Books in our market-leading Community Development list explore and develop the various practices and systems that support communities to take control of their lives, services and environments. They offer essential reading for academics, upper-level undergraduate and graduate-level students in Community Development and related disciplines.
New titles are added to our Rethinking Community Development series every year, an international book series that offers the opportunity for a critical re-evaluation of community development.
Our Connected Communities series showcases collaborative research between universities and communities, seeking to understand the changing nature of communities and their role in addressing contemporary individual, societal and global concerns.
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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.
Chapter 10 ends with a reflection on the current challenges at hand regarding mainstream higher education and universities, as well as the authors’ thoughts on some potential solutions, which draw directly from the spirit of Zapatismo. As a summary chapter, it provides readers with an overview of how the Zapatistas have prioritised political education, social reproduction, solidarity, collective action, democratic process and praxis in their resistance, movement and pursuit of health. The chapter also reiterates the point that the book should ultimately be a gateway text that motivates readers to refuse liberal bystanding and contribute to collective action and radical change wherever they are, from the local to the global, that is relevant, inclusive and enduring.
This ambitious book offers radical alternatives to conventional ways of thinking about the planet’s most pressing challenges, ranging from alienation and exploitation to state violence and environmental injustice.
Bridging real-world examples of resistance and mutual aid in Zapatista territory with big-picture concepts like critical consciousness, social reproduction, and decolonisation, the authors encourage readers to view themselves as co-creators of the societies they are a part of - and ‘be Zapatistas wherever they are.’
Written by a diverse team of first-generation authors, this book offers an emancipatory set of anticolonial ideas related to both refusing liberal bystanding and collectively constructing better worlds and realities.
