In Melbourne, Australia, exorbitant rentals and growing homelessness are exacerbated by a plan to demolish all the remaining public housing tower blocks across the city, displacing 12,000 people. In Nuuk, Kallaalit Nunaat (Greenland), accessibility and affordability of housing is becoming increasingly contested as the city experiences a period of intensive redevelopment while positioning itself as capital of the Arctic. In Barcelona, the touristification of housing is causing rising housing stress. In each city, the effects and costs of climate change are felt in basic dwelling conditions such as heating, cooling and provision of water.

This panel discussion will draw lines of connection between these experiences, critically examining the relations of power that govern urban housing and addressing the social policy transformations required for dwelling justice. The purpose of the event is to bring new knowledge about what drives experiences of housing crisis to help promote more socially just cities.

Meet the speakers

Professor Libby Porter is a scholar of dispossession and displacement in relation to urban policy, housing and property and urban governance. She is the Director of the Centre for Urban Research at RMIT University in Melbourne.

Dr David Kelly is a cultural geographer specialising in ethnographic methods to understand embodied and affective understandings of settler-colonial policy and activism. His research expertise is on inner-city public housing, disability in the city, housing in remote Aboriginal communities, and green-led urban regeneration.

Dr Prashanti Mayfield is an urban geographer, from Birrarung-ga/Naarm in so-called Australia. Her research traces how political narratives evolve and are shaped across time and space and the outcomes that generated from the tensions present between divergent political narratives. She focuses on urban renewal, housing, mining practices, food systems, policy making processes, creative expression, intentional communities and political mobilities.

Dr Kate Shaw is a critical urban geographer at Melbourne University, with a focus on the cultures of cities and the political-economic and social processes shaping them. She is currently writing a book on the redevelopment of deindustrialised docks in rich world cities, titled 'The squander and salvage of urban waterfronts'.

Reserve a spot: Precarious Dwelling: Encounters with the Housing Crisis Tickets, Thu, Jun 13, 2024 at 5:30 PM | Eventbrite