improvement narratives – racialised/settler colonial, socio-cultural, built environment related, and liveability related. These comprised spatial and temporal hierarchies of urban space, that problematised the physical and social make-up of the suburbs, whilst remaining silent on the details of the social problems that required improving, the effectiveness of redevelopment as a solution to these alleged problems, and the uneven distribution of the benefits. A case for change was thus presented as necessary, where social and physical differences between the status quo and the improved place were organised into a hierarchy, forming ‘a rule by difference’.
Chapter 5 grounds the political economy approach of Chapter 4 with a focus on urban dwellers’ experiences and anticipations of dispossession wrought by the gentrifying redevelopments in Redfern and Waterloo. These projects aim to de-concentrate Aboriginal and public housing in the suburbs with mixed-use development and a policy of socially mixed housing tenure, respectively. I analyse dispossession through a propertied lens, as residents’ loss or diminishing of collective mastery over the suburbs of Redfern and Waterloo, and of the loss of membership of Aboriginal and materially precarious place-based social-wholes. I identify how this loss of property is shaped by the very complex of ‘structures, networks and processes’ that hold it up, which include housing legislation and policy, tenancy practices and the dense collective presence of Aboriginal and low-income residents. Dispossession I find, is further complicated by the extra-economic power of centralised planning and the social obligations of the state and Aboriginal Housing Company as more than merely market landlords, adding a layer of certainty and visibility to the projects. This propertied analysis is
16 accompanied with a temporal lens. In investigating it I firstly, draw on Aboriginal activists and residents’ framing of redevelopment in Redfern and Waterloo which see it as a continuation of settler colonialism, thus extending a trajectory of ‘slow’ settler violence, that has repeatedly worked to dislocate urban Aboriginal communities. Secondly, in analysing dispossession as a process, I find that like the loss of property, it is configured by the complex of things that holds it up. Consequently, the consultation process of redevelopment is one that is marked by acute differences in property-power between tenants and their state landlord because of the differential holding up of their respective properties, creating a process of ‘slow violence’.
Chapter 6 begins the discussions of the WestConnex project. It adopts a similar format to that of Chapter 5, taking a political economy approach to identify the type of extra-economic force deployed to implement WestConnex, namely compulsory property acquisition, and the justifications used to make a political case for the project. I first discuss the improvement narratives of the project, which equated improvement with economic productivity. They were voiced in Government strategy documents and calculated in a business case, that was used to justify the road. As seen in the case of Waterloo and Redfern this narrative of spatial and temporal hierarchies constituted a mantra of necessity, where the aspiration of an economically productive future, coupled with a silence on the present value of those places to be destroyed by the road, made the here and now sacrificeable in pursuit of an improved future. While these narratives were not specifically designed to legitimise the dispossession of compulsory property acquisition, they came to be deployed as such by senior public servants, and moreover were at the centre of public debates about whether the project’s public benefits outweighed the costs, including the road’s environmental and social damage. Secondly, I turn my attention to a discussion of the state’s use of force to compulsorily acquire property, that was critical to implementing WestConnex. This force had a legal basis, with state authority guided by legislation which mandated the payment of compensation to dispossessed owners, in the form of the market value of their property. Whilst the intent was to pacify owners, in reality the process took both a compensatory and coercive form, with bureaucratic negotiations spanning months and years.
In Chapter 7 I focus my analysis of the WestConnex project on the social dynamics of dispossessions and contestations. I analyse property owners’ experiences of dispossession, that were shaped by the complex of legislation, culture and market practices through which private tenure is held up in Australia. I take a temporal lens in investigating how the security and financial benefits of ownership derived from the holding up of private property, were threatened and lost in the process of acquisition, leading to a period of chasing, waiting and uncertainty for residents, with some facing physical displacement. This loss spilled outside of formal registers of ownership, to include the loss of those unofficial relations of mastery and membership that people held with their neighbourhoods and suburbs. I hypothesize that if property-lessness continues, over time, it will have ramifications for residents’ subjectivities. I conclude the discussion of acquisition with an analysis of the differentiated
17 experiences of the process, where economic status and age, and access to professional knowledge played an important role in residents’ capacity to contest the process and to recover the financial benefits of ownership.
Following the analysis of dispossession through compulsory property acquisition, I turn my attention to the public contestation of WestConnex’s appropriation of and damage to tracts of a popular public park in Sydney’s inner south. Unlike the acquisitions this loss came with no financial compensation. Such property was not held up in the same way as private property. Consequently, disputes were not about material compensation, but took the form of an occupation, motivated by resident anger at the state decision to surround a public park by road infrastructure. My discussions analyse three issues in the micro-dynamics of contestation. Firstly, I focus on how activists weaponised planning conditions that held up the state’s property to delay its felling of trees on the park’s edges. Secondly, I turn my attention to how belonging to the occupying group manifested as a form of property as membership. Membership was differentially held up along lines of class and race, and the extent of belonging governed participants’ capacity to practise property as mastery over the campsite. Finally, I close the chapter with a discussion of how settler temporal narratives of the parkland played a role in holding up the occupation by bestowing it with moral legitimacy. In so doing it helped re-enforce settler claims to land with a selective historical reading, that maintained a silence on Aboriginal claims.
I conclude the thesis with a set of summaries and reflections on the contributions that it makes to literature on dispossession. I firstly outline the conceptual framing that I have drawn on and developed in the work. I summarise the claims that dispossession is implemented through a syntax of compliance, comprising extra-economic force, justification, pacification and coercion. Such compliance is critical to the cases of discussed in the thesis, where the use of extra- economic force renders dispossession transparent; unmasked by the normalcy bestowed on regular market-led forms of dispossession. The transparency of loss demands the deployment of different forms of compliance so as to respond to public critique and contestation. Secondly I identify the contributions the thesis’s analysis of dispossession makes to understanding processes of capital accumulation, particularly the different ways in which dispossession supports capital accumulation. My third reflection heeds Coulthard’s (2014) call to understand the relation between colonial rule and capital accumulation. I adopt a settler colonial analytic framing to identify the settler rationales that are enacted in state efforts of urbanisation and dispossession, through the syntax of compliance. My last set of reflections are on the propertied and temporal dynamics of dispossession discussed in each of the thesis’s case studies. I note that a performative and relational lens to property adopted in my work sheds light on four different forms of dispossession, that include but are not limited to legal forms of property ownership. I summarise how this more open conceptualisation of property offers in-depth insight into the events and experiences of dispossession, by highlighting how the complex of legal, cultural and social arrangements that hold up
18 property, shape the process and outcomes of dispossession. I outline four temporal narratives discussed in the research, that emerge in the justifications of dispossession, and in urban residents’ experiences and contestation of the process. I show how an attention to temporality sheds lights on the emotional upheavals and events of land dispossession, its thwarting of residents’ future expectations, and the settler colonial context that these contemporary unfoldings are a part of, and which they continue.
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19 Chapter 2 Dispossession, Property and Time
This chapter builds a propertied understanding of dispossession, viewing it as a loss of property, both legal and unofficial, that is effected through an undoing of the networks, structure and processes that hold up possession and belonging. The chapter establishes the conceptual framework that will be used to inform the accounts of dispossession offered in subsequent chapters. By exploring two case studies in Sydney, of gentrifying redevelopment projects in Waterloo and Redfern and the WestConnex toll road, I look at how the use of ‘extra-economic’ force, typically by the state, intersects with how people’s property relations are held up to carve out trajectories of dispossession.
For this purpose I bring together political-economic and sociological writings on dispossession as a consequence of large scale urban change projects, particularly those of David Harvey and Michael Levien alongside writings on property and temporality drawn from critical legal geography and urban scholarship including the works of Sarah Keenan, Nicholas Blomley, Davina Cooper, and Rachel Pain. My aim in bringing these sets of literature into conversation is to contribute to work that grounds political-economy approaches to dispossession and displacement in people’s lived experiences (Doshi 2013; Levien 2013, 2015; Perreault 2013; Hodkinson and Essen 2015; Paprocki 2016; Wilhelm- Solomon 2016; Freeman and Burgos 2017; Zhang 2017, 2018). I do so in a way that focuses analytic attention on how the nature of the loss wrought by urban change projects can be understood through a propertied lens and is shaped by the ‘extra-economic’ character of force used to drive such change.
The chapter begins with an analysis of the debates launched in the wake of David Harvey’s (2003) influential work on accumulation by dispossession. Section 2.1 draws especially on the work of Michael Levien (2013, 2015) and argues for the need to consider the nature of ‘regimes of dispossession’ across different geographical contexts, that incorporate varied means of enacting, justifying and compensating dispossession. In section 2.2., ‘Grounding Dispossession in Property, Space and Time’, I argue that the political economy work on dispossession can be productively complemented with a focus on the kinds of on-the-ground ‘possession’ and membership that dispossession dismantles and/or diminishes. Critical legal studies and legal geography in particular offer relational and performative conceptualisations of property that are useful in understanding this loss. Here I argue that the very complex of social and physical practices and things through which property relations become real in the world shape the course of dispossession.
20 2.1 From Accumulation by Dispossession to Regimes of Dispossession
In The New Imperialism Harvey (2003) develops his concept of Accumulation by Dispossession, (ABD), that has proven to be extremely influential in the social science literature interested in processes of expropriation of commonly held or state held resources from citizens. The expropriations incorporated under the rubric of ABD span a diverse range of actions from slum clearances, national infrastructure projects and real estate developments to the transformation of public welfare and utility services and the patenting of genes and biological organisms. The heterogeneity of this literature is partly a consequence of the expansive potential of Harvey’s concept. That is, a multitude of dispossessory projects where dispossession entails some form of loss of common or public/state resources are carried out in the interest of capital accumulation. Harvey’s work raised, and continues to raise, debates and critiques on the essence of capitalist accumulation, particularly the role of the state. But prior to examining the aforementioned debates and critiques of Harvey’s work, I want to briefly summarise his understanding of ABD and its Marxist roots.
ABD is a process by which resources that were held and/or managed individually, collectively or by a state on behalf of its citizenry – namely, those that lie outside of formal capitalist modes of production – are expropriated and transferred into market-based circuits of production and exchange (Harvey 2003). Harvey differentiates ABD from capital’s other expanded mode of reproduction, where expansion occurs via an established market with institutionalised property arrangements, law and governance instituted by the state, a valid monetary currency and the freedom of contract (Harvey 2003, p. 143).
Harvey sees ABD as a response to capitalism’s crises of over-accumulation, where over- accumulated capital lies idle and needs profitable outlets for investment (Harvey 2003). The opening up of ‘new’ resources that are not in market circulation for capitalist ventures, usually through state- led initiatives, is a solution to such a crisis. This also enacts a dispossession by separating people from the resources on which they formerly relied or controlled and managed. The privatisation of state assets such as land, public housing or utilities, and the appropriation of resources held and managed through communally or culturally specific practices, are examples included in Harvey’s book. However, he also includes seemingly unrelated phenomena such as biopiracy, where community knowledge and practices concerning natural environments are appropriated through patenting and licensing agreements to the advantage of the pharmaceutical industry (Harvey 2003). ABD conceptualises these diverse expropriations as forms of capitalist accumulation that proceed through, or are contingent upon, some form of dispossession – a dispossession that manifests as the separation of people from their means of production and/or subsistence.
ABD is a reconceptualization of Karl Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation (Harvey 2003), which concerns the question of how the status quo of capitalist relations of production, premised on
21 the exploitation of waged labour came into being. Marx’s history of the birth of capital situates itself in the expropriation of common land from peasants, agricultural labourers and clansmen in England and Scotland stretching from the last third of the 15th century through to the end of the 18th century. The loss of people’s rights over the land where they were previously housed, and over which they laboured, characterises the English enclosure and the Scottish clearances. In this context primitive accumulation is defined by separation, where the direct producers were alienated from the means of production, in this case the land. De Angelis’s (2000, p. 12) reading of Marx captures this succinctly:
We can say therefore that primitive accumulation for Marx is a social process instigated by some social actor (the state, particular social classes, etc.) aimed at the people who have some form of direct access to the means of production. This social process often takes the form of a strategy that aims to separate them from the means of production.
‘Freedom’ from attachment to the soil allowed for the formation of a class of labours who could ‘freely’ sell their labour in the market, benefitting industrial capitalism. While the land itself, the former means of production and subsistence of the peasantry, became available as an element of capital.
Harvey’s concept of ABD and similar arguments made by Coulthard (2014), De Angelis (2000, 2001), Federici (2004) and Glassman (2006) are inspired by Rosa Luxemburg’s (2003) reading of primitive accumulation as an ongoing feature of capitalist production, and not just limited to a historic moment in its development. The scholarships’ intellectual contribution lies in detaching the concept from its ‘pre-historic’ or ‘originary’ framework and understanding it as a form of ongoing accumulation. The question of interest is not what the role of ‘primitive’ accumulation is in heralding a new mode of production, but rather how capitalist accumulation continues through contemporary ‘primitive’ accumulation. The analytical reframing of such accumulation as an ongoing process, is particularly productive for settler colonial scholarship that examines the continuing state expropriation of Aboriginal land (Coulthard 2014).
Drawing on Luxemburg’s work, Harvey observes that for her ‘capitalism must perpetually have something ‘outside of itself’ in order to stabilise itself.’ (Harvey 2003, p. 40). He disagrees with her explanations of under- consumption that drive such a form of accumulation, and instead views it as a response to crises of over-accumulated capital that needs to be invested. Such investment is in
22 assets that are ‘outside’ of market-exchange that can act as ‘profitable outlets’. And as discussed above, such an understanding leads to the coining of the term ABD.
While ABD makes a remarkable analytical contribution to understandings of contemporary capitalist dispossession it has also been the subject of critiques. The two most significant for this thesis are questions of the importance given to the role of over-accumulation in driving ABD, and the limited standing given to the use of ‘extra-economic force’, especially when wielded by the state. In careful readings of The New Imperialism, Brenner (2006) and Levien (2012, p.940) observe that it is unclear what separates ABD analytically from Harvey’s other concept of spatio-temporal fix. The latter like ABD is also defined by capital’s location of new avenues for investment in crises of over-accumulation. Furthermore, Levien (2012, 2015) points to the difficulty of investigating whether it is indeed over-accumulated capital, in need of an outlet for profitable investment, that drives ABD. A second and more perceptive point that Levien (2013,2015) makes is Harvey’s lack of specificity in explaining exactly how capital is able to effect such dispossessory projects. In particular he notes the limited agency attached to the role of the state and its use of extra- economic force in Harvey’s account. Levien (2013, pp.16-17) claims:
There is nothing automatic about capital (over-accumulated or not) finding outlets in land or in any other asset; by reading every instance of dispossession as a result of the global impulses of capital, Harvey fails to answer the question of why impulses towards accumulation translate into dispossession in a particular context? Why do capitalists need states to dispossess land for them? Why don’t they simply purchase it on the market? And why do states do it for them?
Levien makes an important point in calling for greater attention to the specifics of how dispossession materially manifests. And for him the use of extra-economic force by the state is a defining feature of the process of dispossession, making the process ‘deeply political’. Such political force is differentiated from economic power in that it is held by actors, usually the state, on the basis of their territorial authority – that is, on the basis of their right to govern a particular space whether that is a nation, a city or village. It is different from the economic prowess of market actors who by virtue of their economic capital can accumulate more capital and dispossess people within the bounds of an institutionalised marketplace. Dispossession through the state’s actions of privatisation or its compulsory acquisition of resources is differentiated from the exploitation of labour in the workplace or the economic compulsion that forces tenants to leave their housing when landlords
23 raise the rent. In Harvey’s thesis of ABD, he acknowledges that the state plays a key role in the process by making assets available to capital through its ‘monopoly of violence and definitions of legality’ (Harvey 2003, p. 145). He does not however see it as a critical feature of ABD. In fact, Harvey specifically attributes economic force as playing a more important role in processes of ABD (Harvey 2006, p. 160), and sees a dialectic between extra-economic and economic power. While not refuting such a dialectic, Levien (2015, p. 149) and Brenner (2006, pp. 100-101) identify a lack of clarity around what separates ABD analytically from the ‘expanded reproduction’ of capital, a distinction that formed the impetus for defining ABD as a separate process in the first place. A distinction between the ‘economic’ and ‘extra-economic’ modes of capital accumulation is a defining feature of Rosa Luxemburg’s work that was the first to see primitive accumulation as a continuing feature of capitalism, and also of Marx’s original thesis. ABD, going by Levien’s scholarship should more accurately be characterised as the use of extra-economic force to expropriate the means of production, subsistence or common social wealth for capital accumulation’ (Levien 2012, p. 940). The disagreement with Harvey on the role of extra-economic force leads him to formulate a separate understanding of capitalist accumulation and dispossession that centres the role of political authority, usually enacted by the state, and maintains a distinction between expanded reproduction and extra-economic accumulation and dispossession.
In the context of extra-economic accumulation ‘The owners of the means of coercion transparently redistribute assets from one class to another’ (Levien 2015, p. 149, emphasis author’s own). Levien is not the first to theorise it in this way. Other writings inspired by Luxemburg make a similar case (De Angelis 2000, 2001, 2004; Glassman 2006). De Angelis (2004, p. 67) writing almost a decade before Levien speaks of primitive accumulation, and presumably of its not so primitive version:
a form of class struggle that appears ‘as a crystal-clear relation of expropriation’ lacking ‘the fetishistic character assumed by capital’s normalization, or the ordinary run of things
The transparency of political intervention is, in my reading, its critical identifying feature. Coulthard (2014)’s work on settler colonialism and dispossession, similarly notes the ongoing nature of ‘primitive accumulation’/extra-economic dispossession, characterised by the nakedness of such force. He claims that, ‘… unconcealed, violent dispossession …’ continues to play a role ‘… in the reproduction of colonial and capitalist social relations in both the domestic and global contexts’ (2014, p. 9 emphasis author’s own). Like in De Angelis’s (2000, p. 12, p. 21), analysis, dispossession through the ‘separation’ of the producers from the means of production, (or social reproduction), i.e. of people from land, is extra-economic where it does not appear as part of the ‘ordinary run of things’.
24 Such intervention is not necessarily physically violent, it can proceed through bureaucratic mechanisms as will be analysed in this thesis (Coulthard 2014; Ghertner 2014). There is however a distinction between the ‘silent compulsion of economic relations [which] sets the seal on the domination of the capitalist over the worker’, and the dispossession of direct and visible extra- economic force (De Angelis 2000, p. 12).
The focus on extra-economic or political power lays the groundwork for Levien’s (2013; 2015) theorisation of ‘regimes of dispossession’. Levien’s (2013; 2015) framework however differs from previous readings, such as those of De Angelis (2000, 2001, 2004) and Glassman (2006), where ongoing primitive accumulation marks the use of extra-economic force to bring resources which were previously ‘outside’ of or, to an extent, protected from the capitalist mode of production into it. ‘Regimes of dispossession’ are not defined by the incorporation of ‘outsides’ into capitalist modes of production. Rather extra-economic force is the critical defining feature of a regime of dispossession, that distinguishes it from normalised capitalist accumulation via economic force. ‘Dispossession is the use of such force to expropriate non- labour assets from one group for the use of another’ (Levien 2013, p. 18). In Levien’s (2013;2015) case study of Rajasthan, India, for instance, dispossession was enacted via the state’s forcible acquisition of private land that was then turned over for the more ‘advanced’ capitalist purpose of building special economic zones. Another example in his work is the state’s forcible acquisition of private land for public infrastructure projects as an example of a type of developmentalist dispossession, where land is in fact transferred from private citizens into state’s hands for projects of state capitalism.
The transparency of extra-economic dispossession means that the consequent societal anger and backlash need to be managed. Implementing dispossession then, becomes a question of compliance (Levien 2015). And this cannot be achieved solely through the domination of extra-economic force. Frederiksen and Himley’s (2019) recent work on dispossession in the extractive industry, inspired by John Allen’s (2006) theorisation of different registers of power, alongside Levien’s (2015) reading of Amitai Etzioni’s (1961) scholarship on organisational compliance, offer overlapping and useful ways to understand how dispossession is implemented. Drawing on this literature I analyse the different modes of power that operate in the cases discussed in this thesis as collectively forming a syntax of dispossession/compliance. First, domination acts through extra-economic force, by cutting of the different options available to individuals and communities who wish to maintain control of their resources. A second mode of power is normative persuasion which aims to convince communities that a given project aligns with accepted economic and social goals. A third mode is the use of techniques of pacification which appeal to people’s immediate material interest to generate compliance, often taking the form of compensation payments in situations of land expropriation. Fourth is coercion, or the threat of negative consequences if people fail to comply with the mandates of a given project.
25 How a regime of dispossession, comprised principally of extra-economic force and a broader syntax of compliance, is executed and people’s willingness to comply, will vary geographically and temporally. The authorities that dispossess deploy varied political, cultural and economic logics, narratives and practices, as do the people contesting dispossession. Levien (2015, p. 149) claims that:
the character and outcome of dispossession in different times and places will be shaped by heterogenous and nationally specific political, economic and ideological factors that cannot be read off of global imperatives of capital. Their specific configuration in any given place and time can be understood as a regime of dispossession
His argument here being that the wielding of extra-economic force by a state authority, as opposed to dispossession being forced by an expanse of global capital creates specific modes of dispossession shaped by the political, economic and social histories and presents of a place. Such heterogeneity is in fact also seen in the exploitation and appropriation of capitalism’s normalized reproduction through an institutionalized market-place. But as De Angelis puts it, there is a fetishistic character to such market dispossession (despite the heterogeneity). In cases of extra- economic accumulation and dispossession the specific cultures and political economies of dispossession are more evident, where things are visible and ‘in your face’. A fine-grained analysis of how extra-economic dispossession plays out allows one to see the variation from place to place and at different historical conjunctures. It highlights what is being expropriated, for and from whom, for what purposes and with what level of success (Levien 2013; 2015). Such an analysis allows Levien to uncover different patterns of dispossession in different periods of India’s history, distinguishing between developmentalist projects of dispossession in the early post-independence era, and the more recent neoliberal land appropriations (Levien 2013; 2015).
Focussing on the role of extra-economic force in the course of dispossession must be done with a few caveats. Firstly, it is important to note that such force is not external to market operations. It is wielded in the service of market actors or that of state capitalism. David Hall (2013) makes the point that such ‘extra-economic force’ can in fact also be wielded by market actors, not by virtue of their political authority, but through acts of fraud or through the use of various forms of customary and inter-personal relations, which are not supposed to be part of typical market transactions. The ‘dichotomy’ between economic and extra- economic force is better seen as a ‘continuum’ (Hall, pp.
26 1593-1594). Secondly it is undoubtedly the case that economic force, which compels people to make choices in a market-place resulting in their own dispossession, is never separate from extra- economic authority. The most obvious example is the state’s guarantee of private property rights and the legal conditions of homeownership and renting, which enable market-based dispossession where conditions of payment are breached. It is the transparent quality or explicitness of political force however that makes it difficult to mask such force, compared with these more regular market operations where exploitation and dispossession tends to be more accepted as part of the normalcy of market rules with their illusion of choice. State force underpins the market but is often latent. It becomes active in cases of state led extra- economic dispossession that I discuss. A visibility emerges because of the atypicality of activating such force. It is unexpected, and hence easier to identify. Arguably, in countries where the state has welfare obligations to maintain a land base and material resources in the interests of the public, visibility is also produced as its actions run counter to expectations. Its use of force is not expected, not part and parcel of the everyday of market transactions.
Levien’s sociological focus is on the national scale but a regime of dispossession can be studied across a range of geographies. The dispossession of resources is intimately related to the production of place, reshaping its materiality and social networks. The logics and practices of urbanising dispossession, such as the cases that I will consider in Sydney’s settler colonial and capitalist context, warrant its own attention. In the following sections I discuss theoretical approaches that contribute to an urban geography of dispossession, by paying attention to how dispossession is implemented through the use of extra-economic force, the settler colonial and economic logics of justification, and the use of compensation to pacify impacted residents. These collectively form a syntax of dispossession/compliance, through which a colonial and capitalist regime of dispossession, expropriates land. This ‘top down’ approach is accompanied with an investigation of people’s experiences of dispossession, how these are shaped by the different mechanisms used to dispossess, and by the propertied relationships people hold over the physical and social spaces in which they live, and to communities of which they are a part.
2.1.1 Extra-economic Force: Privatisation of State Land, Compulsory Acquisition and Centralised Planning
Privatisation of public land, compulsory property acquisition for the purpose of new forms of capitalist accumulation, and the direct use of planning powers to change the physical and social environment of a place are the three forms of extra-economic power that play a critical role in processes of dispossession discussed in this thesis. They are powers of ‘administration and enforcement’ (Wood 2006, p. 12), bestowed upon the state, or some other actor, by virtue of its
27 authority to control a given spatial unit. These are not necessarily illegal acts, and where performed by the state there tends to be a legal basis or legitimacy to the actions. They dispossess individuals and communities of their ownership of material resources and dismantle their relationships of belonging, not by virtue of economic compulsion but through direct domination. Depending on the nature of extra-economic force that is deployed, and the way that its use is governed, different forms of compensation may also be provided to pacify impacted communities and residents. But compliance with dispossession is most evidently through the use of direct political power or the coercive threat of negative sanction.
Recent urban geographical scholarship has taken a keen interest in land dispossession in terms of the impacts on communities (Brickell et al. 2017; Hodgkinson and Essen 2015; Zhang 2017) and the different mechanisms by which it is implemented (Gillespie 2016; Porter 2014; Shin 2016; Zhang 2018). It has not however, sought to analytically centre the different legal forms of extra-economic force, used across different cases of dispossession, in a way that sheds light on the similarity of these operations which on the surface appear very different. Porter’s (2014) work is an exception, which has identified the calculus of possessory rights based politics that underpins two different modes of dispossession – the first being the colonial expropriation of Aboriginal land in Melbourne, Australia and the second being compulsory acquisition of private property in a case of urban renewal in Glasgow, U.K. While she notes that the two dispossessions are not politically equivalent, she problematises a common tendency for struggles against dispossession and the state reparations for dispossession to be underpinned by a possessory politics which frames the expropriation of land in terms of the loss of rights of possession over an object. My analysis differs from Porter’s, in that it is not solely about such a possessory stance in state compensation processes, which work as tools to pacify dispossessed communities. Rather I situate compensation, and the possessory politics that underpins it, in a broader framework of compliance through which extra-economic dispossession operates. It is this framework of compliance, comprising the use of state extra-economic force, different forms of legitimisation, monetary compensation, and coercion, that form the unifying framework with which I understand the cases of land loss in Sydney. Below I list the different legal mechanisms of extra-economic force which have been deployed in the cases that I discuss, following which I discuss different theoretical framings of justification and pacification from urban studies literature, that contribute to a compliance based framework of dispossession.
The first form of extra-economic force deployed in the urban redevelopment and infrastructure projects I discuss here is the state’s authority to alienate public land. Bakker’s (2005, p. 544) definition captures the specific transaction occurring in such cases of privatisation, as a ‘a change of ownership, or a handover of management, from the public to the private sector’. Adopting a similar angle but broadening out the concept beyond the public/state sector and private sector divide Swyngedouw (2005, p. 82) sees it as, ‘a process through which activities, resources, and the like,
28 which had not been formally privately owned, managed or organized, are taken away from whoever or whatever owned them before and transferred to a new property configuration that is based on some form of ‘private’ ownership or control’. The basis of the authority for the ‘taking away’ does not primarily stem from the economic prowess of the purchaser, but rather the political authority, usually of the state, to alienate the things over which it has control, that had previously been held on behalf of the citizenry. While alienation on the market is expected and typical where resources are privately held, the state’s actions to transfer ownership or management of things like public housing or publicly owned land tends to cause more outrage as dispossession is not obscured by the normalised trappings of the market. In cases of privatisation, the alienation of publicly or collectively held resources introduces a profit- based or exploitative logic to the transaction, substantiating the point made above that extra- economic force is not as such outside of the market, and in fact facilitates accumulation.
The second form of extra-economic power discussed in this thesis, is the state’s use of urban planning. Planning mechanisms enforce changes to land use, and can transform the physical and social make up of a place by reconfiguring its physical and social make up. In Sydney, centralised planning strategies have been productive in urban transformation projects, with state Significant Precinct/Infrastructure provisions in planning law playing an important role in Waterloo and Redfern and in the construction of the WestConnex. While landowners and developers can also lobby for planning changes, the cases that I discuss are of the state wielding the force of planning power for its own schemes, adding to the visibility of dispossession. The state of course always plays a role in urban planning, extra-economic force underpins market transactions by designing spatial strategies and setting land use and zoning conditions. But this force becomes ‘crystal clear’ in the course of change where the state’s role is no longer dormant, particularly where it uses special planning mechanisms to facilitate its own projects, that are in the service of the market and private accumulation. Dispossession, in such instances is no longer of the ‘ordinary run of things’, but rather a direct political intervention to separate people from their lived environments.
A third type of state power that is relevant to my work is that of compulsory acquisition. Writings from a variety of different geographical contexts have identified the state’s authority` to compulsorily acquire private or communal land as among the key political powers used to dispossess people of land and housing (Adnan 2013; Gray and Porter 2014; Ghertner 2014; Hodkinson and Essen 2015; Hubbard and Lees 2018; Levien’s 2015, Gillespie 2016; Porter 2014; Shin 2016; Mbiba 2017; Wang et. al. 2017). Examples include the acquisition of land for urban regeneration (Gray and Porter 2014; Gillespie 2016; Hodkinson and Essen 2015; Hubbard and Lees 2018; Porter 2014), to build special economic zones (Levien 2013, 2015) and for commercial trade (Adnan 2013). This is arguably the clearest mechanism of extra-economic force, particularly in societies where property rights are engrained into the social fabric through legal protections, long
29 histories of cultural valorisation and a variety of economic incentives that subsidise this form of landholding. The clarity of dispossession is a product of the economic and cultural embeddedness of property ownership, and the unexpectedness of state intervention to seize land.
2.1.2 Justifications: Narratives of Improvement, Necessity and Rule by Difference
The use of extra-economic force in the redevelopment and infrastructure cases discussed in this thesis was accompanied by narratives of improvement that sought to justify the projects and the dispossession they caused on grounds of economic productivity, racialised and socio-cultural improvement. Before going into the detail of theoretical approaches that analyse such narratives, I want to be clear that I am not arguing that such justifications are necessarily in bad faith, or that the architects and advocates of dispossessory schemes deliberately peddle lies to people in order to justify dispossession, although at times that may well be the case. The narrative of progress, whether that is of well-being or economic growth, in many cases is the raison d'être for a given project. The social and economic motivations and hence legitimisations of the proposed solutions are products of various social hegemonies, such as the equating of progress with economic growth or the restoration of a racialised or classed social order. Those who lose their homes or access to common land may not see it this way, but for much of the public the justifications are reasonable as they correspond with normative ideals and aspirations. Employing a hegemonic ideal of the public interest that resonates can draw a curtain over the possibility of other options, of other futures that are perhaps too radical for some to seriously contemplate, such as the reduction of economic growth or financial investment in the strengths of marginalised communities as opposed to seeing their dispersal and de- concentration as a form of spatial improvement. In other words, while the state power to dispossess has a legal basis, political justifications are likely to accompany extra-economic power – state authorities want to be seen as enacting it responsibly, given the potential electoral consequences.
Gray and Porter (2014) outline how a ‘mantra of necessity’ was constructed around urban regeneration projects in a working-class neighbourhood in Glasgow to build athletes villages for the Commonwealth Games. They claim that this discourse of necessity ‘… combines neoliberal growth logics with their obscene underside—a stigmatisation logic that demonises poor urban neighbourhoods’ (Gray and Porter 2014, pp. 380). State use of extra-economic force is frequently presented as necessary by juxtaposing a problematic present, such as a stigmatised neighbourhood or the unsightliness of slum dwellings, against a desirable future, of economic growth, of global city ambitions (Bannerjee Guha 2013) and ‘world class’ status (Ranganathan 2018) – futures that can be realised through state intervention. Gray and Porter (2014) identify territorial stigma as an example of how the present, or the status quo, of a place is denigrated. But other examples include narratives of economic inefficiency used to justify the privatisation of poorly performing welfare services or
30 the colonial and racialised problematisation of urban areas to legitimise (re)development and dispossession. Ranganathan’s (2018) work, like Gray and Porter’s (2014) emphasises the deficit logic of such narratives of improvement that mobilise economic, racialised or other socio-cultural forms of difference and displace them into a hierarchy to legitimise change or intervention. She terms such urban improvement in her case study of Bangalore, India as a ‘rule by difference’. The bottom end of the deficit is the denigration of a current place or people and the other side of the spectrum is a future redemption, with both sides of the coin defined by prevailing economic and social hegemonies.
Scholarship on settler colonialism offers a parallel lens through which to look at the language of necessity that is used in the mobilisation of state interventions in a place, including in the deployment of extra-economic force. The writings of Bird-Rose (2006), Crabtree (2013) and Graham (2010) discuss the significance of narratives of improvement and progress in the process of colonization, which arguably have mutated to inform the Australian political-economy post-invasion. Nicole Graham (2010) in her book Lawscape explains how ideas of waste and improvement were imperative to the establishment of Anglo property law and settler sovereignty. British sovereignty was based on the claim that Aboriginal peoples had not improved the land, and so were not worthy of property rights (Graham 2010, p. 90). I am interested in how improvement narratives are mobilised in contexts other than the early years of settler colonisation, and how they construct a ‘mantra of necessity’ to justify contemporary extra-economic interventions. Deborah Bird Rose (2004, p. 16) identifies a temporal character to improvement narratives used in the course of colonisation that see history as:
a process of conflict and change such that the present emerges from, and is differentiated from, the past, and such that the future will emerge from, and will be differentiated from, the present. It puts a positive value on change, and posits that history, or society, is moving towards the resolution of conflict and contradiction
Bird-Rose emphasizes that such a paradigm directs action towards the future (Bird Rose 2004, p. 16) and can thus legitimate violence and suffering in the present, as seen in the context of the dispossessions that I discuss in this thesis. Louise Crabtree in her work on decolonising property places this logic of progress in ‘Judeo-Christian teleological narratives in which time moves towards a perfect state that ironically remains perpetually imminent’. (Crabtree 2013, p. 99). Leaving teleology aside, such conceptualisations applied to the context of urban extra-economic intervention
31 and dispossession speak to how the present and past of a place can be denigrated or accorded little value. Consequently, damaging them, or engaging in whole-sale destruction for the sake of future ‘redemption’ is justifiable as they are not valued in the way of a hypothetical future.
The second mechanism of compliance discussed in this thesis is pacification through monetary compensation for property owners impacted by compulsory acquisition. Pacification in this context appeals to the immediate material interests of the dispossessed. In liberal democracies, such as Australia, with established market-based property systems two problematic logics are at play when compensation in the form of the market value of property is rolled out. Compensation is tied to a possessory logic (Porter 2014) which only recognises legal property relations defined on the basis of individual possession. ‘Rights under this conception are a bundle of things that can be possessed, held, alienated and exchanged, and express the positionality of a possessing unitary subject’ (Porter 2014, p. 394). In other words, the property relation and the category of person who bears the legal property rights to land, are the legitimate focus of compensation. Porter claims that possessory logics regulate the ‘restitution of rights’ in things that are owned under conditions of dispossession; a rationale that comes at a cost. It re-enforces a politically unjust structural context, where those claims to and relationships with land and place, and those individuals who are not legible as the proper owning subjects, are cast outside of the narrow purview of recognition, rendered invisible by the legal possessive framework of compensation. Porter claims (2014, p. 397) that our capacity to speak only in terms of a possessory framework reveals the paucity ‘…of how we view the rights of citizens to their homes, neighbourhoods and cities – their place in the world’.
A second reductive logic that underpins the compensation payments for property, is that of abstraction, through which land, the built environment and various neighbourhood facilities that enable life in an area come to be expressed in monetary terms. By this logic, the heterogeneity and material and socio-cultural significance of the physical and social environments can be captured by market calculation. Abstraction allows for land and the built environment to be conceptualised as alienable and more fungible, by reducing and ignoring its complexity, histories, meanings and the relationships in which it is embedded. The monetary valuation of compensation processes tend to channel contestation into disputes over the correct financial value of property (Gray and Porter 2018); as other values are not registered. And as will be discussed later in this thesis, these proceedings are lengthy, costly and painful given the scope for disagreement when placing a dollar value on a complex physical and social environment.
The property relationship, framed and valued through logics of possession and abstraction, has a third politically regressive dimension in settler societies – it is embedded in a politics of colonial land dispossession. Recognition of legal ownership through compensation payments for property acquisition re-enacts a settler land relationship of property, which, as Brenna Bhandar notes, is
32 inherently racialised (Bhandar 2018). Colonisation in Australia in its early stages proceeded on the premise that Aboriginal communities lacked a meaningful relationship with land. Their land governance and ‘property’ systems were deemed inferior against European practices (Blomley 2004; Edmonds 2010; Graham 2010; Bhandar 2018; Wolfe1999). This fiction of property-lessness, whereby land in settler colonies was in effect deemed empty, underpins and constitutes property in countries like Australia. Such a material basis is re-inscribed through the recognition of property as a valid land category in state compensation processes. The recognition of legal property then, is a re-enactment of settler colonialism, a process by which settler colonial reality and its underlying premise of Aboriginal dispossession is made real.
These ‘political economy’ dynamics that shape dispossession intersect with the on-the-ground relations of possession and belonging that such projects explicitly or implicitly target, configuring dispossession in varied ways. I develop a propertied framework in the following section of this chapter which in conjunction with my analysis of top-down state dynamics, highlights how forms of propertied ‘possessions’ are explicitly or implicitly targeted by regimes of dispossession.
2.2 Grounding Dispossession in Property, Space and Time
2.2.1 A Propertied Take on Dispossession
Recurring themes in the literature on dispossession note among its key manifestations - the loss of material resources (Doshi 2013; Hodkinson and Essen 2015; Ghertner 2014; Wilhelm-Solomon 2016; Freeman and Burgos 2017; Gillespie 2016; Shin 2016; Paprocki 2016), the loss of social relationships and transformations in subjectivity (Paprocki 2016; Hodkinson and Essen 2015). Performative approaches to property found in the works of Sarah Keenan (2015), Davina Cooper (2007 and Nicholas Blomley (2013) offer useful ways of thinking about such losses by reconceptualising them as losses of property. In so doing these approaches bring specificity to what forms of ownership and membership are sacrificed or weakened in the course of dispossession, how loss unfolds and why it matters. In adopting a propertied framework alongside a discussion of state authority in dispossession I contribute to a growing body of literature that brings into conversation the political economy of dispossession with people’s lived experiences (Doshi 2013; Hodkinson and Essen 2015; Shin 2016; Paprocki 2016; Zhang 2018). In my analysis I pay particular attention to the ‘structure, networks and processes’ (Keenan 2015) that make property happen. I conceptualise dispossession as a loss of property that unfolds through the reshaping or dismantling of this ‘stuff’ that holds it up. In the sections below I further elaborate on this understanding of property and bring it into conversation with an understanding of dispossession. I draw on Sarah Keenan (2015) and Davina Cooper’s (2007) scholarship to this end, which see property as a relationship of belonging
33 held up in space that has two key dimensions – mastery and membership. This conceptualisation corresponds with the Oxford English Dictionary definition of property (OED 2007):
1. A (usually material) thing belonging to a person, group of persons, etc.; a possession; (as a mass noun) that which one owns; possessions collectively; a person's goods, wealth, etc.
2. The characteristic quality of a person or thing
In Keenan (2015) and Cooper’s (2007) language this two-fold definition of property as ownership and membership, are captured in the terms subject-object belonging – a subject owns an object, and part-whole belonging – where the characteristics of a person marks them as belonging to a wider social whole.
Property as Mastery
Mastery refers to those relationships, where a person uses or has control over an object, such as personal possessions or a house that they own or rent or even a piece of public land that they use for leisure. The ‘thing’ is seen as and treated as separate from the person. Such belonging over something, subject-object belonging, is compatible with the dominant ownership model of property described in legal geography scholarship (Blomley 2004; Graham 2010; Blatman-Thomas and Porter 2019), where exclusion is central. Ownership in this understanding is constituted of control, which defines the position of the property holder with respect to something of value, such that they have a range of freedoms or agencies e.g. the authority to exclude others from it, to alienate the object of property, and to use and access it as they wish within certain legal parameters, (Blomley 2004, pp. 2-7). Another way of looking at this is that, ‘…property must be thought of as an organized set of relations between people in regards to a valued resource,’ (Blomley 2016 a, pp. 593). One person’s agency is likely to exclude others, making the property relation a distribution of power.
Property relations within critical legal geography scholarship and legal studies more generally encompass both official relations recognised by the state, and those that take place in more informal or unofficial spheres but are made real through different forms of social recognition (Radin 1982; Cooper 2007; Blomley 2013; Keenan 2015). The specific practices of property, that is enactments of the relationship of belonging, are extremely diverse and difficult to define in a finite way given the wide range of possible expressions. Examples include squatting of buildings, building an
34 extension on one’s home or reaping the monetary benefits of intellectual property rights. Broadly speaking subject-object belonging is synonymous with ‘mastery’ over something. The thing-like quality is defined because of the socio-cultural emphasis on the separateness between the thing and the person who owns, whereby it tends to take on commodity like characteristics (Cooper 2007; Strathern 2004; Graham 2010). Such separateness is of course a consequence of how it is given force or recognised through a variety of means such as norms, laws and governmental practices. In terms of what ‘counts’ as mastery and what does not, what is to be included and what is not, I maintain in this thesis that propertied mastery is accompanied with the power to exclude, in order to distinguish it from other forms of mastery which may be understood more so as ‘agency’. And secondly, drawing on Blomley (2013, p. 25, p. 36) there must be social and historical precedent of certain relations being included as property, ‘performances of property—like fence building— are…citational, referencing numerous other performances… Our fence, therefore, cites innumerable fences, hedges, and other territorialisations, as well as other markers and signs of ownership and entitlement’. In summary belonging as mastery becomes property when it cites previous practices of property, and I argue that the exclusionary power and practice is critical to such mastery.
Property as Membership
The second case of belonging that Cooper (2007) and Keenan (2015) identify is part-whole belonging. While this is not typically understood as property in the legal sense, they argue that it is in fact a property relation. The properties or characteristics of a person identifies them as part of a broader social entity. So, when the social or cultural practices that constitute whiteness or middle- classness are performed by a person, those performances position them as part of a larger entity or group. Belonging denotes membership of a group or a community and is usefully conceptualised as a property relation because the characteristics that ‘belong’ to a person are in fact relationships with a broader whole. Note the difference in emphasis from subject-object belonging. Here the analytical focus is less on the separateness and severability of the part – it is less thing like. The relationship is ‘held up’ as one of membership. A child is part of a family, the holder of a collective identity such as whiteness or womanhood is part of a white community or a social whole of women, and a given language is part of a broader cultural formation (Cooper 2007). Membership happens through the performance of the appropriate cultural norms and ‘ways of being’ that define that category or ‘larger entity’, as Cooper (2007) puts it. And of course, such membership needs to be recognised, in the same way that subject-object property relies on different forms of recognition. That is the performed membership actions need to be socially recognised as appropriate, as belonging to the whole. Cooper’s (1998) case study of efforts to re-introduce Christian religious education in the school curriculum in Britain illustrates property as membership, where belonging to an Anglo
35 Christian nation-state was dependent on citizens’ capacity to perform those values and practices, and even to exhibit the physical characteristics of that religious and national community. She claims, ‘Membership criteria are not satisfied by formal, legal citizenship; at the very least they require immersion within Anglocentric culture, and the adoption of its traditions, religion and language’ (Cooper 1998, p. 61).
Keenan (2015) describes different form of part-whole belonging in her analysis of Aboriginal legal challenges to the Federal Australian government’s introduction of intervention policies in the Northern Territory in 2007 in response to allegations of widespread child sexual abuse. The government’s compulsory multi-year leasing of land that was originally held by Aboriginal people under various pieces of legislation sparked outrage on the basis that it threatened the Aboriginal culture to which they belonged, that is the cultural whole of which people were a part. Their ‘ownership’ of land and its legal holding up, that is subject-object belonging, was important for the litigants. But as Keenan points out, what was also important, perhaps more important, was the Aboriginal cultural space created on that land that held up or recognised particular subjects and social practices as Aboriginal (and others as not) - the space held up people’s belonging to an Aboriginal cultural whole. Such readings of property as membership, imply the power to exclude, which as discussed above in the case of subject-object belonging, is an important defining characteristic of property. Those who cannot or do not practise the culture, social norms of a particular group or who do not present its bodily characteristics are excluded in some way from that group and the tangible and intangible benefits of being a part of it, that is of having property as membership. Furthermore, what counts as an enactment of membership and what does not, like in the case of property as mastery tends to depend on precedent. Performances of propertied membership count as property to the extent that they cite existing norms. While this does not preclude change, there is a tendency for those practices that cite existing ones to be recognised.
Both property as mastery and property as membership are constitutive of personhood, in that they entail the repeated performance of certain actions, through which the subject comes into being (Butler 2007). Having something, in this case having a propertied relationship with a thing or having a propertied relationship with a group, allows one to be someone (Harris 1993; Radin 1993; Radin 1996; Ahmed 2006; Butler 2007; Blomley 2013; Keenan 2015). Belonging to a social whole, such as to womanhood, whiteness or Aboriginalness, is more intuitively seen as constituting part of a person’s subjectivity. By enacting the social etiquettes and cultural practices of a white or Anglo cultural whole, a white Anglo subject comes into being. The practices of propertied membership are enactments of a way of life. Subject-object belonging is also constitutive of personhood in that mastery over something such as a house shapes one’s actions and who one is. In building extensions, inviting people over, renovating, maintaining one’s garden, building fences and keeping
36 out trespassers ‘I’ become a type of person, a property owner. The longer I practice such mastery the more a particular kind of subjecthood congeals around such practices.
Subject-object belonging and part-whole belonging facilitates one another. So, when an object belongs to me, I practice that belonging, interacting with it in various ways. For example, in owning a home I enact mastery over it, building extensions, inviting people over and renovating. But in making such alterations to physical and social space, I establish my belonging there. The objects and social practices that constitute it, makes it increasingly a space that supports my belonging or membership and the belonging of people like me in that space (Keenan 2015). The socio-cultural characteristics and practices that make me a member of a particular whole, whether it be a racial, sexual or gendered category, are supported across the place of my house, with physical things and through the social gatherings that I hold. In that place I can more easily perform my membership of a particular social or cultural group or the relevant category of people with whom I identify. My mastery over the house, subject-object belonging, thus produces and re-enforces part-whole belonging, that is membership of a group.
Holding up: Making Property Happen
Property as a relationship of mastery or membership is not a given, it has to be ‘made real’ in the world (Blomley 2013). This is where holding up comes in. The above descriptions of property, as mastery and membership, note that it must be recognised in some way for it to happen. It is contingent upon being held up. Belonging to a Christian nation-state and belonging over a house or a personal possession are both dependent on cultural, legal, socio-economic networks that make them into property. Without this holding up, property does not happen. Keenan (Keenan 2015, p. 7). sees holding up as ‘a wide-range of social processes, structures and networks that give force to relations of belonging’, that is they lend the authoritative recognition, recognition that has effect (Cooper 2007). Davina Cooper’s (2007) study of the property structure of Summerhill, a ‘free school’ in the UK, is a useful example through which to understand these conceptual claims. She notes how students were accorded property rights in the things they created such as paintings or sculptures as well as rights to certain spaces. Students could keep possession of certain things and reap their benefits, because of the authoritative recognition of the school community, its respect for the institution’s norms, formal rules and democratic structure. When students performed particular acts that had the precedent of being property, it elicited particular kinds of behaviours from other people towards them that enabled or facilitated that practice. This is holding up, that is the conferring of recognition on the performer of an act, which has the effect of facilitating it and making certain benefits available to that person. Blomley’s (2013) work on performing property offers a useful way of thinking about property holding up. He claims (2013, p. 25) that:
37
performances of property are successful to the extent that they align with other things, ideas, and acts in what we can term ‘enrolment’. The resultant composite can be termed an ‘assemblage’, a complex combination of things and people.
Summer Hill students’ capacity to perform property through such a lens is dependent on a range of ‘networks, structures and processes’ These include the internal norms and rules of the school and a collective respect for those. They comprise formal processes that guide property enactments and that create legitimisations and incentives for students, whose practices conform with their expectations. Property is held up when a student’s action ‘aligns’ and fits with these existing ‘things, ideas and acts’. In other words, the latter are enrolled into a successful performance of property. Where a practice deviates, as in it does not align correctly, because it does not ‘cite’ precedent, the performance of property fails, and the tangible and intangible benefits associated with it may not be made available to the person in question. This type of sanction is an incentive against deviation, whilst the social legitimisation of conforming acts bestows a sense of ease and comfort on the doer. Property as membership works in a similar way. Membership of a group of people, such as a student’s belonging to the school community at Summer Hill, happens when it is recognised by other students and the school administration and when the physical materials one needs to perform membership such as money for tuition fees are accessible etc. That is people, things, practices and ideas need to come together to make such property work or to make it successful (Blomley 2013). Property, official or otherwise, is thus not a pre-given relation, but rather brought into the world.
These ‘processes, structures and networks’ that hold up property or are enrolled into successful property performances are in Keenan’s (2015) account spatial in nature. She draws on Massey’s (2005) understanding of space as: the product of inter-relations and hence constituted through interactions; the sphere of multiplicity and heterogeneity; and always under construction. Different values, norms, media narratives, physical structures and laws intersect producing the ‘dynamic, heterogenous, simultaneity’ of space. The particular ways in which such space becomes shaped gives recognition and support to certain relations of belonging as practices of property and not to others. Thinking back to the example of Summer Hill, the space of the school constituted of people, norms, rules and bureaucratic processes holds up certain practices as among the relations of belonging or property, and not others. ‘Relations of belonging are held up by the spaces in and through which those relations exist’ (Keenan 2015, p. 65). Blomley’s (2016 b, p. 511) critique of this however points out that unless space is treated as so ‘open-ended’ that it becomes ‘incoherent’,
38 surely we must acknowledge that property is held up by alignments that are more than spatial, for example by history, violence, legal technicalities and narratives.
Taking on board his critique I see holding up as more than spatial, but in the two case studies of my thesis concerned with propertied dispossession in the course of large urban change projects, there is inevitably a spatial or perhaps more accurately a place-based account of holding up and its loss.
In my reading and further development of the phenomena of ‘holding up’ or the alignment of a given practice with various ‘things, ideas and acts’, I have come to see these as having four critical characteristics. In this thesis I am particularly interested in the enabling and conditional features of holding up.
Firstly the ‘processes, structure and networks’ that hold up belonging are heterogenous. Holding up can be through informal and unofficial recognition of residents as part of a community, through their neighbours’ extending gestures of friendliness their way and their inclusion in local events. In its more official capacity holding up might take the form of legal recognition that the state accords to those with legal title to land, which simultaneously comes with a variety of conditions. Diverse processes of holding up overlap to enable and place conditions on property relations. For instance, my ownership over a piece of land may be held up through official legal title, but social acknowledgement also holds it up, where my neighbours respect my privacy and do not intrude upon or occupy my home. Were I to breach the conditions of ownership, such as by not maintaining my garden or by building an illegal extension, I may receive both legal and socio-cultural disapproval.
Secondly, holding up places conditions upon property by circumscribing people’s behaviour or actions. It marks the limits of the property relationship. If certain acts do not align with or conform to a set of rules or norms that constitute such conditions, which may be official, unofficial, formal or informal, then property does not happen. Such conditions are produced through cultures, histories, violence, narrative and affect (the ‘networks, structures and processes’), and impresses upon the person or collective that is engaging in a particular act. Placing such conditions on an act, means that it tends to be citational, citing those successful past performances of property that conformed with the conditions. Such conditions may pertain to those acts that are markers of membership and mastery, but equally may impress upon other actions that are not included as enactments of property but are practices that nonetheless are expected from a person for their property to be held up. An example of the first type of condition, is where a person or institution’s property title permits them to build extensions on a home or to redevelop a piece of land, but constraints are placed on their agency by planning regulation. Their propertied relationship of mastery over land and the built structure of their house is circumscribed by legal parameters. Holding up is conditional; it shapes what counts and what does not count as property. In this example those conditions are articulated at
39 the cross-over of planning and property law, and practices in breach of the planning conditions on property face sanctions. Conditions thus work to prevent breaches or penalise people for such breaches. A good example of the second type of condition is where social housing tenants’ property rights in NSW are conditional upon good behaviour in the neighbourhood and, with recent legislative changes, having no convictions of drug supply. Here the conditions of holding up are not specifically about acts or behaviours that are in themselves enactments of property with respect to the thing of property, in this case housing. Rather the conditions concern actions that lie outside of the remit of property practices, outside of the practices of mastery.
A third aspect of holding up, that constitutes the other side of its conditional nature, is that it allows one to act or to be within the constraints referred to above. ‘The world is available as a space for action’ (Keenan 2015, p. 84). Holding up enables property as mastery to happen, through material incentives, legitimisation and facilitative procedures and things, which like the conditions discussed above can be official, unofficial, informal and formal. It is not only comprised of setting conditions on what counts as property as discussed above, but also about enabling those practices. In the context of home ownership, it is enabled via a heterogenous complex of things such as property law, a tax system that subsidises ownership, practices of valuation and a cultural history of valorising and approving such a relationship. Note these laws, norms and practices simultaneously set conditions on property. Alongside enabling acts that actually constitute property, holding up can also enable a range of other practices such as a particular kind of social life or the capacity to start a family. Thinking about membership as property, holding up allows for the performance of certain actions or certain ways of being that are associated with a group. Gentrified neighbourhoods, such as Paddington in Sydney or parts of Notting Hill in London, with high rents, high property prices and upmarket shops, enable the performance of middle-class or upper-middle class belonging by making available, in a small space, the goods, services and cultural approval that legitimise, incentivise and facilitate the socio- cultural and economic practices of this group, which might include the buying of comfortable homes and the consuming of expensive goods. Conversely, in a low-income neighbourhood the services, facilities and forms of cultural approval mean that very different practices will be enabled that mark people out as members of a social whole. As with the conditions of holding up, the enabling of particular practices, generates a citational quality about them, where people’s practices tend to reference those previous performances that were enabled. Put obtusely, the legal, physical and cultural stuff around people pulls their practices in particular directions by incentivising and facilitating them accordingly.
Finally, holding up is constructed and so it can also be dismantled. Property that is held up now and today, may not necessarily always be held up, the conditions of holding up can and will change. But this tends to be difficult given the histories, narratives and deep-seated cultures through which the holding up of dominant forms of property has been produced. Thus, change only happens through
40 persistent work or significant social upheaval. Spaces that are orientated around certain bodies, holding up certain bodies and their ways of life as belonging there, are created via the ‘accumulation of gestures’ (Ahmed 2006, pp. 160). Settler colonial forms of property in land currently have official legal force and are socially and culturally held up across Australia. That status quo has come about through years of physical violence, cultural narratives, formal political actions, everyday gestures, the creation of boundaries and legislation such that certain forms of property, particularly private property are held up, and have enabled settler access Aboriginal land. But even so such property is not held up everywhere indicating the potential for it to be dismantled and disrupted. Aboriginal communities and even non-Aboriginal people practise different forms of property held up in counter-publics and alternative spaces. The neighbourhood of Redfern in Sydney that I talk about in this thesis is an example of such disruption. Informal gathering and the setting up of Aboriginal businesses held up Aboriginal collective mastery over urban space by providing the social approval and facilities to enable it. In so doing it reminds us of the constructed nature of holding up.
Dispossession as a loss of property
Returning now to the question of dispossession, the concept of ‘holding up’ offers a way of understanding the specific ways in which dispossession develops through the removal or the reorganisation of the social, physical and conceptual networks, structures and processes that recognise and give effect to people’s properties, that is their relationships of mastery and membership. As mentioned previously, the literature on extra-economic dispossession broadly sees its lived experience as characterised by the loss of or transformations of material resources, social relations and the consequent alteration of subjectivities. Bringing this understanding of dispossession together with propertied understandings of belonging, I understand the loss of material resources, such as personal possessions or community spaces, or the loss of rights over them as a loss of mastery. This loss occurs via the dismantling of the networks, structures and processes, such as legal rights, community recognition and physical amenities, that formerly held it up.
In addition to this loss of mastery, we can also see dispossession in losses of group membership. Such losses receive little explicit attention in the scholarship on dispossession and part-whole belonging introduces a new analytical dimension. The socio-spatial changes brought about via extra- economic force not only expropriate things, but they also disembed people from socio-cultural ‘wholes’. Having to move away from a place in the wake of dispossessory projects, or the complete physical and social transformation of a lived environment is not only the loss of material things but
41 also the loss or partial loss of group membership that had been held up by the people and by the surrounds that allowed one to perform such membership.
The loss of social relationships discussed in the literature on dispossession is articulated as a loss of social support. Using a propertied framework such relations can be seen as among the networks that hold up people’s belonging to a community group and also over an object. For example, people in my neighbourhood interacting with me when I use the local park is a way in which my belonging to a community and my right to use the local park is held up. But the dispossession literature does not explicitly discuss the work of social relationships through such an analytical lens. Social relationships lost through dispossession instead are characterised as place-based support networks, but not seen to explicitly do the work of validating people’s belonging to a community. Nor are they understood as the relations that hold up people’s belonging over an object such as a home, a community space or piece of land. It is the removal of recognition of people’s belonging over something, and their belonging to a community or social group. In building an understanding of dispossession through this thesis I look across the heterogenous ‘holding ups’ that make property happen, and whose destruction takes apart such property relations.
The transformation of subjectivity that some of the scholarship on dispossession (Paprocki 2016; Hodkinson and Essen 2015) identifies, can be read through a propertied lens as a consequence of the transformation of the structures, networks and processes, that do the work of holding up membership and mastery. Having rights over a thing and belonging to a social whole produce subjectivity, in that they are constitutive of behaviours and actions that are shaped by holding up. These acts make people who they are; that is the subject comes into being through the performance of such acts. Altering the social/spatial fabric that holds up both these forms of property thus shifts a person’s subject position. Taking this lens to Paprocki’s (2016) work on the social dispossession of micro-credit borrowers in Bangladesh, the women’s loss of the objects such as pots, pans, bed- frames and social security cards, required for social reproduction was through a rupturing of the legal, social and cultural recognition or holding up through which these items belonged to them. Such rupturing occurred through the institution of debt relations where their property was treated as collateral. The introduction of micro-credit also restructured gendered relationships and hence rural livelihoods, by placing pressure on women to make repayments by introducing disciplinary practices. New relations of debt and punitive social relations thus effected a transformation of the practices that constituted traditional gender roles. In other words, women’s belonging to a social whole of the responsible empowered female subject was produced through the introduction of new relations of holding up, that to an extent displaced former relations, through which their belonging to a more traditionally domestic social whole had been recognised. A re-working of the networks that held up women’s belonging thus also re-orientated their subject positions somewhat to include
42 not only the performance of domestic responsibilities, but also performances of an individual responsible borrower.
I build an expansive notion of dispossession in this thesis based on conceptualising property as mastery and membership, which holds implications for people’s subjectivity. I do note however, that people have relationships with their homes and the localities in which they live as well as with social groups such as communities, that extend beyond propertied relationships. Recent literature on gentrification identifies connections and attachments between people and place (Elliot - Cooper et al 2019; Davidson 2009), some of which will encompass relationships of property, but others will fall outside of relations of property. In the thesis I identify emotional attachments that residents have with their neighbourhoods and with Sydney as a city as examples of relationships that are not definable as mastery or membership, but that are likely made possible because of their official property relations. Such attachments were brought under pressure in the course of infrastructure building that caused dislocation.
2.2.2 Temporality
The spatial dynamics of dispossession discussed in this thesis were accompanied by temporal dynamics. The way in which property relations were held up intersected with extra-economic force to create the temporalities of dispossession. Projects of urban change are not one-off events but are rather comprised of multiple events and social happenings including announcements, consultations, bureaucratic negotiations and protests with their power distributions and emotional upheavals. Temporality is the unfolding of these dynamics in time and their simultaneous organising of time. In this analysis time has a quantitative aspect measurable in units of time such as months and years and a qualitative aspect constituting its socio-spatial made-up-ness. Recent geographical literature on public housing sales and gentrification in the UK and USA has taken a keen interest in temporality, incorporating this lived and social dimension of time into its analysis of classed spatial changes in neighbourhoods (Cahill 2015; Kern 2016; Pain 2019). The urban housing and infrastructure projects I discuss, when seen as processes as opposed to events bear similarities with these analyses. Pain (2019), Cahill (2016) and Kern (2015) draw on Rob Nixon’s understanding of slow violence meaning, ‘a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales’ (Nixon 2011, p. 2). Nixon’s discussion primarily takes an environmental focus, identifying ‘slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes’ such as climate change, deforestation and the radioactive aftermath of wars (Nixon 2011, p. 2) as among its examples. Pain (2019) links the impact of a series of state policies in the UK town of Horden, starting with the closure of the mines in the late 1980s to more recent housing dispossession, welfare reforms and divestment in public services. She views
43 continuing economic and social decline, manifested in the high levels of poverty, crime and illness, as among the ongoing material effects of the closure- the delayed repercussion of the fast violence of the mine’s closure. The ‘hot’ or fast violences of different subsequent state policies overlap with such effects to deepen ‘urban trauma’ and produce a ‘complex of slow violence’ (Pain 2019, pp. 392-393). Kern (2016) discusses slow violence in the course of gentrification of her old neighbourhood, the Junction, West Toronto, where long-term residents experienced a degree of exclusion from the neighbourhood’s ‘eventfulness’ and new ‘rhythms’ of life. Everyday ordinary displacements from public life, for the most part, are non-catastrophic and quiet – the removal of a bench that provided place to sit and smoke, no loitering signs and sex-workers moving north of the train track. Drawing on Nixon’s (2011) work, Kern (2016) describes these as, ‘a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all’ (Nixon 2011 in Kern 2016, p. 453). While the redevelopment projects and housing redevelopments I discuss entail the transformation of large expanses of the city and can be seen as ‘spectacular events’, being attentive to their temporalities reveal the ‘slower’ forms of violence that are interspersed in their process constituting emotional upheavals and paternalistic treatment.
The concept of slow violence in conjunction with settler colonial perspectives that see settler colonialism as a process as opposed to an event (Wolfe 2006; Porter 2018) shed light on a more fundamental temporality that defines Sydney as a city, that of ongoing settler colonial dispossession. This takes the form of a continuing ‘complex’ or chain of slow settler violence which is ‘temporally dispersed’ (Nixon 2011) and that Aboriginal people have contested since the onset of colonisation. This conceptualisation is particularly relevant for the redevelopments in Waterloo and Redfern. While these are large projects and dispossession is visible, looking across Australia’s urban history positions them as smaller events in a wider chain of settler colonial dispossession that has repeatedly attempted to remove and exclude Aboriginal peoples from urban centres.
Conclusions
Dispossession is the dismantling of the structures, networks and processes that hold up people’s property relations, thus partly or completely removing people’s mastery over something or their membership of a group and altering their subjectivity by reconfiguring who they are and what they do. The loss or weakening of mastery or membership is accompanied with a loss or diminishing of the benefits associated with it. How things were held up at the outset of dispossessory processes will shape how they are dismantled and also people’s lived experiences of dispossession. The undoing of the networks, structures and processes that hold up a person’s freehold title to land, will proceed differently to the dismantling of the legal recognition that holds up tenants’ property rights in their
44 housing which will differ from the eviction of squatters who have no legal property rights, but whose property in a place is socially held up by a community. These varied dispossessions have their own temporalities, shaped by how political force dismantles and/or reshapes on the ground property relations. It is here particularly that I find the possibility of analytically bringing together the political-economy literature on extra-economic dispossession with the lived experiences of dispossession. Levien (2013, 2015) claims that a regime of dispossession consists of a state willing to dispossess through extra-economic force for a range of purposes, and its capacity to generate compliance to dispossession through legitimation and compensation. The way in which such force is deployed, the type of legitimations, forms of domination and compensation that are used are shaped by and intersect with how the relations of belonging dismantled through dispossession, are currently recognised and given force, that is how they are held up. This influences the experience of dispossession, its temporality and also whether and how it is contested.
The extra-economic processes discussed in this thesis of public housing redevelopment in Waterloo, the redevelopment of Aboriginal housing in Redfern; the state compulsory acquisition of private housing and the appropriation of public parkland in the course of the WestConnex motorway proceed in different ways. They all however involved and continue to involve deployments of extra- economic force that dispossess people of the particular forms of holding up that supported their membership of a community and/or mastery over a place. The theoretical path that I tread in this thesis brings together the political-economic dynamics of extra-economic force, compensations and justifications for dispossession, with an analysis of the ‘networks, structures and processes’ that hold up property. Such an intersection illuminates the lived experiences of dispossession, shedding light on how it unfolds. This analysis is developed across two case studies of redevelopment and infrastructure projects in Sydney, discussed over four chapters. Following the conceptual framework that has been established in the two sections of this chapter, each case study comprises a pair of chapters, the first focussing on the political-economy dynamics of dispossession, particularly the role of extra-economic force, while the second chapter investigates lived experiences through a propertied and temporal framework. Before presenting these case studies, the next chapter provides an account of the ethical and methodological approaches adopted in this research.
45 Chapter 3 Methodology
3.1 Positioning Myself and the Social and Political Context of the Research
I started my PhD at the University of Sydney in 2015, arriving here from the UK where I am a citizen and where I have spent most of my life. I came with a broad interest in how urban space, and land use in particular was/is shaped by settler colonial dynamics and the contesting demands made over land as a consequence. I was particularly interested in writing about the Block, an Aboriginal housing cooperative set up in the suburb of Redfern, a product of Aboriginal struggle for urban land rights in the 1970s in Sydney. My MA dissertation had focussed on the Aboriginal social movement that founded the cooperative. Through its story I wanted to trace the link between planning, settler colonialism and claims to urban land in a fast gentrifying part of Sydney. The circumstances I found myself in however shifted my research focus.
A number of factors influenced my decision to change track. I had graduated from an MA course in anthropology where the role of research in colonisation was an important topic of discussion. The planned redevelopment of the Block has created tensions among Aboriginal urban dwellers. It was difficult to see how I, a non-Aboriginal person, might reach out to relevant people and carry out the research respectfully in such a context.
Furthermore, when I arrived in Sydney in late 2015 a wave of development was unfolding across the city. It included public housing demolitions, the building of numerous private apartment blocks and large public and private transportation schemes. These changes spoke to my broad research interests regarding the impact of urban planning and the contesting demands raised through its endeavours. Discussions with other researchers working in urban studies and housing in Sydney and media reporting brought to my attention the loss of housing and public land as a consequence of many of the projects. I began following and familiarising myself with anti-displacement activism in the city through these information sources and through conversations I had with my supervisor Kurt Iveson. Of the multiple projects progressing in Sydney I decided on the Waterloo redevelopment and the WestConnex motorway project as my two main case studies. They were among the largest projects proposed in Sydney in terms of the scale of housing being demolished and built, and the levels of finance invested respectively. The scale of these developments and their social impact drew my research interests and my political and personal sympathy, leading me to explore how such urban transformations were enabled and people’s consequent experiences of dispossession and contestation. I do not necessarily advocate focussing research on issues simply because of their physical and financial scale, but none-the-less in my case it was the scale and prominence of the two case studies that brought them to my attention.
46 Waterloo was particularly important to me as it is one of Australia’s largest public housing estates and is home to a Aboriginal community, some of whom were former residents of the Block. Since the early 2000s government attempts to redevelop it have been conjoined with attempts to gentrify Redfern. Both suburbs have been places over which and from which Aboriginal residents have voiced their experiences of and opposition to dispossession. While my research is not primarily about Aboriginal experiences, I do acknowledge and discuss these struggles.
The second case-study I look at, the WestConnex project, is very different to Waterloo. It is a motorway project that stretches across Sydney from its north west and south west corners to the inner west and inner south suburbs closer to the east of the city. Given that my research was coalescing around ideas of urban dispossession and displacement I felt WestConnex was an important issue to focus on. It proceeded through the loss of homes and neighbourhoods as hundreds of private properties were acquired and large tracts of urban land were transformed into road. The political visibility of the project and the opposition to it made it accessible for research. The project’s progress, its impact and resident opposition was widely covered in local and national media and in activists’ social media outlets. The resident actions groups that had organised around the city to oppose it also gave me the opportunity to support and engage with local communities and learn about the project. WestConnex also offered a different empirical context to Waterloo. Dispossession in the case of WestConnex was in far more affluent suburbs of Sydney. It included the state’s acquisition of private housing. The road encroached onto public parkland, forestland and neighbourhoods that were used by and home to middle class residents, many of whom were private homeowners. In my research I sought to understand if and how dispossession was being effected, experienced and contested differently to the sale of public housing in Waterloo as well as those occurrences and contexts that were common to the two cases.
3.2 Methodology – Ethics, Ontology and Epistemology
3.2.1 Ethics and Motivations
My research proposal received ethics approval from the University of Sydney’s ethics committee prior to the commencement of my fieldwork. The process required that I document my methods of participant recruitment, that I maintain data confidentially, secure written consent where appropriate and ensure participants’ identity remain confidential if they have expressed that I do so. While I have adhered to the requirements of the ethics committee, my discussions below focus on my personal approach to research ethics and my ontological and epistemological stance which for the most part is not addressed in the University’s framework.
47 My research has been shaped by an interest in processes of urban change and a commitment to socio-economic and racial justice. I came to my PhD with a history of anti-racist activism and had dabbled in housing struggles across London. These interests were heightened by the social context that I found myself in when I came to Sydney. Urban geographers and planners across the University of Sydney were researching issues of housing and transport justice, my tutoring work at the University of Sydney and at Western Sydney University focussed on topics of social and environmental justice and urban politics. And the political campaigns being waged around the city took a stance against the demolition of public housing, the displacement of residents and the loss of urban land to poorly planned redevelopment and infrastructure projects. While I am not critical of urban redevelopment projects per se the research themes and case studies I explore direct attention to circumstances of dispossession that are acutely marked by uneven (re)distributions of urban space, and where people’s capacity to participate in and contest the transformations is similarly uneven.
As much as my interests and activism were motivated by a sense of solidarity, the work was also driven by an ethical stance that sought to move away from an extractive research relationship that has been critiqued in Aboriginal and feminist methodological approaches (Smith 2012; Driscoll- Derickson 2015). The suggested methodological approaches of such critiques align with my own epistemological stance that knowledge is ‘situated’ and hence it is not necessary to ‘distance’ oneself from the ‘field’. Such a stance holds that knowledge produced through research is constructed in the interaction between the researcher, the participants and social context of the work (Levers 2013).
A line from Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonising Methodologies that hangs in my head is (2012):
From the vantage point of the colonized, a position from which I write, and choose to privilege, the term ‘research’ is inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism. The word itself, ‘research’, is probably one of the dirtiest words in the Aboriginal world’s vocabulary.
Smith’s claim is premised on centuries of academic and amateur research in the sciences and social sciences that have appropriated Aboriginal knowledge, cultural objects, and biological material to produce knowledge that has materially benefited non-Aboriginal institutions and people at the expense of Aboriginal communities. Social research has often misinterpreted Aboriginal cultures, represented them through the lens of Western cultural frameworks and produced denigrating and dehumanising accounts of their way of life (Smith 2012). As a response Smith’s book offers
48 guidance for Aboriginal scholars on developing de-colonial research practices that are informed by Aboriginal ethics and epistemologies. There is a danger here of dislocating an Aboriginal developed research framework from its broader anti-colonial context. I want to be clear that I did not engage in research underpinned with the objectives of decolonisation. I am not an Aboriginal person, nor is my research specifically directed at Aboriginal dispossession, resistance, and liberation. I do however see Decolonizing Methodologies as a useful intervention for other social research that concerns itself with communities who have been subject to structural violence and at whom significant research attention has been directed. Two linked ethical issues stand out for me in Smith’s writing, firstly how a researcher behaves in a research context and, secondly, how the research project itself is developed. The first is around how one manages oneself and the relationships one builds in a research context. The second speaks to the purpose of one’s work, the way in which the project is developed and the underlying assumptions about the type of knowledge that is produced through research and how it will be used.
On the first issue she provides examples of Maori research ethics protocols from the work of Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, (1991). She locates her proposal for an Aboriginal research agenda in broader goals of decolonisation and self-determination which is not something I can adopt given my position as a non-Aboriginal person. Nonetheless I find her key ethics principles to be useful for my research. Among these are the showing of respect for the community where one is carrying out research and being reflexive in one’s practice. These are applicable to social research outside of Maori and Aboriginal contexts and they capture some of the ethics protocols that I practised and aspired to. They include (Pipi et al. 2004):
1. being respectful by allowing people to meet on their own terms and in their own space;
2. meeting people face to face and building relationships;
3. looking and listening and finding a place from which to speak;
4. making research collaborative and reciprocal;
5. being politically and culturally cautious and reflexive;
49 6. not trampling over the mana of people by sounding out ideas with them, disseminating research findings and providing people with feedback so as to keep them informed about the research process;
7. maintaining humility, not flaunting one’s knowledge and using one’s qualifications to benefit the community.
On the first two points of being respectful and building relationships my involvement with community groups campaigning against the Waterloo and WestConnex projects started from a position of trust. Jenna Condie, an academic and local in Waterloo who was campaigning with the Waterloo Public Housing Action Group (WPHAG) for better tenant participation introduced myself and Alistair Sisson, another PhD student interested in the project, to the group. Jenna had been working on an art and documentary project to raise awareness about the redevelopment and was trusted within WPHAG. When we met her at a talk at Western Sydney University, we had already secured numerous signatures on their petition to the NSW Government to resolve maintenance issues on the Estate. Our intention with this gesture was to indicate that we wished to show support for their struggle as well as carry out research on the impacts of the project. I was welcomed by WPHAG and attended their weekly meetings for over a year with Alistair. Our purpose was to show solidarity, carry out actions assigned to us during the meeting and to keep track of the project with residents and for our own work. I did not use these meetings in my research directly as that had not been agreed with group members. But through our involvement many tenants who were part of the group came to know me and agreed to be interviewed for my research. In the case of WestConnex I was similarly involved in supporting a resident-led campaign against the project. I attended a WestConnex Action Group (WAG) community meeting and put myself forward as willing to support their work by using my research and writing skills. As a consequence, I was allowed into activist spaces to support their work. While I did not interview group members as I did in the case of WPHAG, I did carry out ethnographic analysis of the occupation of public parkland led by the group but supported by residents who were not formal members. I saw the activism as a way of contributing to a struggle whose work I morally supported, and which was beneficial to my research. My involvement with WAG also meant that a certain degree of trust had been built when I approached residents affected by the WestConnex for interviews. Sustaining my political involvement has been difficult throughout the PhD process. I had to formally withdraw from activism in order to commit to academic demands. I have maintained my relationships with some community members from both the groups I engaged with during my fieldwork. My intention at this point is to find accessible and politically ‘useful’ ways of disseminating my research amongst the people impacted by the Waterloo and WestConnex projects.
50 My participation in activism included writing articles and carrying out research for the groups, helping out at community events, raising public awareness of the Waterloo and WestConnex projects, supporting residents’ social-media training, raising signatures for petitions, contributing to a tenants’ handbook and making Freedom of Information requests. Through these actions I used my skills to benefit the groups that I was supporting. The approach varies from participatory action research, in that my ‘actions’ were not for the most part the focus of the research, the exception being the occupation of parkland against
WestConnex in which I participated and about which I write in chapter 7. I did not engage in setting the direction of activism, nor did I challenge the internal power dynamics of the groups that I was supporting. Initially the intention was to look and listen so as to understand the dynamics of the group and make myself aware of any sensitivities before adopting a more active role. It also came from a place of wanting to maintain humility as opposed to flaunting one’s knowledge (Awekotuku in Smith 2012). I was not, however, able to successfully make that transition to a more active role. I found incorporating the principles of looking, listening and finding a place to speak from and making my research collaborative and reciprocal challenging to implement. At the heart of this lay a wariness about appropriating and centring myself in struggles which were not directly mine. As a consequence, I adopted a tactic of ‘holding back’ because of my position as an outsider- researcher to the communities leading the struggles. In hindsight, following discussions and reflection with other researchers who participated in activism I feel that my approach was a little too cautious. In the case of Waterloo in particular, I was wary of the classed power imbalances between myself and some of the tenants. And while my research aims were consistent with the politics of the two groups I was supporting, in that I was critical of the projects that were dismantling and restructuring their neighbourhoods, I was unsure as to how I could direct my work to benefit them. My stance embraced the ethics of being politically and culturally cautious and reflexive (Tuhiwai Smith 2012; Pipi et al. 2004). But as opposed to finding a place to speak from whilst maintaining such caution and reflexivity, I avoided challenging race based and gendered hierarchies within the group. In thinking back on the experience with other researchers who were involved in the Waterloo campaign I wrote (Chatterjee et al. 2019):
My position as a middle-class academic who does not live in the area, makes me question the ethics of my practice. Is this information only going to be of direct benefit to me and my research aspirations? In which case I am essentially preying on other people's situations and using that to my advantage. The structural violence to which they are being subjected, benefits my research and in turn the university, which has played a role
51 in the gentrification of surrounding neighbourhoods, including this one…Deploying feminist and anti-racist tropes that are in frequent circulation in young, middle class and university educated circles to ‘call out’ working class residents or change the quality of their activism might have reinforced existing power differentials between ‘them’ and ‘us’.
There were multiple situations in the case of both WestConnex and Waterloo where I was witness to racist and sexist actions, which on two occasions were explicitly directed my way, but I ‘held back’ and did not speak up. I was concerned about re-enforcing imbalances in power between myself and the perpetrators on the basis of socio-economic status and formal education (Chatterjee et al. 2019). Such an approach unproductively prioritised classed structural inequalities whilst avoiding challenging other forms of inequality. Alongside this sat an assumption that is itself rooted in classed- based prejudice - namely that low income communities, particularly white community members, are not interested in challenging forms of injustice other than those of economic inequality, and that they need protection from intersectional critiques as these run the risk of perpetuating an elite ‘call out’ culture. My actions were also governed by a self-interest and a fear that rocking the boat would have consequences for my research- I would be asked to leave or would not be trusted and liked. While here is not the place to reflect on how I or other researchers might change our ethical approaches in the future, I have started such a thinking process with other academics regarding being cautious and reflexive, but still finding a place from which to speak (Chatterjee et al. 2019).
Alongside the ethics of managing oneself in a research context Smith’s (2012) work discusses the ethics of the research project itself - how research is developed and the underlying assumptions about the knowledge produced and how that can be used. She identifies Maori scholarship that calls for collaborative and reciprocal research. Such practice requires that research aims and intended outcomes are developed with participants and those community members in mind for whom the work is relevant and potentially impactful. It means that the aims of research, the work and its outcomes, are owned and shared with the people who in more conventional practice are cast as the subjects of analysis. I did not follow such a collaborative and reciprocal research practice in my work. I developed my aims and theoretical frameworks in line with my political commitments and intellectual interests. While my discussions with community members indicate that my work is relevant and of interest to many, they did not work with me to decide on my aims, methods and dissemination outlets. There is a lesson here in doing purposeful groundwork prior to starting research if one wants to take a collaborative approach. While I had engaged with community members prior to commencing my research, I had not considered approaching them for the purpose
52 of collaborating on work together. Such a line of practice requires significant time commitments. The limited research funding from the university and the Government, and the pressure to complete PhDs within increasingly stringent timeframes is unsupportive of such a stance to ethics. There is also little institutional support and knowledge to help new researchers navigate the complexities of collaborative research and to resolve conflicts of opinion that will inevitably arise in such a context.
3.2.2 Epistemological Underpinnings
My epistemological framework holds that knowledge is situated and socially constructed, without precluding the possibility of a material reality that exists independent of human observation or experienceThis is consistent with the research ethics I adopt of not shying away from political involvement in the ‘field’. A researcher’s analysis and interpretation of phenomena are societally influenced, and that includes the influence of the phenomena that they are observing (Levers 2013). Furthermore, in social research in particular, one’s presence in the ‘field’ shapes social dynamics; meaning that in the process of interviewing and doing ethnography the researcher shapes the reality and the ‘raw’ data that they are analysing. I unpack some of these issues in further detail in the discussion of my research methods below.
3.2.3 Research Methods
My methods comprised of interviewing, ethnographic work and documentary analysis, across the Waterloo and WestConnex case studies. My thesis addresses two research questions using the information received through my fieldwork. Firstly, I ask how state-led projects of urban change with dispossessory outcomes are realised through different modes of compliance. The second question I explore is how dispossession unfolds in the everyday lives of urban residents.
Ethnography and Activism
The fieldwork for my thesis spanned a 24 month period. Much of this time in the field was spent participating in activism and supporting resident groups protesting the Waterloo redevelopment and the WestConnex project in different ways. In Waterloo I attended weekly meetings organised by a tenant activist group, volunteered at a tenant led information centre, made freedom of information requests and contributed to a tenant handbook. With the WAG, I participated in protests, occupations, bi-weekly meetings, event organising work and the writing of articles. In both cases I attended multiple public gatherings and cultural events held at social centres, at NGO premises and in public parks and green spaces. I predominantly limited my ethnographic research to such public events and protests intended for broader audiences as opposed to the more intimate settings of
53 activist decision making where conversations were not intended for dissemination. I incorporate five ethnographic episodes in my thesis. They include two public information and discussion events held for Waterloo housing tenants and residents in 2018, an Aboriginal Corroborree on the Waterloo Green held in 2018, an anti-WestConnex protest at a public park in Sydney in 2016 and a year-long occupation of the same park between 2016 and 2017. My record-keeping included field notes and audio-recording. In one case where I have included ethnographic information that falls outside of public-facing events I have anonymised individuals by removing personal details that identify them, whilst maintaining general information relevant to my arguments.
Conducting ethnographic research whilst doing activism had three implications for my work besides the fact that it formed the content of my analysis. Firstly, I want to acknowledge that I was not a ‘neutral’ observer as is typically the position expected of a researcher. Such a stance is consistent with the epistemological position that ‘knowledge is situated’. I personally held a critical stance towards both the WestConnex and Waterloo projects on environmental and social grounds. In the case of WestConnex, I participated in a protest and occupation to stop parts of Sydney Park, in inner city Sydney, from being appropriated by the project. As a contributor to the ‘field’, that is to the collective actions which formed part of my analysis, I could not see myself as entirely separate from the issues of property and belonging that I was researching. I acknowledge this most explicitly in Chapter 7 when discussing the collective property claims made in response to WestConnex’s intrusion into Sydney Park. There I briefly discuss my own experiences of belonging, but not quite belonging to the protest and the occupation to expand on theoretical arguments.
Secondly my experience served to corroborate and inform the questions I asked people during interviews and shaped how I interpreted their responses. I adopted a phenomenological approach in my research to build an understanding of people’s experiences of dispossession through the lens of property. This relied on paying attention to people’s lived experiences. While I drew extensively on interview and document research for this purpose, my activism also allowed me to interact with people impacted by the redevelopments. I maintained a regular presence in the suburbs and was able to and carry out ethnographic work in contexts that I would not have had access to were it not for my political involvement. While I do not use this information in the thesis directly, as much of it was from non-public settings, it did corroborate and, in some instances, raise questions about the accuracy of the information communicated to me during interviews. My involvement also helped me develop a more fine-grained understanding of how dispossession unfolded, by being witness to people’s lived experiences regularly, at least those experiences that they were comfortable sharing and discussing. Ethnography and activism at times revealed social dynamics that were important for my research but which I could not use in my thesis unless these were shared in ethics approved interviews. This motivated me to shape the interview questions so as to raise such matters if I had an awareness that the interviewee was comfortable sharing them. The relationships I built with people
54 and the knowledge that I gained pertaining to the impacts of the redevelopment and infrastructure projects on them also sensitised me to the type of questions and language that could be raised in interviews and those that might cause pain or exacerbate intra-group tensions. The combination of ethnography/activism and interviewing was thus important for the development and accuracy of my research content whilst maintaining an ethical approach to privacy and people’s feelings.
Interviews
I carried out 72 semi-structured interviews in total as part of this research project. The participants included tenants in Waterloo, residents impacted by WestConnex, government planning staff, communications consultants and professionals working within the housing NGO sector. Of the 43 interviews with residents I came to know most people through activism, snowball sampling and online searches. My interviews with residents particularly focussed on their experiences of the projects in terms of their social impact such as the loss or the imminent loss of homes, neighbourhoods and suburbs and their experiences with the planning and consultation process associated with the redevelopments. The 29 interviews with government planning and communications consultants and NGO professionals primarily explored the drivers and administration of the projects and their experiences of interacting with impacted communities. The open-endedness of such an approach was helpful in understanding people’s lived experiences and anticipations of dispossession at the scale of the home, neighbourhood and suburb. I used phrases such as, ‘what were your experiences of ‘, ‘what did you think of’, ‘how do you feel about’ and ‘do you agree with [X] and why/why not’, which allowed individuals space to articulate a broad range of experiences. Such an approach also helped me gain insight into the perspectives of government and NGO professionals that had not been articulated in government documentation.
In the case of Waterloo, I carried out most of the interviews with another PhD student at the University of Sydney Alistair Sisson who was also involved in supporting WPHAG in their activism. This approach allowed us to reduce research fatigue in a community, which had been subject to significant amount of research and journalistic interest for decades. We came to meet and know the interviewees through our political involvement and had been active with the group for nearly a year before we approached people for interviews, which allowed us to build a degree of trust. This support for the group’s campaign and critical position towards the NSW Government, created a shared politics and common ground with residents, that helped build rapport. Had we been unknown to the group or had our political stance been more in agreement with the redevelopment project, it would have been harder to speak to the same numbers of people, and our interactions and the type of information produced in the course of the interviews would have been different.
55 I was acutely aware of the power imbalances in the course of the interviews conducted in Waterloo. It was often two people interviewing one person, and there were differences in socio-economic status between us and the interviewees. Taking an intersectional perspective my position as a woman and a person of Indian background who is visibly not white and not Australian complicated this power imbalance. It is not possible to accurately comment on how these shaped the nature of the interviews and the information produced in our interactions, but from my listening over the recordings and noting the things people said and did at the time, I hypothesise that it shaped the topics that were raised and the issues residents chose to maintain a silence on.
Three cases raised my awareness of the fact that residents were concerned that either us or people who read our research would cast judgement on them for who they were and their way of life. In one case, a resident was concerned that we might judge the paraphernalia in her home and assured us that they did not keep such things on show in the presence of children. In another situation an interviewee whose first language was not English, was concerned that we would not edit the transcript and keep his language style, thus revealing his improper use of English. During an interview with a woman whom we both came to know well, she asked us if we felt unsafe coming onto her estate as outsiders. Such concerns and questions strongly suggest that interviewees will have opted not to discuss particular issues of the redevelopment with us given their position as residents whose social practices, property tenure and racial background was denigrated and our position as university researchers and outsiders.
In the case of the WestConnex road project I also participated in political activism against the project with WAG for approximately a 12 month period. My involvement meant that many of the people I interviewed knew me or had heard of me. Where I approached individuals ‘cold’ via social media outlets I introduced myself as someone who was supporting WAG to indicate that I was trustworthy. The group of people I interviewed were very different to the Waterloo tenants. Of the 24 interviews with residents, 14 were homeowners. Except for two, I consider all of them to belong to a middle-class socio- economic group based on their tenure status and cultural habitus. Two of the interviewees explicitly discussed the middle-class and gentrified nature of their neighbourhoods with me. It is difficult to comment on how my position as a university researcher with educational cultural capital, but as a person of colour, a woman and someone with lesser financial resources than my interviewees will have influenced the information produced in the process. While I held the authority to ask questions during the interview, the process was not shaped by the same socio- economic power differences that existed in the case of Waterloo. In fact, one interviewee felt her complaints about the compulsory property acquisition process and its financial impacts might seem unreasonable to me as a younger person who was renting in Sydney. Residents also resented the ‘NIMBY’ label attributed to them by a former NSW state premier and other Liberal Party politicians. Such concerns may have shaped the information people chose to communicate to me in
56 the course of interviews. Concerns and expectations regarding how the information created during interviews might be used also shaped the issues interviewees chose to focus on and those they decided to avoid.
Speaking Out, Bending the Interview and Concerns About Consequences
Some residents I spoke with saw the interview process as a way to publicly express their concerns and frustrations about the redevelopment projects planned for their housing and neighbourhoods. In cases where interviewees wished to focus on particular topics that they felt warranted political attention, such as the poor maintenance on their estate or the emotional toll of redevelopment and construction processes, I made efforts to ensure that my questions attended to their concerns. Through this particular interaction the interview was modified in a way to draw on the experiences that mattered to tenants as opposed to the issues that I wanted to cover in the interview. In the context of public housing, some interviewees expressed critiques of the state’s housing management more generally. The interview and my position as university researcher was seen as a channel to reach an audience outside of the Estate and outside of people’s immediate neighbourhoods. This came across when interviewees explained how important it was for their stories to be communicated, in their inquisitiveness as to whether the information would be publicly released, and in bold statements about the need to raise their voice. While at times ‘bending the interview’ meant a focus on subject matter that was not directly the topic of my research, my interest in people’s experiences of urban change was broad enough to incorporate much of the information that was communicated. Where people’s discussions were not directly relatable to my work, I will be looking at if and how that information can be made available through future outputs.
The type of information shared with me during interviews was also shaped by concerns regarding the consequences of the material being publicly released. Some public housing tenants were concerned about the implications for their tenancies and the potential of punitive action from the state government once the relocation process for the Waterloo Estate commenced. Professionals who worked for state development agencies, government planning communications consultants and non-governmental social housing organisations also expressed concerns about how the information might be used. Those who were wary did not explicitly state the nature of their concerns, but chose to remain anonymous and/or stopped the recording at specific points in the interview to communicate things they did not wish to have on record. While less than 20% of interviewees chose to remain anonymous, the concerns voiced by a few individuals indicates that it is likely that interviewees did not share certain opinions and experiences during the interview to mitigate consequences for their employment and their housing situation.
57 Secondary Sources
The activism and ethnographic work that I engaged in also supported by documentary research. Through it I came to know of newspaper articles, social media posts and government strategy and planning documents. My work understanding the planning process and its associated bureaucracy and documentation carried through the course of activism, helped me to amass and analyse data from strategic urban plans and Business Cases. I have used the information to develop my arguments regarding the justifications for dispossessory projects discussed in chapters 3 and 5.
As part of the document analysis I drew on documents from government, media, business and not- for-profit sources dating between the 1960s and the current period. The documents supported my thesis on two fronts. Along with the ethnography and interviews they formed the primary material of analysis. These also served as a means of triangulating and verifying information received from interviews and ethnographic work. As with the analysis of interview transcripts I drew on my theoretical framework to identify key themes that were repeated within and across the sources. The documents included government annual reports, census and land value data bases, parliamentary inquiry hearings and submissions, Business Cases, urban strategies and plans, parliamentary proceedings, media statements and legislative records to identify and categorise the state’s justifications, its material compensations and the use of force to generate compliance to redevelopment. In the political-economic arguments of Chapters 3 and 5 these documents formed the actual content of analysis. I also drew on newspaper articles, resident testimonies and submissions to the NSW parliamentary inquiry into WestConnex as primary data sources in Chapter 6 that explores residents experiences of compulsory acquisition.
Analysing Information
My analysis was a combination of qualitative coding of interview transcripts, documents and recordings of public meetings, and physically noting relevant and repetitive statements during interviews and ethnographic work. . My intention was to establish broad social tendencies that addressed the research questions. Firstly, I was interested in patterns that indicated how NSW state agencies implemented dispossession through various modes of compliance. Secondly, I surveyed the data that I had for patterns that cast a light on people’s experiences and anticipations of dispossession. I used NVIVO and R software for qualitative coding. I assigned ‘nodes’ in NVIVO and themes in R to relevant pieces of information based on the research questions and the theoretical frameworks I had chosen. For the question concerning dispossession and compliance the nodes and themes that I created were based on Michael Levien’s (2013; 2015) theorisation of dispossession. They included normative justifications, such as the calculations or descriptions of benefits of a project, material renumerations such as payment for the compulsory acquisition of housing and the
58 use or threat of state power in compulsory acquisition. The government documents and interview transcripts that I analysed primarily presented these forms of compliance as bureaucratic, procedural and seemingly value-less or as a matter of fact. The Waterloo and WestConnex redevelopment and infrastructure projects, the dispossession they created and the use of state force to this end was necessary in the interests of improvements to urban space. The material compensations for those who were dispossessed were presented as rationally calculated. In my coding I do not accept the givenness of such explanations. Instead where they repeatedly appeared in my empirical data or were vital to implementing the project and its dispossessory outcomes, I adopted a political- economy framework (Levien 2013,2015), that viewed them as ways of generating compliance to dispossession. In so doing, I ‘re-describe’ empirical trends as part of the dynamics of capitalist urban development. I build on Levien’s framework by developing a second level of theorisation, thus refining the theoretical claims in light of the findings from my fieldwork. I used additional sub-codes to analyse the justifications and material compensations deployed in the case of Waterloo and WestConnex through the theoretical lens of settler colonial studies and economic and critical legal geography. This process identified the type of narratives, logics and values that constituted the different forms of compliance. I grouped the justifications for urban transformation and subsequent dispossession and displacement into different registers of improvement - settler colonial/racialised, classed/welfare paternalism and those based on economic productivity. I also build on the theoretical framework of dispossession by drawing on discussions of time and temporality from settler colonial studies and critical legal geography to analyse the justifications for the WestConnex and Waterloo projects. And finally, I shed light on how the material compensations for homeowners acquired by WestConnex relied on and were constituted by market understandings and valuing of land.
I adopt a parallel method of analysis for the research question on lived experiences of dispossession. I look for a repetition in people’s accounts regarding their experiences and anticipations of dispossession. The main sources of information were interviews, ethnographic work, individual submissions to government inquiries and media articles. My interpretation of these information sources and my framing of interview questions was moulded by the theoretical lens of property developed by feminist and critical legal scholars (Cooper 2007; Blomley 2013; Keenan 2015). Drawing on this scholarship I come to an understanding of dispossession as a loss of property that occurs through the removal or transformation of structures, networks and processes that previously held it up. I look for trends in the empirical data that capture such dynamics, where people lost or anticipated the loss of ownership over homes, neighbourhoods and suburbs as well as of their membership of particular collectives of people, whether that be a place based community or, on a more abstract level, a group of home-owners. In looking for patterns or trends, my empirical work also identified those people-place relations that were lost as a consequence of the redevelopment projects but that did not fall neatly into a propertied register of dispossession. In the discussion of
59 residents’ concerns about redevelopment in Waterloo and Redfern in Chapter 5, I identify that these relations are characterised by an attachment or connection with the social aspects of a place. I theorise such loss or anticipation of loss as forms of displacement as opposed to dispossession.
My fieldnotes, analysis of government documentation and interviews make note of project announcements, periods of waiting and seeking information, public consultations, resistance and the negotiations between state authorities on the one hand and residents, property owners and tenants on the other. Seeing these trends across both my case studies I frame dispossession as embedded in a process. They have a temporality to them. While the adoption of such a temporal lens is my own contribution, critical legal scholarship was again instructive in theorising the quality of such a temporal trajectory that was shaped by the state’s authority over land, people’s subject positions as home owners, public housing tenants or middle class residents, and the racialised and market based values that held up property.
I also identify a longer temporality of Aboriginal dispossession that intersected with and was continued in the Waterloo and WestConnex projects. While my analysis did not draw on formal qualitative coding, I did make note of instances of Aboriginal exclusions in process of contestation to the WestConnex and the broader history of Aboriginal dispossession. In the spirit of Heather Goodall’s (2008) work on Aboriginal resistance to colonisation in NSW, I also positioned the Waterloo redevelopment in a longer trajectory of settler colonialism. Recent approaches to slow violence in gentrification studies were particularly instructive in such theorisation (Payne 2019; Kern 2016). My analysis also owes much to the political spirit of recent works in history and urban geography, that emphasise the urban as a site of Aboriginal dispossession and resistance, and as much part of a settler colonial society as the rest of Australia (Foley 2001; Shaw 2007; Jackson et al. 2017; Porter 2013). In taking such a theoretical perspective in my work, my political intention is to highlight the need for changes to the materiality of urban space and the way in which we make claims to it that acknowledge it as Aboriginal Country (Porter 2018).
Conclusions
This chapter establishes the methodological framework adopted in this thesis. I have outlined my ethical stance, which embraced engaging with political struggles in the ‘field’. I state my epistemological position of knowledge being ‘situated;’ a position which I hold without refuting the possibility of an independent reality. My research methods include interviews, ethnography, the qualitative analysis of these, and document analysis. Having established both a conceptual framework and the methodological approach of the research, the following chapters will commence a discussion of the empirical cases of Waterloo and Redfern and the WestConnex project.
60 Chapter 4 Redeveloping Waterloo and Redfern: Planning Power and Rule by Difference
In December 2015, Michelle, like the other residents of the Waterloo Estate in Sydney’s inner south, received a letter in her mailbox from the then NSW Minister for Family and Community Services (FACS), Brad Hazzard. It read that he was excited to announce the redevelopment of their public housing Estate, one of the largest in Australia. FACS’s media announcement (2015) stated:
The ageing Waterloo social housing Estate will be redeveloped into a world-class vibrant community with more social, affordable and private housing, following the NSW Government’s announcement of the new Waterloo Metro Station. Minister for Social Housing Brad Hazzard said social housing will be redeveloped and boosted above the current 2000 homes
The announcement followed the NSW Government’s decision to locate a stop of the new Sydney Metro train line opposite the Waterloo Estate, acting as a ‘catalyst’ for the redevelopment. The site of the metro and the housing Estate were declared a State Significant Precinct in May 2017 (see Figure 4.1) allowing the project to override local authority planning controls.
61
Figure 4. 1 Waterloo State Significant Precinct (Source: NSW Department of Planning and Environment 2017)
On receiving her letter, Michelle was shocked. Speaking to me over a year later she explained:
On 16 the December 2015 I got a letter from Mr Hazzard. I opened the letter and I looking, they will break up everything here blah blah … they will take us somewhere else. And I was stop reading letter and I will sit down, and I think I will faint believe me.
The 2015 announcement of redevelopment in Waterloo is not the first time that the NSW state-level Government has attempted to appropriate land and transform the suburb. Waterloo and its neighbouring Redfern have experienced a long history of land dispossession in the last half century. The recent redevelopment in Waterloo descends from efforts to gentrify and redevelop the areas that came to the fore in 2004, following anti- police rioting led by young Black people in Redfern. (I use the term Black in this chapter and Chapter 5 instead of Aboriginal, in keeping with how local residents refer to themselves).State intervention and dispossession that is expected to follow are highly visible and ‘in your face’ in comparison to the normalised market gentrification that has
62 engulfed the suburbs. As discussed in Chapter 2, this transparency is accompanied with narratives of improvement that sought to legitimize state actions.
This chapter is the first of the pair which will discuss the housing redevelopments in Waterloo and Redfern. I set out a political economy of two redevelopment projects that have targeted the suburbs, seeing them as part of a regime of dispossession. While the two projects, one targeting Redfern and the Aboriginal housing cooperative, the Block, and the second targeting the Waterloo public housing estate over a decade later, are discussed in separate sections of this chapter, I view them as part and parcel of a broader state initiative to restructure the totality of the Redfern-Waterloo area; an area of low income and Black housing that holds huge cultural and symbolic significance for those communities.
Broadly the analysis develops two themes- the use of extra-economic force by the NSW Government in pursuit of redevelopment and, secondly, the narratives of improvement used to justify the projects and their dispossessory outcomes through the construction of socio-spatial hierarchies, on the basis of which change is justified as necessary- a ‘rule by difference’ (Ranganathan 2018; Gray and Porter 2014). Section 4.1 sets out a historical context of Redfern and Waterloo. In 4.2 I discuss the Government’s centralisation of planning power to redevelop the Block following the 2004 Redfern ‘riots’, and the settler colonial/racialised narratives of improvement used to justify the use of this force to deconcentrate the suburb’s Black presence. Section 4.3 incorporates an analysis of the more recent 2015 announcement to redevelop the Waterloo Estate. I analyse how state extra-economic force was deployed through urban planning processes, in similar ways to Redfern in 2004. Justification for the use of force took the form of three narratives of improvement based on socio-spatial hierarchies – those relating to the concentration of public housing tenants, the improvement of the physical built environment and the enhancing of the liveability of the suburb.
4.1 Waterloo and Redfern – An Historic Context
Waterloo and Redfern are located in inner south Sydney, only a few kilometres from the Central Business District and a short walk from two of Sydney’s major universities. They are situated upon the traditional lands of the Cadigal clan, whose territory runs from the southern site of Port Jackson, that is Sydney Harbour, to around Petersham in inner west Sydney. Multiple land histories have shaped the two suburbs. The 1870s and ‘80s saw Waterloo substantially expand, bolstered by Sydney’s population growth and the industry that had been pushed to the suburb by increasing building regulation in the city. The employment prospects spurred by industrial growth attracted workers to the area, with many of them finding work in the Eveleigh railyards in Redfern. Oral history accounts note that in the late 19th and early 20th century the railway yards and the factories
63 in Redfern, Waterloo and the adjoining suburbs of Chippendale and Alexandria provided employment to Black people who settled in the areas (NSW Government Office of Heritage and Environment 2016). The suburbs have also been home to both European and non-European migrants and working-class communities for most of their post-colonisation history. A strong Lebanese and Chinese presence could be seen in and around Redfern and Waterloo until the onset of the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 and slum clearance activities in the mid twentieth century which stifled their presence. Arabic business owners who set up shops and warehouses, and Chinese and European residents who ran market gardens in the late 1800s are among the diverse groups of people who have come to live there. Black communities were of course its first inhabitants, but it is their activism in the 1960s and ‘70s that made the suburbs (particularly Redfern) politically iconic, becoming centres of Black politics. The work of these diverse communities has contributed to making Redfern and Waterloo the places they are today.
Black political activism in the areas stems back to at least the 1930s. Redfern in particular attracted Black residents from across Australia as, “a place to find work, family and a sense of belonging” (Irish 2017, pp 139). It holds huge significance because of its legacy of self-help services set up in the late 1960s and ‘70s by Black power activists. An Aboriginal housing cooperative, colloquially known as The Block, was set up in Redfern following a hard-fought struggle to gain title to land opposite Redfern station in 1973. It became the site of one of the first urban ‘land rights’ claims in Australia and cemented the community’s presences until the Housing Company began evicting tenants and demolishing its properties in the period from the 1990s onwards. Despite the very racialised nature of gentrification in Redfern and Waterloo over the last couple of decades, there is still a Black presence in the suburbs and a presence of culturally and linguistically diverse residents. The public housing Estates are home to many Black people, some of whom found housing there following evictions from The Block. Redfern continues to be a site for Black run services and organisations including the Legal Service, the Medical Service, Mudgin-gal women’s organisation and the National Centre for Aboriginal Excellence and Koori Radio many of which spill into or sit on the boundary with Waterloo.
4.2 Redfern 2004: Planning Power, Settler Colonial Improvement and the De- concentrating Black Gathering
On the 14th of February 2004 a Black teenager, Thomas J. Hickey lost his life in the course of a police pursuit through the suburbs of Waterloo and Redfern. He was 17 years old at the time. The events that unfolded added fuel to existing calls to redevelop and even demolish much of the physical and social environments of Redfern and Waterloo, including the housing cooperative, The Block. The calls reflect the suburbs’ economic significance, as inner city centres in close proximity of
64 Sydney’s CBD. The analysis in the sections below is less focussed on these economic motivations of state intervention, and instead is directed at state efforts to enact dispossession through the use of extra-economic force and colonial justifications. Heeding Glen Coulthard’s (2014) call to attend to the settler colonial relations of power, where the dispossession of Aboriginal land is critical for capitalist accumulation, my below discussions investigate how state extra-economic force and contemporary colonial narratives of improvement were deployed to legitimise the restructuring of Black urban space.
TJ Hickey’s death marks another instance in a long history of police harassment and violence directed at Black communities in the suburbs of Redfern and Waterloo and across Australia more generally. Following his death, when community members gathered in Redfern to grieve with the family, the NSW Police blocked Lawson Street, where some of The Block’s residences were located (Birch 2004, pp 19-20). Given the history of state violence directed at Black communities, academic and writer Tony Birch claims that the outrage at the police should have come as no surprise (Birch 2004, pp 19). The scenes on the streets of Redfern 24 hours after TJ’s death, were compared to a ‘riot scene in the Gaza strip’ (Ferguson and Hudson 2004), and the events of the 15th of February were dubbed the ‘Redfern riots’ by the Australian media.
In the days following the expression of rage in Redfern, Clover Moore, an independent member of Parliament talked about the existing social programmes to support Black communities. She also raised resident concerns about the planned infrastructure upgrades for the area under the Redfern- Eveleigh-Darlington (RED) strategy (Moore 2004). Claiming that there were concerns around over- development and the sale of public assets, she called for the plans to be re-orientated to support local communities better. While her statements indicate that planning interventions in the area to manage its social and economic ‘problems’ were not new, the riots strengthened the impetus to transform the area. Different representatives of the state government called for intervention. The NSW Liberal Opposition leader John Brogden exclaimed, "bulldozers should flatten the area known as The Block” (Birch 2004, pp 20). The ABC reported Brogden’s comments on another occasion, (ABC News, 16 February 2004):
I'd bring the bulldozers in because I think that allowing this to happen every couple of years which is what's going to happen, will never fix the problem…I feel saddest for a young Aboriginal kid that has to grow up in this part of Sydney…What sort of life are we offering a young Aboriginal kid who at the age of 12 or 14 knows nothing other than grog and violence and unemployment
65 In keeping with his sentiments but adopting a more sophisticated tone in its public facing documents the Redfern Waterloo Authority (RWA), an urban development corporation, was set up in 2005 to address the problems of the suburbs. Its annual reports defined its responsibility as delivering on urban renewal, job creation and improved human services (Redfern Waterloo Authority 2005, 2012). The principle functions of the authority however were to “promote the economic development and use of its land” (Sartor 2004, pp12740). The redevelopment of some of the public housing in Redfern and Waterloo and of The Block were among its objectives.
The RWA’s establishment shortly after the riots, reveals an important driver of the organisation - it was a disciplinary response to what happened in Redfern. In a reading of the Redfern Waterloo Authority Bill in the NSW Parliament, the Labour Minister Frank Sartor stated (2004, p. 12740):
The communities of Redfern and Waterloo are beset by a series of social challenges, compared to the rest of Sydney …The area faces problems related to community safety, drug and alcohol abuse and extreme poverty. Social disadvantage is also a problem … The New South Wales Government is committed to delivering the long-term changes needed in the area and delivering an improved quality of life for all residents…On 26 October 2004 the Premier announced the creation of a new authority, under the control of one Minister, to have sole responsibility for implementing development and urban renewal strategies within the area.
Sartor later held the position of the Minister responsible for the RWA, and repeatedly called for a ‘sustainable solution’ for The Block (PM 2004).
The police officers who were responsible for pursuing TJ Hickey have never been charged with any crime. However, the suburbs of Redfern and Waterloo were subject to the RWA’s urban renewal efforts. The state’s extra-economic force lay in the RWA’s authority to compulsorily acquire land and also in the accumulation of planning authority in the hands of the Minister for Redfern and Waterloo. This surpassed local government planning controls that are characteristic of ‘normal’ market development in Australia. Extra-economic force was manifest in the re-scaling and centralisation of urban governance, producing a type of ‘new state space’ (Brenner 2004; Searle 2006). But as planning academic Glen Searle (2004) notes, unlike the decentralisation of decision- making that is characteristic of such spaces in the American scholarship, in Redfern and Waterloo,
66 and arguably in Australia more generally, such a space was produced through the implementation of a ‘higher’ scale of governance. The NSW State Government, as opposed to the local authority, managed the planning approval and set conditions on those projects considered economically and socially significant for the state (Searle 2006). While the RWA ruled out using its powers of land acquisition on the Block, following community outrage and the media’s questioning of its intentions, Minister Frank Sartor exerted control over the landholder, the Aboriginal Housing Company’s actions, by refusing to grant them planning approval for their proposed redevelopment scheme of a modest 62 houses (Dick 2005b). Frank Sartor claimed, ‘Everything's negotiable except for the concentration of high- dependency housing there’ (Dick 2005 a).
The transparency of state intervention in Redfern and Waterloo demanded justification. Dispossession, through the urban renewal which included the de-concentration of Black housing, was a visibly political act, which generated community ire. State justifications adopted racial and spatialised hierarchies, which enacted a settler will to erase Blackness in city space (Wolfe 1999, 2006). The concentration of Black residents on The Block was a particular problem in the eyes of the NSW Government. It was implicitly characterised as the cause of the Redfern ‘riots’ (Salusinszky 2006). Improving such a problematic gathering was used as moral justification for its heavy-handed state planning. RWA placed political pressure on the Housing Company, demanding that it change how its land was used, undermining the Company’s legal property rights. This type of intervention was necessary to guide redevelopment in the proper direction, away from ‘the concentration of high- dependency housing …’. Dispossession was thus justified with a ‘rule by difference’ (Ranganathan 2018), where difference was framed through through the lens of socio- spatial hierarchy. At the bottom of this hierarchy sat the current Black gathering on land, with its so-called criminal, violent and anti-social behaviour, on the other side was a spatial complex with ‘proper’ behavioural standards. Improvement was in the replacement of the former with the latter. This narrative, and its hierarchy of people and place, gained strength from a silence regarding how extensive the anti-social behaviour and violence on The Block actually was. There was also little critical analysis in RWA’s discourse regarding the extent to which concentration exacerbated such problems and de- concentration remedied them. Recent research has questioned the links between de-concentrations of low-income housing and so-called improvements in behaviour (Arthurson 2012; Shaw 2013; Shaw and Jama 2017). As a member of the Housing Company’s board pointed out, the Redfern riots occurred despite the lower numbers of people living on The Block compared to previous decades (Dick 2005 b).
While the RWA implemented employment programmes and invested in community services as ways of addressing violent or anti-social behaviour; allowing a dense residential gathering on a site of immense political importance to Black residents was not an option. Sartor claimed, that this was not a ‘racial issue’ and the dense gathering of any ‘ethnic group’ with such a socio-economic profile
67 was undesirable and created problems (Dick 2005 b.). However, the justifications for the Block’s redevelopment re-enacted colonial narratives of improvement in two ways, through which a settler project of eliminating and replacing Aboriginality was continued (Wolfe 1999, 2006). Firstly, they sought to disrupt Black gathering in an urban area, a practice consistent with a colonial precedent of Black exclusion from cities. Secondly, legitmisations of this dispossession adopted a racial and spatial hierarchy, where only those of good socio-economic standing, with ‘proper’ behaviour were deemed worthy enough to gather in an area, foreclosing the possibility of the collective Black possession of land.
On the first point, Australia’s history is marked by repeated instances of displacement and dispossession which have been met with Black resistance (Anderson 1993; Jacobs 2002; Goodall 2008; Foley 2001; Shaw 2007; Graham 2010; Foley et al. 2014; Keenan 2015; Munro and Sherwood-Spring 2018). In urban Australia a long history of government policies and actions underpinned by racialised logics, saw Aboriginal people as unfit for city-living (Anderson 1993; Jacobs 2002; Bellear 2007; Porter 2018). The gathering of such bodies and their holding of urban land was seen as a threat to settler order of civility and modernity (Blatman Thomas 2019; Edmonds 2010; Jacobs 2002; Milne 2019). Under such rationales Aboriginality belonged away from the urban centres of empire (Jacobs 2002). Settler colonialism, as structure of governance defined by a will to eliminate Aboriginality (Wolfe 2006), thus continues through an urban inflection. The redevelopment of Redfern and Waterloo, and of the Block in particular, furthered a trajectory of urban land seizure (Anderson 1993; Jacobs 2002; Goodall 2008; Foley 2001; Shaw 2007; Foley et al. 2014; Survival Guide 2018). The Black concentration of Redfern and Waterloo actually holds up an unofficial form of Black property, which will be discussed in the following chapter. The suburbs have immense political significance as sites of urban Black culture. Their Black-controlled services were established as forms of anti-colonial resistance to support urban Black communities. These outlets held land in the middle of Sydney, to confront colonisation, that had sought to physically and culturally eliminate their presence. Government attempts to take charge of how Black housing was delivered, and to disperse its residential gathering, by effect, continues colonial governance, regardless of Sartor’s or the RWA’s intentions. The effect of improvement was the diminishing of Black possession of urban land.
On the second point de-concentration was premised on a racialised hierarchy, where socio- economic status was linked to a standard of behaviour that determined who could possess land and how. Redevelopment and dispossession were justified on the basis that a collective low-income Black presence was productive of undesirable and violent behaviour. Initial stages of colonisation in Australia, and other settler colonies, adopted similar racialised hierarchies tied to the possession of land. Narratives of progress which justified colonisation equated European practices of land governance, property rights and agricultural land use, as indicators of civilisation and modernity
68 (Bhandar 2018; Bird Rose 2004; Crabtree 2013; Graham 2010). Aboriginal land practices were rendered invalid, invisible and inferior under this Eurocentric framework. In present day Redfern, while The Housing Company holds private property and conforms with a grid of ‘normal’ market- based ownership, Black possession is still problematised. The RWA’s intervention took issue with a concentrated Black presence in the area, on the basis that it engendered violent behaviour such as the actions seen during the Redfern ‘riots’. De-concentration was equated with improvement on the basis of a racialised hierarchy to govern who could gather on, and possess land. A Black coming together required breaking up and replacement with a ‘better’, arguably white and wealthier, group of people. By Sartor’s claims the residential gathering of any ‘ethnic group’ with a low socio- economic profile is problematic, but such claims inevitably rule out the living together of many non-white communities who contend with socio-economic marginalisation. By this logic only those groups of a high economic standing who together exhibit behavioural ‘propriety’ can maintain possession of land. This inevitably rules out Black possession, where a history of colonial economic and physical violence has subjected communities to poverty and housing precarity.
While the RWA’s plans for the area were never fully realised, it contributed to increasing social pressure on the Aboriginal Housing Company to redevelop their land and the housing in a way so as not to produce a ‘problematic’ concentration of people. I discuss the dilution of such a presence in the following chapter as a form of dispossession. While the Housing Company sought to maintain 62 houses, this was still in the midst of a large mixed- use development, thus diminishing the people-land nexus that held up Black property across Redfern and Waterloo.
While the RWA was established with bipartisan support, and it was expected to provide the necessary planning muscle to transform Redfern and Waterloo, it proved incredibly unpopular with local communities. Its justificatory narratives were not successful in quelling dissent. Many Aboriginal residents, including board members of the Aboriginal Housing Company (AHC), viewed it as a vehicle to drive them out of the areas and to take control of their land (Standing Committee on Social Issues 2008). The RWA’s proposals to redevelop parts of the Waterloo and Redfern housing Estates raised additional community anxiety as did the wider NSW Government’s poor consultation record (Standing Committee on Social Issues 2004; Standing Committee on Social Issues 2008). In 2011 the Act under which it was established was repealed and the RWA dismantled. However, its assets, rights and liabilities, including its powers of compulsory acquisition were transferred to a new state body, Sydney Metropolitan Development Authority. In 2013 the SMDA transitioned into UrbanGrowth Development Corporation (UGDC). In the latest round of development directed at the suburbs they are the agency responsible for the production of the current master plan for the Waterloo Estate, on behalf of the Estate’s government landlord, Land and Housing Corporation (LAHC).
69 4.3 Waterloo 2015: State Power and Physical and Social Improvement
The redevelopment of the Waterloo Estate announced in December 2015 is expected to span 15-20 years. Under the project the Estate’s land will be privatised and its 2012 houses and apartments will be converted into one of the densest living spaces in Australia – a mix of 70% private and 30% social housing. The redevelopment is part of the NSW Government’s Communities Plus programme under which selected public housing sites, owned and managed by the state, are being demolished and rebuilt as social housing, managed by not- for profit community housing providers. The government enterprise LAHC, that until recently this year sat within the NSW Government’s Family and Community Services department, FACS, is the lead body delivering the programme. LAHC holds title to the land of NSW’s public housing, and much of its social housing. It is responsible for building maintenance, while tenancy management is the responsibility of other groups within FACS. LAHC is a bureaucratic descendent of the former NSW Housing Commission, a government department constituted through the 1942 Housing Act that owned and managed public housing in the state. The Commission earmarked large tracts of land across Sydney for ‘slum’ clearance and redevelopment programmes, many of which were in inner-city suburbs. Indeed, the Waterloo Estate’s current housing is a product of past state projects that appropriated private land and dispossessed and displaced homeowners and tenants to deliver mass rental housing for those most in need (Hayward 1996). A modernising narrative of progress motivated and justified the slum clearance schemes. The replacement of slums with ‘modern’ residences, the implementation of planning improvements through a comprehensive approach to development including the provision of physical amenities were among the primary justifications for such activities (Jones 1972). One of the NSW Government’s largest projects was in the suburb of Waterloo, for which 4 ½ acres of land was resumed from property owners in 1961 (Allen 1972), to build much of the current public housing including the 30 storey towers Matavai and Turanga. The resumption of another 26 acres followed these actions. The state’s resumption contributed to it becoming one of the largest landowners in Redfern and Waterloo. The Waterloo Estate’s Matavai and Turanga buildings were opened by Queen Elizabeth II, a reflection of their celebration at the time (see Figure 4.2). Ironically, the public housing dwellings built in the ‘60s and ‘70s, that were expressions of progress, are now slated for demolition on the basis that they are run down and in need of physical and social betterment. Yesterday’s ‘after’ picture has become today’s ‘before’ picture (Hanlon 2010, p. 92).
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Figure 4. 2 Queen pictured with crowd after unveiling a plaque outside the Matavai and Turanga Towers on the Waterloo Estate (Source: Sydney Morning Herald, Scott Whitehair)
The Waterloo redevelopment is the largest of the Communities Plus programme that includes seven major sites and twenty-four smaller neighbourhood projects. For the Estate’s residents this means the loss of land to accommodate private housing and a transformation of their physical and social living environments. Given the high numbers of elderly residents, many will not live to see the project’s completion. While relocations are to be limited through a phased management of construction, with residents promised the right to return, the extent to which such a promise can be kept given the scale of the redevelopment remains to be seen.
4.3.1 Centralised Planning, Value Capture and Privatisation
State extra-economic force acts in two ways to mobilise the redevelopment. Firstly, in the NSW State Government’s value capture strategy and its centralisation of planning power and, secondly, through LAHC’s proposed privatisation of public land on the Estate. The decision to locate a stop of the new Sydney Metro line opposite Waterloo was a political decision to facilitate the redevelopment. As seen in Redfern in 2004, it was a visible deploying of the NSW Government’s planning power. A location by the University of Sydney was the other possible siting option, for which the University had lobbied. The Metro would have supported its staff and students as well as commuters to the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital that lies adjacent to the University. The option
71 however was rejected in favour of land opposite the Waterloo Estate. As MW a senior planning professional with UrbanGrowth (Interview 14 February 2018) explained,
The decision to locate the metro station to where it went into certainly was influenced by –…it had a catalytic effect on the renewal of Waterloo. So, the choice that government faced, and I wasn’t in the room, but the choice that government faced at the time was do we provide a metro station to Sydney University and meet a transport need there and support the University, or do we locate the metro station at Waterloo and support the renewal of an aged housing estate. The choice was the Housing estate.
The Sydney Morning Herald reported that the then Planning minister Rob Stokes who was responsible for UrbanGrowth, the Minister for FACS at the time Brad Hazzard, who was responsible for public housing, and the deputy premier and police minister Troy Grant all put their weight behind the option of locating the station at Waterloo (Saulwick 2016). Stokes and Hazzard’s planning and housing responsibilities influenced their actions. While Troy Grant’s interests according to the Herald reflected, ‘the cops’ enthusiasm for dismantling the Waterloo towers’ (Saulwick 2016).
In 2016, the market value of many of the individual lots of land comprising the Waterloo Estate rose by approximately 26% on the previous year, the highest increase seen since 2001 (NSW Government Spatial Services 2016). The valuation method in NSW considers the influence of nearby infrastructure and development, suggesting the siting of the metro may have been influential (NSW Valuer General 2017). While it may not have been the sole cause of the increase, the strategic siting of the Metro station was certainly intended to lift land values and make the area more attractive for private development. UrbanGrowth NSW made a strong case for this decision so as to encourage economic development in its Redfern-Waterloo ‘growth centres’. Furthermore, under the Communities Plus programme developers are expected to provide the social housing component of the redevelopment projects in lieu of making a monetary payment for the land. The location of the Metro shored up the economic viability of such a scheme in Waterloo. The state’s engineering of an uplift in land value allowed private developers and investors to earn a significant revenue through the sale of the newly built private housing, whilst part of the uplift is ‘captured’ to finance the social housing component of the mixed Estate. The political force of the state thus
72 organised accumulation in the interest of the market. The limited 30% figure for social housing reflects the prioritisation of private development and the distribution of land to such ends.
The use of state planning force continued in Waterloo’s nomination as a State Significant Precinct (SSP) in May 2017 to simplify the planning approval process. It placed decision- making power, that is the authority to approve, reject and impose changes and conditions on the Waterloo project, with NSW Department of Planning and Environment. As in the case of the RWA and Redfern, a new state space was constructed, rescaling planning regulatory power- by relocating it from the local authority, City of Sydney, and placing it in the hands of the state-level Government. The Department assumes such a role for projects of state or regional significance because of their social, economic and environmental characteristics (NSW Department of Planning and Environment 2016). The SSP nomination allows LAHC and UrbanGrowth, who are driving the project, to bypass the City of Sydney’s regulations. Sydney newspapers widely reported the City’s vehement opposition to the sorts of densities proposed by the project (McKenny and Saulwick 2016.; McNab 2017). While it has been included on the project working group and will have a representative on the project review panel, it is ultimately the Minister for Planning who holds the authority to approve any rezoning proposals that transform the Waterloo Estate’s physical and social make-up. The project’s categorisation as an SSP means it is unlikely to be rejected, making it a mechanism to introduce substantial changes, one of which will be social mixed housing tenure and dense private residential housing.
4.3.2 Justifying Dispossession: Social Mix, Better Housing and Liveability
The NSW Government’s privatisation and planning interventions that dispossess Waterloo tenants of land and completely transform their physical and social environments, have been justified using three narratives of improvement. Firstly, one of behavioural and tenure improvement through a socially mixed estate, secondly through the creation of a modern built environment and finally via the production of a more liveable suburb. These narratives of improvement comprising hierarchical socio-spatial and behavioural differences, are bolstered by a silence on particular details; namely, the extent of the problems that require improvement, the effectiveness of the proposed changes in delivering the promised outcomes and the uneven distribution of the benefits of change.
73 De-concentrating Public Housing Tenure: Improvement through social mix
The 30%-70% social-private residential mix is a critical feature of the Communities Plus redevelopments, meaning a substantial portion of Waterloo’s land will be privatised. This proposal has been justified on the basis that it will resolve the problems arising from the concentration of ‘people all of the same type’ in one area (LAHC Public Meeting 06 September 2018). The Future Directions policy of which Communities Plus is a part, claims that many estates with concentrated social housing experienced (Family and Community Services 2015, p. 24):
high levels of crime, unemployment, domestic violence, tenancy management problems, poor educational outcomes and associated child protection issues…These experiences can be passed on through multiple generations, reinforcing the cycle of disadvantage.
The alleged ‘costs’ of concentration are not only social. Government documents released in the years preceding Future Directions noted the economic and administrative problems of concentrated social housing. A 2013 NSW Government audit found that concentration exacerbated the waiting list, as more people demanded relocations from ‘undesirable’ places; it created monetary costs in the form of repairs, damages and relocations; and properties seen as undesirable were difficult to let (Audit Office NSW 2013). The audit referenced a June 2012 consultant report that estimated the cost to government for imprisonment and community correction for NSW housing estates stood at $80million a year, more than twice the cost for the general New South Wales population (Audit Office NSW 2013, pp 27).
The NSW Government’s policy of social mix in response to such problems has been presented to housing tenants and to the broader public through a narrative of improvement, premised on hierarchies of people and tenure similar to those used in calls to de-concentrate The Block. The gathering together of low-income housing tenants on land is presented as socially and economically costly, as claimed in the Future Directions Policy (Family and Community Services 2016). The hierarchy between a concentrated and socially mixed estate, makes the organisation of people on land, and the organisation of housing tenure on land the axes of improvement. A hierarchy is set up to determine who should be allowed to gather on land. Improvement is in the dismantling and dispersing of such an allegedly undesirable coming together of people and tenure. The ‘rule by difference’ rests on a silence regarding the specificities of these hierarchies. These silences obscure the character of the actual problems created by a concentration of public housing tenants, if the
74 concentration is itself responsible for any of the problems. It also does not engage with questions of how effective a policy of social mix will be in addressing the problems.
The NSW Government’s justifications for public housing redevelopment did not mention the racial diversity of its residents, or the fact that this tenure is materially important for Aboriginal residents, with over a quarter of Aboriginal households in NSW relying on it to meet their dwelling needs (Brackertz 2017). In Waterloo, Aboriginal residents make up make up 8% of its tenants, while only comprising 1.4% of NSW’s population. The Estate also houses communities from migrant backgrounds, with 43% of its residents born overseas (Land and Housing Corporation 2017; Bagshaw 2017). The public facing justifications for Waterloo’s redevelopment was silent on the political significance of the site where T.J. Hickey fell. The hierarchy of people and tenure expressed in the justifications to redevelop the Estate, in effect continued a racialised denigration that called for the removal certain populations. While the character of these narratives used to justify social mix were not as explicitly colonial in their character as they had been in the previous RWA-led calls for de- concentration, the latest efforts still continued a will to erase Blackness in the suburbs. As in the 2004 redevelopment scheme, the denigration of a place that was, and continues to be politically and materially significant for Black people, legitimised a colonial erasure of Aboriginal land possession. For those Waterloo residents, who formerly lived on the Block, they were witnessing once again, state efforts to dismantle their housing and disperse their presence.
The Waterloo Estate fits the Government narrative of a ‘bad’ Estate that can be improved through a mix of housing. Media and government discourse for decades have represented Waterloo and Redfern as places of vicious drug crime and violence. Brad Hazzard, former Minister for FACS, when announcing the redevelopment claimed that (Saulwick 2016):
The major plus of all this which is not necessarily given enough focus is that when you get a mixture of housing, private and public, you get an incredible drop in anti-social behaviour.
This message has been repeated in government promotional material and in government consultants’ interactions with tenants. In a 2018 public meeting for Waterloo residents a LAHC consultant, Rob O’Sullivan, echoed Brad Hazzard’s message, but avoided direct reference to behavioural improvements (LAHC Public Meeting 6 September 2018):
The Communities Plus programme… has to provide a better social housing experience. Provide new and modern and fit for
75 purpose social housing. And overall it is designed to take us away from essentially concentrated areas of one type of housing in Sydney to actually what is reflective of the whole of Sydney, which is mixed neighbourhoods, where you have a mix of socio-economic demographics, where you don’t just have a lot of people all of the same type.
While Rob did not explicitly state the behavioural improvements to be brought by social mix, these have been discussed extensively in community workshops organised for tenants. In a 2018 workshop that I attended for Waterloo tenants, the Bonnyrigg Estate further west of Waterloo in an outer Sydney suburb, was put forward as an example of a success of the social mix policy. KW, a senior housing professional, who formerly worked for Housing NSW a predecessor to FACS, led the session. Her discussion of the improvements brought by social mix describes a people- land/tenure hierarchy that comprise the narratives used to justify redevelopment (Meeting 11 April 2018):
So, with regards to social mix and high density, some thinking is that it’s always beneficial because a rising tide lifts all boats, due to close proximity to the middle class, better housing, better services, so that the rub-off effect is seen as beneficial for social housing residents in this context. So, I actually had to look up, when I was putting this presentation together, where does this saying come from? And its associated with the idea that improvements in the general economy will benefit all participants in that economy. So, if you're creating a socially mixed community with people in different types of tenures, everybody will benefit from that.
The discussion following the presentation included questions regarding the effectiveness of social mix at Bonnyrigg. KB a Waterloo tenant in attendance sceptically asked (Meeting 11 April 2018):
Um... just back to Bonnyrigg for a minute…are the boats being lifted there?
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KW’s response was (Meeting 11 April 2018):
I think …a lot of the evidence is saying yes. Because, before it was redeveloped, the local high school had a really bad reputation; it was at risk of closure. Bonnyrigg had a really bad reputation as well – high crime. Lack of school participation by a lot of children and young people. So ... and it's taken a long time to regenerate and engage and ... it had a lot of money invested in it … even before the redevelopment started … The school is now a selective school and they've got, you know, waiting lists. The unemployment rates have gone down.
These justifications of redevelopment however are silent on the specifics of how improvement will happen. There are gaps in KW’s claims about the causal link between social mix and behavioural improvements. It is not necessarily the case that social housing and private housing residents interact because they are within close proximity of one another. Waterloo is a gentrifying suburb where substantial private residential housing already surrounds the Estate. The Waterloo housing tenants I have interviewed and others that I have come to know in the last years do not necessarily socialise with or form personal relationships with their privately housed neighbours (AR Interview 29 August 2017). Moreover, it is difficult to evaluate whether the improvements that KW reported, were a product of proximity with middle class residents, a consequence of investment in the area or simply because those allegedly responsible for anti-social behaviour had been relocated from Bonnyrigg. I do not want to claim that crime and anti-social behaviour are not concerns on housing estates, many tenants I have interviewed have complained of such problems. But improvement narratives of social mix are problematic because of the socio-economic hierarchy of people and tenure that they create whilst maintaining a silence on the extent of the problems on estates like Waterloo, and without critical reflection on the effectiveness of social mix in delivering improvement (Jama and Shaw 2017; Shaw 2013). There is also little contextualisation of the so- called ‘problems’, with reference to the NSW Governments’ allocation policy that prioritise ‘high needs’ residents, meaning that those battling socio-economic inequalities and mental health issues are more represented in public housing than in market-based housing (Family and Community Services 2019). The proposal of socially mixed estates to improve crime and anti-social behaviour, despite FACS claiming that only a small proportion of tenants are responsible, works to denigrate a
77 tenure form relied upon by people who contend with multiple forms of structural oppression, including those of economic status, race and bodily ability (Family and Community Services 2019). It also breaks up a social gathering of people, where residents have a strong sense of community membership that comes with intangible benefits such as a sense of acceptance, and of social worth (See Chapter 5).
‘New’ and ‘better’ housing
A second narrative of improvement that justifies the Waterloo project on the grounds of delivering new and better housing was directed at the physical qualities of the Waterloo Estate’s built environment. The media release announcing the Estate’s redevelopment described it as ‘ageing’ and promised to deliver a world-class vibrant community. A mantra of ‘new’ and ‘better’ social housing has been constantly directed at tenants through various government communications. The Communities Plus Waterloo Newsletter, that aims to keep tenants informed about the redevelopment, repeated these commitments under a section entitled ‘key facts’. During my time in Waterloo I have seen similar messages repeated to community members by LAHC staff.
The narrative of improvement is constituted of a physical hierarchy between the quality of public housing and a standard of housing that is modern and ‘fit for purpose’. It also incorporates a temporal hierarchy where the inferior aging Estate of the past is juxtaposed with the new apartments of the future. There is little detailed discussion in LAHC’s justifications of the redevelopment as to why the buildings of the Waterloo Estate are not fit for purpose and why the ageing stock is a problem. More discussion, and less of a silence, on this matter would likely raise questions regarding the necessity of complete demolition and redevelopment to address the problems of the ‘ageing’ Estate.
Among the pressing reasons for demolishing the buildings is the cost of maintenance, which is not discussed in state improvement narratives. Government audits, inquiries and LAHC’s annual reports, however, indicate that a significant part of the costs that LAHC incurs around housing is in repairs and maintenance (Audit Office of NSW 2013). Building new housing through programmes like Communities Plus will, at least in the short-term diminish such problems. The extent of the maintenance difficulties was highlighted to me in a conversation with Jenny Leong, the Greens State member for Newtown, whose electorate incorporates part of the Estate. In discussing the various ways that her team supports public housing tenants she explained (Interview 01 April 2018):
So, someone will call the office there’ll be a maintenance issue. It will have been going for a while. We’ll then call what
78 is the MP hotline which is an internal mechanism within FACS that demonstrates how broken the maintenance system is, that there is an MP hotline for people to ring to follow up on maintenance that isn’t being done.
Tenants in Waterloo have also complained about the poor maintenance on the Estate. The neglect was so widespread that the Waterloo Public Housing Action Group, WPHAG, had planned on initiating a class action against the Government. Given this context, for some, the prospect of improved housing is a positive and desirable ambition. When RS, one of the tenants on the Estate, received the letter announcing the redevelopment in 2015, he initially felt that this could be a good thing (27 June 2017)
And I just read further and. ‘Oh, we're gonna revamp Waterloo ... brand new homes’, and all of this kind of stuff … I first of all said ‘oh this sounds too good to be true’ … And I thought ‘well that might be nice’. You know, if it's a new place, at least it's ... better than what they've been maintaining in the building here, which they haven't ... they haven't pulled their finger out in a long time, and there was water leaking, and we had to deal with water coming into our bathroom on the ceiling and our lights blowing out all the time, and having to wait like two or three days for an electrician to come and turn our power on, and that ... And I thought ‘oh that might be nice’.
Some tenants have however questioned whether redevelopment is a necessary solution to address maintenance issues. CS who lives in the Matavai tower felt the Government’s proposals were an over-reach:
with less money than they would spend on making new structures, just make the buildings … some of the buildings are not so habitable … just make them sufficiently liveable … for people to continue living here.
79 CS’s suggestions are low key in comparison with the physical transformation of the entire Estate proposed under Communities Plus. Other tenants made similar calls for better maintenance and small- scale upgrades as opposed to wholesale redevelopment. These statements reject and call into question the Government’s narrative of improvement. They also point to the possibility of alternatives that have less dispossessory effects – that do not dismantle the entirety of the Estate’s social environment. The voicing of these alternatives suggests that justifications of redevelopment have not been successful in legitimising the project to many tenants. However, such alternatives are not featured in a wider public debate, instead the NSW Government maintains a quietness regarding the material details of the problems faced by its housing stock. This silence supports its justifications for redevelopment, as wholesale transformation can be presented as an obvious and desirable improvement, displacing the potential for discussion of alternative action.
Implementing the types of solutions called upon by people like CS of course requires access to more finance, money that LAHC does not have. Its annual reports record an income deficit for each year between 2011/12 to 2017/18. LAHC’s budget-balancing attempts have included curtailing maintenance, capital programmes and the upgrading of properties (Audit Office NSW 2013, pp 18). In evidence to a 2012/13 Select Committee on Social, Public and Affordable Housing, Anne Skewes, LAHC’s Deputy Secretary at the time, explained that to bring the properties up to contemporary standards would require $330 million. Limited federal level funding means tested housing and the setting of rents as a percentage of income has limited the amount of finance available for maintenance leading to the systematic neglect of public housing buildings (Audit Office NSW 2013, p. 18). While money is required for more ‘low key’ solutions like maintenance, repair and smaller-scale physical upgrades such as those proposed by CS, the redevelopment comes at no cost to the Government, with the private sector financing the project in exchange for land. The transfer of public housing to non-government Community Housing Providers (CHPs) proposed under Communities Plus further boosts revenue, as tenants renting with not-for profits are eligible for the federal government welfare payment Commonwealth Rent Assistance (CRA), that is not available for public housing tenants. The NSW Government’s narratives of improvement however do not unpack the financial limitations which have influenced its decision to redevelop housing Estates around NSW. Instead it uses a justificatory narrative of better housing that remains silent on such issues. Vocalising that demolition and redevelopment is more cost effective than carrying out maintenance, instead of a silence on the matter, might raise critiques of how public housing is financed.
While transferring the management of new public housing stock to CHPs addresses some of the monetary and maintenance problems faced by the Government, senior community housing professionals I interviewed also warned that they too faced cost management challenges. Wendy Hayhurst, CEO of the Community Housing Industry Association, explained that despite the CRA
80 payments the low incomes of social housing tenant meant that rental income still fell short of covering CHP expenses (Interview 22 January 2018):
So, from the rents that we charge we then have to fund if its new housing, the interest and the capital repaying back a loan. All of the services. It doesn't add up. There's about 60 percent gap on average between what we can get in income from rents and what it costs to build [and] maintain properties.
Greens MP Jenny Leong expressed related frustration at the financing approach to social housing. Her analysis raises problems with the current Communities Plus approach of redeveloping old public housing stock and transferring it to the community housing sector (Interview 17 April 2018):
And I guess the longer-term transition from public housing to… community housing is that there's no requirement … other than the community housing providers themselves having their own positions on it … there's nothing requiring from the Government that they have any money put aside to be able to maintain that to a level or standard. At the moment, the community housing providers on the whole have newer stock. So you could find yourself in 15-20 years with all of that housing stock being put into the community housing provider sector, but they don't have the funds to maintain it or to keep it to a standard that is liveable, and then we find ourselves in the same situation that we're in now in, in terms of public housing.
Both Wendy Hayhurst and Jenny Leong’s statements point to the fact that the narratives of improvement used to justify the Waterloo redevelopment and Communities Plus more generally are silent about the effectiveness and longevity of their solutions. The narrative does not refer to the limited state financing that might restrict housing providers’ capacity to maintain the newly built properties. It also does not remark on the fact that sustaining a welfare social housing model where such housing is intended for only low-income residents, in a context of limited state subsidy and means testing, will continue to exert financial pressures on housing maintenance. Without more money, efforts to build new housing risks re-producing costly maintenance issues, repeating the
81 patterns of the past. As seen in the case of the Waterloo Estate that was celebrated as a symbol of progress at the time of its construction, the ‘new’ and ‘modern’ housing proposed under Communities Plus might be characterised as in need of demolition and upgrade sooner than expected.
Making Waterloo Liveable
The production of a liveable place characterise a third narrative of improvement directed at the physical and social environment of Waterloo, used to justify the redevelopment. These have been predominantly voiced in the strategies and plans of the state’s development agency UrbanGrowth, who work in partnership with LAHC. The agency’s objectives, as a development corporation under the Growth Centres Act 1974, include the responsibility to promote orderly economic development in specific urban growth centres defined within its remit, which include Waterloo and Redfern.
UrbanGrowth’s plans for Waterloo establish a ‘rule by difference’ where the Estate’s redevelopment is justified using a hierarchical assembling of a future liveable place, versus the here and now of the Estate and suburb. I see these future improvements as loosely coalescing around the concept of liveability, reflecting criteria adopted in the Greater Sydney Commission’s, Sydney’s district planning authority, liveability framework (Arup 2017), (see Figure 4.3). Liveability is never clearly defined in UrbanGrowth’s strategy and planning documents, but it takes the form of a loose bundle of physical and social elements, such as the provision of a diverse range of housing, good transport links, commercial growth and the establishment of social and cultural facilities. Drawing on the Greater Sydney Commission’s framework, I categorise these proposed liveability improvements as connected communities, housing choice, urban design excellence and social and cultural facilities. Like LAHC, UrbanGrowth’s liveability narratives include the physical improvements to the Waterloo Estate’s built environment, but as a development corporation, it also places emphasis on the social environment of the suburb more generally.
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Figure 4. 3 Greater Sydney Liveability Framework Outcomes (Source: Arup 2017)
Following the narratives of de-concentration and social mix, and of improvements to the physical quality of the built environment, the liveability improvements voiced in UrbanGrowth’s strategies and in its masterplan maintains a silence on three issues that raise questions about the substantiality of the benefits expected from the Waterloo Estate’s redevelopment. Firstly, there is little discussion of how evenly the improvements from liveability will be distributed. Secondly, there is no mention of the ways in which the suburb of Waterloo and the Estate are in fact already liveable places of immense social value for residents. Thirdly, there is no presentation of alternatives which might meet liveability objectives without a wholesale demolition and redevelopment. The narrative justifies a dispossessory project by setting up a hierarchy between a future liveable place and a less desirable status quo supported with these three silences. The present place of Waterloo is thus deemed sacrificeable in search of future improvements through a complete overhaul of the social and physical environments, creating a situation where tenants will be subject to decades of physical and social change through construction and relocations (Crabtree 2013; Bird Rose 2004).
Connected Communities
The Waterloo masterplan incorporates the Greater Sydney Commission’s liveability criteria of ‘connected communities’ delivered through integrated transport and land use planning in a way that supports commercial growth. The increased housing stock opposite the Waterloo metro station connects the suburb with ‘global’ Sydney’s employment sectors in Barangaroo, Martin Place and
83 in the north west of the city, thus supporting their economic development (Urban Growth NSW 2016). The extension of streets into the Estate to meet the metro station and new retail facilities, and the introduction of a cycle path between the Estate and the metro similarly connect people to destinations of work. and leisure, (see Figure 4.4).
Figure 4. 4 Waterloo Preferred Masterplan (Source: Waterloo Connect 2019)
While LAHC and UrbanGrowth’s narratives of improvement celebrate the connections the metro will bring, there is little mention of the fact that one of Sydney’s busiest train stations, Redfern station, is within 500 meters of the north end of the Estate. Bus services connect the Estate to the station and also to Central, Sydney’s largest train station.
As mentioned previously Waterloo and the University of Sydney were both contenders for the location of the metro station Arguably, the University would have been a better alternative in delivering the liveability criteria of ‘connected communities’. It attracts thousands of students and staff daily and is adjacent to the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, one of Sydney’s largest public hospitals. This location had the potential to alleviate Redfern station of commuters, where many students and university employees alight. This would also avoid the displacement and dispossession of low income and racially diverse communities.
Uneven Improvements: More Housing and More Choice?
Increasing housing supply and diversity is another liveability criteria championed by UrbanGrowth and LAHC, an advantage which the Estate’s site held over the University of Sydney. Housing choice and increased density are central aspects of the Waterloo masterplan with 6800 ‘new’ and
84 ‘modern’ homes promised across a 30%-70% mix of social and private housing tenures to replace the current 2012 dwellings of the Estate. The mix is viewed as a correcting the current lack of housing diversity in the Waterloo and Redfern areas (UrbanGrowth 2016a). This diversity will also extend to the size of dwellings. The aim is to provide accommodation for a range of income levels and household sizes. In such a reading liveability via housing diversity is underpinned by an ethos of social and economic inclusion. However, no specific details have been released regarding the numbers and the sizes of the new apartments, creating a lack of clarity as to exactly which types of households will benefit from the diversity.
In Waterloo, the introduction of diverse tenures means the breaking up of a ‘concentration’ of public housing and replacing it with a mix of social and private housing, where the latter is the dominant tenure. The private housing and the increased density allow access to more people with higher income levels, who are not eligible for social housing. Sydney in recent years, has featured among the least affordable cities in the world for housing (Demographia 2019). The increase in supply aligns with local and state level government efforts to address the city’s affordability challenges. The inclusion of up to 5% affordable housing on the redeveloped Waterloo Estate, where rents are lower than the market value, but higher than social housing rents, is particularly targeted at such challenges. But the predominance of private housing with market-based prices and rents in the social-mix, means that despite overtures towards social inclusion, all of the private stock is exclusionary for low income residents in general, and for social housing tenants in particular should they wish to access market-based accommodation. By my calculations drawing on 2016 census data and records of 2019 property sales in Waterloo, for low income households, earning less than 80% of the median wage in the Greater Sydney area, the cost of a dwelling was over 12 times their income (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2016). Over 40% of households renting in Waterloo and its adjoining suburbs are in rental stress according to census data, spending more than 30% of their incomes on rent (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2016). The mechanism of land value capture that has enabled the redevelopment by positioning the metro opposite the Estate further contributes to a situation of unaffordability as opposed to remedying it. Land values rose by 26% between 2016 and 2015 for many of the lots on the Waterloo Estate following the announcement of the redevelopment and the metro. While they have since stabilised and the property prices have declined slightly in the suburb in line with a drop seen across Sydney, Waterloo is still not an affordable place to rent privately or to buy property for many households. Many of the social housing tenants in the area rely on welfare payments. For 40% of them the federal government’s aged pension is the primary source of income, 30% rely on the disability support payments and 15% depend on the Government’s unemployment benefit Newstart (Land and Housing Corporation 2017). While they have been promised social housing on the Estate, the new private and affordable housing will be extremely difficult to access for people with a similar socio-economic status to the
85 residents living on the Estate. For Aboriginal households impoverished by a history of settler colonialism, an area of political significance, becomes increasingly out of reach, in yet another iteration of the logic of elimination. Housing diversity and density does not create housing choice for these communities. It rather, takes physical space and land away from an economically low income and racially diverse body of people and re-distributes it to higher income earners. Despite being presented as a socio-economically inclusive approach to redevelopment, the provision of housing choice in a historically low-income, culturally diverse and Black suburb such as Waterloo, actually exacerbates economic exclusion. UrbanGrowth’s masterplan is silent on this uneven distribution of liveability through housing choice.
Housing choice includes a commitment to tenure-blindness, meaning there are no visible physical differences between the social and private housing of the redeveloped Estate. When I attended UrbanGrowth’s planning exhibition in 2018 one of their architectural consultants emphasised this aspect whilst speaking with me. UrbanGrowth and LAHC staff have celebrated this idea communicating it to tenants as an advantage. While this aspiration is consistent with the ideals of socio-economic inclusivity that underpin housing choice, tenure-blindness, for LAHC and UrbanGrowth, is limited to the physical buildings. The locations of the buildings on the Estate, the way in which access to green space, community gardens, sunlight and city views are distributed across the tenures are not incorporated in such a concept, at least there has been no commitment to this so far. There have been promises that the social housing will be distributed across the Estate, with social and private housing residents in separate buildings, but tenure-blindness, in line with the inclusionary dimension of liveability, would mean that an equal proportion of social and private housing will be north facing, have access to the same amounts of sunlight, urban skyline views and green space. Lorna Munro, an Black activist and educator who grew up in Redfern and Waterloo, noted this potential inequality on her radio show Survival Guide claiming that ‘Poor people have to fight for their sunlight’ (Survival Guide 2018). The differences in maintenance regimes and their impact on social and private housing over time is similarly not discussed in the masterplan. The promise of improvement to housing through tenure- blindness is thus underpinned by a silence on the physical details, which suggest that the improvements may not be equally shared by all.
Urban Design Excellence and Crime Prevention
Crime prevention through environmental design principles is explicitly listed as an example of excellent urban design in the Greater Sydney Commission’s liveability framework (Arup 2017). The Waterloo masterplan incorporates such principles through ‘good lighting’, security and facilities around public open spaces that provide the opportunity for ‘surveillance’ and ‘enhanced safety’ (UrbanGrowth 2016a, pp. 48-49; NSW Government 2019, p. 1). Increasing the number of retail
86 facilities on the streets and extending roads and cycleways around and into the Estate’s green spaces increases public surveillance acting as a crime deterrent (Cozens and Love 2015).
The masterplan indicates that the Waterloo Green, the main open green area on the north end of the Estate, will accommodate more residential buildings (see Figure 4.4). The Estate’s new primary open space is positioned at its centre opposite the metro station and is surrounded by retail outlets consistent with a liveability framework that prioritises ‘enhanced safety’ levels through surveillance strategies (see Figure 4.4). Public housing tenants in Sydney have argued for increased security through their Neighbourhood Advisory Boards (NABs) – social housing tenants’ groups through which residents voice their housing related concerns. Changing the physical environment to increase the ‘eyes on the street’ is one way of facilitating such demands. But like the anti-social behaviour that LAHC aims to counteract through a policy of social mix, such preventative urban design is informed by particular definitions of crime and undesirable activities. The Waterloo Green is currently used by the Estate’s tenants for informal social interaction and there are often Black residents who gather and chat around the Green. It is currently a relatively quiet and peaceful space conducive for informal gatherings. On a few occasions whilst passing the Green I have witnessed a police presence, sometimes their personnel are talking with Black groups who have chosen to meet there. One tenant noted whilst chatting to me that Black people who congregate on the Green are at times interrupted by the police, causing them to scatter. The increased social hustle and bustle and ‘eyes on the street’ created by relocating the Estate’s main green space to opposite the Metro stop and surrounding it with retail and community facilities is an informal way of policing a space. These measures produce a sense of security for some tenants and users of that public space, but this increased sense of security does not extend to all users. It relies on diminishing the security of those people whose gathering in public spaces is perceived as unsavoury or criminal. In this case Black bodies that come together on the Green will be among those whose surrounds are being reconfigured to enhance such surveillance.
Another design principle adopted in the redevelopment is an inclusive and accessible built environment. MW, a former programme director for the Central to Eveleigh project when discussing the drivers for the Waterloo redevelopment explained, (14 April 2018)
The particular drivers for Waterloo, that the buildings by and large have reached the end of their economic life. They were built in the 60s and ‘70s. Some of them in the 80s. They don't typically meet today's standards of construction. I mean they meet things like fire standards they meet, but in terms of meeting liveability standards under SEPP 65 they don’t meet
87 those. They don’t meet size standards. And the lived experience for the tenants is not that good…in terms of the actual buildings themselves.
Such narratives emphasise the temporal dimension of improvement. MW sees the Waterloo Estate as ageing and of the past, thus repeating LAHC’s narratives about the housing not being ‘fit for purpose’. The redevelopment is justified on the basis of bringing the Estate’s physical structure in line with contemporary standards, associated with a later point in time. The new housing will meet the latest design quality requirements of the State Environment and Planning Policy 65 (NSW Department of Planning and Environment 2019). In line with this policy ethos UrbanGrowth and LAHC have committed to accessible design for residents with disabilities and older people, meeting the latest silver level of universal design. The Estate’s built environment, as it stands now becomes sacrificeable in the pursuit of these betterments. Temporal and physical hierarchies pit the future modern buildings of the Estate against the current buildings that are ageing and unfit, making an argument for change.
Despite the promise of modern housing, my interviews and interactions with tenants over the last four years suggest that there is a diversity of opinions about the new housing. Some, such as RS, quoted previously welcome the changes. But others take issue with the Government’s claims that the housing is inadequate. These views do not ‘reflect people’s lived experiences’, claimed one tenant at the public information meeting where LAHC and Urban Growth consultants discussed the masterplan. Others such as CS from Matavai, also quoted above, reject the need for wholesale redevelopment but rather feel that more effective maintenance and upgrades will help make some of the properties that are in poor condition, habitable.
The masterplan is consistent with the Greater Sydney Commission’s liveability criteria of delivering ‘social infrastructure’ and promoting ‘culture and innovation’. Liveability in this context includes the provision of communal spaces for cultural and social events, community gardens that are currently popular with the Estate’s residents and opportunities to celebrate and support Waterloo’s Aboriginal and ‘diverse’ communities. A constant hub of activity and movement is planned for the Estate as community and retail facilities bring ‘areas to life’ (UrbanGrowth NSW 2016a., p. 49). But Waterloo already has many spaces that meet local social and cultural needs, set up and managed by people and organisations based in and around the suburb over a period of decades (see Figure 4.5). RedWatch is a community information group, Inner Sydney Voice and Counterpoint Community Services work on advocacy and community development, The Fact Tree and Weave offer youth services and Waterloo Library hosts story and rhyme time sessions for young children and houses a Koori book collection. The Aboriginal Medical Service, Legal Service and the
88 National Centre for Aboriginal Excellence are within short walking distance of the Estate. The Waterloo Green is a well-used space and tenants and local NGOs regularly organise community events there. In 2018 I attended an Black corroboree on the Green with multiple dance performances. It is also the starting point for an annual march organised by The Aboriginal Social Justice Association, held in honour of TJ Hickey in which I have participated for a few years.
Figure 4. 5 Community Facilities in Waterloo and Redfern (Source: Authors Adaptation from Google Maps 2019)
By the standards of the Greater Sydney Commission’s framework that calls for culture and innovation and social infrastructure, Waterloo is already a liveable part of the city with its extensive social and cultural organising see Figure 4. 5. UrbanGrowth’s annual reports, in fact, recognise this aspect of Waterloo (UrbanGrowth NSW 2016 b., p. 5):
a unique inner city area located on the southern edge of the City of Sydney…It continues to develop as a major technology, cultural and creative hub with a diverse community
The masterplan aims to ‘foster’ and celebrate such existing social and cultural facilities and practices. But, as in the propositions of tenure-blindness, there is a lack of specificity as to what such improvements actually comprise , i.e. the number and location of the facilities, their functions, who organises them, how expensive commercial retails outlets will be and exactly how they will support or enhance the current social infrastructure and culture of Waterloo. Accompanying the
89 limited detail on the materiality of the future improvements, is a silence on the fact that the new social and community infrastructure actually encroaches on the built environment and green spaces of a low-income community and on land that is of political and social significance for Aboriginal Australians. The tenants I interviewed did not express a unified demand or opinion regarding the desirability of the increased social activity and cultural and commercial facilities that the redevelopment intends to create. MA, a tenant in the Turanga building, expressed curiosity about the changes and, in fact, welcomed the potential of more vibrancy. In chatting with me he exclaimed:
Now I’m thinking gosh I wonder what the new place will be like? It might be, … you know…sometimes in expensive places they have comfortable places you can sit; you know where you don’t have to buy a cup of coffee and…Gosh you know it might be interesting… So, and also maybe there'll be a place where I can wander around with all these rich people… this [Waterloo] does have certain special things about it. But I do want more vibrancy and more stuff happening, you know.
CS, from Matavai, who lives immediately opposite MA expressed contrary opinions. She enjoys the Estate as it is and already engages in and organises multiple social activities around the suburb by drawing on its existing community services:
So, when I first came here I thought it was, you know I was immediately taken by the Green, and these trees out here. I thought oh this is really lovely... I have a lot of friends here. I have I met people through the recycling store. When I first came here…I bought furniture from the recycling store, and then I met a lady who was running it, Naomi who now is a good friend of mine and she, we were talking about art and she said, ‘Oh why don't you go to art class up in Ragland Street. So, so I went there, to the class and now I have a lot of friends from the art class and now I give art lessons there, and curate the gallery there.
90 CS and MA’s differences in opinion suggest that the changes will be unevenly experienced, some will see and experience improvements where others will not.
Conclusions
In summary, the redevelopment of the Waterloo Estate and the historical pressure to redevelop The Block, in Redfern, have deployed of extra-economic force through the privatisation of land, and the state’s use of centralised planning power to maintain control over the types of developments that occur in the suburbs. The use of political power is justified by multiple improvement narratives, that take the form of a ‘rule by difference’, where social and physical differences are organised into hierarchies that legitimise socio-spatial transformation – they make change appear necessary. These narratives denigrate the existing concentrated living arrangements of Black people and of public housing tenants. The calls to dismantle and deconcentrate housing and those spaces that carry material and political significance for Aboriginal communities, in the name of improvement, continue a settler governance of elimination. The redevelopments in Redfern and Waterloo are an urban inflection of this will to eliminate Aboriginality and possess Aboriginal land. State improvement narratives also position Waterloo’s public housing as physically ageing and unfit, and imply that its social space does not meet standards of liveability. A superior socio-spatial formation of mixed communities, ‘new’ and ‘modern’ housing and a liveable urban environment, is set against a picture of ‘deficit,’ to justify disruptive state intervention that expropriates land and overhauls the social environments of Black, low income and racially diverse urban dwellers. The narratives of improvement conveniently maintain a silence on critical issues that might question their givenness, such as the extent of the problems in need of fixing, the existing facilities that already make the suburbs socially and physically desirable, the effectiveness of the proposed solutions in delivering improvement, and the uneven distribution of the benefits. In the following chapter I continue the discussion of the housing redevelopments in Redfern and Waterloo, but with a shift in analysis to the on the ground propertied dispossessions that are unfolding, and that are expected to unfold in the coming years.
91 Chapter 5 Dispossession: Redfern and Waterloo
In this chapter I analyse how dispossession for urban residents in Redfern and Waterloo unfolds as the dismantling of the collective possession of land, the loss of belonging to a social entity, and through the loss of capacity to produce the future of a place. Following the conceptual framework established in Chapter 2, I adopt a performative approach to property, seeing it as an effect that happens in the world, comprising both relationships of mastery and membership. The chapter identifies how relations of property are held up by the enabling and conditional work done by social and physical spaces, and by policy and legislation. Its analysis shows how such varied forms of holding up, in conjunction with the state extra- economic power to alienate public land and to centralise planning, shape the spatial and temporal anticipations and experiences of dispossession.
Section 5.1 discusses the political significance of Redfern and Waterloo for Black communities and identifies the formal and informal Black possession across the suburbs that both constitute and hold up a collective form of property. Engaging with Rob Nixon’s (2011) concept of slow violence and Elizabeth Grosz’s understanding of time, it reveals how extended Aboriginal temporal horizons position urban redevelopment agendas which displace and de-concentrate Black possession as a continuation of settler colonialism. Section 5.2 turns specifically to the case of public housing tenancy in Waterloo. It identifies the unofficial property enactments of mastery and membership, referred to as precarious property. that are held up by an assembly of land possession, legislation and policy, and by the suburbs’ non-governmental community organisations. Tenants’ anticipations of dispossession through the redevelopment of their Estate, are articulated as a loss of value of life, that had been made possible through the holding up of their property. Section 5.3 concludes the chapter with a focus on the temporality of redevelopment. This temporal analysis discusses the events and emotional upheavals of the consultation process, revealing the uneven distribution of power between state landlord and tenants. This chronological power of property, that is its capacity to organise the time of a redevelopment scheme, is further bolstered by the state’s extra- economic planning power that bestows the scheme with an air of certainty. The transparency of state force along with the level of control it bestows on the state, has triggered shock and uncertainty among tenants and further limited their influence over the redevelopment of their estate. The concept of slow violence is once again utilised to shed light on these experiences of urban change. In contrast to the Aboriginal temporal horizons, where slow violence unfolds over a more expansive timeframe of colonisation, the slow violence of redevelopment unfolds in the everyday events and experiences of the project. Careful attention to these intimate operations reveals how they are shaped by the character of property, where the paternalism and control with which tenants’ rental property is held up by the state landlord, configures the path of dispossession.
92 5.1 Black Property
5.1.1 An Historical Context
Black connections to Redfern likely extend back tens of thousands of years, as they do with the rest of Australia. The earliest settler records of these connections that I could locate are from the early 1800s. Obed West, an Australian writer, noted that the locality of Boxley’s clear, which was later renamed Redfern had been a great ‘rendezvous’ of the ‘Blacks’ in the first decades of the 1800s (West 1883). Remarks made by Mary Chisolm, the wife of James Chisolm who was granted land in Redfern in 1819, alludes to a Black presence in the suburb (Maxwell and Pugh, 2015 p.133): ‘Everyone in Sydney Town told him he was mad to go live out there, in the bush [as] the natives would kill him’. More recent Aboriginal and settler historical records note that Redfern drew Black workers in the early 20th century and it became an increasingly important site of political activism in the 1960s and ‘70s. It was during this period that social services and physical spaces were set up by residents and activists that over time came to enact a form of Black property in the suburb.
The late 1960s and early ‘70s saw a large migration of Black people from across Australia to urban centres like Redfern, escaping life on reserves and missions where many had been held, to find work and locate family members from whom they had been separated by government child removal policies (Goodall 2008; Simon et al. 2002; Special Broadcasting Service 2012). Redfern grew into a politically significant Black centre. This was a particularly important accomplishment in the settler context, that had seen the exclusion and dislocation of Black people from city centres. In defiance of such a settler logic and its control of Black life, Redfern saw the establishment of Black controlled services such as a legal service, a medical service, a housing cooperative and a breakfast program for children, which all served the needs of Black residents. The activists who established Redfern as a social and cultural hub were inspired by the American Black Power movement’s values of community control. While non-Aboriginal people assisted in the running of the programmes, it was Black community members who bore the responsibility of decision making and management (Lothian 2007, p. 26). The services were replicated across the country and are still operating today including in Redfern. In the decades following the establishment of these services and organisations, the suburb became a political hub which saw the flourishing of Black social and cultural practices and a coming together of Black people in the middle of the city (Foley 2001). An urban art scene developed, and Black theatre that was borne of this scene provided educational opportunities (Foley 2001). In the early 1970s residents’ occupation of land to prevent the displacement of low income squatters, and activists’ lobbying of the then federal Labor Government led to a land grant opposite Redfern station which became a Black housing cooperative, The Block. It cemented the community’s presence in the area for decades.
93 Like Redfern, neighbouring Waterloo holds immense social and political importance for Black people. Black residents make up about 8% of the Waterloo Public Housing Estate’s population, and while this may appear small, it compares to a state average of 1.6%. Some of its tenants include former residents of The Block, who found housing on the Estate, following their eviction from the cooperative. Surrounding Waterloo’s public housing towers are healthcare, cultural and sports facilities provided by the Aboriginal Medical Service, the National Centre for Aboriginal Excellence and Koori Radio that straddle the border between Redfern and Waterloo. The estate’s Turanga building that sits on Waterloo Green is the site where TJ Hickey was fatally injured in 2004 whilst being pursued by the police. It is the starting point of an annual march that demands justice be done by him, and an important place for the preservation of his memory (Sydney Morning Herald 12 February 2017). Efforts have been made in recent years to rename the Waterloo Green TJ Hickey Park.
5.1.2 Holding up Black Property
The establishment of a Black presence in Redfern and Waterloo has been productive of an enactment of collective property, both as mastery and membership (Cooper 2007; Keenan 2015). Below I focus on how mastery has been enacted and held up in the two suburbs. I see this property as collective, firstly because it is performed via the combined work of activists, residents and staff who maintain a presence in the area, work in the community- controlled organisations and practice urban Black culture. Secondly, it is an enactment of a shared way of being, taken in the interest of a group or as a representation of a group (Roy 2017; Foley 2001). This sets it apart from acts of possession that are explicitly on behalf of and in the interest of individuals.
Black property is practised via a diverse range of actions that take physical possession of space and that alter it. This collective possession simultaneously constitutes and holds up property as mastery, by enabling and placing conditions upon its performance. Its enabling capacity takes three forms – the provision of physical space for practices of mastery, the conferring of social legitimacy on urban Blackness and the exclusionary effects of Black possession. This enabling aspect of holding up is accompanied by unofficial social conditions, that produce a type of sanction where they are breached.
Property was established in the first instance by the setting up of formal community- controlled facilities and through informal Black gathering in Redfern and Waterloo. Black organisations legally ‘own’ or rent land and buildings to run their services. Black tenants occupy public housing in the suburbs, and gather together for events, regular community meetings and informal social gatherings in
94 and around the area. Mastery happens by this claiming of physical space which then becomes a site for the production of urban Black culture, politics, and a way of life.
A second element in the enactment of property is the work of social and physical networks in Redfern ad Waterloo that hold up Black property. Black institutions’ possession of space provides the physical space for community social and political actions. Thus, they are not only part of a performance of collective property, but also part of the complex that enables it. For instance, the Aboriginal legal service, medical service and the women’s organisation Mudgin-Gal provide space for the delivery of social services, training, and host events directed at Black residents. These activities analysed together, form a type of collective mastery by socially and physically shaping space in the interest of Blackness. The possession of land by Black organisations enables this property by providing the material basis for it to happen. Redfern and Waterloo’s public housing whilst not run by Black residents and organisations, is also part of this complex that holds up property. The provision of affordable housing in increasingly expensive suburbs is important for low income Black residents to maintain a foothold there, and to contribute to an expression of collective property through the possession of space, which takes various forms including the occupation of housing and participation in the social and political gatherings in the area.
Thirdly, formal and informal possession also enables practices of mastery, by conferring them with social legitimacy. The physical possession signals an acceptance of, or an approval of the Black use of land and space to promote Black needs, demands and culture. This logic is particularly significant in a settler context that has typically excluded Black people from city centres on the basis that they are unfit for urban life (Anderson 1993; Jacobs 2002; Foley 2001; Porter 2013; Blatman-Thomas and Porter 2019). Blackness, in this reality, belonged away from the centre, in the bush, and on missions and reserves. Kaye Bellear, who alongside her late husband Bob Bellear played an important role in establishing the Block in Redfern, explicitly positions the cooperative as a countering of urban exclusion (Bellear 2007):
This was Bob’s principle, that they owned land in the middle of the biggest city in the country because traditionally Aboriginal people had always been pushed to the outskirts of towns; had never lived in towns, they were always on the rubbish dump or whatever. He wanted to secure a fairly substantial piece of land that would house Aboriginal people in the middle of Sydney, so that Aboriginal people would always be there and the rest of the community had to acknowledge that this land was freehold land, owned by the Aboriginal community.
95 Her talk of land ownership asserts the legitimacy of Black possession in cities. The assertion of collective possession by the ‘Aboriginal community’, from a place where they had been excluded by settler society, was an assertion of the legitimacy of urban Blackness. The holding up of property by conferring it with social legitimacy, does not take a formal spoken or written form, but rather it is assumed, communicated and practised by the act of possessing. The history of Redfern and Waterloo is particularly important in maintaining this possession and the legitimacy it bestows on urban Black possession. Whilst the Black population of the suburbs has dwindled, a presence continues because of the history of activism, particularly the setting up of community organisations which consolidated such a presence, and which continue to attract Aboriginal people to the area.
Fourth, the collective possession has exclusionary effects. Non-Aboriginal discomfort in Redfern and Waterloo has been recorded extensively in media and social discourse (Anderson 1993; Shaw 2007). The Block, in particular, has been constructed as a ‘no-go’ area from the point of its establishment (Anderson 1993; Shaw 2007). While such an effect has diminished as the suburbs have gentrified, expressions of discomfort and a desire to stay away are not uncommon. Black possession unintentionally enables the property power of exclusion, not through legal recognition, but rather because of the classed and racialised discomfort experienced by those who are not part of this possession. A second and more explicit form of exclusion is incidental to the production of vital community infrastructure geared towards supporting of Black culture and needs. Such a spatial orientation makes space for Black possession and is not orientated towards non- Aboriginal possession. For example, the medical, legal and housing services are not targeted at non Aboriginal people, whose interests already dominate the production of Australian cities. Thus exclusion, whilst not a deliberate act of the propertied subject is nonetheless an effect of Black possession, which gives it the contours of property.
Fifth, the enabling aspects of holding up described above, the provision of physical space, the conferring of social legitimacy, and the exclusionary effect of possession, were accompanied with moral conditions that governed Black property. These conditions delineated which acts were included as collective property, and those that fell outside of or did not conform with expected norms. In Waterloo and Redfern such conditions are expressed in community expectations that urban space is used and organised in a way that supports and promotes a Black presence and Black community needs. While there is no explicit record of such rules, their existence is made clear by the community outrage and condemnation when they are violated. A recent example is the anger directed at the Aboriginal Housing Company’s Pemulwuy redevelopment project, which has proposed limited Black housing on land that was formerly occupied by the Block. Such a use of urban space did not, by the standards of some residents and activists, sufficiently promote a Black presence in Redfern, and triggered outrage, revealing the unofficial conditions that guide Black property. The Company’s decision to build a mixed-use complex, with student housing, and cultural facilities, to
96 be provided along with 62 Black dwellings, triggered an occupation that lasted over a year. Activists set up tents on the Housing Company’s land, claiming that it was ‘Aboriginal land, for ‘our people’ and not ‘private property’ (see Figure 5.1). The point here being that the land was collectively owned by the Black community, as opposed to by the Housing Company. This social rebuke and effort to redirect the project so as to prioritise affordable Black housing, offers a parallel to the legal sanctions that property owners might face when violating conditions of ownership.
Figure 5. 1 Redfern Tent Embassy Protests (Source: Vice 2014, Nicole Verges)
5.1.3 Dispossession of Black Property
In this section I build an understanding of dispossession as a loss of property as mastery, which proceeds through the redevelopment plans for the Block and the Waterloo Estate. The redistribution of land used by Black residents, and the de-concentration of their presence is a diminishing of the social and spatial arrangement that creates the material basis for collective property. Dispossession is influenced by the character of this property, and by how it is held up. In the case of Redfern and Waterloo, the expression of Blackness, and the possession of space in the middle of a settler city had led to the framing of redevelopment as a continuation of settler colonialism. Here the distinction between the loss of collective property and sovereignty are blurred. Whereas I theorise Black possession in Redfern as a form of collective property, it is held up by community-controlled organisations that are informed by an ethos of Black control of Black affairs. This ethos of self- determination, especially assertive when these organisations were first established by activists in the 1970s, is a challenge to settler interference in the governance of Aboriginal community affairs (Foley
97 2001). It was, in effect, a demand for sovereignty. Whilst as many have argued, all transactions in land in countries like Australia are continuations of settler colonialism (Porter 2018; Rogers 2017; Tuck and Yang 2012), in Redfern and Waterloo the ongoing character of colonisation is acutely visible because of its attack on Black collective possession of land, a possession that was made possible by movements for self-determination.
Diluting Black Gathering
The Block’s redevelopment, under the Pemulwuy project, does not, on the face of it, fall into the category of extra-economic dispossession, which is the focus of this thesis. The Aboriginal Housing Company who officially owns the land is a private landholder. Its redevelopment plans will transform the site into a mixed-use precinct with commercial facilities, private student accommodation for up to 600, and 62 affordable homes for Black residents. In my analysis its actions are not regular market transactions, and can be classified as extra-economic character on two counts. Firstly, the redevelopment is part of a broader transformation process undertaken in Redfern and Waterloo, following the 2004 ‘riots’, led primarily by the NSW Government. The Housing Company’s earlier plans were rejected on the basis that concentration of Black residents on its land was undesirable. The project was also declared a State Significant Development (State Environmental Planning Policy (State and Regional Development) 2011), and planning power has been re-scaled to the NSW state-level Government, away from the local authority, the City of Sydney, who held responsibility for approval under ‘regular’ market conditions. Secondly, the extra- economic character of the redevelopment lay in the fact that the Aboriginal Housing Company is not a typical market landlord. It was set up as a Black controlled organisation in the 1970s to support community housing needs in the middle of Sydney. As Wiradjuri Redfern Elder, Jenny Munro (2017, p. 7, emphasis author’s own) noted in her submission to the Pemulwuy project, ‘[The Housing Company] was mandated to protect it [the Block] and build it by the Black community it was supposed to serve and represent’. The Company’s authority by this reading was political authority, which it gained from Black residents’ expectations that it maintain control of land. The Pemulwuy plans to lease out ‘Aboriginal land’ for student housing and commercial development undoubtedly enact a form of economic power, where the Housing Company by virtue of its legal property rights redevelops land within the rules of the market. But its authority simultaneously assumes an ‘extra-economic’ character stemming from the expectations of Black residents. Redfern and Waterloo’s community-controlled organisations were set up as bastions of sovereignty and self- determination, not as regular market actors. Their holding up of Black property, a form of self- recognition, enacts that self-determination. The Housing Company’s legal property, authorised by the Australian state, thus comes into conflict with community expectations.
98 The unofficial character of Black property, its expression of, and legitimising of Blackness in the middle of the city, and the political authority of the Housing Company, have shaped the experience and contestation of dispossession in Redfern. Firstly, the lack of legal status, meant that the loss of Black property through the reduction of physical and social spaces, came with no compensation or official bureaucratic procedure. Under a settler legal regime, the Housing Company’s private property rights may have official recognition, but that does not extend to the unofficial property of Black residents in Redfern and Waterloo. Dispossession has consequently been fiercely contested outside of official legal channels, although this has not precluded participation in official planning processes. The bitterness and anger of the contestation is also partly an effect of the transparency of the extra-economic character of dispossession (see chapter 2); a visibility derived from the thwarting of expectations. The Housing Company was expected to represent the collective interest of the Black community, not behave as a market landholder. Its political intervention was not treated with the begrudging acceptance of normalised market-based operations. Gentrification in Redfern and Waterloo led by such everyday operation has been ongoing for over a decade. But despite community anger at this process, it has not provoked the ferocity of reaction directed at the Housing Company’s redevelopment scheme. In 2014 activists set up the Redfern Tent Embassy on the site of The Block, an occupation led by Jenny Munro which lasted for over a year. The protesters accused the Housing Company of acting like a private landlord, practising its ‘property’ rights, and disregarding a collective Black interest. In response, the Company deemed the occupation a trespass on private property and issued an eviction notice, fuelling further outrage, captured in a banner photographed, ‘This is Aboriginal land not private property’ (see Figure 5.1).
The statement that the land of The Block is ‘Aboriginal land’ goes to the heart of the second way in which holding up has shaped dispossession. The social and physical spaces set up by residents and community organisations enabled Black property and helped legitimise an urban Black presence. De-concentration in Redfern and Waterloo, and a redistribution of land used by Black residents, is a loss of the social legitimacy signified by that concentration, and a loss of the space that makes Black property possible. It devalues the assertion of Blackness in an urban area. This diminishing is consequently framed as a continuation of settler colonialism, particularly its historical and ongoing propensity to exclude Black communities from urban areas (Survival Guide 2018b.). Australia’s history is replete with such examples. Earlier periods of colonisation saw efforts to expel Aboriginal people from Sydney by the then so-called Protector of the ‘Aborigenes’, George Thornton through the closure of Metropolitan Aboriginal camps (Nugent 2005). The pattern reflects a long-standing trope that Black people are unfit for city life and belong outside of urban areas in the ‘bush’ (Morgan 2006). In Redfern and Waterloo, the establishment of the Block as an urban site of Aboriginal housing caused moral consternation, and faced intense stigmatisation for the entirety of its life culminating in the
99 state redevelopment proposals initiated following the Redfern ‘riots’ (Anderson 1993; Morgan 2006; Shaw 2007). This urban exclusion of Blackness is found across Australia. The presence of Aboriginal fringe camps on the outskirts of towns, across the nation is partly a consequence of this spatialisation of race, which in some cases was effected through legislation (Delmege 2005; Edmonds 2012; Foley 2007; Lyons 1983).
The NSW Government’s redevelopment of the Waterloo Estate is part of this settler erasure of Black property in the Redfern-Waterloo areas. As discussed in Chapter 4, the Government has played a critical role in facilitating the project through the centralisation of planning power and the location of the Waterloo metro stop opposite the Estate. This visible show of political power and the fact that the Estate’s existing Black occupancy contributes to the formation of Black property, has further sharpened calls that the Estate’s gentrification like that of the Block continues settler colonial dispossession. Lorna Munro and Joel Sherwood-Spring, two young Black people who spent their formative years in Redfern and Waterloo, on their radio show, Survival Guide, have explicitly identified gentrification with settler colonialism (Survival Guide 2018a). During a talk at the 2018 Sydney biennale, Joel explained (Munro et al. 2018):
the changing or the revitalising, the improving of space … [to] … a middle-class standard or an upper middle- class standard and I mean when you exist in the societies that we do exist in Australia that means white. White standards. White standards of civility, white standards of cleanliness, white standards of order, aesthetic you know all of this stuff. My perspective is like your flat white has a Black history…this is all about people taking up important spaces.
At the same event Lorna rhetorically asked (Munro et al. 2018):
What it is about Black gathering that makes white people so scared?
Bringing their observations into a conversation with a propertied lens on dispossession indicates how the holding up of collective property, through the provision of affordable housing, has shaped dispossession. Joel’s statements refer to the taking of space through projects like Pemulwuy, and the privatisation of land under the Waterloo redevelopment. Black collective property had been performed and is performed in these spaces because the affordable rent enables low income Black
100 residents to possess land. The Pemulwuy project promises to maintain housing for the Black community and the Waterloo project has committed to providing social housing following redevelopment, but in both cases the expanse of commercial facilities and private accommodation amounts to less land for Black occupation and a thinning of their concentrated collective possession. There is also scepticism as to whether Pemulwuy will dedicate any housing for low income Black residents. The apartments surrounding The Block, owned by the corporation Deicorp have a straight view of the site (see Figure 5.2).
Figure 5. 2 View of the Block from Deicorp Apartment (Source: Author 2017)
Deicorp are the Housing Company’s developers and the two organisations have worked together for many years, with Greg Colbran, Deicorp’s project manager, being included among the Company’s team members maintaining oversight of the Pemulwuy project. Speculation has been rife that given the developers’ interest in maintaining the monetary value of the apartments around The Block, it is unlikely that new housing will support low-income Black residents.
In Waterloo concerns about de-concentration and whether residents will be able to return following redevelopment are accompanied with questions about how the project will affect the railing by the Turanga building where TJ Hickey was fatally injured. The building is the starting point of an
101 annual march in his honour and the railing is of importance to his family. The significance of TJ’s passing, and its association with the site on the Waterloo Estate is part of the physical and social complex across Redfern and Waterloo that holds up collective Black property in the area. Residents have communicated that TJ’ s story should not disappear through ‘interference with or removal of the railing’ (Kathy Jones Associates 2018, p. 46). Of the three renewal options presented by LAHC in 2019, two currently eat through the physical space of the Green. It remains unclear how the final redevelopment proposal will manage the site.
The loss of land and dispersal of people in Redfern and Waterloo discussed above, places stress on Black collective property, continuing settler colonial dispossession of land. This framing of the redevelopments in the suburbs is expressed in the catch phrase of one of Survival Guide’s episodes, ‘gentrification is colonisation’ (Survival Guide 2018a). Lorna’s previous quote about why people fear Black gathering, refers to police violence directed at Black protestors during the original Tent Embassy occupation in Canberra in 1973, which inspired the Redfern occupation of 2014, and multiple others around Australia. Her statements draw parallels between gentrification in Redfern, the redevelopment of public housing in Waterloo, and police brutality in Canberra – they all comprise a dismantling of Black gathering, a dismantling of the complex of physical and social space that holds up Black possession of land.
Aboriginal temporalities and Settler Slow Violence?
JE, a Black woman raised in Redfern framed the processes that Lorna and Joel identified, temporally, expressing frustration at a familiar pattern of being ‘moved on’ (17 May 2018):
and you've got to remember the displacement has gone on for Aboriginal people from the year dot. So when they get their foot in, they’re moved on again. They've moved them out of The Block, you know that was that's their land, that's our land that was given to us.
Black Waterloo tenants, who happened to be evictees from The Block who were re-housed in Waterloo, while sitting at yet another Tent Embassy occupation, this time on the Waterloo Green, pointed out to the continual nature of dispossession that Black people have contested. They drew parallels between the evictions on The Block in Redfern, what was happening in Waterloo, and settler colonial dispossession in a similar way to Lorna and Joel (There Goes Our Neighbourhood 2018):
102
We are a community; we are like we were on The Block, we are living it over and over again. When they gonna turn the page? When they moved us [from The Block] they just took me out of the house for 11 months…I haven’t got a record on The Block…paying my rent all the time. I’ve been here [Waterloo] 26 years …so what it is…for me living in that house for the rest of my last few years because I haven’t got long to go but this is what they do to every Aboriginal person…they are trying to make us fringe dwellers again.
The statement that, ‘they are trying to make us fringe dwellers again’ speaks of a threat to collective Black property in Waterloo and Redfern. While LAHC might argue that they are not moving people out from Waterloo, and their intention is for most people to move from their current homes into their new ones, it remains to be seen how feasible this will be. But moreover, the redevelopment still aims to dilute a public housing population, where there is a Black presence, and reduce the amount of space available for such housing. In so doing, it attenuates a concentrated possession of land, breaking up the physical and social nexus that constitutes, and holds up Black property. As with the redevelopment of the Block, little value is bestowed on this formation by the settler state, making redevelopment a devaluation of Black property and life.
JE and the Waterloo occupiers’ temporal framing of the redevelopment of The Block and Waterloo, emphasises the continual violence of settler colonialism in Australia. I see this as form of slow violence, incremental in nature and not spectacular (Nixon 2011). While the suburb’s redevelopments might be large and noticeable events in themselves, they also constitute ‘smaller’ instances in a wider chain of events that Black communities are living ‘over and over again’. Dispossession in Redfern and Waterloo emerge here as both ‘hot conflict’, to use Rachel Pain’s (2019) words, when viewed individually, and as part of a broader process of ‘slow violence’ through which settler colonial dispossession continues. The use of the term slow violence is not to demean the significance of these instances, but to make the point that settler colonial registers of property and time do not interpret such moments as examples of colonisation. A colonial and capitalist register of time, instead, frames the changes in Redfern and Waterloo, as prominent instances of urban development that will socially and economically improve the areas. Aboriginal temporalities are silenced and obscured in such a framing, that takes for granted the state’s ownership of land, and its authority to redevelop that land. The political significance of the events in Waterloo and Redfern is consequently undermined– recall Frank Sartor’s words, from chapter 4, claiming that
103 redevelopment of the Block is not a ‘racial issue’ and the dense gathering of any ‘ethnic group’ with a low socio-economic profile is undesirable (Dick 2005 b.). His words capture this settler non- registering of Aboriginal time horizons.
The violence of land loss through an Aboriginal lens, however, extends beyond the truncated timelines of redevelopment. Not only is the length of this time horizon different, in that it spans across centuries, but so too is the quality of this time - that is how time is experienced and understood. Firstly, Aboriginal time horizons frame the loss of land in Redfern and Waterloo, as one instance of dispossession among many. To quote JE again, ‘… remember the displacement has gone on for Aboriginal people from the year dot …’. Viewing the situation through Elizabeth Grosz’s conceptualisation of time, where time is both fragmented and whole, Aboriginal horizons ‘braid’ past dispossessions of land together, forming a ‘collective time’ of colonial dispossession (Grosz 1999, p. 17). Land loss in Redfern and Waterloo on its own might seem discrete and not a ‘spectacular’ example of colonisation, but taken together with a history of such loss it constitutes a trajectory of colonial dispossession. The situation in Redfern and Waterloo also highlights the urban dimension of colonisation, where extra-economic gentrification in the suburbs re-produces a settler pattern of casting Blackness outside of the city (Blatman Thomas 2019; Blomley 2004; Edmonds 2010; Porter 2018). The unsuccessful attempts to expel Sydney’s Aboriginal inhabitants in the 19th century by the Protector of the ‘Aborigenes’, George Thornton; the efforts to keep the Jagera and Turrbal people on the edge of urban areas in Brisbane; and, in more recent times, the redevelopment of the Swan Brewery site in Perth – a place of significance for Aboriginal residents (Jacobs 2002); and plans to exclude homeless people from Queensland’s parks, which disproportionately impacts Black communities (Smee 2019), are but a few prominent examples of the settler will to erase Aboriginality in urban areas. The housing redevelopments in Redfern and Waterloo are present-day expressions of such urban exclusion.
A second qualitative dimension of this Aboriginal temporality is that it operates not only on colonial registers of property, but incorporates the loss of unofficial property enactments. Both JE and the occupiers in Waterloo mention the loss of the Block, and others such as Lorna Munro and Joel Sherwood Spring have expressed anger at gentrification and the wider redistribution of land in Redfern. Their grievances thus include land that is not legally owned by all Black residents, such as that of the Waterloo Estate, but where a concentrated Black presence takes the shape of a collective and unofficial enactment of property. Whilst all land in Australia has been subject to colonisation, Redfern and Waterloo are significant for these residents because of Black residents’ collective possession through which urban land had been reclaimed.
The fast violence of urban redevelopment, where value is accorded to inner city land and valorisation proceeds by legal registers of property and to the rhythm of project timescales, clashes with these
104 Black temporal and spatial horizons of dispossession. Promises that residents can return to the Waterloo Estate after a period of temporary relocation, and that both Redfern and Waterloo will retain public housing and housing for Black residents, do not see the urban transformation in the suburbs that seize land, and that disaggregate Black possession, as a continuation of settler colonialism. In such registers time is the time of the redevelopment project, and land belongs to those with legal title. Black temporalities go unrecorded.
5.2 Precarious Property in Waterloo
In 2015 the NSW Government announced the redevelopment of the Waterloo Estate. As discussed in Chapter 4, the project entails the privatisation of land and the introduction of socially mixed housing on the Estate. In this section I first discuss how public housing tenants’ rental property, their unofficial mastery over the Estate, and their membership of the Estate’s community is held up by government policy, and by the social concentration of low-income residents on the Estate. I then turn to how tenants’ anticipations of dispossession manifest as a loss of membership of a place- based community. These anticipations are acutely shaped by the quality of tenants’ property relations, that is by how these relations are held up, and by the level of control inherent in LAHC’s political power, which makes dispossession appear certain.
5.2.1 Holding up Precarious Property: Welfare Policy and Social Concentration
Waterloo tenants’ sense of comfort and power over the Estate is a product of public policies and of the dense social gathering of low-income people, through which two forms of property are held up – their membership of the community of the Estate, and their mastery over the Estate. Public policies do the work of holding up by providing low income applicants with access to housing, and by placing conditions on such access, which require that applicants demonstrate acute levels of socio-economic precarity in order to be considered eligible for state housing. Such conditions shape the character of property. While tenants enact official rental property, they also participate in the production of a collective property, that is underpinned by a common precarious way of being. While individual tenants do not perform property in the interest of the broader group, the gathering of tenants facing materially difficult circumstances on public housing estates like Waterloo shapes the space of these estates, making them comfortable for similar groups of people. Tenants’ individual rental properties through their concentration in an area, thus comes to perform a collective property. This collective property is partly held up by government policy, and partly by tenants’ possession of land, by which their presence is legitimised. It also orients the space of the Estate towards the needs of materially precarious residents. In so doing it holds up tenants’
105 belonging on the Estate, that is property as membership, where they are able to find social acceptance.
NSW Housing Allocation Policy: The Conditions of Mastery and Membership
The NSW Government’s eligibility criteria determines access to social housing based on applicants material precarity (Family and Community Services 2019), with income being a critical determinant. Eligibility places one on a waiting list, which in inner city Sydney is between 5-10 years. The NSW Social Housing Eligibility and Allocations Policy, defines a precarious person against a ‘normal’ person in three ways, primarily determined by the capacity to access suitable market-based housing. Firstly, it sets income eligibility limits, that specify the maximum income thresholds for households to be entitled to public housing. For a single adult household, the figure is $640 a week, with an additional $240 weekly for every additional adult. To put this in perspective, the median weekly personal income in Sydney according to the 2016 census was $1060. The stringent income criteria is a product of a history of public housing policy, that since its mass introduction in the post-World War II era, has positioned the ‘market’ as the ‘normal’ provider of dwelling (Hayward 1996; Yates 2013). Income eligibility was first introduced in a 1973 agreement between the federal Australian government and the state levels (Yates 2013). The means-testing was motivated by criticisms that public housing did not accommodate the poorest in society. Criteria to access this type of property has grown increasingly stringent since that decision. Secondly it typically requires that applicants do not own assets or property through which their housing needs might be resolved, although the condition is waved in circumstances where it is untenable for the applicant to live in the property they own, such as instances where it is located in another country or if they are at risk of violence should they return. Thirdly the Allocations policy prioritises people in urgent need and those who cannot access suitable market-based housing (Audit Office NSW 2013, p.14; FACS 2019). The prioritisation of those in ‘urgent’ need, means that not only does one have to demonstrate a low income, but also other forms of deprivation and marginalisation, in order to reduce wait times. These are defined by unstable housing conditions, situations where applicants are at risk of harm, where accommodation is physically and socially inappropriate for them and where clients are survivors of racist colonial policies of child removal from Aboriginal families or of institutional child sexual abuse.
Precariousness is, of course, a fundamental human condition, life is constituted by, and dependent on relations with others, but this vulnerability is spread unevenly across the population. As Clara Han (2018) notes, drawing on Judith Butler and Isabel Lorey’s work, precarity, is a ‘differential distribution’ of ‘primary vulnerability’. This makes it a characteristic of a person and is structured by their relationship with the world. In a housing context, as defined by NSW’s housing Allocations
106 Policy, it manifests in people’s differential levels of access to the resources and socio-economic privileges and protections that would allow them to access market-based accommodation. Compared to the personal qualities of race or religion, whose extensive histories and presents of codification, makes them familiar characteristics of people, precarity is less widely discussed and acknowledged as a characteristic or personal quality. Precarity as a property/attribute is however implicitly codified in government policy that sets conditions on who qualifies as a ‘member’ of a public housing social whole, thus determining who can gather on Estate’s like Waterloo.
The exacerbation of material precarity through structural inequalities of class, race, age and bodily ability etc. which distribute vulnerability unevenly, is evident in who inhabits the Waterloo public housing Estate, and public housing more generally. 43% of residents in Waterloo were born overseas, 16% in Russia and China. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander residents make up at least 8% of all residents, see Figure 5.3, compared with a state-wide average of 1.4 % (Bagshaw 2017).
RESIDENTS PLACE OF BIRTH
Australian born (non ATSI)
23 26 Australian born ATSI
Residents born in China
Residents born in Russia Percentage % Percentage 8
Residents born in other 27 countries 8
Residents place of birth non 8 identified
Figure 5. 3 Waterloo Estate residents’ place of birth (Source: Land and Housing Corporation 2017)
107 H and LO’s, stories of accessing public housing are testimony to the socio-economic difficulties that people must demonstrate to hold a tenancy. They both managed to pull through years of housing uncertainty and homelessness before finding accommodation on the Redfern and Waterloo estates respectively (H Interview 24 April 2018; LO Interview 13 August 2017):
I came into housing due to two reasons, my health which meant I was on a low income in fact I am on a disability support pension, and as well as domestic violence. So prior to housing, I lived in my own home although there was a period of time before then I was homeless …my last job was 2007 before I got my injury, and I was able to afford housing then. But of course, when I got my injury, I ended up back in that cycle of couch surfing and homelessness….so I was on the list from … 2008 ... So, from 2008 till 2014 I was applying and applying, and I had very good medical grounds because of my injury … and you're wondering why am I'm not getting housed? I've jumped all the hoops. I've provided all the paperwork. There's something seriously wrong with this system…so basically 2010 I basically managed through riding trains um repeatedly being asked to jump their hoops, until my doctor wrote to them and said you’ll stop asking her to fill out forms she’s met all your conditions and she needs to be housed … I still wasn’t housed until the end of 2014.
I found that I had mental problems. So, the challenge of that and my reaction or my behaviour shall I say, I got the sack. So then I couldn’t afford my flat in Manly so I got put out of there … so from there I ended up living in Cronulla at a boarding house … and then from there I went to a trailer park this is still with my boxes … and then from there I was put on the street and so I was street homeless for about a year and a half to two years and then a friend of mine turned me onto this guy that had a boarding house ... and I was there for 6 months. The guy that was there with me,a mate of mine, I talked to his carer and asked is there anything she could help me do … and so she
108 asked me if I had records from my psychiatrist … and so within a period of 6-8 months I got the place that I have now.
These acute levels of precarity are reflected in the Government statistics, where in Waterloo for just under 30% of tenants the disability support pension is the primary source of income, for approximately 15% it is the Government’s Newstart allowance and for 40% of tenants it is the aged pension, (Land and Housing Corporation 2017), (see Figure 5.4). H and LO’s respective subject positions, that of an Aboriginal woman, and that of a migrant to Australia who has battled with mental health conditions, point to a correlation between structural inequalities along lines of race, gender, citizenship and material precarity.
45 PRIMARY INCOME TYPE
40
35
30
25
Percentage % Percentage 20
15
10
5
0 Age Disability Newstart Wages Carer Parenting Veterans Other pension Support Payment Payment Pension Income Type
Figure 5. 4 Waterloo Residents’ Primary Source of Income (Source: Land and Housing Corporation 2017)
NSW Government’s Allocation Policy holds up tenants’ mastery over their housing as renters, and an unofficial collective mastery over the space of the estates on which they live, by both enabling access and by setting condition on who can access. On estates like Waterloo the Policy produces a concentrated possession or gathering of people who live with precarity. This possession, enacts and holds up a collective form of property as mastery, as seen in the discussions of Black property, and
109 property as membership. The collectiveness of mastery is in the diverse but shared precarity of tenants who inhabit the Estate, a shared ‘ontology’ (Roy 2017). This concentrated possession acts on the space of Waterloo, shaping it into a place that is orientated to supporting precarious lives. The Estate’s social space thus comes to hold up tenants’ membership of a precarious social whole. Both mastery and membership are thus effects of government policy, and the social legitimacy conferred on them through the concentrated presence precarity. In the discussion below I primarily focus on how property as membership is enabled on the Estate.
The Enabling Effects of Concentration: Property as Membership
The dense concentration of people on the Waterloo Estate who face different and multiple forms of precarity has orientated the place around those bodies which contravene the norms of a white, middle-class and ableist society. While in conventional social narratives, that valorise the amassing of wealth and access to private housing, precarity is undesirable, in Waterloo the gathering of precarious people holds up individual tenants’ membership of a community. It enables tenants to be on the Estate as they are, shielding them from social judgement that they is more acute in other places. Whilst not all residents feel such recognition, it was expressed in multiple interviews and conversations I had with tenants. KB, who lives on the Waterloo Estate singled out its non- judgemental environment as among the aspects she really liked about it (Interview 12 April 2017):
What I like about it is kind of the space of the area and the people. Um because there are lots of like kind of fucked up people, and so they don’t judge, they don’t judge, basically. That’s actually what’s really nice about it. It’s kind of all welcoming
These statements indicate that people’s precarity is accepted on the Estate, allowing them to secure community membership. Having the property of being precarious, does not make one ‘out of place’ in Waterloo, the way it might elsewhere. KB does not specify which acts or ways of being are performances of precarity, no doubt these will take a myriad of forms. But, her personal sense of comfort on the Estate indicates the enabling effect of residential concentration, where precarious ways of being are welcomed.
The gathering of tenants also holds up the belonging of precarious people by placing boundaries around who belongs and who does not. Like in the case of Black property discussed previously,
110 tenants’ collective possession of space generates an exclusionary power. This manifests in the discomfort of wealthier outsiders on the Estate. While KB says Waterloo is all welcoming, she acknowledged later in the interview that it was not for everyone, indicating that there is a certain whole or group, that people in Waterloo are a part of, and not everyone can belong there. MW, a former senior UrbanGrowth employee, expressed his exclusionary experience of feeling unsafe on the Waterloo estate, even as a middle-aged man (Interview 14 April 2018):
It’s an enormous concentration of social housing tenants with nobody else there, and it creates certain social stigma, but also, it creates a concentration of disadvantage which… has issues. And if you spend time sort of say if you walk around in the evening in winter time around Waterloo it’s not a great experience, and I’ve done that I actually went round there personally to see what it was like, to have that lived experience, and uhh as a kind of as a middle aged bloke, um you find yourself being on alert because of the environment which you’re in and say for a woman walking around at night I don’t think it would be a particularly pleasant experience….[The] Waterloo [estate] for someone who lives nearby is almost a no go area. So, there’s open spaces within Waterloo. The only people who go there are public housing tenants. Other people do not go.
Among the alleged no-go open spaces that MW mentions is the Waterloo Green, that is currently used by older housing tenants, tenants with disabilities and Aboriginal residents. The users of this space have passing social chats, take short walks around it and also meet and socialise in groups. The gathering of precarious bodies on the Green signals who belongs and who does not, that is it sets conditions on property. MW lacked the precarious characteristic of Waterloo tenants, and consequently was not part of the social entity to which residents belonged. While there is no explicit description of why he felt uncomfortable, other public servants I interviewed expressed similar feelings. One of his colleagues mentioned that they never visit estates alone for fear of hostility, while a LAHC staff member claimed that they change their style of clothing when visiting housing estates, so as to fit in with the people there. He had just returned from such a visit donning casual clothing which included a hoodie. In this narrative external appearance is a marker of socio- economic privilege, and indicates whether one fits or is an outsider in places like Waterloo. Visible signs of precarity then, are a condition of membership to the tenant community of Waterloo. This type of ‘boundary’ making is not stringently policed and is somewhat fluid, as Blomley (2004)
111 reminds us. The extent to which people feel excluded from Waterloo also depend on their particular subjectivities and their reading of the space of the Estate. Nonetheless, the social space in Waterloo created by tenants , produces an uncodified power to exclude wealthier outsiders.
In identifying the work of precarity as property in accessing housing, in conferring social legitimacy and noting its exclusionary effects my point is not that social housing tenants are advantaged, or recipients of undeserved advantages. Rather, the point is that while their gathering in Waterloo has been demonised in government narratives that look to ‘improve’ the Estate through a policy of social mix (see Chapter 4), this very gathering holds up their belonging in Waterloo, and is productive of benefits.
5.2.2 Dispossession: Social Mix, a Loss of Comfort and Worth
Resident anticipations of dispossession through redevelopment in Waterloo, are shaped by the ways in which belonging is held up by the social concentration of tenants and by government policy. These anticipations reveal the influence of NSW Government’s welfare obligations to house tenants, on the course of dispossession. The state’s authority to privatise land and centralise planning power, as discussed in chapter 4, is tempered by these obligations. Tenants cannot be dispossessed of social housing altogether, in the course of the redevelopment, as might happen in a market-based eviction. The state must find them alternative accommodation. Its policy of social mix, where tenants remain on the Waterloo Estate but live alongside private residents, allows it to meet such obligations (while simultaneously releasing the finance necessary for redevelopment, by privatising part of its land base). This makes for a very particular experience of ‘in place’ dispossession that is different to a more ‘standard’ eviction, where the landlord has no such responsibility to hold up tenants’ property. The Waterloo redevelopment in this respect also varies from other cases where extra-economic force is wielded by the state, in circumstances where it bears no such obligations to re-house dispossessed residents, as we will see in the following chapters that discuss compulsory acquisition.
The planned introduction of socially mixed housing in Waterloo, (70% private and 30% social housing), has raised various concerns among tenants about what life will be like with neighbours who are private homeowners or renters. Anticipations of dispossession expressed a loss of comfort and a loss of worth, resulting from a policy of diluting tenants’ gathered togetherness, that currently holds up their membership to the community of the Estate. In other words, narratives of dispossession were framed as a diminishing of the intangible benefits, produced by belonging to a social group. AK who has lived in Waterloo for decades was not happy at the prospect (Interview 21 June 2017):
112 And they want to put the private and the public. I say this building, they will be half private or half public or every floor will be different? How you mean? We don't know. If will be in one building, private and public well then, private people will have beautiful curtains, expensive curtains and the poor [public] people they didn't have money, they will look cheap. That wouldn't be nice
‘In-place’ dispossession, through the introduction of socially mixed housing, is anticipated as a loss of the acceptance and legitimacy of residents’ visible signs of precarity, that is currently produced by the dense precarious community around them. Since my interview with AK, LAHC staff have strongly indicated by word of mouth, that the social and privately-owned buildings will be separate. But her concerns about looking ‘cheap’, speaks to a larger concern about social exclusion, where precarity will position tenants as inferior to others in the same neighbourhood, denigrating their way of being in the world. The intangible benefits of precarious property, i.e. the sense of comfort and acceptance derived from social approval, with which it came to be imbued with value, is thus threatened.
AN who arrived in Waterloo shortly before the redevelopment was announced, voiced similar worries about the social mix policy (Interview 05 April 2018):
Well, either there'll be complete segregation like has happened in the past, or a sort of attempt at some kind of community space that two years later will be walled off and we, as housing people, will get the dark, cold bit and they'll have the fountain and the water feature or whatever it is…But what I particularly resent is this... this kind of propaganda it's not really spoken, but the implication goes something like this, for me: 'You people should be very grateful to these nice rich people because they're going to pay for your houses
The social exclusion that AN refers to was seen on the Carlton public housing Estate in Melbourne, where certain community spaces were only accessible to private renters and owners (Fincher et al. 2019). She also has apprehensions about the privatisation of land that will occur through the Waterloo redevelopment, that makes public housing tenants the direct beneficiaries of their privately housed neighbours’ wealth. AN expresses disdain for the idea that she should show gratitude to future private
113 property owners on the estate. In her framing of the situation, it embeds inequality into the future space of the estate and diminishes her sense of self-worth. Social mix is productive of an estate where public housing tenants’ access to dwelling space becomes dependent on private home-owners’ wealth. Thinking back to KB’s above statements regarding the lack of judgement in Waterloo, the acceptance of precarious lives is also an acknowledgement of the worth of such lives; a worth that diminishes when neighbouring private wealth subsidises social housing. One group of people are subject to the ‘charity’ of another, who are not the distant and diffuse group of ‘taxpayers’, but rather their immediate neighbours. AN’s fears anticipate dispossession through a weakening of tenants’ belonging to the Waterloo community by the institution of relations of dependence between two groups, who have significant wealth disparities. Her fear is that she will be expected to show gratitude and reverence for the ‘charity’ she has received.
5.2.3 Dispossession and Local Support Services
Tenants concerns centre not only on the loss of community on the Estate, but also extend to the spaces of the broader suburb, whose gentrification they fear will be exacerbated by the Estate’s redevelopment. A range of non-governmental organisations in and around Waterloo and neighbouring Redfern deliver community services to locals. Their official and informal forms of place-based support are particularly directed at residents contending with acute levels of socio- economic precarity, making them useful for Waterloo’s public housing tenants. Alongside government welfare policies and the concentrated of precarious residents, these services enable relations of mastery and membership over and to the locality. While the redevelopment of the Waterloo Estate does not directly impact them, there is a concern that the acceleration of gentrification will impact local services’ capacity to operate.
The Holding Up of Community Services
Multiple state and non-governmental organisations offer a range of different support services to Waterloo and Redfern’s diverse residents which are particularly helpful for the public housing community, for residents managing substance abuse and those for whom English is not a first language. Such organisations have their roots in the areas’ history as open to low income, migrant and Aboriginal residents. The spaces support people in carrying out a whole array of necessary life tasks, including managing the public housing administration, caring for their children and remain socially engaged in the community. Two organisations that play an important role are Counterpoint Community Services, operating since 1977, and South Sydney Community Aid (SSCA), operating since 1968, now incorporated into Counterpoint, as Counterpoint Multicultural Services (CMS).
114 Counterpoint acts as a grass-roots local service provider, with a managing committee comprised of residents. A range of different organisations and individuals operate out of its community centre, the Factory, including a support worker to assist Waterloo tenants with the redevelopment, and a longer- term support employee who assists with the public housing neighbourhood advisory boards. CMS also provides services to people from outside of the Estate, many of which are directed at people from non-English speaking and non-Anglo backgrounds. It engages in community development work by running multi-cultural playgroups and events, and providing advocacy services, referrals and information and advice on issues such as housing and government welfare payments. LK and K who works for Counterpoint walked me through some of ways in which they supported residents (Interview 04 December 2017):
We do have a lot of Chinese clients, and Chinese groups and
mainly because of our multicultural centre, their main needs that they want are English classes and social activities; so whether its playing majong, whether it’s doing like a Cantonese opera group or cooking together like having community celebrations where they can come perform, share things about their culture, and well just kind of be together, I think that what we found with the groups just being able to be with people from your own culture and own language background
Housing support, shelter and housing, mental health probably like informal mental health services…. drug and alcohol, again informally…housing number one for sure…transfers, applications, maintenance, difficulties with housing, so difficulties with communication and just outcomes with housing I suppose…people who come in and wanna use the computers. So, we have a steady flow of people that wanna come in and just be able to access, go on the social media, check their email…access their Centrelink…print out their statements
Such NGO’s provide the necessary physical space, the workers and the know-how for a diverse range of people so that they can physically, socially and financially maintain themselves in Waterloo and
115 Redfern. The acute precarity that comes from not fitting with the social norms of being economically comfortable, from a dominant socio-cultural group and being physically healthy, is supported and alleviated to an extent through place-based resources. The physical and social spaces and networks of Redfern and Waterloo’s community services thus hold up the membership of precarious residents, by supporting their social practices and needs. These practices and needs, whether they are mental health related, language classes, or cultural activities identify residents as part of a social whole. The repetition of accessing and engaging local services practised over years cements belonging to a place. While the NGO services that do the work of holding up membership, are open to all groups, as community worker NS, who ran Counterpoint’s playgroups, explained, (Interview 2017), they are more useful for precarious residents than wealthier communities. They hold an exclusionary effect/power by virtue of this socio-economic orientation of their services. The type of services that the NGO’s offer also hold up precarious residents’ collective mastery in the area. On an individual basis residents’ accessing of services does not appear as a collective act of property, however, these actions begin to follow the contours of such property when seen together, and when the repetition of these acts over years in the same places is accounted for. These actions coalesce into a collective that physically and socially organises a place. While they are performed and taken in the interest of individuals, they are underpinned by a way of being, where the performers are those who face multiple forms of precarity. Those who do not lead precarious lives are not supported, or rather they are not in need of the services in the area.
Dismantling of Support Services?
The potential loss of the multiple social services, such as those offered by Counterpoint, is a concern for residents like KB. While the Waterloo redevelopment is directed at the Estate, there are fears of a follow-on effect, where a whole-sale classed transformation will make local NGOs’ redundant and under-funded. KB in anticipating Waterloo post- redevelopment claimed (Interview 12 April 2017):
Everything will be horrible…lots of the social services…there’s something for people with children and there’s something for people with drug problems, there’s just all sorts of things like that. I just don’t know if there will still be there when the average income goes up, ‘cause then we won’t qualify. The funding will go to a poorer area of the city.
116 Recent studies in urban geography (DeVerteuil 2010) highlight the survivability of local NGOs in gentrifying cities, but residents like KB still fear a socio-cultural re-orientation of place through the loss of funding for Waterloo’s social services. The area will no longer be ‘poor’ enough, as she puts it. Another tenant in an interview with the Guardian expressed that they felt, ‘on the verge of extinction’ because of such transformation (Weeks 2017). These anticipations of dispossession through the dismantling of place-based services, also speak to a loss of precarious property which is held up by local services. Feeling ‘on the verge of extinction’ expresses an ending of one’s capacity to be in the world, which in the case of large urban transformations such as those in Redfern and Waterloo, proceeds through the loss of social and physical spaces that hold up collective mastery and membership.
5.3 The Temporality of Redevelopment: Producing the Future Space of Waterloo
In this section I analyse how the temporality of the Waterloo project, which to date has included the announcement and consultation process, has been shaped by the official legal holding up of LAHC’s authority as the landholder, and the paternalism of Government policy and practices through which tenants’ rental property is held up. Further complicating the mix is LAHC’s extra-economic power, as a state entity, by virtue of which it has been able to influence planning regulation. I firstly identify and analyse the paternalistic and controlling policies, tenancy legislation and practices which enable and place conditions on Waterloo tenants’ property, following which I analyse how this interacts with LAHC’s authority as the landlord to configure redevelopment. So far, LAHC has initiated and significantly controlled the length and format of events that constitute the consultation, circumscribed tenant participation, ordered the sequence of events and controlled the release of information. LAHC’s control and paternalism in the process, stems from and mirrors the policies and practices that hold up its property claims vis-à-vis tenants. Consequently, the property-power to shape a place enacted in public consultation is unevenly distributed between LAHC and Waterloo tenants. Attending to the temporality of dispossession reveals how the state’s control over the process of redevelopment limits tenants’ mastery, with the latter forcefully reminded of their lack of control and input over their estate’s future, and of the fact that their tenancies are not only based on their precarity, but are precarious in themselves, dependent on a landlord who has the power to redistribute them across space as it sees fit, in a time of its choosing. This time of redevelopment, in effect, continues the same uneven distribution of power between state landlord and tenant that characterises public housing tenancies.
117 5.3.1 The Conditions of Public Housing Property: Paternalistic Governance
Waterloo tenants’ property, that is their mastery over their homes, is held up in ways that set paternalistic conditions upon their behaviour. While previously my discussions paid attention to tenants’ property as membership, in this section I attend to their formal rental property. The conditions placed on such rental property, that hold it up, are defined in NSW Government legislation, such as the NSW’s Residential Tenancies Act (2010), state housing policies and they are enforced by LAHC’s parent department, Family and Community Services, who manages public housing tenancies. While many of the conditions overlap with those of private tenancies, some are premised on the treatment of social housing as a ‘non-commodity’ good, and are underpinned by a paternalistic logic that sets financial and moral conditions on tenants’ behaviour.
Stringent income eligibility criteria require that tenants demonstrate their precarity during tenancy reviews and when additional occupants join the household in order to retain their social housing, akin to what Mark Peel (2003) terms a ‘performance of poverty’. Such checks create disincentives to increase one’s income beyond a certain threshold. The income eligibility criteria that tenants must adhere to, so that the state continues to hold up their property, is a condition that does not specifically relate to practices that typically qualify as property as mastery such as, caring for one’s home, paying the rent or carrying out maintenance. The state’s holding up extends instead to a control of employment prospects and of people’s capacity to earn money. Breaching conditions of income eligibility runs the risk of losing one’s tenancy.
Financial conditions are accompanied by moral conditions that apply to social housing, and are outlined in FACS’s tenancy policy statements on being a good neighbour (Family and Community Services 2018 a), its anti-social behaviour management policy (Family and Community Services 2018 b) and parts of the NSW Residential Tenancies Act (2010). The two policies outline the behavioural expectations of tenants and the steps FACS might take in response to breaches, such as encouraging formal mediation, seeking information from other agencies such as the police and applying visitor sanctions. The Residential Tenancies Act (2010) also polices tenants’ behaviours by sanctioning the use of Acceptable Behaviour Agreements, that requires them and other occupants to make a commitment of refraining from specified anti-social behaviours. Legal action for breaking such commitments might include proceedings in the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal that lead to a termination of tenancy or use of the strike provisions of the NSW Residential Tenancies Act (2010) which can also place a tenancy at risk (Family and Community Services 2018b). The extent to which tenants’ behaviour is and can actually be policed by housing law and policy will vary across cases and people’s ingenuity might allow them to evade the system. But such conditions of holding up tenancy, in principle, act as governance mechanisms that shape tenant behaviour.
118 In reality, eviction from social housing is rare given the state’s responsibilities to meet critical housing needs. But deviating from expected behavioural standards might trigger interventions from FACS such as the issuing of strike notices that can build up to threaten a rental tenancy. The explicitness of the response to anti-social behaviour, outlined in FACS’s policies and the Residential Tenancies Act (2010), is not seen or at least not common in private tenancy contracts, where such behaviours are perhaps not expected to the same extent. Furthermore, it is not the responsibility of a market landlord to resolve them, who can more easily resort to eviction in the event of difficult tenants. The state’s welfare obligations, instead, lead it to adopt controlling and paternalistic practices that seek to maintain public housing tenancies. This holding up of public rental property thus produces a precarious security.
5.3.2 The Troubled Mastery of Tenants: Fixing One’s Home
Another way in which the NSW Government holds up tenants’ property practices, that has a bearing on the redevelopment process, is in the control of maintenance, a critical practice through which social housing tenants exert mastery over their dwelling. Unlike privately owned homes where homeowners can, to an extent, modify their physical space and carry out maintenance work without seeking permission from a higher authority, tenants in both public and private housing overwhelmingly rely on their landlord and/or estate agents. LAHC’s position as the landholder on the Waterloo Estate, allows it to set the parameters of tenants’ mastery, thus holding them up in a limited way. Unlike the scrutiny around income, and the Acceptable Behaviour Agreements, such control actually sets conditions on actions, that more directly relate to property as mastery, that is they relate to the ‘thing’ of property or to the relations between people with respect to that thing. It shapes which acts of property that tenants can engage in, and which ones are officially cast outside of their property powers. Fixing things independently of LAHC’s contractors, who are responsible for maintenance, lies outside of tenants’ propertied remit. But even in this limited form, tenants exercise property as mastery by organising the maintenance of their homes. Tenants identify the necessary problems and fixes, make demands of the landlord, and follows these up. Such practices are encumbered and sometimes thwarted by the difficulties of unresponsive contractors. DM, a Waterloo tenant, (Interview 07 March 2018) explained the challenges and frustrations in arranging small works in her home, but also highlighted some of her successes as a consequence of persistence and making minor improvements without turning to LAHC:
When I moved in here, I paid for the security I’ve got on the window. [When the garden fence] fell down…I phoned maintenance re. the fence and suggested [they] make it with a
119 lock on it. And I’ve been since told that no they won’t do that ...We’ve got trees out there that are hitting in the gutters and that, I’m trying to get that fixed. But as I say it’s a slow process, you go through maintenance, then you go from there … [LAHC], when they did the fences, planted some of the plants so the vines will grow up. But there wasn’t a lot of them. We’ve planted more along there so that eventually it’s gonna intertwine around the fence and look pretty and nice.
The systematic maintenance backlog was a pressing issue raised by the tenants’ group WPHAG, who have been contesting and trying to negotiate the terms of redevelopment with LAHC. The problems were so severe that the group considered class action against the Government (Sydney Criminal Lawyers 2016). The local NGO, Counterpoint Community Services also highlighted the severity of the problems in a submission to NSW Government’s Legislative Assembly Inquiry into the Management of the NSW Public Housing Maintenance Contracts (Kelly 2016). Maintenance issues relating to fumigation, flooding and dangerous leaks had not been completed in time with delays of up to 18 months. These scenarios occurred despite tenants exerting their property powers through repeated demands for works to be completed, and by eliciting the help of local NGOs and the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal.
In summary, the temporality of public housing tenancy is assembled by the control that the state exerts as a landholder on tenants’ propertied acts, and the paternalistic and welfare-orientated logics applied to tenants’ behaviours and their income generating capacity. Such control and paternalism continue to be applied in the course of redevelopment. Consequently, the power to shape the future of the Estate is unevenly distributed between LAHC and tenants.
5.3.3 The Slow Violence of Redevelopment: Property Power, Paternalism and Configuring Temporality
As the landholder LAHC has controlled the temporality of the project, that is its the length of time and the nature of the events that constitute it. As Estair Van Wagner notes, ownership allows for the exertion of ‘chronological power’ (Van Wagner 2018, p. 129). LAHC’s legally recognised title grants it authority on three fronts. It initiates and orders the sequence of events that comprise the redevelopment, it controls the release of information relevant to the project and it circumscribes tenants’ agency in processes of consultation, thus limiting their capacity to shape the future of their estate. Additionally, the same paternalistic governance which tenants’ property rights are subject to,
120 structures their participation in consultation, limiting their agency, while presenting the process as good for them. LAHC’s power as the landholder, its paternalistic holding up of tenants’ rental property, and the consequent diminishing of their agency, is further consolidated by the extra- economic power that LAHC yields, via centralised planning. The mandate to assess and approve the redevelopment has been rescaled from local authority to state-level Government, through Waterloo’s nomination as State Significant Precinct. As a part of the state-level government LAHC has influence over the planning process and the project’s approval, power which is not a feature of ‘normal’ market operations. Its control is evidenced in the confident tone of the project’s announcement, and the announcement of the Communities Plus programme more generally, (See Chapter 4), which occurred prior to the commencement of any statutory planning. While LAHC does not officially wield the authority to approve its own project, it is a member of a project review panel along with the Department of Planning, which will collectively make a recommendation to the NSW Minister for Planning and Environment with whom the final decision rests. But given that the project has already been announced, there is a certainty to LAHC’s power suggesting that rejection is unlikely.
While the project was announced in December 2015, as of September 2019 no construction work has commenced on the Estate, nor has planning approval been received. But tenants have still had to engage with a range of communications and engagement sessions. I view this temporality, that is the trajectory of events comprising them, as bearing similarities to Rob Nixon’s (2011, p.2) conceptualisation of slow violence - ‘incremental’ in nature and not ‘spectacular’. While the redevelopment may be characterised as a spectacular event, its workings comprise everyday lowkey occurrences. The time scales here are different to the Aboriginal time horizons discussed at the beginning of this chapter, which situate the redevelopment in a broader settler colonial process. In contrast I adopt a narrow time horizon, that pays attention to the intimate operations of the redevelopment; thinking of it as a process, where for four years now tenants have been subject to uncertainty, frustrations and anxiety by the process.
Slow Violence: Announcements, Uncertainty and Anger
CS, who lives on the Waterloo Estate recounts receiving the letter about the redevelopment just before Christmas (Interview 30 August 2017):
when we received a letter in our letter box on the day. I wondered at the time why people were all running round in the foyer asking ‘[you've] seen the letter boxes haven't you?’ … I think several people would have been down there together
121 reading the letters and they were all somewhat astonished and I don't think really took it in. And when people did take it in of course, they wanted to go to the Factory for instance and South Sydney Community Aid. They wanted to go to places where they might get assurance and answers to their questions. But of course, they were shut. And later on when asked about it … Anne Skewes [Deputy Secretary, NSW Land and Housing Corporation]…said ‘oh but you know we had to put it out then because otherwise if it came out later you'd think we're all lying to you we think you're lying to us anyway. But I think what she meant was that the decision had been made.
Others I interviewed shared similar feelings of uncertainty, shock and not quite ‘taking it in’. Recall AK, quoted in the last chapter, who on receiving the letter thought she might faint. Such reactions are a consequence of the unexpectedness of the announcement, the transparency of imminent dispossession and the control that LAHC wielded as both a landholder and a state entity. Although Waterloo tenants have faced multiple state redevelopment attempts directed at their estate, and their precarity means that dispossession is not a novelty for them, their public housing tenure is held up by the welfare obligations of the state. It offers greater security from eviction than private rental housing. The state’s obligation to house its tenants, meant that the potential loss of dwelling space was not on tenants’ radar, nor was it morally palatable. Dispossession in such instances, where there is a breach of expectation, acquires a transparency. It is a direct separation of people from their place of residence, productive of shock and uncertainty, as it is not masked by the normalcy of market- based exclusion and eviction.
The experiences of shock and uncertainty were compounded by LAHC’s power as the property holder to make a decision about redevelopment without tenant input. To quote CS ‘the decision had been made’. This left tenants caught off guard. Such property power is further bolstered by the NSW Government’s extra-economic planning power, a remit over which LAHC has some influence as a member of the review panel which will recommend the project for official approval. The certainty expressed in LAHC’s announcement is underpinned by a coming together of both its property power and planning power, allowing it to initiate and implement redevelopment, regardless of the interests of the 3000 people housed on its land.
The transparency of dispossession, and LAHC’s enhanced control over decision-making was accompanied by the same paternalistic governance with which tenants’ rental property is held up. The redevelopment has been presented as good for tenants while giving them little information about, or
122 agency over its outcomes. As noted above and in Chapter 4, a narrative of improvement positioned social mix as a way of bettering tenants’ anti-social behaviour (Saulwick 2016), claims which were accompanied with promises of delivering a ‘a world-class vibrant community’, and ‘better amenity, better homes, better facilities, fantastic transport and more jobs’ (UrbanGrowth 2016a). The state’s approach has fuelled tenant anger, adding to the emotional rollercoaster of redevelopment. AK recounted her fury at the meeting where Minister Hazzard informed tenants about the project in person, shortly after the tenants had received their letters (Interview 21 June 2017):
there was more than 300 people. He tell to us so many thing. He should talking to children like this. You will get this, you will get this. We adults know this is not true. Don't bullshit us…. But they are. And they make us more angry and more upset, they were so people screaming and talking you know. And I raised voice and I said to the lady, ‘come and give me microphone’. And I take the courage and I tell him I live here 45 years what about where you will put me after? I am I spend my life here, my child grow up here, my grandchildren grow up here. I try to speak and he said don't worry we will looking after you.
AK’s anger at being patronised by the Minister and his promises that tenants ‘will get this’ and ‘get this’, is part of a process of slow violence, which has unfolded incrementally in Waterloo through the blocking of agency and the withholding of information. It continued on from the early stages of announcements, into the consultation processes.
Slow Violence: Organising Temporality and Frustrated Waiting
As the landholder, LAHC not only initiated the project but also ran and managed the non- statutory community consultation as required by its internal policies and the provisions of The NSW Housing Act (2001), that encourages it to consult tenants on matters relating to their housing. It ordered the sequence of events comprising the consultation, dividing it into two stages (Van Wagner 2018):
– Visioning (October- December 2017) focussed on understanding the views and aspirations that Waterloo’s public housing residents held for the future of their estate;
123
– Options testing (October 2018) allowed participants the opportunity to provide feedback on the three redevelopment options designed by LAHC’s consultant UrbanGrowth. A preferred masterplan was developed based on the feedback.
LAHC decided on the timing of the stages with some input from the tenant-led Waterloo Redevelopment Group (WRG). Its control over the timeframes of the consultation is evidenced in their communications informing residents of the schedule of consultations, (see Figure 5.5.) (Waterloo Connect 2017a. & b., 2018). Of course, tenants who wished to be involved pressed them for information as to when the participatory sessions would commence through representative groups such as WRG, but there was a substantial amount of waiting for LAHC’s decisions. Adding to the list of activities were a series of capacity building workshops run by local NGO Counterpoint from mid-2017, that continued until mid-2018 to arm residents with the requisite planning knowledge so as to facilitate meaningful participation.
Figure 5. 5 Waterloo Estate’s Visioning Process schedule (Source: Waterloo Connect 2017b)
The process has rarely run to schedule. The visioning and options testing workshops were delayed and eventually took place two years after the project announcement. Tenants were initially informed
124 that relocations from their housing would not commence until mid-2017. That date was then pushed back to mid-2018. As things currently stand, there is no clarity as to when relocations will commence, as the decision lies with the landholder, LAHC. The redevelopment has placed tenants’ lives in a state of suspension, their frustrations evident from before the commencement of consultation in late 2017. CS noted how tired she was waiting for substantive information on the redevelopment even a year after its announcement (Interview 29 March 2017):
Then there were various letters, informing you that there was going to be a consultation and there was going to be a consultation. And, so people…they actually did think that they would be consulted. But there was, I think one attempt to have an afternoon tea here in the community room, …with scones and cream or whatever, something like that. And a few people turned up…But it wasn't a consultation it was telling you that there was going to be a consultation. So, we had that. Then we had another kind of meeting there with different people telling us there was going to be a consultation. And we would be consulted.
CS’s statements reveal how slow violence manifests as a frustrated waiting game, and in the limited agency that tenants wield over the redevelopment. While there is a case for a slow and considered approach in redevelopment as opposed to swift demolition, in Waterloo such an approach relinquishes no decision-making power to residents. It continues the control that tenant’s property practices are subject to, leaving them in a state of abeyance. The situation is akin to Yiftachel’s (2009) description of the informal and illegal urban settlements in Israel-Palestine, which continue in a state of ‘permanent temporariness’ despite being outside of the state’s definitions of legality. This temporariness in the case of Waterloo, however, unlike the Israeli spaces is within the realm of formal legal recognition; a product of deliberate state intervention as opposed to negligence.
It is important to note that the experiences of uncertainty and of frustrated waiting are not universally felt in Waterloo. For some, the individual impacts such as potential relocations and the loss of social and physical networks are too far into the future to contemplate and engage with. As an interviewee from Clare Lewis’s documentary about the Waterloo redevelopment, There Goes Our Neighbourhood, explained whilst reflecting on the apathy of some residents, and the impact on political organising (There Goes Our Neighbourhood 2018):
125
I think maybe when the bulldozers come and when its actually happening. I think it’s so far kind of in the future at the moment that people are not realising the actual you know like what’s…they’re not seeing the reality…that this whole community is going to be completely and utterly gutted.
While this lack of engagement might protect some from the slow violence of waiting and its frustrated anticipations, it also leaves residents unprepared for the physical and social upheaval of their estate.
Slow Violence: Withholding Information
Following Waterloo’s nomination as a State Significant Precinct, (see Chapter 4), as per legal planning requirements, the Department of Planning issued various study requirements, to determine appropriate land use and development controls for the project (NSW Planning and Environment 2016). In mid-2017 multiple consultants conducted investigations including geotechnical, flooding and heritage related studies, and those concerned with housing, social sustainability and employment. The full detail of this work has still not been released to the public, even though they are critical in determining future land use, zoning and planning controls, and hence in shaping the future physical and social make-up of the Estate. The withholding and drip feeding of information has been a regular feature of LAHC’s engagement process. The statutory planning requirements held up the mastery of the landholder in producing the future of the Estate, by placing the onus on them to commission studies, and shape technical information that will inform future land use on the Estate. While this data will eventually be released in the round of statutory consultation, there is no legal requirement that non property-holders like tenants or other users of space in Waterloo influence the focus of the studies or that the consultants carrying out the work are responsible to the non-owner parties. Waterloo residents had been pushing for an earlier release of data from the studies, which would have armed them with planning knowledge and provided an indication of LAHC’s intentions regarding future of Waterloo. This knowledge could have supported tenant input during LAHC’s Visioning and Options testing workshops. Instead the latter’s withholding of the information, intentional or otherwise, has confined tenants’ capacity to contribute ideas to or make complaints about propositions with which they are unhappy. The control that LAHC has, by virtue of its legally recognised property thus exerts control over the course of redevelopment.
126 The story of withholding information repeats itself in the dissemination of the three proposed redevelopment options in 2018. The release was short on detail of the exact number of buildings of a specified height, the size of the flats, and the exact spatial layout of social and private housing. This was despite resident groups demands for transparency. As of yet, decisions regarding the size and location of future dwellings, where the public housing component will be, and the amount of publicly accessible land have not been made available, leaving tenants still waiting for answers. The constant withholding has sparked frustration and anger. AR who lives in Waterloo explained (30 August 2017):
This is what shits me you don’t find out anything that they are doing. They just will not tell you. And if you push and push and push you might get some information, …they’re told to misdirect, I’m sure they are because the Government doesn’t want trouble
For some ‘not knowing’ has manifested in anxiety, given the limited power to decide on their future living circumstances. AK claimed (Interview June 2017):
I'm really stress a lot. I, I in the night-time its worse for me. In the daytime I talk with people …but night-time when I going in the bed where they will put me, I can't stay ground floor. What I will take with me? So many things I have for so many years, I keep from my grandchildren.
AK’s sentiments express concerns from before the release of the Government’s staging plan in early 2019 which set out approximate redevelopment timeframes for each part of the estate. This delivered AK some re-assurance, as her block was not set for redevelopment for another 10-15 years. She was confident of being dead by that time and so felt ‘safe’. But others still face uncertainty, a consequence of the multiple ways in which slow violence has acted to limit their capacity to shape their own futures.
127 Slow Violence: Circumscribing Tenants’ Mastery
The same paternalism that governed tenants’ morality, making it a condition of holding up property, was mirrored in the limitations that LAHC placed on tenant participation in the design of the future of their estate. AN recounted an example of such paternalism in a conversation with one of LAHC’s consultants, Peter (05 April 2018):
our neighbour Rose, you might have seen her, she's a tiny little Asian lady and since 1996… she's run the garden. And it's like a market garden, you know. And she came to one meeting particularly about the gardens, because it's her life. It's actually her life. And Peter said, [patronisingly] 'I did notice that you don’t just care about yourself. You’re very concerned for Rose.' And it's like yeah, whatever. And he said, 'I thought about that, what you said about Rose, and I thought maybe we could do something like have a garden and we could call it Rose's garden’... It's just how people relate, you know? I mean, I've always thought... I understand from this perspective my fear of going into public housing now, because of all these unspoken currents that just flow through. I mean…the freedom it allows me and security it allows me, and the independence it allows me -- it is all worth all the other, but all the other is never-ending and it's really quite sinister in its persistence. That he thinks he can talk to me like that, about 'Rose's Garden', I mean--And I also know he means well, but he's an idiot! You know, it's not about that, you know. It's about her little plot that is her life. Does he get it? You know, it would be like me going, 'Hey, Peter, I thought I'd take your car and, you know, half your house, and you'll be right --you can go on the bus. We'll put a plaque up for you!
AN’s account paints a picture of LAHC’s paternalistic control over the redevelopment that manifests in a tokenistic inclusion of tenants’ needs and demands, without relinquishing any serious power to make decisions. Instead of allowing people like Rose and AN to have a say in whether the land and housing that they use is built over, LAHC and its consultants made ‘nice’ and well-
128 intended gestures that are presented as in the interest of tenants, as Peter’s remarks demonstrate. AN’s experience also illustrated the uneven distribution of power as a consequence of LAHC’s position as the landholder, which allows it to control Waterloo’s redevelopment. While other parties, such as tenants, can have a say, the extent of their influence in shaping the future of the Estate is determined by the landholder, LAHC.
The Visioning exercise exemplified a similar paternalism to AN’s account. Tenants had no platform to control the issues that were important to them, but LAHC and its consultants still presented the process as successful and beneficial to tenants. The process was described as ‘extensive’, ‘active, meaningful and respectful’ with the aim to ensure that the redevelopment was informed by the ‘views and needs of the existing community’ (Kathy Jones Associates 2018, pp. 24). It was centred on 5 themes, culture and community life, transport street and connections, housing and neighbourhood design, community facilities, services and shops, and environment and open space. While approximately 1570 people participated, over half of whom were tenants, and a range of methods were deployed from surveys to more open-ended discussions guided by a facilitator, tenants’ agency to act and choose was restricted to certain issues. As AN explained to me (05 April 2018):
then there was visioning, which was very tricky because that was the one where you could only sort of say yes to three things out of 12, so it's straight away circumscribed and it didn't make sense.
The Options testing workshops that followed the Visioning process allowed tenants the chance to comment on the three options developed by UrbanGrowth. But community development manager, Kira Osborne, pointed out that like the Visioning process, the workshop discussion sessions were limited, and facilitators moulded the content of discussions (Public Communications 08 December 2018):
feedback from participants was that they often felt restricted in their response, limited in their options and guided too much by the facilitators. Future consultation should encourage in depth discussions about the values and challenges of the numerous options presented.
129
Neither the Visioning nor the Options Testing incorporated the particularities of planning. Things like floor space ratios, dwelling sizes, the level of privatisation, the exact number of buildings of a certain height, the location of social and private housing around the estate, the effects of shadowing, the size of community gardens and access to sunlight were either discussed with little detail or not at all. While some tenants expressed preferences on issues of housing design, bedroom size and the number of rooms per dwelling, during the face-to-face workshops, as noted in the Visioning report, this level of information was not systematically collected (Kathy Jones Associates 2018). Their needs and demands on this front do not appear to carry significant weight in decision-making. Issues such as dwelling size, location, density, privatisation levels and the amount of publicly accessible land has significant influence on the financial returns of the project, whilst also being critical to residents’ quality of life. They contribute to the liveability of a place, one of the objectives of the Waterloo redevelopment (see Chapter 4). Tenants’ agency was circumscribed to limit input to issues with little financial bearing on the redevelopment.
Slow Violence: Appropriating Tenant Labour
A critical component to the success of government consultation initiatives in Waterloo is tenants’ unpaid labour. The consultations are presented as a way for tenants to influence the redevelopment and to receive information about what the future holds for them. And, while almost none of the tenants I spoke with hold the illusion that their labour will significantly impact the redevelopment, they do want to use the process to gain some knowledge about what is planned for their estate and consequently what their future lived environments might look like. In other words, tenants’ engagement in consultation is partly a product of their lack of control over the project. Their rental property status does not enable them to initiate the redevelopment or shape what outcomes it will deliver. They consequently direct their labour to the engagement process in the hope of finding things out. I have personally witnessed the effort that many in Waterloo have made to keep themselves informed of the project over the last four years. KB expressed frustration at the amount of time and effort required to stay informed:
Extremely disruptive … I’d rather just be getting on with my life than having to find information from them. Its vague …I can’t just ignore ... it does take up a lot my life … I could be doing something else…the fact that I have to just listen to these people and deal with them as well ... you know I don’t like
130 them … and they kind of … mentally and morally … they’re in another world and I have to pay…attention to them … I don’t really wanna move in those circles and now I do.
Along with the NGO-run capacity building workshops and the official government-run consultation sessions, residents have also engaged independently to influence the redevelopment. For nearly four years they have organised themselves into various groups including Groundswell, a coalition of NGOs and residents, the Waterloo Redevelopment Group set up by Waterloo NAB and WPHAG. They have set up and attended meetings with government representatives including the Minister for FACS, senior public servants, LAHC staff and communication consultants. Aboriginal and non- Aboriginal residents have collaborated, even staging an occupation on the Waterloo Green by setting up an Aboriginal Tent Embassy. They have spoken with and worked with film makers, journalists, a theatre production company, academics, planners and architects in order to express their demands and frustrations, and to understand what the redevelopment project means technically, socially and physically for the suburb. Many more years of such uncompensated voluntary work is expected, a contrast to the remunerated consultants and government staff who run the engagement programme.
Slow Violence: Property Title and the Production of the Future
Casting an eye over the redevelopment’s temporality so far, LAHC has initiated the project, ordered the sequence of events that comprise it, withheld information and circumscribed and appropriated tenants’ agency. By this trajectory, property as mastery held up in law is set to determine the future possibilities of Waterloo. LAHC’s legal title to land has empowered it to draw boundaries around which aspects of Waterloo’s future place are open to democratic tussle and the agency of tenants, and which ones are closed off. Tenants’ limited mastery in creating this future, robs them of ontological security, a situation which is further consolidated by LAHC’s extra- economic state planning power. Of course, the future is always subject to multiple contingencies and shaped by the actions of various actors. There will certainly be deviations from the state’s redevelopment ambitions. Social movements have a history of blocking and reshaping plans written by those who hold political and economic power. But nonetheless, the state’s property and planning power as it stands creates a tendency towards a particular kind of future; one of its own making.
Conclusions
This chapter concludes my discussion of Redfern and Waterloo. It identifies and analyses the spatial and temporal dimensions of three forms of property and dispossession – that of Black property, of
131 precarious property and of public housing rental property. In understanding Black urban residents’ and tenants’ framings and anticipations of redevelopment, it makes three broad contributions to studies of dispossession.
First, it identifies a relationship between the character of property and that of dispossession – how property, official or otherwise, is held up shapes the course of dispossession. Second, it reveals how extra-economic force further configures the process of dispossession, by rendering it transparent, and by arming the state with centralised planning power. In the discussions of Black property in Redfern and Waterloo, for instance, Blackness was expressed through property enactments which were enabled by the physical and social spaces of the suburbs. Consequently, the loss of these spaces materialised as a continuation of settler colonialism, via the possession of land and the urban exclusion of Black communities. The lack of legal status conferred on such property led to contestation outside of official legal channels via a land occupation. Further fuelling the outrage, particularly in the case of land owned by an Aboriginal housing provider, was the extra-economic status of this company, which was expected to represent the collective will of the Black community. Its redistribution of land was equivalent to explicit political intervention, that ran contra to such expectations, rendering dispossession transparent.
In the case of the Waterloo Estate, anticipations and experiences of dispossession, of both formal rental property and tenants’ precarious property, were influenced by the ways in which property is held up. The extra-economic power of the state further compounded the process. An assembly of housing allocation policy, the social concentration of precarious residents, and the variety of community services that surround the Estate, hold up tenants’ precarious property, as both mastery and membership. This is productive of a sense of comfort, worth, and a power over place; benefits which are threatened by the government plans of social mix, and the potential loss of neighbourhood services. Tenant anticipations of dispossession speak of the loss of such benefits, expressing fears that they will be treated as inferior residents on their estate, and that their way of life will be diminished. The third form of dispossession discussed in the chapter pertains to the loss of tenants’ official rental property, which is shaped by the same ethos of paternalism and control that holds up public housing tenancies. Adopting a temporal lens, the chapter analyses how the process has unfolded as a form of slow violence, characterised by shock, uncertainty, anger, frustration, and tenants’ limited power to influence the future of their Estate. The state’s control over the process, by virtue of its legal status as the property holder, equates to a control over the temporality of redevelopment, and over the future of Waterloo. Property power in other words, is power over time; a capacity which produces an uncertain future for those who do not wield it, leaving them in a state of abeyance. Dispossession, manifests as a loss of ontological security. The state’s extra-economic power and the air of certainty that it brings to the redevelopment, further bolsters its prowess, with residents’ shock at the announcement of
132 redevelopment amplified by the transparency of state force, and their lack of control further cemented by its planning power.
A third contribution of this chapter is its temporal analysis of dispossession. Drawing on Grosz’s understanding of time as both ‘fragmented’ and ‘whole’ (1999), and concepts of slow violence (Nixon 2011) it demonstrates how spatial and propertied loss has a distinct temporality. Time in this analysis, has both a length and a qualitative dimension comprising events and the meaning that they hold for people. The chapter discusses Black perspectives on dispossession, and public housing tenants’ experiences of redevelopment using these theoretical frames. Rather than seeing the loss of land in Redfern and Waterloo as an individual and discrete moment, Black time horizons link such loss with historical dispossession. The braiding together of fragmented instances of dispossession produces an overarching temporality of colonial land dispossession. The fast violence of state redevelopment, blind to ongoing colonisation and bound to official registers of property and the timescales of the project, fails to acknowledge such a framing. It consequently renders Black temporality invisible in state and colonial registers of time and property. The chapter brings the same temporal lens to Waterloo public housing tenants’ experiences of redevelopment. The timelines are not as extensive as Black temporal perspectives, but rather pertain to the everyday experiences of redevelopment. The intimate and low-key workings of the project over a period of years, comprises an overarching temporality, which as noted above is characterised by slow violence that unfolds through acts of state paternalism and control, producing shock, uncertainty, frustrations and anxiety among tenants.
The case of Waterloo and Redfern discussed over the last two chapters combines a political-economy analysis of state force, a relational approach to property, and attention to temporality to shed light on how dispossession unfolds and is unfolding in the suburbs. The following two chapters apply this analytic framework to a very different case study of a multibillion dollar toll-road being constructed across Sydney. I explore how economic justifications and monetary pacification are used to dispossess private property owners, and how the legal and social holding up of property shapes the course of dispossession. In first of the two chapters, I discuss how logics of improvement take both narrative and calculative form to justify the road project, and analyse the state’s coercive approach to delivering compensation for property acquisition. Both actions are part of the state’s machinery of dispossession that appeals to residents’ normative and material interests (Levien 2015). The second chapter turns to questions of property as mastery and as membership. It analyses how the legal and social arrangements that hold up property configure the path of dispossession and of contestation, and makes links between property, subjectivity and dispossession. It closes with a settler colonial analysis of the propertied and temporal dynamics of contestation, thus problematising the actions of progressive social movements that are not grounded in an anti-colonial politics.
133 Chapter 6 Driving Through the WestConnex
‘NSW is under construction’, ‘construction revolution’, ‘record-breaking’ infrastructure investment, ‘destructive’ and ‘over -development’ are among the phrases used by NSW’s Liberal politicians, the media and Sydney residents to describe the scale of infrastructure building ongoing in the city (Liberal Party NSW 2019; ABC News 2019). Since 2013 a series of 10 key transport and redevelopment infrastructure projects have been undertaken by the New South Wales’s Liberal- National Party coalition government to support the state’s anticipated population growth and to enhance economic productivity (NSW Government 2018). Infrastructure spending from 2013 to 2017/18 averaged $15.3 billion per year (NSW Treasury 2018a). The WestConnex toll road which will connect Sydney’s north west and south west with the city’s metropolitan areas in the east is the centrepiece of this action. At a total project cost of $16.8 billion, raised through private sector and government loans and grants, it is the most expensive project Sydney has seen and is also among Australia’s most expensive infrastructure schemes. The road will be funded by user tolls adding to Sydney’s eight existing toll roads.
NSW Liberal politicians argue WestConnex will form the spine of Sydney’s motorway network and claim it will allow for ‘seamless’ travel across the city benefitting freight operators, business and commuters, whilst also creating thousands of construction jobs. However, the project has been extremely controversial. It has angered many Sydney residents, particularly those in the city’s inner west. The road has torn through neighbourhoods dispossessing homeowners, renters and users of urban public space who lived in the pathway of the project, and has caused significant environmental damage. So far, it has entailed over 597 compulsory property acquisitions (Public Accountability Committee 2018b.), the removal of hundreds of trees, geotechnical investigations and construction work across 37 suburbs, the destruction of the critically endangered Cooks River Ironbark Castlereagh forest and damage to the habitat of the endangered Green and Golden Bell Frog.
I became aware of the scale of upheaval through my involvement with an anti-WestConnex group in St Peters, a suburb significantly impacted by the project, near where I lived whilst working on my PhD. Activists involved in campaigning against WestConnex were angry about its social and economic impacts, but they also had scathing critiques about the arguments and claims used to justify the project by the NSW State Government.
Mega infrastructure projects, particularly road projects and their detrimental impacts, have been extensively discussed in urban scholarship. Jane Jacob’s contestation of Robert Moses’, a senior New York public official, plans to run a freeway into New York’s Lower East Side, is the quintessential urban case study that has sparked discussion and debate about the impact of car-dependency and large-scale modernising projects on the social and economic life of cities (Jacobs 1961; Berman 1988), a theme which still runs through contemporary scholarship (Jordan 1998; Salamanca 2015;
134 Legacy et al. 2017). Sydney has seen its fair share of road projects contested by urban communities because of the dispossession that they threaten, and local scepticism regarding the public interest and improvement narratives presented to justify them (Burgmann and Burgmann 2017; Legacy et al. 2017; McManus and Haughton 2019). The WestConnex has been compared with the 1970s plans to build the Western Distributor and North West Distributor through Sydney’s inner suburb of Glebe, which was stalled by an alliance of community organizing and labour union power, wielded by the Builders Labourers Federation. Like these past projects WestConnex has faced considerable opposition, with government justifications being contested by community groups, local authorities, consultants and Members of Parliament. But such opposition has not been able to replicate the success of past activism in stalling construction work. Compulsory acquisition of land has been critical on this front, implemented through state bureaucratic force.
As with the previous case study of Waterloo and Redfern, my analysis of the dispossession in the context of the WestConnex is presented across two chapters. Drawing on the framework established in Chapter 2, this first chapter considers the forms of justification, state force, compensation and coercion that were crucial to the specific forms of land dispossession associated with the WestConnex project. It begins with section 6.1. painting an overview of the political context that led to the road’s implementation. Sections 6.2. and 6.3 then discuss the narratives of economic productivity gains associated with WestConnex that were used to make a political case for the project and justify its dispossessory effects. These were presented in state strategy and Business Case documents, part of the NSW Government’s bureaucratic governance framework. I identify the spatial and temporal hierarchies that constitute the justifications for the project, which juxtapose an inefficient past and present, against the promise of an economically productive future space enabled by the road, whilst maintaining a silence on the present value of those localities that lie in its wake, that are damaged or lost. The WestConnex’s Business Case expressed this narrative in a calculative form, using market- based rules of abstraction, opportunity costs and utilitarian principles, that assigned a monetary value to the economic productivity promised by the road’s proponents. In section 6.3 I explore the bureaucratic legal procedure through which extra-economic force was deployed to compulsorily acquire property from private owners, a form of dispossession that was critical to amassing land for WestConnex. The NSW Government’s actions combined domination, coercion and offers of monetary compensation and were guided by legislation, in a way that was effective in generating compliance with acquisition.
This chapter comprises the political-economy analysis of the WestConnex case-study. The following chapter will bring that into conversation with residents’ experiences of dispossession through compulsory property acquisition, and their contestation of the loss of public parkland, by adopting a propertied and temporal theoretical lens.
135 6.1 A Road to Connect Sydney
When I arrived in Sydney in late 2015, construction work on WestConnex had been underway for over a year. The project has three phases and is expected to continue until at least 2023. Roads and Maritime Services (RMS), an agency of the NSW Government, is the project proponent and is responsible for the construction and maintenance of roads across the state, while WestConnex’s delivery and operations are being managed by a private company set up by the NSW Government, the Sydney Motorway Corporation (SMC). On completion the road will span 33 kilometers and will comprise three sections extending from the north west and south west parts of Sydney into the eastern areas of the city (see Figure 6.1). This includes the M4 East widening between Paramatta and Homebush in the west of the city and the M4 extension between Homebush and Haberfield in the inner west; the New M5 which comprises twin underground motorway tunnels and links to the old M5 at King Georges Road continuing onto the inner south suburb of St Peters where cars emerge at an interchange; and the M4-M5 link that includes twin tunnels connecting the new M5 at St Peters with the M4 at Haberfield and an interchange in the suburb of Rozelle and the Iron Cove Link - another pair of underground tunnels running to St Peters.
Figure 6. 1 Overview of the WestConnex route (Source: Roads and Maritime Services 2018)
The WestConnex builds on the city’s existing M4 East and M5 motorways that are part of its strategic road network that carries most of NSW’s container freight and acts as a feeder and
136 distributor for rail, sea and air transport (Infrastructure NSW 2012a). This network is critical to Sydney and NSW’s economy, but has been subject to substantial congestion which is expected to worsen with anticipated increases in demand for transport (Infrastructure NSW 2012a). Congestion is a significant problem across Sydney with the city housing seven of Australia’s ten most congested roads (O’Sullivan 2017). The NSW Government’s ambitions are that WestConnex will relieve some of this congestion by delivering improved motorway access for commercial freight operations by extending and expanding the M4 and M5 motorways, thus better linking Sydney’s international gateways, i.e. Port Botany and Sydney Airport in the east, with the greater Sydney area that lies more to the west. The road’s construction is embedded in a broader politics where the federal and state-level Liberal- National Coalition Governments are eager to be seen as ‘congestion-busting’. The favoured slogan has been directed particularly at electorates in Western Sydney (Liberal Party Australia 2019; McCormck 2019).
The link that the WestConnex will make also connects the bulk of Sydney’s industrial and residential areas that lie to the west of the city, with various business and employment locations dispersed around the more eastern parts of Sydney (Infrastructure NSW 2012a). This speaks to the road’s other objective, which is to support the economy of Sydney’s western suburbs. The dependence on road transport in the city, as with other Australian cities, reflects its critical role in urban development. The Department of Main Roads, now RMS, influenced Sydney’s first city-wide plan, the 1948 Cumberland Plan, in a way that emphasised travel by private car, making provision for 200 miles of expressway across the metropolis (Sandercock 1977). The quantity of proposed road increased to 350 miles in the subsequent 1968 Sydney Region Outline Plan (Sandercock 1977). Fast forward to 2012, and the NSW state government’s long-term masterplan for transport has supported seven new motorway investments to fill ‘missing gaps’ in Sydney’s current road network, of which the WestConnex is one (Infrastructure 2012). The use of road transport to support economic growth creates problems of congestion, which are particularly acute in urban centres with their concentration of people and businesses and substantial travel demands. While the WestConnex has been proposed to tackle this congestion, the travel by motor vehicle that it will facilitate in fact simultaneously exacerbates it through induced demand. Vehicular road transport has been the main contributor to the doubling of Sydney’s passenger travel in terms of the kilometre task between 1977 and 2004 (Bureau of Traffic and Regional Economics 2007). Whilst the WestConnex will support a connection between western and more central parts of Sydney, it is also expected to further consolidate the city’s car dependence.
The NSW Liberal Party came to power in 2011 on the promise of extensive infrastructure investment. Premier Barry O’Farrell established Infrastructure NSW in July 2011, an independent statutory body with the objective of advising the NSW Government on the state priorities and ensuring that decision-making was informed by professional expertise (Infrastructure NSW 2012a).
137 Their board was constituted of senior public servants and corporate members and its first State Infrastructure Strategy proposed WestConnex. The board included a Max Moore Wilton, the CEO of the Airport Corporation which operates and manages Sydney Airport. The airport is an important piece of infrastructure for the city, and among the WestConnex’s objectives was the expediating of car and freight travel to and from the airport. Its first chairman, Nick Greiner, was a former premier and treasurer of the state. During his premiership in the early 1990s he allegedly described himself as the ‘father of urban toll roads’ (Dempster 2011) and re-introduced urban road tolls in Sydney. Greiner has also been the chair of Bilfinger Berger, a major stakeholder in the consortium that built the Cross City Tunnel toll road in Sydney. While there is no evidence of a direct conflict of interest, Greiner’s historical involvement in supporting road infrastructure is likely to have influenced Infrastructure NSW’s approach to transport provision. He is currently a consultant for Transurban, the dominant interest in the private consortium that acquired a stake in WestConnex in 2018 and a leading international operator and developer of toll roads.
Infrastructure NSW’s 2012 State Infrastructure Strategy, produced through engagement with various government agencies and the private sector, identified projects worthy of investment. In October 2012 this was presented to Premier O’Farrell. Based on a future vision of NSW in 2032 its recommendations included 70 projects, of which WestConnex was arguably the most important. While the Strategy was not used directly as a tool of justification directed at residents dispossessed by WestConnex, it was used to justify the infrastructure projects to the NSW Premier, who holds the authority to stop such schemes. These productivity-related justifications were repeated in WestConnex’s formal Business Case and in the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) directed at government agencies and the broader public during the project’s planning consultations. They were subsequently used by senior bureaucrats and politicians in attempts to quell public anger and legitimise the disruption and destruction that project brought to the suburbs that lay in the path of construction.
6.2 The Road Ahead: Improvement as Economic Productivity
6.2.1 Future Strategies
Infrastructure NSW’s Strategy document constructed a narrative of improvement centred on urban economic productivity to justify its proposed infrastructure projects, including WestConnex, through selective representations of the past and the future of Sydney and NSW. A ‘mantra of necessity’ was created by its contrasting of an economically inefficient past with a future of economic productivity (Gray and Porter 2014). The mobilisation of such a spatial and temporal deficit acted as a propelling force to bridge the gap between the past place and time, and the future place and time of the city.
138 State infrastructure investment was deemed ‘necessary’ if Sydney was to realise a successful future and move away from the inefficiency and slow growth of previous years. Infrastructure NSW’s CEO Paul Broad opened the Strategy with a quote from the economist Paul Krugman (Infrastructure NSW 2012a., p. 6):
productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run it is almost everything
The Strategy was underpinned by this notion. It saw the recent past of the 1990s and 2000s, and the present as marred by urban road congestion, economic inefficiency, infrastructure deficiency, low population growth and poor government management. It emphasised that NSW’s slow growth, 25% slower than the national average in the decade leading up to 2012 was a cause for concern. Sydney’s roads were awarded a ‘D rating’ in terms of their carrying capacity (Infrastructure NSW 2012 a). The strategy stressed the disadvantage of high congestion levels on the current M4 and M5 motorways that made for poor connectivity for commuters and commercial enterprise that relied on fast transport across the city. Through the construction of a bleak picture, the document made a case that change was necessary to fix Sydney’s road network and better serve the city’s economy.
Infrastructure NSW’s focus on Sydney’s future meant that it showed little concern for the present use of the land that had been marked out for WestConnex’s construction. The silence on social and physical make-up of the places that the road would cut through, and on the value that it held for its residents and for the wider city, further strengthened the case for transformation (and in this, there is a clear resonance with the improvement narratives used in Waterloo and Redfern discussed in Chapter 4). The route marked out for WestConnex passes through several suburbs around Sydney’s inner west including Haberfield, Homebush, Strathfield, St Peters, Beverley Hills, Kings Grove and Kogarah. These predominantly middle-class neighbourhoods are reasonably populated by Sydney standards, and many of the local amenities they value have since the commencement of construction been damaged.
In contrast to the relative silence on socio-cultural and environmental importance of the land that WestConnex will appropriate and transform, justifications for the project focussed predominantly on the importance of the future economic productivity that the project will facilitate. (Infrastructure NSW 2012a). The Strategy claimed that Sydney, Australia’s largest and ‘only global city’, was anticipated to grow by 1.6 million people between 2011 and 2031, with western parts of the city receiving half this increase (Infrastructure NSW 2012a). It relied on expectations that NSW’s economy would expand by 70% between 2012 and 2032, with Sydney’s growth outpacing non-
139 urban areas, contributing 77% to the gross state product. Such projections of economic and population growth are central features of urban planning strategies and government policy. They carried an air of inevitability and matter-of-factness about them. Their certainty remained unquestioned in the Strategy, despite the fact that the future holds much uncertainty and is constantly being produced through multiple social and economic influences originating within the official bounds of the city and the nation, as well as outside of it, making accurate statistical projections difficult. While the population growth was deemed desirable and expected to fuel economic growth, the consequent increase in transport demand for work and from increased consumption threatened the efficiency of Sydney’s existing road network. Improvement lay in facilitating such population and economic growth through an efficient ‘free’ flow of traffic through the city. Through the eyes of Debora Bird Rose (2004) and Louise Crabtree (2013), these narratives placed a positive value on change. While Bird-Rose and Crabtree’s scholarship discusses improvement in the context of colonisation, the NSW state government’s narratives to justify large scale urban transformation through WestConnex resonate with their analysis. Action becomes orientated towards a desired future that is differentiated from the undesired past and present. The gap between Sydney’s inefficient past and a desired future of growth was thus itself productive. It produced a drive for action that sought to plug the infrastructure deficit. In proceeding with Infrastructure NSW’s recommendation to build WestConnex, Premier O’Farrell reiterated the Strategy’s narrative of progress and the necessity of action in the interest of future betterment. (Ayres 2012):
Even though times are tough, we recognise the need to invest in economic infrastructure to help boost productivity and create jobs … Infrastructure NSW has conducted a rigorous appraisal of the state's infrastructure needs and we accept its view that WestConnex is the best initial project for our community and our economy … Infrastructure NSW has painted the big picture and we are getting on with the detailed work that is now needed
Such forms of justification take a similar form to those used to legitimise redevelopment in Waterloo and Redfern, but the gauge of progress varies. In the case of WestConnex, progress lies in efficiency or economic productivity achieved by connecting different parts of Sydney and allowing for the smooth transportation of ‘people, goods and ideas’ (Infrastructure NSW 2012b). Improvement is in the optimisation of travel time. If, as Bird Rose (2004) claims, such narratives are typically constituted by a hierarchical disjuncture of time and place, where the present of a place
140 was denigrated and deemed sacrificeable for an improved future, then in the case of WestConnex, progress was in the transformation of current commercial and residential land uses to realise a time- efficient road network. Urban physical and social space had to be reconfigured in the interest of saving time, or more accurately in the redistribution of how time was spent. As the NSW Government’s document, ‘WestConnex Sydney’s Motorway Priority’ explained (Infrastructure NSW 2012b):
For the freight industry this means more pick-ups and drop offs each day. Similarly, for business it means more time on the job and less time in a vehicle. This directly translates to more productive use of drivers as labour and vehicles as capital.
The projected urban future was one where Sydney remained ‘competitive’ and a desirable place to do business thanks to the time efficiency brought by WestConnex (Infrastructure NSW 2012b). These justifications in Infrastructure NSW’s internal documents for the Government, were mirrored in public facing statements and literature directed at Sydney’s residents through WestConnex’s Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), in SMC’s liaison efforts, and in statements from senior bureaucrats and politicians to legitimise the project to the public. While senior government staff members have acknowledged the difficulties created by the project, their legitimisation of present- day suffering in the interest of Sydney’s future repeats the rationale of Infrastructure NSW’s Strategy document. Ken Kanofski, former chief executive of RMS, used such a narrative that prioritised the future on two occasions in his testimony to the 2018 Parliamentary Inquiry into the project. During his second testimony he explained (Public Accountability Committee 2018c., p. 33):
Building major infrastructure in the inner city is very challenging. Property acquisitions and construction do impact people's lives; we acknowledge this, and we work very hard to minimise these impacts. Sydney is a rapidly growing city. Motorway projects and major public transport projects are both required to ensure we keep Sydney moving and facilitate Sydney's long-term economic and population growth.
Former Chief Executive of the SMC, Dennis Cliché’s (Public Accountability Committee 2018b, p. 2), statements to the Inquiry expressed similar sentiments:
141 we acknowledge that the WestConnex project has impacted members of the community. These impacts are taken very seriously, and we do everything we can to minimise them. Unfortunately, this is one of the realities of delivering a major project in a densely populated city.
Such attempts to legitimise current disruption and dispossession, in the interests of a better future were repeated in formal documentation such as the project’s EIS. The EIS is publicly available. and prepared by the project proponent as per NSW statutory planning requirements. It provides information on the environmental impacts of the project, on the proposed mitigation measures, and is used to inform development consent decisions. WestConnex’s EIS drew directly on the improvement narratives of the Strategy to make a case for the project, stating it would deliver a ‘step change in network performance’, ‘major city shaping improvements’ and economic growth (Roads and Maritime Services 2015, pp. 3-21). Other public communications echoed such an outlook, such as the community updates from the SMC (Sydney Motorway Corporation 2015a., p. 7, 2016, p. 2, 2017), which spoke of how the project would deliver ‘tomorrow’s Sydney’, providing ‘safer, faster and more reliable travel’, making it easier for businesses and communities to connect.
6.2.2 The Business Case for WestConnex: The Measure of Productivity
The project’s Strategic Business Case put a dollar value on the economic benefits promised in Infrastructure NSW’s strategy. The production of a Business Case was a critical component of government decision-making and oversight processes for all projects valued with an estimated total cost of $10 million (NSW Treasury 2012). The requirements lent them bureaucratic credibility. By justifying the NSW Government’s commitment to and investment in WestConnex, the project’s Business Case ultimately enabled private sector investment. It added a financial calculation to the narratives of improvement discussed in the Strategy, and by politicians and public servants. Whilst not directly concerned with the legitimisation of dispossession, the Business Case was drawn into public debates about the benefits and economic legitimacy of the project. It was not effective in convincing many Sydneysiders of the improvements that WestConnex would bring. Its use of cost- benefit analysis, in particular, was at the centre of debate and dispute among urban residents, local political authorities and the media, about the worthiness of the road project. It, in effect, served as a measure of the progress that WestConnex was expected to deliver for Sydney; mobilised by both supporters and opponents to justify and to delegitimise the project.
142 The Business Case was initially formulated in 2013 and updated in 2015. Its production was a requirement of Infrastructure NSW’s Major Projects Assurance Framework, a nascent framework designed to ensure accountability in the delivery of high value government infrastructure projects. It gave Infrastructure NSW the responsibility of keeping a tight watch over projects valued in excess of $100 million (Audit Office of NSW 2014, p. 15). The provision of a business case alongside other phases of the assurance framework, provided internal justifications for the NSW Government’s decision-making; by forming a procedure through which its choices could be to be held to account. The Business Case’s traffic projections and cost-benefit analysis were constituted by seemingly value-free calculations creating a rules-based and ‘rational’ foundation for government investment (Beckert 2013 p. 220, 2016; Weber 1968). The calculations assessed WestConnex’s costs and benefits over a period of time, and attempted a ‘best guess’ at the future economic productivity it would deliver (Beckert 2016, p. 290). These ‘fictional expectations’, or ‘mental representations’ of ‘future states’ made an uncertain future appear comprehendible in the present (Beckert 2016).
The Business Case’s production of future expectations was critical in legitimising the government’s investment in the road, and facilitating project approval. While the NSW Government had committed some state financing to WestConnex in early 2013 before the release of the Business Case, a budget paper stated that an additional $1.8 billion would be released subject to the Business Case (NSW Treasury 2014). This financing was from Restart NSW, a government money pool generated from the sale of public assets, and was contingent on projects using cost-benefit analysis to demonstrate a benefit-cost ratio of greater than one. WestConnex’s Business Case, with a multitude of problematic assumptions discussed below, met this condition (NSW Treasury 2018b). The Government’s commitment had ripple effects, in that it instilled confidence in private sector financing through banks and the consortium, Sydney Transport Partners led by toll road operator Transurban, who now hold a 51% stake in the Sydney Motorway Corporation
In the sections below I analyse the Business Case’s rule-based approach, informed by market and utilitarian assumptions, in assessing WestConnex’s economic benefits. Following this discussion, I briefly outline some of the disputes between the NSW Government and the public regarding the calculations. While WestConnex’s cost-benefit analysis did not start life as a tool of justification to quell public anger and generate compliance with the project, it has been incorporated into such a role, wielded as a form of justification, albeit an unsuccessful one. The technical calculations meant to internally validate WestConnex as a viable state project, were mobilised in a sphere of public debate, used by both government proponents to legitimise the project and its dispossessory outcomes, and by residents and activists to poke holes in these arguments.
143 I end my analysis of the Business Case’s calculations of improvement with a short discussion of how the assumptions and measurements that underpinned the future it had conceptualised, come to be inscribed in Sydney’s urban space with varying levels of success.
Calculating the Future: Abstractions of Time and People
KPMG, the global accounting firm, was contracted to develop the economic and financial appraisal in WestConnex’s Business Case. The cost-benefit analysis approach they used is a popular tool to determine the economic viability of government and private sector policies, programmes and projects in Australia and internationally. The benefits of the WestConnex project were divided into user benefits for transport users, non-user benefits that extended to society as a consequence of changed travel behaviour, and the wider economic impact (KPMG 2015, p. 12). The transport user component included travel time savings, travel reliability and vehicle operating costs (see Table 6.1) while the non-user component included crash cost savings, greenhouse gas emission savings, environmental externality savings and residual value of asset savings (see Table 6.2) (KPMG 2015, p. 13). My focus is primarily on the travel time savings as their benefits amounted to $12.9 billion, making them the most significant of the project. Moreover, such savings represent the bulk of the benefits for many transport initiatives (Transport for NSW 2015; Andersson et al 2018). But what do these benefits, these future improvements mean exactly? How is a figure of $12.9 billion attributed to future travel time savings?
Calculating WestConnex’s benefit of economising on travel time by expediating traffic flow, involved the incorporation of real-world data about traffic patterns to build a transport model. As Michel Callon’s (1998) work claims, economic and technical models that represent the world are built through a process of ‘empirical observation’ and ‘conceptual incorporation’ of historical real- world data. The WestConnex Road Traffic Model, which has not been made publicly available in its entirety, was used to determine changes in traffic behaviour and flow conditions as a consequence of building WestConnex (Sydney Motorway Corporation 2015 b). It correlated such changes with changes in travel times as a consequence of increased vehicle speed (Sydney Motorway Corporation 2015b). The model drew upon driver surveys used to assess the value they placed on travel time and on observations of the existing patronage of Sydney’s toll roads. The data was used to develop various traffic projections for different time periods, that compared the scenario of building the road with a base scenario of not building it. Estimates of the travel time savings delivered between 2019, when the first M4 section of WestConnex came into operation, and 2052 were used to work out a consumer surplus to which was applied a standard unit monetary value of time, that is the value of travel time savings (VTTS) see Table 6.4.1 A total dollar value was thus assigned to the travel time WestConnex was predicted to save. The economic productivity that was the subject of the narratives
144 of improvement discussed in Infrastructure NSW’s strategy thus began to take a calculated form. Improvement was measured in terms of ‘utility’ or benefits, based on the monetary value of time.
Discounted Undiscounted Benefits by Vehicle Type $ million $ million
(Present Value) (Total Value)
Travel Time Savings Cars-Privately Registered, Business Use 4305.9 18303.4 Cars-Privately Registered, Commuter 1687.6 7290.7 Cars-Privately Registered 991.8 4541.3 Light Commercial Vehicles 3389.3 14094.9 Heavy Commercial Vehicles 2528.3 10895.1 Vehicle Operating Cost Savings Cars-Privately Registered, Business Use 1570.6 6639.7 Cars-Privately Registered, Commuter 1065.2 4581.8 Cars-Privately Registered Other 620.8 2835.1 Light Commercial Vehicles 1163.6 4875.3 Heavy Commercial Vehicles 1761.6 7522.5 Travel Time Reliability Savings Cars-Privately Registered, Business Use 336.9 1463 Cars-Privately Registered, Commuter 285.5 1242.7 Cars-Privately Registered Other 209.5 939.2 Light Commercial Vehicles 438.7 1906.1 Heavy Commercial Vehicles 194.6 832.5
Figure 6 1 User Benefits of WestConnex (Source: KPMG 2015)
Discounted Undiscounted
$ million $ million
(Present Value) (Total Value) Non-User Benefits Crash cost savings 11.3 300.6 Greenhouse gas emission saving 831.9 3580 Environmental externality savings 63.1 -3.6 Residual value of assets 748.9 9171.7
Figure 6. 2 Non-User Benefits of WestConnex (Source: KPMG 2015)
145 Discounted Undiscounted
$ million $ million
(Present Value) (Total Value) Non-User Benefits Crash cost savings 11.3 300.6 Greenhouse gas emission saving 831.9 3580 Environmental externality savings 63.1 -3.6 Residual value of assets 748.9 9171.7
Figure 6. 3 Non-User Benefits of WestConnex (Source: KPMG 2015)
Discounted Undiscounted
$ million $ million (Present Value) (Total Value)
Benefit Type Wider Economic Impacts Agglomeration Economies (WB1) 1681.5 7067.8 Labour market deepening (WB2) 452.7 2020.7
Figure 6. 4 Wider Economic Impacts of WestConnex (Source: KPMG 2015)
VTTS ($ per vehicle hour) TfNSW (2015 Q1) Values Vehicle Type Cars-Privately Registered, Business Use 53.6 Cars-Privately Registered, Commuter 21.32 Cars-Privately Registered Other 21.32 Light Commercial Vehicles 37.83 Heavy Commercial Vehicles 69.57
Figure 6. 5 Value of Travel Time Savings (VTTS) parameters (Source KPMG 2015)
1The consumer surplus was the difference in the travel time between current trips and the travel time for different stages of the WestConnex, that is a measure of the benefits a consumer receives in excess of the costs that they are willing to incur (KPMG 2015, pp. 47)
146 Mirroring the narratives of improvement, the Business Case focussed on valuing the productive future to be enabled by the project, whilst remaining silent on the present social and material importance of the land that lay in its wake for the people living there. To this end, it incorporated the projections of annual travel demand determined by the transport model to allocate a monetary value to travel time saved by the road. Urban land was not directly valued in such calculations, but rather its future value was implicit in the extent to which it facilitated traffic flow and saved time, hence delivering benefits for individuals and businesses. The future economic value of urban land thus lay in reconfiguration, in the image of economic efficiency.
The VTTS estimates used in the calculation of the benefits were taken from Transport for NSW’s 2015 Principles and Guidelines for Economic Appraisal of Transport Investment and Initiatives (Transport for NSW 2015). The value of an hour of travel time saved by a project varied across the classes of vehicles. The value of an hour saved on private journeys was $21.32, for business journeys the figure was $53.60, and for light and heavy commercial vehicles the estimates were $37.83 and $69.57 respectively. These figures are based on NSW’s average hourly earnings (Transport for NSW 2015). Private travel was valued at 40% of this figure, business journeys were 128% of the figure to account for wages and on costs, while commercial journeys for freight transport incorporated not only employment costs of transport workers but also a factor to account for the value of travel time for freight. This greater value placed on business and commercial journeys reflect the cost reductions to employers from reduced commute time, while the private transport journeys measure the benefits to road users for travel time saved on non-work trips. Travel time savings are essentially a calculation of how much money people or businesses will trade to redistribute time, and thus improve the quality of its use. The future productivity improvements calculated in the cost-benefit analysis derive from a redistribution of how time is spent across space, where the optimisation of labour time and of time spent at a given destination as opposed to getting there are maximised. The value of time, and hence of the imagined improved future, reflects assumptions about the amount businesses and people are willing to pay for improvement in how time is spent, which in turn is premised on the cost of labour. The attributing of monetary values to travel time savings is guided by a rationale that abstracts people’s behaviour and time through a market-based prism. Commuters willingness to pay for time saved or rather redistributed, is based on a reduction of people to consumers who swap money for time, even though in reality this is not a trade everyone will make or can make. Secondly, the monetary equivalent of time, expressed in the VTTS measures, is determined by market values, namely the cost of wage labour for both non- work and business travel, and also of freight goods for freight transport journeys. But there are other ways to value and account for time, such as through qualitative health benefits of time saved or by the utility delivered through a better quality of journey-time. Such measures were not part of the Business Cases’s calculations. A third assumption is that every unit of time is uniform, that is it is
147 fungible, and it can be assigned a consistent monetary value. But time has both a uniform dimension of duration, as in clock time, and also a qualitative dimension, that is quality time. By assigning time a market-based monetary value, quality time is abstracted through a market-based lens. But factors such as the comfort of a journey or the health benefits of travelling using one mode of transport as opposed to another, impact on the quality of duration, not just the total length of a journey and its purpose. People’s willingness to pay for the savings a road such as WestConnex will bring are affected by differences in the qualitative character of commute time (Austroads 2011, p. 29). For instance, some users who enjoy or do not mind short to medium-length commute to work or elsewhere may not be willing to trade money for shortening these lengths, while others might. The assumption of the uniformity of all units of time also means that it is taken as a given that time saved on travel is of a type that can be transferred into other work- related productive activity or other activities that brings people benefit. But of course, this is not necessarily the case, as the Bureau of Transport Economics points out, ‘When extra units of time are acquired through savings in travel time, the value of each additional unit of time will depend, at least in part, on the use to which these savings may be put’ (Bureau of Transport Economics 1982, p. 22). And yet, the Business Case calculated the value of all time saved with reference to the average wage, effectively assuming that time saved in transit would be spent performing economically productive work. In summary the commoditisation of time through its reduction to a fungible, tradable entity with a market value, and the abstraction of travellers and wage-labourers to consumers underpins the calculations that measure the efficiency improvements brought by WestConnex to Sydney’s future urban space.
The Rate of Improvement and Summing the Benefits: The Time Value of Money and a Utilitarian Calculus
Alongside calculations of the value of time saving, a parallel rules-based approach was also observed in the Business Cases’s viability calculation, where the improvements (that is, the monetary value of travel-time savings) had to be delivered at a particular annual rate and exceed project costs. Such an approach was facilitated through a discounted cash flow technique – a market-based tool that uses the concept of opportunity cost to assess the viability of projects. In addition, following utilitarian principles, a total value of improvement was determined by calculating the various monetised travel time savings that WestConnex would deliver annually for different journeys across Sydney, recorded in the undisclosed Transport Model. Below I will analyse this rules-based approach, specifically the use of discounted cash flow techniques and utilitarian principles, highlighting some of their seemingly arbitrary assumptions and questioning their givenness.
148 The present value of the monetary benefit derived from WestConnex’s travel time savings over the 2019-2052 appraisal period is calculated by working out the total value of travel time savings annually, and discounting that at a rate of 7% per annum. These annual discounted values are summed, and compared with the project’s costs, a comparison that is expressed in economic measures such as net present value and the benefit cost ratio. Such measures of project viability justified the state decision to invest in WestConnex. The Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) technique used in the assessment evaluates the rate at which project benefits are delivered allowing public decision-makers to assess future gains in today’s monetary terms. The logic applied is that a dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow, because money in hand has earning potential and can be invested to generate a return (Dulman 1989). The projected future gains of an investment are discounted by a rate that compensates for this ‘time value of money’ to assess whether the finances should be held onto or invested (Dulman 1989). This logic is premised on the concept of opportunity cost – the value of the investment one has to give up when choosing a particular course of action. The DCF analysis essentially assesses the productivity of money that it is invested and locked into a particular scenario over time. In applying DCF to WestConnex the annual economic benefits it delivered over the appraisal period between 2019 and 2052, of which the time benefits were the greatest contributor, were discounted back at a rate of 7% to express the future monetary gains in present day terms. Putting finances towards WestConnex today locked those finances into a particular use scenario. The ‘time value of money’ reflects the value of these other uses that are lost (Dulman 1989; Doganova 2018). An assumption is made that in financing the WestConnex, the Government has given up another investment with an annual rate of return of 7%. The origins of the 7% figure are unclear but it is a standard figure applied to NSW transport investments. The discounted present value is compared to the capital and operational costs of WestConnex to assess its economic viability using a benefit to cost ratio ((Present Value - Project Costs)/Project Costs). The WestConnex, then, is viable so long as the annual monetised travel time savings are delivered at a rate of return of 7%, so as to match the other hypothetical investment or use to which capital can be deployed. Economic viability is premised on profit being delivered at an appropriate rate that compensates for the time value of money
The annual discounted benefits that accrue from WestConnex over its appraisal period were then summed in the Business Case to calculate the total benefits. Economic viability was determined on the basis of the total discounted monetised benefits such as travel time savings exceeding operational and construction costs. The calculation is underpinned by utilitarian moral principles where the maximisation of benefits by aspiring to the ‘greatest good for the greatest number of people’ is embedded in the allocation of public goods and services. Cost-benefit analysis’s rules for decision making that might seem value-free are in fact part of a normative moral framework. Utilitarian calculations assume that benefits can be aggregated and are comparable to costs, usually
149 using the common yardstick of money. The calculation of benefits relies on a series of abstractions. As discussed previously, WestConnex’s time benefits rely on an abstraction of time and people without which the summing together of travel time benefits become tedious and complex. Such assumptions are integral building blocks of the future imaginary constructed through the Business Case. The discounted monetised time benefits experienced by drivers and employers on an annual basis, are summed to give the total improvement brought by the project. Critiques of such utilitarian decision-making frameworks contend that benefits experienced individually, that are differently valued by people, should not be amassed and weighed against costs. Others see that the benefits borne by some do not necessarily justify the costs imposed on others, and that the value of some things is not discretely measurable and cannot be subject to a utilitarian calculus (Rawls 1999; Coddington 1971; Donavan 2006; Rolston 1988).
Several social, environmental and financial costs were omitted from WestConnex’s business case. Planning academic Glenn Searle critiqued the business case for its exclusion of costs such as: the building of extra local roads to cope with traffic flowing from WestConnex, increased congestion on some local roads, the loss of property value, health impacts including the costs of increased noise and pollution, costs to public transport revenue, the loss of built- heritage, of biodiversity and the impact of project construction on communities and businesses (Public Accountability Committee 2018a). While attempts in the course of construction have been made to mitigate such impacts, the fact that they were not considered seriously in the cost-benefit analysis’s modelling is testimony to the lower value placed on the present social and physical make up of urban places. The calculations of future improvements maintain a silence on the value of the here and now, and problematically repeated in a numeric form the narratives of improvement used in Infrastructure NSW’s Strategy and drawn on by politicians and public servants. They were premised on a valorisation of future space, whilst the present was seemingly irrelevant. The aspiration of economic productivity as a redistribution of time, was seen as reason enough to damage urban space in the here and now.
Whilst the cost-benefit analysis’s calculations are not directly concerned with compliance and at winning public support for WestConnex, they were drawn into public debates over whether WestConnex is a good investment and whether its benefits will be significant. The project’s benefit- cost ratio calculations in particular were at the centre of many such debates, where they were used by members of the public and political opponents of the NSW Government to criticise the project and to justify their organisation and activism against it. Such opposition indicates that the Business Case and its cost-benefit analysis have been unsuccessful in securing buy-in from many residents, activists and experts. Even though it had not initially been intended as a tool for justification to the public, government proponents of WestConnex such as senior RMS and SMC staff wielded it in their submissions and arguments during parliamentary audits and inquiries to justify their decisions to invest in WestConnex. The NSW Government’s submission to the 2018 Parliamentary Inquiry
150 into the impact of WestConnex defended the project by using the benefit-cost ratio as a measure of its legitimacy. In contrast, the City of Sydney’s submission to the same Inquiry claimed that the benefit-cost ratio was over-inflated given that most of the travel time savings will be of less than 3 minutes and are unlikely to be realised (Public Accountability Committee 2018 b). I observed the heated encounters between Greens Member of Parliament Cate Faehrmann and RMS’s CEO Ken Kanofski over WestConnex’s benefit-cost ratio during the Public Inquiry. Residents labelled it a ‘fraudulent’ measure (Public Accountability Committee 2018a). In providing evidence to the Inquiry, Rozelle Against WestConnex’s convener, Peter Hehir asserted (Public Accountability Committee 2018a., p. 33):
Both the benefit-cost ratio and the construction cost have been grossly misrepresented, with the true cost estimated independently by SGS Economics at $45 billion
In response to Cate Faehrmann’s question on whether the benefit-cost ratio justifies the implementation of WestConnex he retorted (Public Accountability Committee 2018a., pp. 37- 38):
Certainly not. There is no justification. The cost to health has not been quantified, but clearly, I would suggest it runs into billions. If we were to look at a fair cost-benefit ratio, just in respect of construction costs you are talking 16.8. SGS Economics, as I said earlier, have put that figure at something like 45 billion. The difference has to be made up by taxpayers. The cost to the community is horrendous. This is preventable and, unfortunately—there is no justification for importing 50 tonnes of carcinogenic material and putting to death a considerable proportion of the residents of our community. It is appalling.
His statements illustrate the migration of calculations used for rational justifications of government decision making, informed by a set of seemingly ‘value-less’ rules, into the sphere of a more hot value-laden politics. Cost-benefit analysis became a tool used by the NSW Government and its staff to legitimise the project and its social and environmental consequences in the face of public anger.
151 But it was also wielded by opponents of WestConnex to raise questions about whether the future improvement was worth the costs, and whether the costs reflected the value that people attached to their homes and suburbs.
Actualising the City
The influence of the Business Case and its justifications extended outside of the spheres of government decision making and public debate. Its specific assumptions and measurements were at least partly ‘actualised’ in the world (Callon 1998). The toll charges that travellers pay for the road reflect the construction and operating costs of WestConnex as well as its benefits. They incorporate the monetary value of travel time savings and the assumptions about road users as consumers who are willing to trade time for money, and of time as a fungible entity that can be allocated a market value (Portfolio Committee No 2.- Health and Community Services 2017; Transurban 2017). The enforcement of toll payments means drivers are actually paying money for time that the road saves. As vehicles use WestConnex, Sydney’s urban space is inscribed with and comes to increasingly perform the assumptions of the cost-benefit analysis model. Just as the calculations of WestConnex’s traffic model and the resultant cost-benefit analysis incorporated data of past toll road patronage, future models will be shaped by the traffic flows induced by WestConnex. A cycle is thus set up, where real-world data informs technical models and their calculations, which in turn shapes the world through their implementation. This ‘new’ world of increased traffic levels and toll charges subsequently informs future calculative models and the realities that they try to imagine.
It is important to remember however, that the world is not produced exactly in the image of theoretical models. Actualisation is always partial and contingent. Since the introduction of tolls on the M4 section of the WestConnex, the road has seen a drastic reduction in traffic levels (ABC News 1 June 2018). Evidence from Australia and internationally suggests that actual road traffic levels tend to fall short of forecasts (Li and Hensher 2010; Bain 2009a., 2009b.; GHD 2011; Flvbjerk et al. 2003, 2006). Drivers do not always play their ascribed role as toll road consumers who are willing to ‘buy’ time for a certain amount of money. The Cross City Tunnel, another NSW state-led motorway project was built under Sydney in the early 2000s suffered from an unwillingness to stomach the cost of tolls reflected in its lower than expected usage (Haughton and McManus 2012; Phibbs 2008). Given the high levels of toll paid by Sydney drivers, many do not have the desire or the capacity to constantly incur such charges, and so they avoid toll roads. The NSW Department of Premier and Cabinet has implemented a toll relief scheme to subsidise costs for regular toll road users in the anticipation that reality will diverge from the expectations of the traffic model and Business Case. In effect the Government will pay for the redistribution of travel-time to mitigate against the possibility of drivers not doing so. This undermines the Business Cases’ calculations of the future cost savings
152 delivered by the WestConnex. It also facilitates market accumulation by effectively guaranteeing the returns of the private sector consortium that holds a 49% stake in WestConnex. Such action attempts to nudge the world back towards the imaginaries set out in technical models. Even so, the extent to which calculated futures are realised is embedded in the messiness of the world which is difficult to predict and control.
6.3 Bureaucratic Domination and Compensations: Compulsory Acquisition
Compulsory acquisition of property was a key form of state extra-economic force used to expropriate land for WestConnex. As noted previously, over 597 properties in the path of construction have been acquired by the NSW Government for the project to date. This taking of land was accompanied with monetary compensation for affected property owners. Drawing on the compliance framework developed in Chapter 2, such payment is a form of pacification, which appeals to the material interest of dispossessed residents. Its calculation and delivery were organised into a bureaucratic process shaped by the requirements of NSW legislation. In the following sections I discuss how such pacification operated in tandem with bureaucratic pressure to drive through RMS’s acquisition of land across Sydney. My analysis attends to the ways in which compensation was informed by market- based abstractions and valuations of place, and how coercion was enabled by the certainty of state power and by the temporal sequencing of acquisition in state legislation.
6.3.1 Domination and Compensations: The Pressure to Comply
The bureaucracy of compulsory acquisition saw property owners’ contestations of dispossession channelled into negotiations with RMS over the appropriate amount of monetary compensation they should receive. My discussions below focus on how such compensation was bound up with state domination and coercion, which ultimately obligated people to comply with the state’s mandate. The certainty of state power, alongside the bureaucracy of acquisition worked together to force early compliance on many residents by limiting their capacity to bargain, leaving them feeling angry and cheated. I conclude the chapter by noting the implicit threat of physical force that was present throughout the process, that backed RMS’s acquisition, and which was arguably critical and necessary to generate compliance with dispossession.
The alienation of land, and residential and commercial buildings from property owners in the course of WestConnex was effected through the sovereign authority of the state, that is through extra- economic power, as opposed to the economic compulsion of market exchange. In more standard market transactions, property owners and buyers seek out valuers to appraise the value of a property. This is then fine-tuned by bargaining between the prospective sellers and prospective buyers in the course of sale. In the heated property markets of cities such as Sydney, it is typically owners who
153 have leverage, with prices being forced upward by multiple buyer offers. Political force can be wielded in market transactions by powerful developers and investors who have access to superior planning knowledge and political connections, forcing owners to part with their properties at lower than expected values. Such instances however are not regarded as part of the everyday institutionalised rules and operation of the market, and they consequently spark outrage. In compulsory property acquisition, the political power of the state in taking property is similarly ‘crystal- clear’ (De Angelis 2004). There is a certainty and compulsion to acquisition that is not a feature of ‘regular’ market exchange. This certainty, embedded in political authority, is critical to generating compliance to dispossession. The state’s definitive authority to take property for WestConnex placed pressure on property owners to strike a deal with the acquiring authority, RMS.
Compounding the certainty of land loss through acquisition was the time, finances and bureaucracy of the process, set out it the Land Acquisition Act 1991 (referred to as below as the Acquisition Act). It proceeded in a series of bureaucratic stages (see Figure 6.2 and 6.3). Firstly, RMS commences the process by informing owners that their property is marked for acquisition. It conducts a property appraisal, for which it engages a professional valuer, following which it submits an offer letter to the owner, who during this has the option of engaging a valuer, paid for by the Government. The valuation proceeds by standard market logics of abstraction, where valuers determine the worth of a property by reducing its heterogeneity to a dollar value, based on similar properties in the surrounding areas. If no agreement is reached ‘voluntarily’ on the appropriate amount of compensation, RMS issues a proposed acquisition notice (PAN) to the owners commencing the official compulsory acquisition. The Acquisition Act requires a period of at least 90 days following the issuing of a PAN before the land is compulsorily acquired to give adequate time for negotiation. If no agreement is reached by this stage, RMS is within its legal right to publish the notice in the NSW Gazette. A PAN can be issued, and the property gazetted for acquisition prior to any agreement on compensation being reached. In such cases, homeowners are eligible for 90% of the compensation offered by RMS, (90% of the market value as determined by RM’S valuer). RMS owns the land from the date of the Gazette publication, but negotiations continue over the payment amount. The Valuer-General, the state’s valuation authority, in this situation, holds the responsibility to determine compensation by engaging an independent valuer. Where owners accept the determination, the amount withheld is made available to them. Owners who still wish to contest the decision, have the option to commence litigation proceedings in the Land and Environment Court.
154
Figure 6. 6 Voluntary Acquisition Process & Official Compulsory Acquisition (Source: Figure adapted from Roads and Maritime Services, 2014)
Property owners’ accounts of the above process indicate the domination and coercion employed by the state and moreover that is built into formal bureaucratic procedure. For many residents the process was spread over months and years, configured by the sequencing of the Acquisition Act. The case of Desane, a commercial property developer in the suburb of Rozelle, illustrates how domination was applied in state communications with property owners . While this was not the case of an individual resident whose home is being acquired, an image that is typically brought to mind when thinking about acquisition, it nonetheless reveals the state’s forceful approach to the process, which emanates from the certainty of its power. Court records outline the dispute between Desane and RMS regarding the acquisition of the former’s property for the M4-M5 link. Steve Brien, Senior Communication and Stakeholder Engagement Lead for RMS, in a meeting with Desane director Rick Montrone and planning consultant Elise Crameri, made statements such as (Desane Properties Pty Limited v State of New South Wales [2018] NSWSC 553):
155 We are only here to let you know that your property is required for the project.
‘Is required’, ‘will unfortunately require’, ‘the land will be compulsorily acquired’ are expressions used in RMS staff’s series of communications with Desane, indicating the state’s sovereign authority (Desane Properties Pty Limited v State of New South Wales [2018] NSWSC 553). An extract of a letter from Davendra Chandra, Senior Acquisitions Officer with RMS, is a good example of this power, see Figure 6.4. It states that unfavourable delays to mutual agreements would lead to the official initiation of compulsory acquisition via the issue of a Proposed Acquisition Notice (PAN) to Desane. The letter attempts to force Desane into ‘voluntarily’ coming to an agreement on the terms and conditions of RMS’s purchase of their land within 21 days. Failure to comply meant RMS’s issuing of a PAN, which had the legal effect of compulsory acquisition within a 90-day period of its issue as per the Acquisition Act (see Figure 6.4). The bureaucratic domination expressed in such correspondence is underpinned by the certainty with which RMS can take land, a certainty that stems from its legislatively supported sovereign power. In combination with the 6 month time-limit for negotiation enforced by the Acquisition Act, which had been expended in Desane’s case, such force generated immense pressure on Desane to settle for an unfavourable compensation, so as to avoid Valuer-General intervention, and lengthy litigation proceedings in the Land and Environment Court.
The formal actions which the developer eventually took against the state in the form of a court injunction to block the acquisition, cost millions of dollars (Parliamentary Inquiry 2018). Desane’s challenge was the only significant one mounted to stop the acquisition process itself. Most others were based on demands for increased compensation. And while the NSW Supreme Court initially ruled in Desane’s favour, the first of such ruling in Australian history (Tan 2018), the decision was later overturned after a successful challenge by the NSW Government, ending a two-year stand-off between the two parties. The developer later settled a payment with RMS for their property.
156
Figure 6. 7 Extract of a Letter, Senior Acquisitions Officer with RMS (Source: Desane Properties Pty Limited v State of New South Wales. [2018] NSWSC 553
Desane’s financial resources were not available to most property owners, nor did others have the time and the legal knowledge to challenge the state, which further bolstered its capacity to secure early compliance. The state’s power to acquire land, and the finances and bureaucracy of acquisition created immense pressure on residents to ‘voluntarily’ settle. The domination that underpinned the compensation process, limited their agency to negotiate, as they might have done in a standard market transaction. In the latter case other offers are available creating the impression of ‘choice’, and the right to refuse an offer and stay put, if one’s economic circumstances allow. The suburb of St Peters was one among several where such domineeering compensations left homeowners feeling ‘bullied’ and under ‘duress’ to accept RMS’s offer. In a submission to the Parliamentary Inquiry into the project a former resident wrote (Anonymous 2018, p.2 emphasis added).
Never had we thought to sell or move! ...We were told that it will happen with or without our cooperation … Our St. Peters home was taken.
157 The feeling that their property was ‘taken’ indicates the domination that marked negotiations with RMS, and speaks to the explicitness and certainty of state force – people were forced to ‘sell’. This lack of alternatives was accompanied with bureaucratic coercion that was writ into the acquisition process. Refusing to settle early, meant entering the official stage of acquisition, a lengthy and expensive exercise with extensive legal fees. The sense of duress that characterised acquisition was thus also a product of the time, energy and money required to engage in the process and challenge state power. Consequently, most people agreed to a ‘voluntary’ settlement. Bureaucratic procedures exerted coercive power, by acting as deterrents to contesting dispossession, in effect, generating compliance. The threat of negative sanction was not verbally expressed, but lay in the consequences of taking one’s challenge further – lost wealth, time and emotional strain, of engaging in a lengthy state process.
Annie Coates from St Peters who was in her 60’s was among the residents who settled by ‘agreement’. She rebuffed an initial offer of $825,000 for her 4-bedroom terrace in St Peters, which she considered below market value but felt compelled to accept a subsequent offer of $960,000, still below market value in her estimates. Her lawyers advised her that this was the ‘best offer’ she would get, and she agreed to accept it under pressure (Public Accountability Committee, 2018e). In a market-exchange she might have been able to seek out other buyers, an especially likely scenario given Sydney’s heated property market. But in compulsory property acquisition the state is the only buyer. While the compensation she received is a considerable amount of money, the average house price in Sydney at the time between 2015 and 2017 sat at over a million dollars (ABC News 2019 b). As a consequence, as we will see in the next chapter, Annie had to leave the city. Rosalind and Chris Jackson who had lived in their St Peters house since 1985, made a similar decision (Public Accountability Committee 2018d). As in Annie’s case RMS’s initial offer was increased, and while they still did not want to accept this amount, their lawyers advised that they would not receive a better settlement. Rosalind was not comfortable entering the official acquisition process for health reasons, a process which she understood would take another year and be expensive with no guarantee of the Valuer-General or the Land and Environment Court’s decisions leading to more compensation. I will discuss the impact of people’s different subjectivities on the experience of dispossession in more detail in the following chapter, but here it is suffice to say that she and Chris ‘reluctantly’ accepted the offer partly because of the certainty that the state could take their land and housing, and partly because of the time, money and bureaucracy of acquisition. The ordering of events in the Acquisition Act is significant here because of the coercive effects that it produced. A period of 6 months of negotiation followed by an official process commencing with the Valuer General’s assessment, created angst among residents because of the time period, and the fact that they were eligible for only a partial compensation whist waiting (the 90% of the market value determined by RMS). Such a situation which appears to have induced early compliance. Even
158 though most of the market value was released at this stage, it may not have been sufficient finance to buy another property, thus acting as a deterrent to challenging the state, and extending the process further. The engaging of the Valuer General’s office in acquisition added to the time period for which their lives were in limbo. The Valuer-General, Simon Gilkes, claimed that on average an 83 day gap lay between the gazettal date and the determination of compensation (Gotsis 2016). Those who did not accept this determination and chose to proceed with litigation in the NSW Land and Environment Court faced a longer wait before receiving the full compensation. 83% of cases were settled without official compulsory acquisition (Valuer General 2018). But as Annie, and Rosalind and Chris’s cases indicate, the figure does not necessarily indicate a ‘voluntary’ settlement, with no measure of ‘compulsion’. Early settlement instead is a direct consequence of the authority of the state to acquire property, and the fear of entering the lengthy and expensive official acquisition process, set out in the Acquisition Act.
Reduced bargaining power, the threat of negative consequences, and the perception that RMS was exploiting its authority to make below market values offers on property, created feelings of being cheated and ripped off. G, a retiree, who had lived in St Peters since 1995, claimed (Interview 25 October 2016):
But they are so ripping us off … I have had no negotiations with RMS. It's just what they're going to pay me for the property now. Now we have been forced to go to the LEC, Land and Environment Court, … we have gone straight to LEC, because no one's negotiated. No negotiations no counter offers.
G’s statements indicate a measure of unfairness that was premised on norms of market- based negotiations and valuations, against which she was assessing the state’s acquisition process. Others have expressed similar frustrations. T also from St Peters was angry that she did not receive an ‘offer’ but rather it was an ‘insult’. And Rodney Cummins from the same suburb accused RMS of hard bargaining (Public Accountability Committee 2018g):
My home in St Peters was compulsory acquired by RMS as part of the interchange. I believe I was bullied in this process,
159 especially when RMS threatened to decrease their offer by $70,000 if I did not immediately agree with their offer on that day
Pauline Lockie, an Inner West Sydney Councillor, whose home was acquired for WestConnex, has claimed that such experiences are not outliers. Her article in the Sydney Morning Herald (Lockie 2016) suggests that many people were offered hundreds of thousands of dollars below what they believed to be the market value of their housing. Residents’ characterisations of the process of acquisition as unfair and on par with theft are a direct consequences of the combination of the leverage and transparency of state power, where selling is mandatory and there is only one ‘buyer’.
Although state force was predominantly bureaucratic, in the final instance compliance was enforced physically by the police, in the few instances, where residents and activists attempted to block the demolition and expropriation of housing in their neighbourhoods. The use of physical force sets it apart from the bureaucratic negotiations, authoritative language and the issuing of PANs used in the acquisition process. But the threat of physical force is what ultimately makes extra-economic force effective. It is always implicit in such processes of dispossession. SJ’s submission to the parliamentary Inquiry captured this characteristic of acquisition (Public Accountability Committee 2018e):
There was also an underlying threat of police intervention if we did not comply – which made me feel very uneasy. This was evidenced when my neighbour was forcibly removed from his home and thrown in jail
The neighbour he speaks of is Van Ngo, a 68-year-old Vietnamese man from St Peters who was arrested and refused bail for breaking into his home, that had been acquired by RMS, within hours of being evicted. He was the last remaining resident on a row of houses that had been acquired in St Peter’s Campbell Street. While WestConnex has generated a huge amount of protest including occupations, instances of former homeowners occupying their properties and resisting dispossession have been rare, indicating the success of bureaucratic forms of state domination and coercion in enforcing dispossession.
160 Conclusions
The state has deployed narratives of improvement, compensation, and bureaucratic domination and coercion to justify WestConnex and its dispossession, and to pacify and force property owners into to relinquishing land. The improvement narratives have attempted to justify the project, by prioritising the goals of an economically productive future whilst critiquing the inefficiency of Sydney’s here and now, and remaining silent on the value that many of the places damaged by the road hold for the public. In so doing, the narrative constructs a spatial and temporal deficit that constitutes a drive for action, to plug the city’s infrastructure gap. It takes a calculative form in the project’s Business Case, which has been used to both internally justify the project, and to legitimise it in public communications. Economic productivity is measured in units of time, where the distribution of time across space, is the object of improvement. A monetary value is applied to this via a cost-benefit analysis technique that relies on market logics of abstraction, opportunity cost and a utilitarian calculus. The calculations’ focus on the future, means that little attention is paid to the value of the here and now of Sydney and its urban spaces that will be, and have been, lost and damaged for the construction of the WestConnex. In other words, urban space is valued to the extent that it can be reconfigured in the image of economic productivity. This re-modelling is in the interest of market actors such as the Transurban-led conglomerate who will operate the WestConnex and receive its tolls. The NSW state-level Government’s policy to subsidise regular toll road users further secures the proceeds derived from the dispossession of urban land.
Dispossession enacted through a bureaucracy of compulsory acquisition has been crucial to the successful execution of the WestConnex. Domination, coercion and compensation have been used in conjunction in such a process to enforce compliance with land acquisition. Compensation was informed by its own calculations of the market value of landed property, underpinned by logics of abstraction. The certainty of the state’s power to expropriate land limited resident’s room for negotiation, whilst the time and monetary costs of acquisition acted as deterrents for those who wished to challenge the state’s offer. These factors compelled many residents into early compliance, leaving them feeling cheated and ‘ripped off’.
An important note in concluding this chapter is that the compensation process, and residents’ assumptions of a fair market value for their property, took for granted practices of exchange and valuation, that are premised on the abstraction and alienability of land and the built environment from its diverse social relationships, histories, meanings and values. In so doing, a social reality was reproduced which reduced the complexity of human relationships with land and space, in order to render them alienable. And, as will be discussed in Chapter 8, such actions were, in effect, a performance of a settler colonial governance of land and space (Porter 2014; Bhandar 2018). The following chapter explores the more expansive relationship of property, that owners’ held with their
161 homes, neighbourhoods and suburbs. I shift the analytic focus to questions of how residents’ property relations, official or otherwise, shaped the land acquisition process. The discussions will make clear that alongside the assumptions of abstraction and alienability that informed the market value of property, owner’s also expressed relationships with place that are not capturable in legal and market registers of ownership. These include the material security which property brings, and the unofficial practices of mastery and membership with which people’s different ways of life come into being.
162 Chapter 7 Compulsory Acquisitions and Contestation – a Propertied and Temporal Lens
In this chapter I turn my attention to the dispossession and contestation that unfolded in the course of the WestConnex project. Drawing on the propertied theoretical framework developed in Chapter 2, and its understanding of dispossession as a loss of mastery and membership, I analyse private property owners’ experiences of compulsory acquisition, and residents’ collective resistance to the road’s encircling of a large parkland in Sydney’s inner south. In the first half of the chapter, (section 7.1), I argue that dispossession had a distinct temporality that was shaped by the very complex of ‘structures, networks and processes’ that hold up private property relations. The legal holding up of private ownership which creates assumptions of control over the future, and a market system that allocates value to landed property, were particularly influential in shaping dispossession into bitter negotiations between residents and the state’s acquiring authority, RMS, over the correct market- value of property. Conversely the lack of official state recognition of urban dwellers’ relationships with their housing, neighbourhoods and suburbs that fell outside of market-based ownership, influenced acquisition in ways that forced physical dispossession and a loss of unofficial property relations with place upon some residents. My discussions reveal the differentiated experiences of dispossession resulting from owners’ varied subject positions; with age, access to finance and the knowledge base of professionals crucially defining the emotional and financial experiences and outcomes. I hypothesize that should property-lessness continue for acquired owners, there will be ramifications for their subjectivity, which had been shaped by the property practices of ownership.
The second half of the chapter, section 7.2, shifts the analytical focus to residents’ physical occupation of different sections of Sydney Park, a public space in Sydney’s inner south, in which I participated. The park is set to be surrounded by the WestConnex, in response to which activists and residents physically occupied its land and used planning conditions to hold up a collective property claim to the park, that aimed to stop its expropriation and the destruction of its trees for the road. The occupation revealed an ownership that urban dwellers practised over their suburbs and neighbourhoods, and the value attached to these, that were not incorporated in registers of private property, or in the calculative improvement narratives of the Business Case. As in the previous discussions on acquisition, my analysis draws on the framing of property developed in Chapter 2. I find that the membership of the collective occupation, and occupiers’ capacity to practice mastery over the camp site was differentially held up, stratified according to socio-economic and racialised subject positions, and the extent to which individual occupiers were there by political choice as opposed to ‘capitalising’ on a middle-class protest to access shelter. I conclude the chapter by problematising the settler colonial narratives that held up our collective property claims over Sydney park, arguing that such claims, whilst contesting dispossession, were enabled by a temporality that
163 remains silent on Aboriginal claims to Sydney’s land. Our collective property claim continued this temporal trajectory, by a limited consideration of its political implications in an ongoing colonial context.
7.1 The Course of Dispossession
7.1.1 The Security of Ownership
Property rights tend to ‘settle’ or ‘secure’ expectations (Blomley 2004, 2013). They are legally held up in a way that the titleholder typically decides what happens to their property within the remit of various statutory conditions such as those enforced by planning. Ownership protects those with title to land from the eviction and dislocation that is characteristic of rental tenure. The owner’s future is under control, or at least it is seen to be so. Titleholders are not oblivious to the fact that sudden life changing events might impact their futures, but there is an expectation that the future activities planned around property ownership are secure. Legal holding up is productive of economic and social security. It becomes possible to imagine a life trajectory, comprising practices of renovating, decorating, gardening, renting out rooms, raising children and selling and re-mortgaging. The loss of legal recognition through state acquisition is not typically a consideration in this trajectory. While the state’s authority actually underpins official property rights, it is for the most part latent and in the background.
Private property ownership is also held up culturally and bureaucratically in a way that it is an important source of wealth around which life is planned. Government tax legislation, grants and loan schemes, practices of valuation along with cultural celebrations such as the ‘Australian Dream’ of homeownership have contributed to incentivising and legitimising this form of property (The Australian Dream 2010; Archer 1996). It is a cultural goal that has been sedimented into practice over decades and centuries (Castles 1994; Bourassa et al. 1995; Archer 1996; Hayward 1996; The Australian Dream 2010). Its desirability is reflected in its position as the dominant tenure in Australia, with ownership rates standing at 65% according to the 2016 census (Stone et al. 2016).
The median property prices in the Sydney suburbs of St Peters, Haberfield, Homebush and Rozelle affected by compulsory acquisition ranged from just above $900,000 to over $2 million in the years between 2014-2017 when most acquisitions for the WestConnex occurred (Realestate.com.au. 2019). This was at the peak of a 5 year increasing trend of property prices in Sydney (see Figure 7.1). The figures and trend reflect this legislative, market-based and cultural incentivisation and legitimisation of property ownership. Acquisition not only disrupted residents’ security and interrupted life trajectories, it also threatened a relationship which was the source of tremendous amounts of wealth. Dispossession, in other words, operated in relation to how property is held up.
164
Figure 7. 1 Median House Prices Sydney, Three Month Moving Average (Source: Heath 2018 Adapted from CoreLogic, RBA 2018)
7.1.2 The Unexpected Acquisition
The legal holding up of property, by which it becomes a source of security, means that homeowners do not expect their properties to be compulsorily acquired. That was the case for most residents living in the wake of the WestConnex project, perhaps with the exception of those living on RMS road reservation in Sydney’s inner south suburb of St Peters. The news of the project and its acquisitions shocked residents and was the first event in a long-drawn-out temporality of dispossession.
Aurelia, introduced in the last chapter, was among the residents whose homes were acquired for the project. As a consequence, she moved with her family away from the Homebush suburb of Sydney to a flat in Alexandria. I spoke with her after the dust had settled from the process of compulsory acquisition (Interview 23 January 2018):
Yeah so, the very first kind of clue that we got about it was from my father in law …. my father in law is an older gentleman and he panicked about this tunnel that was going through Homebush and apparently, they showed under …our
165 house on the news, Channel Seven news. And he called me I went, ‘Oh don't panic, it's fine you know it will be fine.’, and things like that. And then went to bed that day and didn't bother. And then the next morning I remember the girl she was from the Inner West Courier and the ‘Strathfield Scene’ part of that…And she came and knocked at my door, and said to me, 'Oh I'm from Strathfield Scene. I was just wanting to find out from you how you feel that your house is gonna be knocked down’. And I literally I thought I was going to faint. I burst into tears. And I went ‘oh my god, my father in law was right’…. And I said, ‘What do you mean?’. And she said ‘Haven't you heard it was on the news yesterday. And these houses are going.
Of course, not all residents who faced acquisition found out in such dramatic circumstances. Others received letters, heard from information centres established in their neighbourhoods or from community members. But nonetheless the shock many experienced, as revealed in Aurelia’s account, was partly a consequence of the infrequency of the state’s use of such political authority.
The testimonies of homeowners affected by WestConnex in the following media and interview quotes, reveal the expectations of material security derived from ownership (Bacon and Gooch 2015; Interview 23 January 2018; Interview 21 June 2017; Knaus 2017):
When Kevin and Ann moved into their home five years ago, they expected to stay there for the rest of their lives. They had specifically chosen the house because it had no stairs, was walking distance to the train station and shops, and in a quiet street.
We had just done a major renovation, and this was going to be our forever home.
Because you’re having the house ripped out from under your feet so all the things you envisage for your future disappear.
In our family’s case it was our first home, it was the home that we had planned to raise our little girl in, we had actually
166 transferred schools to bring her somewhere nearby.
Arguably these expectations are particularly strong for middle class and/or white residents, who likely formed the majority of the acquirees in the case of WestConnex. Of the suburbs where most acquisitions occurred, Strathfield, Homebush, Concord and Ashfield were home to many non-Anglo communities, but the educational attainments and household incomes were close to or surpassed that for the Greater Sydney area (see Figure 7.2). St Peters and Rozelle were less culturally and linguistically diverse and also had median weekly incomes above the Greater Sydney median (see Figure 7.3).
CULTURAL AND LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY OF SUBURBS IMPACTED BY WESTCONNEX COMPULSORY ACQUISITIONS English only spoken at home Greater % Sydney Country of Birth NSW Australia % Australian Rozelle Ancestory %
St Peters
Haberfield
Ashfield
Concord
Homebush North Strathfield 0 20406080100 Percentage %
Figure 7. 2 Sydney suburbs Impacted by WestConnex Acquisitions, Language, Country of Birth, Ancestry, and Educational Attainments (Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics 2016)
167
MEDIAN HOUSEHOLD WEEKLY INCOME ($)
Greater Sydney
NSW
Rozelle
St Peters
Haberfield
Ashfield
Concord
Homebush
North Strathfield
0 500 1000 1500 2000 2500 3000 3500 Dollars $
Figure 7. 3 Sydney suburbs Impacted by WestConnex Acquisitions, Median Household Income (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2016)
7.1.3 Chasing, Waiting and Uncertainty
The announcements of acquisitions unleashed a process marked by uncertainty, waiting and the chasing up of information on government decisions. The expectations of control over one’s future and the wealth tied up in property ownership were unsettled by the state’s coercive powers of acquisition. We do not have exact figures, but we know from interviews, media reports and the public testimonies to the 2018 Parliamentary Inquiry into the road project that for some people the compulsory acquisitions process ran for several years. After the initial project announcements, residents were anxious to understand more regarding what acquisition entailed and when they would receive letters of confirmation with offer amounts. In cases where residents received early offers, there were questions as to why the properties had been undervalued. In seeking information residents organised meetings and communicated with RMS representatives, their local authorities and lawyers to keep informed of the process.
In the suburb of St Peters, the local WestConnex Action Group, who were protesting the project, organised a community information session for affected owners with law firm Slater and Gordon. Owners of acquired properties also met with RMS representatives, and were assured that the length
168 and nature of the process would be to the formers’ ‘timeframe’ with fair compensation offered (Public Accountability Committee 2018e; G Interview 25 October 2016).
In Ashfield the local authority organised a meeting for residents affected by M4 acquisitions with the law firm Pikes and Vereker, and the SMC who were delivering the project on behalf of RMS (Negotio Resolutions 2015). Following Pikes and Vereker’s presentation on the acquisition process there were multiple questions from residents that were concerned with RMS’s under valuing of their properties, the difficulties of buying new homes, the cost of the process and implications for income and tax concessions. The nature of the questioning reveals the work of law and policy in holding up property ownership as a source of finance and material security. The responses did not allay residents’ concerns and doubts and the local authority advised that they seek out independent valuers, accountants and lawyers, or liaise directly with RMS. At the end of the meeting a frustrated attendee exclaimed, ‘What is the point of this meeting if we can’t get anything done?’ (Negotio Resolutions 2015, p. 6). Their sentiments capture the overall frustrations at the lack of information on an issue that was critical to their financial well-being and life-plans. Despite the flurry of meetings and efforts to contact politicians, by and large affected property owners felt ignored and dissatisfied with the NSW Government. As seen in the case of the Waterloo tenants, information on the projects’ impact on their housing situation was difficult to access, with much time spent waiting and chasing. Some felt that the onus was on them to seek out information. T who received news of the acquisition through a community pop up shop organised at the behest of the WestConnex Action Group, claimed that any information came through residents’ persistence as opposed to from RMS or the SMC (Interview 21 June 2017):
I heard from others that their houses were ear-marked for acquisition … and I went to one of their pop us shops to look at the map and saw that my house was also ear marked for acquisition. So, I enquired and then I was told that, ‘yes’… And they claimed that they had called multiple meetings that they had door knocked, they’d posted to everyone that was affected. This was completely untrue. They didn’t do any of those things. We had to push them all the time for information, all the time to have pop up shops. You know we invited them to meetings I think they came to one. But any disclosures that occurred were through pressure from us.
While RMS had in fact door knocked and/or sent letters to residents, T’s case suggests that some people had been missed. Her statements regarding the lack of information, uncertainty, and to the
169 effort of pursuing information reflect the experiences of many others. For some, this uncertainty stretched many months and years. In St Peters after the announcement of acquisitions in early November 2014, residents did not receive offer letters until the end of January, and at the time there were still households in uncertain situations, as a decision had not been made on the status of their homes (Gainsford 2015).
The lack of information left some people like Aurelia, from Homebush, in a state of limbo for over a year. This waiting period was particularly distressing given the wealth and security derived from property ownership. In Aurelia’s case, the house that she and her family lived in was their ‘forever home’, a place where she and her partner raised their children who attended the nearby school, and a short drive from her work-place. These life activities were possible through the stability provided by home ownership. After hearing about the potential acquisition in November 2013, she waited until February 2014 for the first information session on the project. The Government left ‘us hanging’ for two months, she claimed. The first meeting offered little information on the project overall, and little certainty regarding the acquisition of their home. I sensed her frustrations during our conversation where she explained that her questions were repeatedly met with promises of ‘getting back’ to her (Aurelia Interview 23 January 2018). A confirmatory offer letter arrived 18 months after she first received word of acquisition. Receiving a formal letter of acquisition with an offer of compensation did not resolve the uncertainty, but marked the beginning of another long drawn out process of negotiation with RMS over valuation and compensation. Connecting the experience of homeowners with the justifications for WestConnex discussed in Chapter 6 brings attention to a redistribution of time through compulsory property acquisition. Saving time in the interest of urban economic productivity, that benefits international consortiums such as Sydney Transport Partners, rests on the usurping of time from urban dwellers whose housing is expropriated in the name of such improvement.
7.1.4 Market Value Dispossession
Holding up Property Ownership and Valuation
As noted previously a diverse complex of legislation, policy, cultural narratives and practices, hold up property ownership. This holding up includes the economic encouragement of property investment through tax breaks and subsidisation; the work of the professional practice of valuation; the state’s annual valuation of land for the purpose of rates calculations; conveyancing legislation that organises the process of property sale, and; people’s repeated actions of selling and buying (Blomley 2013). For the purposes of understanding dispossession through compulsory acquisition, I will focus on the market valuation of land and housing, which is critical in enabling property
170 ownership, particularly the ownership practice of alienating the things one owns in a market exchange. Valuation provides a way of determining the monetary benefits of land title, by using a logic of abstraction to assign heterogenous goods like land and housing a dollar value, payable to the owner in a market-based exchange. Compulsory acquisition for the WestConnex was shaped by the abstractions of the valuation process, leading to disputes between property owners and state authorities that centred on the rigour of valuation and the correct value of a property, a situation exacerbated by the level of wealth associated with ownership.
Dispossessing Private Property and Preserving the Market Value
Recall in the previous chapter that owners who faced compulsory acquisition were compensated with the market value of their property. This legal requirement under the Acquisition Act 1991 is a recognition of the property practice of alienating land through a market exchange. In contrast to compulsory acquisition’s thwarting of the material security of ownership, the monetary benefits of ownership are preserved, or at least legislation and bureaucratic procedures mandate this.
Disagreement over compensation, and the levels of wealth associated with property ownership, was the source of bitter and extended negotiations between the state’s acquiring authority, RMS, and residents facing acquisition. The conversion of a legal property relation in land, into a monetary value during acquisition is based primarily on how the acquired land would have been valued in a hypothetical ‘normal’ sale between a seller and buyer. The objects of the Acquisition Act include:
to guarantee that, when land affected by a proposal for acquisition by an authority of the State is eventually acquired, the amount of compensation will be not less than the market value of the land (unaffected by the proposal) at the date of acquisition
The state organised dispossession of property is shaped, in principle at least, by how it is held up as a market-based practise, where property rights in land can be exchanged for a market value. The Acquisition Act ensures or at least provides the legal framework to ensure that impacted owners reap the major financial benefits of a normative property practice. In doing so it draws on a logic of abstraction that underpins the practice of valuation.
The disputes between RMS and dispossessed property owners, partly discussed in Chapter 6, reflect the difficulty of valuing land and its improvements. Valuation proceeds by abstracting heterogenous objects from their specific and individual qualities, and assigning them a monetary value based on
171 comparisons with the recent sale of other similar pieces of land and buildings in the area. But as Rosalind Jackson, a homeowner from St Peters introduced in the last chapter, explained in her submission to the NSW Parliamentary Inquiry into WestConnex, her house was not easily comparable to others in the area (Public Accountability Committee 2018d). It was unique. This made a market valuation based on comparison with other houses difficult. Were the commodities in question of a more uniform quality, these comparisons would have less bearing on dispossession. Court records of SJ’s case against RMS in particular evidences the difficulties of abstraction (NSW Caselaw 2018). In order to ascertain his property’s market value, as per standard procedure RMS’s and SJ’s valuers used the sale of comparable properties in the area. Disputes centred on things like ornate features, land size, the bedroom potential of a fourth room and its specific locational attributes. The negative impact of the WestConnex on the sale prices of the comparable properties was adjusted for, further complicating the process. Abstraction, by reducing the specific constitution of property, including its locational characteristics, to dimensions measurable in the monetary terms of market-value fuelled an extended period of negotiation.
NEW M5 WESTCONNEX ACQUISITIONS RESIDENTIAL 3000000 n ($)
2500000
2000000
1500000 untary and Compulsory Acquisitio Compulsoryand untary
1000000
500000
Residential Property Prices Vol Prices Property Residential 0
Figure 7. 4 New M5 Property Acquisitions (Source: Author’s Adaptation from NSW Government Spatial Services n.d.)
172 The intensity of the arguments between RMS and property owners, and the lengths to which the latter went, in order to obtain an appropriate value for their property are products of the status of ownership as a source of wealth, (and consequently material security), around which life is planned. The high financial stakes, illustrated by the market values ‘agreed’ between the NSW government and individual property owners for the new M5 leg of the WestConnex, further fuelled the bitterness of the disputes (See Figure 7.4.) Leaving aside a few low outliers, most property values were in excess of $800,000, with a median of above a $1 million. Whilst this represents substantial sums of money, resident anger suggests that many were not convinced that the compensation reflected the market value of their property.
The negotiation of dispossession was thus shaped by an intersection of a varied complex of policies and practices which hold up property ownership as a source of wealth, and as a practice of market- based alienation. It is no surprise then that the negotiations reported in newspapers, community meetings, in Parliamentary Inquiry testimonies, and through the interviews I conducted with property owners, were tense and long drawn out. The RMS issued official Property Acquisition Notices for 597 cases of acquisition, indicating that there were difficulties in reaching an agreement with owners. In approximately a quarter of these cases, acquisition moved into the latter stage of acquisition, where determination of market value was carried out by the NSW Valuer General, indicating that no resolution had been reached with RMS. Some owners took matters even further with litigation proceedings.
Aurelia called the money RMS offered her ‘shit money’. She described the negotiations, where she and her husband decided on a target value and went to pains to provide records of the money spent on renovations and gardening and ‘scaping’ work. Her husband surveyed the previous 6 months residential selling prices in the neighbourhood and found a real estate agent who offered them predictions of future land values in the area. RMS through the course of negotiations ‘…slowly came further up and further up’ and eventually settled on a price they were happy with (Aurelia Interview 23 January 2018). The process took 6 months, reflecting the difficulties of valuing land and the built environment, where something that is not uniform needs standardisation. Its various individual features needed abstraction, into a thing to which a dollar value is assigned by comparing it with other such non uniform ‘things’, (the land and built environment of comparable houses), in the area. Their actions also reflect the financial significance of housing. Getting a price that she was happy with was important to Aurelia given the amount of money spent on the house and the need to finance a new property.
If we accept the norm that land and housing, that comprise the thing of the property relation, are actually measurable by the market-value, then the ‘extent’ to which such value is recovered by owners determines the ‘extent’ of dispossession (Levien 2013):
173 Dispossession of Market Value = Hypothetical Market Value at Auction - Market Value Negotiated with RMS
In reality however the market value is but one measure of the property relation that people have with their housing. Dispossession is a more expansive process. The tangible and intangible benefits that are not captured, or at least not fully captured in such a value include a personal sense of stability, the power to plan for the future, the aesthetic appreciation and value people attach to their housing and the emotional bonds formed through the memories of inhabiting that space. Property in housing also allows one access to the surrounding areas, with which people develop relationships that are not held up by practices of monetary valuation.
7.1.5 Relations Outside of Market Value
While some owners felt that RMS under-valued their properties, others did not make accusations of undervaluing per se, but were concerned that the acquisition did not sufficiently compensate them to maintain equivalent living conditions. SJ pointed out to the Inquiry into WestConnex (Public Accountability Committee 2018e):
If I get $1 million and it costs me $1.8 million to buy a home in the area, then that is the market value, I am sorry—not this crap that we have been given, and the way we have been treated.
The gap between market value of an acquired property, and market value of properties in the surrounding neighbourhoods and suburbs meant that those who could not bridge the difference, faced physical dispossession and a loss of the unofficial relations of property they held with these places.
At an Ashfield Council meeting in July 2015 intended to inform property owners affected by the M4 acquisitions about the process, a frustrated retiree expressed the financial difficulties they faced (Negotio Resolutions 2015, p. 4, 6):
I have been given a valuation of $660,000 for my 2 bedroom property. I have been to a real estate agency in Burwood, Ashfield, and Strathfield. When I tell them, I want to spend $660,000 they say “very sorry – probably best for you to move
174 along”. I am 80 years old. How am I supposed to keep moving along? I expect RMS to be coming to me and saying “we will find you a similar 2 bedroom property with a beautiful garden and garage like you have now
Annie from St Peters was among those who was forced to leave Sydney as her compensation was not sufficient to purchase another property in her suburb or in nearby areas. In a submission to the Parliamentary Inquiry she spoke of her unhappiness of living away from the city. The cost of water, land rates and strata fees in the new apartment ate into her finances and she missed the social and domestic activities and friends that were part of her life in the city (Public Accountability Committee 2018)e:
I had a close connection with my house and my community. My people are in Sydney. My interests are in Sydney. I had my house painted, inside and out. The floors were sanded. I had my modest art works on the walls. I had a sunny courtyard where I had planted olive trees, a kafir lime tree, a beautiful magnolia tree and a bay tree. Also, I could dry my clothes in the sun. Something that I cannot do now. When I left the olive tree had started to fruit for the first time. My interests include the performing and visual arts. I loved my neighbourhood. I loved my terrace house. I loved attending Alumni events at the University of Sydney. I loved being near Newtown. I loved my huge Italian stove that baked my patisserie goods, my lasagne and my breads. (I have lost enjoyment of life.)
These quotes sheds light on the relations of attachment, and the valuing of a place, that fall outside of the official registers of property ownership. Richard, the homeowner in the Ashfield Council Meeting and Annie both valued their housing and neighbourhoods. Annie in particular expressed an attachment to the community and social life she had access to in Sydney. Her way of life became increasingly difficult to sustain given that her new apartment does not have the physical facilities that facilitated the continuing of everyday activities such as cooking and gardening in particular ways. Compounding this was the loss of the social activities in Sydney through her physical dispossession. I see these practices, as property practices of mastery and membership. They
175 constituted a form of inhabitance that was enabled and held up, through access to certain things, activities and people – the particularities of the physical space of home, the immediate access to an urban community and the social activities and vibrancy of the city. In other parts of her submission Annie describes her struggles to commute into Sydney and to preserve her former way of life. While she has maintained the way of being of a house owner, the loss of the physical and social make up of her particular house and of a particular city had consequences for who she could be. Her testimony points to the relationship between property and personhood, that was disrupted by dispossession, where enactments of mastery and membership constitute who one can be.
While the loss of legally held up property ownership was ‘compensated’ through the market value, unofficial property relations were not prioritised in compensation. ‘Solatium’ was offered for the non-financial costs of acquisition, but it hardly captures those relationships between urban dwellers and the homes, neighbourhoods and the city that they inhabit, and the associated values and benefits. These diverse and complex relationships lacked legal holding up. They were not properly appraised in the course of compulsory acquisition, and nor could they be given that such relations and values are not reducible to a monetary value, and are not legible in legal registers. The process of acquisition reflects the conceptual poverty of the state’s holding up of property, which does not register the expanse of the relationships between people and the places that they inhabit (Porter 2014). The logic of abstraction that informed market valuation, also divorced property from the histories, meanings and the relationships in which it is embedded. The point here is not that more monetary compensation is warranted to make up for this loss, but rather that the framing of legal property itself is fundamentally flawed.
7.1.6 Dispossession: From Propertied to Property-less Subjects
Compulsory acquisition changed people’s life courses by influencing where they lived and how they lived. In Chapter 2 I discussed how having property with respect to an object such as land or a house, property as mastery, shapes people’s subject position. And more generally speaking, having and being are connected – having something, has consequences for one’s personhood. A corollary to this is that the loss of a thing such as housing, or the place of a neighbourhood alters who one is, as it reconfigures one’s position in the world. The interruption of long standing social practices with which people engaged with their housing and neighbourhoods; is also an interruption of practices that express and enact personhood.
Property owners’ accounts of compulsory acquisition indicate shifts in personhood because of the process. Given that a subject comes into the world through sustained acts of repetition, and the acquisitions occurred fairly recently some of these changes will be temporary, whilst others may
176 have more long lasting effects, changing how certain residents are in the world. G whilst chatting with me about her experiences of WestConnex, complained about the loss of mastery over her home, which she could occasionally access following acquisition prior to it being demolished (25 October 2015):
My front lawn never looks like this…I had to actually complain to one of their recruitment people yesterday going could you stop talking outside my house. Have you seen them there? They are very confrontational … you you'll see a lot of people in fluros who just walk up and down and think they own the property
Her words, ‘My front lawn never looks like this’ speak to the fact that the property had previously been hers and she had kept it well, adhering to the expected proprietary practices of ownership. The social norms that are among the conditions by which property is held up could not be maintained after acquisition. Dispossession through the loss of ownership meant a ceasing of such practices of mastery performed by the property-owning subject. Her complaints of WestConnex staff walking over and around her property, similarly, speak to the loss of another such property practice, that of exclusion. Dispossession means she no longer wields such power.
Such loss of mastery in my view was most sharply experienced in RMS’s charging of former owners a rent and a bond payment for remaining in their homes following acquisition. While this practice ended in late 2016 allowing residents to remain rent free for a period of 90 days, many impacted residents such as G and T, were outraged at having to pay rent for the house they had previously held title to. G complained (Interview 25 October 2016), ‘RMS expect me to pay 500 bucks a week rent to live here. In my own house’. Some owners had their bond withheld as they remained beyond the time period allowed in the fixed-term lease, causing further community outrage. A diminishing of status from owner to renter entailed a re-arrangement of the distribution of power between RMS and acquired residents. Through such a re-arrangement the latter were forced into temporarily occupying an inferior social status in the hierarchy of ownership. Should former owners continue to occupy such a tenant status for an extended period of time, I hypothesize that there will be ramifications for their personhood. Ensuring one meets the requirements of a tenancy agreement, otherwise facing the prospect of eviction or the forfeiture of the bond payment are conditions of private tenants’ mastery, which the owner subject does not have to contend with. The loss of property-owning status and engaging in the practices of a renter, over a sustained period
177 of time will foster a new way of being. For both G and T, the loss of property-owning status was temporary as they both purchased new homes following the acquisition, and regained their status as owners, maintaining their subject positions as property owners. SJ’s story followed a different path. He was not able to purchase a new property as quickly, and the loss of his property was productive of locational instability and an extended uncertainty. This stability or security, is a benefit of the legal holding up of property ownership, as mentioned previously. It produces a settled way of being. Unable to access new property, SJ found himself living in limbo moving between Sydney and another part of NSW. Such a shift in life from being a stable resident to a person living with insecurity, and moving between different places, is a consequence of the loss of ownership through dispossession and the subject position it is productive of.
7.1.7 Differentiated Experiences of Dispossession: Age, Economic Status and Professional Resources
Alongside being influenced by the ways in which property has been held up, dispossession was shaped by acquirees’ capacity to put up a fight against RMS, where they disagreed with the Government’s offer, and their capacity to buy a new house. Such capacities were in turn influenced by disparate factors such as access to finance and income, legal know-how, and people’s health and social support networks. These resources were unevenly distributed across acquirees making for differentiated experiences of dispossession. Among the cases of acquisition brought to my awareness, people’s age, economic position and negotiating capacity in particular, stood out as characteristics that shaped and produced different experiences of dispossession.
The impact of aging on people’s quality of life in terms of physical health and the types of life events which one has to manage, intersected with the acquisition process to produce distressing effects. G who lost her husband in 2013 spoke to me about the difficulties of managing the uncertainty of the acquisition process at a challenging time in her life. While the death of loved ones is something experienced by people of all age groups, such experiences are more frequent for those who are older. When I interviewed G, she took me to her late husband’s room in the house that was empty and awaiting demolition (Interview 15 October 2016):
The bed was here. And that's where James would always sleep. So, there are his ashes. He died in 2013. And I haven't been able to put him anywhere because I didn't have- I didn't know where I was going. Oh. So now I'm going to Woy Woy, I'll be able to plant him, and I'll be there beside him. But I put him
178 here, I had his ashes in storage for two years, and I just want to know where I was going to go to put him … But how they've done it so wrong … For two years … I've known about this.
G despite the difficulties took her case to the Land and Environment Court to challenge RMS’s offer, but in other situations people did not feel empowered to pursue such action. Rosalind Jackson and her husband Chris settled with RMA early in the acquisition process despite their unhappiness at the offer because of the health problems she faced and serious concerns raised by her doctor. Court challenges tended to increase the compensation amount offered in NSW, a possibility that was ruled out for the Jacksons. The acquisition process which demanded significant bureaucratic work and stressful engagements with RMS was not set up to accommodate the subject positions of older people or people with physical health problems.
Economic status was another aspect that shaped the process and outcome of dispossession. It was compounded by residents’ age, making the consequence of the loss of housing particularly materially damaging. The issues raised by the retiree at the Ashfield Council meeting mentioned previously, reveal the concerns of those acquirees who no longer had an income. Councillor Pauline Lockie hinted at this problem when discussing the compensation offers for acquisition, in her submission to the WestConnex Parliamentary Inquiry (Lockie 2018):
many will settle for tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars less than they should. For people in their 30s or 40s, such a compromise will set them back years. I cannot begin to fathom how badly such a loss will affect people who've reached the end of their working lives
Being part of a younger social group with income generating capacity or access to assets that could be converted into money, opened up access to mortgage credit and the opportunity to buy a new house for some, but not others. The material consequences of dispossession were spread in uneven ways, making certain groups of people more vulnerable to physical displacement, as they could not gather the finances to buy back into their neighbourhoods. Retirees, no longer considered economically productive subjects, found themselves in situations where accessing a mortgage to buy a new property was difficult if the properties on offer in their neighbourhoods or around Sydney were far more expensive than RMS’s market valuation, a situation exacerbated for those who lacked other assets and finances.
179 Annie a retiree and former St Peters resident, whose case was mentioned above, lived on her own and had to leave Sydney after she was unable to buy back in St Peters or in other suburbs. In her submission to the Inquiry she wrote (Public Accountability Committee 2018e):
A mortgage is not possible as my tiny income is insecure. I have not been able to gain work… My stress was compounded by real estate agents laughing when I told them my budget of $960 000 to buy in my neighbourhood.
By way of contrast T, whose St Peters home was acquired, and Aurelia’s experiences of acquisition, while still extremely difficult, did not entail physical displacement from Sydney. Both were employed and had partners who were also in work. Aurelia felt in some ways they came out ‘better’ than before. Whilst their new apartment in Alexandria, inner south Sydney, was away from Homebush, she had made friends and developed a good social network. Her family had plans to move to another house in the future, a sign of economic stability that derived at least partly from having access to two incomes. T similarly benefited from being in a relationship. She explained how she and her partner pooled their finances together to buy a new property (Interview 21 June 2017):
In order to get it because it was much more expensive than what I got for my house, my partner -she had a house in St Peters just round the corner…- sold her place in Crown Street and we put our money together and bought this place, otherwise it couldn’t have happened. Independently I couldn’t have done it.
Her experience was shaped by her economic position, as a person engaged in income generating work, and by the personal relationship that opened up access to additional material resources. These aspects of her person mitigated against property-lessness and physical displacement. A very different situation to Annie a retiree who faced a Sydney housing market alone.
Closely linked to people’s economic status was their capacity to negotiate with RMS, aided by their access to professional and informational resources, which allowed some to put up a more robust fight to secure the appropriate market value of their homes. While it is difficult to judge RMS’s compensation offer to residents, given that the market value of property is not reducible to an
180 objective figure, a study by the Parliamentary Research Service found that in a sample of 58 cases of acquisition between 2007 and 2016 that went to the Land and Environment Court, almost all resulted in an increase in compensation with an average of about 58% (Gotsis 2016). The case of commercial property owned by developer, Desane, discussed in the previous chapter, whose CEO was a valuation professional, further supports the conclusion that property owners’ negotiating capacity and knowledge base mattered given that Desane saw an increase in offer from $17 million to $78 million in an out of court settlement. Those with poor professional support were at a disadvantage in the process. Rodney Cummin’s account of his experience in St Peters reads (Public Accountability Committee 2018g):
The person representing the legal firm that was supporting me was often overseas and difficult to contact. I was also not told he was not in Australia without [sic] until I made persistent enquiries. I believe the inquiry should investigate how people faced with compulsory acquisitions select legal counsel for such a major disruption to their life. People faced with compulsory acquisition as I was do not have experience in engaging legal representation.
T who like Rodney was also from St Peters had a partner who was a solicitor, who advised her to find independent legal support. She attended a conference with RMS representatives, alongside her lawyer and her valuer and negotiated uncompromisingly, refusing to lower her asking price as she was sure the valuer had underestimated her house’s worth. Her refusal to meet them half-way was disconcerting for RMS representatives she explained to me with some satisfaction whilst recounting the process. ‘They were very taken aback…and I got the value’. Aurelia hired a lawyer her family had known for years who had done conveyancing work for them in the past, and whose competence they trusted. Entering negotiations with RMS Aurelia and her partner were armed with extensive data about land values and property prices in the area from real estate agents. Like T, they too did not accept the first offer but rather kept pushing until the amount they wanted was agreed to. Not everyone however had access to the resources of supportive and skilful property and legal professionals as Rodney’s complaints indicate, producing differentiated experiences of dispossession.
181 7.2 Sydney Park Camp: Planning Conditions, Occupation and Temporarily Holding up Property
As much as WestConnex’s compulsory acquisition of private property angered residents who were dispossessed, the wider outrage at the project was more acutely driven by its environmental impacts including its eating into local green space, the traffic increases expected in some neighbourhoods, increased noise pollution and deteriorations in air quality. Among the issues hotly contested in St Peters was the placing of a large interchange in the suburb near the popular Sydney Park, leaving the park surrounded on two sides by the WestConnex. Recall the theoretical analysis of dispossession discussed in Chapter 2. Different forms of justification and material reparation are mechanisms to generate public compliance. In the context of the WestConnex, the Government failed in its compliance efforts. There was no compensation to pacify communities who lost public land and amenity, and the Government’s narrative of improvement which noted WestConnex’s benefits failed to gain resident buy in. In the case of Sydney Park, surrounded by left leaning neighbourhoods which voted in a Greens Party state Member of Parliament, and which have histories of strong environmental activism, a failure of these tools of compliance resulted in heated contestation over the park’s land. Financial compensation in the compulsory acquisitions process channelled owners’ anger into a bureaucratic fight for market value, as discussed above. In contrast there was no such financial investment or bureaucratic channel for the public to engage with for damage to urban park land. Furthermore, it is not possible to restore land to its original state once it has been appropriated and engulfed on two sides by a road with significant traffic levels. This failure to pacify, was accompanied by a failure to justify. A government communications professional, I interviewed claimed that local anger had resulted from WestConnex’s lack of material benefit for inner west Sydney residents (ED Interview 03 September 2018):
We’re really building WestConnex to cater for…freight that needs to get to the airport and port Botany and all of the sort of businesses and warehouses out in like Western and South Western Sydney. And people who spend hours everyday stuck in traffic to try and improve travel times and to improve you know the productivity of the state. We haven’t actually built it for the people in Haberfield and in St Peters…so they are the communities that are going to be most impacted. But they are actually not gonna get the benefits.
182 Whilst the project might bring improvements for certain parts of Sydney, the lack of material benefits for the people whose neighbourhoods and urban public space is being damaged, meant that its economic legitimisations were not seen as valid. As ED states, ‘they are actually not gonna get the benefits’. But moreover, the suburbs of St Peters, Erskinville and Newtown surrounding Sydney Park had a residential base with strong environmental politics, who were politically and ethically opposed to investment in road projects and environmentally damaging infrastructure. In St Peters community organising had prevented the establishment of coal-seam gas mining in the suburb in 2012. Some residents had participated in the Green Bans of the 1970s, where an alliance between community groups and the NSW trade union, the Builders Labourers Federation, stalled socially and environmentally damaging development across the city. The public interest arguments of economic productivity had little sway for these urban dwellers, expressed in the slogan, ‘WestConnex won’t work, public transport will’. Consequently, not convinced of the Government’s improvement narratives, and not pacified with any material renumeration, contestation manifested in physical occupation.
I first realised what the blue ribbons around the trees in Sydney Park signified when I attended a meeting in 2016 at the park pavilion near the oval located on its eastern side. Janet from the WestConnex Action Group (WAG) that had organised the event explained how the ribbons marked the trees slated for removal for the project. WAG had been contesting the motorway and were among a growing number of anti-WestConnex groups that had sprouted across the city. While the road was only taking a small strip of the park, about 12 meters in along Euston Road, many more trees were to be removed along Campbell Road at its southern end as part of the works, and WestConnex would surround the park on its Euston and Campbell Road sides (see Figure 7.5). The Park had previously been a rubbish tip that was transformed through local residents’ tree planting efforts and investment from the City of Sydney Council. It is one of the few large green spaces that is publicly accessible in inner south Sydney and is popular with runners and dog walkers.
183
Figure 7. 5 Sydney Park (Source: Google Earth 2019)
On 18th September 2016 I received emails from WAG to come to the car park on the Euston Road edge of Sydney Park the following day to protest WestConnex construction work that was due to commence. The work allegedly included the taking of a strip of parkland to widen Euston Road and the felling of the 350 trees around the park that stood in the way. The protest was attended by Lord Mayor of the city of Sydney Clover Moore and the local NSW Greens MP for the area Jenny Leong. I stayed for a few hours but could not attend the evening meeting where a decision was made to set up a makeshift camp to keep watch over the site. On the first night of the occupation while volunteers slept in their tents, they were ambushed by the police at 3:00 am in the morning and physically dragged off the camp site. A cage was erected around the site, enclosing some of the trees marked for removal. RMS with the assistance of the police and a standard property practice of fencing thus maintained hold over the area and excluded the occupiers. As a consequence, the protestors set up base adjacent to the original site and continued to hold possession there for about a month (see Figure 7.6). The slight shifting of the camp was an indication of the events to unfold, where the duration for which a collective property claim was made through physical occupation and held up unofficially by residents and activists was restricted because of the lack of official legal holding up.
184
Figure 7. 6 Sydney Park Camp 1 (Source: WestConnex Action Group 2016)
The camp site was occupied 24/7 and volunteers (of which I was one) put themselves forward to do shifts for 2-hour slots. What started as a small protest eventuated in a year- long occupation across three different parts of the park. I see the occupation as a collective property claim over the park. During this time, we acted as if the place of occupation and the park more generally belonged to us. This claim had no authoritative legal recognition but instead was held up through a gathering of people who volunteered their labour and material resources to make and maintain the camp site. Tents were donated as were chairs and tables. Basic cooking facilities were provided which allowed those who stayed overnight and the early morning shifts to nourish themselves. Through regular volunteering people came to know each other. Over the time that I spent there my presence came to be greeted by residents and activists with a sense of familiarity that acknowledged my presence as legitimate. I walked around the camp with an ease, flicked through the roster, put myself down for shifts and helped myself to food and drink. When volunteering there like other participants I kept an eye out to ensure construction work had not commenced, chatted with passers-by to raise awareness about WestConnex’s impact and took turns in staying up and keeping watch over the trees for the few night shifts that I did. From the start of the occupation in September 2016 to the lead up to Christmas 2016 we held regular meetings to discuss strategies, we organised film nights, music festivals, and supported artists’ projects in the park that gave voice to the protest and recorded the significance of the park for locals. While our actions of mastery through possession of land and the regular use of the site were individual acts, the occupation was not premised on the basis of individual ownership, but rather a collective form of ownership. It was ‘our’ park, and ‘we’ were
185 protecting it. These were possessive property claims that were explicitly embedded in a collective, making the occupation what Krippner (2017) and Roy (2017) call possessive collectivism, in contrast to the possessive individualism of private property. In this respect the Sydney Park occupation’s claims were different from the individual claims of property owners dispossessed by WestConnex. The who or the subjects of the collective ‘we’ that was making the claims to the park was however left largely undefined. Whilst local residents, who lived in and around St Peters, took the lead in volunteering and organising the occupation, the people who volunteered at camp were not always from the immediate area. And during the occupation the camp was frequented and supported by artists, trade union supporters and students. So, while the collective making the property claim was constituted mainly of people from the surrounding neighbourhoods and suburbs, its loose membership spilled messily beyond that physical scale and stretched out across Sydney. The collective ‘we’ was also synonymous with the ‘public’ more generally. The claim being made was on behalf of urban residents, that this was a park for people and not for a road. While such a property claim was collective, it still had the critical exclusionary dimension of property. It was an attempt to exclude the NSW state government, made in response to the latter’s move to acquire public land. It was also exclusionary to those who did not belong properly to its mostly middle class and white constitution, as I will discuss in more detail below.
The lack of legal recognition of the collective property claim, meant the group had no official authority to stall the taking of a strip of the parkland for the road, to stop WestConnex from engulfing the park on two sides, or to prevent the destruction of trees. And so, adopting a politics of postponement to delay dispossession, protestors used physical occupation and exploited legal planning conditions that governed the WestConnex project.
When we first set up camp in September 2016 Wendy Bacon, a local journalist and WestConnex Action Group member, began making enquiries about whether an arborist report had been submitted to the Department of Planning. The submission of such reports and their acceptance by the Department was a condition of the planning approval granted for WestConnex. The report was required to demonstrate that due process would be followed during the felling of any trees, and that care had been taken to minimise the number of removals and unnecessary impact on those trees outside of the project scope. WestConnex’s contractors had in the past commenced chopping down trees in St Peters prior to the required arborist checks (Harris 2016). Janet Dandy Ward, one of the WestConnex Action Group’s founding members, had personally tried to block such an attempt, and on receiving community complaints the SMC at the time had stopped the work. Given this experience, on finding that such a report was yet to be submitted for Sydney Park’s trees, campers maintained vigil over the construction site to ensure that no activity occurred. The camp’s organisers notified the Department of Planning about WestConnex contractors’ setting up in the area in what seemed like attempts to start construction without proper approvals. A work notification issued by
186 the SMC on the 13th of September appears to confirm activists’ suspicions. The notification was issued prior to any arborists report even being lodged with the Department of Planning, and stated that investigative activities including tree removals were to commence from the 19th . When volunteering on shift we were asked to keep watch over the trees and contact the Department of Planning if any ‘illegal’ construction commenced. It remains unclear as to whether these tactics definitely delayed the project, but complaints were made to the Department when suspicions arose. Such actions were directed at forcing the state’s property practices to comply with planning conditions. The WestConnex contractors were legally required to enact the state’s property over the park in a way that was subject to such conditions. Activists and residents exploited the statutory authority of the planning approval to circumscribe how mastery over land was performed and in so doing they delayed or at least attempted to delay the state government’s property practices. Statutory planning requirements thus gave activists and residents a basis on which to postpone the state’s taking of parkland, by circumscribing state contractor’s actions in ways that aimed to protect as much tree coverage as possible. This was also a way of enacting an unofficial property claim to the park, it sought to exclude the state and assert its own mastery.
Knowledge of such planning conditions also allowed camp members to prepare for the commencement of any tree felling work, and to organise for more volunteers if we felt work was imminent. On the 6th of October 2016 following the Department of Planning’s approval of the arborist report permitting the removal of some trees along the Euston Road-side of the park, camp organisers shortly sent out text messages to ensure that people were present to block the works. I remember receiving call out messages on the 7th before tree loppers attempted to enter the fenced area that enclosed the doomed trees, located by the initial camp base. We stood by the entrance to protest and many others around me blocked the entry point by lying down in an attempt to stop trucks from going onto the site (see Figure 7.7).
187
Figure 7. 7 Campaigners at Sydney Park Attempt to Block Tree Felling 7 October 2016 (Source: Sydney Morning Herald 08 October 2016)
The police were called in and they physically removed those who had put their bodies in the line of work, just as they had done to the campers who stayed overnight on the first day of the occupation. People’s attempts to block workers and equipment, and to resist the police’s force caused some delay but not much. Ultimately the lack of legal recognition of our collective claim restricted the duration for which we could maintain it through the physical possession of obstructing bodies.
Even so, protesters I spoke with claimed that our actions had set back the immediate taking of land and felling of trees in the park. The occupation, the keeping watch and the use of planning conditions to our advantage meant that work could not simply start on the sly. Even after the felling of two trees residents reported nesting birds in a third, and thus used planning conditions designed to protect native wildlife to stall construction again. The dual complex of legal planning provisions and the unofficial holding up of property claims through physical occupation thus shaped the path of dispossession. And for a very short time they held up a collective ownership of the park and postponed the appropriation of parkland for a road project.
Later in 2016 the camp migrated to the southern part of Sydney Park near the corner of Campbell Road and Euston Road. The intent was to protect the trees and buildings slated for removal and demolition on that side, work that was due to be completed before the year end. And while like the first occupation this one was not successful in its aims of protecting the park’s trees, the camp maintained a presence in the area for a number of months. A decision was eventually made to move
188 it to a busier section of the park on the north near the cricket oval, and where the weekly Saturday park run took place. This last site of the occupation was predominantly about raising awareness about the WestConnex project and its impacts, and to encourage locals to join the campaign being waged against it, as opposed to the previous focus on protecting Sydney Park.
7.2.1 Membership and Mastery in Contesting Dispossession: Citizenship, Class and Settler Colonialism
It was in the last iteration of the camp that internal tensions became particularly acute, although like in any political action they were always simmering below the surface. Membership of or belonging to the loose base of people organising the occupation was unevenly held up, by a nexus of legal rights, social approval and physical support, which both set conditions upon and enabled people’s membership. Such membership came with the intangible benefit of fuller participation in the collective property claim being made to contest the dispossession of parkland.
Belonging to the Occupation: The Holding up of Social Approval and the Conditions of Membership
My own experience when the trees in Sydney Park were felled during the first iteration of the camp speaks to this issue of how capacity to participate in the collective property claim of an occupation is unevenly distributed – in my case, by citizenship status. On the day that volunteers blockaded the entry to the caged area containing the trees to felled, I did not put myself forward to stand in front of the vehicles entering the compound. I remember feeling uncomfortable at the prospect of facing the police. As I watched overwhelmingly middle aged and elderly white women block the entrance, I felt a sense of guilt. But at the same time being in Australia on a student visa meant that even if I wanted to risk arrest, it might have damaged my capacity to be in the country at all. That was not a risk I wanted to take at the time. I do not wish to suggest here that the people facing arrest and manhandling had nothing to lose, they certainly did, especially if the police had increased their level of violence. But nonetheless my particular concern about the possibility of remaining in the country will not have crossed most people’s minds. Having residency status or citizenship comes with a series of rights, which in some ways makes participation in political activity easier by removing certain risks such as deportation. Such participation through direct action was one of the ways in which people marked themselves out as members of the Sydney Park camp. And while this was only one example of an action among many that people took to perform membership, my lack of citizenship status restricted my capacity to participate in and to properly belong to the park occupation. I did however fit into the camp in other ways, by volunteering at various events, by doing shifts and keeping myself informed of the WestConnex project and the campaign against it. My belonging there was also informally held
189 up in other volunteers’ approval of my presence, expressed in friendly acknowledgement and encouragement.
In contrast to my own experience of not having a full sense of belonging, there were others who did not belong because of their classed and racialised subjectivities. There were conditions on membership, and not everyone’s was fully held up at the camp. The tensions that this caused came to the fore particularly during the last site of occupation in a busier more public facing section of the park. One morning I arrived at the camp for an early morning shift to find Anne, a regular volunteer, sweeping the floor. She explained that the place must look presentable. A shabby place was not inviting. It gave the wrong impression, and we did not need more bad press. I heard similar statements made by other activists during the occupation, they wanted the space to be clean and welcoming. These concerns later overlapped with worries about who was staffing the camp, as a group of people who were sleeping rough and in need of shelter had become the primary occupants. Many were Maori from New Zealand and included among them a family. They were joined for a short time by a group of young male backpackers who similarly lacked access to market-based accommodation. While this small collective was overwhelmingly men, two or three women who were family members and friends also joined from time to time, one of whom maintained a regular presence at camp and took on the responsibility of ensuring the space remained clean. Some volunteers felt an unease at this presence, particularly that of the men because of some instances of excess drinking, smoking and disruptive behaviour. Laura who lived locally and took responsibility for the roster was among those who voiced their concerns. As we walked through the park when I interviewed her, she gave me her perspective:
it [the camp] had lost focus from being an anti-WestConnex thing to providing shelter for people who needed it. And I don’t know how honest you want me to be…I got in trouble at the time some months in when I was saying we have a school carnival here. There are going to be lots of parents here can we please make sure there are some sensible middle-aged women at the Camp, because…the image thing. And you are not going to succeed no matter how good a person you want to be, and a lot of the backpackers were brilliant or really helpful. But it had become a bit of a refuge for people in need. And people will take their kids miles away to get away from that sort of thing…And if we are trying to attract people to help the cause as in to protest against WestConnex and to sign forms and to
190 go out and to tell people what we are doing then they are not going to identify with that in any way. Let alone the criminal element which we had to deal with occasionally…It’s not safe or it’s perceived as unsafe…some of them were fascinating interesting people and I had great talks with them but you are not going to be sending your kids there for a cake stall. It’s just not going to happen…Erskinville [suburb adjacent to St Peters] is very middle class very affluent, usually Green voting all that
She was not alone in her feelings. The few instances of violence and theft which did not result in serious physical harm, but which came to be associated with the backpackers and some of the Maori group and their visitors, further raised people’s concerns. The tensions within the occupation for me reflected how belonging to the occupying group and hence one’s capacity to fully engage in its practices were held up by social approval, that was conditional upon members following classed social norms. One was more likely to be accepted and supported at the camp if one communicated and presented in a middle-class way, and was there solely by ‘choice’, not because one was ‘in need’. Ali, a friend of mine who I met through the occupation took notice of the way in which the belonging to the camp was held up along such lines (Interview 07 April 2018):
But I had the idea, and so did my friend Greg…that it would be kind of a bit more inclusive and a bit more about, it would also be about supporting people. Clearly that was not, you know that was our type of politics…Clearly it did not overlap to this type of situation because most people were middle class and they found it quite foreign…but then because of the situation of the marginalised people who came and joined us, that sort of became problematic for everyone I think… I also realised that you need to look at the overall situation for the camp and if there was you know unacceptable behaviour it wasn’t that good for the camp. But I was used to a different style of politics where it was anarchist and it was all in together, whatever happens happens…but other people had a different idea about you know having a clean white table cloth -whatever, bringing down wine, wine glasses. So, I come from a different background.
191 Such classed dynamics were not disconnected from the question of which people could access housing in the areas around Sydney Park. Although people from across the city came to support the occupation, the loose group at the heart of the struggle were all locals. The gentrification of the suburbs of St Peters, Erskinville and Newtown in the last 20 -25 years which lay immediately around the M5 leg of WestConnex that was impacting Sydney Park contributed to shaping such a membership base. It was people who had access to these neighbourhoods who were in a position to make collective claims over them and to the locale’s parkland, on the basis of their regular use and through their easy access to the camp’s occupation. Classed societal structures allowed such local volunteers to access a regular income, buy housing, pay rent and develop cultural capital through university education that opened up access to the cheaper shared housing in the suburbs around the park. These suburbs are also predominantly white. The classed and racialised demographics were reflected in the camp’s primary organisers. While camp members never deliberately excluded people on the basis of class or race, and many of us were involved in other forms of progressive politics, for one to easily be part of the group’s loose and informal membership base and make decisions for and with them, one had to present as middle class. Laura, quoted earlier, felt that conversing in ways and presenting oneself in ways that appealed to locals was important to recruit them into the campaign and to win their support. And with reference to those who used the camp as shelter, she made the point that they were very different from the affluent residents of the surrounding neighbourhoods. They were also primarily there to access shelter, as opposed to support the campaign against WestConnex, which was the focus of the protest. Her concerns also stem from the changing motives of the occupation, which had shifted from protesting the trees to attracting people to the campaign. While chatting with me she said:
Some people you have great conversations, others you’ve got nothing in common you don’t even know where to begin to talk…And you feel like they are not helping achieve what needs to be achieved in this upper middle class area because some of them were extremely ignorant of the campaign. And they were there doing their best…trying to convince someone to join up saying, ‘Oh yeah and the cops came down’, any locals that were [here] - gone [we laugh]. … I guess trying to be all things…trying to do the right thing on too many levels lost focus which is why I ended up effectively going out.
192 From this perspective knowledge and support for the anti-WestConnex campaign along with middle class behavioural norms were factors through which people could contribute to the occupation and thus be properly accepted, welcomed and held up as part of it. Even if they had been more passionate about stopping WestConnex, however, the Maori group and the backpackers’ lacking middle-class language, values and a classed sense of proprietary was a drawback. And while their presence supported the Sydney Park occupation and many people appreciated, thanked and supported them in maintaining themselves there, some of their other actions or the actions of their visitors such as ‘excess’ drinking and instances of petty theft were frowned upon. They did not quite fit with the middle-class membership of the collective ‘we’ making the property claim over Sydney Park. They did not belong to us. Belonging to the collective claim in opposition to WestConnex was thus shaped by one’s socio-economic subject position and one’s commitment to the campaign against WestConnex, which was expected in the occupying space to supersede other politics and demands. Such exclusions where membership was unevenly held up had the effect of producing uneven levels of property as mastery.
Uneven Masteries
The membership of the Maori contingent and backpackers was held up uneasily by other camp volunteers, with a mix of appreciation, regulation and critique. Many made efforts to negotiate their stay, asking them to limit alcohol consumption to particular times, organising showering facilities and ensuring regular food was provided. No one was asked to leave unless they had engaged in violent or criminal activity while on site. Belonging to the group was thus held up subject to certain conditions of propriety. These expectations reveal the internal power distributions of the occupation. Decision-making power at the camp, particularly the power to exclude people and govern behaviour, was a form of property as mastery wielded overwhelmingly by middle class and white campers who were committed to the anti-WestConnex campaign. Their fuller membership of the occupation enabled by the social approval they received because of their classed subjectivities, allowed them to wield a wider range of property powers. This included the authority to make decisions about the types of behaviours permissible at camp, that is the ways in which our collective claims could be expressed, who belonged at the camp and under what conditions they could stay. The Maori group’s capacity to belong to the camp was never held up by other occupiers in ways that meant they were at the forefront of decision making on running the camp. It was also not clear if they wanted or could take up this responsibility. Such actions are acts of property as mastery over the campsite. They are enactments of a relationships of power between people with respect to a valued resource, from which some people are excluded to varying degrees. Property as mastery was thus an effect or an intangible benefit of property as membership. The conditional and uneasy holding up of
193 membership allowed a restricted form of mastery over the camp site. The Maori and backpacker contingent belonged to the occupation subject to certain conditions of proprietary, and they performed mastery over the camp site but did not wield the full range of property powers such as those of exclusion and decision making. The differentiated levels of mastery within the group according to who properly belonged and who did not, was brought into sharp relief for me when listening to Ali’s recollection of events one morning at the camp when she awoke to an argument between an Aboriginal man who was passing through Sydney and sleeping at the camp and a non- Aboriginal white volunteer (Interview 07 April 2018):
One morning I’d slept over. The first thing I woke to hearing was a big fight going on between one of the other campers and this Aboriginal guy, and she was basically saying well you have to leave. And so, I just do my automatic dialogue about this is his country blah blah blah, which was probably a little bit short sighted, not realising that somebody said he had been violent. But that is my automatic reaction…So we ended up having quite an argument, but I feel the structure of the organisation of the camp was not set up to deal with any situation like that.
While the man’s exclusion may have been necessary for the safety of other campers, it was still the exclusion of an Aboriginal person by a non-Aboriginal person. The incident occurred in a context where a predominantly middle-class white group of people – the decision makers at the camp – had expressed concerns about the behaviour of other allegedly problematic group, the rough sleepers and Maori occupiers. While it is necessary to remove someone when their behaviour is disruptive and threatening, there is also a settler colonial and racialised context which such acts of mastery over the camp facilitate. The authority to exclude and to decide on the appropriate behaviours during the occupation, examples of property as mastery, were wielded overwhelmingly by white and middle class campers and directed at mainly non-white or low income people, some of whom were Maori and one of whom was Aboriginal Australian. This governance of the behavioural norms of classed and racialised communities, contrasts with the limited attention directed at allegations of racist, sexist and classist behaviour. When informal conversations were had about the patronising and somewhat demeaning tone and language used by some to speak about the backpackers and a couple of the Maori volunteers, no firm rules were implemented for behavioural change that had definite repercussions. This contrast with the regulation of drinking, theft and the threat of exclusion in the case of violent
194 behaviour. While Laura was reprimanded by one person for a particular comment about the Maori and backpacker groups, and there were Facebook posts asking that we treat each other with respect, subtle racist and classist overtures were not seen as things that needed regulation. To many they were invisible. They certainly did not prevent people from being members of the occupation in the way that petty crime and disruptive behaviour did. In the end it was predominantly a middle class and white decision to dismantle the camp when the campaign ran out of steam and the occupation was mainly a site occupied by people sleeping rough.
Despite the tensions many middle-class camp goers did actually develop friendly relations with the backpackers and the Maori volunteers. When the occupation ended a collective of such camp goers helped L, one of one of young men who had been with the camp from the very beginning, find accommodation and offered financial assistance for rent. While such actions are paternalistic, they are also an acknowledgement of the labour put into the occupation and a show of support and friendliness.
Strange Encounters and Hybrid Mastery
The presence of low-income backpackers and Maori urbanites who did not have a fixed address shaped the type of collective property claim being made and the character of the Camp. The campaign’s gathering together of material things such as cooking facilities, food, kettles, gas, lamps, heaters and its organisation of maintenance activities to ensure the site remained usable constituted a physical and social holding up of human belonging or property over that place (property as mastery). Things came together in a way that made it a site available for human occupation. The material support of the camp had been socially assembled so as to enable people’s being in place through which a collective claim of belonging or property over the parkland was made. Of course, at the same time the materiality was itself an enactment of that property. Judith Butler (2015, p. 73) in writing about political occupation claims that:
the square and the street are not only the material supports for action, but they themselves are part of any account of bodily public action we might propose. Human action depends upon all sorts of supports—it is always supported action.
In shaping the land of the occupation by assembling the physical resources required for life on it, it drew in people who lacked access to such resources that are typically found in the private space of a
195 home. The collective property claim to urban parkland through a middle- class led occupation thus came into close contact with those who lived much of their lives in public realms, who had been dispossessed of the private space of a home. As the camp site held up protestors’ occupation of the park, so too it allowed people sleeping rough to be there and to enact mastery, albeit a restricted form of mastery as discussed above, by making home in the park. Such a strange encounter, particularly at times when most of the occupying was done by those people who used the camps as a home as opposed to a protest site, sat uneasily with some of the group. Laura, mentioned above, explained her discomfort to me:
not just that they were there, but they were responsible, and I actually felt guilt. We had sort of this cycle of we are using them, but they are using us… And if we want to stop the camp then we are making these people go back out on the streets. And it sits uneasily with something that’s - you know- … when you are going to do 2 hours at camp you are walking into someone’s home. And they have taken ownership of it and you know part of you resents that as well. It’s not I’m not saying that’s right or good, you’re not always as mature as you want to be. Let alone it being just awkward…And you’ve walked into their home and sat down.
Her words reveal that despite their not quite belonging, by maintaining a presence on site and helping with organising it and keeping it clean, the volunteers who were rough sleeping shaped the character of contestation. Through a continuous presence they moulded the occupation into a strange hybrid, both a collective property claim over the park and over Sydney’s inner west and inner south neighbourhoods in opposition to WestConnex’s encroachment, but also a property claim over the park as a site of shelter, a claim that was enacted less boldly than the demands of our protest, but which sat adjacent to it. While we were both enacting property over land theirs was a claim where making shelter was the primary aim, while ours was a claim also made physically, but which particularly in the last iteration of occupation was aimed primarily at communicating a political demand as opposed to setting up physical mastery to block the destruction of trees.
196 7.2.2 Colonial Temporalities – A Narrative of Silence and the Holding up of Moral Legitimacy
The Sydney Park campaign did not have much of an Aboriginal presence and the site was not known to campers as a place of Aboriginal activism, a different situation to the Redfern and Waterloo redevelopments discussed in chapters 4 and 5. This absence was partly responsible for the ways in which its property claims were enacted and held up by a colonial temporality, where Aboriginal claims to land and the ways in which colonisation made our collective claim possible were not seriously contemplated. We held up our collective claim through social organisational networks and the provision of resources needed to maintain the Camp’s presence, but also through the moral legitimacy we placed on our actions. Such holding up, was premised on an invisible temporal narrative that was not explicitly voiced, but was rather implied. We celebrated our actions, thanked volunteers and saw the occupation as doing the right thing. Ali, one of the camp volunteers quoted above viewed this as a lack of mindfulness regarding, ‘what had happened initially in that place’. Prior to colonisation she told me, Sydney Park had been part of a turpentine forest. The suburbs of St Peters and Newtown around the park were marked as Kangaroo grounds and had been hunting areas for Gadigal and Wangal Aboriginal inhabitants (Tench 1789). She claimed that there was a ‘great divide’ between the way she experienced the space, with colonisation always at forefront of her mind, and the way other people did. It was not the case that the Camp showed no support for Aboriginal politics. The camp supported Aboriginal led activism, shared the occupation site with Aboriginal women activists visiting from Queensland, and campers on an individual basis attended anti-colonial rallies. But questions of colonial possession and dispossession did not morally inform our collective property claim to land in Sydney Park.
For many camp volunteers the history of the park stemmed back to when it had been a rubbish tip in the 1990s. Some had been around long enough to have contributed to its transformation into a beautiful parkland over many years by planting trees, and were especially connected to it for such reasons. For others including myself who had recently moved to the area, viewing the land we occupied as colonised was not central to the discussions we had in practising everyday politics. Such a temporality did not register Sydney Park as land that has been gained through appropriation and dispossession of Cadigal inhabitants in the not-so-distant past. Colonisation was always somewhere else and ‘somewhen’ else (Cityroadpod 2019; Porter 2018). An incident at the Camp one morning when the police arrived to confiscate the camp’s tree sit, unsettled such a colonial temporality. Ali described the incident to me (Interview 07 April 2018):
It was one morning the police came in at 6 o’ clock to take down the trees sit and …and I just went over. I’d just woken up, ‘you have no jurisdiction to do this’ [we laugh]. But it was
197 like what, whatever. Like it was so off, it was so out there. Like it was probably completely irrelevant to the whole thing, but it was just what I thought of at the time. Like you know where is your jurisdiction? But you know it’s all messy because it’s no longer Aboriginal land.
While we might question her claim that ‘it’s no longer Aboriginal land’, Ali in general was challenging the police’s right to remove the tree sit and enact mastery over the camp, on the basis that this land was Aboriginal land and the Australian state had no jurisdiction to police it. And, the same questions could be raised of the property claims that we were making through our occupation. As Evelyn Araluen an Aboriginal academic and poet from Sydney reminds us ‘all times are capable of being’ (Araluen 2019). Within Aboriginal temporalities, that is within Aboriginal narratives of historical and present events, the Camps’ extra-legal property practices of occupation along with the police’s intrusion, and the City of Sydney and RMS’s public ownership of land are all different types of legal and extra-legal settler property claims on colonised Cadigal land. Our coming together and making a collective property claim on state owned land through occupation was held up as morally valid, partly because of a dominant temporal narrative, a sequencing of events from the perspective of the colonisers. In this sequencing and understanding of the past and present events we had the right to make a collective community claim over land to stop it from being taken for what many saw as an environmentally and socially destructive road project. We did not consider ‘what had happened initially in that place’, that it had been a turpentine forest and a hunting ground, nor did we discuss more contemporary Aboriginal connections with the Park or Sydney more generally. Our temporal narrative instead was that a road project was destroying parts of Sydney, including the neighbourhoods we lived in and the urban green space we accessed which residents had helped create. One of the people I interviewed at Sydney Park captured this narrative (Interview 10 08 2016):
I’ve watched the park come together over the last 10 or 12 years. It was really pretty scratchy then. A lot of trees had been planted but they were very small, grass wasn’t growing… it was still this problem with the methane gas coming out of the old tip out the soil killing things. But you could see this enormous potential…The park designers and managers here have continued to develop the potential for this to be a major stepping stone for wildlife migrating through the city, for
198 migrating birds in particular…other things like possums and bandicoots that live in places like this. It’s sort of the ‘lungs of the area… I believe that they have taken a monstrous task here…environmentally it’s a very big ask to chop down 1000 mature trees that people love and take decades to replace, I believe that we cannot just save Sydney Park but dramatize the madness of this project.
A loose collective of people who used and loved the park in such a narrative are the appropriate subjects to make property claims to that place. Such claims made through the Sydney Park Camp however also cited a multitude of others made for hundreds of years across Australia that did not seriously contemplate or acknowledge Aboriginal prior ownership of land and how this might shape the legitimacy of our claims. During an interview with Ali, quoted above, I asked (07 April 2018):
What sort of things did people say when you raised the issue of Aboriginal struggle or that this was, this is Aboriginal land?
She replied:
Oh, they would make excuses like well we tried to get so and so…but maybe they did try and get them to come but it’s kind of artificial. Like some of those people have never sat down at a table with an Aboriginal person before, it’s all new.
The Camp did not maintain a total silence on Aboriginal claims and dispossession. Our Camp meetings commenced with an acknowledgement of Aboriginal Country, volunteers organised an Aboriginal smoking ceremony at the start of one of our community events and we also ‘hosted’ Aboriginal political groups, Grandmas Against Removals and Sovereign Women United who were campaigning against the removal of Aboriginal children from their families in NSW and Queensland. The WestConnex Action Group officially lent its support to the Aboriginal led movement, Fighting in Resistance Equally (FIRE), when they organised an Invasion day march to protest the Australia day celebrations that marked the arrival of the first convict fleets in the country. But despite such politics, Aboriginal narratives of dispossession were not central to our occupation. And this lack of centrality enabled our collective property claim, by bestowing it with moral legitimacy. Seeing our own occupation and the existing settler planning and property relations that
199 governed the park as reliant on a colonial narrative of silence, and a marginalisation of Aboriginal dispossession, was not at the front of our thinking. This partial silence shaped the character of our claim to the park – it did not need to consider acknowledgement of Aboriginal sovereignty in material ways. We did not have to seriously contemplate whether a history of Aboriginal land dispossession warranted the transformation of our claims and more broadly of the planning and property management, and the physical make up of urban public spaces such as Sydney Park so that Aboriginal belonging was held up, or so that Aboriginal governance was instituted in land. The occupation’s questioning of the legitimacy of the state’s expropriation parts of Sydney Park for a road project, and of the police’s authority to infringe upon the camp, was not done in dialogue with Aboriginal communities. It was not informed by goals of decolonisation or co-existence, developed in conjunction with Sydney’s Aboriginal inhabitants.
Expecting that claims to urban space challenge the colonial status quo might appear to be a tall ask, given the effort necessary to maintain an occupation. It is political action that is draining of people’s time, energy and resources. The Sydney Park camp’s immediate objective was to stake a claim to public space and to stop a destructive road project, not to question settler colonialism. It is against such a backdrop that Ali felt her statements about settler jurisdiction and Aboriginal sovereignty were ‘irrelevant’ and ‘out there’. But lacking the capacity to consider how collective property claims to public land are reliant on temporal narratives that are silent on Aboriginal dispossession, and how these claims might be re-shaped to support decolonisation and co- existence with Aboriginal communities, means that they cite and re-iterate settler possession of land, continuing those colonial temporalities that hold them up such possession.
It is not my intention here to create a way forward, an endeavour that needs to be developed with Sydney’s Aboriginal residents. But it is important to note that any such engagement runs the risk of falling prey to a politics of recognition, which has been critiqued by Indigenous scholars (Coulthard 2014). The terms of engagement tend to become ‘determined by and in the interests of the hegemonic partner in the relationship’ (Coulthard 2014, p. 17). Furthermore, as Tuck and Yang (2012) note, solidarity with Aboriginal struggle in the interest of decolonisation is unsettling. The repatriation of land that the goals of decolonisation demand, is incommensurate with settler possession including the ways in which possession was enacted in Sydney Park. This incommensurability means that many urban social movements must rethink their engagements with Aboriginal communities beyond tokenistic acknowledgements of past colonisation, towards a praxis of working through the entanglements of contemporary land rights struggles.
200 Conclusions
Dispossession in the course of the WestConnex project through the loss of housing was shaped by how private property, particularly home ownership, is held up in Australia. The process of compulsory acquisition was configured by a complex of market valuation and its logic of abstraction, legal recognition, socio-cultural narratives, and state policies that hold up home ownership as a source of wealth and of security by which the future appears under control. Dispossession was consequently unexpected, and met with shock, a sense that was further fuelled by the transparency of state intervention. The loss of security and the wealth associated with property ownership triggered uncertainty for home-owners, who took to actively pursuing information from the state to understand the consequences for their lives. The bureaucratic procedure of acquisition was characterised by extended disputes over the correct market value of property, reflecting the significance of its financial and security benefits, as well as the difficulties monetarily valuing objects as heterogenous as land and housing. Dispossession was not limited to the loss of these formal property relations, and extended to unofficial relations of mastery and membership that residents held, with their housing, the surrounding neighbourhoods and the city more generally. Such relations and their associated values and benefits are not officially held up as private property is, were scantly acknowledged in the state’s formal acquisition process. In cases where the compensation that property owners received was insufficient to purchase another home in the area, they faced physical displacement. In seeing dispossession as a more expansive process than the loss of an official property relation, the chapter highlights the conceptual poverty that frames the narrow understandings of property prioritised in state acquisition processes. In keeping with this more expansive understanding of dispossession, it identifies the implications of the process for residents’ subject positions and personhood, making the point that the loss of official and unofficial property relations is a disruption of practices through which people can be in the world. The discussion of compulsory acquisition concludes with an analysis of residents’ differentiated experiences of dispossession, revealing how age, access to finance and professional knowledge produced materially uneven impacts for people.
Ironically, dispossession also brought into being unofficial property claims in the course of contestation. The threat to the much-loved Sydney Park which was being engulfed by the WestConnex triggered an occupation. In analysing the character of the occupation, and the extent of its success I found that it used a dual complex of legal planning provisions and bodily obstruction to hold up a collective property claim over the park and to delay dispossession. The membership of the occupation was stratified, with the social approval through which membership was held up, being contingent on occupiers conforming with middle-class ways of presenting and communicating. Uneven membership was accompanied with the uneven distribution of property as mastery. The social approval that authorised one to fully belong to the camp collective, enabled some participants to hold decision-making power and the powers of exclusion. Such mastery was not afforded to
201 those whose membership was marginal as a consequence of their racialised and classed subjectivity. Nonetheless the ongoing presence of marginalised campers who remained to access the camp’s material resources, meant that the camp enacted an uneasy and hybrid property claim, a claim over the park as a public place for people and not for a road, but also a claim over the park as a site of shelter.
Despite the camp’s contestation of the state led dispossession that WestConnex brought, its property was held up by a settler colonial temporal narratives. It maintained a silence on the fact that our possession of land in Sydney Park was enabled by Aboriginal dispossession. The case points to the fact that land occupations initiated by settlers for progressive political ends, are not by themselves anti-colonial. But, in the interest of dismantling a settler colonial order they have a moral obligation of engaging with Aboriginal communities on the latter’s terms, in ways that do not subordinate Aboriginal interests to settler ones.
This chapter brings to a close the empirical discussions of the thesis, across which I have developed an analytical framework for dispossession that brings together a political economy of state force with critical legal geography’s expansive understandings of property. I have brought into conversation the operations of state tools and logics of extra-economic force, and the justifications, compensations and the bureaucratic domination through which it is implemented, and the varied forms of property that are diminished and extinguished in this process, creating multiple forms of dispossession. In the following and concluding chapter I identify the key contributions that the thesis makes to studies of dispossession, settler colonialism and property.
202 Chapter 8 Conclusions
This thesis has developed a geographical conceptualisation of dispossession through an analysis of large-scale processes of housing redevelopment and infrastructure building in Sydney, Australia. I have conceptualised state-led urban regimes of dispossession through a propertied and temporal lens, analysing how they unfold via the diminishing and dismantling of the ‘structures, networks and processes’ that hold up urban dwellers’ diverse property relations, producing varied experiences of dispossession and contestation. By bringing into conversation a grounded propertied framework with a discussion of state authority, the thesis contributes to a growing body of literature that makes connections between the political economy of dispossession and people’s lived experiences (Doshi 2013; Levien 2013, 2015; Perreault 2013; Hodkinson and Essen 2015; Paprocki 2016; Wilhelm- Solomon 2016; Freeman and Burgos 2017; Zhang 2017, 2018).
These concluding reflections present the conceptual contributions that this thesis makes engaging with the research questions posed in Chapter 1:
RQ1 - What different mechanisms of state extra-economic force are used to implement dispossession?
RQ2 - What light does such analysis of dispossession shed on the political economy of a place?
RQ3 - What official and unofficial property relations are dismantled in the course of dispossession? What insights does a relational and performative approach to property offer in understanding of dispossession? Specifically, what does it reveal about the spatial and temporal dimensions of dispossession, and the differentiated experiences of the process?
My reflections and analysis in this chapter and across the thesis, are not only offered as critique, but in the hope that urban space can be produced in ways that centre people’s well- being, supports the struggles of communities who have been subject to structural violence, and erodes the settler colonial foundations of cities like Sydney.
Reflection 1 Extra-economic Dispossession and a Syntax of Compliance (RQ1)
An important contribution that this thesis makes to literature on urban dispossession is its explicit and detailed analysis of how extra-economic force operates. It characterises extra-economic force as those actions that dispossess through direct political intervention, which are not masked by the normalcy of regular market-based land transactions. A differentiation is made between eviction or the exclusionary displacement of market-led gentrification, on the one hand, and extra-economic dispossession on the other. The former cases are more socially palatable because of their status as ‘normal’ instances of capitalist accumulation, occurring via regular economic forces of the property market (Levien 2013;
203 2015). In contrast instances of dispossession that do not conform with market hegemony provoke a much wider and visceral outrage. Dispossession in such cases is not masked with a garb of normalcy, and hence is rendered transparent. In the Australian cases of this thesis, where the state is the prime executor of dispossession, the social and political responsibilities of a liberal democratic government, make its use of state power to seize land unexpected and highly visible. The concept of ‘regimes of dispossession’ characterised by the use of such extra-economic force, particularly that of the state, is an apt description for the cases discussed in the thesis. De Angelis’s (2000, p. 12) describes such dispossession as occurring through ‘… social forces that are posited outside the realm of impersonal “pure” economic laws’. Exclusion and displacement through property price and rental increases, are distinguished from the explicit political intervention of compulsory acquisition and the privatisation of public resources. What is considered normal dispossession governed by economic law, or any other hegemonic system, on the one hand, and what is abnormal and unacceptable extra-economic dispossession, on the other, will vary geographically and across time. It depends on the extent to which communities subject to dispossession, and the broader public, accept a particular instance of land loss as part of the ‘ordinary run of things’ (Marx 1867: 899-900). In the cases I discuss across the thesis the force wielded, usually by the state, to separate communities from their official and unofficial properties has a legal basis, but it was not accepted as a regular operation of market-based land transactions, which explains extent of community outrage. Consequently, the question of dispossession becomes a question of compliance (Levien 2015). The tools and logics through which dispossession was implemented – legal extra-economic force, justification, pacification and coercion – form a syntax of dispossession/compliance. While urban scholarship and settler colonial studies provide rich and insightful analyses of such tools and logics (Blomley 2004; Coulthardt 2014; Crabtree 2013; Jackson 2017; Milner 2019; Porter 2013; Smith 1996) they are rarely explicitly theorised as collectively making up a syntax of dispossession/compliance. This thesis expands these conversations.
This thesis develops Levien’s (2015) compliance-based understanding of dispossession by analysing the operations of extra-economic force alongside the various forms of justification, pacification and coercion that are used to implement dispossession. Together these comprise what I argue is a syntax of dispossession/compliance. The success of such a compliance-based framework, depends on the extent to which the different modes of power that work through it are effective in forcing, persuading and pacifying individuals and communities to comply with the mandates of dispossession. A reading across the two cases, discussed in this thesis, the redevelopments in Redfern and Waterloo and the WestConnex project, presents an overview of the different tools and logics that are used to implement dispossession, although not every element is mobilised in each case. And given that it is difficult to trace the exact psychological and the lived experience of how compliance works on people facing dispossession, (or on their supporters and the broader public), the thesis analyses state efforts to
204 generate compliance with a detailed discussion of the four mechanisms which it uses – legal extra- economic force, justification, pacification and coercion, with each operationalising different modes of power (see chapter 2).
Domination acts through extra-economic force. In two case studies discussed in the thesis, urban housing redevelopment in Redfern and Waterloo and the WestConnex road project, I identify various legal mechanisms by which the state deploys extra-economic force - the alienation of resources held for public purposes, the centralised re-scaling of statutory planning power, and the use of its powers of compulsory property acquisition. I note a fourth example of extra-economic force that is wielded by a non-state actor, the Aboriginal Housing Company, in its redistribution of land set aside for Black housing. Whilst in cases of the global south, in particular, physical force is a critical means, but not the only means, by which to close down resistance and alternative possibilities to dispossession, in liberal democracies such as Australia, bureaucratic decisions are key mechanisms with which to shut down alternatives. In the cases of Waterloo and Redfern and the WestConnex, state monopoly over decision-making, and the power of land-owners such as the Aboriginal Housing Company, over tenants and occupiers with no legal property interests, is expressed through legal mechanisms (Chapters 4 and 6). Such domination, however, does not operate in isolation (Levien 2015).
A second instrument of dispossession is legitimisation, where appeals are made to normative societal ideals to justify dispossession. The outcomes of a dispossessory project are presented as aligning with socially accepted values and goals such as those of development or national progress. The justifications discussed in this thesis take the form of such developmentalist improvement narratives. The public interest in the case of Redfern and Waterloo is one where social and economic progress is equated with the de-concentration of Black and low-income communities, the promise of upgraded housing and liveability goals that correspond with Sydney’s global city aspirations. In the case of the WestConnex a more explicitly economic goal of productivity is used to justify the disruption and dispossession caused by the construction of the road. The improvement narratives have their own syntactic form constituted of spatial and temporal hierarchies – where progress is always situated in the future, making the present sacrificeable in the pursuit of this goal (Bird Rose 2004; Crabtree 2013). Residents’ critique of the justifications and the occupations of land which occurred in Sydney Park and in Redfern, indicate that such legitimisations have been unsuccessful in convincing communities of the benefits of the respective redevelopment projects. Urban residents’ critiques further shed light on the spatial hierarchies expressed in the improvement narratives. There was a silence on the value that people attributed to the urban areas slated for damage and destruction, on the specificities of the problems that dispossession would allegedly resolve, and on the effectiveness and the uneven distribution of the expected improvements.
205 A third tool of dispossession discussed in the thesis is the attempt to pacify individuals facing land dispossession by an appeal to their material interest. This was analysed in the case of the WestConnex where monetary compensation was offered to owners for the acquisition of their properties. Such a form of compliance channelled contestation into efforts to attain adequate monetary compensation. The situation was different to the contestation for public land in Sydney park appropriated for the WestConnex and the redevelopment on the Block in Redfern, where no monetary offer was made for land loss, and for the collective property claims that communities enacted in these spaces. Contestation in these latter contexts took the form of occupations that operated outside of official channels.
A fourth mechanism of dispossession was coercion, where the threat of negative sanction was used to enforce compliance with dispossession. Property owners subject to compulsory acquisition, were on the receiving end of coercive communication with state employees. They were also threatened by the negative financial consequences and the arduous legal proceedings of acquisition which acted as deterrents to engaging in long drawn out court disputes with the state.
Reflection 2: Linking Accumulation and Dispossession (RQ 1 & 2)
Returning to David Harvey’s (2003) thesis of accumulation by dispossession, discussed in Chapter 2, a critical aspect of this work is highlighting the significance of dispossession for accumulation. Drawing on Marx’s primitive accumulation he defines it as a process where resources that were held and/or managed individually, collectively or by a state on behalf of its citizenry – namely, those that lie outside of formal capitalist modes of production – are expropriated and transferred into market- based circuits of production and exchange (Harvey 2003). Like him, and many other scholars have argued, (Coulthard 2014; Federici 2004; De Angelis 2004; Glassman 2006; Luxemborg 2003; Levien 2015; Shin 2016), ‘primitive’-like accumulation through direct political dispossession of resources is an ongoing feature of capitalism, and not only an inaugurating feature of its establishment in Western Europe. While I differ from Harvey in seeing accumulation by dispossession as a process of incorporating an ‘outside’ into capitalist property relations, I nonetheless see important links between the forms of dispossession I have documented and accumulation.
Firstly, it shows how extra-economic force operates as part of a syntax of compliance, which is critical to expropriating land for capitalist accumulation. As others have pointed out such force, often wielded by the state, is vital to and precedes market-led accumulation (Glassman 2006; Levien 2015; De Angelis 2000; Shin 2015). My work offers a reading of such force as a syntax of compliance. Accumulation is thus contingent on the success of compliance. In the WestConnex project it has enabled accumulation for the global consortium Sydney Transport Partners, led by toll road operator Transurban. The consortium holds a 51% stake in the public-private partnership, Sydney Motorway
206 Corporation, that controls and is building WestConnex. In Redfern and Waterloo such compliance, if successful, will generate wealth for private capital– developers, private landholders and their financiers – through the redevelopment, transfer and renting of land.
A second way in which this thesis contributes to studies of accumulation by dispossession, stems from its theoretical position that extra-economic dispossession is not defined by the incorporation of resources ‘outside’ of capitalism, into it (Levien 2015). Such a conceptualisation of dispossession moves away from David Harvey’s theory of Accumulation by Dispossession, defined by the incorporation of ‘outsides’ into capitalist modes of production (Harvey 2003). The spaces of extra- economic dispossession like those considered in this thesis are already well and truly incorporated into capitalist property relations. In so called liberal capitalist democracies, including the one from which I write, one is hard pressed to find spaces outside of capitalism. So, if we acknowledge that extra-economic dispossession is not characterised by the incorporation of publicly held or communally held resources into capitalist production, if these resources are already part of the market economy, then that points to an additional role of extra-economic dispossession in accumulation. That is, it enables a shift from one form of capital accumulation to another. The privately owned land in the case of the WestConnex, and the land held by the Aboriginal Housing Company was required to meet the demands for efficient transport connections across Sydney and those of a booming real estate market respectively. In the former case there is a shift in land use, from predominantly residential to that of large infrastructure, whilst in the latter case there is a shift from residential to commercial land use, as well as a move from less profitable Aboriginal residential use to more profitable student housing. The function of extra-economic dispossession was not only to expropriate land and offer it as the means of production for capital accumulation, it also enabled a transition to allegedly more economically productive and desirable forms of capital accumulation, at least from the viewpoint of those doing the dispossessing.
A third contribution of this thesis to studies of accumulation by dispossession is its identification of the function of extra-economic force in the valorisation of land. This is particularly the case where such force is deployed via urban planning. The case of Waterloo, see Chapter 4, shows how centralised planning and value capture techniques were used to raise the land value of public housing in the suburb. Planning thus functioned to enhance the degree of accumulation. While this does not directly speak to the question of how dispossession itself supports accumulation, such valorisation, by increasing the levels of profit derived from land, make the dispossession of those who occupy land feasible, and worthwhile for the state and for capital.
207 Reflection 3: A Colonial Capitalist Regime of Dispossession (RQ 2)
Following Coulthardt’s (2014) call to understand the relationship between colonial rule and capital accumulation I theorise that settler colonial logics and assumptions about land, improvement and time, continue to operate via different compliance mechanisms, that are used to execute dispossession, (and to facilitate accumulation). Such logics and assumptions, then, are critical to the success of urbanisation projects. Drawing material from Chapters 4 and 6 of the thesis, the discussion below identifies how settler rationales are enacted in state efforts of urbanisation and dispossession. This analysis contributes to work in settler colonial studies (Blatman-Thomas and Porter 2019; Bonds and Inwood 2016; Coulthard 2014; Jackson 2017; Milner 2019; Lloyd and Wolf 2015; Wolf 1999), that examines how colonisation continues to operate via different legal formations, urban governance practices and through ‘common knowledge’ (Moreton-Robinson 2015). The settler colonial project is distinguished in the scholarship from other instances of colonisation, as marked by the settlement of non-Aboriginal communities, predominantly white Europeans, on Aboriginal land. Settlers come with the intention to reside permanently in a place and replace ‘native’ populations (Bonds and Inwood 2016; Veracini 2011; Wolfe 1999; 2006). Colonisation in such a reading is a process, rather than an event, defined by the will to ‘erase’ Aboriginal populations and expropriate their land.
The syntax of compliance – extra-economic force, legitimisation, pacification and coercion – discussed in the thesis operates through the political-economy of a place. Together they produce a regime of dispossession. In Sydney, I claim that this regime is one of colonial capitalism, to use Glen Coulthard’s term. The discussion below makes such a claim by identifying how settler colonialism is performed, that is how it becomes real in the world, through state led dispossession (Blomley 2013). My analysis adopts a performative lens which sees social reality as coming into being through acts of repetition (Blomley 2013; Butler 2006). The enactment of logics and assumptions that repeat dominant settler colonial conventions make colonisation a reality. The analytic emphasis is not only that a political and economic situation precedes and surrounds dispossession, in this case Sydney’s settler colonial context, and consequently shapes its character. But also, that colonisation of Aboriginal land is in fact enacted via urbanisation projects that dispossess city residents. A. D. King (1976, p. xii) claimed that colonial cities were ‘laid out by the rulers and not the ruled’ and discussed the uneven distributions of power between these groups on such a basis. I would add that settler colonial cities are constantly being made and remade by the rules themselves, i.e. the rationales that organise land and time. These rules gain credence and become material by their enactment and re- enactment. Settler colonialism materialises in urban space by the rationales that organise land and time, seen in the state’s deployment of extra-economic force, in the narratives of improvement used to legitimise dispossession, and in monetary compensations offered to dispossessed property owners (see Chapters 4 and 6). The settler will erase Aboriginality is performed by these rationales which assume and enact settler relationships with, and understandings of space and time.
208 Firstly, settler colonialism is performed through state extra-economic force, premised on the sovereignty of a settler state, and Aboriginal dispossession; a situation borne from the historical legal fiction of ‘terra nullius’. This doctrine legitimised European control of territory based on the distinction between Aboriginal land as wasteland or as empty, and a superior European form of land use and cultivation (Bhandar 2018). Such sovereignty underwrites all Australian property and land transactions that occur in regular market operations, but for the most part state power is latent and in the background. The exchange of property or the displacement of tenants through rental increases does not rely on its deliberate intervention. By contrast, the deploying of state force, in compulsory acquisition, in the alienation of public land and via special planning mechanisms, is an assumption, re-enactment and visible performance of territorial sovereignty.
Second, the narratives of improvement used to legitmise urban redevelopment in Redfern and Waterloo, and the infrastructure building project of the WestConnex, embody colonial conceptualisations of time and of progress. The different narratives of racialised, classed, place-based and economic improvement, comprised spatial and temporal hierarchies, where progress is always in the future. The present of a place slated for damage or destruction is either denigrated, or there is a silence on the value that it holds for those living in its vicinity. Coupled with a silence on the specificity of the problems of a place that make it deserving of intervention, and on the effectiveness of the proposed improvements, the present is made sacrificeable in the pursuit of future betterment (Bird Rose 2004).
In Waterloo and Redfern, the improvement narratives directed at physical and social spaces and at the official and unofficial property arrangements in the suburbs, adopt a logic of ‘rule by difference’ (Ranganathan 2018). Racialised, socio-cultural and physical attributes of housing in these suburbs was abstracted from the on-the- ground context of their production, through a series of silences on the details of the socio- spatial problems that actually existed; the effectiveness of redevelopment in addressing these problems; the uneven distribution of future material benefits brought by redevelopment; and on the material, political and social value of that place held for its urban dwellers. A case for change was constructed by organising difference into hierarchy, positioning the current place of Redfern and Waterloo as inferior in comparison with the future desirable places created through redevelopment. In the case of the WestConnex, government documents and the testimonies of public servants’ equated improvement with economic productivity. Mimicking the syntax of the narratives used to justify redevelopment in Waterloo and Redfern, a productive urban future was juxtaposed against the economic inefficiency of the status quo. The value of the neighbourhoods, the more than human environments and of people’s homes, was lesser than that of the desired future, proposed in these narratives. The present was thus once again sacrificeable in the pursuit of the future.
209 This hierarchical conceptualisation of space and time, where the future is tied to ideals of a modern and civilised urban space, whilst the past and the present pale in value, mirrors the structure of early colonial narratives, where the improved land use brought by European settlement and cultivation practices justified the expropriation of Aboriginal land (Bird Rose 2004; Bhandar 2018; Blomley 2004; Crabtree 2013; Edmonds 2010; Jackson 2017). This developmentalist notion of progress, whose origins some historians locate in eighteenth and early nineteenth century European enlightenment thinking, placed European civilisation at the pinnacle of human development (Edmonds 2010). The dispossession of Aboriginal land, deemed unimproved and even waste, was morally legitimised in the pursuit of this future (Blomley 2004; Edmonds 2010). Edmonds (2010, p. 17) writes of the settler colonial city, specifically Victoria in Canada, as a space of modernity, commerce and the residence of white Europeans; a space where Aboriginal dispossession was justified using a ‘stadial evolutionary sequence of progress, …’. The use of improvement narratives to justify contemporary urban change in Sydney, that will allegedly deliver a civilised, liveable and economically productive city, even where they are not deployed to directly and visibly justify Aboriginal dispossession, enact a settler temporal structure that privileges the future over and above the past and the present, and unquestionably binds it with some kind of economic and social betterment. Not only is this rationale productive, in that it is an effort to justify the destruction of contemporary urban space, but it also does work in the enacting of a syntax of time which privileges the future. Such a settler temporal orientation materialises, in other words it is performed, through improvement narratives, and in the execution of the urban projects which they seek to legitimise.
Settler temporal orientations may be dominant, but they are by no means the only way in which to cognitively organise time and the resources of a society. A counter position is offered in some Aboriginal conceptualisations of time. Bird Rose’s (2004) writing about the temporal orientations of the Aboriginal residents from the Victoria River District in Australia’s Northern Territory, describes how action is orientated towards their ancestors who are present in Country. Current generations are seen as walking in the footsteps of their ancestors – behind them as opposed to ahead. Action in this orientation is directed towards maintaining and engaging with this continuing presence of past generations in Country, as opposed to attaining a particular future.
The justifications used to redevelop Redfern and Waterloo took the form of improvement narratives which explicitly performed a settler colonial will to eliminate the ‘native’ (Wolfe 2006). The concentration of Black residents on the Block in particular was seen as undesirable and incommensurable with maintenance of proper order. Settler colonial cities, as many scholars have noted, are built on such a rationale (Anderson 1993; Blomley 2004; Edmonds 2010; Jacobs 2002; Blatman-Thomas and Porter 2019). As Edmonds (2010, p. 7) puts it in her discussions of Victoria, Canada, ‘The powerful, symbolic purchase of the settler-colonial city, postulated as the apotheosis of colonial endeavour, has largely continued to render Indigenous presence in the city marginal or non-
210 existent, or incompatible and anomalous’. While this may seem like a distant colonial past, from another part of the British empire, as my discussions of recent redevelopment in Redfern and Waterloo, Sydney show, progress was explicitly equated with the de-concentration and the redevelopment of Black social space that had been created by Aboriginal people during the twentieth century. The state government directly intervened to remedy the social ills allegedly caused by this concentration of Black people. Dispossession in Black Redfern is of property created through the mobility and activism of Aboriginal people in a period of established settler colonial rule, as opposed to the dispossession of Aboriginal land in early years of colonisation. Settler colonialism as a process, thus not only continues to dispossess Aboriginal nations of Country, but also urban Aboriginal communities from different nations, of the urban spaces and land base which they have created during settler rule. Such urban spaces are not officially recognised in the way of traditional connections such as those of Native Title, or via formal legislation such as the NSW Aboriginal Land Rights Act. They are still however sites, as discussed in Chapter 5, where unofficial collective possession has reclaimed land in a settler city.
The narrative of improvement in present day Redfern did not, on the surface, call for a displacement of individuals from the city, but rather it was a Black collective that was deemed problematic. This logic continues a long history of Aboriginal urban exclusion, where their alleged lack of civil and proper behaviour positions them as unfit for life in cities; the seats of settler economic activity and social order (Anderson 1993; Jacobs 2002; Shaw 2007). Settler colonial erasure did not call for physical banishment from the urban, but rather took the form of de-concentration or dilution, which in effect is still the casting of Blackness outside of the city. Ironically, the target of such pressure to deconcentrate a Black community was directed in a place where private land title was held by an Aboriginal institution. The propensity to erase came despite their adoption of settler property practices.
A third way in which settler colonial logics were reproduced through contemporary dispossession in Sydney was via the privileging of propertied relations in the compensation payments made to residents facing compulsory property acquisition. In the dispossession of land for the WestConnex toll road, Australian law recognised the importance of private property and offered impacted individuals the market value of their properties as a form of pacification. While Aboriginal communities were not specifically targeted, the WestConnex runs across Cadigal, Bedigal, Burramatagal and Wangal Country. The propertying of Aboriginal Country was, and continues to be, a key technique of colonisation through which settler possession of land is realised. The settler-colonial city, writes Edmonds (2010, p. 7) ‘ …was a site where the appropriation of Indigenous land was coupled with aggressive allotment and property speculation, and where property relations were constructed quickly through the rhetorical celebrations of making a white, civilized British civil space’. The production of ‘civil’ urban space relied on instituting settler property relations with land. These relationships are
211 critical in settler cities, which are sites of commerce, and home to the labour force required to drive capitalist accumulation. Legally recognised possession of this kind produces land and space as definable and exchangeable objects with boundaries, whilst also giving birth to the rightful owning subject (Blomley 2004; Porter 2014). They are abstracted from the multiple histories, relations, meanings, values, and the heterogeneity that makes them unique. The compensation packages for compulsory acquisition in its privileging of a narrow logic of property, reproduces this framing and in fact reproduces Aboriginal dispossession. Legal property of this kind, where land and space become bounded exchangeable objects, in countries like Australia is a settler creation; a packaging of Aboriginal land by settler rules of possession. Ironically in cases of settler dispossession, as seen in urbanisation projects like WestConnex, property once again materialises as the relationship with land that is recognised and that counts. In other words, recognition within a settler state apparatus is confined by those settler land rules that dispossess Aboriginal people, that produced and continue to produce a dispossessed Aboriginal subject position, and that are re-enacted in state compensation processes. Acquisition for the WestConnex included technical valuation procedures, where the individual physical elements of land and housing were abstracted from their social contexts and histories. Extensive legal proceedings were in place to ensure the accuracy of these assessments and of the calculation of market value (see chapters 6 and 7). Underpinning these events of dispossession are the logics of settler property as contained, object-like and severable. Such a conceptualisation allows for land ownership to be divorced from the colonial histories and present, that brings it into being. This is but one way among many by which to enact and understand the relationships between people and place. Aboriginal land epistemologies offer different perspectives. Bawaka Country et al. (2016, p.) writing with Bawaka Country, northeast Arnhem Land, North East Australia explain, ‘Country includes humans, more-than-humans and all that is tangible and non-tangible and which become together in an active, sentient, mutually caring and multidirectional manner in, with and as place/space’. Such a conceptualisation offers an alternative to settler ways of property, but its relational density, its state of constantly ‘becoming’, the inclusion of the more-than-human world and acknowledgement of the uniqueness of place is ‘incommensurable’ with the abstraction and severability of legal property (Moreton-Robinson 2015). It is not for me to say if the collective possession in Redfern and Waterloo parallels such a conceptualisations of Country, but it is an example of Aboriginal urban reclamation brought into being through political practices of care and support, and through dense social networks. The NSW government’s road construction project across Aboriginal Country and its compensation packages, are not equipped to account for such spatial relations. Indeed, how can they, given that that compensation is premised on rationales that assume a bounded, exchangeable and object-like conception of property. In this project, the expanse of Aboriginal Country was once again framed through the lens of settler colonial logics of property, which are premised on and express Aboriginal dispossession.
212 Reflection 4 Dispossession and Property (RQ 3)
The settler colonial will to erase operates through the possession of land in each of the case studies of this thesis – in the attack on Black property claims, the state plans to alienate public housing, the acquisition of private property, and the expropriation of public parkland. Whilst not each instance is directed at Aboriginal bodies, possession is still directed at Aboriginal Country which is packaged into tradeable unit/s for private housing, infrastructure and commercial outlets. As discussed above, the abstraction and alienability are key characteristics of such possession – settler rules that underpin the governance of space. Land required for urbanisation projects is assumed to be alienable and replaceable with monetary compensation. The state recognition, indicated in the payment of compensation, does not extend to the diversity of property relations that exist in the city, which are dismantled for urbanisation projects. Recognition is limited to legal property rights, which are compensated with market value. Compensation reveals the paucity of settler property logics, where people’s connections with their places of inhabitance, the uniqueness of their physicality and their irreplaceability, are reduced to a monetary value (see Chapter 7).
The narrowness of the legal recognition of property is further highlighted by the lack of acknowledgement for the varied unofficial properties across the city that are held up. Adopting a performative and relational lens, the thesis sees property as a much more expansive relationship, that warrants that we take seriously the loss of those relations that do not feature in official registers. Property is practised as both mastery, that is belonging over a thing, and membership, that is belonging to a group. These relations are ‘effects’, that come into being through a complex assemblage of ‘structures, networks, and processes’ which hold them up (Blomley 2013; Keenan 2015). Holding up is more than an act of state recognition, tantamount to a form of governance, that may encompass state recognition, but also pertains to a multiplicity of mechanisms that recognise, support and circumscribe belonging as mastery and membership (Cooper 2007; Keenan 2015). Attending to the work of holding up captures those property relationships that spill over, beyond the narrow purview of legal state recognition.
The thesis identifies the productiveness of holding up in the enabling and conditional work of the physical and social spaces, and formal legal and bureaucratic practices which allow property relations to materialise. The discussions of urban dwellers’ official and unofficial properties in Redfern and Waterloo, and in the inner Sydney suburbs impacted by the WestConnex, identifies the enabling work of holding up in the physical and social support that facilitates belonging. A second component of holding up is in the conditional work of moral and social expectations that govern the appropriate form that practices of belonging should take, i.e. only certain practices count as belonging.
The thesis deployed this more ‘open’ analytic of property to understand processes of dispossession, claiming that dispossession is shaped by the very property relations that it dismantles, specifically by
213 the ways in which property is held up. Attending to the work of holding up offers insight into how the events and experiences of dispossession unfold. It sheds light on the legitimacy, meaning, and valuing of property relations that are shaped by the ‘structures, networks and processes’ that do the work of holding up. It thus helps understand what is lost in the course of dispossession. Identifying how property is physically and socially sustained, that is how it is an effect, thus brings insight to what happens when that sustenance is suspended. The thesis discusses four instances of dispossession – the loss of Black property, precarious property, privately owned property and that of collectively held public land to illustrate the relationship between property and dispossession.
Black property in Redfern and Waterloo, defined as a form of unofficial collective mastery, is held up by the possession of physical space, the social legitimacy conferred on an urban Black presence, and the moral conditions that property be directed to support Black communities. Dispossession through redevelopment was interpreted as a continuation of settler colonialism because property was supported by and imbued with a particular meaning and value by the physical and social spaces of the suburbs. The possession of land and the gathering of Black bodies enabled collective mastery through the practising of culture, politics and the meeting of social needs, and in their conferring of this property enactment with social legitimacy. Property relations expressed urban Blackness in a settler city, where such a presence had been deemed undesirable, and from where Black communities has been historically excluded. The possession of land for redevelopment was hence seen as a continuation of colonial ‘erasure’, an eroding of a Black presence that had defied this settler endeavour. In current day Redfern and Waterloo modern day settler colonialism came through state efforts, but also through the actions of a Black land holder in the suburbs, the Aboriginal Housing Company. Community outrage took the form of a year-long occupation, triggered by the value placed on Black property, but also because of the Company’s breaching of the moral conditions of holding up – expectations that Black land use be directed to support Black community needs. The plans for commercial development in Redfern did not conform with these conditions. The unofficial character of Black property relations, the lack of legal state recognition, meant there were no official processes to halt or govern dispossession, channelling political action into protest and occupation.
The second instance of dispossession focusses on Waterloo public housing tenants’ anticipations of the weakening of their community membership, and the loss of their collective mastery in the suburb, as a consequence of the state’s proposed redevelopment project. While these property relations have no formal state recognition, they are held up by government welfare policy, by the social concentration of low-income residents on the Estate, and with the support of the surrounding community services. The economic criteria used to determine eligibility for public housing, places conditions on tenant membership on housing Estates like Waterloo, such that belonging is contingent on one’s material precarity. The consequent dense gathering of precarious residents, and the diverse social services around them in Waterloo, serve to enable membership and collective mastery by
214 creating an environment that is accepting of precarity and supporting of residents’ social needs. The holding up of precarious property has been productive of a sense of social acceptance and worth. The Estate redevelopment plans to deconcentrate tenants with socially mixed housing, and the potential loss of social services drew concerns from residents who spoke of the benefits produced by their property relations on the Estate. Their fears included a loss of worth, of comfort, and power in place – direct products of government policy and the social spaces that hold up belonging as property.
A third instance of dispossession discussed in the thesis is the acquisition of private property for the WestConnex. Unlike in Redfern and Waterloo, the case is a loss of official property relations that are both legally and culturally enabled, such that they are sources of wealth and security, productive of a sense of control over the future. Dispossession was consequently unexpected, marked by shock, uncertainty, and the disruption of future expectations. The legislation and technical practices of valuation, through which property is enabled channelled owner’s contestation into long and bitter bureaucratic negotiations with the state. Individual experiences were further complicated by their subject position, their economic status closely linked with age, access to finance, and professional knowledge, making for differentiated experiences of dispossession.
The loss of the security benefits of ownership, the relationship between ownership and subjectivity and of the unofficial property relations of mastery and membership that residents’ held with respect to their housing, neighbourhoods and suburbs, were not accounted for in the state compensation packages. The interruption of the ‘proper’ practices of ownership, such as the upkeep of one’s homes, and the unsettling of a stable way of life recounted by some residents indicate that acquisition had consequences for how they could be in the world. Life that had been centred around and facilitated by property ownership, which had been productive of personhood, was on hold. Residents who were forced to relocate from places of long term inhabitance, also spoke of the loss of the physical space of their home, and the social space of their neighbourhoods. Relocation separated people from the physical and social spaces that had enabled practices of mastery and membership over their homes and to their communities. These unofficial properties and the attachments and valuing of place that they produced were not legible in legal registers and technical practices of property and valuation. The visibility of such connections between a place and its inhabitants, and between property and subjectivity, revealed in the course of dispossession highlights the inadequacy of the property logics that informed the state’s infrastructure project and its compensation process. Abstraction and the assumed severability of land and the built environment allowed for the ascription of a market value to a dense and complex network of relationships, and questions of how and if such a project should continue were left out of the picture.
The fourth discussion of dispossession focusses primarily on the community contestation that arose in response to WestConnex’s expropriation of public parkland in Sydney’s inner south. The analysis
215 takes a slightly different angle to previous discussions of dispossession, with a focus on the property relations that emerge in acts of contestation, and the ways in which they shape the course of dispossession. The occupation of Sydney Park saw a channelling of social action into an oppositional and more radical form of protest partly due to the lack of any formal state recognition of public property in the park. Property here does not refer to the ownership of the local authority, but rather the mastery enacted by a broad and loose collective of park users who included locals but also residents from across Sydney. Unlike the case of private property acquisition, there was no official bureaucratic mechanism for this collective to appeal to, for redress, or to prevent the WestConnex’s surrounding of and expropriation of parkland. The presence of a politically active community in the suburbs surrounding the park, and the fact that resistance was not absorbed into official channels, made room for direct action. The occupation combined the use of planning provisions and its possession of land to hold up their collective property claim, and delay construction.
The thesis’s analysis of the Sydney Park occupation problematises its property enactment, in line with Iveson’s (2017) reminder that critical geography ask questions, ‘… about the kinds of claims and authority that are enacted by any counterpublic that uses occupation as a spatial strategy’. It identifies how membership of the occupying collective, and mastery over the park were unevenly held up along lines of class and race, producing stratified property relations. This was manifest in the unequal distribution of decision-making power on matters of exclusion and the appropriate behavioural norms at the camp site, with homeless non-white occupiers holding limited power. The protest’s internal politics were also situated in a broader and vexed settler colonial politics. While its property claim on the surface was not necessarily defined by assumptions of abstraction and alienability of land, common settler property logics, it still took possession of Aboriginal Country. Such possession is materially premised on an abstraction of land from historical relationships and assumes its alienation from the Cadigal inhabitants. The occupation’s possession was held up by settler temporal narratives which bestowed a moral legitimacy in its actions. In settler time our occupation was protecting public space from a damaging project; space that through local effort had been reclaimed and transformed from its former use as a rubbish tip into a popular public park. This time maintained a silence on the dispossession of the Cadigal in inner south Sydney whose land we were occupying, and on ‘what had happened initially in that place’. In a classic settler ‘move to innocence’ temporal narratives legitmised the possession of Country, leaving vexed questions, of Aboriginal sovereignty, who should possess land and how/if that possession should be enacted, untouched (Tuck and Yang 2012). The holding up of collective property through occupation might have contested the dispossession of settler public space, it did not however contest the foundational colonial dispossession of Aboriginal land. The political relevance of this issue extends beyond the occupation of Sydney Park. It begs the question, what does it mean to fight for public space and for the public good, on stolen land? If all land in Australia, is Aboriginal land, then struggles for public space, and indeed wider struggles for
216 the public good, need to reconsider the authority which holds up their claims, and grapple with how these can be orientated towards decolonial futures (Iveson 2017; Tuck and Yang 2012).
Reflection 5 Temporalities of dispossession (RQ 3)
The thesis conceptualises the temporal dimensions of dispossession alongside its spatial dimensions. It claims that attention to temporality is critical to build an understanding of how dispossession unfolds and how it is resisted. The thesis identifies four temporal narratives that emerge in the justifications of dispossession, and in urban residents’ experiences and contestation of the process. Its discussions highlight the contrasting ways in which these temporalities construct the past and the future, which make for very different accounts of urban change and present-day dispossession. Below I summarise and theorises these findings and make note of what insights a temporal analysis has for understanding contemporary settler colonialism.
Future Orientated Justifications
The state narratives of improvement used to justify dispossession adopt settler temporal orientations, where action is directed towards realising normative future goals of economic and social development, such as those of productivity and of an urban space free of classed and racialised bodies. As discussed previously, these narratives are defined by hierarchies of space and time, where progress is always situated in the future, making the present sacrificeable in its pursuit (Bird Rose 2004; Crabtree 2013). Their legitimising power is in the valorisation of space that will be produced after a major urban transformation, whilst maintaining a silence on, or engaging in the active denigration and problematising of the current constitution of a place. The ubiquity of these narratives in the justification of urbanisation processes, indicates their significance for ongoing colonisation. The possession and transformation of Aboriginal Country is constantly legitimised through such narratives. A temporal orientation that sacrifices present place, for future development cannot account for the complex relations of Country (Bawaka Country et al. 2016). It also forecloses the possibility of a place, in this case the city, becoming something other than a resource to be put to the service of future accumulation, including the possibility of Aboriginal reclamation. The tendency is to remake a colonial reality where Aboriginality is cast outside of the city.
Settler Temporality in Contestation as a ‘Move to Innocence’
Community contestation of the loss of public parkland relied on a temporal narrative to legitimise its occupation, that maintained a silence on colonisation and Aboriginal dispossession in that part of
217 Sydney. The occupation was morally justified on the basis that it resisted the expropriation of public space for an environmentally damaging road project. Local efforts in creating the park through years of tree planting and soil replacement further bolstered community action. But as discussed above, this temporal narrative which positioned a non-Aboriginal public as the creators, defenders, and the rightful proprietors of space, had little to say about the dispossession of the Cadigal, the traditional owners in that part of Sydney. The collective property claimed to keep land in the hands of the ‘public’ works to erase ‘existing, prior, and future’ Aboriginal claims and forms of governance (Tuck and Yang 2012, p. 28). Settler time, in this instance, functions as a ‘move to settler innocence’. Drawing on Mawhinney’s work (1998), Tuck and Yang (2012, p. 10) conceptualise such moves to innocence as, ‘… those strategies or positionings that attempt to relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility without giving up land or power or privilege, without having to change much at all’. While the Sydney Park occupation acknowledged Aboriginal Country in its meetings and many of the occupiers expressed solidarity with Aboriginal struggles, as a collective a settler temporality informed our resistance, which did not critically engage with questions of colonisation and dispossession, which were implicitly located in the past even whilst being explicitly recognised in the present. The occupation held land collectively, as if it was our right to do so, as if colonisation was not ongoing. There was a failure to activate the spoken acknowledgment of Country in a meaningful way. Acknowledging Country also means recognising that we occupy stolen land, have benefited from it, and that the production of the Park, its transformation into a road, and our possession of land to contest such an occurrence, are all spatial realities borne of colonisation. Such acknowledgement then, comes with a moral responsibility to transform the organisation and the representation of the occupation (Iveson 2017). Settler time however, evades the realisation of this acknowledgement, and the difficult questions it raises about responsibility and the form of politics that should be practised on a Country that was not ours to possess.
Colonial and Propertied Slow Violence
Dispossession in the course of urban redevelopment in Sydney is analysed as a form of slow violence, ‘incremental in nature and not spectacular’ (Nixon 2011). In Redfern and Waterloo, two different conceptualisations of slow violence are used to discuss Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal residents’ experiences. Aboriginal temporalities position the change as an iteration of settler colonialism, one instance of land loss among many. The term slow violence is not intended to undermine the significance of dispossession, but rather to make the point that when viewed individually, events and processes of redevelopment appear as ‘hot conflict’, but they are simultaneously part of a broader process of ‘slow violence’ through which settler colonialism continues. State redevelopment appears fast through settler time frames which accept the packaging of Aboriginal Country into property, and
218 where valorisation proceeds without registering Aboriginal temporalities. Drawing on Elizabeth Grosz’s conceptualisation of time, as both fragmented and whole, we might see how Aboriginal temporalities of dispossession challenge this framing, by braiding together different instances of land loss into a ‘collective’ colonial time (Grosz 1999, p. 17). Land losses in Redfern and Waterloo, represent individual and discrete ‘fragments’ in this framing. Slow violence does not only operate on legal registers of property. It is not a grievance about the loss of formal property rights, but refers to a continuous colonial expropriation of Aboriginal land. It thus refuses settler time frames, that take for granted state sovereignty and settler rights to possess Aboriginal Country, as legal property, as facts that have already been established. These Aboriginal temporalities are evident by casting an eye over a wider horizon of time, spanning centuries, and by adopting a qualitatively different framing of history to that recounted in settler temporalities.
Public housing tenants’ experiences of slow violence come to the fore when attention is paid to the intricate, and every-day experiences of redevelopment. The time scales in such analysis are different to the Aboriginal temporalities discussed above, which situate the redevelopment in a broader settler colonial process. Slow violence here, is configured by the unequal distribution of property power between the state and public housing tenants, a consequence of the state’s legal property rights, and the paternalism and control that underpin state policy, legislation and practices that hold up public housing tenancies. The distribution of property in effect redistributes and shapes the time of redevelopment. The chasm in power is further widened by the extra-economic planning processes, which accumulates planning capacity in the hands of the state. The redevelopment to date, has been marked by tenants’ anticipations of dispossession, project announcements and long drawn out consultations, characterised by shock, uncertainty, and anger. The paternalism and control that shaped public housing tenants’ experience as renters, in effect organised the temporality of redevelopment, turning the process into one of frustrated waiting, where information was withheld, mastery was circumscribed and tenant labour was appropriated for the exigencies of the state engagement process. Whilst a slow and democratic redevelopment process is arguably less damaging than a fast and unconsidered approach, the process in Waterloo relinquished little power to tenants that would have allowed them to wield substantial influence.
Property and Imagined futures
A final temporal dimension identified in this thesis is the shattering of imagined futures. Property owners impacted by compulsory acquisition and public housing tenants who faced redevelopment, might have held different legal property rights but both these properties were productive of a sense of material security. Property ownership in particular tends to settle expectations, evidenced in the cases of acquisition, where resident narratives revealed how life was planned around ownership, and the
219 future was envisioned as under control. Whilst sympathising with those people whose futures have been disrupted, it is important to note that their security rests on settler possession of land, borne of Aboriginal dispossession. The disruption of these settler futures, made for uncertain and frustrating experiences of acquisition, with owners chasing the state for information on compensation and the timeframes of the process; information that had implications for their financial well-being and life- plans. These impacts are absent in state’s narratives of improvement, discussed above, that justify urbanisation projects. Like the narratives of slow violence, they evidence the contradicting temporalities produced in the course of dispossession, where the production of an improved urban space of the future, rests on and is accompanied by the disruption of the future security of current residents.
In her seminal book For Space, Doreen Massey (2005, p. 18) states that ‘… time and space must be thought together ... thinking of time and space together does not mean they are identical ..., rather it means that the imagination of one will have repercussions (not always followed through) for the imagination of the other and that space and time are implicated in each other’. This thesis’s analysis of the narratives of improvement used to justify urbanisation and dispossession, of the abstract and severable conceptualisations of space that inform legal property and of the silence and narrow temporal frames which obfuscate colonial violence, demonstrate how space and time can be thought together, and their conjoined role in the (re)production of settler colonial urbanisation. In rethinking the space and time of dispossession and displacement in settler cities, I hope this thesis can make a contribution towards an urban politics committed to justice, that is better equipped to take these conceptualisations seriously in the making of decolonial futures.
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