Neoliberalism has atomised us - weakened unions, fractured civil society, privatised and commodified much of what constituted the public realm. Couple this with generalised disenfranchisement from mainstream politics, the traditional sites and spaces for grassroots organisation and mobilisation have been lost. It is in this context that ‘right to the city’ discourse has re-emerged, turning the city itself into both “the setting and the stakes of political contestation” (Tonkiss, 2005: 61). Using Right to the City–Brisbane as an example of grassroots urbanism, we explore the ways in which inhabitants of cities are (re)writing themselves onto urban landscapes, seeking collaborative and just ways to transform them. Right to the City-Brisbane is an emerging movement attempting to develop a collective, everyday, coherent, radical spatial politics. Drawing on a range of engagement mechanisms and strategies, we are attempting to “change ourselves by changing the city” (Harvey, 2008: 1). In this presentation, a number of members of Right to the City–Brisbane will discuss the group’s approach to questions of power, justice, and belonging in the city, and the ways we are intervening in, and seeking to transform, the structures and processes currently (re)producing urban space and the material conditions of our lives.

Brisbane Free University (BFU) is a free education project, preoccupied with the radical potential of space. The difficulty we continue to encounter in finding safe, open and free spaces to gather and share ideas has presented a confrontation that gives form to the project as a whole. In this paper, we will explore the multiple and intersecting spatial confrontations emerging out of the BFU, mapping these confrontations onto the broader struggles for space, place and belonging in the neoliberal city. Setting up temporary learning spaces in the rapidly-gentrifying inner-city of Brisbane has taught us a great deal about the abject economies of space under capitalism. We learn to think of ourselves as scavengers, seeking out the byproducts of gentrification: “wasted” spaces, discards, the remnant public realms on the fringes of acceptability. We borrow chairs. We print posters for free. And we set up temporary interventions in the logic of capitalism in the form of public lectures, workshops and reading groups. The critical geographies of BFU draw us along the boundaries of settler colonialism and neoliberalism. A carpark under a bank, the People’s Park, and a community cafe. The political and ethical implications of free education, and public space.