Fieldwork Notes

Abstract

Taller and denser city skylines are a hallmark of 21st century urban growth. But if the rise of vertical living is plain to see, largely unnoticed is the way that condominium and other analogous legal architectures that underpin this residential development create new intensities of property relations. As city residents including growing shares of private renters seek urban homes, this book questions how those new intensities of property relations reconfigure home in verticalizing cities. Drawing on legal geography's understandings of everyday property, this book embarks on a tour of the condo tower's propertied landscapes to understand how its residents understand and practise property in their private units and shared spaces and as they use shared infrastructures and how such socio-territorial dynamics inform their homemaking. Based on condo residents' personal accounts of living in contemporary Australian high-rise developments, it delivers a much-needed systematic analysis of the making and unmaking of the high-rise home. It identifies a set of socio-territorial pressures points that constrain condo homemaking and tables evidence of how associated dynamics contribute to the subjectification of the condo renter as risky and unruly condo resident. Inside High-Rise Housing argues that as private high-rise housing reconfigures homemaking in vertical cities it risks unmaking the condo home including through reproducing and hardening tenure-based stratifications within these private vertical urbanisms. The distinct materialities and spatialities of contemporary high-rise development, compound such risks, especially in the context of poor-quality high-rise design and construction.