Group items tagged

I am a huge supporter of internships as experiential learning opportunities if they are truly that, with clearly delineated learning objectives, supervision by experts, and time limits.  But this was obviously not an internship in that sense. 

Which brings me to an annual event which illustrates the failings of real estate journalism more than any other situation: the publication of a piece of self-serving propaganda called the Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey.

This document is political posturing by vested interests and should never be featured by any media outlet in Australia. It is published by a lobby group that campaigns for the end of government regulations that restrict the activities of land developers. The group argues that regulation causes prices to rise and makes homes unaffordable. It has created a political document masquerading as research to support their views.

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.