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With the book’s evidence in hand, this concluding chapter first synthesizes how everyday condo living harbours risks for the high-rise condo home, especially in the context of substandard condo design and construction quality. Legal scholar Michael Heller’s anticommons thesis provides a helpful way to conceptualize an additional potential risk of underuse associated with the ‘sharing’ of some common property elements in condominium. Stepping back, this chapter then considers the prospects for high-rise condo futures in light of these risks. It delivers two sets of provocations informed by this book’s findings on the impacts for homemaking of poor quality high-rise housing and owner/renter relations. These provocations are intended to promote discussion and perhaps action for brighter urban condo futures. This latter task is identified as far from straightforward, however, with recent optimism expressed by urban scholars about condominium’s prospects subsequently argued to be premature or potentially misplaced.
This chapter sets out a property-sensitive conceptual framework for examining home which better accounts for the way home is practised in propertied landscapes. Drawing on legal geography’s understanding of everyday property, the framework captures how perceptions and practices of property inform homemaking. It then provides a revised conspectus of contemporary high-rise condo living by rereading relevant housing and urban literatures through this framework. This review serves two purposes. First, it synthesizes extant understandings of the lived experience of (high-rise) condo housing and identifies various omissions, including of the socio-territorial dynamics behind everyday condo living. Second, it tables evidence of condo owners and renters’ divergent homemaking experiences. It shows that despite some recognition that internal tenure-based inequalities riddle condo life, these have not been systematically explored from owners’ or renters’, perspectives, leaving unknown their implications for the condo home.
This chapter explores the private unit’s borders and introduces territorial incursions as another constraint or pressure point for condo homemaking. It identifies how residents engage in socio-territorial practices of boundary-management in response to repeated visual, acoustic, olfactory and material breaches into their private units. This chapter shows these private borders operate as intensive, often porous zones of physical contact between residents’ condo units, especially where design and construction is subpar and as poor zones of social interaction. Residents’ interpretation of co-residents’ incursions as unreasonable contribute to the construction of co-residents, and renters especially, as ‘bad’ neighbours. These bordering dynamics undermine the condo home, creating perceived nuisance and diminishing residents’ (sense of) territorial control. Residents independently mediate their private interests with private judgements about what will be non-invasive to co-residents, with recourse to formal governance rules and agents relatively limited. This chapter corroborates how informal local working rules circumscribe condo homemaking.
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Condominium and comparable legal architectures make vertical urban growth possible, but do we really understand the social implications of restructuring city land ownership in this way?
In this book geographer and architect Nethercote enters the condo tower to explore the hidden social and territorial dynamics of private vertical communities. Informed by residents’ accounts of Australian high-rise living, this book shows how legal and physical architectures fuse in ways that jeopardise residents’ experience of home and stigmatise renters.
As cities sprawl skywards and private renting expands, this compelling geographic analysis of property identifies high-rise development’s overlooked hand in social segregation and urban fragmentation, and raises bold questions about the condominium’s prospects.
This chapter begins by introducing the contemporary rise in vertical living. It then explains how legal architectures that underpin high-rise residential development involve a form of collective private ownership with distinct property rights, responsibilities and restrictions. Against this background, the chapter then sets out an approach to understanding how condo residents understand and practise property in high-rise condo buildings with a view to determining how associated socio-territorial dynamics inform the making and unmaking of the condo home. The approach draws on legal geography and socio-legal scholars’ understandings of everyday property as socially constructed, contingent, performative and observable in the here-and-now to position the condo tower as a lived propertied landscape. Sections thereafter outline the book’s argument, its empirical, conceptual and theoretical contributions to geography and housing studies and the book’s structure.
This chapter examines the shared infrastructure that makes private units accessible, functional and comfortable homes and introduces circulation frictions as another constraint or pressure point for condo homemaking. It identifies how the circulation of people, non-humans, objects and matter around the condo’s common property elements – its entryways, lifts, cables, rubbish chutes and so forth – is variously stalled, obstructed or otherwise compromised. Residents find the collective management of these everyday condo mobilities complex and sometimes fraught, with the mobilities of visitors, waste, parcels and so forth variously facilitated and thwarted by multiple high-rise agents, including co-residents and building managers and diverse digital security and communication technologies. While owners are relatively better placed to navigate and respond to these frictions in ways that support their homemaking, circulation frictions present another means through which condo renters are constructed as unruly condo subjects.
Taller and denser city skylines are a hallmark of 21st century urban growth. But if the rise of vertical living is plain to see, largely unnoticed is the way that condominium and other analogous legal architectures that underpin this residential development create new intensities of property relations. As city residents including growing shares of private renters seek urban homes, this book questions how those new intensities of property relations reconfigure home in verticalizing cities. Drawing on legal geography's understandings of everyday property, this book embarks on a tour of the condo tower's propertied landscapes to understand how its residents understand and practise property in their private units and shared spaces and as they use shared infrastructures and how such socio-territorial dynamics inform their homemaking. Based on condo residents' personal accounts of living in contemporary Australian high-rise developments, it delivers a much-needed systematic analysis of the making and unmaking of the high-rise home. It identifies a set of socio-territorial pressures points that constrain condo homemaking and tables evidence of how associated dynamics contribute to the subjectification of the condo renter as risky and unruly condo resident. Inside High-Rise Housing argues that as private high-rise housing reconfigures homemaking in vertical cities it risks unmaking the condo home including through reproducing and hardening tenure-based stratifications within these private vertical urbanisms. The distinct materialities and spatialities of contemporary high-rise development, compound such risks, especially in the context of poor-quality high-rise design and construction.
Taller and denser city skylines are a hallmark of 21st century urban growth. But if the rise of vertical living is plain to see, largely unnoticed is the way that condominium and other analogous legal architectures that underpin this residential development create new intensities of property relations. As city residents including growing shares of private renters seek urban homes, this book questions how those new intensities of property relations reconfigure home in verticalizing cities. Drawing on legal geography's understandings of everyday property, this book embarks on a tour of the condo tower's propertied landscapes to understand how its residents understand and practise property in their private units and shared spaces and as they use shared infrastructures and how such socio-territorial dynamics inform their homemaking. Based on condo residents' personal accounts of living in contemporary Australian high-rise developments, it delivers a much-needed systematic analysis of the making and unmaking of the high-rise home. It identifies a set of socio-territorial pressures points that constrain condo homemaking and tables evidence of how associated dynamics contribute to the subjectification of the condo renter as risky and unruly condo resident. Inside High-Rise Housing argues that as private high-rise housing reconfigures homemaking in vertical cities it risks unmaking the condo home including through reproducing and hardening tenure-based stratifications within these private vertical urbanisms. The distinct materialities and spatialities of contemporary high-rise development, compound such risks, especially in the context of poor-quality high-rise design and construction.
This chapter examines the condo’s shared amenities and introduces territorial annexations and territorial withdrawals as constraints or pressure points on condo homemaking. It identifies how residents perceive and assert proprietorial claims over shared home spaces but also sometimes forgo their legal entitlements as they retreat from these spaces. Condo governance actors legitimize and delegitimize residents’ claims as their (in)action informs which practices residents understand as acceptable. Residents likewise influence which territorial claims management sanction as residents ‘snitching’ prompts managers to police practices they might otherwise overlook. Again, residents interpret co-residents’ territorial claims as private “takings”’ with this undermining condo homemaking, including by constructing condo renters as unruly condo subjects. Residents display a territorial apathy towards shared amenities that seems to indicate a weak sense of ownership. Residents’ sense of ownership is ambivalent, however, for they continue to appreciate even amenities they rarely frequent for their perceived financial value as they envisage their condo homes as financial assets.
This chapter contextualizes the rise of Australian high-rise condo living in international urban trends in vertical urbanization and the proliferation of condominium. It introduces condoization to help foreground that how condos are produced, consumed and governed informs condo living. It overviews the history, geographies and housing submarkets behind the remarkable contemporary surge in condo development in Australian cities, especially in the wake of the 2008/09 global financial crisis. To further contextualize homemaking in condo housing, it documents issues surrounding formal condo governance, including highlighting how by-laws govern residents’ home lives and the way formal governance enables condo owners to exert power over condo renters.
