Academic literature on the topic 'Real property, massachusetts'

Economic studies of changes in property rights institutions have been hampered by the use of ideal types. Conceptually we usually identify a small number of discrete property rights regimes, e.g., “open-access,” “common property” and “private property,” and then try to comprehend our data in terms of these categories. But in the so-called real world ideal types are seldom encountered. Instead we usually see complex mixtures of assorted arrangements, all growing or declining or mixing or separating at different rates and in different directions. Models containing nothing but ideal-type concepts are ill-suited to the analysis of such a reality. In this paper I want to examine a case of institutional change where one institutional regime was transformed into another; not by a discrete jump from one system to another, but through a gradual process of institutional adaptation and transition.

This article is an original cultural anthropological study that is based on fieldwork done by the principal investigator, Antonio L. Rappa, on groups of urban workers and peasant farmers of Bangkok, Chiangmai, and Pattaya from 1998 to 2016. The focus of this article is on how these workers survive late modernity within the neoliberal capitalist world scenario. The fieldwork also showed the importance of materialism among Thai workers and how they remain trapped in giving up the surplus labor value of their work to the bourgeoisie (Marxian Theory). Since 1932 (the Siamese and since 1946), the Thai workers have been suppressed and exploited by the ruling elite (Power Elite Theory). Whether we use a Cultural Anthropological/Marxian, neo-Marxist Anthropological, or Power Elite theory (C. Wright Mills’ Theory) approach, it remains clear in 2022 that the Thai people still continue to be imprisoned by a desire for luxury goods and services (Thorstein Veblen). Then, there is the complication of religion. At least 93% of all Thai people are Theravada Buddhists and staunchly believe in worshipping the Buddha as well as in various superstitions. The remaining 5–7% are Muslims and Christians. It is only the Muslims who have consistently given political trouble to the Bangkok capitalists but the Muslims are not socialists or communists since they believe in the god known as Allah. Ever since the 1970s, Thailand came under serious threat from communism like many Southeast Asian states. King Bhumiphon Adulyadej (Rama IX) was already a deeply respected monarch and a virtual demi-God to the superstitious and animistic Thai Buddhists. Few Thais realized at that time that the King was also a well-read scientist knowledgeable in urban planning and agriculture. Rama IX applied the knowledge that he garnered from Switzerland and Cambridge, Massachusetts, toward building a new kind of thinking, called Self-Sufficiency Economy (SSE). Rama IX’s SSE was not unique to Thailand and commonly practiced to various effects in South Asia, the Far East, and Southeast Asia. Nevertheless, the king thought that the SSE would be a good way out for his people. He believed that if each Tambon or village could cooperate using existing resources, provincial assistance in agricultural knowledge, and the model-village concept, then the Thai people would be self-sufficient in many aspects. This was also known as the One-Thambon, One-Product (OTOP) policy. This is itself a manifestation of the materialist cultural anthropologic of Thai culture itself. The article concludes with an analysis of the dual pricing system or two-tier pricing system, and why the Thai people appear to support Thorstein Veblen’s Theory and C. Wright Mills’ Theory rather than any neo-Marxist theory of land distribution and property ownership.

This manuscript is an original cultural anthropological study that is based on fieldwork done by the principal investigator, Antonio L. Rappa, on groups of urban workers and peasant farmers of Bangkok, Chiangmai, and Pattaya from 1998 to 2016. The focus of this manuscript is on how these workers survive late modernity within the neoliberal capitalist world scenario. The fieldwork also showed the importance of materialism among Thai workers and how they remain trapped in giving up the surplus labor value of their work to the bourgeoisie (Marxian Theory). Since 1932 (the Siamese and since 1946), the Thai workers have been suppressed and exploited by the ruling elite (Power Elite Theory). Whether we use a Cultural Anthropological/Marxian, neo-Marxist Anthropological, or Power Elite theory (C. Wright Mills’ Theory) approach, it remains clear in 2022 that the Thai people still continue to be imprisoned by a desire for luxury goods and services (Thorstein Veblen). Then, there is the complication of religion. At least 93% of all Thai people are Theravada Buddhists and staunchly believe in worshiping the Buddha as well as in various superstitions. The remaining 5–7% are Muslims and Christians. It is only the Muslims who have consistently given political trouble to the Bangkok capitalists but the Muslims are not socialists or communists since they believe in the god known as Allah. Ever since the 1970s, Thailand came under serious threat from communism like many Southeast Asian states. King Bhumiphon Adulyadej (Rama IX) was already a deeply respected monarch and a virtual demi-God to the superstitious and animistic Thai Buddhists. Few Thais realized at that time that the King was also a well-read scientist knowledgeable in urban planning and agriculture. Rama IX applied the knowledge that he garnered from Switzerland and Cambridge, Massachusetts, toward building a new kind of thinking, called Self-Sufficiency Economy (SSE). Rama IX’s SSE was not unique to Thailand and commonly practiced to various effects in South Asia, the Far East, and Southeast Asia. Nevertheless, the king thought that the SSE would be a good way out for his people. He believed that if each Tambon or village could cooperate using existing resources, provincial assistance in agricultural knowledge, and the model-village concept, then the Thai people would be self-sufficient in many aspects. This was also known as the One-Tambon, OneProduct (OTOP) policy. This is itself a manifestation of the materialist cultural anthropologic of Thai culture itself. The manuscript concludes with an analysis of the dual pricing system or two-tier pricing system, and why the Thai people appear to support Thorstein Veblen’s Theory and C. Wright Mills’ Theory rather than any neo-Marxist theory of land distribution and property ownership.

Each community’s title deed carries the indelible blood stains of our ancestors. (Watson, "Howard’s End" 2)IntroductionAccording to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term coalition comes from the Latin coalescere or ‘coalesce’, meaning “come or bring together to form one mass or whole”. Coalesce refers to the unity affirmed as something grows: co – “together”, alesce – “to grow up”. While coalition is commonly associated with formalised alliances and political strategy in the name of self-interest and common goals, this paper will draw as well on the broader etymological understanding of coalition as “growing together” in order to discuss the Australian government’s recent changes to land rights legislation, the 2007 Emergency Intervention into the Northern Territory, and its decision to use Indigenous land in the Northern Territory as a dumping ground for nuclear waste. What unites these distinct cases is the role of the Australian nation-state in asserting its sovereign right to decide, something Giorgio Agamben notes is the primary indicator of sovereign right and power (Agamben). As Fiona McAllan has argued in relation to the Northern Territory Intervention: “Various forces that had been coalescing and captivating the moral, imaginary centre were now contributing to a spectacular enactment of a sovereign rescue mission” (par. 18). Different visions of “growing together”, and different coalitional strategies, are played out in public debate and policy formation. This paper will argue that each of these cases represents an alliance between successive, oppositional governments - and the nourishment of neoliberal imperatives - over and against the interests of some of the Indigenous communities, especially with relation to land rights. A critical stance is taken in relation to the alterations to land rights laws over the past five years and with the Northern Territory Emergency Intervention, hereinafter referred to as the Intervention, firstly by the Howard Liberal Coalition Government and later continued, in what Anthony Lambert has usefully termed a “postcoalitional” fashion, by the Rudd Labor Government. By this, Lambert refers to the manner in which dominant relations of power continue despite the apparent collapse of old political coalitions and even in the face of seemingly progressive symbolic and material change. It is not the intention of this paper to locate Indigenous people in opposition to models of economic development aligned with neoliberalism. There are examples of productive relations between Indigenous communities and mining companies, in which Indigenous people retain control over decision-making and utilise Land Council’s to negotiate effectively. Major mining company Rio Tinto, for example, initiated an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Policy platform in the mid-1990s (Rio Tinto). Moreover, there are diverse perspectives within the Indigenous community regarding social and economic reform governed by neoliberal agendas as well as government initiatives such as the Intervention, motivated by a concern for the abuse of children, as outlined in The Little Children Are Sacred Report (Wild & Anderson; hereinafter Little Children). Indeed, there is no agreement on whether or not the Intervention had anything to do with land rights. On the one hand, Noel Pearson has strongly opposed this assertion: “I've got as much objections as anybody to the ideological prejudices of the Howard Government in relation to land, but this question is not about a 'land grab'. The Anderson Wild Report tells us about the scale of Aboriginal children's neglect and abuse" (ABC). Marcia Langton has agreed with this stating that “There's a cynical view afoot that the emergency intervention was a political ploy - a Trojan Horse - to sneak through land grabs and some gratuitous black head-kicking disguised as concern for children. These conspiracy theories abound, and they are mostly ridiculous” (Langton). Patrick Dodson on the other hand, has argued that yes, of course, the children remain the highest priority, but that this “is undermined by the Government's heavy-handed authoritarian intervention and its ideological and deceptive land reform agenda” (Dodson). WhitenessOne way to frame this issue is to look at it through the lens of critical race and whiteness theory. Is it possible that the interests of whiteness are at play in the coalitions of corporate/private enterprise and political interests in the Northern Territory, in the coupling of social conservatism and economic rationalism? Using this framework allows us to identify the partial interests at play and the implications of this for discussions in Australia around sovereignty and self-determination, as well as providing a discursive framework through which to understand how these coalitional interests represent a specific understanding of progress, growth and development. Whiteness theory takes an empirically informed stance in order to critique the operation of unequal power relations and discriminatory practices imbued in racialised structures. Whiteness and critical race theory take the twin interests of racial privileging and racial discrimination and discuss their historical and on-going relevance for law, philosophy, representation, media, politics and policy. Foregrounding contemporary analysis in whiteness studies is the central role of race in the development of the Australian nation, most evident in the dispossession and destruction of Indigenous lands, cultures and lives, which occurred initially prior to Federation, as well as following. Cheryl Harris’s landmark paper “Whiteness as Property” argues, in the context of the US, that “the origins of property rights ... are rooted in racial domination” and that the “interaction between conceptions of race and property ... played a critical role in establishing and maintaining racial and economic subordination” (Harris 1716).Reiterating the logic of racial inferiority and the assumption of a lack of rationality and civility, Indigenous people were named in the Australian Constitution as “flora and fauna” – which was not overturned until a national referendum in 1967. This, coupled with the logic of terra nullius represents the racist foundational logic of Australian statehood. As is well known, terra nullius declared that the land belonged to no-one, denying Indigenous people property rights over land. Whiteness, Moreton-Robinson contends, “is constitutive of the epistemology of the West; it is an invisible regime of power that secures hegemony through discourse and has material effects in everyday life” (Whiteness 75).In addition to analysing racial power structures, critical race theory has presented studies into the link between race, whiteness and neoliberalism. Roberts and Mahtami argue that it is not just that neoliberalism has racialised effects, rather that neoliberalism and its underlying philosophy is “fundamentally raced and produces racialized bodies” (248; also see Goldberg Threat). The effect of the free market on state sovereignty has been hotly debated too. Aihwa Ong contends that neoliberalism produces particular relationships between the state and non-state corporations, as well as determining the role of individuals within the body-politic. Ong specifies:Market-driven logic induces the co-ordination of political policies with the corporate interests, so that developmental discussions favour the fragmentation of the national space into various contiguous zones, and promote the differential regulation of the populations who can be connected to or disconnected from global circuits of capital. (Ong, Neoliberalism 77)So how is whiteness relevant to a discussion of land reform, and to the changes to land rights passed along with Intervention legislation in 2007? Irene Watson cites the former Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Mal Brough, who opposed the progressive individual with what he termed the “failed collective.” Watson asserts that in the debates around land leasing and the Intervention, “Aboriginal law and traditional roles and responsibilities for caring and belonging to country are transformed into the cause for community violence” (Sovereign Spaces 34). The effects of this, I will argue, are twofold and move beyond a moral or social agenda in the strictest sense of the terms: firstly to promote, and make more accessible, the possibility of private and government coalitions in relation to Indigenous lands, and secondly, to reinforce the sovereignty of the state, recognised in the capacity to make decisions. It is here that the explicit reiteration of what Aileen Moreton-Robinson calls “white possession” is clearly evidenced (The Possessive Logic). Sovereign Interventions In the Northern Territory 50% of land is owned by Indigenous people under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1976 (ALRA) (NT). This law gives Indigenous people control, mediated via land councils, over their lands. It is the contention of this paper that the rights enabled through this law have been eroded in recent times in the coalescing interests of government and private enterprise via, broadly, land rights reform measures. In August 2007 the government passed a number of laws that overturned aspects of the Racial Discrimination Act 197 5(RDA), including the Northern Territory National Emergency Response Bill 2007 and the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Amendment (Township Leasing) Bill 2007. Ostensibly these laws were a response to evidence of alarming levels of child abuse in remote Indigenous communities, which has been compiled in the special report Little Children, co-chaired by Rex Wild QC and Patricia Anderson. This report argued that urgent but culturally appropriate strategies were required in order to assist the local communities in tackling the issues. The recommendations of the report did not include military intervention, and instead prioritised the need to support and work in dialogue with local Indigenous people and organisations who were already attempting, with extremely limited resources, to challenge the problem. Specifically it stated that:The thrust of our recommendations, which are designed to advise the NT government on how it can help support communities to effectively prevent and tackle child sexual abuse, is for there to be consultation with, and ownership by the local communities, of these solutions. (Wild & Anderson 23) Instead, the Federal Coalition government, with support from the opposition Labor Party, initiated a large scale intervention, which included the deployment of the military, to install order and assist medical personnel to carry out compulsory health checks on minors. The intervention affected 73 communities with populations of over 200 Aboriginal men, women and children (Altman, Neo-Paternalism 8). The reality of high levels of domestic and sexual abuse in Indigenous communities requires urgent and diligent attention, but it is not the space of this paper to unpack the media spectacle or the politically determined response to these serious issues, or the considered and careful reports such as the one cited above. While the report specifies the need for local solutions and local control of the process and decision-making, the Federal Liberal Coalition government’s intervention, and the current Labor government’s faithfulness to these, has been centralised and external, imposed upon communities. Rebecca Stringer argues that the Trojan horse thesis indicates what is at stake in this Intervention, while also pinpointing its main weakness. That is, the counter-intuitive links its architects make between addressing child sexual abuse and re-litigating Indigenous land tenure and governance arrangements in a manner that undermines Aboriginal sovereignty and further opens Aboriginal lands to private interests among the mining, nuclear power, tourism, property development and labour brokerage industries. (par. 8)Alongside welfare quarantining for all Indigenous people, was a decision by parliament to overturn the “permit system”, a legal protocol provided by the ALRA and in place so as to enable Indigenous peoples the right to refuse and grant entry to strangers wanting to access their lands. To place this in a broader context of land rights reform, the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 2006, created the possibility of 99 year individual leases, at the expense of communal ownership. The legislation operates as a way of individualising the land arrangements in remote Indigenous communities by opening communal land up as private plots able to be bought by Aboriginal people or any other interested party. Indeed, according to Leon Terrill, land reform in Australia over the past 10 years reflects an attempt to return control of decision-making to government bureaucracy, even as governments have downplayed this aspect. Terrill argues that Township Leasing (enabled via the 2006 legislation), takes “wholesale decision-making about land use” away from Traditional Owners and instead places it in the hands of a government entity called the Executive Director of Township Leasing (3). With the passage of legislation around the Intervention, five year leases were created to enable the Commonwealth “administrative control” over the communities affected (Terrill 3). Finally, under the current changes it is unlikely that more than a small percentage of Aboriginal people will be able to access individual land leasing. Moreover, the argument has been presented that these reforms reflect a broader project aimed at replacing communal land ownership arrangements. This agenda has been justified at a rhetorical level via the demonization of communal land ownership arrangements. Helen Hughes and Jenness Warin, researchers at the rightwing think-tank, the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS), released a report entitled A New Deal for Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders in Remote Communities, in which they argue that there is a direct casual link between communal ownership and economic underdevelopment: “Communal ownership of land, royalties and other resources is the principle cause of the lack of economic development in remote areas” (in Norberry & Gardiner-Garden 8). In 2005, then Prime Minister, John Howard, publicly introduced the government’s ambition to alter the structure of Indigenous land arrangements, couching his agenda in the language of “equal opportunity”. I believe there’s a case for reviewing the whole issue of Aboriginal land title in the sense of looking more towards private recognition …, I’m talking about giving them the same opportunities as the rest of their fellow Australians. (Watson, "Howard’s End" 1)Scholars of critical race theory have argued that the language of equality, usually tied to liberalism (though not always) masks racial inequality and even results in “camouflaged racism” (Davis 61). David Theo Goldberg notes that, “the racial status-quo - racial exclusions and privileges favouring for the most part middle - and upper class whites - is maintained by formalising equality through states of legal and administrative science” (Racial State 222). While Howard and his coalition of supporters have associated communal title with disadvantage and called for the equality to be found in individual leases (Dodson), Altman has argued that there is no logical link between forms of communal land ownership and incidences of sexual abuse, and indeed, the government’s use of sexual abuse disingenuously disguises it’s imperative to alter the land ownership arrangements: “Given the proposed changes to the ALRA are in no way associated with child sexual abuse in Aboriginal communities […] there is therefore no pressing urgency to pass the amendments.” (Altman National Emergency, 3) In the case of the Intervention, land rights reforms have affected the continued dispossession of Indigenous people in the interests of “commercial development” (Altman Neo-Paternalism 8). In light of this it can be argued that what is occurring conforms to what Aileen Moreton-Robinson has highlighted as the “possessive logic of patriarchal white sovereignty” (Possessive Logic). White sovereignty, under the banner of benevolent paternalism overturns the authority it has conceded to local Indigenous communities. This is realised via township leases, five year leases, housing leases and other measures, stripping them of the right to refuse the government and private enterprise entry into their lands (effectively the right of control and decision-making), and opening them up to, as Stringer argues, a range of commercial and government interests. Future Concerns and Concluding NotesThe etymological root of coalition is coalesce, inferring the broad ambition to “grow together”. In the issues outlined above, growing together is dominated by neoliberal interests, or what Stringer has termed “assimilatory neoliberation”. The issue extends beyond a social and economic assimilationism project and into a political and legal “land grab”, because, as Ong notes, the neoliberal agenda aligns itself with the nation-state. This coalitional arrangement of neoliberal and governmental interests reiterates “white possession” (Moreton-Robinson, The Possessive Logic). This is evidenced in the position of the current Labor government decision to uphold the nomination of Muckaty as a radioactive waste repository site in Australia (Stokes). In 2007, the Northern Land Council (NLC) nominated Muckaty Station to be the site for waste disposal. This decision cannot be read outside the context of Maralinga, in the South Australian desert, a site where experiments involving nuclear technology were conducted in the 1960s. As John Keane recounts, the Australian government permitted the British government to conduct tests, dispossessing the local Aboriginal group, the Tjarutja, and employing a single patrol officer “the job of monitoring the movements of the Aborigines and quarantining them in settlements” (Keane). Situated within this historical colonial context, in 2006, under a John Howard led Liberal Coalition, the government passed the Commonwealth Radioactive Waste Management Act (CRWMA), a law which effectively overrode the rulings of the Northern Territory government in relation decisions regarding nuclear waste disposal, as well as overriding the rights of traditional Aboriginal owners and the validity of sacred sites. The Australian Labor government has sought to alter the CRWMA in order to reinstate the importance of following due process in the nomination process of land. However, it left the proposed site of Muckaty as confirmed, and the new bill, titled National Radioactive Waste Management retains many of the same characteristics of the Howard government legislation. In 2010, 57 traditional owners from Muckaty and surrounding areas signed a petition stating their opposition to the disposal site (the case is currently in the Federal Court). At a time when nuclear power has come back onto the radar as a possible solution to the energy crisis and climate change, questions concerning the investments of government and its loyalties should be asked. As Malcolm Knox has written “the nuclear industry has become evangelical about the dangers of global warming” (Knox). While nuclear is a “cleaner” energy than coal, until better methods are designed for processing its waste, larger amounts of it will be produced, requiring lands that can hold it for the desired timeframes. For Australia, this demands attention to the politics and ethics of waste disposal. Such an issue is already being played out, before nuclear has even been signed off as a solution to climate change, with the need to find a disposal site to accommodate already existing uranium exported to Europe and destined to return as waste to Australia in 2014. The decision to go ahead with Muckaty against the wishes of the voices of local Indigenous people may open the way for the co-opting of a discourse of environmentalism by political and business groups to promote the development and expansion of nuclear power as an alternative to coal and oil for energy production; dumping waste on Indigenous lands becomes part of the solution to climate change. During the 2010 Australian election, Greens Leader Bob Brown played upon the word coalition to suggest that the Liberal National Party were in COALition with the mining industry over the proposed Mining Tax – the Liberal Coalition opposed any mining tax (Brown). Here Brown highlights the alliance of political agendas and business or corporate interests quite succinctly. Like Brown’s COALition, will government (of either major party) form a coalition with the nuclear power stakeholders?This paper has attempted to bring to light what Dodson has identified as “an alliance of established conservative forces...with more recent and strident ideological thinking associated with free market economics and notions of individual responsibility” and the implications of this alliance for land rights (Dodson). It is important to ask critical questions about the vision of “growing together” being promoted via the coalition of conservative, neoliberal, private and government interests.Acknowledgements Many thanks to the reviewers of this article for their useful suggestions. ReferencesAustralian Broadcasting Authority. “Noel Pearson Discusses the Issues Faced by Indigenous Communities.” Lateline 26 June 2007. 22 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2007/s1962844.htm>. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1998. Altman, Jon. “The ‘National Emergency’ and Land Rights Reform: Separating Fact from Fiction.” A Briefing Paper for Oxfam Australia, 2007. 1 Aug. 2010 ‹http://www.oxfam.org.au/resources/filestore/originals/OAus-EmergencyLandRights-0807.pdf>. Altman, Jon. “The Howard Government’s Northern Territory Intervention: Are Neo-Paternalism and Indigenous Development Compatible?” Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research Topical Issue 16 (2007). 1 Aug. 2010 ‹http://caepr.anu.edu.au/system/files/Publications/topical/Altman_AIATSIS.pdf>. Brown, Bob. “Senator Bob Brown National Pre-Election Press Club Address.” 2010. 18 Aug. 2010 ‹http://greens.org.au/content/senator-bob-brown-pre-election-national-press-club-address>. Davis, Angela. The Angela Davis Reader. Ed. J. James, Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. Dodson, Patrick. “An Entire Culture Is at Stake.” Opinion. The Age, 14 July 2007: 4. Goldberg, David Theo. The Racial State. Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2002.———. The Threat of Race: Reflections on Neoliberalism. Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2008. Harris, Cheryl. “Whiteness as Property.” Harvard Law Review 106.8 (1993): 1709-1795. Keane, John. “Maralinga’s Afterlife.” Feature Article. The Age, 11 May 2003. 24 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/05/11/1052280486255.html>. Knox, Malcolm. “Nuclear Dawn.” The Monthly 56 (May 2010). Lambert, Anthony. “Rainbow Blindness: Same-Sex Partnerships in Post-Coalitional Australia.” M/C Journal 13.6 (2010). Langton, Marcia. “It’s Time to Stop Playing Politics with Vulnerable Lives.” Opinion. Sydney Morning Herald, 30 Nov. 2007: 2. McAllan, Fiona. “Customary Appropriations.” borderlands ejournal 6.3 (2007). 22 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol6no3_2007/mcallan_appropriations.htm>. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. “The Possessive Logic of Patriarchal White Sovereignty: The High Court and the Yorta Yorta Decision.” borderlands e-journal 3.2 (2004). 1 Aug. 2007 ‹http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol3no2_2004/moreton_possessive.htm>. ———. “Whiteness, Epistemology and Indigenous Representation.” Whitening Race. Ed. Aileen Moreton-Robinson. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 75-89. Norberry, J., and J. Gardiner-Garden. Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Amendment Bill 2006. Australian Parliamentary Library Bills Digest 158 (19 June 2006). Ong, Aihwa. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. 75-97.Oxford English Dictionary. 3rd. ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. Rio Tinto. "Rio Tinto Aboriginal Policy and Programme Briefing Note." June 2007. 22 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.aboriginalfund.riotinto.com/common/pdf/Aboriginal%20Policy%20and%20Programs%20-%20June%202007.pdf>. Roberts, David J., and Mielle Mahtami. “Neoliberalising Race, Racing Neoliberalism: Placing 'Race' in Neoliberal Discourses.” Antipode 42.2 (2010): 248-257. Stringer, Rebecca. “A Nightmare of the Neocolonial Kind: Politics of Suffering in Howard's Northern Territory Intervention.” borderlands ejournal 6.2 (2007). 22 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol6no2_2007/stringer_intervention.htm>.Stokes, Dianne. "Muckaty." n.d. 1 Aug. 2010 ‹http://www.timbonham.com/slideshows/Muckaty/>. Terrill, Leon. “Indigenous Land Reform: What Is the Real Aim of Land Reform?” Edited version of a presentation provided at the 2010 National Native Title Conference, 2010. Watson, Irene. “Sovereign Spaces, Caring for Country and the Homeless Position of Aboriginal Peoples.” South Atlantic Quarterly 108.1 (2009): 27-51. Watson, Nicole. “Howard’s End: The Real Agenda behind the Proposed Review of Indigenous Land Titles.” Australian Indigenous Law Reporter 9.4 (2005). ‹http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/AILR/2005/64.html>.Wild, R., and P. Anderson. Ampe Akelyernemane Meke Mekarie: The Little Children Are Sacred. Report of the Northern Territory Board of Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse. Northern Territory: Northern Territory Government, 2007.

From the sensuous scenes of culinary delectation and preparatory foreplay in Eat Drink Man Woman to the current crop of texts infused with metaphors of consumption as assimilation, writers and filmmakers have signified diasporic Asian bodies by merging cultural and racial markers. This is an introduction to the issues involved in representing the Asian body in diaspora and the politically fraught issues for racial minority populations in majority 'white' nations. Examples in this piece skim from Japanese-Canadian literature and metaphors of ingestion to racial minority identity politics in the United States. In Chorus of Mushrooms, a novel by Japanese-Canadian Hiromi Goto, one of the foci for the Tonkatsus' cultural change-over from the Japanese to the Canadian side of the hyphen is a determined alteration in eating habits. 'Western' food is the only type provided and the grandmother, Naoe, comments that her daughter has "converted from rice and daikon to weiners and beans" (13). In many ways, Keiko tries to force her family to eat their way into a new Canadian skin. Ostensibly, through the absorption of Western-style Canadian food, the Tonkatsus would achieve the goal of becoming one of 'them'. Using metaphors of cultural miscegenation, Keiko's daughter Muriel, as well as Obasan's Naomi and Stephen Nakane, could be described as 'banana'-yellow on the outside, white on the inside (Brydon 104). In the Asian-Australian literature and politics Webpages, The Banana Schtick, this term is reclaimed deliberately and defines specific issues for Asian-Australian writers and academic work which bypass the usual 'area studies' presumptions. This customarily derogatory metaphor is used by those within and without racial minority communities, across most class groups, barring the embedded invisibility of whiteness. Similar metaphors which denote the clashing (or possible melding) of races or cultures include the use of the term 'oreos' for African-Americans who take on what are deemed white, middle-class characteristics, or who do not act 'like a negro should' (Dyson 222). The term 'apples' has referred to Native Americans and 'coconuts' to individuals of South-East Asian or West Indian origin. The plethora of food metaphors link these models of hybrid identities with notions of cultural consumption and ingestion. Yau Ching, while examining Ang Lee's film Eat Drink Man Woman, observes: "those close-ups of the kungfu of chopping and stir-frying constitute a postmodern version of the West's Chinoiserie. I felt like I was stripteasing, selling something that I didn't have" (31). Yau's positioning as a part of the 'striptease' offered by the highly detailed shots of food preparation evokes discomfort. The scenes are meant to be evocatively 'Chinese' and operated as cultural shorthand: "food thus serves as an index of the imaginary 'heritage' passed on, the racial symbolism, the alimentary sign of Chineseness" (31). This obsession with the minutiae of process and material becomes a part of what Shu-Mei Shih calls a "porno-culinary genre" (1), another way for 'chinese-ness' to be observed, assessed, and ultimately consumed. A site that reacts explicitly to this commodification of Asian-ness, and particularly Asian women, is Mimi Nguyen's Exoticise This! It provides an excellent listing of Asian feminist and Third World women's resources, zines, and creative work. Notably, it is one of the few critically engaged, non-pornographic sites that will appear during a search for "Asian women" using Web search engines or directories. As pointers of racial/cultural doubling, the food markers mentioned above assume a constant social or mental bearing as 'towards white': white as the centre, as the most desired once again. The community or familial censure that this 'doubling' encounters could be read as a start in eroding the assumed attractive power of being 'white,' except that the judgments are based on essentialist ideas of what white/non-white means (in behaviour, talk, etc.) and their incompatability. This mode of reasoning maintains that a subject must be one side of the hyphenated identity or the other. For the most part, the terms used to describe the 'whitened' Others are analogous with various versions of raw produce and organic perishables. Conversely, "whiteness [is] often signified ... by commodities and brands: Wonder Bread, Kleenex, Heinz 57. In this identification, whiteness [comes] to be seen as spoiled by capitalism, and as being linked with capitalism in a way other cultures are not" (Frankenberg 199). The condition of whiteness as embodying capitalism inflect various constructions of western 'modernity', as well as the assumption that this kind of modernity is the logical state to which all nations and communities aspire. The growing area of 'whiteness' studies, and publications like Race Traitor, challenge this notion of a neutral flesh colour. The tokenistic acceptance of racial minority communities promotes divisiveness by allowing only a narrow range of representation for 'coloured' peoples. This perpetuates the masking of white privilege in that it remains the always-present and never-questioned. David Palumbo-Liu, an Asian-American race theorist, presents the symbiotic relationship between Korean-Americans and Anglo-Americans in the 1990s as an example of this creation of self-destructive alienation. He uses the incidents surrounding the 1992 Los Angeles riots, post-Rodney King trial, to emphasise how "Korean-Americans were represented as the frontline forces of the white bourgeoisie" (371), protecting their goods and property, being part of the capitalist programme which enabled them to become asset-rich 'Americans'. In most images and reports, the presence of white Americans (in downtown south-central Los Angeles) was elided while that of black Americans was amplified. Ruth Frankenberg suggests that "racist discourse ... frequently accords hypervisibility to African Americans and a relative invisibility to Asian Americans and Native Americans" (12). Palumbo-Liu states more specifically: the locating, real and figurative, of Asians in between the dominant and minor is made less tenuous and even rationalized by a particular element which situates Asians within the dominant ideology, and frees them of the burden of their ethnicity and race while retaining (for obvious ideological purposes) the signifier of racial difference: the notion of self-affirmative action. (371) The basic desire to be accepted/assimilated into majority white societies has meant that, in some instances, Asian citizens are complicit with the promulgation of certain stereotypes of themselves. Bypassing the expectations and approvals of white society altogether are increasing numbers of Asian-Canadian and Asian-American texts, whether in the form of novels, magazines (such as Giant Robot), or films, which do not assume a white audience but, instead, one that recognises the stereotypes and amalgamations of being part of diasporic Asian communities in North America and elsewhere. References Brydon, Diana. "Discovering 'Ethnicity': Joy Kogawa's Obasan and Mena Abdullah's Time of the Peacock." Australian/Canadian Literatures in English: Comparative Perspectives. Ed. Russell McDougall and Gillian Whitlock. Melbourne: Methuen, 1987. 94-110. Ching, Yau. "Can I Have MSG, an Egg Roll To Suck on and Asian American Media on the Side?" Fuse 20.1 (1997): 27-34. Dyson, Michael Eric. "Essentialism and the Complexities of Racial Identity." Multiculturalism: A Reader. Ed. David Theo Goldberg. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Basil Blackwell, 1994. 218-29. Frankenberg, Ruth. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. London: Routledge, 1993. Goto, Hiromi. Chorus of Mushrooms. Edmonton: NeWest P, 1994. Kogawa, Joy. Obasan. Markham: Penguin, 1981. Lee, Ang, dir. Eat Drink Man Woman. Samuel Goldwyn, 1994. Palumbo-Liu, David. "Los Angeles, Asians, and Perverse Ventriloquisms: On the Function of Asian America in the Recent American Imaginary." Public Culture 6 (1994): 365-81. Shih, Shu-mei. "Globalization, Minoritization, and Ang Lee's Films." Paper given at the 15th Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian American Studies, 23-28 June 1998. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Tseen Khoo. "Fetishising Flesh: Asian-Australian and Asian-Canadian Representation, Porno-Culinary Genres, and the Racially Marked Body." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.3 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/fetish.php>. Chicago style: Tseen Khoo, "Fetishising Flesh: Asian-Australian and Asian-Canadian Representation, Porno-Culinary Genres, and the Racially Marked Body," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 3 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/fetish.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Tseen Khoo. (1999) Fetishising flesh: Asian-Australian and Asian-Canadian representation, porno-culinary genres, and the racially marked body. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(3). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/fetish.php> ([your date of access]).

Photo by Clément Hélardot on Unsplash INTRODUCTION The history of biomedical research in the United States is both inspiring and haunting. From the first public demonstration of anesthesia in surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital to the infamous Tuskegee Experiment, we see the significant advances made for the medical field and the now exposed power dynamics that contribute to injustices when they are left unmonitored.[1] Over the past century, biomedical research led to positive change but also reinforced structural racism. Henrietta Lacks, whose tissue was used without her consent to generate HeLa cells, and the Tuskegee study research subjects, who were denied an existing treatment for syphilis, exemplify how biomedical research in the US has been a vector for exploiting minority groups in exchange for knowledge creation. As we usher in the age of computational medicine, leaders of the field must listen to calls from communities around the country and world to decrease the prevalence of structural racism in the next wave of medical advances.[2] We are vulnerable to perpetuating structural racism through algorithms and databases that will drive biomedical research and aid healthcare systems in developing new methods for diagnosing and treating illness. With guidelines from governmental funding agencies and inclusivity of racial and ethnic minorities in research and development communities, we can inch closer to a more just future for our nation's health. BACKGROUND Many health systems rely on commercial software to store and process their patient’s data. This software commonly comes with patented predictive algorithms that help providers assign a risk score to patients based on health needs. However, biases held by algorithm developers can reflect racial disparities and incorporate them in the algorithms if proper counterbalances are not in place to audit the work of algorithm designers.[3] Despite the recent digitization of healthcare data across the United States, racial bias has already found its way into healthcare algorithms that manage populations. ANALYSIS l. Use of Algorithms One landmark study that interrogated a widely used algorithm demonstrated that Black patients were considerably sicker than white patients at a given risk score, evidenced by signs of uncontrolled disease.[4] The algorithm predicted the need for additional help based on past expenditures, and we historically spend less on Black patients than white patients. Rectifying this bias would lead to three times as many Black patients receiving additional resources. The algorithm produces a treatment gap due to a history of unequal access to care and lower spending on people of color compared to white people in the healthcare system. The disconnect between the clinical situation and historical resource allocation exemplifies how certain predictors may produce an outcome that harms patients. The study shows that using a proxy measure for healthcare spending to quantify how sick a patient is instead of using physiologic data can amplify racial disparities. This example highlights the need for collaboration between clinicians, data scientists, ethicists, and epidemiologists of diverse backgrounds to ensure model parameters do not perpetuate racial biases. ll. Use of Big Data in Algorithm Creation In addition to eradicating algorithms that make decisions based on proxy measures encoding racial inequities, we must also be diligent about the content of databases employed in algorithm development. Racial disparities in a database may result from the intentional selection of a homogenous population or unintentional exclusion due to systemic issues such as unequal distribution of resources. For example, a genetic study conducted in a Scandinavian country is more likely to be racially homogenous and not generalizable to a broader population. Applying algorithms derived from homogenous populations to either diverse populations or to different homogenous populations would fail to account for biological differences and could result in a recess of care when used beyond the appropriate population. Additionally, companies like Apple or FitBit could de-identify consumer data collected using their wearable sensors and make it available in research. This is problematic because the demographic distribution of people who have access to their technology may not reflect the general population. To combat these potential disparities, we must construct freely accessible research databases containing patients with diverse demographic characteristics that better model the actual populations that a given model will serve. lll. Government-Based Safeguards Armed with an understanding of how systemic bias is integrated into algorithms and databases, we must strive to construct safeguards that minimize systemic racism in computational biomedical research. A potential way to step forward as a society would be aligning incentives to produce the desired results. Governmental agencies wield enormous power over the trajectory of publicly funded research. Therefore, it is crucial that computational biomedical research funding is regulated by procedures that encourage diverse researchers to investigate and develop healthcare algorithms and databases that promote our nation's health. For example, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has set forth two large initiatives to catalyze equitable growth of knowledge and research in healthcare artificial intelligence (AI). The first initiative is the Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Consortium to Advance Health Equity and Researcher Diversity (AIM-AHEAD), which focuses on increasing diversity in researchers and data within AI/machine learning (ML). The program states that “these gaps pose a risk of creating and continuing harmful biases in how AI/ML is used, how algorithms are developed and trained, and how findings are interpreted.” Increased participation of researchers and communities currently underrepresented in AI/ML modeling can prevent continued health disparities and inequities. Programs like AIM-AHEAD are crucial to reducing the risk of creating and continuing harmful biases in biomedical research. With the four key focus areas of partnerships, research, infrastructure, and data science training, AIM-AHEAD and its future incarnations can promote health equity for the next era of medicine and biomedical research. The second initiative announced by the NIH is known as the Bridge to Artificial Intelligence (Bridge2AI) program.[5] This program has a different approach to tackling systemic racism and bias by focusing on the content and process of AI/ML research. Two key components of AI/ML research are rich databases and algorithm development protocols. To develop reproducible and actionable algorithms, researchers must have access to large, well-labeled databases and follow best practices in their development of algorithms. However, large databases are not readily available across the healthcare research ecosystem. As a result, many investigators struggle to gain access to databases that would enable them to carry out AI/ML research at their home institution. A movement toward more freely available databases like the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care (MIMIC) and electronic Intensive Care Unit (eICU) through the PhysioNet platform created at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory for Computational Physiology can improve access to data for research.[6] By adopting the practice of freely available databases commonly used in the AI/ML research communities outside of medicine, MIMIC and eICU lowered the barrier to entry for data scientists interested in health care. The improved access from MIMIC and eICU has led to over 2,000 publications to date. While this is a solid foundational step for the healthcare AI/ML research community, it is essential to reflect on progress and ensure that freely accessible databases are racially and geographically diverse. In this manner, Bridge2AI will facilitate the expansion of healthcare databases that are ethically sourced, trustworthy, and accessible. Without government programs such as AIM-AHEAD and Bridge2AI, the US biomedical research community is at higher risk of perpetuating systemic racism and biases in how AI/ML is used, how algorithms are developed, and how clinical decision support results are interpreted when delivering patient care. lV. Private Sector Standards Even with the proper incentives delivered from governmental agencies, there can be a disconnect between the public and private sectors, leading to racial bias in algorithms used in patient care. Privately funded AI/ML algorithms used in care decision-making should be held to the same ethical standards as those developed by publicly funded research at academic institutions. Publicly funded research is usually peer-reviewed before publication, giving reviewers a chance to evaluate algorithmic bias or deficiencies. Algorithms used in care may have avoided similar scrutiny. Corporations have an inherent conflict between protecting intellectual property and providing transparency of algorithmic design and inputs. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is responsible for regulating AI/ML algorithms. It has classified them as Software as a Medical Device (SaMD), focusing on the development process and benchmarking.[7] The importance of holding privately funded algorithm development to the same standards as publicly funded research is highlighted in a September 2020 review of FDA-approved AI/ML algorithms. All SaMD approved by the FDA are registered by private companies.[8] Regulators must be well-versed in structural racism and equipped to evaluate proprietary algorithms for racial bias and maintain oversight as population data drifts occur and the algorithms continue to optimize themselves. The FDA role is crucial to clinical use of SaMD. CONCLUSION Computational decision support using algorithms and large databases has the potential to transform the way we deliver care. However, governments should plan how they will prevent structural racism and associated inequities from running rampant in the new systems. Racial bias and mistreatment are engrained in the history of medical research. In the newly formulated digital world, these biases are potentially even more dangerous. They now can propagate quietly in the background, masked under layers of computer code that very few people understand how to write and interpret. It will be possible for a doctor to unconsciously propagate bias because an algorithm is nudging the doctor’s behavior to make the best treatment decision for their patient. Healthcare leaders must be vigilant in guiding the development of algorithms and databases to minimize systemic racism. Guidance from funding agencies to uphold minimum quality standards, a transparent vetting process for algorithms by governing bodies like the FDA, and a diverse community of researchers and developers will allow us to curb the spread of structural racism in research and build equitable tools for diagnosing and treating illness. The real question is: will the age of digital medicine also lead to a more equitable healthcare system? - [1] About the USPHS Syphilis Study. Accessed August 18 2021. https://www.tuskegee.edu/about-us/centers-of-excellence/bioethics-center/about-the-usphs-syphilis-study; MGH. MGH Firsts. Accessed August 18 2021. https://libguides.massgeneral.org/mghhistory/firsts. [2] Geneviève LD, Martani A, Shaw D, Elger BS, Wangmo T. Structural racism in precision medicine: leaving no one behind. BMC medical ethics. 2020;21(1):1-13. [3] Barocas S, Selbst AD. Big data's disparate impact. Calif L Rev. 2016;104:671. [4] Obermeyer Z, Powers B, Vogeli C, Mullainathan S. Dissecting racial bias in an algorithm used to manage the health of populations. Science. 2019;366(6464):447-453. [5] NIH. Bridge to Artificial Intelligence. Accessed August 17 2021. https://commonfund.nih.gov/bridge2ai. [6] PhysioNet. PhysioNet: The Research Resource for Complex Physiologic Signals. Accessed August 17 2021. https://physionet.org. [7] FDA. Software as a Medical Device (SaMD). Accessed August 16 2021. https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/digital-health-center-excellence/software-medical-device-samd. [8] Benjamens S, Dhunnoo P, Meskó B. The state of artificial intelligence-based FDA-approved medical devices and algorithms: an online database. npj Digital Medicine. 2020;3(1):1-8.

“This table breeds idleness!” read the text of a handwritten message placed prominently on the table I shared with 5 of my friends many years ago in secondary school. Ours was one of several tables positioned to the side of the main teaching area of the classroom where we would gather on arrival, decant our bags to tables, gossip with our ‘group’ and then begin our school day. It was also a space where we could sit or study quietly between classes and during free periods. The note about our idleness was left only on ‘our’ table. Recognising the handwriting of our classroom teacher, Sister Celestine, we greeted her note with restrained laughter and a sense of teenage pride. Her reprimand was stern, but she had also acknowledged our specialness. We were seen as we might have wanted to be seen, recalcitrant, not too hardworking, slightly roguish, and a bit improper.That note, and its words, stayed with me for a long time. There was something wonderfully urgent about this call to reflexivity; and something pleasantly disturbing about the panicky tone of its message. It seemed a peculiar expression of both crisis and care. ‘Idleness’ was a word we rarely encountered. In fact, it seemed such an old fashioned utterance, belonging more to a past era of our nun and the vernacular of her time. What was it that moved this nun to construe our mischief and our youthful conviviality as idleness? We considered ourselves spirited and boisterous, certainly not inert, as the word seemed to imply. This was curious, but it was the word ‘breeds’ that captured me more. What precisely is the generative or reproductive power of the conjunction of our bodies and this table? The concern was clearly not just about our idleness, but also about the breeding power of this table.Idleness here speaks to us of what happens when proper things are not happening. When the table and our bodies converge in this space of idleness we are in the terrain of waste: wasting time (that could be spent on studying), wasting potential (that could advance our life prospects), wasting space (that could be used productively). The breeding of idleness is a judgement about how we are occupying this time and space. The table is a wasted space, and in turn it produces us as a waste of space. It is regulated by a circular logic. We are wasting time, which is wasting space; this in turn produces us as the wasters of that space. The space of the table might be used more purposefully, but not while it is breeding us. The nun’s note to us might have read, “You are a waste of space because you are wasting time.” Time is thus spatialised. The ‘table of idleness’ has returned to me in recent times as a partial metaphor for the paradigm of urban renewal. Contemporary urban renewal and regeneration programs in places like the UK, Europe, North America and Australia are inspired to use space more productively, and to design and develop urban space in ways that enable the production of vibrant, clean, safer places where cultural diversity might be experienced as cosmopolitan chic. Tethering modern urban design to property development and the trend to ‘lifestyle’ based local economies, urban renewal is a strategy sweeping most postindustrial economies. Suburbs ripe for these renewal, regeneration or revitalisation projects are identified in part through the presence of dormant, derelict spaces, in other words, wasted spaces from bygone eras. Typically these suburbs show the signs of neglect associated with economic change. They have become dormant as large-scale deindustrialisation and the development of large shopping malls away from urban centres sees people exiting the suburbs to work and shop. Street life diminishes and local businesses struggle or close, leaving landscapes of decaying infrastructure and urban decline. Urban renewal apprehends such idle spaces as wasted opportunities that can be designed and developed into a usefulness that provides lifestyles of comfort, vitality and urban safety. But these wasted spaces also produce shadow wastes. Much like our table of indolence and time wasting, these spaces are considered breeding grounds, not just for a sense of urban dullness and decay but, more worryingly, for generating urban sloth and danger. They become the breeding grounds for what is now commonly referred to as ‘antisocial behaviour’ or ‘urban incivility’. That is, those who ‘unproductively’ and ‘dangerously’ occupy particular urban public spaces. In the inner western Melbourne suburb of Footscray, which is currently undergoing renewal, these bodies are identified as the unruly public drinkers and drug users, black African men who have created a street café culture, and people with mental health difficulties who occupy the streets and who at times display anomalous bodily comportment and atypical civil demeanours. Many of these people are poor and sometimes engage in unconventional modalities of conviviality. A contemporary urban version of the idle schoolgirls in many ways, they sit at tables, on footpaths, in stairwells, on seats, in parks and often linger around railways stations. They are the unproductive, idle, culturally defunct bodies of the present day. It is useful to hold these bodies in mind when considering the waste products, and waste producers, of present time In the discourse of urban renewal, Footscray is depicted as a once thriving regional hub that has been ‘in decline’ since the 1980s. Decline here is code for the loss of industry and retail business alongside rising levels of poverty, cultural diversity, and public crime (predominantly drug related and property crime). A suburb in the grip of uneven gentrifying change, its dominant image of danger and diversity still sabotages its ‘lifestyle potential’. It remains a wasted space.The nexus of urban renewal and wasted space reveals a double obligation of renewal programs. The need to remove the waste, to ‘clean up’ the debris and decay of a bygone industrial and suburban era and to ‘clean out’ its progeny, the bodies borne of, and now further wasting, this wasted space. In this sense idle space as waste entails a bio-politics that produces particular bodies as a ‘waste of space’. Urban Dictionary defines waste of space thus: 1. A person devoid of any redeeming characteristics; 2. Someone who consumes valuable resources without contributing anything to society. A bum. A drain on the economy. 3. A person or occasionally an object which nobody is fond of. In fact, most people hate this person/thing and find it completely useless. 4. Completely useless people. 5. Waste of room, usually on computer hard drives, that could be used for better things. It is therefore worth considering the conceptual and historical trajectory of the link between waste and idleness as a prelude to considering in more detail some of the anxieties associated with the disorderly urban effects of idle bodies in wasted spaces. Waste as Improper UseAt its most elemental, waste is a judgment. Waste as profligate or excess consumption, or as leftover material, or as something that has deteriorated through neglect or lack of effort, is a moral reckoning. Judgments about waste signal a moral economy far more than they do a fiscal one. In his book On Garbage, John Scanlan notes that ‘waste’ in its old and middle English modes referred to a land or an environment that was unsuitable to human habitation. This reference was gradually replaced by the corresponding terms ‘wilderness’ or ‘desert’, thus marking the beginning of waste as reprimand. Bringing together modern and pre-modern language usage, Scanlan suggests that waste at its most general refers to an imbalance (22). Whether it is rubbish, junk, clutter or other extravagance excess, and squander, waste is too much, but also too little in the sense of ‘not making the best use of something’ (time, resources, opportunities). Pared right down waste refers to the proper use of something. Scanlan again: “‘waste’ carries force because of the way in which it symbolises an idea of improper use, and therefore operates within a more or less moral economy of the right, the good, the proper, their opposites and all values in between” (22 my emphasis). In the contemporary urban domain this might refer to the overuse of vast tracts of land exhausted or wrecked by industry, the abandonment or underutilisation of shops and commons, or the improper and uncivil use of the space that lingers. Scanlan traces this idea of waste as improper use back to the relation between self and natural space that inheres in seventeenth century English political philosophy. Referring to the work of John Locke in particular, waste is conceived as the original condition of the chaos of nature. For Locke selfhood became linked to freedom from this chaos and entailed the virtue, indeed the necessity, of human labour and intervention to ward off the potential ruin that nature may inflict. Locke outlines a philosophical and ethical basis for claims to property over land and natural resources such that “claims to property ownership rest on an idea of the proper use of land which entails the appropriation (through the use of one’s labour) of its previously unused potential” (Scanlan 24). Hence, “Land that is left wholly to nature, that hath no improvement of pasturage, tillage, or planting, is called, as indeed it is, waste; and we shall see the benefit of it amount to little more than nothing.” (Locke quoted in Scanlan 24). This Lockean understanding of waste has come to be associated with his theories of property rights, but, as Scanlan points out, it was also driven by the idea that any benefits derived from property were “dependent on a duty to a higher power” (26).Nature is construed as useless and chaotic (waste) in the absence of human intervention. Property and ‘land use’ were not just about use by humans, but use for humans in order to defend them against the unruliness of nature and the disorder and ruin it might issue. The danger of going to rack and ruin through the disorder of untamed waste is crucial to this understanding. To neglect nature through idleness or lack of intervention is to invite ruin. Idleness thus breeds waste. There is a link here between land and character, for doing nothing or not doing things properly corresponds with improper character. Scanlan advances that waste can best be understood here as an indeterminacy signaling the need for form and discipline. He notes that Montaigne in his essay On Idleness compares wasted land with the idle mind, which when undisciplined allows wildness of character and purpose. Reminiscent of schoolgirls at their table of idleness, the defunct bodies of urban life are seen to be without purpose or goal and to be wasteful of life itself. As a consequence they are deemed to be inviting havoc and all its destructive tendencies. This fear of the indeterminacy of waste, says Scanlan, portends the social and cultural links between “waste, imperfection, disorder and ruin” (25). While concepts of properness and proper use have multiple histories, it is not difficult to see how these seventeenth century Enlightenment associations of proper use and rights to property underpinned the period of new imperialism of the nineteenth century. We might say then that waste features prominently in the imperialist imaginary. Codes of properness, as in the proper use of things, are time and place specific, hence interrogating the meanings of ‘proper use’ entails a prior enquiry into the framing of time. It is linear time, that is, time as progress which frames imperial and colonial history. Progress is movement away from scarcity, disorder and deficiency towards enlightened reason, discipline and mastery. However, this notion of progress, which is central to ideologies of both Enlightenment and imperialism, is always dependent on a shadow other: backwardness. Anne McClintock emphasises a corresponding need to always travel backwards in time in order to apprehend the colonised spaces and people as existing in an eternally prior time, as obsolete historical subjects. According to McClintock, imperialist discourse relies on two principal tropes: panoptical time and anachronistic space. She explains that the eighteenth century historians and empiricists required “a visual paradigm […] to display evolutionary progress as a measurable spectacle.” Progress is fundamentally a visually driven process and narrative. Panoptical time is depicted as “the image of global history consumed—at a glance—in a single spectacle from the point of privileged invisibility” (37). Marginal groups are placed outside of history in the sense that they can be seen by the bourgeoisie, who itself remains unseen. In this spectacle of progress, history appears static and fixed, but this is countered through the invention of the trope of anachronistic space. This space denies the agency of the archaic subjects that exist outside and therefore threaten history as progress. McClintock explains: “the agency of women, the colonised and the industrial working class are disavowed and projected onto anachronistic space: prehistoric, atavistic and irrational, inherently out of place in the historical time of modernity” (40). If imperial panoptical time produces inferior subjects who are “hemmed in” (Fanon 29) by anterior time and anachronistic space, contemporary urban renewal projects prompt questions about their time, the time of now. How might we conceptualise the time/space of now, and are these regulatory technologies of panoptical time and anachronistic space at work in the time/space of now? In what way is urban renewal a contemporary “measurable spectacle of progress” in an age of postindustrial neoliberalism?Urban Space, Proper Use and Idle BodiesIn a recent article on sexual politics and torture, Judith Butler argues that the ways in which debates of this nature are framed “are already imbued with the problem of time, of progress in particular, and in certain notions of what it means to unfold a future of freedom in time” (1). Butler reminds us that hegemonic conceptions of progress endure, and continue to define themselves over and against a pre-modern temporality produced for self-legitimation. This narrative of progressive modernity continues to spatialise time. For her it is the framing of modernity as sexual freedom that apprehends others as outmoded and stuck in anachronistic space. The time of now in the urban setting is the time of neoliberal modernity, a time that is also driven by spectacle. The vision of freedom through lifestyle consumption similarly identifies others who are outside this time and who threaten it. Neoliberalism as the ideology of a radically free market that institutes economic deregulation, tariff reduction, public financial support for business and its shareholders, and the reduced role of government in areas of welfare and social expenditure, the effects of which are discernable at the urban scale. For Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore, “actually existing neoliberalism” is witnessed in what they call the “creative destruction” that inheres in the urbanisation of neoliberalism. In this materialisation of neoliberal time, modernity and progress continue to be driven visually. Thus this neoliberal/urban nexus depends on further sub-units of time, nominated by Brenner and Theodore as moments of (visual) “destruction and creation.” A series of examples of such creative destruction are offered by Brenner and Theodore and include the destruction of rights through the creation policing and social exclusion agendas. They argue that the mechanism of “re-regulating urban civility” entails moments of destroying notions of the liberal city in which all inhabitants are entitled to social services and political rights, and moments of creating zero tolerance policing, new forms of social surveillance and new policies to prevent social exclusion. The destructive moment of “re-representing the city” recasts the postwar image of the working class through visions of urban disorder, dangerous classes of people and of economic decline, involves the creative moment of entrepreneurial discourses about the need for revitalisation, renewal and reinvestment in urban areas (372). The ‘proper use’ of neoliberal urban space depends on the dynamic of destruction/creation through a new consumer-driven urban entrepreneurialism. Urban renewal as proper neoliberal usage is a re-ordering of space to make it fit for purpose. Proper use here follows the Lockean impulse of human intervention through planning, design and redevelopment, is now apprehended not as service to God, but capitulation to the dictates of the neoliberal agendas implemented by the combined forces of the state and capital. The moral economy of waste is at work in the moral economy of urban renewal, As Sharon Zukin elaborates: “the look and feel of cities reflect decisions about what and who should be visible and what should not, concepts of order and disorder, and on uses of aesthetic power” (7). At the crux of waste, and of urban renewal, is an anxiety about visibility, therefore the persistently visible presence of waste as idleness, has become an acute focus of contemporary urban governance and police ‘law and order’ campaigns. Modernity and progress must materialise as an urban aesthetic that is purposeful and vibrant, not idle and wasteful.The indeterminacy of waste thus becomes determined by its attribution as ‘garbage’ to be disposed of, banished, evicted, cast out. Waste converted to garbage is made into an object disconnected from the process of its production. Garbage is a noun rather than a verb, and as such, it conceals process. Creative destruction is again at play; waste is destroyed (as process) and garbage (as object) is produced. In the suburbs this conversion from process to object is narrated through the objectifying language of anti social behavior and incivility. I recently attended Maribyrnong council meeting (Maribyrnong being the local government authority for Footscray), where a discussion about cleaning up the central activity district quickly became a discussion about “those antisocial people.” This was not the terminology of council officers, but of a number of ratepayers. This anxiety about the image of the area is reflected also in the minutes of a further council meeting where differences between the stigmatised image of Footscray was compared with the changing images of other inner municipalities: “The visibility of these antisocial behaviours and the associated negative impact has significantly diminished in these [other] areas due to the gentrification of the inner-city, and the associated revitalisation of street activities. [Our municipality] is on the cusp of a similar transformation. In the meantime the social issues … continue to remain more visible” (71). These bodies are the garbage to be removed from the urban landscape so it might be made anew.The bodies at the imaginative centre of this cleansing impulse are those bodies that one might see as the waste products of neoliberalism. Loic Wacquant suggests that today’s urban policies focus on “making the dangerous and dirty classes invisible.” This, he argues is “leading to a cleansing of the urban environment and the streets from the physical and human detritus wrought by economic deregulation and welfare retrenchment” (198). Consequently, waste in urban renewal both conceals and reveals the shadow side of contemporary cultural politics. Public policy is increasingly concerned with the detritus, yet the failed and wasted bodies that litter the streets and stations, these bodies and their predicaments, as with other garbage objects, are steadfastly disconnected from the policies and processes that produced and continue to ‘breed’ them. The moral economy of urban renewal targets a cluster of wastes—idle bodies, wasted time, and improper uses of space—all fused in an endless reproduction of uselessness. This coalescence of wastes and wasters forms the spectacle of contemporary urban decay and failure. Neoliberal urban renewal begins to mimic Locke’s taming of nature, making it useful as a defense against ruin and disorder. The uncultivated bodies of urban waste are contemporary versions of Lockean wildness. Being of such poor character they have no right to occupy the property in which they idle. Through the panoptical time of neoliberalism they are cast as remarkable spectacles of failure, out of place in this time and space. They are wasting time, and are themselves a waste of space. References Brenner, Neil and Nik Theodore. “Cities and the Geographies of ‘Actually Existing Neoliberalism’.” Antipode 34.3 (July 2002): 349-79.Butler, Judith. “Sexual Politics, Torture and Secular Time.” The British Journal of Sociology 59.1 (2008): 1-23.Fanon, Frantz. Wretched of the Earth. London: Penguin, 1963.Maribyrnong City Council. Ordinary Meeting Minutes, File no: HEA-60-014, 29 April. 2010.McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. London: Routledge, 1995.Scanlan, John. On Garbage. London: Reaktion, 2005.Wacquant, Loic. “Relocating Gentrification: The Working Class, Science and the State in Recent Urban Research.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32.1 (2008): 198-205.Zukin, Sharon. The Culture of Cities. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1995.

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There is, in our sense of place, little cognisance of what lies underground. Yet our sense of place, instinctive, unconscious, primeval, has its own underground: the secret spaces which mirror our insides; the world beneath the skin. Our roots lie beneath the ground, with the minerals and the dead. (Hughes 83) The-Home-and-Away-Game Imagine the earth-grounded, “diagrammatological” trajectory of a footballer who as one member of a team is psyching himself up before the start of a game. The siren blasts its trumpet call. The footballer bursts out of the pavilion (where this psyching up has taken place) to engage in the opening bounce or kick of the game. And then: running, leaping, limping after injury, marking, sliding, kicking, and possibly even passing out from concussion. Finally, the elation accompanying the final siren, after which hugs, handshakes and raised fists conclude the actual match on the football oval. This exit from the pavilion, the course the player takes during the game itself, and return to the pavilion, forms a combination of stasis and movement, and a return to exhausted stasis again, that every player engages with regardless of the game code. Examined from a “diagrammatological” perspective, a perspective Rowan Wilken (following in the path of Gilles Deleuze and W. J. T. Mitchell) understands as “a generative process: a ‘metaphor’ or way of thinking — diagrammatic, diagrammatological thinking — which in turn, is linked to poetic thinking” (48), this footballer’s scenario arises out of an aerial perspective that depicts the actual spatial trajectory the player takes during the course of a game. It is a diagram that is digitally encoded via a sensor on the footballer’s body, and being an electronically encoded diagram it can also make available multiple sets of data such as speed, heartbeat, blood pressure, maybe even brain-wave patterns. From this limited point of view there is only one footballer’s playing trajectory to consider; various groupings within the team, the whole team itself, and the diagrammatological depiction of its games with various other teams might also be possible. This singular imagining though is itself an actuality: as a diagram it is encoded as a graphic image by a satellite hovering around the earth with a Global Positioning System (GPS) reading the sensor attached to the footballer which then digitally encodes this diagrammatological trajectory for appraisal later by the player, coach, team and management. In one respect, this practice is another example of a willing self-surveillance critical to explaining the reflexive subject and its attribute of continuous self-improvement. According to Docker, Official Magazine of the Fremantle Football Club, this is a technique the club uses as a part of game/play assessment, a system that can provide a “running map” for each player equipped with such a tracking device during a game. As the Fremantle Club’s Strength and Conditioning Coach Ben Tarbox says of this tactic, “We’re getting a physiological profile that has started to build a really good picture of how individual players react during a game” (21). With a little extra effort (and some sizeable computer processing grunt) this two dimensional linear graphic diagram of a footballer working the football ground could also form the raw material for a three-dimensional animation, maybe a virtual reality game, even a hologram. It could also be used to sideline a non-performing player. Now try another related but different imagining: what if this diagrammatological trajectory could be enlarged a little to include the possibility that this same player’s movements could be mapped out by the idea of home-and-away games; say over the course of a season, maybe even a whole career, for instance? No doubt, a wide range of differing diagrammatological perspectives might suggest themselves. My own particular refinement of this movement/stasis on the footballer’s part suggests my own distinctive comings and goings to and from my own specific piece of home country. And in this incessantly domestic/real world reciprocity, in this diurnally repetitive leaving and coming back to home country, might it be plausible to think of “Home as Capital of the Region”? If, as Walter Benjamin suggests in the prelude to his monumental Arcades Project, “Paris — the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” could it be that both in and through my comings and goings to and from this selfsame home country, my own burgeoning sense of regionality is constituted in every minute-by-minutiae of lived experience? Could it be that this feeling about home is manifested in my every day-to-night manoeuvre of home-and-away-and-away-and-home-making, of every singular instance of exit, play/engage, and the return home? “Home, Capital of the Region” then examines the idea that my home is that part of the country which is the still-point of eternal return, the bedrock to which I retreat after the daily grind, and the point from which I start out and do it all again the next day. It employs, firstly, this ‘diagrammatological’ perspective to illustrate the point that this stasis/movement across country can make an electronic record of my own psychic self-surveillance and actualisation in-situ. And secondly, the architectural plan of the domestic home (examined through the perspective of critical regionalism) is used as a conduit to illustrate how I am physically embedded in country. Lastly, intermingling these digressive threads is chora, Plato’s notion of embodied place and itself an ancient regional rendering of this eternal return to the beginning, the place where the essential diversity of country decisively enters the soul. Chora: Core of Regionality Kevin Lynch writes that, “Our senses are local, while our experience is regional” (10), a combination that suggests this regional emphasis on home-and-away-making might be a useful frame of reference (simultaneously spatiotemporal, both a visceral and encoded communication) for me to include as a crucial vector in my own life-long learning package. Regionality (as, variously, a sub-generic categorisation and an extension/concentration of nationality, as well as a recently re-emerged friend/antagonist to a global understanding) infuses my world of home with a grounded footing in country, one that is a site of an Eternal Return to the Beginning in the micro-world of the everyday. This is a point John Sallis discusses at length in his analysis of Plato’s Timaeus and its founding notion of regionality: chora. More extended absences away from home-base are of course possible but one’s return to home on most days and for most nights is a given of post/modern, maybe even of ancient everyday experience. Even for the continually shifting nomad, nightfall in some part of the country brings the rest and recreation necessary for the next day’s wanderings. This fundamental question of an Eternal Return to the Beginning arises as a crucial element of the method in Plato’s Timaeus, a seemingly “unstructured” mythic/scientific dialogue about the origins and structure of both the psychically and the physically implaced world. In the Timaeus, “incoherence is especially obvious in the way the natural sequence in which a narrative would usually unfold is interrupted by regressions, corrections, repetitions, and abrupt new beginnings” (Gadamer 160). Right in the middle of the Timaeus, in between its sections on the “Work of Reason” and the “Work of Necessity”, sits chora, both an actual spatial and bodily site where my being intersects with my becoming, and where my lived life criss-crosses the various arts necessary to articulating a recorded version of that life. Every home is a grounded chora-logical timespace harness guiding its occupant’s thoughts, feelings and actions. My own regionally implaced chora (an example of which is the diagrammatological trajectory already outlined above as my various everyday comings and goings, of me acting in and projecting myself into context) could in part be understood as a graphical realisation of the extent of my movements and stationary rests in my own particular timespace trajectory. The shorthand for this process is ‘embedded’. Gregory Ulmer writes of chora that, “While chorography as a term is close to choreography, it duplicates a term that already exists in the discipline of geography, thus establishing a valuable resonance for a rhetoric of invention concerned with the history of ‘place’ in relation to memory” (Heuretics 39, original italics). Chorography is the geographic discipline for the systematic study and analysis of regions. Chora, home, country and regionality thus form an important multi-dimensional zone of interplay in memorialising the game of everyday life. In light of these observations I might even go so far as to suggest that this diagrammatological trajectory (being both digital and GPS originated) is part of the increasingly electrate condition that guides the production of knowledge in any global/regional context. This last point is a contextual connection usefully examined in Alan J. Scott’s Regions and the World Economy: The Coming Shape of Global Production, Competition, and Political Order and Michael Storper’s The Regional World: Territorial Development in a Global Economy. Their analyses explicitly suggest that the symbiosis between globalisation and regionalisation has been gathering pace since at least the end of World War Two and the Bretton Woods agreement. Our emerging understanding of electracy also happens to be Gregory Ulmer’s part-remedy for shifting the ground under the intense debates surrounding il/literacy in the current era (see, in particular, Internet Invention). And, for Tony Bennett, Michael Emmison and John Frow’s analysis of “Australian Everyday Cultures” (“Media Culture and the Home” 57–86), it is within the home that our un.conscious understanding of electronic media is at its most intense, a pattern that emerges in the longer term through receiving telegrams, compiling photo albums, listening to the radio, home- and video-movies, watching the evening news on television, and logging onto the computer in the home-office, media-room or home-studio. These various generalisations (along with this diagrammatological view of my comings and goings to and from the built space of home), all point indiscriminately to a productive confusion surrounding the sedentary and nomadic opposition/conjunction. If natural spaces are constituted in nouns like oceans, forests, plains, grasslands, steppes, deserts, rivers, tidal interstices, farmland etc. (and each categorisation here relies on the others for its existence and demarcation) then built space is often seen as constituting its human sedentary equivalent. For Deleuze and Guatteri (in A Thousand Plateaus, “1227: Treatise on Nomadology — The War Machine”) these natural spaces help instigate a nomadic movement across localities and regions. From a nomadology perspective, these smooth spaces unsettle a scientific, numerical calculation, sometimes even aesthetic demarcation and order. If they are marked at all, it is by heterogenous and differential forces, energised through constantly oscillating intensities. A Thousand Plateaus is careful though not to elevate these smooth nomadic spaces over the more sedentary spaces of culture and power (372–373). Nonetheless, as Edward S. Casey warns, “In their insistence on becoming and movement, however, the authors of A Thousand Plateaus overlook the placial potential of settled dwelling — of […] ‘built places’” (309, original italics). Sedentary, settled dwelling centred on home country may have a crust of easy legibility and order about it but it also formats a locally/regionally specific nomadic quality, a point underscored above in the diagrammatological perspective. The sedentary tendency also emerges once again in relation to home in the architectural drafting of the domestic domicile. The Real Estate Revolution When Captain Cook planted the British flag in the sand at Botany Bay in 1770 and declared the country it spiked as Crown Land and henceforth will come under the ownership of an English sovereign, it was also the moment when white Australia’s current fascination with real estate was conceived. In the wake of this spiking came the intense anxiety over Native Title that surfaced in late twentieth century Australia when claims of Indigenous land grabs would repossess suburban homes. While easily dismissed as hyperbole, a rhetorical gesture intended to arouse this very anxiety, its emergence is nonetheless an indication of the potential for political and psychic unsettling at the heart of the ownership and control of built place, or ‘settled dwelling’ in the Australian context. And here it would be wise to include not just the gridded, architectural quality of home-building and home-making, but also the home as the site of the family romance, another source of unsettling as much as a peaceful calming. Spreading out from the boundaries of the home are the built spaces of fences, bridges, roads, railways, airport terminals (along with their interconnecting pathways), which of course brings us back to the communications infrastructure which have so often followed alongside the development of transport infrastructure. These and other elements represent this conglomerate of built space, possibly the most significant transformation of natural space that humanity has brought about. For the purposes of this meditation though it is the more personal aspect of built space — my home and regional embeddedness, along with their connections into the global electrosphere — that constitutes the primary concern here. For a sedentary, striated space to settle into an unchallenged existence though requires a repression of the highest order, primarily because of the home’s proximity to everyday life, of the latter’s now fading ability to sometimes leave its presuppositions well enough alone. In settled, regionally experienced space, repressions are more difficult to abstract away, they are lived with on a daily basis, which also helps to explain the extra intensity brought to their sometimes-unsettling quality. Inversely, and encased in this globalised electro-spherical ambience, home cannot merely be a place where one dwells within avoiding those presuppositions, I take them with me when I travel and they come back with me from afar. This is a point obliquely reflected in Pico Iyer’s comment that “Australians have so flexible a sense of home, perhaps, that they can make themselves at home anywhere” (185). While our sense of home may well be, according to J. Douglas Porteous, “the territorial core” of our being, when other arrangements of space and knowledge shift it must inevitably do so as well. In these shifts of spatial affiliation (aided and abetted by regionalisation, globalisation and electronic knowledge), the built place of home can no longer be considered exclusively under the illusion of an autonomous sanctuary wholly guaranteed by capitalist property relations, one of the key factors in its attraction. These shifts in the cultural, economic and psychic relation of home to country are important to a sense of local and regional implacement. The “feeling” of autonomy and security involved in home occupation and/or ownership designates a component of this implacement, a point leading to Eric Leed’s comment that, “By the sixteenth century, literacy had become one of the definitive signs — along with the possession of property and a permanent residence — of an independent social status” (53). Globalising and regionalising forces make this feeling of autonomy and security dynamic, shifting the ground of home, work-place practices and citizenship allegiances in the process. Gathering these wide-ranging forces impacting on psychic and built space together is the emergence of critical regionalism as a branch of architectonics, considered here as a theory of domestic architecture. Critical Regionality Critical regionalism emerged out of the collective thinking of Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis (Tropical Architecture; Critical Regionalism), and as these authors themselves acknowledge, was itself deeply influenced by the work of Lewis Mumford during the first part of the twentieth century when he was arguing against the authority of the international style in architecture, a style epitomised by the Bauhaus movement. It is Kenneth Frampton’s essay, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance” that deliberately takes this question of critical regionalism and makes it a part of a domestic architectonic project. In many ways the ideas critical regionalism espouses can themselves be a microcosm of this concomitantly emerging global/regional polis. With public examples of built-form the power of the centre is on display by virtue of a building’s enormous size and frequently high-cultural aesthetic power. This is a fact restated again and again from the ancient world’s agora to Australia’s own political bunker — its Houses of Parliament in Canberra. While Frampton discusses a range of aspects dealing with the universal/implaced axis across his discussion, it is points five and six that deserve attention from a domestically implaced perspective. Under the sub-heading, “Culture Versus Nature: Topography, Context, Climate, Light and Tectonic Form” is where he writes that, Here again, one touches in concrete terms this fundamental opposition between universal civilization and autochthonous culture. The bulldozing of an irregular topography into a flat site is clearly a technocratic gesture which aspires to a condition of absolute placelessness, whereas the terracing of the same site to receive the stepped form of a building is an engagement in the act of “cultivating” the site. (26, original italics) The “totally flat datum” that the universalising tendency sometimes presupposes is, within the critical regionalist perspective, an erroneous assumption. The “cultivation” of a site for the design of a building illustrates the point that built space emerges out of an interaction between parallel phenomena as they contrast and/or converge in a particular set of timespace co-ordinates. These are phenomena that could include (but are not limited to) geomorphic data like soil and rock formations, seismic activity, inclination and declension; climatic considerations in the form of wind patterns, temperature variations, rainfall patterns, available light and dark, humidity and the like; the building context in relation to the cardinal points of north, south, east, and west, along with their intermediary positions. There are also architectural considerations in the form of available building materials and personnel to consider. The social, psychological and cultural requirements of the building’s prospective in-dwellers are intermingled with all these phenomena. This is not so much a question of where to place the air conditioning system but the actuality of the way the building itself is placed on its site, or indeed if that site should be built on at all. A critical regionalist building practice, then, is autochthonous to the degree that a full consideration of this wide range of in-situ interactions is taken into consideration in the development of its design plan. And given this autochthonous quality of the critical regionalist project, it also suggests that the architectural design plan itself (especially when it utilised in conjunction with CAD and virtual reality simulations), might be the better model for designing electrate-centred projects rather than writing or even the script. The proliferation of ‘McMansions’ across many Australian suburbs during the 1990s (generally, oversized domestic buildings designed in the abstract with little or no thought to the above mentioned elements, on bulldozed sites, with powerful air-conditioning systems, and no verandas or roof eves to speak of) demonstrates the continuing influence of a universal, centralising dogma in the realm of built place. As summer temperatures start to climb into the 40°C range all these air-conditioners start to hum in unison, which in turn raises the susceptibility of the supporting infrastructure to collapse under the weight of an overbearing electrical load. The McMansion is a clear example of a built form that is envisioned more so in a drafting room, a space where the architect is remote-sensing the locational specificities. In this envisioning (driven more by a direct line-of-sight idiom dominant in “flat datum” and economic considerations rather than architectural or experiential ones), the tactile is subordinated, which is the subject of Frampton’s sixth point: It is symptomatic of the priority given to sight that we find it necessary to remind ourselves that the tactile is an important dimension in the perception of built form. One has in mind a whole range of complementary sensory perceptions which are registered by the labile body: the intensity of light, darkness, heat and cold; the feeling of humidity; the aroma of material; the almost palpable presence of masonry as the body senses it own confinement; the momentum of an induced gait and the relative inertia of the body as it traverses the floor; the echoing resonance of our own footfall. (28) The point here is clear: in its wider recognition of, and the foregrounding of my body’s full range of sensate capacities in relation to both natural and built space, the critical regionalist approach to built form spreads its meaning-making capacities across a broader range of knowledge modalities. This tactility is further elaborated in more thoroughly personal ways by Margaret Morse in her illuminating essay, “Home: Smell, Taste, Posture, Gleam”. Paradoxically, this synaesthetic, syncretic approach to bodily meaning-making in a built place, regional milieu intensely concentrates the site-centred locus of everyday life, while simultaneously, the electronic knowledge that increasingly underpins it expands both my body’s and its region’s knowledge-making possibilities into a global gestalt, sometimes even a cosmological one. It is a paradoxical transformation that makes us look anew at social, cultural and political givens, even objective and empirical understandings, especially as they are articulated through national frames of reference. Domestic built space then is a kind of micro-version of the multi-function polis where work, pleasure, family, rest, public display and privacy intermingle. So in both this reduction and expansion in the constitution of domestic home life, one that increasingly represents the location of the production of knowledge, built place represents a concentration of energy that forces us to re-imagine border-making, order, and the dynamic interplay of nomadic movement and sedentary return, a point that echoes Nicolas Rothwell’s comment that “every exile has in it a homecoming” (80). Albeit, this is a knowledge-making milieu with an expanded range of modalities incorporated and expressed through a wide range of bodily intensities not simply cognitive ones. Much of the ambiguous discontent manifested in McMansion style domiciles across many Western countries might be traced to the fact that their occupants have had little or no say in the way those domiciles have been designed and/or constructed. In Heidegger’s terms, they have not thought deeply enough about “dwelling” in that building, although with the advent of the media room the question of whether a “building” securely borders both “dwelling” and “thinking” is now open to question. As anxieties over border-making at all scales intensifies, the complexities and un/sureties of natural and built space take ever greater hold of the psyche, sometimes through the advance of a “high level of critical self-consciousness”, a process Frampton describes as a “double mediation” of world culture and local conditions (21). Nearly all commentators warn of a nostalgic, romantic or a sentimental regionalism, the sum total of which is aimed at privileging the local/regional and is sometimes utilised as a means of excluding the global or universal, sometimes even the national (Berry 67). Critical regionalism is itself a mediating factor between these dispositions, working its methods and practices through my own psyche into the local, the regional, the national and the global, rejecting and/or accepting elements of these domains, as my own specific context, in its multiplicity, demands it. If the politico-economic and cultural dimensions of this global/regional world have tended to undermine the process of border-making across a range of scales, we can see in domestic forms of built place the intense residue of both their continuing importance and an increased dependency on this electro-mediated world. This is especially apparent in those domiciles whose media rooms (with their satellite dishes, telephone lines, computers, television sets, games consuls, and music stereos) are connecting them to it in virtuality if not in reality. Indeed, the thought emerges (once again keeping in mind Eric Leed’s remark on the literate-configured sense of autonomy that is further enhanced by a separate physical address and residence) that the intense importance attached to domestically orientated built place by globally/regionally orientated peoples will figure as possibly the most viable means via which this sense of autonomy will transfer to electronic forms of knowledge. If, however, this here domestic habitué turns his gaze away from the screen that transports me into this global/regional milieu and I focus my attention on the physicality of the building in which I dwell, I once again stand in the presence of another beginning. This other beginning is framed diagrammatologically by the building’s architectural plans (usually conceived in either an in-situ, autochthonous, or a universal manner), and is a graphical conception that anchors my body in country long after the architects and builders have packed up their tools and left. This is so regardless of whether a home is built, bought, rented or squatted in. Ihab Hassan writes that, “Home is not where one is pushed into the light, but where one gathers it into oneself to become light” (417), an aphorism that might be rephrased as follows: “Home is not where one is pushed into the country, but where one gathers it into oneself to become country.” For the in-and-out-and-around-and-about domestic dweller of the twenty-first century, then, home is where both regional and global forms of country decisively enter the soul via the conduits of the virtuality of digital flows and the reality of architectural footings. Acknowledgements I’m indebted to both David Fosdick and Phil Roe for alerting me to the importance to the Fremantle Dockers Football Club. The research and an original draft of this essay were carried out under the auspices of a PhD scholarship from Central Queensland University, and from whom I would also like to thank Denis Cryle and Geoff Danaher for their advice. References Benjamin, Walter. “Paris — the Capital of the Nineteenth Century.” Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. Trans. Quintin Hoare. London: New Left Books, 1973. 155–176. Bennett, Tony, Michael Emmison and John Frow. Accounting for Tastes: Australian Everyday Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Berry, Wendell. “The Regional Motive.” A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural. San Diego: Harcourt Brace. 63–70. Casey, Edward S. The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minneapolis P, 1987. Deleuze, Gilles. “The Diagram.” The Deleuze Reader. Ed. Constantin Boundas. Trans. Constantin Boundas and Jacqueline Code. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. 193–200. Frampton, Kenneth. “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance.” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Post-Modern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983. 16–30. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. “Idea and Reality in Plato’s Timaeus.” Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato. Trans. P. Christopher Smith. New Haven: Yale UP, 1980. 156–193. Hassan, Ihab. “How Australian Is It?” The Best Australian Essays. Ed. Peter Craven. Melbourne: Black Inc., 2000. 405–417. Heidegger, Martin. “Building Dwelling Thinking.” Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Row, 1971. 145–161. Hughes, John. The Idea of Home: Autobiographical Essays. Sydney: Giramondo, 2004. Iyer, Pico. “Australia 1988: Five Thousand Miles from Anywhere.” Falling Off the Map: Some Lonely Places of the World. London: Jonathon Cape, 1993. 173–190. “Keeping Track.” Docker, Official Magazine of the Fremantle Football Club. Edition 3, September (2005): 21. Leed, Eric. “‘Voice’ and ‘Print’: Master Symbols in the History of Communication.” The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture. Ed. Kathleen Woodward. Madison, Wisconsin: Coda Press, 1980. 41–61. Lefaivre, Liane and Alexander Tzonis. “The Suppression and Rethinking of Regionalism and Tropicalism After 1945.” Tropical Architecture: Critical Regionalism in the Age of Globalization. Eds. Alexander Tzonis, Liane Lefaivre and Bruno Stagno. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Academy, 2001. 14–58. Lefaivre, Liane and Alexander Tzonis. Critical Regionalism: Architecture and Identity in a Globalized World. New York: Prestel, 2003. Lynch, Kevin. Managing the Sense of a Region. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT P, 1976. Mitchell, W. J. T. “Diagrammatology.” Critical Inquiry 7.3 (1981): 622–633. Morse, Margaret. “Home: Smell, Taste, Posture, Gleam.” Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place. Ed. Hamid Naficy. New York and London: Routledge, 1999. 63–74. Plato. Timaeus and Critias. Trans. Desmond Lee. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1973. Porteous, J. Douglas. “Home: The Territorial Core.” Geographical Review LXVI (1976): 383-390. Rothwell, Nicolas. Wings of the Kite-Hawk: A Journey into the Heart of Australia. Sydney: Pidador, 2003. Sallis, John. Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus. Bloomington: Indianapolis UP, 1999. Scott, Allen J. Regions and the World Economy: The Coming Shape of Global Production, Competition, and Political Order. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Storper, Michael. The Regional World: Territorial Development in a Global Economy. New York: The Guildford Press, 1997. Ulmer, Gregory L. Heuretics: The Logic of Invention. New York: John Hopkins UP, 1994. Ulmer, Gregory. Internet Invention: Literacy into Electracy. Longman: Boston, 2003. Wilken, Rowan. “Diagrammatology.” Illogic of Sense: The Gregory Ulmer Remix. Eds. Darren Tofts and Lisa Gye. Alt-X Press, 2007. 48–60. Available at http://www.altx.com/ebooks/ulmer.html. (Retrieved 12 June 2007)

Introduction: Brutal?The word “brutal” has associations with cruelty, inhumanity, and aggression. Within the field of architecture, however, the term “Brutalism” refers to a post-World War II Modernist style, deriving from the French phrase betón brut, which means raw concrete (Clement 18). Core traits of Brutalism include functionalist design, daring geometry, overbearing scale, and the blatant exposure of structural materials, chiefly concrete and steel (Meades 1).The emergence of Brutalism coincided with chronic housing shortages in European countries ravaged by World War II (Power 5) and government-sponsored slum clearance in the UK (Power 190; Baker). Brutalism’s promise to accommodate an astonishing number of civilians within a minimal area through high-rise configurations and elevated walkways was alluring to architects and city planners (High Rise Dreams). Concrete was the material of choice due to its affordability, durability, and versatility; it also allowed buildings to be erected quickly (Allen and Iano 622).The Brutalist style was used for cultural centres, such as the Perth Concert Hall in Western Australia, educational institutions such as the Yale School of Architecture, and government buildings such as the Secretariat Building in Chandigarh, India. However, as pioneering Brutalist architect Alison Smithson explained, the style achieved full expression by “thinking on a much bigger scale somehow than if you only got [sic] one house to do” (Smithson and Smithson, Conversation 40). Brutalism, therefore, lent itself to the design of large residential complexes. It was consequently used worldwide for public housing developments, that is, residences built by a government authority with the aim of providing affordable housing. Notable examples include the Western City Gate in Belgrade, Serbia, and Habitat 67 in Montreal, Canada.Brutalist architecture polarised opinion and continues to do so to this day. On the one hand, protected cultural heritage status has been awarded to some Brutalist buildings (Carter; Glancey) and the style remains extremely influential, for example in the recent award-winning work of architect Zaha Hadid (Niesewand). On the other hand, the public housing projects associated with Brutalism are widely perceived as failures (The Great British Housing Disaster). Many Brutalist objects currently at risk of demolition are social housing estates, such as the Smithsons’ Robin Hood Gardens in London, UK. Whether the blame for the demise of such housing developments lies with architects, inhabitants, or local government has been widely debated. In the UK and USA, local authorities had relocated families of predominantly lower socio-economic status into the newly completed developments, but were unable or unwilling to finance subsequent maintenance and security costs (Hanley 115; R. Carroll; The Pruitt-Igoe Myth). Consequently, the residents became fearful of criminal activity in staircases and corridors that lacked “defensible space” (Newman 9), which undermined a vision of “streets in the sky” (Moran 615).In spite of its later problems, Brutalism’s architects had intended to develop a style that expressed 1950s contemporary living in an authentic manner. To them, this meant exposing building materials in their “raw” state and creating an aesthetic for an age of science, machine mass production, and consumerism (Stadler 264; 267; Smithson and Smithson, But Today 44). Corporeal sensations did not feature in this “machine” aesthetic (Dalrymple). Exceptionally, acclaimed Brutalist architect Ernö Goldfinger discussed how “visual sensation,” “sound and touch with smell,” and “the physical touch of the walls of a narrow passage” contributed to “sensations of space” within architecture (Goldfinger 48). However, the effects of residing within Brutalist objects may not have quite conformed to predictions, since Goldfinger moved out of his Brutalist construction, Balfron Tower, after two months, to live in a terraced house (Hanley 112).An abstract perspective that favours theorisation over subjective experiences characterises discourse on Brutalist social housing developments to this day (Singh). There are limited data on the everyday lived experience of residents of Brutalist social housing estates, both then and now (for exceptions, see Hanley; The Pruitt-Igoe Myth; Cooper et al.).Yet, our bodily interaction with the objects around us shapes our lived experience. On a broader physical scale, this includes the structures within which we live and work. The importance of the interaction between architecture and embodied being is increasingly recognised. Today, architecture is described in corporeal terms—for example, as a “skin” that surrounds and protects its human inhabitants (Manan and Smith 37; Armstrong 77). Biological processes are also inspiring new architectural approaches, such as synthetic building materials with life-like biochemical properties (Armstrong 79), and structures that exhibit emergent behaviour in response to human presence, like a living system (Biloria 76).In this article, we employ an autoethnographic perspective to explore the corporeal effects of Brutalist buildings, thereby revealing a new dimension to the anthropological significance of these controversial structures. We trace how they shape the physicality of the bodies interacting within them. Our approach is one step towards considering the historically under-appreciated subjective, corporeal experience elicited in interaction with Brutalist objects.Method: An Autoethnographic ApproachAutoethnography is a form of self-narrative research that connects the researcher’s personal experience to wider cultural understandings (Ellis 31; Johnson). It can be analytical (Anderson 374) or emotionally evocative (Denzin 426).We investigated two Brutalist residential estates in London, UK:(i) The Barbican Estate: This was devised to redevelop London’s severely bombed post-WWII Cripplegate area, combining private residences for middle class professionals with an assortment of amenities including a concert hall, library, conservatory, and school. It was designed by architects Chamberlin, Powell, and Bon. Opened in 1982, the Estate polarised opinion on its aesthetic qualities but has enjoyed success with residents and visitors. The development now comprises extremely expensive housing (Brophy). It was Grade II-listed in 2001 (Glancey), indicating a status of architectural preservation that restricts alterations to significant buildings.(ii) Trellick Tower: This was built to replace dilapidated 19th-century housing in the North Kensington area. It was designed by Hungarian-born architect Ernő Goldfinger to be a social housing development and was completed in 1972. During the 1980s and 1990s, it became known as the “Tower of Terror” due to its high level of crime (Hanley 113). Nevertheless, Trellick Tower was granted Grade II listed status in 1998 (Carter), and subsequent improvements have increased its desirability as a residence (R. Carroll).We explored the grounds, communal spaces, and one dwelling within each structure, independently recording our corporeal impressions and sensations in detailed notes, which formed the basis of longhand journals written afterwards. Our analysis was developed through co-constructed autoethnographic reflection (emerald and Carpenter 748).For reasons of space, one full journal entry is presented for each Brutalist structure, with an excerpt from each remaining journal presented in the subsequent analysis. To identify quotations from our journals, we use the codes R- and N- to refer to RB’s and NC’s journals, respectively; we use -B and -T to refer to the Barbican Estate and Trellick Tower, respectively.The Barbican Estate: Autoethnographic JournalAn intricate concrete world emerges almost without warning from the throng of glass office blocks and commercial buildings that make up the City of London's Square Mile. The Barbican Estate comprises a multitude of low-rise buildings, a glass conservatory, and three enormous high-rise towers. Each modular building component is finished in the same coarse concrete with burnished brick underfoot, whilst the entire structure is elevated above ground level by enormous concrete stilts. Plants hang from residential balconies over glimmering pools in a manner evocative of concrete Hanging Gardens of Babylon.Figure 1. Barbican Estate Figure 2. Cromwell Tower from below, Barbican Estate. Figure 3: The stairwell, Cromwell Tower, Barbican Estate. Figure 4. Lift button pods, Cromwell Tower, Barbican Estate.R’s journalMy first footsteps upon the Barbican Estate are elevated two storeys above the street below, and already an eerie calm settles on me. The noise of traffic and the bustle of pedestrians have seemingly been left far behind, and a path of polished brown brick has replaced the paving slabs of the city's pavement. I am made more aware of the sound of my shoes upon the ground as I take each step through the serenity.Running my hands along the walkway's concrete sides as we proceed further into the estate I feel its coarseness, and look up to imagine the same sensation touching the uppermost balcony of the towers. As we travel, the cold nature and relentless employ of concrete takes over and quickly becomes the norm.Our route takes us through the Barbican's central Arts building and into the Conservatory, a space full of plant-life and water features. The noise of rushing water comes as a shock, and I'm reminded just how hauntingly peaceful the atmosphere of the outside estate has been. As we leave the conservatory, the hush returns and we follow another walkway, this time allowing a balcony-like view over the edge of the estate. I'm quickly absorbed by a sensation I can liken only to peering down at the ground from a concrete cloud as we observe the pedestrians and traffic below.Turning back, we follow the walkways and begin our approach to Cromwell Tower, a jagged structure scraping the sky ahead of us and growing menacingly larger with every step. The estate has up till now seemed devoid of wind, but even so a cold begins to prickle my neck and I increase my speed toward the door.A high-ceilinged foyer greets us as we enter and continue to the lifts. As we push the button and wait, I am suddenly aware that carpet has replaced bricks beneath my feet. A homely sensation spreads, my breathing slows, and for a brief moment I begin to relax.We travel at heart-racing speed upwards to the 32nd floor to observe the view from the Tower's fire escape stairwell. A brief glance over the stair's railing as we enter reveals over 30 storeys of stair casing in a hard-edged, triangular configuration. My mind reels, I take a second glance and fail once again to achieve focus on the speck of ground at the bottom far below. After appreciating the eastward view from the adjacent window that encompasses almost the entirety of Central London, we make our way to a 23rd floor apartment.Entering the dwelling, we explore from room to room before reaching the balcony of the apartment's main living space. Looking sheepishly from the ledge, nothing short of a genuine concrete fortress stretches out beneath us in all directions. The spirit and commotion of London as I know it seems yet more distant as we gaze at the now miniaturized buildings. An impression of self-satisfied confidence dawns on me. The fortress where we stand offers security, elevation, sanctuary and I'm furnished with the power to view London's chaos at such a distance that it's almost silent.As we leave the apartment, I am shadowed by the same inherent air of tranquillity, pressing yet another futuristic lift access button, plummeting silently back towards the ground, and padding across the foyer's soft carpet to pursue our exit route through the estate's sky-suspended walkways, back to the bustle of regular London civilization.Trellick Tower: Autoethnographic JournalThe concrete majesty of Trellick Tower is visible from Westbourne Park, the nearest Tube station. The Tower dominates the skyline, soaring above its neighbouring estate, cafes, and shops. As one nears the Tower, the south face becomes visible, revealing the suspended corridors that join the service tower to the main body of flats. Light of all shades and colours pours from its tightly stacked dwellings, which stretch up into the sky. Figure 5. Trellick Tower, South face. Figure 6. Balcony in a 27th-floor flat, Trellick Tower.N’s journalOutside the tower, I sense danger and experience a heightened sense of awareness. A thorny frame of metal poles holds up the tower’s facade, each pole poised as if to slip down and impale me as I enter the building.At first, the tower is too big for comprehension; the scale is unnatural, gigantic. I feel small and quite squashable in comparison. Swathes of unmarked concrete surround the tower, walls that are just too high to see over. Who or what are they hiding? I feel uncertain about what is around me.It takes some time to reach the 27th floor, even though the lift only stops on every 3rd floor. I feel the forces of acceleration exert their pressure on me as we rise. The lift is very quiet.Looking through the windows on the 27th-floor walkway that connects the lift tower to the main building, I realise how high up I am. I can see fog. The city moves and modulates beneath me. It is so far away, and I can’t reach it. I’m suspended, isolated, cut off in the air, as if floating in space.The buildings underneath appear tiny in comparison to me, but I know I’m tiny compared to this building. It’s a dichotomy, an internal tension, and feels quite unreal.The sound of the wind in the corridors is a constant whine.In the flat, the large kitchen window above the sink opens directly onto the narrow, low-ceilinged corridor, on the other side of which, through a second window, I again see London far beneath. People pass by here to reach their front doors, moving so close to the kitchen window that you could touch them while you’re washing up, if it weren’t for the glass. Eye contact is possible with a neighbour, or a stranger. I am close to that which I’m normally separated from, but at the same time I’m far from what I could normally access.On the balcony, I have a strong sensation of vertigo. We are so high up that we cannot be seen by the city and we cannot see others. I feel physically cut off from the world and realise that I’m dependent on the lift or endlessly spiralling stairs to reach it again.Materials: sharp edges, rough concrete, is abrasive to my skin, not warm or welcoming. Sharp little stones are embedded in some places. I mind not to brush close against them.Behind the tower is a mysterious dark maze of sharp turns that I can’t see around, and dark, narrow walkways that confine me to straight movements on sloping ramps.“Relentless Employ of Concrete:” Body versus Stone and HeightThe “relentless employ of concrete” (R-B) in the Barbican Estate and Trellick Tower determined our physical interactions with these Brutalist objects. Our attention was first directed towards texture: rough, abrasive, sharp, frictive. Raw concrete’s potential to damage skin, should one fall or brush too hard against it, made our bodies vulnerable. Simultaneously, the ubiquitous grey colour and the constant cold anaesthetised our senses.As we continued to explore, the constant presence of concrete, metal gratings, wire, and reinforced glass affected our real and imagined corporeal potentialities. Bodies are powerless against these materials, such that, in these buildings, you can only go where you are allowed to go by design, and there are no other options.Conversely, the strength of concrete also has a corporeal manifestation through a sense of increased physical security. To R, standing within the “concrete fortress” of the Barbican Estate, the object offered “security, elevation, sanctuary,” and even “power” (R-B).The heights of the Barbican’s towers (123 metres) and Trellick Tower (93 metres) were physically overwhelming when first encountered. We both felt that these menacing, jagged towers dominated our bodies.Excerpt from R’s journal (Trellick Tower)Gaining access to the apartment, we begin to explore from room to room. As we proceed through to the main living area we spot the balcony and I am suddenly aware that, in a short space of time, I had abandoned the knowledge that some 26 floors lay below me. My balance is again shaken and I dig my heels into the laminate flooring, as if to achieve some imaginary extra purchase.What are the consequences of extreme height on the body? Certainly, there is the possibility of a lethal fall and those with vertigo or who fear heights would feel uncomfortable. We discovered that height also affects physical instantiation in many other ways, both empowering and destabilising.Distance from ground-level bustle contributed to a profound silence and sense of calm. Areas of intermediate height, such as elevated communal walkways, enhanced our sensory abilities by granting the advantage of observation from above.Extreme heights, however, limited our ability to sense the outside world, placing objects beyond our range of visual focus, and setting up a “bizarre segregation” (R-T) between our physical presence and that of the rest of the world. Height also limited potentialities of movement: no longer self-sufficient, we depended on a working lift to regain access to the ground and the rest of the city. In the lift itself, our bodies passively endured a cycle of opposing forces as we plummeted up or down numerous storeys in mere seconds.At both locations, N noticed how extreme height altered her relative body size: for example, “London looks really small. I have become huge compared to the tiny city” (N-B). As such, the building’s lift could be likened to a cake or potion from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. This illustrates how the heuristics that we use to discern visual perspective and object size, which are determined by the environment in which we live (Segall et al.), can be undermined by the unusual scales and distances found in Brutalist structures.Excerpt from N’s journal (Barbican Estate)Warning: These buildings give you AFTER-EFFECTS. On the way home, the size of other buildings seems tiny, perspectives feel strange; all the scales seem to have been re-scaled. I had to become re-used to the sensation of travelling on public trains, after travelling in the tower lifts.We both experienced perceptual after-effects from the disproportional perspectives of Brutalist spaces. Brutalist structures thus have the power to affect physical sensations even when the body is no longer in direct interaction with them!“Challenge to Privacy:” Intersubjective Ideals in Brutalist DesignAs embodied beings, our corporeal manifestations are the primary transducers of our interactions with other people, who in turn contribute to our own body schema construction (Joas). Architects of Brutalist habitats aimed to create residential utopias, but we found that the impact of their designs on intersubjective corporeality were often incoherent and contradictory. Brutalist structures positioned us at two extremes in relation to the bodies of others, forcing either an uncomfortable intersection of personal space or, conversely, excessive separation.The confined spaces of the lifts, and ubiquitous narrow, low-ceilinged corridors produced uncomfortable overlaps in the personal space of the individuals present. We were fascinated by the design of the flat in Trellick Tower, where the large kitchen window opened out directly onto the narrow 27th-floor corridor, as described in N’s journal. This enforced a physical “challenge to privacy” (R-T), although the original aim may have been to promote a sense of community in the “streets in the sky” (Moran 615). The inter-slotting of hundreds of flats in Trellick Tower led to “a multitude of different cooking aromas from neighbouring flats” (R-T) and hence a direct sensing of the closeness of other people’s corporeal activities, such as eating.By contrast, enormous heights and scales constantly placed other people out of sight, out of hearing, and out of reach. Sharp-angled walkways and blind alleys rendered other bodies invisible even when they were near. In the Barbican Estate, huge concrete columns, behind which one could hide, instilled a sense of unease.We also considered the intersubjective interaction between the Brutalist architect-designer and the inhabitant. The elements of futuristic design—such as the “spaceship”-like pods for lift buttons in Cromwell Tower (N-B)—reconstruct the inhabitant’s physicality as alien relative to the Brutalist building, and by extension, to the city that commissioned it.ReflectionsThe strength of the autoethnographic approach is also its limitation (Chang 54); it is an individual’s subjective perspective, and as such we cannot experience or represent the full range of corporeal effects of Brutalist designs. Corporeal experience is informed by myriad factors, including age, body size, and ability or disability. Since we only visited these structures, rather than lived in them, we could have experienced heightened sensations that would become normalised through familiarity over time. Class dynamics, including previous residences and, importantly, the amount of choice that one has over where one lives, would also affect this experience. For a full perspective, further data on the everyday lived experiences of residents from a range of different backgrounds are necessary.R’s reflectionDespite researching Brutalist architecture for years, I was unprepared for the true corporeal experience of exploring these buildings. Reading back through my journals, I'm struck by an evident conflict between stylistic admiration and physical uneasiness. I feel I have gained a sympathetic perspective on the notion of residing in the structures day-to-day.Nevertheless, analysing Brutalist objects through a corporeal perspective helped to further our understanding of the experience of living within them in a way that abstract thought could never have done. Our reflections also emphasise the tension between the physical and the psychological, whereby corporeal struggle intertwines with an abstract, aesthetic admiration of the Brutalist objects.N’s reflectionIt was a wonderful experience to explore these extraordinary buildings with an inward focus on my own physical sensations and an outward focus on my body’s interaction with others. On re-reading my journals, I was surprised by the negativity that pervaded my descriptions. How does physical discomfort and alienation translate into cognitive pleasure, or delight?ConclusionBrutalist objects shape corporeality in fundamental and sometimes contradictory ways. The range of visual and somatosensory experiences is narrowed by the ubiquitous use of raw concrete and metal. Materials that damage skin combine with lethal heights to emphasise corporeal vulnerability. The body’s movements and sensations of the external world are alternately limited or extended by extreme heights and scales, which also dominate the human frame and undermine normal heuristics of perception. Simultaneously, the structures endow a sense of physical stability, security, and even power. By positioning multiple corporealities in extremes of overlap or segregation, Brutalist objects constitute a unique challenge to both physical privacy and intersubjective potentiality.Recognising these effects on embodied being enhances our current understanding of the impact of Brutalist residences on corporeal sensation. This can inform the future design of residential estates. Our autoethnographic findings are also in line with the suggestion that Brutalist structures can be “appreciated as challenging, enlivening environments” exactly because they demand “physical and perceptual exertion” (Sroat). 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Adam Negro’s Tryal centers on the freedom suit of a Black African man, named Adam, living in colonial Massachusetts. At various times Adam was enslaved and indentured to a Massachusetts judge and merchant named John Saffin. In 1700, Adam sued Saffin to enforce the terms of an indenture contract. Saffin revoked the contract on the grounds that Adam did not comport himself properly during the term of his indenture. A variety of witnesses offered testimony about Adam’s actions and speech in petitions and depositions. With the help of another Massachusetts Judge, Samuel Sewall, Adam won his freedom suit. Historians and literary scholars alike read Adam’s legal battle as an early example of the textual self-fashioning that characterizes the African American tradition of life writing and autobiography.

Rural Massachusetts is delightful at the end of summer. The classic New England architecture blends with the lawns, gardens, and green forests into a picture of perfect harmony. It is sunny, and the right time in the afternoon for a stroll around the college town of Amherst. However, after a few blocks a distinct crack appears in this idyll: a traditional white wooden house is being renovated and a skull and crossbones sign on the lawn is telling us to keep out due to danger of lead poisoning. It turns out that the customary white colour of the houses around here was oft en due to lead-based pigments. The use of lead in paints was phased out in 1978, but it is still an issue judging from the 16-page pamphlet available in six languages from the US Environmental Protection Agency, and the criminal cases brought against real estate companies and landlords failing to inform tenants and buyers of the lead status of their homes. Marcus Vitruvius Pollio would probably have agreed with this pamphlet and legislation, and so most certainly would Alice Hamilton. Although almost two millennia separate the Roman engineer from the first woman on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, they are united in the fight against the dangers of lead to the workforce and to the public. We do not know much about the life of the first century BC architect and engineer Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, otherwise known as Vitruvius, except what can be inferred from his famous work The Ten Books on Architecture. This magnum opus, written in the days of the Emperor Augustus, probably represents the summary of the professional experience of an old man. The title is slightly misleading, as architecture in Roman times would cover a much broader area than today. So Vitruvius tells us a great deal about engineering in general, about the chemistry of pigments and, to the benefit of this story, about aqueducts and the proper treatment of water. He is also clearly a conservative man, lashing out against ‘decadent frescos’ and ‘these days of bad taste’.