Urban Broadcast Collective

Part II of our chat with Professor Brett Christophers from Uppsala University about his new book, The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain. And it’s a story that we just couldn’t squeeze into one episode, so alas, we’ve given the next two episodes of City Road over to exploring the ideas in the book. In the first episode we talk about the old enclosure acts of the last few centuries before moving to what Brett calls the new enclosure—or the privatisation of public land in the UK today. In the second episode, Brett draws some connections between the privatisation of public land and addressing the housing problem in the UK. He maps out the winners and losers of The New Enclosure, and here’s a hot tip, if you’re looking to buy or rent a house, you’re unlikely to be a winner. Here is the book blurb from Verso. Much has been written about Britain’s trailblazing post-1970s privatisation programme, but the biggest privatisation of them all has until now escaped scrutiny: the privatisation of land. Since Margaret Thatcher took power in 1979, and hidden from the public eye, about 10 per cent of the entire British land mass, including some of its most valuable real estate, has passed from public to private hands. Forest land, defence land, health service land and above all else local authority land—for farming and school sports, for recreation and housing—has been sold off en masse. Why? How? And with what social, economic and political consequences? The New Enclosure provides the first ever study of this profoundly significant phenomenon, situating it as a centrepiece of neoliberalism in Britain and as a successor programme to the original eighteenth-century enclosures. With more public land still slated for disposal, the book identifies the stakes and asks what, if anything, can and should be done. Guest Professor Brett Christophers’ research ranges widely across the political and cultural economies of Western capitalism, in historical and contemporary perspectives. Particular interests include money, finance and banking; housing and housing policy; urbanization; markets and pricing; accounting, modelling and other calculative practices; competition and intellectual property law; and the cultural industries and the discourse of “creativity”. Brett has written many articles and book chapters, including: The Great Leveler: Capitalism and Competition in the Court of Law (Harvard University Press, 2016), which provides a theoretical and historical examination of the relationship between competition and monopoly in capitalism (focusing historically on the development of the US and UK economies from the late nineteenth century to the present-day), and of the role of competition/antitrust and intellectual property laws in mediating that relationship; Banking Across Boundaries: Placing Finance in Capitalism (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), which explores representations of finance in Western political-economic thought and systems of economic measurement (e.g. national accounting); practices of international banking and their historical evolution; and the relationships between these respective representations and practices; Envisioning Media Power: On Capital and Geographies of Television (Lexington Books, 2009) from his PhD thesis at the University of Auckland and explores the geographical political economy of international television and cognate media products; and Positioning the Missionary: John Booth Good and the Confluence of Cultures in Nineteenth-Century British Columbia (University of British Columbia, 1998), is based on his Master’s thesis at the University of British Columbia and is a study of the missionary axis of British colonialism in Western Canada, drawing on postcolonial and poststructural theory.

How much public land has been stolen from the British people? The short answer is, a lot! In this episode of City Road we talk to Professor Brett Christophers from Uppsala University about his new book, The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain. And it’s a story that we just couldn’t squeeze into one episode, so alas, we’ve given the next two episodes of City Road over to exploring the ideas in the book. In the first episode we talk about the old enclosure acts of the last few centuries before moving to what Brett calls the new enclosure—or the privatisation of public land in the UK today. In the second episode, Brett draws some connections between the privatisation of public land and addressing the housing problem in the UK. He maps out the winners and losers of The New Enclosure, and here’s a hot tip, if you’re looking to buy or rent a house, you’re unlikely to be a winner. Here is the book blurb from Verso. Much has been written about Britain’s trailblazing post-1970s privatisation programme, but the biggest privatisation of them all has until now escaped scrutiny: the privatisation of land. Since Margaret Thatcher took power in 1979, and hidden from the public eye, about 10 per cent of the entire British land mass, including some of its most valuable real estate, has passed from public to private hands. Forest land, defence land, health service land and above all else local authority land—for farming and school sports, for recreation and housing—has been sold off en masse. Why? How? And with what social, economic and political consequences? The New Enclosure provides the first ever study of this profoundly significant phenomenon, situating it as a centrepiece of neoliberalism in Britain and as a successor programme to the original eighteenth-century enclosures. With more public land still slated for disposal, the book identifies the stakes and asks what, if anything, can and should be done. Guest Professor Brett Christophers’ research ranges widely across the political and cultural economies of Western capitalism, in historical and contemporary perspectives. Particular interests include money, finance and banking; housing and housing policy; urbanization; markets and pricing; accounting, modelling and other calculative practices; competition and intellectual property law; and the cultural industries and the discourse of “creativity”. Brett has written many articles and book chapters, including: The Great Leveler: Capitalism and Competition in the Court of Law (Harvard University Press, 2016), which provides a theoretical and historical examination of the relationship between competition and monopoly in capitalism (focusing historically on the development of the US and UK economies from the late nineteenth century to the present-day), and of the role of competition/antitrust and intellectual property laws in mediating that relationship; Banking Across Boundaries: Placing Finance in Capitalism (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), which explores representations of finance in Western political-economic thought and systems of economic measurement (e.g. national accounting); practices of international banking and their historical evolution; and the relationships between these respective representations and practices; Envisioning Media Power: On Capital and Geographies of Television (Lexington Books, 2009) from his PhD thesis at the University of Auckland and explores the geographical political economy of international television and cognate media products; and Positioning the Missionary: John Booth Good and the Confluence of Cultures in Nineteenth-Century British Columbia (University of British Columbia, 1998), is based on his Master’s thesis at the University of British Columbia and is a study of the missionary axis of British colonialism in Western Canada, drawing on postcolonial and poststructural theory.

In this episode of City Road we talk to Saskia Sassen about her work on globalisation and the global city by tracing the key ideas in three of her books. We start with Saskia’s most famous book, The Global City, and the idea of intermediation in the global city. We move onto Saskia’s historical and, as Saskia suggests, her best book, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages to discuss the methodological tools of capacities, tipping points and organising logics. We end our discussion with Saskia’s latest book, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy and the ideas of expulsion and the systemic edge in the present. Guest Professor Saskia Sassen is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and a Member of its Committee on Global Thought, which she chaired till 2015. She is a student of cities, immigration, and states in the world economy, with inequality, gendering and digitization three key variables running though her work. Born in the Netherlands, she grew up in Argentina and Italy, studied in France, was raised in five languages, and began her professional life in the United States. She is the author of eight books and the editor or co-editor of three books. Together, her authored books are translated in over twenty languages. She has received many awards and honors, among them multiple doctor honoris causa, the 2013 Principe de Asturias Prize in the Social Sciences, election to the Royal Academy of the Sciences of the Netherlands, and made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French government.

Jess Noonan and Peter Jewell interview Jessie Hochberg the CEO of Nightingale Housing which is based in Melbourne Australia. Nightingale is an innovative facilitator in the housing development market bringing together housing creators (the development team)and end users at the outset of projects. Their template has much to be admired. Jessie explains the unique approach of Nightingale and the need for innovation in the housing sector. For more details go to www.planningxchange.org. Audio engineering by Zak Willsallen.

Jess Noonan and Peter Jewell interview Gavin Queit of GK Solutions ('Securing Your Tomorrow') on design measures to improve the safety of the public realm whilst improving aesthetics.

In this This Must Be the Place David has a chat with Anthony O'Donnell, one of the three authors of the book Moss Cass and the Greening of the Australian Labor Party. Cass was a minister in the Whitlam government of 1972-75 and made major inroads in the Labor party's embrace of the green movement (so, paving the way for the saving of the Franklin River in the early 80s for instance) and was responsible for the granting of the public radio licenses which, let's face it, have completely changed Australia's cultural landscape since the mid-1970s. It's a great piece of Australian political history.

Jess and Peter of PlanningXChange interview Brett Davis. Brett is the Executive Dirctor of Regional Planning at the VPA. Prior to this he was a senior Panel member at Planning Panels Victoria. A broad range of planning and design topics are covered emphasising the importance of sound regional planning. UPDATE from Liz - file now replaced with the correct file (Brett not Gavin!)

In this experimental episode of This Must Be The Place Elizabeth pilots a computer program named Digital Death Trip, or alternatively Trove Town Tragedy, coded by Elizabeth’s sister Sarah. The program selects a random location in Victoria, then a random ‘tragedy’ from that location using the National Library of Australia’s Trove archive of digitized newspapers, and the Trove API. The olden days articles retrieved are mostly from between the 1860s and 1950s. The program uses ‘Speak’ to read out articles in a robot voice. It’s art meets historical geography meets Perfect Match robot. Death Trip is a reference to 1973 book Wisconsin Death Trip, a collection by Michael Lesy of photographs and news articles from two small superficially comfortable Wisconsin towns in the late 19th century. By picking darker articles – suicides, epidemics, bankruptcies, murders, tramp armies – the effect was “constantly repeated themes”, with fragments illustrating each another and the disruptions of their times. Elizabeth wondered if something broadly similar could be done with Australia’s Trove. Trove’s API allows you to use a key to search and use results automatically, to create your own application (one example is the Trove Penguin Bot). Much of Trove is open and crowd-sourced - anyone can search, or correct machine-read text, or create lists. While it doesn’t yet have specific location data, experiments like this bring more of a spatial dimension. What the Death Trip code does is randomly select a place name in Victoria, combine this with the key word “tragedy”, search Trove, shortlist and read out headlines, and compile a case file on a random article. Depending what comes back, the idea is to investigate the selected town tragedy. This could be an excuse to go on trips to visit Victorian towns, perhaps some with swimming pools. While the code could search for any kind of event or word, this project is specifically interested in the word ‘tragedy’. Tragedy was a common news headline partly because covering Coroner’s courts and police beats was a convention of the emerging popular newspaper industry of the 19th century. The articles the bot retrieves are not just any tragedies, but those tied to a place, usually with ‘the’ definite article. Nearly every Australian town seemed to have had incidents headlined The [insert Town Name] Tragedy. These included forces of nature – drowning and fires, and what we might now call negligence involving workplace machinery. Car accidents, as we now know them, were at first ‘tragedies’. And violence: it covered suicides, murders, and murder-suicides particularly in the context of the home. Naming things ‘The’ town tragedy seemed to suggest such things couldn’t and haven’t happened in that place, and that if they did they would leave a lasting impact. One thing the experiment shows is these things have happened, usually more than once, and they are forgotten, and happen again. Tragedy seemed then, as now, to mean the line between things we want to try to understand or control, and those we do not. Some of these change, and some don’t (notably, some of the language of domestic murder suicides). As part of this project, Elizabeth has so far corrected and tagged about 1,100 tragedies. Words like farm, ‘pea-rifle’, and ‘quarrel’ have new connotations. In this test, Elizabeth and Sarah run through the concept, then the mechanics and mishaps of running the code, and see which towns and tragedies the bot picks. As it turns out, those selected are from 2 irrigation towns in Victoria: The Tatura Tragedy 1905; and The Quantong Tragedy 1894. As a follow up, Elizabeth will use the results to find out more about the incidents and their contexts in time and place. Trove Town tragedy list: trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/result…trovetowntragedy Github project: github.com/SarahTaylorProject/trove_experiment

In this episode of This Must Be The Place Elizabeth speaks with RMIT’s Associate Professor Anitra Nelson about a new book, “Housing for De-Growth: Principles, Models, Challenges and Opportunities”, and a slightly less new (but still 2018) book, “Small is Necessary: Shared Living on a Shared Planet”. ‘Degrowth’ — a type of ‘postgrowth’ — is a political, practical and cultural movement for down-scaling material and energy throughputs. Housing for Degrowth, co-edited by Anitra with Francois Schneider, includes an international collection of critical case studies, many written by activist scholars, of practical experiments – ‘demonstrations’ – in approaches to housing. While diverse in their contexts, they tend to share principles such as an emphasis on housing justice, security, and basic rights. Degrowth projects also emphasise moving forward with the best available technologies, rather than austerity/moving backwards, or ‘decoupling’ that emphasises technological solutions. They also prioritise re-use and reduction in materials and energy, and designing for future re-use. The case studies explore benefits but also unexpected trade-offs - for example, the chapter on tiny house living reflects critically on the colonial and homesteading narratives of tiny homes. Without closing down discussions of larger system change, Housing for Degrowth is about grassroots groups and experiences: with the logic that “the only way we can actually get people on board is if they feel confident that they’re not going to be losing their safety and security and those things they really care about”. Small is Necessary is not explicitly about degrowth, but speaks to case studies consistent with degrowth principles. It examines examples and ideas for housing based on sharing and collaboration: including cohousing, land-sharing, and ecovillages. In it Anitra speaks about the move to smaller housing and to co-living in terms of what it can offer diverse groups, including older people: more security, affordability, amenities, support from neighbours. The episode notes parallels with the utopian thinking, and ideas of quality over quantity, of William Morris in “Notes from Nowhere” (1890). For example, huge increases in housing size often go alongside reduced rights to public space. The episode also covers challenges of prevailing housing systems; the difficult role of rights-speak in social movements; tensions between environmental and social movements; and planning regulations. For example Anitra suggests planners should enable and allow simple and smaller buildings as long as they are safe and secure. However, most policy frameworks directly discourage these kinds of housing. Each of the cases in “Housing for Degrowth” reflects on difficulties met with permit processes. These highlight basic dilemmas in policy: standards based on fears of overcrowded families, while serving a purpose and having historical grounding, are not necessarily consistent with current issues in housing systems. Anitra talks about what is drawing people in to models like co-housing. One driver is the housing market: the experience of higher housing and energy costs, and of housing insecurity. In Europe, shrinking areas and cities are another driver – Anitra was recently part of a workshop at the EU Parliament, where policy-makers unexpectedly open to hearing about alternatives to growth models commented, “honestly, we feel like we have exhausted mainstream possibilities”. Anitra has lived in co-housing for several decades. Housing for Degrowth is available through the Routledge Environmental Humanities Series. Small is Necessary is available through Pluto Press and also open access.

Jess Noonan and Peter Jewell interview Geographer David Bissell about his recently released book 'Transit Life - How Commuting is changing our Cities'. David is Associate Professor at the School of Geography, Melbourne University. UPDATE - apologies from Liz, this has now been replaced with the correct file (David not Brett!)