94. “To what an equitable &inclusive city would be like”: Carolyn Whitzman on Melbourne&change_TMBPT

In this episode of This Must Be The Place Elizabeth chats with Professor Carolyn Whitzman, on the eve of Carolyn winding up her 16 years at the University of Melbourne. Carolyn will now be heading back to Canada, specifically to Ottowa (“like a Canadian Adelaide”). In the episode she explains how being an academic was her second career, after working as an activist and ‘femocrat’ on violence prevention programs in Toronto. While her early contacts with Melbourne were as part of a campaign against an Olympic bid (“Bread not Circuses”), after completing her PhD and morphing into ‘pracademic’, Carolyn eventually moved to Melbourne to take up an academic position. Here she reflects on some of the themes in her research, teaching and projects in that time - which have been broad ranging but which have tended to centre on ideas of rights, marginality, and inclusivity. This episode focuses more on Carolyn’s work on affordable housing: on reasserting housing as a basic need or right, versus its role in wealth creation and inequality. She discusses working with housing developers and with their perceptions of how to adapt different models of affordable housing provision to the local context. There have been some projects and innovations that have cut through – for example a recent Launch Housing project of modular housing on a road allowance, and developments using airspace above parking lots. There is a slowly expanding understanding of what “good intensification” might mean. The challenge, Carolyn suggests, is how to scale affordable housing up – this an area where Canada offers some precedents, for example in Vancouver’s not for profit alliances, and the federal-level Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. Carolyn hopes that her move to (and third career reinvention in) Ottawa, as it expands both its light rail system and its affordable housing sector, might mean “getting a little bit closer to the ideal of what an equitable and inclusive city would be like”. But there’s also much to take back from Melbourne, perhaps more so its public spaces and design culture, than its often-absurd transport and housing inequalities. Carolyn suggests that Melbourne doesn’t necessarily meet (and indeed sometimes is losing), “the preconditions for a decent life” but says that “I’d love everyone to be able to benefit from this beautiful city”. As well as being about rights to the city for diverse groups, more broadly the episode is about the challenges of change, and the fear that goes along with it. Also discussed: community participation, matching growth with planning and infrastructure, trust in government (lack thereof), cat fud and the far side, parking (versus football ovals = clash of titans?), Vancouver (Canada-lite), the idealism and motivation of students (versus the realities of exploitation and politicians that usually awaits them), public transport, Point Cook, federal government roles, planning schools, expertise, and generalisations about national anxieties. Note/apology: the episode is recorded in Carlton’s Kathleen Symes Library and Community Centre and has a fair bit of community background noise in it.