Governing disassembly in Indigenous housing

Abstract

Without proper attention, houses disassemble. In public housing, property management regimes are charged with performing the repairs and maintenance necessary to combat this entropic tendency. This article argues that such governance regimes can accelerate housing’s disassembly, through rules that restrict housing interventions, bureaucratic technologies that misrecognize housing failure, and processes that defer and delay necessary fixwork. It analyzes Indigenous housing in the Northern Territory of Australia, in terms of three specific legal-bureaucratic instruments and the temporalizations they constitute: the lease and promise; the tender and repetition; the condition report and waiting. The article considers the effects of these pairings in Alice Springs town camps and the challenge of thinking beyond bureaucratic housing regimes.

Keywords:

• Housing
• policy
• maintenance
• temporality
• property management

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Tess Lea and the three anonymous reviewers for their intelligent and constructive feedback, and the editors at Housing Studies for advice on expanding the article title.

Disclosure statement

No financial interest or benefit has arisen from the direct applications of this research.

Funding details

The Housing for Health Incubator at The University of Sydney, Australia, is funded by the Henry Halloran Trust, the University of Sydney Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, the University of Sydney Medical School, the Marie Bashir Institute for Infectious Diseases and Biosecurity, and The Fred Hollows Foundation.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Liam Grealy

Liam Grealy is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Sydney in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies. He is employed by the Housing for Health Incubator, for which his work examines housing and infrastructure policy in regional and remote Australia and southeast Louisiana.