Housing rights and residents' voices in the marketplace of ideas

Public housing represents a diminishing part of the urban landscape and the urban policy agenda, and struggles over its future have rarely been framed in terms of a ‘right to the city’ (until recently, see Right to the City Alliance 2010). Nonetheless, de-concentration and social mix projects bring into relief all the key interests and forces at work in contemporary neoliberal urbanization. In the first part of this paper we illustrate the demise of the trope of citizenship rights in the housing arena. Housing authorities have typically deployed social inclusion and poverty reduction discourses to justify redevelopment while ‘an increasingly entrepreneurially minded local state apparatus’ (Harvey 2008) has invited private capital to not only rebuild the physical fabric, but to remake the social relations around public tenancy within the trope of consumerism. Drawing on a case study of a 'mixed tenure' redevelopment in Western Sydney, we outline the effects on tenant collectivism and self-organising where a private consortium was contracted by government to manage all aspects including physical redevelopment, tenancy management, tenant consultation and participation, and even to provide a tenant advocacy service.

We report on a project which seeks to reassert the political subjectivity of public tenants by changing the scale and medium of organising. Residents' Voices is a partnership involving university researchers and local tenant organisations in several cities Australia and the US. The paper will report on the project's use of new media technologies and a tenant-driven website (residentsvoices.net) to recast debate on redevelopment and deconcentration of public housing from the perspective of tenants' lived experience and right to place.

Harvey, David The Right to the City New Left Review 53 (September-October) 2008, 23-40

Right to the City Alliance We Call These Projects Home – Solving the Housing Crisis from the Ground Up May 2010