Beyond the post‐political: is public participation in Australian cities at a turning point?

Abstract

This special section builds on Planning the Post‐Political City—Part 1 to examine if and how planning is showing signs of a post‐democratic turn taking place in Australian cities. In Part 1, we presented a collection of papers examining Australia as a post‐political landscape, exploring the new ways in which Australian publics are resisting dominant neoliberal practices and logics of growth and, in doing so, are intervening in decision‐making practices to assert new forms of power and participation. In Part 2, we show how participatory practices continue to evolve. We use this brief editorial to ask a foundational question: have those implicated in the governance and management of Australian cities embarked on a post‐democratic path? As they are presented with new exclusionary and managerial governance systems, the public's participation suggests at the very least that post‐political and post‐democratic conditions are neither immutable nor inevitable. However, more democratic forms of governance rely on a rich array of activist types and approaches requiring greater institutional support in order to challenge Australia's post‐political condition.

The right to the city: outdoor informal sport and urban belonging in multicultural spaces

“…For marginalised migrants, such as temporary migrants, in global cities like Singapore, it is clear that the spatial capacity to engage in outdoor informal sport and leisure is integral to the social processes of multicultural urban belonging. But these engagements with urban environments and the resources they afford are competitive and contested, and conflicts over access to public spaces and what happens in them are on the rise across major cities (Legacy et al, 2018). While informal leisure practices enable temporary migrants to appropriate space and realise the right to occupy and live in the city, they continue to be limited in their right to institutional participation and decision making over the production of urban life (i.e.…”

Native title and the politics of rejection: beyond the post‐political binary of consensus and dissensus in urban Aboriginal activism

“…The NTE is one among a handful of groups that have been critical of how SWALSC has prosecuted Nyoongar native title initiatives, and in particular, it has criticised SWALSC's decision in 2009 to pursue negotiations for an out-of-court settlement that would extinguished in perpetuity all native title claims in the south-west of Western Australia. As part of a special section on planning the post-political city (Legacy et al, 2018), the paper highlights the importance of a settler colonial reading of the processes shaping and unsettling Australian cities. The post-political critique (Swyngedouw, 2011(Swyngedouw, , 2014 envisages possibilities for socio-spatial change by reasserting democratic ideals that do not fully capture, as yet, the unique claims to space inherent in Indigenous assertions of sovereignty.…”