Extinction is an integral part of normal healthy fear responses, while it is compromised in several fear-related mental conditions in humans, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Although much research has recently been focused on fear extinction, its molecular and cellular underpinnings are still unclear. The development of animal models for extinction will greatly enhance our approaches to studying its neural circuits and the mechanisms involved. Here, we describe two gene-knockout mouse lines, one with impaired and another with enhanced extinction of learned fear. These mutant mice are based on fear memory-related genes, stathmin and gastrin-releasing peptide receptor (GRPR). Remarkably, both mutant lines showed changes in fear extinction to the cue but not to the context. We performed indirect imaging of neuronal activity on the second day of cued extinction, using immediate-early gene c-Fos. GRPR knockout mice extinguished slower (impaired extinction) than wildtype mice, which was accompanied by an increase in c-Fos activity in the basolateral amygdala and a decrease in the prefrontal cortex. By contrast, stathmin knockout mice extinguished faster (enhanced extinction) and showed a decrease in c-Fos activity in the basolateral amygdala and an increase in the prefrontal cortex. At the same time, c-Fos activity in the dentate gyrus was increased in both mutant lines. These experiments provide genetic evidence that the balance between neuronal activities of the amygdala and prefrontal cortex defines an impairment or facilitation of extinction to the cue while the hippocampus is involved in the context-specificity of extinction.

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The latest manifestation of Asian‐led foreign real estate investment in some global cities is contributing to housing becoming a liquid, global asset. Drawing on empirical data about Sydneysiders’ reported levels of real estate market activity, housing stress, and views about foreign real estate investment, we found that those who are financially invested in Sydney's local real estate market are generally more supportive of the presence of foreign investors and investment than are those not invested in that market. We also found that there were no significant comparative differences in beliefs about foreign investment between those who are in housing stress and those who are not. On the strength of those findings, we ask whether a degree of commonality is developing around a set of ideological reference points related to the commodification of housing. As housing in global cities is increasingly commodified and financialized, these ideological reference points could be boosting its commodification across boundaries of cultural difference and political jurisdiction. We conclude by suggesting the need for a new line of inquiry through which scholars could investigate the politics of globalised hyper‐commodified housing in order to expose the ideological reference points that serve to bolster the commodification of housing.

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‘Chinese Sydney’ has shifted away from its inner-city Chinatown towards new residential suburban concentrations with varied histories of progressive diversification. In some of these suburbs, where 40% or more of residents report Chinese heritage, older generations of diaspora Chinese intermingle with a substantial recent wave of China-born middle-class professionals – often distinguished as the ‘new Chinese’. This paper situates the localised, internal diversities of the modern arrival city within the geo-political conditions, urban development strategies and migration patterns that shape Sydney’s Chinese ethnoburbs (or ‘Sinoburbs’). Drawing on demographic analysis, site mapping of local infrastructure and site observations, we trace changing demographics and patterns of suburban development within three different case study suburbs. In doing so, we elucidate some emerging lines of inquiry that challenge the extant focus in both enclave and ethnoburb models of urban ethnic concentration and suggest a number of new interventions to future research on emerging Sinoburbia localities both in Australia and elsewhere.

Artists and creative workers have long been recognized as playing an important role in gentrification, being often portrayed as forerunners of urban change and displacement in former industrial and working‐class suburbs of ‘post‐Fordist’ cities. However, as is well represented by recent research, the relationship between the arts, gentrification and displacement has been called into question. The purpose of this article, which draws on 30 case studies of creative spaces in Sydney's inner suburbs, is to chart some of the strategies of spatial adaptation and makeshift economies of solidarity that cultural workers adopt in order to keep living and working in areas of ‘supergentrification’. We document how cultural infrastructure is transformed by the gentrification process and argue that these alterations are critical to the survival of arts and culture in the city. Such makeshift economies contribute, in a practical way, to preserving the diversity that gentrification is sometimes deemed to destroy or displace. While the survival of creative spaces is a much less researched phenomenon than other forms of resistance or displacement, we suggest that it has important consequences for both research and policy decisions around gentrification, infrastructural development and urban cultural economies.