Group items tagged

Hometrack's Brendan Darcy recently released analysis claiming that the ABS data significantly under-estimated the housing supply in Australia, because it only counts "occupied dwellings". But on census night in 2006, the ABS reported 830,000 unoccupied dwellings. "We estimate there are at least 10 million dwellings in Australia compared with ABS data showing occupied dwellings of 8.3 million. The extra one to two million dwellings consist of a mixture of housing awaiting sale or development, vacant dwellings, second homes, and abandoned homes," Darcy concluded.

Australia has one of the most skewed property taxation regimes in the industrialised world, rewarding investors and owner-occupiers at the expense of renters and those looking to buy a house. The Capital Gains Tax exemption for the family home costs taxpayers $30 billion a year, disproportionately advantaging those of us who own multi-million dollar homes.

the number of landlords reporting profits grew by 36,000, while those reporting losses grew by 594,000.

Claiming a RttC has not merely been a “way to respond to neoliberal urbanism” (Purcell 2002: 99) but a way to escape an apparent inability to influence agendas on the national or international scale; think, here, of the largely reactionary climate in the US under Reagan and UK under Thatcher in the 1980s. Claiming the RttC was to claim asylum away from neoliberal national agendas of the time; an exodus that came as a necessity. Or even think of the later claim of RttC as pacification: “a ‘new urbanism’ movement that touts the sale of community and boutique lifestyles to fulfil urban dreams” (Harvey 2009: 323).

By now there is a fact: (neo)Nazis and the ultra-conservative, authoritarian and neoliberal governments following the dictate of the EU, IMF and ECB in Greece have both chosen a scale of intervention that was, until recently, almost monopolised by voices of the social antagonist movement and critical Left: the urban scale.

A second option — essentially, the only one viable—  would be for us to use this unprecedented attack as an opportunity, an opportunity to define solidly what in this particular scale of intervention (the urban) is politically alluring and fertile for the broader movement of social and human emancipation.

This is the blog of the project Opportunities for Outdoor Play? Playgrounds – New Spaces of Liberty (The Question of Form) at Kunsthof Zürich, a transdisciplinary collective research and production project curated by Dimitrina Sevova in cooperation with Prof. Elke Bippus, Franziska Koch and the Bachelor Medien & Kunst, Vertiefung Bildende Kunst of the Zurich University of the Arts. Kunsthof Zürich is an outdoor exhibition and event space of the Bachelor Medien & Kunst. See also the blog of the research and production group: