Comfortably inhabiting reality: justifying and denouncing arguments in a development dispute in the post-industrial gentrified inner-city

Abstract

This article seeks to understand the ‘critical capacities’ of actors involved in public disputes by focussing on one such case in Melbourne, Australia. The dispute centred on a non-government school's proposal to develop classrooms in a heritage listed building on public land sublet from a charitable foundation. Following local council's rejection of the original proposal, the school successfully appealed to the Victorian Planning Minister. After introducing a critical pragmatic analytic framework, five accounts of the dispute given by key actors are examined, uncovering similarities in the arguments used by each. Then, in the same accounts, analysis identifies differences in how the pro- and anti-development groups justified their own and denounced their opponents' positions. Both groups recognised formal rules as the best means for preserving equal citizens' access to public space, yet the pro-development group justified their argument by reference to local community benefit, in contrast with the anti-development group, who adopted an abstract argument concerning the privatisation of public space. Understood as mobilising different ‘models of justice’, the groups are regarded as appealing to a ‘real’ order, an implicit politicised hierarchy that situates winners in relation to losers. In effect, the pro-development group justified its position by representing it as congruent with, rather than disrupting, the real order encompassing the situation. In conclusion, the paper discusses the usefulness of the critical pragmatic analytic framework for understanding governmental power relations and assemblages, as actors demonstrate their critical capacities in contexts where erstwhile formal equality obscures the presence of hierarchical order.

Keywords:

• governance and power relations
• local communities
• public disputation
• social order
• urban politics

Acknowledgements

I thank the five respondents for taking the time to contribute, as well as Ms Ginger Ekselman for her research assistance. I also thank Ronan Paddison and Space and Polity's anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions for improvements to the original mnuscript. Moreover, I especially thank Meg Holden for shaping how I think about the French critical pragmatists' work over several years of especially enjoyable research collaboration. That said, I am solely responsible for all of this article's faults. Interviews were conducted under RMIT University Human Research Ethics Application Number 2000593–10/11.