Citizenship, concentrations of disadvantage and the manipulated mobility of low-income citizens : the role of urban policy in NSW

This paper considers questions of local governance and 'consumer citizenship' in a neoliberalised city. The recent New South Wales State Plan outlines an approach to state building that explicitly combines new democratic practices at the local level with an increasing role for the private sector in the delivery and management of infrastructure and services across the state. The plan includes a renewed commitment to local regimes of democratic participation constructed within discursive frames such as 'social inclusion'. However, the movement of those who live in so-called 'concentrations of disadvantage', now threatens the place-based organisational structures that have formed the foundation of citizen participation in these areas since the mid-1900s. These include public housing tenant groups, local community coalitions and other neighbourhood alliances that recruit and organise spatially in place. The planned dispersal of public housing tenants from some public housing estates or the market-driven movement of low-income private renters from gentrifying inner city landscapes is having a profound effect on these civil society organisations. In this paper I put forward an argument for retheorising the civil society organisations accessed by low-income citizens to take note of the increasingly mobile urban landscape within a so-called 'post-democratic' city.