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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.
This chapter enters the private unit and introduces local working rules as a constraint or pressure point for condo homemaking. It identifies how locally contingent tacit codes of conduct and social expectations circumscribe residents’ homemaking as they do their laundry, store personal possessions, undertake minor renovations and manage home-maintenance issues. This chapter complicates the perceived role of formal private restrictions (by-laws) and residents’ private interests in regulating property practices in everyday condo living by capturing how residents self-regulate to conform with local working rules. It highlights how residents engage in ‘faux’ compliance with formal restrictions to satisfy private interests and other-regarding concerns and it shows how such practices variously support and undermine homemaking in the private unit, including by challenging residents’ traditional propertied expectations of their condo units as private domains of relative autonomy and control.
There was no discrete ‘built capital’ in Bourdieu’s triad of economy–society–culture. But those base capitals become objectified or embodied in material things or human capacities. Modern economies, for example, require an infrastructure of fixed and mobile objects: places of economic production, means of connectivity and transportation, and other apparatus, to enable that production. Likewise, society is rooted in a material world: places of home, of private and public dwelling, of interaction and the formation of social bonds, which host the development of meaning and shared culture. It was noted in Chapter 1 that later extensions of Bourdieu’s thinking transformed his fundamental capitals into public goods and community resources (Coleman, 1998), tying them to particular places and therefore arriving at the notion of ‘place capitals’. Taking this line of logic further, these capitals became ‘assets’ that advance or restrict the economic, social and cultural lives of different places. How places develop will depend on whether they are asset-rich or asset-poor, whether they have the means to get ahead or are more likely to be left behind. Social capital has become a key signifier of place-based development potential but is often, we would argue, invoked as a shorthand for a constellation of linked capitals, material and non-material. A combination of many things – capacities, skills, knowledge and infrastructures – produces that potential, all of which centre on people, what they do individually and collectively, and what resources they have to hand. Emery and Flora (2006) list only one item under ‘built capital’ in their own expansion of Bourdieu’s triad: infrastructure.
We began this book by articulating the ambition of making future rural places better or at least thinking through the different ways in which those places might become better through actions that respect the unique characteristics and dynamics of place. Our approach to analysing current rural places and place-based interventions has been guided by Bourdieu’s theory of capitals (1986) – and especially by the proposition that social energy, transmutable from economic resources, is at once a source of development opportunity and spatial and social inequalities. More broadly, and like other researchers (for example Castle, 1998; Emery and Flora, 2006; Courtney and Moseley, 2008), we have explored the ‘placing’ and spatial interaction of a broader array of capitals as a basis for unpacking the complex realities of rural places – their materiality, symbolism and socio-economic practices. We have sought to understand how the ‘spatial energy’, rooted in capitals, can be channelled by planning and brought centre stage in the co-production of rural places with communities.
The book has been structured around four capitals that ‘make’ rural places: built, economic, land-based and socio-cultural capital. Our efforts to break these capitals into their constituent parts (a task undertaken in each thematic chapter) illustrates how each is inextricably linked to the others – the built with the economic, land with socio-cultural and so on. There can be no compartmentalising of these capitals; and yet in order to see how the smaller pieces, the assemblages, come together in the whole, it has been necessary to expose the individual parts and map the connections through case studies that hopefully reveal something of the nature of place capitals and also draw attention to the role of planning in its many guises, as a connective tissue that bonds and mobilises such capitals, framing the actions of different groups.
