This communication will explore the relationship between apartment ownership and the daily life shaped from it in and around several suburban high-rise buildings in Melbourne. The increasing number of high-density buildings being developed in Melbourne’s suburbs constitutes a highly visible phenomenon that has gained in economic importance and socio-cultural signification. This growing densification is both an expression of the financialisation logics of residential real estate and a political answer to a sustained demographic growth of the city. At the micro-scale, this has consequences in the way these new homes are imagined, lived in, and negotiated. Acknowledging the heterogeneous and social qualities of time, the presentation will focus on the affective and emotional dimensions of apartment ownership from a timely perspective. Drawing on a growing body of literature on rhythms (Edensor 2010), it will use a set of qualitative methodologies including an online questionnaire and a series of interviews with residents. The communication will ultimately show what social rhythms are shaped in high-density contexts, what their spatial inscriptions are, and how apartment ownership gets entwined with the production of daily time-space arrangements in the building.

Edensor, T. ed. 2010. Geographies of rhythm : nature, place, mobilities and bodies. Farnham : Ashgate.

There is growing evidence that the financial and social investments that sustain owner-occupation produce a type of everyday territorialisation amongst owner-occupiers regarding appropriate development in their streets and neighbourhoods. Current research for instance, indicates that the likelihood and success of resident objection to strategic plans for higher-density housing increases in areas of higher socio-economic status (Taylor et al 2016). There is also a positive correlation between the likelihood of objection and house prices. Drawing on a survey of just over 3000 residents from five Australian cities, this paper asks whether and how attachments to home as a site of comfort and homeliness enter into owner-occupiers' decisions to oppose neighbourhood change. In doing so the paper contributes to a growing body of research recognising the diverse agents and forces through which cities are planned and developed.

Despite intensifying risk, owner-occupation is axiomatic in Australia. The owned house is dually cast as a financial asset and instrument, while simultaneously persisting in its domestic role as ‘home’. This paper investigates how these owner-occupier and investor subject identities overlap, exploring the emotional performance and material expression underwriting new homes in a master-planned estate in an increasingly affluent coastal setting in southern Sydney. 21 households participated in semi-structured walking interviews focusing on purchasing decisions, building a new home, and early home-making practices. Residents explained how meanings of home and practices of home-making straddle current use and future exchange value. Irrespective of current needs, residents tended to build a house deemed competitive in Sydney’s current housing market: large, family oriented, with upgraded features marking a coastal home and lifestyle. At times this living arrangement surpassed their housing needs and budgets, stretching owner-occupiers emotionally and financially. The paper stays with these uncomfortable accounts, towards unmasking elite housing subjects as hopeful and fearful, and their homes as sites of satisfaction and regret. I conclude by suggesting implications for future housing provision - particularly the decision-making that underpins new project homes.

This will be time for discussion within the second session for The Financialisation of Housing