Hybridized Legal Geographies

Presenting author: Rebecca Leshinsky (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology)

Other authors: Dulani Halvitigala (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology), Judith Callanan (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology)

Co-joining private and public residents in strata developments offers opportunities and challenges. Challenges arise because it was not a relationship envisaged by the original drafters of  Strata legislation. Opportunities exist because there continues to be concerns about affordable housing, whilst at the same time, there are vacant apartments and buildings in Australian cities. The starting point for both private and public housing cohorts is an understanding of the legal regimes in which they are both situated. Mixing tenure may be intentional via specific land use planning and development instruments or, unintentional through the Government Housing Department or authorised not-for-profits purchasing private lots in strata developments.

This paper overviews the state of Victoria community (not-for-profit) housing legal regime, and then sets it in the context of strata law. By understanding the foundational legal issues with co-joined tenure in strata via not-for-profit housing, there will be greater opportunity to create robust strategies for more harmonious lived experiences for all strata residents.  

Presenting authors: Jo Gillespie (University of Sydney), Tayanah O’Donnell (Australian National University)

In Legal Geography: Perspectives and Methods (2020, Routledge) a range of scholars offered new insights into how legal geography scholarship can advance social research.  In this session we explore the role of a legal geography perspective as a gateway to interdisciplinary research and impact.

Presenting author: John Carr (University of NSW)

While a wide range of scholarship has traced the growth of precariousness at every level of contemporary life – whether economic, environmental, medical, or political – this paper seeks to offer a heuristic lens on accelerating change in a variety of realms that has enabled the acceleration of insecurity.  By drawing on the legal concepts of tenure and ownership/property, I posit our current age as one of increasing consolidation and growth of logics of ownership at the expense of cultures and practices of tenure.   While often associated with residential rentals and university employment, I argue that the concept of tenure should be associated more broadly with a set of spatio-temporal rights and norms that are inherently in tension with the exclusionary possessiveness of ownership and property.  Taken this way, we may see the erosion of stability in a range of conceptually discrete realms – including housing, health, privacy, employment, and access to resources and technologies – as part of a broader move by which often broadly distributed practices of tenure are being subsumed by increasingly consolidated practices of ownership.

Presenting author: Amelia Thorpe (University of New South Wales)

This paper examines the unsanctioned placement of paint, plastic cones and other small-scale infrastructure adjustments on city streets by informal groups calling themselves 'Transformation Agencies' and 'Departments of Transformation'. Taking the names of official organisations - with just a small shift, from 'Transportation' to 'Transformation' - is playful, but also provocative: what is it that is being transformed? Beyond the immediate physical changes, these interventions can be understood as 'acts of citizenship' (Isin and Nielsen, 2008) that work to (re)constitute the scope of citizenship rights. In this paper I argue that Transformation Agencies contribute not just to the material form of the city, but to the city-citizen relationships at the heart of urban governance. Through guerrilla paint and pop-up posts, these interventions work prefiguratively to imagine and enact forms of citizenship that are not oriented around automobility.