Global city aspirations, graduated citizenship and public housing : understanding the consumer citizenships of new liberalism

Much has been written about the way in which global city discourses rearticulate the relationships between the state, urban space and the global economy. Less analysis has been undertaken about how this reconfiguration stamps the mark of a global economic order onto local citizenship practices. Public housing is a legacy of specific national (welfare) states where citizenship rights arose from territorially bound constitutional discourses, and is incompatible in its current form with the consumer-based rights and responsibilities of a global economic order. At the same time property markets in high value areas of cities like Sydney see not only increasing presence of international investment but fundamental changes in planning and governance processes in order to facilitate it. Global market oriented discourses of urban governance promote consumer 'performances of citizenship' and an approach to distribution and rights, including the right to housing, which reflects Wacquant's characterization of a "Centaur-state that practises liberalism at the top of the class structure and punitive paternalism at the bottom" (Wacquant, 2012: 66). In this paper we explore what is new about neo-liberal approaches to public and social housing policy, and how tenants respond to and negotiate it. We argue that in Australia tenants' right to participate in local-level democracy, and in housing management, must be reconsidered in light of the broader discourses of consumer citizenship that are now enforced on tenants as a set of 'responsibilities' to the market and state.