The informal Australian city

ABSTRACT

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 deepening our understanding of changes currently underway in urban governance and politics. Drawing on that literature and our own research into informal practices in Australian cities, we examine the forces that help to produce informality, the diverse forms and agents of informality, the forms of authority that they enact, and their relationship to formal economies, regulations and politics. We use examples of informal housing, informal labour, do-it-yourself music venues, graffiti and its regulation, food foraging, and queer community building in Sydney to illustrate our arguments. We conclude by reflecting on the lessons learnt across these diverse cases for our understanding of urban governance and politics in Australia, and offer an agenda for further research on this issue.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban informality
• informal housing
• informal labour
• graffiti
• live music
• queer geographies
• food foraging
• urban governance
• Sydney

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Kurt Iveson http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2362-4743

Craig Lyons http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2683-0689

Notes

1 See http://member.afraccess.com/media?id=CMN://2A1029723&filename=20170817/MGR_01884577.pdf.

2 See http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-14/summit-on-tasmanian-housing-crisis-to-look-for-solutions/9544980.

3 See https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/squatters-evicted-from-millers-point-20140916-10hkt8.html.

4 See, https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/slum-lord-fined-215000-after-fire-guts-illegal-housing-setup-in-alexandria-20170310-guv3pu.html and https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/people-discovered-living-in-shipping-containers-behind-alexandria-factory-20140702-zssss.html.

5 On underpayment at Convenience Store chain 7–11, see https://www.smh.com.au/interactive/2015/7-eleven-revealed/.

6 See https://www.smh.com.au/national/black-jobs-rampant-exploitation-of-foreign-workers-in-australia-revealed-20150930-gjxz7q.html.

7 See https://www.smh.com.au/interactive/2016/great-student-swindle/.

8 Ibid.

9 While NSW legislation currently gives local governments authority to remove graffiti from private property without permission, this power was only given in 2002. At that time, Sydney Lord Mayor Frank Sartor ‘admitted that in days leading up to the Olympics, the City of Sydney had resorted to removing graffiti from CBD walls illegally’ – see Sydney Morning Herald, 13 April 2002, p. 35.

Additional information

Funding

Some parts of this work were supported by City of Sydney.