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Planning processes that make space for Indigenous peoples in Australia appear to herald more inclusive and socially just practices, in the critical collaborative tradition, as they respond to Indigenous rights-claims and aspirations. The article describes a case in western Victoria where non-Indigenous planners are forging new relationships with Indigenous land claimant groups. The case extends current theorisations about more collaborative and socially just practices of planning in multicultural settings, and highlights the further theoretical and practical work to be done to fully realise the complexities of planning in (post)colonial settings.

Rights are central to the theory and practice of planning, and to the practice of struggles for those who are marked by conditions of dispossession and displacement. Those rights are often articulated through planning as property ‘rights in’ and procedural ‘rights to’. Yet when struggles against the dispossessory tendencies of planning become articulated through these rights-based discourses in planning, the potential arises for their immediate limitation and co-optation. This article takes two particular modes of dispossession – Indigenous dispossession under the ongoing processes of colonialism, and displacement as a result of urban regeneration – and exposes why a persistent stance of critique to the promise of rights is so critical.

When compulsory purchase for urban regeneration is combined with a sporting mega-event, we have an archetypal example of what Giorgio Agamben called the "state of exception". Through a study of compulsory purchase orders (CPOs) on the site of the Athletes' Village for Glasgow's 2014 Commonwealth Games, we expose CPOs as a classed tool mobilised to violently displace working class neighbourhoods. In doing so, we show how a fictionalised mantra of "necessity" combines neoliberal growth logics with their obscene underside-a stigmatisation logic that demonises poor urban neighbourhoods. CPOs can be used progressively, for example to abrogate the power of slum landlords for social democratic ends, yet with the increasing urbanisation of capital they more often target marginalised neighbourhoods in the pursuit of land and property valorisation. The growing use of CPOs as an exceptional measure in urbanisation, we argue, requires urgent attention in urban political struggles and policy practice.

Urban settlement has been central to the making of European settler-colonial societies since their inception. Settlement, or more sharply invasion, is given material presence and organizational shape through processes of urbanization. The establishment of towns and cities are synonymous with 'development' and 'progress' in the colonialist endeavor, and constitute a distinct activity literally building the settler-colonial nation. The process and materiality of urbanization continues to be a primary mechanism operationalizing the spatial and economic dispossession of colonized peoples. Further, the racist imaginary deployed by colonizers of Indigenous peoples has worked to render the urban as a place not Indigenous, profoundly spatially and temporally disconnected from Indigenous histories and geographies, despite the obvious fact in settler-colonial societies that most cities and settlements sit on unceded territories. Cities in settler-colonial contexts, then, occupy a paradoxical kind of site in relationships between colonizer and colonized. They occupy Indigenous lands and form a central component of the settler society, yet at the same time render Indigeneity profoundly out of place. The settler city is often portrayed as a symbol of a 'new world', a space of liberalism and democracy, a hub of globalization, a magnet for international migration, or a center of investment and corporate powerall dominant discourses that conceal their ongoing colonial nature. Such cities are symbols of the profound displacement, erasure and often destruction of Indigenous histories and geographies and are at the same time precisely the form that keeps that displacement hidden. Cities barely register as the actual locations of claimed lands in global land rights struggles, and yet contain the very sites where the actions of those struggles, on the streets, in Parliaments and courtrooms, materialize. The purpose of this Special Issue is to bring the context and process of the city more explicitly into conversation with the dynamics of settler-colonial power and Indigenous struggle. It is somewhat surprising that critical urban theory, which has developed since the 1970s into a major field of research, has generally overlooked the skewed dynamics of power in settler-colonial contexts as a key dimension for theorizing contemporary cities. Like much of the social sciences, urban studies have been focused on the global Northwest, and have tended to theorize from that vantage point, focusing on the major categories of inequalities produced through capitalism, globalization, citizenship, gender and immigration. These studies have consistently overlooked the perceptions, logic and mobilizations of Indigenous people as apparently irrelevant to contemporary forms of

In the conspicuously geographical debate between ‘North’ and ‘South’ urbanism, settler colonial cities remain displaced. They are located in the ‘North’ but embody ‘South‐like’ colonial dynamics and are hence neither colonial nor postcolonial. Heeding the call to theorize from ‘any city’, this article aims to contribute to a more systematic theorization of the urban from settler colonial cities. In it we focus on the work property does to materialize the settler colonial city and its specific relations of power. We identify three faces of property—as object, as redress and as land—and use case vignettes from Israel/Palestine and Australia to consider how each register continues to inform the functioning of settler colonial cities. We find that, through property, dispossession and settlement are continuously performed and creatively enacted. At the same time, the performance of property reaffirms the endurance of Indigenous land systems amid ongoing colonization. The article makes a contribution to contemporary debates in urban studies about the importance of surfacing the specificities of urban experiences around the world, while further unsettling the dissociative nature of urban property.

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