From high-rise projects to suburban estates: Public tenants and the globalised discourse of deconcentration

This article provides an international context to the We Call These Projects Home report by describing how, despite marked differences in form and location of housing and in the socio-cultural makeup of the tenant community, deconcentration and dispersal of public tenants has become a central concern of housing authorities in Australia. This comparison brings into relief several important elements of the deconcentration agenda which help to explain the vigour with which it is pursued despite continuing debate concerning the claimed benefits for tenants.In contrast to the high density, and culturally homogenous US projects, in Australia much of the focus of redevelopment activity has been either in low-density outer-suburban housing estates, or in higher density inner urban areas where land value is high and gentrification pressures are already evident. Nonetheless, a similar cultural theory of ‘neighbourhood effects’ has been deployed to justify intervention. This paper will argue that the diffusion of this policy without regard for actual local conditions exposes the ideological nature of the deconcentration agenda which has the effect of, at once, making former state assets available for private speculation and capital accumulation, and also demonising those who benefit from state subsidised housing but do not participate as private consumers in the housing market.The paper also considers the ways in which conventional policy-driven research on neighbourhood social conditions has effectively excluded the situated knowledge of public housing tenants, compounding their relative powerlessness, and how the political rhetoric associated with deconcentration has added to the stigma of public housing and the cultural exclusion of tenants. More recent attempts to involve tenants in consultation on redevelopment plans serve to illustrate further the political and economic interests at stake, despite some tenant groups’ continued attempts to mount an alternative agenda. A cross-national project currently being undertaken in Australia and the US is described which attempts to provide tenants with the means to develop their own research and policy agenda.

► USA and Australia have divergent housing markets but similar public housing policy.
► Public housing dispersal is motivated more by ideology than local urban conditions.
► Conventional research systematically excludes tenants’ situated knowledge.
► The Right to the City requires collaborative tenant driven research and publication.