Dallas Rogers

Individual foreign investment in residential real estate by new middle-class and super-rich investors is re-emerging as a key issue in academic, policy and public debates around the world. At its most abstract, global real estate is increasingly thought of as a liquid asset class that is targeted by foreign individual investors who are seeking to diversify their investment portfolios. But foreign investors are also motivated by intergenerational familial security, transnational migration strategies and short-term educational plans, which are all closely entwined with global real estate investment. Government and local public responses to the latest manifestation of global real estate investment have taken different forms. These range from pro-foreign investment, primarily justified on geopolitical and macro-economic grounds, to anti-foreign investment for reasons such as mitigating public dissent and protecting the local housing market. Within this changing geopolitical context, this book offers a diverse range of case studies from Canada, Hong Kong, Singapore, Russia, Australia and Korea. It will be of interest to academics, policymakers and university students who are interested in the globalisation of local real estate.

The chapters in this book were originally published in the International Journal of Housing Policy.

This paper contributes to the ‘digital turn’ in geography and to conceptualizations of cognitive capitalism by focusing on how changing forms of cultural representation in the digital world constitute new forms of value extraction. It takes as a key case study the RealTech company Juwai; one of the largest transnational digital platforms connecting international estate agents and Chinese buyers. Positioning the digital platform as a site in which multiple cultural and geographic knowledges are produced and articulated as a condition for value extraction, the paper analyses a suite of textual and visual content in both English and Mandarin produced on Juwai that targets Chinese buyers and the Australian real estate industry. The core argument is that the production of cultural difference or cultural asymmetry is not simply a by-product of Juwai’s form of platform capitalism, rather mediating cultural asymmetries is a process of value extraction that is a central component of their business model. We point to a business model of ‘cultural platform capitalism’ where the technology exceeds its conventional connective and extractive functions (i.e., data as value) by translating cultural knowledge as a key business practice (i.e., cultural risk as value).

This special section examines the possibility of meaningful debate and contestation over urban decisions and futures in politically constrained contexts. In doing so, it moves with the post‐political times: critically examining the proliferation of deliberative mechanisms; identifying the informal assemblages of diverse actors taking on new roles in urban socio‐spatial justice; and illuminating the spaces where informal and formal planning processes meet. These questions are particularly pertinent for understanding the processes shaping Australian cities and public participation today.

Public – or, as we are now more likely to refer to it, social - housing represents a very small and indeed falling proportion of Australia’s housing stock, especially when compared to most European countries. From a peak of just under 6 per cent of dwellings nationally in the 1980s (10 per cent in South Australia), by 2006 social housing represented around 4 per cent of housing stock.2 Government subsidies for low-income rental housing have been politically contested since the earliest federal government intervention following the Second World War, but at least until the early 1990s public housing provided affordable and secure housing for those households who could not afford to house themselves appropriately through owner occupation or private rental. Some 70 years beyond its inception and despite a similar situation of chronic undersupply of housing in major cities, and with the least affordable housing internationally, public housing is now perceived by many as a highly problematic form of tenure which exacerbates or even produces social problems rather than ameliorating them.

This chapter considers how social housing tenants produce digital countercultural products to talk about, represent and analyse people and place relationships, and particularly how they used these products to explore territorialised representations of poverty and class. We draw on three examples from the Residents’ Voices – Advantage, Disadvantage, Community and Place project (hereafter Residents’ Voices): (1) digital story telling disseminated through a website; (2) tenant-driven media analysis of the popular Australian television parody ‘Housos’; and (3) a short dramatic film written and directed by social housing tenants. Each example uses digital media production to represent, and perhaps even challenge, territorial stigma, but represents social housing tenants and their neighbourhoods in different ways. The aim is to expose the methodological challenges within each digital cultural production process in relation to representations of territorial stigma.

This Blue Sky study explores a new conceptual approach to community involvement in planning that responds to contemporary critiques of participatory planning. Blue Sky projects are focused on exploring innovative ideas and concepts. This research explores a new conceptual approach that rethinks how local citizenries are involved in the politics of urban development.

We focus on the New South Wales (NSW) planning system to explore five key research questions: (1) What are the structural constraints of the NSW state government’s planning systems that prevent people from getting involved in urban planning? (2) What does the community know about the planning system? (3) Do members of the community want to be involved in urban planning and development matters? (4) How do people actually participate in urban development and the planning of their city? (5) How should we design community participation in the planning of the city in light of the previous four questions?

Drawing on the findings, this study builds on critiques of the Habermasian consensus politics that currently frame contemporary models of citizen engagement. We explore alternative ways of thinking about community engagement in urban development. Unlike consensus politics, we argue that recent work on agonistic pluralism acknowledges the enduring disagreement of different stakeholders, and accounts for the unequal power relations that underpin moments of agreement. It therefore provides an alternative way of conceptualising the conflicts that exist in the urban environment as ongoing agonistic politics, which might prove to be more responsive to changes throughout the development process in the long-term.

Moving foreign human and financial capital through landed property is not a new phenomenon in Sydney. It is a recurring geopolitical strategy that is replete with intercultural tension and deep colonial roots. In contemporary Australia, there is an
assumption in public policy and media rhetoric that there is a high level of public concern about foreign investment. However,
there is little empirical data that examines public perceptions. In this study, we are interested in whether the dominant voices in this debate represent broad public views about this issue. We sought to fill this gap by conducting a survey of almost 900
Sydney residents, looking at their perceptions of foreign and Chinese investment. We find high levels of public concern and discontent about foreign investment amongst Sydneysiders, with Chinese investors being a key target of this discontent. In the context of high housing prices in Sydney, there were widely held concerns about housing affordability. Survey respondents had a sophisticated understanding of what influences house prices, but with an overemphasis on the role of foreign investment. There is a general lack of support for policy that encourages foreign investment, and a lack of confidence in how the government is regulating foreign investment. Half of our participants reported that they would not welcome Chinese foreign investment in their suburb.

Foreign investment in residential real estate – especially by new middle-class and super-rich investors – is re-emerging as a key political issue in academic, policy and public debates. On the one hand, global real estate has become an asset class for foreign individual and institutional investors seeking to diversify their investment portfolios. On the other, a suite of intergenerational migration and education plans may also be motivating foreign investors. Government and public responses to the latest manifestation of global real estate investment have taken different forms. These range from pro-foreign investment, primarily justified on geopolitical economic grounds, to anti-foreign investment for reasons such as mitigating public dissent and protecting the local housing market. Within this changing global context, the six articles in this special issue on the globalisation of real estate present a diverse range of empirical case studies from Canada, Hong Kong, Singapore, Russia, Australia and Korea. This editorial highlights four methodological challenges that the articles collectively highlight; they are (1) investor cohorts and property types, (2) regulatory settings, (3) geopolitics and (4) spatial differences and temporal trajectories.

Mobilities of people and capital from Asia to Australia now encompass policies and practices that link immigration, citizenship, international education and real estate investment in complex and entangled ways. These mobilities are mediated by 'brokerage assemblages' made up of mutually constitutive and generative components that cut across state, non-state, human and non-human actors and processes. This article firstly establishes how assemblage thinking can be productive for understanding how such complex and interconnected mobilities are mediated. Secondly, it analyses a selection of online content that forms part of the brokerage assemblages that link, facilitate and create education, immigration and real estate mobilities from Asia to Australia, primarily from China. We focus in particular on an analysis of online materials that circulate through three key platforms: (1) a major online investor portal based in Hong Kong and Shanghai that targets transnational investors and brokers (2) a smaller Australian-based Chinese-language property portal utilised by Australian real estate brokers and (3) one mainstream and one industry specific Australian media outlet. We use assemblage thinking to show how forms of information are coded and recoded across these different platforms not only to represent, but also to constitute, the links between education, real estate and migration mobilities.

This article analyses the cultural, housing and intergovernmental politics of individual foreign investment in Australian real estate. The first section provides a brief history of Australia’s housing system and shows the historical trend toward housing affordability ‘problems’ in Sydney and Melbourne. This review interrogates the claim Chinese investors compounded Australia’s housing affordability problem after the global financial crisis. The second more substantive section draws on interview, real estate website and media data to demonstrate how the Australian housing system and Chinese and Australian actors enabled Chinese investment in Australian real estate. The third section demonstrates how a minority of Australian residents and some journalists are contesting Chinese foreign investment in Australian real estate. This study shows how contemporary global real estate
relations complicate the politics of Asian real estate investment in Anglo-sphere countries.

Global city discourses rearticulate the relationships between the state, urban space and the global economy. At the local level, global city reconfigurations stamp the mark of a global economic order onto local citizenship practices. Public housing is a legacy of specific national (welfare) states where citizenship rights arose from territorially bound constitutional discourses, and is incompatible in its current form with the consumer-based rights and responsibilities of a global economic order. At the same time, property markets in high-value areas of cities like Sydney, Australia, see not only increasing presence of international investment but fundamental changes in planning and governance processes in order to facilitate it. Global market-oriented discourses of urban governance promote consumer “performances of citizenship” and a graduated approach to the distribution of rights, including the right to housing. In this article we explore what is new about neoliberal approaches to public and social housing policy, and how public tenants respond to and negotiate it. In Australia tenants’ right to participate in local-level democracy, and in housing management, must be reconsidered in light of the broader discourses of consumer citizenship that are now enforced on tenants as a set of “responsibilities” to the market and state.

This article brings Lefebvre’s Right to the City thesis into conversation with Bauman’s notion of the flawed consumer to account for the neoliberal colonisation of public tenant organising in urban redevelopment. Drawing on a case study of public housing redevelopment from Sydney, Australia, we show that neoliberal community building and the emergence of professional community builders obviate the self-organising efforts of tenants. In this case tenants’ rights were attenuated when the housing authority invited private capital to not only rebuild the physical fabric but also remake the social relations around public tenancy within the trope of consumerism. We argue for a revival of tenant self-organising as a collective political project that might counteract the individualisation of tenants’ rights under neoliberal community building regimes. Such a political project needs to be extended beyond the boundaries of the local neighbourhood or ‘housing estate’ to expose the strategies at work in public housing redevelopment projects. Drawing on Right to the City we argue that inhabitance should confer the right to participate in place-making. We conclude that tenant self-organising is one way that tenants
imagine, collectively construct and inhabit lived space; it is a process of meaning- and place-making amongst a community with a shared experience of contemporary urban transformation.

This paper explores the issue of territorial stigmatisation through tenant-driven research chronicling the experiences of social housing tenants as they examined and reflected upon the Australian television series Housos. The television series aired on an independent, part publicly funded, television station in 2011 and depicts the lifestyles of fictional tenant characters on an imaginary social housing estate. The series presents satirical and exaggerated parodies about everyday life on the estate, drawing on a range of stereotypes of social housing tenants. Tenants are portrayed as feckless and antisocial individuals who engage in a range of irresponsible and sometimes criminal behaviour in order to avoid work and whose family and other relationships are dysfunctional. Public tenants are far from passive victims of stigmatisation and conducted the analysis presented in this study. They reveal a sophisticated understanding of how stigma operates through the media, various agencies, and the nonresident community. While economic and political forces, and changing modes for governing poverty, have resulted in geographical confinement of residents on estates, tenants reflected on their own ‘real-life’ experiences and provide accounts of deliberate and self-conscious use of ‘negative’ social status to produce positive collective identities. Alternatively, non-tenant participants repeated common prejudices about public housing, and reflected on their belief that the system was not effectively preventing welfare cheats and ‘bludgers’ from loafing at their (taxpayers’) expense.

Abstract: While universities can play a major role in advancing research-based community development, academic discourses of rigor, quality and ethics often conflict with the participatory and collaborative approaches required by community development principles. While experienced academics often have difficulty negotiating these issues, they present greater challenges for research students whose work will ultimately be assessed on its" academic merit." This paper suggests specific areas where change is required to allow ...

This case study outlines the methodology (action research) and tools – (1) mobile phone video diaries and (2) focus groups – that we used to explore representations of disadvantaged Australian social housing tenants as presented through the medium of television. The academic researchers worked with disadvantaged citizens living in social housing acting as co-researchers for the project. The study focused on the Australian ‘comedy’ television series ‘Housos’, which aired in 2011. The show depicted the lifestyles of fictional tenant characters on an imaginary social housing estate. Tenants were portrayed as feckless and antisocial individuals who engage in a range of irresponsible and sometimes criminal behaviour in order to avoid work and whose family and other relationships were dysfunctional. Soon after the programme commenced, social housing tenants approached us to conduct a research project on the programme. We conducted an action research project with tenants over the 9-week first season of the show with residents in New South Wales and South Australia. Each week, participants watched the current episode and responded to key research themes and questions in a creative medium of their choice, such as mobile phone video diary recordings.

This special issue on housing and socio-spatial inclusion had its genesis in the 5th Housing Theory Symposium (HTS) on the theme of housing and space, held in Brisbane, Australia in 2013. In late 2013 we put out a call for papers in an at-tempt to collect an initial suite of theoretical and empirical scholarship on this theme. This collection of articles pro-gresses our initial discussions about the theoretical implications of adding the “social” to the conceptual project of thinking through housing and space. We hope that this special issue will act as a springboard for a critical review of housing theory, which could locate housing at the centre of a much broader network of social and cultural practices across different temporal trajectories and spatial scales. This editorial presents an overview of the theoretical discus-sions at the HTS and summarises the six articles in this themed issue, which are: (1) The meaning of home in home birth experiences; (2) Reconceptualizing the “publicness” of public housing; (3) The provision of visitable housing in Australia; (4) The self-production of dwellings made by the Brazilian new middle class; (5) Innovative housing models and the struggle against social exclusion in cities; and (6) A theoretical and an empirical analysis of “poverty suburbanization”.

In October 2011 the Australian comedy series ‘Housos’ premiered on SBSTelevision, despite vocal opposition earlier in the year from social housing tenants in Western Sydney. Housos is a satire about the daily life of tenants in a fictitious social housing estate called ‘Sunnyvale’, a lawless zone where people act outside of the law and common norms of society. The depictions of the social housing tenants draw on a number of caricatures and stereotypes, with the characters often portrayed as feckless individuals who shun work, survive on welfare benefits, indulge in substance abuse, routinely commit crimes and cause generalised disorder. This paper reports findings from research which forms part of a larger ARC Linkage project entitled ‘Residents Voices’. The questions and methods used in this study emerged after screening of the first episode of Housos at an inner city social housing estate for an audience consisting of social housing tenants and community workers from across thegreater Sydney metropolitan area. These questions were then taken up in a tenant-led research project conducted over the 9-week season of Housos in Sydney and Adelaide.

While universities can play a major role in advancing research-based community development, academic discourses of rigor, quality and ethics often conflict with the participatory and collaborative approaches required by community development principles. While experienced academics often have difficulty negotiating these issues, they present greater challenges for research students whose work will ultimately be assessed on its "academic merit." This paper suggests specific areas where change is required to allow research students to engage effectively with the community.

The well-reported rise in Chinese investment in global real estate and the role that Asian investors are playing in Anglo-sphere real estate markets is emerging as a key site for critical housing scholarship. The increasing activity of middle class and superrich investors from Brazil, Russia, India, Indonesia, China, and South Africa (known collectively as the BRIICS) and the Four ‘Asian Tiger’ countries (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan) in global real estate markets have introduced new and revived some existing economic, cultural and political sensitivities. The economic systems, housing policies, home ownership rules and taxation settings within the BRIICS are reportedly ‘pushing’ BRIICS investors away from domestic investment, leading them to look for investment opportunities overseas. Equally, the housing, foreign investment visa, economic and educational landscapes of several Anglo-sphere countries are reportedly ‘pulling’ new middle class and superrich investors and capital into housing investment in these countries. Collectively, these push and pull factors are shaping global real estate investment, yet remain poorly understood by housing scholars.

Within this changing foreign real estate investment landscape this special issue will examine the global politics of international real estate, the geography of foreign capital flows, global real estate investors, international real estate professionals and the impacts of the globalization of local real estate.

Contributors to this special issue could cover the following related themes:
• Global superrich capital and relationships to local housing affordability
• The flow of Asian foreign investment and/or superrich capital into real estate
• The temporal and/or spatial implications of foreign real estate capital in cities
• Changing international real estate relations and globalizing real estate practice(s)
• The economic, cultural and housing politics of international real estate investment
• The transnationality and global mobility of foreign real estate investors and superrich capital
• Foreign investment ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors (e.g. intersections between the home and host countries housing policies, economic systems, visa and migration practices and political conditions)

Please submit your abstract to the Guest Editors by 15 March 2015. The deadline for paper submissions is 1 July 2015.

Send all correspondence, including article submissions, to the Guest Editors:
Dr Dallas Rogers, University of Western Sydney (d.rogers@uws.edu.au)
Dr Sin Yee Koh, City University of Hong Kong (sinykoh@cityu.edu.hk)

Visit the journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/reuj

Foreign investment in residential real estate – especially by new middle-class and super-rich investors – is re-emerging as a key political issue in academic, policy and public debates. On the one hand, global real estate has become an asset class for foreign individual and institutional investors seeking to diversify their investment portfolios. On the other, a suite of intergenerational migration and education plans may also be motivating foreign investors. Government and public responses to the latest manifestation of global real estate investment have taken different forms. These range from pro-foreign investment, primarily justified on geopolitical economic grounds, to anti-foreign investment for reasons such as mitigating public dissent and protecting the local housing market. Within this changing global context, the six articles in this special issue on the globalisation of real estate present a diverse range of empirical case studies from Canada, Hong Kong, Singapore, Russia, Australia and Korea. This editorial highlights four methodological challenges that the articles collectively highlight, they are (1) investor cohorts and property types, (2) regulatory settings, (3) geopolitics, and (4) spatial differences and temporal trajectories.

In our last Editorial we reflected on the central role of housing in the COVID-19 pandemic (Rogers & Power, 2020). As this Issue goes to press, housing continues to play an integral role, both in the progression of the pandemic and responses to it.

This paper addresses the process and patterns by which private property was applied on the Australian continent. Alongside lease-holdings (limited by term, or perpetual) and squatting practices, the identification and documentation of private property in both individual cases and in aggregate over a large geography offers a compelling approximation of the appearance and spread of British-Australian settlement. Plots and patterns of private land ownership can be read in relation to other forms of land use and tenure that are each subject to specific historical legal instruments and definitions. This paper explores how, in particular, the first generation alienation of private property might be constructed, represented and theorised through a critical approach to the tools and practice of GIS. What are the technical considerations in identifying the extent of a site and mapping its transfer into private hands? How far can the process of mapping the initial alienation of parcels of Crown land over time expose legacies of colonial practices in present-day methods? And serve as a testbed for the generation of other layers that capture, for instance, patterns of informal privatisation; or interact with other phenomena—most notably that of frontier violence—that likewise occur on land, in time. The paper locates this work among the problems of mapping colonial land occupation with tools that share a heritage with the surveying tools that allowed that same acquisition; while at the same time seeking to use our “more-than-maps” approach to critical GIS to consider ongoing appropriation and dispossession on Aboriginal land.