Planning in Indigenous Australia

From Imperial Foundations to Postcolonial Futures

Sue Jackson, Libby Porter, Louise C. Johnson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317437161
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Planning in settler-colonial countries is always taking place on the lands of Indigenous peoples. While Indigenous rights, identity and cultural values are increasingly being discussed within planning, its mainstream accounts virtually ignore the colonial roots and legacies of the discipline's assumptions, techniques and methods. This ground-breaking book exposes the imperial origins of the planning canon, profession and practice in the settler-colonial country of Australia.

By documenting the role of planning in the history of Australia's relations with Indigenous peoples, the book maps the enduring effects of colonisation. It provides a new historical account of colonial planning practices and rewrites the urban planning histories of major Australian cities. Contemporary land rights, native title and cultural heritage frameworks are analysed in light of their critical importance to planning practice today, with detailed case illustrations. In reframing Australian planning from a postcolonial perspective, the book shatters orthodox accounts, revising the story that planning has told itself for over 100 years. New ways to think and practise planning in Indigenous Australia are advanced.

Planning in Indigenous Australia makes a major contribution towards the decolonisation of planning. It is essential reading for students and teachers in tertiary planning programmes, as well as those in geography, development studies, postcolonial studies, anthropology and environmental management. It is also vital reading for professional planners in the public, private and community sectors.

Part I

Planning and Indigenous Peoples

1

Framing Relations between Planning and Indigenous Peoples

Libby Porter

Introduction

On 3 March 2015 the enormous drapes covering a new 32-storey apartment building in Melbourne’s central business district were thrown off, to reveal an extraordinary sight: a colossal image of the face of William Barak staring down at the city’s main street (see Figure 1.1). This moment of the unveiling of what we call here the Barak building marked an ironic moment for Indigenous–settler relations in Australia, but especially so in densely settled Melbourne.

Figure 1.1The Barak building, Melbourne

Source: Libby Porter

William Barak was an Aboriginal man, a ngurungaeta (senior clan Elder) of the Wurundjeri people (Ellender & Christiansen 2001), whose country was stolen to create the city of Melbourne. Barak’s life, from 1823 to 1903 (Ellender & Christiansen 2001), spanned the frontier violence of the early colonial days of Melbourne’s settlement. He is a profoundly important figure in the story of the Wurundjeri people, and their fight to access their land base and retain their language and culture in the face of one of the swiftest dispossessions in British imperial history (Boyce 2013; see also Chapter 6). As one of Victoria’s early land rights activists (Presland 2010) and a tireless advocate for his people, Barak is an important figure not only for Wurundjeri descendants but for everybody in Australia.

The positioning of his face on this building is very curious. The building is one of many in the Grocon development company’s portfolio in Australian cities. It is not a civic building but a private residential development of more than 530 apartments with a smattering of retail uses on the ground floor. Priced in Melbourne’s expensive property market, the apartments were bought off the plan quickly, many by overseas investors. The building is located on the former Carlton and United brewery site and, according to the developer and architect, stands as a landmark at one end of what is regarded in city design circles as Melbourne’s “civic spine”. The building is aligned to look towards the Shrine of Remembrance, a war memorial that infamously fails to commemorate Aboriginal soldiers.

These are ironies indeed: an image of an Aboriginal leader dispossessed of his lands is reproduced on a high-end private apartment building on those very lands, built on the site of a factory that produced a substance that harmed many Indigenous people, referencing one end of a “civic spine” that fails to honour Aboriginal lives in the city. The building thus prompts questions about the contemporary relationships between Indigenous people, urban development and planning in a settler-colonial state such as Australia. How did this building come to have Barak’s image built into its façade? How should we interpret what it means? What hopes can we reasonably hold for it to catalyse positive change, whether practical or symbolic, in race relations and planning?

Such questions have been the subject of much debate (see, for example, Hansen 2015; Kennedy 2015). A public panel discussed them just a few weeks after the building was unveiled. Panellists included three Aboriginal and three non-Indigenous experts (Federation Square 2015). Their discussion, like much of the wider public discussion, focused on questions of representation and identity. For us, the building also raises questions about dispossession, power, authority and resistance.

All are themes and concepts we discuss across this book as we unpack the practice of planning in Australia from a different perspective from that normally used. This chapter establishes a conceptual framework for doing so, using a range of critical theoretical perspectives that seek to deconstruct and repoliticise the nature of settler-colonial societies. We use the Barak building and the panel event as a lens on the important concepts these critical social theories advance, and how they intersect with planning. This chapter is therefore structured around a set of core tensions: visibility, representation, recognition, authority and the contested nature of space and place. In each section our purpose is threefold: to reframe planning in a more critical way to help unpack the complicity of the discipline in acts of colonial dispossession; to introduce readers to the key concepts deployed throughout the book; and to identify how these debates are relevant to planning today. We start with a brief overview of the theoretical perspectives.

Theoretical Perspectives for Planning in Settler-Colonial Societies

The conceptual framework underpinning this book draws from a number of different perspectives in critical social theory. Our aim is to provide a reading of advances made in settler-colonial studies (such as Alfred 1999; Alfred & Corntassel 2005; Wolfe 2006; Veracini 2010; Corntassel 2012; Coulthard 2014), combined with postcolonial theory (Fanon 1986; Said 1993; Spivak 1994, 1999a) and critical Indigenous and feminist theories (Watson 2002, 2007, 2015; L.B. Simpson 2014; A. Simpson 2014; Moreton-Robinson 2015). Together, they provide a conceptual framework with which to unpack dominant discourses and challenge some of the racialised assumptions that continue to live in the legacies of colonialism. Some of these perspectives have been brought to bear on planning and urban studies, and we cite those who have done so throughout the chapter.

As with other critical social theoretical perspectives, many with a “post” prefix (poststructural, postmodern…), the point of departure is that all social life is constructed, and it is therefore possible to read expressions of power and social relations through particular instances of social life. Place, also, is produced through social dynamics and relations (Lefebvre 1991; Massey 2005). In providing the basis for critique, these perspectives also seek to identify and articulate anti-colonial and decolonising strategies. We advance a critical analysis of planning’s historical and contemporary complicity in colonial relations of power, and seek to use that critical reading to find hopeful moments of socially transformative possibility, as Brad Coombes and colleagues (2012) urge.

To do this it is important to clarify the use of the term “postcolonial” in this book. There has been a long debate about this term. We refer to “postcolonial” not as an event or epoch – that is, not signalling “after” – but as a body of critical theory that offers conceptual tools for grappling with the consequences of colonial occupation. We do not interpret Australia as being beyond settler colonialism. Indeed, we take pains to point out how it remains deeply colonial. And so we proceed in this chapter to take each of the debates that the Barak building and the panel event either raised or was silent about. Using those debates as a launching pad, we frame each in theoretical terms to help us think about what such issues mean for planning.

Visible or Invisible?

Melbourne is a city where Aboriginal presence is not very visible. In opening the panel discussion, the architect of the Barak building, Howard Raggatt, claimed that a key purpose of the building was to fill this “void of absence” that has marked Melbourne’s relationship with Indigenous people. The size and prominence of the image of Barak looking across the city is striking: here is an important ancestor of the Wurundjeri people, finally given a privileged place in the story of this city.

But what does it really mean? Making visible what has previously been hidden is an important dimension of the ethical and political project of critical social theories. They are critical precisely because they uncover what is being hidden in normalised understandings of the social world. Critical social theories seek to break open assumptions for examination. A core concern is illuminating how “common sense” and the acceptance of categories presumed to be normal are in fact operations of power that mask the social realities of more marginalised groups in favour of dominant interests. “Making the invisible visible”, as Leonie Sandercock set out to do in her collection of essays of that name (1998) and in her work exposing injustices against First Nations people in Canada (Attili & Sandercock 2010; Sandercock & Attili 2013), is a crucial task. Making visible what has been hidden by colonial orderings of society in Australia enables a more critical awareness of how planning and city-building have been implicated in making Indigenous people invisible (Anderson 1993; Jackson 1996; Jacobs 1996; Taylor 2000; Porter 2010, 2013). Oren Yiftachel (1998) calls this understanding “the dark side of planning”.

The dispossession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people from and of their country is the dark side of planning in Australia – its untold story. Dispossession is the forced removal of territory from a sovereign people. This involved the physical removal of people from their country, and caused widespread disruption to the economic, social and religious base of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander law and life. While the pattern of this removal varied greatly across the continent, the process and the tools used were much the same. As these processes were intrinsically about land, the practices that we now recognise as planning were central to securing control over territory. Surveying, naming, mapping and delimiting territories for particular groups, selling and developing land, property rights, and changing uses – all are recognisably planning practices, and all were used for dispossession in Australia (Jackson 1998; Howitt 2001; Porter 2010). We address these in more detail in Part II.

The physical and material operations of dispossession were accompanied by a concurrent practice that narrated particular kinds of stories about Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal identity, character and presence. As Edward Said (1993, p. xiii) identifies:

The main battle in imperialism is over land… [B]‌ut when it came to who owned the land…and who now plans for its future – these issues were reflected, contested, and even for a time decided in narrative.

While the material processes of dispossession were under way – taking lands by force and removing people off those lands by violence and occupation – this had to be made justifiable. It had to feel right in the minds of settlers. Those being dispossessed were painted as unworthy of that land – deviant, misfits or otherwise undeserving. This is often discussed in the literature as Othering – the capital “O” drawing attention to this socially constructed process of making one group abnormal or deviant from the presumed norm. It is important then to look at how this kind of narrative – what is called a “discourse” – unfolds. A discourse is a set of words that have a material effect; words that promote speakers or writers of them into positions of power.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have been defined as Others in Australian society in a number of important ways, and the discursive process of Othering is very real today. An especially powerful characteristic of colonial discourse is the establishment of binary categories: the binary “civilised/primitive” is a good example. Colonisation involved projecting a binary – “colonists” and “Aborigines” – constructed by deeming perceived cultural, biological and social characteristics as essential markers of difference. That difference is constructed hierarchically: colonists, settlers or whites are “better”, and Aboriginal people “worse”, because of their respective characteristics. This is often referred to as essentialism.

Binaries work when two categories come to be seen as diametrically opposed to each other. As such, these define their relation to each other. For example, the racialised category of “black” also enables a category of “white” to emerge. Throughout history, Indigenous people have been regarded as a distinct social category. Indeed, the category “settler” comes to have a distinct power when there is an Other – Indigenous – against which it is defined. Space and place served to dramatise these differences. In many parts of the colonial world the city was cleaved into two opposite areas, such as those Frantz Fanon recognised in Algerian cities, or the huge social distance between the settler town and an opposing native town in Canada (Harris 2008). The practical outcomes of separation and segregation were to ensure surveillance and the efficient use of force, control disease and protect colonists from insurgency. Geographers and cultural theorists have long recognised and documented the workings of these spatial relations of difference (Said 1993; Godlewska & Smith 1994; Jacobs 1996; Taylor 2000; Yeoh 2004; Anderson 1993; Shaw 2007).

Marking difference in such racialised terms is not merely descriptive or discursive; ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Endorsement
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Planning in Indigenous Australia: An Introduction
• Part I Planning and Indigenous Peoples
• Part II Imperial Foundations
• Part III Towards Postcolonial Futures
• Index