Kurt Iveson
Biographic Data
| ID | 158185 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kurt Iveson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kurt |
| FAMILY NAME | Iveson |
| SIGNATURE | IVESON K |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Sydney |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2362-4743 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 48 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 469 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 48 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Enablers of community‐led action in Australian climate disasters: Recognising the role of pre‐existing social foundations and local knowledges
This study explores how disaster‐impacted communities in New South Wales, Australia, mobilised during and after the bushfire crisis of 2019–20 and multiple catastrophic floods between 2020 and 2022. Interviews were conducted across three regions: Northern Rivers; Blue Mountains; and Hawkesbury. Our findings illuminate how community‐led actions are driven by a broad range of ‘local knowledges’, based in and organised through long‐standing networks…
Acts of energy citizenship in community solar gardens
Characterised as sites of energy citizenship, community energy projects help people locked out of the corporate green energy and rooftop solar markets to participate in the renewable energy transition. However, the environmental politics of community energy projects cannot be assumed. Drawing from document analysis and semi-structured interviews with community energy organisers, advocates and participants, we compare two projects in New South Wal…
The ups and downs of telecommunications infrastructure: The urban geopolitics of communications cabling in colonial Sydney
As telecommunications networks have facilitated the outward and upward expansion of cities, their development has also involved downward expansion into the urban underground. The making and remaking of underground space for urban telecommunications infrastructure is not simply a technical exercise. The work of undergrounding also has an urban geopolitics, in which technical challenges are joined by political conflicts over issues of urban aesthet…
The city on the horizon
In this commentary on Beveridge and Koch's ‘Seeing Democracy Like a City’, I draw their stimulating ideas into dialogue with Sydney's green ban movement – a remarkable enactment of urban democracy from 50 years ago whose legacy remains enshrined in the built fabric and in the political imaginary of my city. This dialogue is used to offer some reflections on elements of their argument concerning the role of institutions in urban democratic theory …
Navigating the dilemmas of mutual aid: International student organising in Sydney during the Covid‐19 pandemic
In 2020, thousands of international students found themselves stranded in Sydney, Australia, with the suspension of international travel and closure of borders. While many lost their livelihoods due to lockdowns, the Australian government excluded international students and other temporary visa holders from all forms of income support and disaster relief—resulting in food and housing insecurity and social isolation. This article describes and ana…
Prefiguring Pragmatically? Prefigurative Politics and the Constellation of People Power Strategies for Winning Affordable Housing in Cape Town
This article contributes to ongoing discussions about the practice of prefigurative politics by urban social movements, and the relationship between prefiguration and other political practices. We argue that urban social movements can deploy prefigurative power in combination with other political strategies with which it is often contrasted and opposed. To demonstrate, we explore Cape Town's Reclaim the City movement that occupied several inner-c…
Urban people power strategies in a connected world: Exploring the patterns of practice, exchange, translation and learning
Urban social movements, alliances and organisations use a range of strategies to contest injustice and inequality by making urban authority accountable to the ‘power of the people’. While there is irrepressible diversity in the strategies used to build and enact people power across global urban contexts, movement participants rarely start from scratch in developing these strategies. There are patterns of contestation that resonate and circulate b…
Democratising cities: Introduction
The world’s cities are plagued by serious ills of injustice, inequality and uneven development. Through hard-fought struggles against these urban inequalities and injustices, cities remain important breeding grounds for forms of democratic action that have the potential to reinvigorate the practice and potential of democracy itself. Contemporary struggles over rights to the city generate new answers to questions at the heart of the democratic ide…
Transmission and territory: Urban bordering during Covid-19
The Crisis of Inequality and the Crisis of Equality
Informality from above in the governance of graffiti and street art in Sydney
This article analyses the ways in which urban authorities and elites embrace informality when formal laws and regulations get in the way of making the city they want. In the case of Sydney, we show that the governance of graffiti and street art is not exclusively a matter of enacting and enforcing formal anti-graffiti laws and regulations. Rather, graffiti governance takes the form of a “rule by aesthetics” in which authorities and elites draw on…
Together in difference: A review symposium on Everyday Equalities: Making Multicultures in Settler Colonial Cities , by Ruth Fincher, Kurt Iveson, Helga Leitner and Valerie Preston
Celebrating and launching this inspiring book with Professor Lesley Head at the School of Geography at the University of Melbourne was a multicultural event that circulated immense joy. There was a
Boring cities: The privatisation of subterranea
Most of the world’s major cities are now undergirded by complicated subterranean infrastructures; buried communication networks, water and waste management systems, storage vaults, transportation corridors, and even underground housing. In the past, only states, backed by tax revenue, could afford to undertake the boring and excavation required to build such spaces. Today however, the private sector seeks to profit from building, maintaining, and…
Everyday Equalities: Making Multicultures in Settler Colonial Cities
The New Enclosure: A view on landownership from Sydney
Christophers Brett, The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain. London: Verso Books, 2018; 384 pp. 9781786631589, £16.00 (hbk); 9781786631596, £11.99 (pbk); 9781786631619, £12.00 (eBook)
The informal Australian city
In recent years, a vibrant literature on urban informality has emerged in urban geography. A key claim of this literature is that informality is not only present in cities in the Global South, and that the concept can be usefully applied to understand important dimensions of urbanisation in cities in the Global North. In this paper, we apply insights from that literature to an examination of informality in Australian cities, as a means of deepeni…
Social control in the networked city: Datafied dividuals, disciplined individuals and powers of assembly
Consciously or unconsciously, urban inhabitants in digitally networked cities leave traces of themselves every time they interact with the digital devices and infrastructures that have become taken-for-granted parts of daily life. There have been lively discussions about the nature of social control and modes of power in such urban contexts. According to some, modulatory mechanisms of power characteristic of the digitally networked city have supe…
Iris Marion Young and urban geographies of difference
This paper examines the impact of Iris Marion Young’s work on the field of geography. We discuss two matters that were elucidated by Iris Marion Young, and that have been taken up, repeatedly and as foundational insights, by urban and social geographers and urban planning scholars. These are (1) Young’s conception of justice and its central relationship to social difference and (2) Young’s attention to the city as a particular kind of social form…
Our Digital Rights to the City
‘Our Digital Rights to the City’ is a small collection of articles about digital technology, data and the city. It covers a range of topics relating to the political and economic power of technologies that are now almost inescapable within the urban environment. This includes discussions surrounding security, mapping, real estate, smartphone applications and the broader idea of a ‘right to the city’ in a post-digital world. The collection is edit…
Problems, publicity and public space: A resurgent debate
Urban public space is once again high on the agenda of social science researchers across disciplines.The reasons for this renewed interest include a range of dramatic events that are redefining its importance as a centre for social encounter and interaction, forum for discussion and dissent, interface of virtual and material connections and stage for the reinstatement of democratic practice and resistance in the face of state repression.Beginning…
Making space public' through occupation: The Aboriginal Tent Embassy, Canberra
Through the actions of activists involved in the Arab Spring uprisings, European anti-austerity movements and the Occupy and Umbrella movements among others, long-term occupations of public space have re-entered the repertoire of insurgent social movements to spectacular effect. These events have dramatised the challenges and limits of occupation as a spatial strategy for 'making space public'. This paper seeks to make a contribution to the criti…
Propositions for more just urban public spaces
Across a diverse range of urban geographical contexts, the provision and governance of public spaces frequently generates conflicts of varying intensity involving urban inhabitants and urban authorities. A clear moral and philosophically based argument and evaluative framework is necessary for both critiquing and informing the positions that are taken in public space disputes. In this paper, we develop a model of socially just public space that c…
Manifesto for Living in the Anthropocene
The recent 10,000 year history of climatic stability on Earth that enabled the rise of agriculture and domestication, the growth of cities, numerous technological revolutions, and the emergence of modernity is now over. We accept that in the latest phase of this era, modernity is unmaking the stability that enabled its emergence. Over the 21st century severe and numerous weather disasters, scarcity of key resources, major changes in environments,…
Beyond city limits: A conceptual and political defense of ‘the city’ as an anchoring concept for critical urban theory
With the publication of their piece 'Towards a New Epistemology of the Urban?' in City 19 (2-3), Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid hoped to ignite a debate about the adequacy of existing epistemologies for understanding urban life today. Brenner and Schmid's desire to set urban research on a new course is premised on a wide-ranging critique of 'city-centrism' that they believe is holding back both mainstream and critical urban research. In this p…
Planning in the multicultural city: Celebrating diversity or reinforcing difference?
Recovering the politics of the city: From the ‘post-political city’ to a ‘method of equality’ for critical urban geography
This paper uses Jacque Rancière's understanding of politics to ask what makes cities political entities. We review existing urban geography debates to identify some of the defining features of urban politics and then subject them to critical questioning: are they actually political? The paper seeks to develop existing interpretations of Rancière's philosophy within geography to develop his ‘method of equality’ in order to recover the politics of …
Cities within the City: Do-It-Yourself Urbanism and the Right to the City
In many cities around the world we are presently witnessing the growth of, and interest in, a range of micro-spatial urban practices that are reshaping urban spaces. These practices include actions such as: guerrilla and community gardening; housing and retail cooperatives; flash mobbing and other shock tactics; social economies and bartering schemes; 'empty spaces' movements to occupy abandoned buildings for a range of purposes; subcultural prac…
Social control in the networked city: Datafied dividuals, disciplined individuals and powers of assembly
Consciously or unconsciously, urban inhabitants in digitally networked cities leave traces of themselves every time they interact with the digital devices and infrastructures that have become taken-for-granted parts of daily life. There have been lively discussions about the nature of social control and modes of power in such urban contexts. According to some, modulatory mechanisms of power characteristic of the digitally networked city have supe…
The wars on graffiti and the new military urbanism
An ever‐expanding number of urban authorities have declared ‘war’ on graffiti. This paper explores the role the wars on graffiti have played in the creeping militarization of everyday life in the city. Wars on graffiti have contributed to the diffusion of military technologies and operational techniques into the realm of urban policy and policing. Furthermore, new Western military doctrines of urban warfare have sought to ‘learn lessons’ from the…
Beyond city limits: A conceptual and political defense of ‘the city’ as an anchoring concept for critical urban theory
With the publication of their piece 'Towards a New Epistemology of the Urban?' in City 19 (2-3), Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid hoped to ignite a debate about the adequacy of existing epistemologies for understanding urban life today. Brenner and Schmid's desire to set urban research on a new course is premised on a wide-ranging critique of 'city-centrism' that they believe is holding back both mainstream and critical urban research. In this p…
Propositions for more just urban public spaces
Across a diverse range of urban geographical contexts, the provision and governance of public spaces frequently generates conflicts of varying intensity involving urban inhabitants and urban authorities. A clear moral and philosophically based argument and evaluative framework is necessary for both critiquing and informing the positions that are taken in public space disputes. In this paper, we develop a model of socially just public space that c…
Social or spatial justice? Marcuse and Soja on the right to the city
This paper offers a brief comparative reading of how Peter Marcuse and Edward Soja conceptualise the spatiality of justice and the right to the city. The work of both of these authors has been featured in City in recent issues, and while there are clear differences in their approaches, I argue that there are also points of convergence. In particular, both Marcuse and Soja insist that working towards the ‘right to the city’ is not only a matter of…
Occupations, mediations, subjectifications: Fabricating politics
The revolutions and protests that have spread across the globe since 2008 have been seen as a watershed moment. In this article we examine the relationships between urban space and politics that have emerged across these events. We draw upon the political philosophy of Jacques Rancière to provide a framework to understand some events of this period as political moments and, in addition, attempt to build upon Rancière's work to trace out the geogr…
Building a City For “The People”: The Politics of Alliance‐Building in the Sydney Green Ban Movement
How can we act to contest urban injustice? This article grapples with this question through an analysis of the green ban movement that emerged in Sydney in the 1970s. For a time, this unruly alliance of construction workers, resident activists, and progressive professionals powerfully enacted a radical right to the city, blocking a range of unjust and destructive “developments” worth billions of dollars and proposing alternative development plans…
Branded cities: Outdoor Advertising, Urban Governance, and the Outdoor Media Landscape
In many cities both rich and poor, new forms of outdoor advertising are emerging with potentially significant implications for the nature of the urban public realm. Public–private partnerships for advertising‐funded provision of basic items of urban infrastructure such as bus shelters, street signs and public telephones have grown as a result of structural changes in the advertising industry and shifts towards neoliberal forms of urban governance…
Justice and Injustice in the City
Following a recent growth of interest in questions of justice and the city, this paper considers how the work of contemporary critical urbanists compares with earlier accounts of urban justice and injustice. Our purpose in making this comparison is to consider how scholars concerned with justice and injustice in the city might better articulate the conceptual relationship between justice-thinking and (in)justice-documenting in their writings abou…
Justifying exclusion: The politics of public space and the dispute over access to McIvers ladies' baths, Sydney
McIvers Baths is an ocean pool in the Sydney beach of Coogee which is open to women and children only. In December 1992, a male resident of Coogee lodged a formal legal complaint of 'discrimination on the grounds of sex' with the Anti-Discrimination Board of New South Wales. Over the next three years, a coalition of activists and institutions campaigned successfully to oppose this complaint and maintain the exclusion of men from McIvers. In this …
The informal Australian city
In recent years, a vibrant literature on urban informality has emerged in urban geography. A key claim of this literature is that informality is not only present in cities in the Global South, and that the concept can be usefully applied to understand important dimensions of urbanisation in cities in the Global North. In this paper, we apply insights from that literature to an examination of informality in Australian cities, as a means of deepeni…
Making space public' through occupation: The Aboriginal Tent Embassy, Canberra
Through the actions of activists involved in the Arab Spring uprisings, European anti-austerity movements and the Occupy and Umbrella movements among others, long-term occupations of public space have re-entered the repertoire of insurgent social movements to spectacular effect. These events have dramatised the challenges and limits of occupation as a spatial strategy for 'making space public'. This paper seeks to make a contribution to the criti…
Designs on the urban: New Labour's urban renaissance and the spaces of citizenship
The contours of the so-called 'urban renaissance' in British cities have been the subject of increasing amounts of critical attention from urban scholars. In particular, many have noted the exclusionary consequences of the renaissance for urban public spaces in revalorized city centres. In this paper, the authors ask whether New Labour's urban policy might also be opening up new political opportunities for progressive interventions in contests ov…
Some critical reflections on being critical: Reading for deviance, dominance or difference
One of the most exciting aspects of the papers gathered together in ‘Cities for People, Not for Profit’ was the over‐arching desire to articulate a renewed vision for critical urban theory (see City 13(2/3), especially Brenner et al. (2009 Brenner, N., Marcuse, P. and Mayer, M. 2009. ‘Introduction’. City, 13(2/3): 176–184. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]), Marcuse (2009 Marcuse, P. 2009. ‘From critical urban theory to the right to th…
Informality from above in the governance of graffiti and street art in Sydney
This article analyses the ways in which urban authorities and elites embrace informality when formal laws and regulations get in the way of making the city they want. In the case of Sydney, we show that the governance of graffiti and street art is not exclusively a matter of enacting and enforcing formal anti-graffiti laws and regulations. Rather, graffiti governance takes the form of a “rule by aesthetics” in which authorities and elites draw on…
Boring cities: The privatisation of subterranea
Most of the world’s major cities are now undergirded by complicated subterranean infrastructures; buried communication networks, water and waste management systems, storage vaults, transportation corridors, and even underground housing. In the past, only states, backed by tax revenue, could afford to undertake the boring and excavation required to build such spaces. Today however, the private sector seeks to profit from building, maintaining, and…
Locking Down the City (Well, Not Quite): Apec 2007 and urban citizenship in Sydney
This article critically analyses security measures put in place for the 2007 APEC Leaders’ Meeting in Sydney. Drawing on an emerging repertoire of international summit security techniques, APEC security authorities attempted to impose a range of spatial and temporal restrictions which were explicitly designed to marginalise dissent. These restrictions were premised upon, and designed to reinforce, a binary distinction between the ‘virtuous’ urban…
Transmission and territory: Urban bordering during Covid-19
Iris Marion Young and urban geographies of difference
This paper examines the impact of Iris Marion Young’s work on the field of geography. We discuss two matters that were elucidated by Iris Marion Young, and that have been taken up, repeatedly and as foundational insights, by urban and social geographers and urban planning scholars. These are (1) Young’s conception of justice and its central relationship to social difference and (2) Young’s attention to the city as a particular kind of social form…
Urban people power strategies in a connected world: Exploring the patterns of practice, exchange, translation and learning
Urban social movements, alliances and organisations use a range of strategies to contest injustice and inequality by making urban authority accountable to the ‘power of the people’. While there is irrepressible diversity in the strategies used to build and enact people power across global urban contexts, movement participants rarely start from scratch in developing these strategies. There are patterns of contestation that resonate and circulate b…
Problems, publicity and public space: A resurgent debate
Urban public space is once again high on the agenda of social science researchers across disciplines.The reasons for this renewed interest include a range of dramatic events that are redefining its importance as a centre for social encounter and interaction, forum for discussion and dissent, interface of virtual and material connections and stage for the reinstatement of democratic practice and resistance in the face of state repression.Beginning…
Navigating the dilemmas of mutual aid: International student organising in Sydney during the Covid‐19 pandemic
In 2020, thousands of international students found themselves stranded in Sydney, Australia, with the suspension of international travel and closure of borders. While many lost their livelihoods due to lockdowns, the Australian government excluded international students and other temporary visa holders from all forms of income support and disaster relief—resulting in food and housing insecurity and social isolation. This article describes and ana…
Seeking Spatial Justice: Some reflections from Sydney
It’s a pleasure to have the opportunity to write a response to Seeking Spatial Justice. In 2008, I attended the ‘Spatial Justice’ conference in Paris, and met Ed Soja and UCLA postgraduate Ava Brom
Designs on the urban: New Labour's urban renaissance and the spaces of citizenship
The contours of the so-called 'urban renaissance' in British cities have been the subject of increasing amounts of critical attention from urban scholars. In particular, many have noted the exclusionary consequences of the renaissance for urban public spaces in revalorized city centres. In this paper, the authors ask whether New Labour's urban policy might also be opening up new political opportunities for progressive interventions in contests ov…
Justifying exclusion: The politics of public space and the dispute over access to McIvers ladies' baths, Sydney
McIvers Baths is an ocean pool in the Sydney beach of Coogee which is open to women and children only. In December 1992, a male resident of Coogee lodged a formal legal complaint of 'discrimination on the grounds of sex' with the Anti-Discrimination Board of New South Wales. Over the next three years, a coalition of activists and institutions campaigned successfully to oppose this complaint and maintain the exclusion of men from McIvers. In this …
Publics and the City
List of Illustrations. 1 The Problem with Space. 2 Publics and the City. 3 Making a Claim: The Regulation of Protest at Parliament House, Canberra. 4 Cruising: Governing Beat Sex in Melbourne. 5 Making a Name: Writing Graffiti in Sydney. 6 Fun. No Hope. Don't Belong. : Re-making Public Space in Neo-liberal Perth. 7 Justifying Exclusion: Keeping Men out of the Ladies' Baths, Sydney. 8 Imagining the City: Concluding Reflections. Bibliography. Index
Planning and Diversity in the City
The City versus the Media? Mapping the Mobile Geographies of Public Address
Frequently, efforts to establish the city's significance for the public sphere frame the city in opposition to the media. The city is imagined as a space of unmediated and co‐present publicness, while the media is imagined as a space of mediated and distantiated publicness. This essay argues against such an opposition. In place of it, the essay outlines an approach to the urban dimensions of public address which emphasizes the interaction of urba…
Locking Down the City (Well, Not Quite): Apec 2007 and urban citizenship in Sydney
This article critically analyses security measures put in place for the 2007 APEC Leaders’ Meeting in Sydney. Drawing on an emerging repertoire of international summit security techniques, APEC security authorities attempted to impose a range of spatial and temporal restrictions which were explicitly designed to marginalise dissent. These restrictions were premised upon, and designed to reinforce, a binary distinction between the ‘virtuous’ urban…
The wars on graffiti and the new military urbanism
An ever‐expanding number of urban authorities have declared ‘war’ on graffiti. This paper explores the role the wars on graffiti have played in the creeping militarization of everyday life in the city. Wars on graffiti have contributed to the diffusion of military technologies and operational techniques into the realm of urban policy and policing. Furthermore, new Western military doctrines of urban warfare have sought to ‘learn lessons’ from the…
Some critical reflections on being critical: Reading for deviance, dominance or difference
One of the most exciting aspects of the papers gathered together in ‘Cities for People, Not for Profit’ was the over‐arching desire to articulate a renewed vision for critical urban theory (see City 13(2/3), especially Brenner et al. (2009 Brenner, N., Marcuse, P. and Mayer, M. 2009. ‘Introduction’. City, 13(2/3): 176–184. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]), Marcuse (2009 Marcuse, P. 2009. ‘From critical urban theory to the right to th…
Seeking Spatial Justice: Some reflections from Sydney
It’s a pleasure to have the opportunity to write a response to Seeking Spatial Justice. In 2008, I attended the ‘Spatial Justice’ conference in Paris, and met Ed Soja and UCLA postgraduate Ava Brom
Teaching Across the Divide: Physical and Human Geographies of Hurricane Katrina
This article critically reflects on our effort to ‘teach across the divide’, by integrating physical and human geography in a new first-year course. We achieved this integration by structuring our course around a series of key events, in order to draw out the interaction of ‘natural’ and ‘social’ forces. After setting out the intellectual and institutional reasons for integration, we illustrate our approach with reference to one of the key events…
Art and Crime (and Other Things Besides … ): Conceptualising Graffiti in the City
In this paper, we critically review the literature on graffiti and street art with a view to bridging the divide between the stark extremities of public graffiti discourse. We make the case for moving beyond singular responses to the challenges posed by graffiti – into the complex terrain between visions of a city free from graffiti and one where public art has free rein. To this end, we have chosen a series of interrogations of common dialectica…
Ten Years After 9/11
Social or spatial justice? Marcuse and Soja on the right to the city
This paper offers a brief comparative reading of how Peter Marcuse and Edward Soja conceptualise the spatiality of justice and the right to the city. The work of both of these authors has been featured in City in recent issues, and while there are clear differences in their approaches, I argue that there are also points of convergence. In particular, both Marcuse and Soja insist that working towards the ‘right to the city’ is not only a matter of…
Ten Years After 9/11: Part Two
Branded cities: Outdoor Advertising, Urban Governance, and the Outdoor Media Landscape
In many cities both rich and poor, new forms of outdoor advertising are emerging with potentially significant implications for the nature of the urban public realm. Public–private partnerships for advertising‐funded provision of basic items of urban infrastructure such as bus shelters, street signs and public telephones have grown as a result of structural changes in the advertising industry and shifts towards neoliberal forms of urban governance…
Justice and Injustice in the City
Following a recent growth of interest in questions of justice and the city, this paper considers how the work of contemporary critical urbanists compares with earlier accounts of urban justice and injustice. Our purpose in making this comparison is to consider how scholars concerned with justice and injustice in the city might better articulate the conceptual relationship between justice-thinking and (in)justice-documenting in their writings abou…
Reporting on the unreported with Paul Mason: Scenes from Sydney, 2011
This article engages with Paul Mason's 2012 book Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere: the New Global Revolutions from the perspective of a place where things have not quite ‘kicked off’ – Sydney, Australia. Through this engagement, I argue that Mason's book provides a useful framework for interrogating the political dynamics of events in a range of places beyond those which feature in its pages. Mason emphasises the importance of relationships betwee…
Cities within the City: Do-It-Yourself Urbanism and the Right to the City
In many cities around the world we are presently witnessing the growth of, and interest in, a range of micro-spatial urban practices that are reshaping urban spaces. These practices include actions such as: guerrilla and community gardening; housing and retail cooperatives; flash mobbing and other shock tactics; social economies and bartering schemes; 'empty spaces' movements to occupy abandoned buildings for a range of purposes; subcultural prac…
Planning in the multicultural city: Celebrating diversity or reinforcing difference?
Occupations, mediations, subjectifications: Fabricating politics
The revolutions and protests that have spread across the globe since 2008 have been seen as a watershed moment. In this article we examine the relationships between urban space and politics that have emerged across these events. We draw upon the political philosophy of Jacques Rancière to provide a framework to understand some events of this period as political moments and, in addition, attempt to build upon Rancière's work to trace out the geogr…
Recovering the politics of the city: From the ‘post-political city’ to a ‘method of equality’ for critical urban geography
This paper uses Jacque Rancière's understanding of politics to ask what makes cities political entities. We review existing urban geography debates to identify some of the defining features of urban politics and then subject them to critical questioning: are they actually political? The paper seeks to develop existing interpretations of Rancière's philosophy within geography to develop his ‘method of equality’ in order to recover the politics of …
Building a City For “The People”: The Politics of Alliance‐Building in the Sydney Green Ban Movement
How can we act to contest urban injustice? This article grapples with this question through an analysis of the green ban movement that emerged in Sydney in the 1970s. For a time, this unruly alliance of construction workers, resident activists, and progressive professionals powerfully enacted a radical right to the city, blocking a range of unjust and destructive “developments” worth billions of dollars and proposing alternative development plans…
An Eruv for St Ives? Religion, identity, place and conflict on the Sydney north shore
Religious identity, when marked by physical changes to urban landscapes, has been a cause of tension and conflict in many cities. In the Sydney suburb of St Ives, an attempt to create an eruv, a symbolic and only partly physical boundary around orthodox Jewish space, was vigorously opposed and eventually defeated through the planning system. The religious and physical significance of the eruv resulted in diverse rationales of opposition, centred …
Featured Graphic. A Community-Led Critique of Accessibility of Sydney's Public Transportation Network
The shift from auto-dependent modes of urban transportation has been a key focus of the sustainability literature for over two decades (Low, 2013; Mees, 2010). This literature argues that mobility in cities ought to be addressed through public transportation rather than individualised forms of transport as a pathway to low carbon economies. However, pathways to achieve such a city remain highly contentious. Many authors suggest that citizen actio…
Manifesto for Living in the Anthropocene
The recent 10,000 year history of climatic stability on Earth that enabled the rise of agriculture and domestication, the growth of cities, numerous technological revolutions, and the emergence of modernity is now over. We accept that in the latest phase of this era, modernity is unmaking the stability that enabled its emergence. Over the 21st century severe and numerous weather disasters, scarcity of key resources, major changes in environments,…
Political science (35 works) · Sociology (35 works) · Law (26 works) · Politics (26 works) · Urban Planning and Governance (21 works) · Law (17 works) · Geography (16 works) · Public Spaces through Art (13 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (12 works) · Media studies (12 works)