Keith Jacobs offers the following thoughts on Dallas Rogers’ article in issue 1 of the 2014 volume of Society and Space, titled “The Sydney Metropolitan Strategy as a zoning technology: analyzing the spatial and temporal dimensions of obsolescence.”
Sydney Metropolitan Zoning Strategy
Whilst governments claim to operate benevolently to ensure that its most disadvantaged citizens are not prey to the ravages of commercial interests, much of the empirical evidence points the other way. Cities across the world are becoming more spatially segregated as rising property prices force households to the outer fringes. Public housing estates are increasingly viewed as a blot on the urban landscape and, under the guise of ‘regeneration’, policies are in place to privatise the remaining housing stock.
For this reason, it is imperative that scholars do not take Government policy statements on face value but attempt instead, to excavate the workings of the State and map out its practices. Dallas Rogers’ fascinating article ‘The Sydney Metropolitan Strategy as a zoning technology: analysing the spatial and temporal dimensions of obsolescence’ is the kind of research that is required. The focus of his article is the ways in which planning authorities pursue and justify privatisation and other neoliberal economic interventions. Rogers sets out to unearth the power relations that underpin contemporary urban politics.
The first part of Rogers’ paper focuses on methodology. He argues that both ‘time’ and ‘space’ need to be understood primarily as social phenomena and deployed as a lens to frame our understanding of politics. As he writes ‘social actors are engaged in an endless struggle over setting the boundaries of, or validating their subjective experiences within, calendar time and physical space’. So terms like ‘market place’ and ‘age of retirement’ are used as imaginary constructs to push through and legitimate policy change. He uses the term ‘stewardship’ to depict the way that planners and politicians adopt chronological and spatial narratives. Rogers goes on to argue that one of the technologies deployed by planners is to render certain neighbourhoods as dysfunctional and obsolete. These depictions, he writes, are a necessary pretext to justify the break up of public housing estates and to set in train policies that enable businesses to make profits through property investment.
In the empirical part of the paper Rogers pays close attention to the zoning framework set out in the Sydney Metropolitan Strategy that construes public housing estates as obsolete or degenerate spaces. As he notes, the assumption that underpins the Strategy is that contemporary Sydney needs fixing and that new business aligned projects are required to remedy its defects. Rogers terms this framing ‘marketcentric’. In the case of the City of Sydney’s planning documents, we are told that the obsolete built environment must be reconfigured as a set of planning zones, if the city is to compete in the global economy. Rogers refers to these practices as ‘temporal zoning technologies’.
Rogers rightly points out that what is at risk is the city’s social diversity as the capacity of low-income households to reside in the inner city are undermined by rising house prices. The government, though it might wish to appear progressive, supports business elites and property developers through its zoning policies. To support his claims, Rogers details the plight of Sydney’s public housing. He notes how both tenants and the estates they reside in are seen as dysfunctional and an impediment undermining the business elite’s aspiration for Sydney to become a globally competitive city. Such a characterisation is necessary to justify the privatisation policies now being put in place.
What policy conclusions can we draw from Rogers’ analysis? First, that the state is actively engaged in pushing a neoliberal policy agenda and that the causalities of this agenda are the urban poor. Second, the long-term implication of such policies is now clear: low-income households are being displaced and inner neighbourhoods have become the preserve of the rich.
In respect of methodology (though Rogers does not use the term) his analysis points to a need to explicitly ‘historicise’ the present; that is to pay close attention to economic political narratives and the infusion of long-running ideologies into policymaking and practice. An historical approach enables us to note the continuities with the past but also the ruptures. It is evident that much of what is happening now can be viewed as a departure from the Keynesian consensus that permeated politics from the mid 1940s. We appear to be moving towards a more rampant neoliberal ascendency in which private interests are seen as inimical to progress and welfare as an impediment to economic sustainability. Rogers’ lucid account of the demise of public housing in Sydney serves as a stark reminder of what we can expect over the coming years.
Keith Jacobs, School of Social Sciences, University of Tasmania
