Global city aspirations, graduated citizenship and public housing: analysing the consumer citizenships of neoliberalism

Abstract

Global city discourses rearticulate the relationships between the state, urban space and the global economy. At the local level, global city reconfigurations stamp the mark of a global economic order onto local citizenship practices. Public housing is a legacy of specific national (welfare) states where citizenship rights arose from territorially bound constitutional discourses, and is incompatible in its current form with the consumer-based rights and responsibilities of a global economic order. At the same time, property markets in high-value areas of cities like Sydney, Australia, see not only increasing presence of international investment but fundamental changes in planning and governance processes in order to facilitate it. Global market-oriented discourses of urban governance promote consumer “performances of citizenship” and a graduated approach to the distribution of rights, including the right to housing. In this article we explore what is new about neoliberal approaches to public and social housing policy, and how public tenants respond to and negotiate it. In Australia tenants’ right to participate in local-level democracy, and in housing management, must be reconsidered in light of the broader discourses of consumer citizenship that are now enforced on tenants as a set of “responsibilities” to the market and state.

Keywords:

• global city
• public housing
• citizenship
• neoliberalism
• property rights
• democracy
• participation
• right to the city

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Erratum

Introduction

The past decade has witnessed an outpouring of scholarship on the neoliberal city. Most of the widely read work on this topic has been theoretical, critical and tends to explore the larger political and economic mechanisms that structure urban space, foster social injustice and incite activism. (Long, 2013, p. 52)

What is missing, argues Long, is a body of empirical studies which examine the role of place theory and place-based resistance to neoliberal globalization in different urban contexts. This article presents a study of place-based resistance from Sydney Australia. In Sydney, the “global city” has emerged as both a key conceptual term and as a rhetorical descriptor locating the city as an important node within the global economy (NSW Government, 2005, 2010, 2011; Rogers, 2014; Sassen, 1991). The global city should not be understood solely as an economic or urban planning regime but also a political project reshaping citizen–state relationships. As a political project, integral to other social and material restructuring processes, governments are redefining citizens’ rights and responsibilities in pursuit of their global city aspirations (Rogers, 2014). However, “the global” is an abstract political space, and it is through governmental action at the level of the nation-state and the city that the “globalized” consumer citizenships of neoliberalism are enacted. In the US, Wacquant (2012, p. 66) argues that citizenship practices are stratified as the bureaucratic agencies that define and distribute public goods “spawns a Centaur-state that practices liberalism at the top of the class structure and punitive paternalism at the bottom”. Similarly, in Asia, Ong (2006) argues that neoliberal citizenship might be said to be developing a degree of civic polyvalence as the social and urban spaces of the city are “graduated” through urban and social policy frameworks. We argue that Australian’s metropolitan planning and the government’s global city aspirations are creating a similar socio-urban space of governance which is informed by neoliberal logic (McGuirk, 2005; McGuirk & O’Neill, 2002).

Historically, public housing represented a key element of national welfare states and a tool of urban development and management for national and state governments. However, public housing developments and the tenants who continue to live there also form a material element of the urban landscape which is now being actively reconstructed as “global” territory (Rogers, 2014). In this article, we present a case where neoliberal public housing reform and metropolitan planning intersect which echoes and illustrates the graduated citizenship rights and spatial strategies that have been recorded by Wacquant (2012) and Ong (2006) in the US and Asia, respectively. Moreover, we show that this reconfiguration of citizenship is not unilateral but is a contested and dialectical process. We outline the political practices of Sydney local resident action group REDWatch. REDWatch’s locally situated political practices are directed towards state actors within the city. Their actions have focused on the “social” in notions of citizenship as a way of attempting to protect local residents’ ongoing public housing rights in and to their neighbourhood. Their political projects revisit and reclaim local public housing residents’ rights to housing in their neighbourhood and resonate with recent right to the city scholarship.

Recent reformulations of Lefebvre’s (1968) right to the city thesis might be condensed to three key forms. The first is a teleological societal metaphor, a utopian discourse purporting a new ideal or idealised type of power structure toward which we are heading: the revolution to come (Harvey, 2008). The second is a current legal demand, a claim to the rights of a citizenship that is bounded by city spaces: the reclaiming of rights by drawing on the law within the existing system (Soja, 2010). The third is the suggestion of an actually existing aggregated disapproval, a revolution in the present: a critical mass of people that are already acting to mount a revolution against repression (Hou, 2010; Iveson, 2013; Swyngedouw, 2011). For Hou, Iverson Swyngedouw and Soja, the right to the city is of the second and third type: performative in the present. It is about the staging of political acts by insurgent publics within urban and/or public space. The question of who is authorised to act and in what manner their action is recognised is crucial.

Leary and McCarthy (2013) argue that urban regeneration is now a global phenomenon, whereby neoliberal restructuring processes are changing the social and material landscapes of cities, especially, although not exclusively, in Australia, UK, US, Asia and parts of Africa and South America. When governments define and seek to address “urban problems” through urban regeneration programmes the inclusion of public housing redevelopment is often cast as facilitating the civic contribution of tenants. These projects authorize and discourage, even prohibit in some cases, certain civic acts. Recognizing the way in which government and state-sponsored consultants activate and deactivate rights to the city through these projects provides a valuable tool for understanding how urban regenerations and public housing redevelopments function as political projects within contemporary urban spaces. Whereas private homeowners are a class of people for whom the global city makes sense, because they have access to the capital required to navigate globalizing cities, public housing tenants have a different experience (Lepofsky & Fraser, 2003; Rogers, 2014). Their form of urban inhabitance (Lefebvre, 1968), and their actions that fall outside the civic spaces that are authorized by the state, could result in them being denied the right to urban life (Harvey, 2008). Increasingly, under global city discourses an individual is not a recognized member of the “community” because of their citizenship status, but instead must participate in the global city and global economy for their actions to be legitimated in the urban regeneration process.

Moving from “social welfare” to “global market” citizenship

After the Second World War, citizenship received renewed academic attention as many post-war Allied governments engaged in unprecedented investment in education, health, public housing and infrastructure. The dominant Keynesian economic policy shifted the nexus of rights and responsibilities toward social citizenship (Marshall, 2009). Marshall (2009, p. 78) was deeply concerned with the ways in which citizenship could act as the “architecture of inequality” and his taxonomy of civil, political and social citizenship is well known. Marshall presented social citizenship rights as a suite of substantive rights that were being delivered through the Keynesian welfare state, and that would ensure that citizens “live the life of a civilized being according to the standards prevailing in the society” (Marshall, 2009, p. 8). Marshall’s project was essentially expansionist and universalist. However, social citizenship was not just about social and spatial justice, more fundamentally it was about making democracy workable (for a more in-depth analysis of the global city and citizenship see Isin, 2000; Rogers & Bailey, 2013; Sassen, 2006).

As neoclassical economics succeeded Keynesian theory the welfare state was transformed into a neoliberal disciplinary mechanism (Wacquant, 2012). Global capitalism eroded, or has at least impacted upon, state sovereignty, democracy and the rights and responsibilities of citizens (Peck, 2010; Turner, 2002). Rather than seeing housing, like health or education, in Marshallian terms as underwriting citizenship and political participation, low-income citizens such as public/social housing tenants must now perform citizenship to be eligible for housing. Fitzpatrick and Pawson (2013) point to a case in point with the end of security of tenure for public/social housing tenants in Australia, UK and New Zealand. Thus, concepts of equality and citizenship are accorded different meanings within different spheres of action. The demands of neoliberal citizenship feign economic, political and social equality between citizens, while the demands of social citizenship point to the economic, political and social inequalities with cities (Mouffe, 2005, p. 39; Peck, 2010; Rancière, 2000; Wacquant, 2012). States are actively reworking access to social citizenship by conceptualizing the inhabitants of cities as “consumer” and “corporate” citizens. Bauman (1998) argues that citizens who are unable to meet their financial “responsibilities” to the market and the state, such as low-income citizens who cannot secure employment or their housing in “the market”, are conceptualized as “flawed consumers” (p. 614). Flawed consumers are the antithesis of the morally superior consumer or neoliberal citizen (Marinetto, 2003; Peck, 2010; Swyngedouw, 2005). A consumer citizen is a citizen who performs citizenship in accordance with the moral responsibilities that are mediated by the neoliberal marketized state (Rogers, 2012).

Ong (2006) argues that the market-centric restructuring of the political spaces of governance is not a technique confined to managing the conventional nation-state. Instead it is one in which the citizenry, non-government and the private sectors are all implicated. Ong uses the concept of graduated citizenship to show that the “goal of graduated modes of ruling” (p. 88) is to establish a transnational network of national spaces through which citizens, businesses and community organizations can be governed. Through these “hybrid zones of government and citizenship” (p. 88) state actors graduate both the social and physical spaces of the city in specific ways in an attempt to enact the demands of their imagined future global city (Rogers, 2014). This requires a coordinated political effort spanning the national through the state and territories to the local. The bounded relationships between citizen, state and territory are reconfigured to include a wider array of actors seeking recognition and authorization (rights and responsibilities). Policy and business narratives about modern global cities tell us much about the contemporary urban condition and the decline of social citizenship.

Private sector developers are actively implicated in the reconstruction of citizenship within cities. For example, an advertisement for a mixed commercial and residential development in Kuala Lumpur vividly illustrates this (see: UEM Land Holdings Berhad, 2012). This advertisement runs with the title “The new address for the world citizen” and shows a 20-storey gated community. The discursive image constructs an urban space in which economic power can be used to purchase a new home to allow the homeowner to become a “world citizen”. Owning or living in this space is not imbued with value because of the access it provides to local services and infrastructure, but by something much more abstract, but nonetheless made possible by the urban governance regime in place in Kuala Lumpur – the freedom it provides to participate in global markets. Of course this form of citizenship is only meaningful to those people who are able to secure necessities, such as health, housing and education, through their own private means.

Similarly, in Australia the strategic planning and social policy frameworks of the New South Wales state government are not about maintaining local citizens rights to the urban space that they currently live in. But rather the plans are positioned in terms of the global citizens that might be drawn into “Global Sydney”, which has been spatially marked out as a specific geographical segment of the metropolitan area (see: NSW Government, 2013a). Different spatial rules and citizenship requirements apply to different parts of the city (Rogers, 2014). For example, the NSW state government brings “globalized markets” and “future housing provision” discourses together in the Sydney Metropolitan Strategy, as follows:

Strengthen Sydney’s long-term economic prosperity by increasing the city and region’s competitiveness in globalized markets … the Plan provides a sound basis for future investment. It allows the Government and the market to confidently respond to economic growth and housing and infrastructure needs, at the right time, and in the right location, to support Sydney in the next 25 years. (NSW Government, 2005, p. 3)

The private sector is central to realizing the state’s infrastructure and employment vision for Sydney, as demonstrated by the following statement;

These targets are closely related to trend based projections but they recognize that more concerted action may be needed in some areas to stimulate private sector investment and employment growth. (NSW Government, 2005, p. 14)

Thus, the private sector, as well as the state, is implicated in graduating the urban spaces of the city and promoting global citizenships (Ong, 2006), even if invited by the state. These types of socio-spatial representations – the advertisement for the mixed commercial and residential development and the Sydney Metropolitan Strategy – show that citizenship is not spatially bound within the city. Rather, the state and the private sector developers graduate the urban spaces of the city into “global economic corridors” or “new addresses for world citizens” (NSW Government, 2013a; UEM Land Holdings Berhad, 2012), and these new discourses can undermine the claims to urban space of those who already live there.

In Sydney, and through the Sydney Metropolitan Strategy, the state presents the city as a site for both drawing on and managing the powerful forces of a globalizing economy into the future. As mentioned above, large areas of public housing represent a physical legacy of social citizenship that antagonize and become a problem for the idea of the “global city”. This problem requires citizenship rights to be reconstructed and graduated and the NSW state housing authority has reconfigured public housing provision and rationalized the public housing stock in terms of the prevailing neoliberal economic logic. For example, in 2005 the NSW state government

… announced the most significant changes in the history of [the state housing authority] with the release of a reform plan, Reshaping Public Housing. These changes constitute a fundamental shift in the philosophy of public housing, and ensure the ongoing sustainability of the public housing sector. They include: an end to tenure for life, changes to eligibility for public housing, and increases in rent for tenants most able to pay, amongst other reforms. The result will be a public housing system that is better targeted towards providing housing assistance for those most in need … As the housing stock ages, costs for repairs and maintenance also escalate. This places huge pressure on the housing budget. (Housing NSW, 2005)

The legacies of the welfare state and an era of constitutional rights, which equated to a social citizenship right to housing and urban space, often in the form of public housing in NSW, are now being replaced with the citizenship rights and responsibilities of a new economic/urban order (Fitzpatrick & Pawson, 2011; Rogers & Bailey, 2013). The consumer citizenships of neoliberalism are partly constructed as a right to choice that is to be activated through consumption (Jubas, 2009). This set of rights is accompanied with a set of responsibilities to the market, the nation-state and/or the “local community”. This includes the responsibility to have choice through consumption as a precondition to living in specific parts of the global city. In the next section, we present a case study of public housing estate redevelopment planning in Sydney to demonstrate how the idea of global market citizenship was translated into an urban management strategy. In Sydney, global market citizenship destabilized local citizens’ claims to their local urban space – claims that were based on inhabitance and social citizenship – because the “Global Sydney” vision is built around notions of private property and economic progress.

The following analysis presents a local resident action group’s response to this urban management strategy and their attempt to reclaim social citizenship and their rights to local urban space. The analysis was undertaken using data from two studies. The first was an Australian Research Council funded Linkage project entitled Residents Voices’. This project was designed to create opportunities for public housing residents to develop and express their own knowledge and understanding of the links between place and disadvantage. The second study was an Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute post-doctoral research fellowship focused on questions of citizenship and disadvantage, and the role that public policy plays in facilitating the forced relocation of public housing tenants. Both studies used participatory research methodologies. For one year the postdoctoral fellow spent one day per week in Redfern/Waterloo attending and observing public meetings and government events. He recorded the activities of REWatch members and worked collaboratively with public housing tenants on several smaller research projects (see: Arthurson, Darcy, & Rogers, 2014; Darcy & Gwyther, 2012). Drawing on data from both studies this analysis includes a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of a corpus of 25 texts (Fairclough, 2003; van Dijk, 1985). These texts including print media, website materials and federal and state government policy documents. These texts outline the activities of REDWatch and several NSW state government departments. Politicians, government departments, journalists and industry and other interest groups authored these texts. CDA was deployed to account for the political nature of the policy and media texts. The analysis shows that these texts are politically embedded statements through which social actors forward particular interest positions (Fairclough, 2003; van Dijk, 1985). The CDA and participant observation was supplemented with eight interviews conducted toward the end of the year-long participant observation period for the purpose of this study. The interviews were conducted with state government bureaucrats, senior government planners and key REDWatch members working on the Redfern/Waterloo redevelopment project.

REDWatch: public housing redevelopment in Redfern/Waterloo

REDWatch is a local community organization based in the Redfern/Waterloo area 3 km south of the central business district of Sydney, between the downtown area and the airport. The organization’s membership includes local public, social and private renters, private homeowners and representatives from non-government organizations. Individual members from several major political parties also attend and contribute to REDWatch meetings. Their name is an acronym formed in part from the Sydney suburbs the organization has a political interest over – Redfern, Eveleigh, Darlington and Waterloo, which is colloquially known as Redfern/Waterloo. The organization deliberately combined the acronym REDW with the word “watch” to signify their political intention to watch the government and private sector’s actions in their area (Porter et al., 2013, pp. 542–546). REDWatch have a three-tier membership structure comprising a Co-ordination Group, Membership Group and a Supporters List. A dedicated group of seven members form the Co-ordination Group undertake the bulk of the day-to-day work of the organization on a voluntary basis. There is a fluctuating group of around 30 paid-up members in the Membership Group. At the third and more informal level, there are around 175 registered supporters who are regularly invited to REDWatch events and receive newsletters. However, the group is not only advocating for greater social and spatial justice for their local area by way of their members’ activities. The organization

… offers a virtual resource centre for both residents and academics [and others, which] brings together information concerning the community from Government reports, the media and local email updates to provide a community information resource for those wanting to know what is happening in the area and why it is happening. We have added a lot of historical information so the community can be reminded of what we have been promised [by the government] at various points of time. (REDWatch, 2011)

As shown in Table 1, during the study period the REDWatch website received around 1000 visits per day and more than 25,000 visits per month. This suggests that the REDWatch website is indeed a virtual resource and information centre for the area. This level of interest, while surprising, is understandable for the Redfern/Waterloo area is in the heat of the territory marked out as “Global Sydney” by the state planning department. It is a key strategic redevelopment site for the NSW State Government, which has been preparing extensive redevelopment plans, in various forms, since the mid-2000s. The NSW state government (2010) states

Sydney is Australia’s only truly global city and one of the world’s great metropolises (p. 2) … Urban renewal is about transforming under-used or dilapidated areas, building on the strengths of a place and providing multiple or “mixed uses” that meet the needs of the community. Mixed use development, if well planned and designed, has the potential to generate an interesting, vibrant atmosphere that brings people closer, increases social capital and social cohesion, addresses environmental issues and fosters economic development. (p. 23)

Table 1. Number of visits to REDWatch website during the study period.

Month	Average daily visits	Monthly total visits
September 2012	1062	25494
August 2012	921	28568
July 2012	794	24639
June 2012	913	27410
May 2012	789	24465
April 2012	1088	32650
March 2012	1125	34892
February 2012	1243	36063
January 2012	979	30371
December 2011	1012	31400
November 2011	1036	31108
October 2011	894	27733
Total visits		354793

Source: REDWatch website generated statistics provided by the REDWatch Co-ordination Group.

In Sydney, transforming under-used or dilapidated areas includes a focus on public housing estates and tenants. The NSW state government holds large tracts of public housing and public land in Redfern/Waterloo. Public housing buildings are a defining feature of the area, so much so that the Redfern/Waterloo area has long been synonymous with Indigenous and low-income housing in media and other public discourse. The Redfern/Waterloo area has a relatively stable public housing population. 57% of public housing tenants have lived in Redfern/Waterloo for more than five years (32% have lived there from more than 10 years). The area has a very low-income profile compared to other sections of the city, a predominantly older profile (53% of public housing tenants are aged over 60) and a significant number of single person households and people with disabilities (2011 Census). In Redfern, there are 1604 public housing properties (29% of all housing) and in Waterloo there are 2536 public housing properties (92% of all housing).

The area has been subject to various NSW State Government statutory planning bodies including: the Redfern Waterloo Partnership Project; the Redfern Waterloo Authority; the Sydney Metropolitan Development Authority and more recently Urban Growth NSW. A nominated Minister in NSW state government held a portfolio named for Redfern Waterloo from 2004 to 2011. The NSW state government’s (2013a) Sydney Metropolitan Strategy provides strategic regional planning for Sydney that covers the Redfern/Waterloo area (see NSW Government, 2013a). Related, the Sydney Metropolitan Strategy and Urban Growth NSW texts outline the use of market-centric approaches to urban planning to “unlock private sector investment by coordinating and delivering lead-in infrastructure and services in development areas, and by planning and fast tracking urban renewal projects” (Urban Growth NSW, 2012, p. 1). From 2004, the NSW State Government has rescaled regulatory planning governance for the area by removing significant planning approval responsibilities from the City of Sydney and directed these responsibilities toward the NSW state government (2013b) bodies in an attempt to “fast track” large-scale housing redevelopment projects with the private sector. Another related factor, that follows a government trend O’Neill (2013, p. 2) has termed “the financialisation of infrastructure”, the NSW state government restructured the NSW state housing authority (Housing NSW) by placing the public housing assets under the control of the NSW Department of Finance and the public housing tenancies under the control of the NSW Department of Families and Communities.

REDWatch has closely monitored the statutory and regulatory planning changes of the NSW local and state governments. Through their political practice REDWatch is assisting public housing tenants to monitor the financialization of public housing infrastructure in NSW and the restructuring of tenants’ rights and responsibilities in their local area. The organization initially formed following a meeting between two political parties in Redfern focused on the 2004 “Inquiry into Issues relating to Redfern & Waterloo” (Legislative Council – Standing Committee on Social Issues, 2004). REDWatch members wanted “to move beyond a ‘submission approach’ to citizen involvement into the Inquiry, aiming instead to become a ‘pressure group’” that soon developed into an organisation with “multi-partisan membership and no political affiliation” (REDWatch member interview 2012). A REDWatch member argued that they needed to empower themselves as a collective but renounce, as much as possible, common ideological, political, economic or “interest positions” that typically structure local resident action groups. Their mission statement encapsulates the organization’s focus as a monitory civil society collective, which states “REDWatch exists to monitor Government involvement in our area and to push for outcomes that benefit the community and not just the Government” (REDWatch, 2011, p. 1).

REDWatch’s political practice involves public housing tenants around notions of “local inhabitance” and social citizenship rather than the “property relations” of global capitalism. REDWatch is focused on the people that live in the Redfern/Waterloo area, rich and poor, and their political practice with low-income citizens has focused on questioning and challenging the decline of the welfare state and public housing in their area. Rather than enabling rights through private property, tenants are defending the provision of public housing on ideological grounds and are mounting a political challenge as a right to social citizenship in their local urban space. In the next section, we explore the political intentions of the state government and local residents through two empirical cases. The first is the NSW government’s public housing tenants’ participation strategy for the area. The second is REDWatch’s self-directed political action in the redevelopment planning for Redfern/Waterloo. The analysis presents these two cases as local state-sanctioned participation and local-citizen sanctioned participation, respectively; exposing their relationships with consumer and social citizenships, and demonstrating how these enabled and/or disabled particular rights and responsibilities.

Local state-sanctioned participation: state government authorities

State-sanctioned participation includes “community consultation” and “community engagement” processes, whereby the rights, responsibilities and actions of citizens are orchestrated and then authorized (sanctioned) by the government within tightly defined political spaces, such as participatory planning frameworks (Legacy, March, & Mouat, 2014). The community consultations around the government’s master-planning for Redfern/Waterloo (currently known as the Built Environment Plan 2) is one example of state-sanctioned citizen participation in the urban politics of the redevelopment of Redfern/Waterloo public housing sites (Housing NSW, 2012). In a response to, and citing, the Sydney Metropolitan Strategy in 2010 the REDWatch website informed its members that

the broader [metropolitan] strategy has many implications for Redfern Waterloo … in relation to “Central to Eveleigh – support strategic renewal of this highly accessible corridor” (page 84). The second reference seems to confirm some people’s worst fears of what the [statutory bodies of government] was up to in Redfern Waterloo. In a footnote on social inclusion in the strategy says “The work of the NSW Government in Redfern-Waterloo is addressing social exclusion upfront to make an area more viable for urban renewal, see: http://www.smda.nsw.gov.au/”. (p. 34)

Soon after, in January 2011, the NSW state government statutory body placed the “Built Environmental Plan 2 (BEP2)” document outlining the redevelopment plans for public housing sites in Redfern, Waterloo and South Eveleigh on public exhibition (Housing NSW, 2012, p. 1). Informed by the participatory planning discourses within the Sydney Metropolitan Strategy the government sought “community and stakeholder consideration and comment” on this planning document (Housing NSW, 2012, p. 1). There is considerable interdiscursivity between the BEP2 and the Sydney Metropolitan Strategy texts. BEP2 was very much part of the government’s broader “metropolitan” vision for Sydney, with the government stating that the BEP2 planning document had been designed to “Meet the needs of a growing Sydney as outlined in the Metropolitan Plan” (Redfern-Waterloo Authority, 2011, p. 2). The Sydney Metropolitan Strategy also referenced the Redfern/Waterloo area by deploying the term social exclusion as a way of identifying the public housing and Indigenous populations (see REDWatch’s website excerpt above for a summary of this discourse). Within both texts the “urban renewal” planning focus was on the large tracts of public housing and other state-owned land and infrastructure to “Create a more sustainable community within Redfern and Waterloo social housing sites” (Redfern-Waterloo Authority, 2011, p. 2). Concealed within these two plans was a broader political discourse about addressing social exclusion/inclusion by constructing public tenants as unproductive market citizens and public housing as an unproductive use of urban space. A sustainable community, in this context, is a community that doesn’t have subsidised tenants, or at least has far fewer of these than Redfern/Waterloo. This type of social exclusion discourse is a radical revision of social citizenship. Marshall’s social citizenship provides for a conceptualization of subsidised housing as being about social inclusion and it affords a policy mechanism through which the state might address social exclusion. The NSW state government’s background text, taken from a 2011 “tenant survey” in Redfern/Waterloo, is an example of the prevailing “home ownership” consumer discourse:

Compared to wider Sydney, Redfern Waterloo experiences higher levels of economic and social disadvantage, manifested in lower levels of income, education, home ownership and labour force participation, reflecting high public housing occupancy … The aim is to renew the existing public housing stock, provide more diverse housing types, improve public spaces and community facilities and provide more affordable housing. (Housing NSW, 2011, P. 8)

Rather than income-related rent and security of tenure being understood as providing the means by which tenants and governments might address disadvantage, as was the case under former welfare state models of social citizenship, the Sydney Metropolitan Strategy and BEP2 texts present income-related rent and security of tenure (i.e. public housing tenure) as a cause of disadvantage and social exclusion (Darcy, 2012; Fitzpatrick & Pawson, 2011). The state-sanctioned “community engagement” processes and “tenant surveying” in the Redfern/Waterloo area were framed within this policy approach. The policy and planning texts disabled social citizenship by promoting market citizenship to be realized through private homeownership (Housing NSW, 2011, 2012; NSW Government, 2010). Central to these “participatory” processes was a political focus on collecting data that might support the policy programmes that focus on moving tenants into employment or training initiatives, and out of public housing (Housing NSW, 2011, p. 17). Related, the government planned to significantly reduce the public housing stock in Redfern/Waterloo by introducing different housing forms using discursive terms such as “social housing” and “affordable housing” (see Table 2).

Table 2. The social, affordable and private housing mix for Redfern/Waterloo.

Housing type	Approx no. of dwellings
Social housing	2800
Affordable housing	700
Private housing	3500
Total	7000

Source: Reproduced from Housing NSW (2011, p. 5).

Affordable and social housing, argues the NSW state government, is not “public housing” but rather “housing for low to moderate income households, including key workers, provided at a discounted rental and usually managed by a community housing provider” or the private sector through taxation concessions (Housing NSW, 2011, p. 5). The policy discourse shift from “public housing” toward “affordable housing” and “social housing” within the metropolitan and Redfern/Waterloo planning texts has its discursive roots in the Federal Government’s restructuring of the welfare state and social citizenship. Under this housing policy approach the non-government and the private sectors replace the state as the key constituencies for providing and managing low-income housing. The non-government and the private sectors are expected to address the social and spatial injustices in Redfern/Waterloo. By detaching the provision of public housing from the state, the NSW state government effectively detached the social from citizenship. Thus, all subsequent community consultations and participatory planning processes were framed within and conditional upon the neoliberalization of social service and infrastructure provision, and underwritten by consumer citizenship. However, REDWatch did not accept that the state was no longer responsible for the social welfare of public housing tenants and the right to an urban life it offered them. They challenged the implicit neoliberal rationale in the government’s urban plans and “community engagement” strategies for the Redfern/Waterloo area (Redfern-Waterloo Authority, 2011) by assisting public housing tenants to mobilize an urban politics through their own citizen-driven “community engagement” strategy, which focused on defending the social component of citizenship.

Local citizen-sanctioned participation: REDWatch

The second form of citizen “participation” in public housing redevelopment, we will explore, is also related to the redevelopment of the Redfern/Waterloo area. This is a case of what we have termed “citizen-sanctioned participation” in urban politics. Citizen-sanctioned participation includes urban activism and insurgent political processes, whereby the rights, responsibilities and actions of citizens are orchestrated and then authorized (sanctioned) by the citizens themselves through a much wider suite of political spaces, such as those that are enabled by the broader political machinery of representative democracies (Swyngedouw, 2011). REDWatch’s action regarding the planned reductions in public housing in Redfern/Waterloo is one example of citizen-sanctioned participation in urban redevelopment (Housing NSW, 2012). The REDWatch case provides revealing insights about the right to the city as an empirical tool to frame resident action and resistance. In terms of the three part-part framework outlined above, in this case the residents political action was based on a legal demand for democracy and social citizenship that was driven by an aggregated disapproval with the reconfiguration of their rights to urban space.

The NSW state government’s redevelopment plans project population changes that could result in the loss of up to 700 public housing dwellings in the area. Reductions in public housing stock through “social mix” estate redevelopments have been a concern of tenants for over a decade in NSW (see Table 3; Arthurson, 2012; Darcy, 2010; Rogers, 2012). However, this reduction was not always clear within the NSW state government’s redevelopment texts and is bound up with the restructuring of social citizenships. Further, the discussion is obfuscated through the discursive work of terms including “social” and “affordable” housing. In Redfern/Waterloo the government claims that:

There will be no loss of social housing as a result of BEP 2. To offset any reduction in social housing within the immediate BEP 2 area, Housing NSW will be acquiring replacement social housing within the City of Sydney area. (authors emphasis: Redfern-Waterloo Authority, 2011, p. 5)

Table 3. Public housing estate redevelopments announced in New South Wales 2000–2010.

Estate	Public housing dwellings at estate redevelopment announcement	Housing NSW’s target private to public tenure ratio (private/public)	Reduction in public housing dwellings onsite through the redevelopment	Tenants to be rehoused through the redevelopment
Bonnyrigg	833	70/30	0	>95%
Redfern/Waterloo	4500	70/30	0–700	Undisclosed
Airds/Bradbury	1470	70/30	839	60^a–95%
Dubbo	300	100/0	300	100%
Minto	1000	70/30	850	>95%

Source: Rogers (2012, p. 7).

^a Retaining 42% is the ‘best-case’ scenario for Housing NSW. This would require that the current residents of the 630 social housing dwellings be retained in the same dwellings over the course of the redevelopment. Based on other projects, such as the Bonnyrigg redevelopment, and the infrastructure, construction and the associated rehousing polities of this project, achieving the ‘best-case’ scenario seems unlikely.

The discursive move from “public housing” to “social housing” signals the decline of social citizenship and the housing politics implicit to the metropolitan and planning texts. This was not simply a renaming of public housing, but rather a name giving – social housing – to a new form of post-welfare state low-income housing to be provided by the non-government and private sectors (Darcy, 1999). Public housing tenants were acutely aware of this socio-urban politics and they worked with REDWatch to facilitate a wider public debate about the public housing changes in Redfern/Waterloo. This debate took place outside the government’s planning frameworks and their participatory planning and consultation events. It was not necessarily about strategic or regulatory planning (McClymont, 2011) but rather represents an urban politics that sought greater social and spatial justice for local public housing tenants (Hou, 2010; Iveson, 2013). It was an urban politics that intersected with, rather than directly contributed to, the government’s planning frameworks (Soja, 2010; Swyngedouw, 2011). In an attempt to mediate between the very different “community interests” in the area REDWatch focuses on ensuring greater government transparency and working within established legal frameworks such as the Government Information Public Access Act (GIPA) (NSW Government, 2009). REDWatch formally requested “non-public” and “commercial-in-confidence” government documents related to public housing in Redfern/Waterloo through GIPA, and then published these documents on their public website.

REDWatch launched their website in 2004 to circulate government documents about the redevelopment plans and their area to their members. However, the organisation found there was “a broad range of people out there who found [the website] useful … the website brought a different dimension to [their urban politics]” (REDWatch interview 2012). The website facilitates a form of civic participation – what REDWatch (2012, p. 1) called a “virtual resource centre” that operates like a collective memory for the area – that is not driven by a hardline or solidified interest/consensus position (McClymont, 2011). REDWatch is driven by an organizational mission to validate and make publically available information that was formerly considered invalid (e.g. non-technical local knowledge) or classified as confidential (e.g. private-sector, commercial-in-confidence information) to ensure that there is more information and analysis of local issues in the planning, policy and media debate. REDWatch found that the organization and their website became an important site to hold: (1) local knowledge about the area (2) the government’s plans for the area; and (3) the government’s history of planning and consultation commitments to local residents. As the various NSW government statutory planning bodies came and went the REDWatch website, argues a REDWatch member, “operat[ed] like an inconvenient ‘corporate memory’, because stuff disappears from [government web]sites, people move on” (REDWatch interview 2012).

REDWatch placed the government documents relating to BEP2 and public housing on their website (e.g. see: http://www.redwatch.org.au/RWA/bep2). Then public housing tenants and other REDWatch members reviewed these texts and used REDWatch’s established relationships with journalists and academics to assist in an analysis of the public housing reforms that BEP2 would qualify. The BEP2 text revealed that 700 public housing dwellings would be lost in Redfern/Waterloo to achieve the social mix targets, which the government described as “a mix of 60% private and affordable housing dwellings and 40% social housing to encourage a thriving and sustainable community” (Redfern-Waterloo Authority, 2011, p. 5). Local public housing tenants were well aware of the discursive work of the terms “social” and “affordable” housing, the politics underlying this discursive move and the significant changes they signified.

The government had committed to replacing the 700 “public” housing dwellings with a comparable 700 “social” housing dwellings in unspecified locations in the City of Sydney, and thereby detached tenants rights to remain in place in Redfern/Waterloo. In other words, if these “public housing” dwellings were lost some tenants would be required to relocate to another part of the city under the “social housing” programme. Further analysis by REDWatch and tenants showed that the replacement of these 700 dwellings in the City of Sydney, as promised by the government (Redfern-Waterloo Authority, 2011, p. 5), was not included in the redevelopment budget. At this stage the government would not release the sites in Redfern/Waterloo where the 700 public housing dwellings would be lost. REDWatch and tenants analysed the available data, including floor space ratio data and other locational indicators, and identified that the loss of dwellings would most likely be in a section of Redfern/Waterloo comprised of three-storey apartment blocks. Their analysis revealed this information before it was publicly available from government sources (see Redfern-Waterloo Authority, 2011, p. 5). With this information, REDWatch pressured government about their proposed tenancy management model for the public/social housing tenancies, including any plans for transitioning from a state-as-landlord public housing system to non-government or private sector-as-landlord “social” housing system; a change that represents a fundamental restructuring of social citizenship rights, responsibilities and ideals. The government responded by claiming that the BEP2 plans were about the physical infrastructure changes and not about housing management changes. REDWatch pointed out that this was clearly not the case, as demonstrated by the governments own sources, such as their “The social, affordable and private housing mix for Redfern/Waterloo” text (see Table 2 and Housing NSW, 2011, p. 5).

With this data REDWatch used their media and academe contacts to promote a wider debate about the loss of public housing dwellings and the possibility of restructuring the public housing tenancy management system. While a direct link between REDWatch and any given media piece is hard to demonstrate, journalists regularly contact REDWatch and have published a diverse range of information and views through a selection of media publications including the Sydney Morning Herald, South Sydney Herald and City Hub newspapers (Marshall, 2012; Moore, 2011). Notwithstanding the problems of determining the explicit links between REDWatch and journalists, the following City Hub newspaper piece almost certainly draws on REDWatch’s public housing analysis.

The flaws in the second stage of the Built Environment Plan (BEP2) for the redevelopment of NSW housing sites in Redfern and Waterloo are indicative of a government that has no regard for public housing, according to the NSW upper house MP David Shoebridge. The plan in which developers are given the opportunity to build private housing in exchange for renovating existing public housing, has been heavily criticised for removing 700 public housing units without a proper plan to relocate them and for attempting to radically change the social mix of the area. (Marshall, 2012)

These types of media publications were then redirected back to the local community through the REDWatch website (e.g. see: http://www.redwatch.org.au/RWA/bep2). The diversifying of actors, social and political analyses and publication outputs go some way to disabling a solidified interest position for the organization and opens up the planning debate at the local/state political nexus. REDWatch members and tenants will continue to monitor the government’s restructuring of public housing infrastructure and tenancy management throughout the redevelopment of the Redfern/Waterloo area. More recent discussions between REDWatch and the government indicate that the government has a strong commitment to the social mix targets but has conceded that housing densities might need to be increased to allow for the retention of the 700 public housing dwellings on site. This commitment, while mitigated by the possible increase in housing densities, marks a significant victory for local tenants in terms of their right to remain in place. However, the question about the move from public housing to social housing tenancy management remains off limits as a topic for discussion with the government.

Conclusion

Over the past decade critical urban scholarship has been deployed to analyse and expose how the globally mobile political and economic mechanisms of neoliberalism have restructured urban and social space. Much has been made about the social injustices of the neoliberal city and state. What is needed and is now emerging is critical urban scholarship that analyses and exposes socio-urban resistance to neoliberal globalization and the restructuring of the social rights that it entails.

We argue that citizen participation/resistance in issues relating to strategic planning and welfare reforms can be broadly conceptualized as taking two key forms. The first is state-sanctioned participation whereby state or state-sponsored actors frame the rules of engagement and manage the participation process. The second is citizen-sanctioned participation whereby local citizens and/or citizen groups frame the rules of engagement and manage the participation process. Very different ideas about democracy, citizenship and social and spatial justice underwrite these different participation forms.

In the REDWatch case, the citizen-sanctioned participation spaces involved local public housing residents in a political project to protect their rights to remain in Redfern/Waterloo. Their form of “participation in planning” resonates with recent rights to the city theorizing and was underwritten by a current legal demand for democracy and social citizenship and their resistance was driven by an aggregated disapproval with the reconfiguration of public housing tenants’ rights to urban space in Sydney. Their locally situated political practices were directed towards state actors within the city. Their actions focused on the social in notions of citizenship as a way of attempting to protect and reclaim local residents’ ongoing public housing rights in and to their neighbourhood. REDWatch and tenants destabilized the government’s global city of Sydney vision, which was built around notions private property, economic progress and a revision of citizenship rights and responsibilities. Local public housing tenants were well aware of the discursive work of the terms “social” and “affordable” housing, the politics underlying these discursive terms and the significant public policy and citizenship changes that they signified. To counter this discursive politics local citizens’ in Redfern/Waterloo reclaimed their right to local urban space, a right that they based on inhabitance and social citizenship. These types of political projects are global–local in scope and political intent because public housing estate redevelopments and the tenants who live there form a material element of the urban landscape, which is now being actively reconstructed as global territory in Sydney.

By contrast, the government’s state-sanctioned participation spaces were conditional upon enabling rights through the promotion of private property and welfare reform. Their local state-sanctioned participation spaces, such as the government’s public consultations, were conditional upon the consumer citizenships of global neoliberalism; they disabled local residents’ social rights and responsibilities and threatened their rights to remain in place. Neoliberal public housing reform and metropolitan planning represent spatial strategies that reconfigure citizenship in Australia, but they are not unilaterally accepted. Public housing reform and metropolitan planning remain contested and dialectic political projects. Local citizen-sanctioned political participation in Sydney has focused on the social in notions of citizenship as a way of attempting to protect local residents’ ongoing rights to their suburb.

The case study demonstrates that global city discourses rearticulate the relationships between the state, urban space and the global economy. At the local level, global city reconfigurations stamp the mark of a global economic order onto local citizenship practices. Public housing is a legacy of specific national (welfare) states where citizenship rights arose from territorially bound constitutional discourses, and is incompatible in its current form with the consumer-based rights and responsibilities of a global economic order. At the same time property markets in high value areas of cities like Sydney see not only increasing presence of international investment but fundamental changes in planning and governance processes in order to facilitate it. Global market-oriented discourses of urban governance promote consumer “performances of citizenship” and a graduated approach to the distribution of rights, including the right to housing.

Theories of citizenship can be used to investigate how global city discourses are replacing the social citizenship of the welfare state with the consumer citizenship of global neoliberalism. In Sydney, strategic metropolitan planning and the revision of public housing policy threatens public housing tenants’ rights to the urban spaces in which they currently live. These urban management strategies reposition Sydney in terms of the global citizens that might be drawn into the global economic corridors of the city. Public housing policy and large-scale public housing estate redevelopments must be understood in relation to these broader requirements of global consumer citizenships and urban space. Nonetheless, it is at the level of the nation–state and the city that the globalized consumer citizenships of neoliberalism are enacted. We argue that analyses of local resident actions group’s responses to these types of social and urban management strategies, their attempts to reclaim social citizenship and their political projects to protect their rights to local urban space must supplement broader critical global neoliberalism scholarship.

Notes

This article was originally published with errors. This version has been corrected. Please see Erratum (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21650020.2014.938537).