L Porter
Biographic Data
| ID | 4053 |
|---|---|
| NAME | L Porter |
| GIVEN NAMES | L |
| FAMILY NAME | Porter |
| SIGNATURE | PORTER L |
| AFFILIATIONS | RMIT University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7240-8206 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 336 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1974 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Everyday infrastructures of care: Older women in state-initiated housing in Bangladesh
A settler spectacle masquerading as critical urban theory
Realising decolonising spaces: Relational accountability in research events
Research events are important places where disciplinary structures and norms are reproduced and challenged. This article uses the authors’ experiences organising a geography research event on decolonising settler cities on Wadjuk Nyungar Country in Perth, Western Australia, to interrogate the transformations that a decolonising ethic demands. Learning with the Indigenous research method of yarning as a decolonising practice, we document and refle…
Planning Solidarity? From Silence to Refusal
Libby PorterCentre for Urban Research, RMIT University, Melbourne, AustraliaI’m not sure who needs to hear this.Perhaps this is a letter, written to a future version of myself. Maybe written to who
Re-scaling social mix: Public housing renewal in Melbourne
Social mix is a widely used component of urban housing policy in post-welfare states. Problematizing homogenous areas of disadvantage, social mix policies purportedly aspire to increase socioeconomic diversity within defined areas. In Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, a major program of public housing renewal has been underway since the early 2000s, justified by a social mix agenda. This paper investigates the discursive and scalar mechanisms used …
The Places We Live, June 2020
No description available
Climate Justice in a Climate Changed World
Climate justice is a framework that brings into view the intersection between climate change and the way social inequalities are experienced as structural violence. Climate justice has grown in public debate and grassroots campaigning over the past decade, where not for profits and environmental NGOs in particular increasingly make the connection between human rights, uneven development and climate change. Often presented as a question of human r…
The politics of biodiversity offsetting across time and institutional scales
Navigating the neighbourhood: Gender, place and agency in children’s mobility
Children have an intrinsic right to urban space. Yet children’s perspectives and agency are largely absent from research and public policy on issues that concern them. Common conceptualisations of children as vulnerable, incompetent, or unruly designate their marginalised status in the city. When gender is added, the deficit approach is reinforced. In this paper, we draw from theoretical and methodological approaches that affirm children’s agency…
The politics of greening unceded lands in the settler city
Urban greening is a buzz term in urban policy and research settings in Australia and elsewhere. In a context of settler colonial urbanism, like Australia, a first fact becomes clear: urban greening is always being practiced on unceded Indigenous lands. Recognising this requires some honest reckoning with how this latest urban policy response perpetuates dispossessory settler-colonial structures. In this paper, we listen to the place-based ontolog…
Urbanizing settler-colonial studies: Introduction to the special issue
Urban settlement has been central to the making of European settler-colonial societies since their inception. Settlement, or more sharply invasion, is given material presence and organizational sha
Creating a thinking space for the rising stars of Australian urban geography
The Institute of Australian Geographers Urban Study Group and Australian Geographer present the first essay in our Leading Insights/Thinking Space partnership. We discuss Dr Natalie Osborne's 2018 essay, flag Dr Marilu Melo's 2019 essay and talk about creating a thinking space for the rising stars of Australian urban geography
Remaking imperial power in the city: The case of the William Barak building, Melbourne
When the enormous drapes that had been covering a new building in central Melbourne were thrown off in early 2015, an extraordinary sight was revealed: a colossal image of a face staring down the city's civic spine. This moment of unveiling marked a fascinating moment for Indigenous-settler relations in Australia, but especially urban, densely settled Melbourne. For the face is that of William Barak, ancestor and leader of the Wurundjeri people, …
Placing Property: Theorizing the Urban from Settler Colonial Cities
In the conspicuously geographical debate between 'North' and 'South' urbanism, settler colonial cities remain displaced. They are located in the 'North' but embody 'South-like' colonial dynamics and are hence neither colonial nor postcolonial. Heeding the call to theorize from 'any city', this article aims to contribute to a more systematic theorization of the urban from settler colonial cities. In it we focus on the work property does to materia…
We’re not very good at soccer’: Gender, space and competence in a Victorian primary school
This paper draws on findings from a pilot project conducted at an inner city primary school in Melbourne, Australia. Inviting grade six girls and boys (aged eleven and twelve) to focus on spaces of their schoolground, we learned about the ways in which gender, age, ethnicity, language ability and sporting competence influenced active play and belonging. Informed by the understanding that schoolgrounds, gender and active play are socially construc…
Housing and Resilience – When, for Whom and for What? A Critical Agenda
As a concept resilience is proving remarkably...resilient. It has become a keyword used to describe the contemporary urban and environmental condition. However, unlike that other prolific keyword “sustainability”, it lacks both the ethical intent (if not practice) and international agreement of the Brundtland Report directive to seek to balance economic, social and environmental outcomes for the benefit of future generations. Resilience, like con…
From an urban country to urbanCountry: Confronting the cult of denial in Australian cities
I write from the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation, who have practised their sovereignty and law in Naarm, more familiarly known as Melbourne, for countless generations. I
Contested Property Claims: What Disagreement Tells Us about Ownership
Indigenous People and the Miserable Failure of Australian Planning
Major changes in Australian law and significant research efforts have re-positioned Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as important actors in planning. Yet, this has barely penetrated the consciousness of the mainstream professional community. Current requirements for professional competencies and planning curricula fall well short of preparing planners to productively engage with Indigenous people. The profession itself barely acknowl…
Planning for Coexistence?: Recognizing Indigenous Rights Through Land-Use Planning in Canada and Australia
Planning is becoming one of the key battlegrounds for Indigenous people to negotiate meaningful articulation of their sovereign territorial and political rights, reigniting the essential tension that lies at the heart of Indigenous-settler relations. But what actually happens in the planning contact zone - when Indigenous demands for recognition of coexisting political authority over territory intersect with environmental and urban land-use plann…
Unlearning the Colonial Cultures of Planning
1. Introduction : culture, colonialism and planning -- 2. Indigenous people and their challenge to planning -- 3. A colonial genealogy of planning -- 4. Systematizing space : 'natures', 'cultures' and protected areas -- 5. Managing the sacred -- 6. Modes of governance : the difference indigeneity makes to progressive planning -- 7. Unlearning privilege : towards the decolonization of planning
Planning in the face of conflict: The surprising possibilities of facilitative leadership
By Any Means Necessary: Urban Regeneration and the “State of Exception” in Glasgow's Commonwealth Games 2014
When compulsory purchase for urban regeneration is combined with a sporting mega‐event, we have an archetypal example of what Giorgio Agamben called the “state of exception”. Through a study of compulsory purchase orders (CPOs) on the site of the Athletes' Village for Glasgow's 2014 Commonwealth Games, we expose CPOs as a classed tool mobilised to violently displace working class neighbourhoods. In doing so, we show how a fictionalised mantra of …
Bounded recognition: Urban planning and the textual mediation of Indigenous rights in Canada and Australia
While the recognition of marginalized social groups has become widely accepted as an important consideration for contemporary planning, the particular challenge of Indigenous recognition has barely registered in urban planning contexts. In this paper, we use a discursive and interpretive analysis of urban planning texts from Victoria, Australia, and British Columbia, Canada, to illustrate how the ‘contact zone’ between Indigenous peoples and urba…
Possessory politics and the conceit of procedure: Exposing the cost of rights under conditions of dispossession
Rights are central to the theory and practice of planning, and to the practice of struggles for those who are marked by conditions of dispossession and displacement. Those rights are often articulated through planning as property ‘rights in’ and procedural ‘rights to’. Yet when struggles against the dispossessory tendencies of planning become articulated through these rights-based discourses in planning, the potential arises for their immediate l…
Placing Property: Theorizing the Urban from Settler Colonial Cities
In the conspicuously geographical debate between 'North' and 'South' urbanism, settler colonial cities remain displaced. They are located in the 'North' but embody 'South-like' colonial dynamics and are hence neither colonial nor postcolonial. Heeding the call to theorize from 'any city', this article aims to contribute to a more systematic theorization of the urban from settler colonial cities. In it we focus on the work property does to materia…
From an urban country to urbanCountry: Confronting the cult of denial in Australian cities
I write from the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation, who have practised their sovereignty and law in Naarm, more familiarly known as Melbourne, for countless generations. I
The politics of greening unceded lands in the settler city
Urban greening is a buzz term in urban policy and research settings in Australia and elsewhere. In a context of settler colonial urbanism, like Australia, a first fact becomes clear: urban greening is always being practiced on unceded Indigenous lands. Recognising this requires some honest reckoning with how this latest urban policy response perpetuates dispossessory settler-colonial structures. In this paper, we listen to the place-based ontolog…
Possessory politics and the conceit of procedure: Exposing the cost of rights under conditions of dispossession
Rights are central to the theory and practice of planning, and to the practice of struggles for those who are marked by conditions of dispossession and displacement. Those rights are often articulated through planning as property ‘rights in’ and procedural ‘rights to’. Yet when struggles against the dispossessory tendencies of planning become articulated through these rights-based discourses in planning, the potential arises for their immediate l…
Unlearning the Colonial Cultures of Planning
1. Introduction : culture, colonialism and planning -- 2. Indigenous people and their challenge to planning -- 3. A colonial genealogy of planning -- 4. Systematizing space : 'natures', 'cultures' and protected areas -- 5. Managing the sacred -- 6. Modes of governance : the difference indigeneity makes to progressive planning -- 7. Unlearning privilege : towards the decolonization of planning
By Any Means Necessary: Urban Regeneration and the “State of Exception” in Glasgow's Commonwealth Games 2014
When compulsory purchase for urban regeneration is combined with a sporting mega‐event, we have an archetypal example of what Giorgio Agamben called the “state of exception”. Through a study of compulsory purchase orders (CPOs) on the site of the Athletes' Village for Glasgow's 2014 Commonwealth Games, we expose CPOs as a classed tool mobilised to violently displace working class neighbourhoods. In doing so, we show how a fictionalised mantra of …
What's Love Got To Do With It? Illuminations on Loving Attachment in Planning
10.1080/14649357.2012.731210 Original image by Libby Porter, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia In 2009, the People of Color Interest Group (POCIG) sponsored a round table at the annual Associ
Indigenous recognition in state-based planning systems: Understanding textual mediation in the contact zone
Indigenous peoples around the world are claiming and, in many cases, achieving recognition of their customary land rights, with significant challenges for planning systems. How should we understand both the nature of this demand and its politics of recognition? This article demonstrates how the insights and principles contained in political and democratic theory, along with a methodological framework inspired by Institutional Ethnography informs …
The meaning of place and state‐led gentrification in Birmingham’s Eastside
Despite Birmingham’s claim to constitute ‘England’s second city’, it has arguably been overlooked in much recent academic research – perhaps because of a tendency to regard Manchester as the paradigmatic English example of the emerging post‐industrial city‐region. Contributors to CITY have gone some way to redressing this imbalance – with Frank Webster’s paper in vol 5 no 1 and Kevin Ward’s paper in vol 7 no 2 underlining the wider issues raised …
The Point is to Change It
So wrote Marx in 1845, and it is a statement that should resonate deeply with planning. It is after all, the most often-used reason to support the argument that the discipline of planning is “diffe
Rights or Containment? The politics of Aboriginal cultural heritage in Victoria
Aboriginal cultural heritage protection, and the legislative regimes that underpin it, constitute important mechanisms for Aboriginal people to assert their rights and responsibilities. This is especially so in Victoria, where legislation vests wide-ranging powers and control of cultural heritage with Aboriginal communities. However, the politics of cultural heritage, including its institutionalisation as a scientific body of knowledge within the…
Conceptualising Sustainability in UK Urban Regeneration: A Discursive Formation
Despite the wide usage and popular appeal of the concept of sustainability in UK policy, it does not appear to have challenged the status quo in urban regeneration because policy is not leading in its conceptualisation and therefore implementation. This paper investigates how sustainability has been conceptualised in a case-based research study of the regeneration of Eastside in Birmingham, UK, through policy and other documents, and finds that c…
Remaking imperial power in the city: The case of the William Barak building, Melbourne
When the enormous drapes that had been covering a new building in central Melbourne were thrown off in early 2015, an extraordinary sight was revealed: a colossal image of a face staring down the city's civic spine. This moment of unveiling marked a fascinating moment for Indigenous-settler relations in Australia, but especially urban, densely settled Melbourne. For the face is that of William Barak, ancestor and leader of the Wurundjeri people, …
Bounded recognition: Urban planning and the textual mediation of Indigenous rights in Canada and Australia
While the recognition of marginalized social groups has become widely accepted as an important consideration for contemporary planning, the particular challenge of Indigenous recognition has barely registered in urban planning contexts. In this paper, we use a discursive and interpretive analysis of urban planning texts from Victoria, Australia, and British Columbia, Canada, to illustrate how the ‘contact zone’ between Indigenous peoples and urba…
Re-scaling social mix: Public housing renewal in Melbourne
Social mix is a widely used component of urban housing policy in post-welfare states. Problematizing homogenous areas of disadvantage, social mix policies purportedly aspire to increase socioeconomic diversity within defined areas. In Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, a major program of public housing renewal has been underway since the early 2000s, justified by a social mix agenda. This paper investigates the discursive and scalar mechanisms used …
The politics of biodiversity offsetting across time and institutional scales
Navigating the neighbourhood: Gender, place and agency in children’s mobility
Children have an intrinsic right to urban space. Yet children’s perspectives and agency are largely absent from research and public policy on issues that concern them. Common conceptualisations of children as vulnerable, incompetent, or unruly designate their marginalised status in the city. When gender is added, the deficit approach is reinforced. In this paper, we draw from theoretical and methodological approaches that affirm children’s agency…
Producing Forests: A Colonial Genealogy of Environmental Planning in Victoria, Australia
In settler societies such as Australia, the colonial state actively produced its territory to secure it from its former Aboriginal owners. Imperial spatial technologies, including exploration, surveying, mapping, (re)naming, and classification of land and its potential uses, were the primary means of this activity. These were the early foundations of planning as a form of state-based action to secure the ordering of space, the production of knowl…
We’re not very good at soccer’: Gender, space and competence in a Victorian primary school
This paper draws on findings from a pilot project conducted at an inner city primary school in Melbourne, Australia. Inviting grade six girls and boys (aged eleven and twelve) to focus on spaces of their schoolground, we learned about the ways in which gender, age, ethnicity, language ability and sporting competence influenced active play and belonging. Informed by the understanding that schoolgrounds, gender and active play are socially construc…
Housing and Resilience – When, for Whom and for What? A Critical Agenda
As a concept resilience is proving remarkably...resilient. It has become a keyword used to describe the contemporary urban and environmental condition. However, unlike that other prolific keyword “sustainability”, it lacks both the ethical intent (if not practice) and international agreement of the Brundtland Report directive to seek to balance economic, social and environmental outcomes for the benefit of future generations. Resilience, like con…
Creating a thinking space for the rising stars of Australian urban geography
The Institute of Australian Geographers Urban Study Group and Australian Geographer present the first essay in our Leading Insights/Thinking Space partnership. We discuss Dr Natalie Osborne's 2018 essay, flag Dr Marilu Melo's 2019 essay and talk about creating a thinking space for the rising stars of Australian urban geography
The Copper and Lead Mines of Ecton Hill, Staffordshire
The meaning of place and state‐led gentrification in Birmingham’s Eastside
Despite Birmingham’s claim to constitute ‘England’s second city’, it has arguably been overlooked in much recent academic research – perhaps because of a tendency to regard Manchester as the paradigmatic English example of the emerging post‐industrial city‐region. Contributors to CITY have gone some way to redressing this imbalance – with Frank Webster’s paper in vol 5 no 1 and Kevin Ward’s paper in vol 7 no 2 underlining the wider issues raised …
Rights or Containment? The politics of Aboriginal cultural heritage in Victoria
Aboriginal cultural heritage protection, and the legislative regimes that underpin it, constitute important mechanisms for Aboriginal people to assert their rights and responsibilities. This is especially so in Victoria, where legislation vests wide-ranging powers and control of cultural heritage with Aboriginal communities. However, the politics of cultural heritage, including its institutionalisation as a scientific body of knowledge within the…
Planning the Cultural Quarter in Birmingham's Eastside
Cultural planning and the development of cultural quarters has become a new orthodoxy in the revitalization of inner city industrial districts, yet this orthodoxy is now widely questioned as to whether it delivers on its promises. In Birmingham UK, the aim to create a new cultural quarter in the industrial inner city area of Eastside represents a unique opportunity for the city to examine and learn from past lessons of the “cultural turn” in urba…
Producing Forests: A Colonial Genealogy of Environmental Planning in Victoria, Australia
In settler societies such as Australia, the colonial state actively produced its territory to secure it from its former Aboriginal owners. Imperial spatial technologies, including exploration, surveying, mapping, (re)naming, and classification of land and its potential uses, were the primary means of this activity. These were the early foundations of planning as a form of state-based action to secure the ordering of space, the production of knowl…
Indigenous Peoples: Resource Management and Global Rights - Edited by Svein Jentoft et al
Informality, the Commons and the Paradoxes for Planning: Concepts and Debates for Informality and Planning Self-Made Cities: Ordinary Informality? The Reordering of a Romany Neighbourhood The Land For…
Land formalisation Formalising landholding through the issue of legal land titles has proved to be a seductive proposition for a number of governments in the global south during the first decade of the 21 century. Much of this thinking, and indeed policy development, has been based on Hernando De Soto’s conceptualisation of dead capital, perhaps most accessibly captured in The Mystery of Capital (De Soto, 2001). The argument has been very persuas…
Indigenous recognition in state-based planning systems: Understanding textual mediation in the contact zone
Indigenous peoples around the world are claiming and, in many cases, achieving recognition of their customary land rights, with significant challenges for planning systems. How should we understand both the nature of this demand and its politics of recognition? This article demonstrates how the insights and principles contained in political and democratic theory, along with a methodological framework inspired by Institutional Ethnography informs …
Conceptualising Sustainability in UK Urban Regeneration: A Discursive Formation
Despite the wide usage and popular appeal of the concept of sustainability in UK policy, it does not appear to have challenged the status quo in urban regeneration because policy is not leading in its conceptualisation and therefore implementation. This paper investigates how sustainability has been conceptualised in a case-based research study of the regeneration of Eastside in Birmingham, UK, through policy and other documents, and finds that c…
The Point is to Change It
So wrote Marx in 1845, and it is a statement that should resonate deeply with planning. It is after all, the most often-used reason to support the argument that the discipline of planning is “diffe
Resilience: A Bridging Concept or a Dead End?“Reframing” Resilience: Challenges for Planning Theory and PracticeInteracting Traps: Resilience Assessment of a Pasture Management System in Northern Afgh…
Introduction The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. (Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, 1929) We live in challenging times with a heightened sense of uncer...
What's Love Got To Do With It? Illuminations on Loving Attachment in Planning
10.1080/14649357.2012.731210 Original image by Libby Porter, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia In 2009, the People of Color Interest Group (POCIG) sponsored a round table at the annual Associ
Bounded recognition: Urban planning and the textual mediation of Indigenous rights in Canada and Australia
While the recognition of marginalized social groups has become widely accepted as an important consideration for contemporary planning, the particular challenge of Indigenous recognition has barely registered in urban planning contexts. In this paper, we use a discursive and interpretive analysis of urban planning texts from Victoria, Australia, and British Columbia, Canada, to illustrate how the ‘contact zone’ between Indigenous peoples and urba…
Possessory politics and the conceit of procedure: Exposing the cost of rights under conditions of dispossession
Rights are central to the theory and practice of planning, and to the practice of struggles for those who are marked by conditions of dispossession and displacement. Those rights are often articulated through planning as property ‘rights in’ and procedural ‘rights to’. Yet when struggles against the dispossessory tendencies of planning become articulated through these rights-based discourses in planning, the potential arises for their immediate l…
The Charleston Orphan House: Children's Lives in the First Public Orphanage in America
Planning in the face of conflict: The surprising possibilities of facilitative leadership
By Any Means Necessary: Urban Regeneration and the “State of Exception” in Glasgow's Commonwealth Games 2014
When compulsory purchase for urban regeneration is combined with a sporting mega‐event, we have an archetypal example of what Giorgio Agamben called the “state of exception”. Through a study of compulsory purchase orders (CPOs) on the site of the Athletes' Village for Glasgow's 2014 Commonwealth Games, we expose CPOs as a classed tool mobilised to violently displace working class neighbourhoods. In doing so, we show how a fictionalised mantra of …
Planning for Coexistence?: Recognizing Indigenous Rights Through Land-Use Planning in Canada and Australia
Planning is becoming one of the key battlegrounds for Indigenous people to negotiate meaningful articulation of their sovereign territorial and political rights, reigniting the essential tension that lies at the heart of Indigenous-settler relations. But what actually happens in the planning contact zone - when Indigenous demands for recognition of coexisting political authority over territory intersect with environmental and urban land-use plann…
Unlearning the Colonial Cultures of Planning
1. Introduction : culture, colonialism and planning -- 2. Indigenous people and their challenge to planning -- 3. A colonial genealogy of planning -- 4. Systematizing space : 'natures', 'cultures' and protected areas -- 5. Managing the sacred -- 6. Modes of governance : the difference indigeneity makes to progressive planning -- 7. Unlearning privilege : towards the decolonization of planning
Contested Property Claims: What Disagreement Tells Us about Ownership
Indigenous People and the Miserable Failure of Australian Planning
Major changes in Australian law and significant research efforts have re-positioned Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as important actors in planning. Yet, this has barely penetrated the consciousness of the mainstream professional community. Current requirements for professional competencies and planning curricula fall well short of preparing planners to productively engage with Indigenous people. The profession itself barely acknowl…
We’re not very good at soccer’: Gender, space and competence in a Victorian primary school
This paper draws on findings from a pilot project conducted at an inner city primary school in Melbourne, Australia. Inviting grade six girls and boys (aged eleven and twelve) to focus on spaces of their schoolground, we learned about the ways in which gender, age, ethnicity, language ability and sporting competence influenced active play and belonging. Informed by the understanding that schoolgrounds, gender and active play are socially construc…
Housing and Resilience – When, for Whom and for What? A Critical Agenda
As a concept resilience is proving remarkably...resilient. It has become a keyword used to describe the contemporary urban and environmental condition. However, unlike that other prolific keyword “sustainability”, it lacks both the ethical intent (if not practice) and international agreement of the Brundtland Report directive to seek to balance economic, social and environmental outcomes for the benefit of future generations. Resilience, like con…
From an urban country to urbanCountry: Confronting the cult of denial in Australian cities
I write from the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation, who have practised their sovereignty and law in Naarm, more familiarly known as Melbourne, for countless generations. I
Urbanizing settler-colonial studies: Introduction to the special issue
Urban settlement has been central to the making of European settler-colonial societies since their inception. Settlement, or more sharply invasion, is given material presence and organizational sha
Sociology (31 works) · Political science (29 works) · Law (19 works) · Law (15 works) · Geography (13 works) · Politics (13 works) · Urban Planning and Governance (12 works) · Indigenous (10 works) · Archaeology (8 works) · Economics (8 works)