Inner-city Melbourne Research Articles

Improving inclusion for children and young people with a disability in inner-city Melbourne, Australia

Children and young people with a disability experience challenges in accessing urban environments. This study aimed to generate ideas that can help make an inner-city local government area in Melbourne, Australia more inclusive for children and young people with disability. A workshop was held with children and young people self-identifying as having a disability (n = 5) and their parents and guardians (n = 4). Participants brainstormed ideas in response to a prompt centred on ways that Melbourne's inner-city could be made more inclusive for children and young people with a disability. A qualitative analysis of the ideas was undertaken. Ideas common across both groups included the need for adequate and disability-appropriate communication, the provision of pedestrian infrastructure, and accessible public transport. The study's findings have direct relevance for policy makers, informing upcoming policy in the local municipality. The value of research/policy/lived experience-collaborations for local policy improvement is clear, as they provide an opportunity to draw upon a range of perspectives to identify and address local challenges, while also informing larger-scale projects and initiatives in other cities. Through such collaborations, it is possible to tailor infrastructure and accessibility improvements to the specific needs of local communities, resulting in more effective and equitable policy outcomes.

Pandemic policing and the construction of publics: an analysis of COVID-19 lockdowns in public housing

ABSTRACT COVID-19 responses have cast a spotlight on the uneven impacts of public health policy with particular populations or sites targeted for intervention. Perhaps the starkest example in Australia was the ‘hard’ lockdown of nine public housing complexes in inner-city Melbourne from 4 to 18 July 2020, where residents were fully confined to their homes. These complexes are home to diverse migrant communities and the lockdown drew public criticism for unfairly stigmatising ethnic minorities. This article draws on media articles published during the lockdown and the Victorian Ombudsman’s subsequent investigation to explore the implications of broad, top-down public health measures for culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities. Drawing on Lea’s (2020) conceptualisation of policy ecology, we analyse the lockdown measures and community responses to explore the normative assumptions underpinning health policy mechanisms, constituting ‘target populations’ in narrow, exclusionary terms. We argue that the lockdown measures and use of police as compliance officers positioned tower residents as risky subjects in risky places. Tracing how such subject positions are produced, and resisted at the grassroots level, we highlight how policy instruments are not neutral interventions, but rather instantiate classed and racialised patterns of exclusion, reinforcing pervasive social inequalities in the name of public health.

The chemical question: Mapping the brain-biology frontier

'It's my hormones, doc. It's my hormones, and no one's listened to that.' It was the late 1980s, in what was once Royal Park Psychiatric Hospital in inner-city Melbourne. A brash young...

Gender, Sexuality, and Risk in the Practice of Affective Labour for Young Women in Bar Work

This article explores the ways that gender, sexuality, pleasure, and risk are entangled in affective labour and the production of value in ‘front of house’ bar work. Through their work as bar staff at ‘hip’ inner-city Melbourne venues, the young women we discuss produce affects in the form of a ‘vibe’ of relaxation, fun, pleasure, and release. We address McRobbie’s call for the ‘actual working practices’ which comprise affective labour to be explored and highlight the ways gender relations including the heterosexual matrix of desire are mobilised in the production of value in young women’s bar work. We discuss the tensions at play in this context where women are required to generate both a positive and a pleasurable feeling in their interactions with others while negotiating the complex politics of heterosexual desire while at work, including managing and negotiating harassment from male customers. This management requires complex sensate and embodied practices that are both conscious and unconscious (described, for example, as an ‘instinct’), involving constantly ‘scanning’ and ‘reading the crowd’ and monitoring their own embodied and affective responses to particular men while they carry on other conversations or pour drinks. We argue it is critical to study the ‘actual working practices’ which comprise affective labour in order to expose the ways relations of inequality can be mobilised in the production of value in this context.

Women as landowners in Victoria: questions from Little Lon

Evidence gathered from a small area of inner-city Melbourne indicates that women were far more active in the property market in the nineteenth century than has previously been recognised. Married women found ways to overcome common law restrictions to their ownership, and widows and daughters worked their way around the attention of trustees, but their land ownership was often disguised by the conventional use of male relatives’ names in the records. The unexpectedly high rate of women’s property ownership in this small urban area highlights the colony of Victoria’s early adoption of property rights for married women and raises the question of whether the findings would be consistent across the remainder of Victoria in this period.

Playing hard: Young men’s experiences of drinking in inner-city Melbourne

In recent years, the concept of ‘calculated hedonism’ has dominated sociological understandings of young people’s drinking practices. However, while contributing some important insights, this conceptualisation has not sufficiently considered the affective and embodied aspects of alcohol consumption. Our analysis explores the meanings and understandings of alcohol consumption among male participants in an 18-month study of young adults living in inner-city Melbourne. Data were collected via in-depth, semi-structured interviews and participant observation during drinking events. We draw on Roger Caillois’ notion of ‘play’ to analyse sessional drinking among these men. The four categories of play identified by Callois – competition, chance, simulation and vertigo – were all present in the accounts of these men’s drinking practices. This analysis offers a way of conceptualising men’s alcohol consumption in more nuanced ways that acknowledge the affective and embodied aspects of drinking as part of pleasure-seeking.

Enabling occupational participation and social inclusion for people recovering from mental ill-health through community gardening.

There is a need for mental health practitioners to understand how inclusive environments that enable participation can be developed. This paper presents the findings from an ethnographic exploration of Mind 'Sprout', a supported community garden situated in inner-city Melbourne. The study explored how this community development project created a socially inclusive environment, and enabled occupational participation among people recovering from mental ill-health. Consistent with the ethos of ethnography, data were collected through participant observation and asking questions of people as they participated at 'Sprout'. Six individual interviews and review of organisational documents were also conducted. Qualitative analysis was used to identify the understandings of how the Sprout community was created and experienced by its members. Three interrelated themes were revealed: Sprout community garden enabled social inclusion and occupational participation by creating community, creating a flexible environment that supports participation and creating a learning environment. The way Sprout operated enabled its members to participate together in occupation and to interact socially within the garden community and beyond as part of the local community. Sprout has developed a philosophy of active participation. The findings point to the opportunities that community development projects offer for creating environments that enable participation and social inclusion. They also suggest that an opportunity exists for occupational therapists to broaden their practise by leading or collaborating in these projects.

Placing Graffiti: Creating and Contesting Character in Inner-city Melbourne

Debates over definitions of urban graffiti as either ‘street art’ or ‘vandalism’ tend to focus on either contributions to the field of artistic practice or violations of a legal code. This paper explores the place of graffiti as an urban spatial practice—why is graffiti where it is and what is its role in the constructions and experiences of place? Through interviews and mapping in inner-city Melbourne, the paper explores the ways that potential for different types of graffiti is mediated by the micro-morphology of the city and becomes embodied into the urban habitus and field of symbolic capital. From a framework of Deleuzian assemblage theory graffiti negotiates ambiguous territories between public/private, visible/invisible, street/laneway and art/advertising. Graffiti is produced from intersecting and often conflicting desires to create or protect urban character and place identity. It is concluded that desires to write and to erase graffiti are productive urban forces, while desires to promote or protect it are problematic.

A Test of Character: Regulating Place-identity in Inner-city Melbourne

During the 1990s, urban planning in Melbourne changed from prescriptive regulation to a place-based performance framework with a focus on existing or desired ‘urban character’. This paper is a case study of a contentious urban project in the inner-Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy: a highly valued place characterised as an irregular and transgressive mix of differences: between building types, functions, forms, heights and people. Contrasting conceptions, experiences and constructions of ‘character’ are explored from the viewpoints of residents, architect/developer and the state. To what degree does the regulation of ‘character’ open or close the city to creative innovation? Can it become camouflage for creative destruction? How to regulate for irregularity? The paper concludes with a discussion of theories of place (Massey vs Heidegger) and the prospects of concepts such as habitus (Bourdieu) and assemblage (Deleuze) for the interpretation of a progressive sense of place.

Strike While the Iron's Hot: Using the Internet and Current Events for Political Engagement

This paper outlines my classroom experiences with a group of second ary school students of French, and it focus es on the development of approaches for encouraging critical political engagement which can be applied to other educational settings. The context here is a government school in inner-city Melbourne, Australia, catering to a socially and ethnically diverse student population of roughly 1200 girls over the school years 7 to 12. I will be discussing a topic on youth employ ment conditions which I taught as part Unit 1 of the senior Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) French course (Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority, 2003). VCE French prescribes three broad themes, further broken into topics, which are common to many other language courses. These are: 1. The individual:

Narratives of high-rise housing: placing the ethnicized newcomer in inner Melbourne

Over the last decade, inner-city Melbourne has experienced a dramatic growth in the construction of high-rise housing, a relatively unfamiliar housing form in Australia. In this paper we examine narratives concerning ethnicity that circulate among those involved in the planning and construction of this new high-rise housing. Our aims are two-fold: first, we wish to show that part of the ‘making sense’ of things that goes on in the developers' narratives in this context concerns the ethnicity of the occupants envisaged for the housing. High rise is an alien housing form in Melbourne, and attributing alternative characteristics, including ethnicities, to potential occupants, allows developers to ‘place’ people as a natural fit for the new housing form. Second, we wish to demonstrate how developers' narratives about the probable occupants of the new housing, and their reasons for being there, are complexly situated in the processes leading to the production of this housing in the places it is located. The narratives, as we see it, are part of the political economy of the housing production.

Death of a Factory: Market Rationalism's Hidden Abode in Inner-City Melbourne

This article does not have an abstract

Being 'Real' in Suicide Prevention Evaluation: The Role of the Ethnographer's Emotions Under Traumatic Conditions

While there is a tradition of recognising and contending with the emotional content of ethnography (e.g. informant emotions, researcher empathy), there are few accounts of research which illustrate clearly the emotional work done by researchers, and the value of such work as an analytical tool. Yet, in the human services, and especially where trauma is involved, ignoring emotional dynamics actually runs the risk of 'dumbing down' our analyses. The current paper draws on ethnographer experiences during an evaluation of a youth suicide prevention project at the Connexions agency in inner-city Melbourne. The organisation, which is a part of Jesuit Social Services, provides outreach, therapy and other services (e.g. drop-in, labour market program) to marginalised young people. The paper argues that researcher emotions are actually important to isolate and examine in order to adequately capture the meanings participants attribute to their realities and actions. Nevertheless, through the exploration of specific dilemmas, it is shown that recognising and processing difficult emotions can be a confronting yet rewarding exercise for researchers, both personally and in terms of research outcomes. The paper also discusses how the ethnographer managed to conduct research in a setting involving trauma.