Accommodation or inhabitance? New migrants, housing and the right to the city in Sydney, Australia

This paper explores the applicability of the concept of the Right to the City and forms of urban citizenship in relation to new migrants’ housing pathways in Sydney, Australia. In particular, it focuses on the extent to which new migrants’ sense of belonging - as a sense of entitlement to claim participation in urban space – is shaped through access to housing, and also how this is mediated in relation to local housing advocates and authorities. This is particularly relevant in Sydney where the neoliberal urban policy and a lack of stable and affordable housing is rapidly exacerbating socio-spatial inequalities and injustices in the city (Stilwell, 1998). Drawing on the framing of the Right to the City as a practice of inhabiting (Isin, 2000; Purcell, 2000), the paper is based on qualitative research with new migrants in Western Sydney, and explores their everyday practices of inhabitation in relation to housing and their neighbourhood environment, and how this shapes, and is shaped by processes of social transformation across multiple socio-spatial levels. This analysis is situated within the broader context of formal citizenship rights, multiculturalism and national identity in Australia, in which property ownership and the ‘Australian suburban dream’ are key tropes informing the notion of the ‘good citizen’. While acknowledging the argument around the appropriation and ‘watering down’ of Lefebvre’s original concept of Right to the City, the paper argues that the concept may be useful for exploring the possibilities inherent in the informal, everyday and banal practices of migrant engagement in urban space and housing as examples of urban citizenship claims, and how this may produce important spaces for social transformation.