The politics of space and time within market-centric urban policy : the case of the Bonnyrigg Living Communities Project

This article provides a discourse analysis framework that explicitly interrogates how conceptions of space and time are implicated in the discursive processes of urban policy making. Urban policy increasingly delineates social subjects and geographical space according to internationally mobile discourses of urban and social pathology, but local actors construct these discourses as localized urban ‘realities’ with corresponding market-based solutions. Reporting on a five-year study of the Bonnyrigg Living Communities project in Sydney, Australia, the analysis demonstrates how employees of the state-, non-government- and private-sector institutions reimagined and (re)coordinated time and space within this public housing estate redevelopment project, according to market-centric logic. Using the spatial metaphor of ‘invited space’ (Cornwall 2004) and the temporal metaphor of ‘imaginary time’ (Hawkings 1988), the analysis shows market-centric approaches reconfigure and demarcate space and time in specific ways. These allegorical forms showcase the power relations inherent to the structure of market-centric policy formation.