Citizenship, tenant participation and a public-private partnership : the case of the Bonnyrigg Living Communities Project

Abstract

Urban and social policy in Australia has undergone significant reform over the last 50 years, linked to wider social and cultural change. The objective of this study was to examine a case that exemplifies one of the trajectories of this change, the entry of the private sector into the provision of affordable housing and public housing management, to further explore market-centric urban and social policy responses. The central research task explored how public- and private-sector actors shaped tenant participation strategies within the Bonnyrigg Living Communities Project (BLCP), a A$733,000,000 redevelopment of a public housing estate 30 km south-west of Sydney, Australia by public-private partnership. In December 2004, the New South Wales State Government announced the BLCP and the state's first public housing estate redevelopment by public-private partnership. The BLCP involves a 30-year contract between a state government and a private-sector 'partner' managed under a performance based fee structure (NSW Department of Housing, 2004b). The 81-hectare Bonnyrigg public housing estate had a population of around 3,300 people and 833 publicly owned dwellings in 2004. The contract covers the delivery of physical infrastructure and a suite of social objectives, including tenancy management, 'community building' and 'community consultation'. Over the contract term, the net housing stock across the estate will be increased from about 950 to over 2,330 dwellings. In pursuit of policy objectives to deconcentrate public housing and create 'social mix', the ratio of public to privately owned housing stock in the neighbourhood will be reduced from the 2004 ratio of about 90% public and 10% private to about 30% public and 70% private. A non-profit housing manager, under contract to the private sector 'partner', is to manage the public tenancies for 30 years. This study focuses explicitly on tenant participation as an 'invited space' (Cornwall, 2004, 2008) within neo-liberal urban governance. In this study, urban and social planners, economists, property developers, major financial institutions and non-government service providers all play important - indeed, central - roles. However, the account offered in this thesis is largely an attempt to make sense of my own experience in the BLCP, as a researcher and consultant who worked closely with public housing tenants, the state housing authority and with the private-sector 'partners' on public housing tenant participation processes over the first 5 years of the redevelopment. The pivot point on which the analysis is balanced is citizenship. Within the discourse of citizenship, the sovereignty of individuals - citizens' rights - is established, at times collectively, through their relationship to the state as 'citizens'. In this case study, the sovereignty of individuals - public housing tenants' rights - was increasingly established through their relationship to the housing market as 'housing consumers'. The analysis draws attention to neoliberal conceptions of citizenship that view citizens of the state who live in state managed housing, as morally inferior to citizen 'customers' who source their housing in the marketplace. This has profound changes on public housing tenant participation strategies. Within this analytical frame, public housing tenants' experiences of citizenship were traced over time through the different participation spaces created by the public and private sectors to involve them in the redevelopment project. These experiences were traced along a dialectically connected continuum from a well-informed and politically powerful citizenry to subjugated social subjects (Arnstein, 1969; Foucault, 1969). The study draws attention to the discursive strategies within institutions that shaped how particular social actors created participation spaces (Fairclough, 2003). The analysis makes explicit the mechanisms by which public housing tenants were invited into, or restricted from, decision-making spaces. The study examines the roles and practices of the public- and private-sector actors, and social institutions, which held decision-making power within certain decision-making spaces at specific moments in time.

Date of Award	2011
Original language	English