Every city is shaped by the politics of property, ownership and belonging. Yet little attention has been paid to what we call in this paper ‘marginalised property’ – the everyday practices of property where society sees none. Framing property as a practice, reconstituted in and through everyday life, helps illuminate the essential relationship between property and belonging and allows a more expansive definition of property as plural and multi-faceted. This paper looks at marginalised property practices in the cities of Sao Paolo (Brazil), Santiago (Chile), and Melbourne drawing on a major 3-year qualitative study in each city. In a major housing occupation in downtown Sao Paolo, residents become activists to secure their place in a highly organised squat. In Santiago, the Indigenous Mapuche people are returning to the city using a particular Chilean regulation to access land for traditional huts and meeting places. In Melbourne, Aboriginal people quietly assert their sovereignty through story and resurgent cultural practices. The paper considers how each are property practices, exploding familiar dichotomies of formal/informal and private/common. Read together, the cases reconfigure how different human-land relationships are lived, enacted and contested – whether quietly or loudly – in everyday life.

“If it took place, then it can happen again.”
Sartre, 1968
This presentation will discuss two recent urban occupations to consider the role of aesthetics, space and place in contemporary urban activism. Drawing on Mark Fisher’s articulation of futurelessness and Ghassan Hage’s idea of the radical imaginary, this paper is framed around two events: the No Homeless Ban sleep-out in Melbourne and Brisbane’s Instead of a Casino occupation. Both of these events are examples of Hage’s alterpolitics made spatial: short-lived, aestheticised and raucous, they playfully subvert the expected structures of both political activism and urban space, entwining them, and establishing new modes of political imagining in the slippage. In this auto/ethnography, I suggest that these events take root in “a new politics that comes from outside the existing space of conventional political possibility” (Hage 2015, 61), producing a new, irreverent optimism of the impossible. And as our cities become spaces of increasing precarity and instability, these interventions represent the powerful demonstration that there is more to the city than the totalising logics of neoliberalism. More than anything, these events build political possibility through communitas; a shared hope that another city is possible, and another future is already unfolding.

This paper explores how plant-based food cultures are being assembled in metropolitan Sydney.  The interest in plant-based food has grown considerably in recent years with urban agriculture, farmers markets, food social movements, and ethical consumption practices changing how and what people eat, and creating new knowledge and skills in urban foodscapes.  Drawing on an ongoing research project investigating environmental and ethical food production and consumption in Sydney, the paper focuses on how plant-based food cultures are being assembled.  We focus on three elements: (1) relational foodscapes – how different actors (growers, makers, local governments and businesses) are putting together new spaces for plant-based food in the city; (2) prefigurative politics – how does shifts towards plant-based food prefigure worlds that people want to live in as an ethical response environmental and social change? (3) apprehensions – what are some of the pitfalls and problems in making just transitions towards plant-based food (for example, bodily and spatial gentrification, food justice)? 

Voices of tenants in public housing are seldom heard when our cities are being planned, designed and built by other stakeholders with more power and resources to decide, act on and influence our common future. Still, resource use changes in everyday life of citizens in affluent countries have been pointed out as important ingredients in reaching sustainability goals. This paper presents research anticipating to raise the voices of tenants in the question of how water is used in public rental housing, with focus on hot tap water. The research project explored practices related to hot water flows and water materialities, such as socio-technical relations between tenants and bathroom artefacts. First, tenants met in focus groups to discuss hot water use in their homes. The discussions in the focus groups were facilitated by one researcher and one artist. The artist then took some of the themes from the focus groups to explore further. Some artefacts became important, both in the stories told by tenants and in the ideas about creating a public exhibition based on the tenants’ stories. The exhibition combined actual artefacts, placed in a river, with stories told by tenants and was on display in the summer of 2016.