Commentary: Property and propriety: (re)making the space of indigeneity in Australian cities

Abstract

This commentary reflects on the ways in which identity-bound studies reflecting on indigeneity and the city rarely connect with the theories that drive world systems and post-world systems accounts of urbanization. It ponders how we might begin to make links between a default ‘local’ episteme of Australian indigenous studies and a ‘more worldly’ episteme that operates as the infrastructure for understanding (global) urbanization. First, it points to how Australian cities are in an ongoing process of settlement/unsettlement, cycles of creative destruction that implicate indigenous interests (old and new) in various ways. Second, it points to the place of Aborigines within a wider intensification of urban social polarization. Third, it points to the place of Australian cities in an age of migration such that the outlines of differentiation associated with Australia's inaugural settler–indigene distinction must nowadays negotiate cities in which there is evident super-diversity.

Notes

1. Fay Gale, Urban Aborigines, Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1972.

2. Marcia Langton, ‘Urbanizing Aborigines: The Social Scientists’ Great Deception’, Social Alternatives 2(2), 1981, pp 16–22; Tim Rowse, ‘Transforming the Notion of the Urban Aborigine’, Urban Policy and Research 18(2), 2000, pp 171–190; Kay Anderson and Jane M Jacobs, ‘Urban Aborigines to Aboriginality and the City: One Path through the History of Australian Cultural Geography’, Australian Geographical Studies 35(1), 1997, pp 12–22; Kay Anderson, ‘Sites of Difference: Beyond a Cultural Politics of Race Polarity’, in Ruth Fincher and Jane M Jacobs (eds), Cities of Difference, New York: Guilford Press, 1998, pp 201–225.

3. See as examples only: Jennifer Robinson, ‘Global and World Cities: A View From Off the Map’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 26(3), 2002, pp 531–554; AbdouMaliq Simone, For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004; Stephen Legg and Colin McFarlane, ‘Ordinary Urban Spaces: Between Postcolonialism and Development’, Environment and Planning A 40(1), 2008, pp 6–14.

4. Jane M Jacobs, Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City, London: Routledge, 1996.

5. Wendy S Shaw, Cities of Whiteness, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007.

6. Steven Vertovec, ‘Super-Diversity and Its Implications’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 30(6), 2007, pp 1024–1054.

7. John Allen, Doreen Massey and Alan Cochrane, Rethinking the Region, London: Routledge, 1998, p 143.

8. Ash Amin, ‘Regions Unbound: Towards a New Politics of Place’, Geografiska Annaler, Series B, Human Geography 86(1), 2004, p 34.

9. Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, ‘Cities and ethnicities’, Ethnicities 2, 2002, p 291.