Cruel sub-urbanism : cool commons Down Under

One theme that ran through the 2022 AAG panel memorializing the life and work of Lauren Berlant was an appreciation for Berlant's capacity to hold together and in tension "multiplicity and power, the critical and the reparative, conceptual abstraction and attunement to phenomenal difference" (Ruez 2022). These operative tensions resonate with my own collaborative efforts to enrol research into processes of transition across a number of shared concerns. Berlant's concept of cruel optimism (2011) and her more recent theorization of the commons (2016), pared of its utopian content, have shaped an ongoing collaborative project focused on climate adaptation in Australia's urban centres in areas of Western Sydney (Mellick Lopes et al. 2021). This rapidly growing region, home to new immigrants and socially disadvantaged communities, also contains suburbs that have posted some of the world's hottest temperatures. By design, the optimistic trajectory of auto-dependent suburban development continues westward even as the realities of climate change"”heat, bush fire, drought, flood"”tell us it cannot go on (Mellick Lopes and Healy 2021).