ESSAY #1 Urban Renewal and Public Housing A rock and a hard spot

By Rebecca Conroy

Urban renewal, a strategy with precedents in earlier slum abolition acts, is largely driven by housing needs, and bound up in realising new forms of spatialised capital in relation to urban centres. When entire public housing estates become targets of urban renewal, the collision of interests and the needs of civil society become rich sites for investigation. The following series of essays will explore the intersections of these interests and needs across public housing, urban renewal and the spatialised politics of place making.

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ESSAY #2 Locating Art and Community in Temporary Democracies

By Rebecca Conroy

‘Community’ and ‘Art’ have long been engaged in a troubled and sometimes awkward embrace. While critical theory debates have been fuelled by the provisional and resolutely imprecise forms of their encounter, this essay will consider context as an anchor point and lens to explore site specific works in Temporary Democracies.

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ESSAY #3 The Australian suburb_it’s a class act

by Rebecca Conroy

The Australian Suburb is a central conceit in the national imaginary. At once a marker of the aspirational and all things equal on a playing field, it is also the trademark of ugliness—of xenophobia, of parochialism, and a lack of ‘class’. The suburb is also a measure of the growing wealth inequality in Australia, and the destruction of the Aussie dream home as Australia takes up number three position as most unaffordable housing market in the world.

ESSAY #4 The Cul de Sac of Love.

by Rebecca Conroy

In this personal crafting of story and critical enquiry, the writer draws on her own experience of  homeownership to explore what this might mean for Australians in the context of possession/dispossession and repossession. Using the emotional space of the display home and the real estate exhibition as a lens, the writing explores the spatialised production of the neoliberal subject within the ongoing colonisation of aboriginal land.

ESSAY #5 Testing the Tabula Rasa

by Joni Taylor

This article explores how the works in Temporary Democracies connect to Radical and Utopian Architectural Strategies that subvert the master plan and create new alternatives.

ESSAY #6 Psychics, Fables, and the Mythology of Urban Failure

By Ianto Ware

Ianto explores the paradoxes and necessity for Psychics, fables and myths in urban design, and the problematics for artists getting on board.