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Links between the rapid growth of tertiary students resident in a city and that city's gentrification have recently been proposed in a UK-based literature about ‘studentification’. These analyses frame student subjectivity, identity, and experience in particular ways—students are agents of urban change, propelling shifts in neighbourhood housing and entertainment submarkets in a manner that local host communities often resent. Consideration of the experiences of the students themselves, through the effects of the host society and the city on them, is less common. Based on research conducted in Melbourne, we focus on transnational students, who are seen as consumers for a major export industry. We use the voices of transnational students recently arrived in the city to make the claim that an unintended sociospatial segregation of these students is occurring, largely driven by institutional practices. Students' agency is fundamentally affected by their institutional context, which determines the conditions of their entry to Australia and to university there, their housing, and, to a remarkable degree, their opportunities for social interaction.

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Socially constructed ideas about the life course, sometimes encompassing gender relations, have long informed the views of those within the housing development industry about who should be housed where in the city, living what sorts of lives. Drawing on the findings of a recent study of developers' narratives about the construction of expensive, high-rise housing in central Melbourne, a relatively new form of dwelling even in this part of the metropolitan area, several themes are found to characterise the taken-for-granted ways in which these city-builders view the gendered life courses of housing consumers. Developers' narratives oppose the suburban 'home' to the high-rise 'lifestyle', consider central city high-rise residences as appropriate only for people without families, and see women, separately from the couples they make up with men, only as potential victims requiring the security that high-rise apartment living is said to provide. These narratives reiterate the characteristics of an essentialised 'empty nester', or 'young professional' housing consumer, who is envisaged to occupy the new housing and is defined according to life course stage and gender. The developers' partial and narrow accounts of the likely consumers of this high-rise housing is one factor amongst many that explains the building of precincts of high-rise housing that have limited facilities for children and for pursuits other than consumption of the individual 'lifestyle'.

Analysis of the risks of sea-level rise favours conventionally measured metrics such as the area of land that may be subsumed, the numbers of properties at risk, and the capital values of assets at risk. Despite this, it is clear that there exist many less material but no less important values at risk from sea-level rise. This paper re-theorises these multifarious social values at risk from sea-level rise, by explaining their diverse nature, and grounding them in the everyday practices of people living in coastal places. It is informed by a review and analysis of research on social values from within the fields of social impact assessment, human geography, psychology, decision analysis, and climate change adaptation. From this we propose that it is the 'lived values' of coastal places that are most at risk from sea-level rise. We then offer a framework that groups these lived values into five types: those that are physiological in nature, and those that relate to issues of security, belonging, esteem, and self-actualisation. This framework of lived values at risk from sea-level rise can guide empirical research investigating the social impacts of sea-level rise, as well as the impacts of actions to adapt to sea-level rise. It also offers a basis for identifying the distribution of related social outcomes across populations exposed to sea-level rise or sea-level rise policies.