Planning for land and housing in settler colonial cities, where it continues to enable dispossession, expulsion and extraction at scales from the mundane to the spectacular, is structurally ruined. Drawing inspiration from the Indigenous concept of Country in so-called Australia and the fact of Indigenous sovereignty-never-ceded, this lecture will examine contemporary housing and land politics and struggles – and trouble the view of land, planning, housing and justice from a site of structural ruin.

Professor Libby Porter is Director of the Centre for Urban Research at RMIT University, where she researches and educates on planning and urban geography. Motivated by social and ecological injustice, her work is about how urbanization creates forms of dispossession and displacement and what we might do about it. Her research aims to sharpen our understanding about the relationship between land and housing justice, the displacing effects of urban renewal, critical questions of urban governance and the politics of property. As someone living on stolen lands and benefiting from the dispossession of First Peoples, her work grapples with displacement and dispossession processes in cities.

She has contributed to debates about the responsibility of planning and urban development to First Peoples sovereignty, as well as the displacement and unjust housing outcomes of urban regeneration. She is author of many books and papers, including Unlearning the Colonial Cultures of Planning (2010, Ashgate), Planning for Coexistence? with Janice Barry, and Planning in Indigenous Australia: From imperial foundations to postcolonial futures, with Sue Jackson and Louise Johnson.