An alternative good citizen : exploring a new perspective in public housing

Public-housing tenants are regularly presented as being flawed or failed economic citizens (Bauman, 1998). This perceived deficiency is primarily constructed around the expectation that citizens’ economic obligations are best served through acquiring and maintaining paid employment and private housing. Such perspectives on the ‘shortcomings’ of public-housing tenants are illustrated through the agendas of various tenant-participation programs that have been created in numerous national contexts, including Australia. This study critically engages with and challenges this neoliberal construction of Australian public-housing tenants by juxtaposing it against a pre-market perspective. This alternative perspective asserts that unpaid collaboration on common land is the primary participation obligation of economically responsible citizens. To theoretically frame this critical inquiry, governmentality theory—where a contextual understanding of knowledge (and how knowledge is enlisted to affirm status-quo power)—helped to frame the participation juxtaposition at the heart of the study. This critical approach informed the study’s aims, which are: 1) to explore the extent to which market notions of participation and housing are manifest in state-sponsored tenant participation programs and the effect of these programs on resident participation subjectivities (feelings, perspectives, hopes and fears) 2) to examine the extent to which alternative participation processes (through an innovative participation process called ‘Village’) could produce new tenant participation subjectivities. These aims are addressed using data collected through a series of interviews with tenants living in a public (became ‘social’ housing in 2010 when management was passed to an NGO) housing complex in the Blue Mountains, Australia. All participants had some experience with both state-sponsored conventional tenant participation processes and with the alternative participation process called Village, that provided a counterpoint of unpaid collaboration on public land. The research established that participants’ subjectivities are structurally positioned as dependent through state-sponsored forms of tenant-participation programs. Such programs were found to be less about helping residents ‘find a voice’ and achieve vital community development goals, and more about capacity-building tenants with the skills and subjectivities required for their ultimate integration into paid-work and private housing. Juxtaposed to the above state-sponsored tenant-participation subjectivities, Village as a process accepts the economic validity of unpaid collaboration on public land. In doing so, the research found that Village’s unique process was able to better validate residents because it was a process that, far from trying to condition them into market subjectivities, accepted their public tenure and facilitated informal, non-specialised and convenient collaboration on singular issues specific to residents' interests. Furthermore, it was found that this approach to tenant participation helped to facilitate new and more empowered participatory subjectivities. This thesis argues that dependency subjectivities emerge as both a defense and a necessity by people who find themselves alienated by market constructions of economic citizenship. As evidenced by its trial of Village, the study further argues that if governing bodies validated unpaid collaboration for those in social housing they could begin to support an alternative to these dependent subjectivities. Further reforms to wider policy-settings governing social-housing tenants are crucial for building on these finding and enabling the positive subjectivities that emerge when unpaid tenant participation is validated and authorised