Architecture, Building and Planning - Theses
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ItemSex and the slum : imperialism and gender in nascent town planning, Australia and New Zealand, 1914-1919( 2003)This thesis explores early 20th century town planning discourse in two of Britain's dominions, Australia and New Zealand. It uses the first national town planning conferences held in Australia and New Zealand (1917, 1918 and 1919) as a vehicle for examining themes of imperialism and gender within town planning discourse. In both dominions, women had a visible presence and an increasing voice in the nascent town planning movement. The women planning advocates were predominantly middle-class, they supported the continuation of women's traditional domestic role and they celebrated women's position as the `mothers of the race'. They wanted improved housing standards in order that women could undertake their important work of mothering to better effect. Similarly, they wanted more extensive kindergarten and playground facilities in order to shape and mould the citizens of tomorrow. But more than this, the women who took the most active role in the Australian and New Zealand town planning conferences were imperialist, win-the-war loyalist and in some cases even militarist. It was the imperial race that was at stake. The term `planning's imperial aspect' has been used by others to describe the initiatives of imperial powers in exporting town planning to their colonies and dominions. However, in view of the Australian and New Zealand enthusiasm for importing town planning, and the extent to which Australian and New Zealand planning advocates promoted town planning in terms of its potential to benefit the imperial race, this thesis expands the usage of the term to encompass colonial/dominion initiatives in importing town planning from the relevant imperial power, in this case from Britain. The thesis shows that in early 20th century Australia and New Zealand, the activities of women planning advocates clearly demonstrate planning's imperial aspect. This is because the women recognised the particular plasticity of children's bodies and minds and the consequent opportunities that infancy and youth provided for the instillation of middle-class values and behavioural norms, and thus focused their attention on the sites and activities that had the greatest potential to positively modify the fitness, health and morality of children - the imperial soldiers, workers, wives and mothers of tomorrow.
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ItemThe order of housing things : public housing policy discourse in New Zealand and Australia, 1983-1999( 2001)The purpose of this thesis is to examine discourses of housing assistance to understand how empirical knowledge came to be effected in the state housing assistance arrangements of New Zealand and Australia. To achieve this purpose a discursive methodology was crafted to account for both the constitution of empirical knowledge, and the bureaucratic apparatus by which housing assistance is administered. By pursuing the theoretical insights of US pragmatist thinkers, and recent French post-structuralist authors, empirical knowledge in the thesis was understood as a series of regular relations between abstract categories of 'things' or 'statements', as enunciated in the utterances of housing assistance policy actors and agents. Similarly the state was viewed as a discursive apparatus, which operates to constitute reality through the enunciation of this empirical order of things. The results of the methodological strategy were to be found in the empirical case studies of housing assistance in New Zealand and Australia during the period 1983 to 1999. In New Zealand a regular arrangement of housing policy discourse operated. until 1990. This 'order of housing things' constituted its subjects as unable to operate effectively in the housing market, thus requiring direct intervention via the housing assistance apparatus to ensure their needs were met. After 1990, this arrangement was replaced by an order in which the market was constituted as able to efficiently allocate housing to those in need, with maintenance of an adequate income becoming the sole basis for state action. In Australia, the order of housing things has consistently been one in which the directly provided subsidised state housing is the enunciated and practiced 'truth' of housing assistance. While alternative orders have been enunciated, such as the provision of assistance solely through an income payment, none of these alternatives obtained the status of the incumbent order during the study period. The thesis contributes to social scientific understanding through the careful and extensive empirical analysis of public housing policy in the two countries under consideration. Added to this understanding are the detailed theoretical explorations, which tease out recent post-structural approaches to discourse and the state, and which provide methodological solutions to questions of the nexus between empirical reality, language, practice, subjects and government policy.