From housing crisis initiative to public issue: Justifications Analysis of land-use proposals in the public sphere

ABSTRACT

This article demonstrates how Justifications Analysis can be used to understand how citizens effectively politicise land-use proposals in the public sphere. I examine a proposal to develop housing on a public reserve in Auckland, New Zealand, and the moral justifications employed by supporters and concerned citizens. Invoking market and civic justifications, supporters de-politicised it as a partial solution to the housing crisis. In response, concerned citizens politicised the proposal with an anti-privatisation argument that denounced its market evaluation. Drawing on civic and green justifications, they morally evaluated the reserve as a space that should be protected for its recreational and environmental significance. My findings support and extend earlier studies that utilise Justifications Analysis and Boltanski and Thévenot’s justification theory. I reveal how public responses to land-use proposals can be understood as culturally informed political acts that transform seemingly apolitical topics into public issues that are contestable in the public sphere.

KEYWORDS:

• Housing crisis
• Justifications Analysis
• land-use conflict
• public sphere
• NIMBY
• politicisation

Acknowledgements

I thank the interviewees for participating in this research. I also thank Hollie Russell and Oliver Guthrie for their research assistance and insightful feedback on an earlier draft of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Open Polytechnic’s Research Incentive Grant and Research Growth Fund; The Open Polytechnic of New Zealand.