Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Journal, Vol.3, No.1, 2011 1
ISSN: 1837-5391; http://utsescholarship.lib.uts.edu.au/epress/journals/index.php/mcs
CCS Journal is published under the auspices of UTSePress, Sydney, Australia
Practising Place: A Critical Approach to Localism
John Rule
University of New South Wales
Abstract
This paper draws on empirical data from my doctoral research on the changing nature of inner city community
development work. The professional identity of the community worker emerged in the 1970s and is linked to
other emergent identities - the resident activist, social activist and community activist. Inner city community
development work is in a state of flux and requires new investigative and analytical tools to help make sense of
both its past, present and future. Whilst it is clear that governing patterns have changed considerably since the
1970s, and challenged the role and the potential of what were once considered radical or alternative community
development approaches, I argue that it is still possible to identify areas for productive engagement through
what I have called practising place.
Introduction
My research covered a limited geographical area, inner city Sydney, but there are theoretical
connections that extend beyond inner city Sydney and Australia. Castells (1983, 2004), Dirlik
(1996), Massey (1993, 1999) and Sandercock (1990, 1998) all suggest that ‘local practices’
should be a focus of research and study in contemporary times. There is a growing body of
theory and empirical research that is trying to make sense of the various forms of practice that
are emerging under the heading of ‘the local’. In this paper I am concerned with two aspects
of this larger discussion. Firstly, does there remain any potential for the local to be a site of
resistance; and secondly, what are the emergent identities that might enable a progressive
activist politics to continue at a local level? As I explore these questions in this paper, it
becomes clear that those who engage in political practices of resistance and activism are
always challenged because of the power of existing rationalities. Clifford (2001) and Castells
(2004) argue that resistance is often ‘reintegrated’ back into existing social structures; therein
lies the dilemma of any activist political practice – how to resist such reintegration.
Based on evidence from key informants, there is some evidence that social change can
continue to happen from combined activist struggles. However, in those struggles, those
engaged as activists must remain critically aware of the limits of those local practices, and,
additionally, must remain aware that the identity of the activist should be fluid, open-to-
change and resistant to any form of essentialism.
2 Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Journal, Vol.3, No.1, 2011
Study Method
Rose (1997) was interested in the way that community is imagined and performed and the
potential of resistant community work practices. Rose explored the diverse interpretation of
the ‘local’ and ‘community’ with a group of community arts workers in Edinburgh, Scotland.
I used a similar method of investigation with community workers, who had worked for a
range of small inner city Sydney community organisations, Neighbourhood Centres (NCs),
from 1975 through to 2005. These community workers (five) were involved in
neighbourhood centre work, youth work, family support programs, housing estate
development programs and migrant community development programs. In my research I also
had regular meetings and dialogic conversations with two people who had a long history of
engagement with these organisations and defined themselves as urban and social activists.
For Rose there are no assumptions about ‘community’, the meanings only becoming apparent
by the investigation of how community is performed in specific sites. Like Rose, I took the
view that the local, the specific, the neighbourhood may be valued as a site of investigation,
but a critical or deconstructive approach needs to be applied to the stories and myths that are
circulated about community.
Community and Urban Social Movements
Castells (1977, 1983, and 2004) has monitored the activities of many groups trying to create
sensitive and democratic processes to produce liveable cities. Castells initially conceptualised
urban social movements as manifestations of class conflict (1977, p.325). In a later study
Castells (1983) proposed that there are some basic themes in urban movements and protests,
regardless of whether they are tenant struggles, youth organising associations, urban
uprisings, or resident and neighbourhood associations. He concluded that resistance takes
place around collective consumption issues of housing, schools and welfare provision, or the
defence and expression of cultural identities, or around the workings of the state institutions
and sometimes, local government, or a combination of these. He saw all this as a form of
resistance, a counter to the imposition of global economic and cultural forms of domination.
Castells was less hopeful about the potential of ‘emancipation’ promised by the urban
movements as he followed their trajectories over a longer period; he notes the ways in which
the movements themselves, their discourses, individuals involved and organisations had often
been integrated into government arrangements through differing systems of citizen
Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Journal, Vol.3, No.1, 2011 3
participation and community development activities (2004:65). Later in this paper I recount a
similar trajectory of urban social movements in inner city Sydney.
Sandercock (1990, 1998) has also focused on urban history and the struggles of citizens,
communities and groups to shape cities and impact on planning processes. She has written
about these struggles in the Australian context (1990), as well as presenting an extensive
international review of attempts to plan for ‘multicultural cities’ (1998). Under the heading of
‘insurgent practices’ she argues that there are individuals who she calls ‘the mobilizers’, these
are individuals whose radical local practices are rarely recognised beyond their locality base.
In a review of six major cities, Sandercock keeps asking questions of the group she identifies
as the ‘mobilizers’ and these questions are similar to the ones I asked the community workers
and activists: What theories inform their community practice? What knowledges are being
used in these practices? What are the definitions of community that are being used? What are
the processes that groups are using in their struggles with power and what is achieved?
Sandercock identifies and seeks out ‘the mobilizers’ in particular struggles; similarly I have
sought out activists and community workers who have played ‘organising’ or ‘mobilising’
roles around the development of inner city Sydney Neighbourhood Centre (NCs).
Massey’s locality studies have also been extensive (1993, 1999). Massey argues for a
progressive sense of place; otherwise the development of communities constructs a
distinction between members and non-members that is exclusionary and intolerant of any
sense of ‘other’. She argues that if places that are conceived as a set of social relations,
(rather than a point which is arrived at, which needs to be preserved and defended), there may
be openness to the possibility that others can be accommodated within that set of social
relations (1993, p.66-68). I found this ‘progressive sense of place’; which is Massey’s
conceptual framework developed to resist exclusions, a useful framework to bring to my
research. Dirlik (1996) proposes a similar notion in his discussion of ‘critical localism’. He
notes that the impact of global capitalism has produced a range of local movements of
resistance. He argues that the affirmation of the ‘local’ comes with a danger of sliding into
nostalgia and is amenable to exclusionary tendencies. He argues that ‘critical localism’ could
be developed and from this critical position the local and place can be useful to negotiate the
removal of oppressions or inequalities that are inherited from the past. Dirlik sees in this a
useful and meaningful resistance to the excesses of global capital, ‘The boundaries of the
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local need to be kept open (or porous) if the local is to serve as a critical concept’ (1996,
p.42).
The Importance of Place
I argue that in field of community development work a critical examination of place can
provide some new analytical and conceptual tools to enliven community development
practices. Interdisciplinary work in human and social geography provides an interesting
starting point to examine the question of place. In this next section I provide a brief overview
of some approaches to community and place which I found useful to bring as conceptual
resources to my research, and to developing what I have called ‘practising place’.
Sandercock provides a critical history of the way that planning, and particularly town
planning, have carved out roles as adjuncts to modern bureaucratic and state power
arrangements. The consequence has been a limiting of the potential for the development of
inclusive local social formations and communities. In response, Sandercock (1998), dreams
of her ‘cosmopolis’ and searches for her ‘postmodern utopia’. This utopia, she argues must
always be present but never actually presented. She does not want to impose her utopian
vision on others. Sandercock ‘scours cities’ looking for ‘insurgent practices’ and evidence of
‘one thousand tiny empowerments’. Keith and Pile (1993) and Pile (1997) map ‘spaces of
resistance’; much of their work concentrates on turbulent inner city environments in England
during and after years of rule of the conservative Thatcher government. They sought to show
how ‘…fragmentation, ruptures and discontinuities can be politically transformed from
liability and weakness to opportunity and strength…’ (Keith & Pile 1993, p.193).
Concentrating on Los Angeles as the exemplar of the modern metropolis, Soja (1996), uses
the concept of a ‘third space’. The third space is a metaphorical space in which ‘difference’ is
marked for potential rather than limitations. By paying attention to the possibilities of this
third space, which is not unreal but an imagined place, new social patterns could be formed,
patterns which are supportive of difference rather than social patterns that are based on a fear
of difference. Harvey goes, from ‘place to space and back again’ but always with the starting
point that ‘…place in whatever guise…is a social construct’ (Harvey 1993, p.7). Watson and
Gibson (1994), Wilson (1991) and Zukin (1992) search the streets of postmodern cities,
often, and particularly in the case of Wilson, the streets of inner cities or city centres tracing a
feminist storyline. Watson and Gibson (1995) study Australian cities and the way in which
the urban and place is ‘thought’, they try to overlay that thinking with a social justice
Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Journal, Vol.3, No.1, 2011 5
framework. Wilson emerges from her tours of the ‘labyrinth’ with ‘…a new, ‘feminine’ voice
in praise of cities’ (Wilson 1991, p.11). Zukin calls for a professional commitment to
‘liminality’, to supporting by whatever means, those who are not given a place within highly
territorialised city spaces (1992, p.242).
In my research I was interested in how the activists and community workers imagine their
place, in the interviews and conversations with activists and community workers I tested out
the possibility that place could be envisaged as utopia, as transformation, as inclusive rather
than exclusive, as a social construct and as a place of liminality. Like Sandercock and the
other authors who I have referred to as radical and critical human geographers, I adopt the
epistemological stance that we know what we know, through being in a place, and through
participating in constructing the sets of social relationships within that place.
Research Context
Barry, Clohesy and Smith (1985) provide a history of inner city Sydney community and
neighbourhood work. They describe the pre-conditions for the emergence of resident and
community action groups and neighbourhood associations in the 1960s. These included:
technological changes to traditional employment of labour on the waterfront; threatened job
losses (in the manufacturing sector); an increase in speculative land development; an
expansion of tertiary institutions into residential areas of Darlington and Chippendale;
expressways planned through Glebe, Ultimo, Pyrmont, Woolloomooloo and Darlinghurst;
and actions by the state Department of Housing in Surry Hills and Redfern which were
forcing changes to the working class residential base of pockets of inner city Sydney.
Resident Action Groups brought together individuals who felt threatened by these changes,
planners who thought that there could be more effective ways of managing inner city
environments and sections of the student movement attending local universities, who at that
time, were looking for effective change strategies beyond the provision of welfare services.
The organisations that emerged through this process were marginal to the extent that they
concentrated on information, advocacy and social action for groups who had traditionally
been locked out of government planning processes. For example, the Coalition of Inner
Sydney Resident Action Groups was formed in 1972 with a brief to focus on housing;
transport and energy; education and community services. Jakubowicz (1974, 1984)
questioned the class based nature of urban environmentalism and the difficulties of defending
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‘urban’ working class interests within these resident movements, and he noted the importance
of cross-class alliances, as did Barry, Clohesy and Smith (1985). Mundey (1987) and
Burgmann and Burgmann (1998, pp.56-58) document the connections between the inner city
Resident Action Groups and the environmental activism of the NSW Builders Labourers’
Federation. They also note the cross-class alliances, between residents and unions, and
amongst resident groups, as well as drawing attention to the central role played by women in
these actions.
The Australian Assistance Plan (AAP) instituted by the Whitlam government established a
public policy and funding framework in which new organisations developed. The AAP
provided seeding funding for many small community-based initiatives, including the
Neighbourhood Centres (NCs). The 1970s saw a growth in co-operatives and community
associations, usually taking on some form of local resident management structure, and
seeking to employ professional staff in the roles of co-ordinators and community
development workers (Roberts & Pietsch 1996, p.144). The NCs early links to the
environment and feminist movement, as well as their role in supporting cultural diversity
through multicultural project initiatives is described by Edwards (1996) in a report sponsored
by the Inner Sydney Council for Regional and Social Development.
By the end of the 1980s discourses of environmentalism, feminism and multiculturalism were
still evident in the community organisations, but other discourses connected with increasing
professionalisation, new managerialism and new funding regimes were beginning to
circulate. They did not entirely erase those earlier discourses but introduced a new set of
tensions. As noted by Barry, Clohesy and Smith (1985) ‘efficiency’ and ‘management
rhetoric’ came to dominate community focused projects and development work. Yeatman
(1990) characterised the preceding decade as a period of struggle between the managerial
agenda of the state and grass roots efforts to democratise political processes in Australia; the
micro techniques of scientific management were applied to social services and welfare
provision became market oriented and privatised. This accompanied increasing government
monitoring of funding contracts and more detailed reporting procedures. A report produced in
1994, ‘We Just Grew like Topsy’, by the Local Community Services Association of NSW, a
peak body for community and neighbourhood centres, suggested that in this decade small
community based organisations were overwhelmed by a raft of new government directed
programs, these programs had strict and generally unmanageable service delivery
Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Journal, Vol.3, No.1, 2011 7
expectations and reporting requirements. This change was also noted by Williams and Onyx
(2002).
Reviews of community work practice in Australia by Kenny (1994), and Weeks, Hoatson and
Dixon (2003) have noted the ways in which movements based on different structural features
- race, gender, sexuality, ecology, class and social identity – became active and collectively
organised through community development activities in the 1970s. They also note that these
movements and the organisations which grew up around them were in a sense forced
‘underground’, or, at least their activities curtailed, in late 1980s and 1990s because of the
recasting of social issues as ‘individual problems and individual responsibilities’.
Everingham (2001) provides a detailed account of the way in which economic rationalism
impacted on the community sector. She argues those organisations that had drawn ‘…their
inspiration from the emancipatory objectives of the new social movements… in the 1960s…’
were, after ‘Two decades of public service reforms under economic rationalism’, in the
position where their autonomy and roles within community were severely eroded (2001,
p.108). The language of mutual obligation and contractualism brought about a new politics
where ‘community' was charged with the responsibility of being an agent for implementing a
government directed agenda. Further, through a contract state paradigm that became evident
in the mid 1990s, government (at local, state and federal levels) has linked community
organisation activity to a series of contracted service arrangements with very specific, limited
measurements and service outputs (Hoatson, Dixon & Stoman 1996; Everingham 2001).
The above highlights the changed focus of the organisations as political and economic
changes occurred and as other discourses, for example economic rationalism, contractualism,
and mutual obligation, came to dominate social processes. The conservative social policy
paradigm continued through to the present, and its impacts on alternative social formations at
a local community level over the last number of years is well documented (Darcy 2002;
Suehood, Marks & Waterford 2006; Keevers, Treleaven & Sykes 2008; Onyx, Dalton,
Melville, Casey & Banks 2008)
This brief history of the emergence of locally based community organisations in inner city
Sydney, and how they have been impacted by national social policy changes, provides a
context in which to locate the accounts of practice which follow.
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Dialogic Conversations with Activists and Community Workers
The Neighbourhood Centres have been sites where particular identity formations have been
made possible. The identity of ‘generalist community worker’ for example, is an identity
position made possible because of the emergence of local community organisations. Clifford
(2001) describes local sites as ‘enunciative modalities’ and is interested in seeing what forms
of political subjectivity and identities are activated in different local sites. Enunciative
modalities, according to Clifford, ‘…can help us to define and delineate those spaces, or sites,
in which individuals fashion their own identity as political subjects’ (Clifford 2001, p.11)
The identities of ‘resident activist’, ‘urban activist’, ‘social activist’ and ‘community worker’
have only been constructed (and available) in the last forty years. Based on my research I
suggest these identities have been occupied, or taken up, in the inner city NCs in ways that
are distinctive of those sites, and, certainly, shaped by the urban social movements discussed
earlier. The participants in this research have adopted those positions and mobilised particular
discourses from those positions, to do what I have labelled ‘practising place’. Further, being
able to mobilise those identities has been an essential part of that practice where place is not
just a statement about geographical location but takes on the dimensions of ‘standpoint’,
‘perspective’ and ‘position’. There are similarities to the politics of location described by bell
hooks:
As a radical standpoint, perspective, position, ‘the politics of location’ necessarily
calls those of us who would participate in the formation of counter-hegemonic
cultural practice to identify the spaces where we begin the process of re-vision
(hooks 1991, p.145).
Rose (1997) interviewed community arts workers in Edinburgh, who were fluent in left
liberal discourses of community development and empowerment. Those she interviewed
were also critical of those discourses, although interested in how they were activated. They
saw their community project work and activities as a place to which their own identities and
political positions were bought, and within which they were shaped. In my research around
the NCs participants indicated a similar awareness, both in terms of the discourses in which
they are enmeshed, and, the ways in which identities are shaped by, and shape those
discourses.
Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Journal, Vol.3, No.1, 2011 9
Castells (2004), Dirlik (1996), Massey (1993, 1999) and Sandercock (1998) place some form
of identity story at the centre of the story of urban social movements. Sandercock describes
these social movements, most visible in inner city environments and politics, as not just
promoting a form of ‘identity politics’ but as moving ‘towards a progressive politics of
difference’. Sandercock argues that this identity work is really the most important aspect of
planning that is sensitive to community, environment and cultural diversity. She develops the
argument that the task is not one of just concentrating on the positives of difference, but of
unmasking ‘the social construction of identities’ (1998, p.123).
In my research the activists (Enid and Neil) provided very detailed accounts about their life
history as activists. They described in detail what they thought it meant to be an activist; they
described how it came to be that they took up this subject position and how their own
personal histories were a part of that. The issue of identity became part of the conversation
with the activists; they explained what they meant by the activist identity and critically
examined its effects.
The community workers, (Carla, Michael, Monica, Sarah and Tevi) also talked about their
own subject positions and identities. Quite often in the transcript data these kinds of
statements were found: ‘...as a community worker I operated in this way…’ and ‘ As a
feminist I think...’ and ‘From a structuralist position I see it like this… ‘. Other statements
included: ‘Because I grew up in a working class background…’ and ‘My migrant experience
leads me to take this view…’ These identities of community worker, feminist, structuralist
and migrant were often put forward as a way of explaining positions and became part of the
conversations. It was clear that the community workers saw that their ways of working and
their practices were deeply enmeshed with ‘who they were’ and with their identities.
The Activist Position
Healy (2000) argues that the ‘heroic activist’ is a deeply gendered construction which needs
to be opened up to multiple identifications. In the sections that follow it becomes clear that
the activists I interviewed did not assume that the activist label situates them as, ‘…heroic
actors who stand outside the systems of power and speak the truth to them’ (Healy 2000,
p.135 following on from Foucault). Rather, the activists in this research describe what they
have done in the course of their ‘daily practices’ and find that the activist label is applied to
them, often because in these daily practices they are positioned as challenging power
10 Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Journal, Vol.3, No.1, 2011
relationships and the label of activist is a way of discrediting their daily practices and actions.
The labelling often came from those who ‘speak with power’, as a deliberate strategy to
position their (the activists) actions in a marginal place. Moreover, the activists do not
describe their actions as ‘heroic’. As one of them explains, the only thing that they did, was to
‘contest authority’ and this placed them in a contrary position to ‘authority’ and led them to
be constructed in negative and pejorative ways by those positioned with institutional
authority. Enid and Neil acknowledge they are not completely in control of their own naming,
or identity position; quite often that identity position, the position of activist, is forced upon
them by the social structures in which they operate.
In considering the ways that political subjectivities emerge in the governmentalised state,
Clifford (2001), draws attention to the political subject of the activist. He is interested in the
figure of the activist, because of the potential of this subject position. As he describes it, the
subject position of the activist, which exists within the ‘interplay of discourse, power and
subjectivation’, has radical potential because ‘…we cannot...underestimate the effect of even
a single political subject on the experience of the social body as a whole’ (Clifford 2001,
p.123). Notwithstanding the important potential of the political subject position of the
activist, Clifford suggests that there is a danger that activist political practices are easily
reintegrated into existing political structures and rationalities. I raised this dilemma during
the dialogical conversations and it elicited the following responses.
Enid’s Story of the ‘Urban Activist’ Position
Enid called herself an ‘urban activist’. The following transcript material provides an account
of what she means by the expression ‘activist’:
There was a lot of activity going on in the seventies and there were a lot of people who might
not have called themselves an activist although it [activism] was certainly there. There was
another expression - urban guerrilla - I liked that one. That idea of the urban guerrilla…how
can I say… it so shocked a lot of people including the bureaucracy, but not all of the
bureaucrats because after all, these ‘guerrillas’ often became part of the establishment! So
that it [the activist position] may well be a mythic position but it was certainly there.
I have great faith in that that word [activism] does come up. I’ve experienced it myself. It
really represents the change that occurred in Australian society from people who were
prepared to go out and have a go - the public demonstrations. The demanding baby boomer
group who were busy fighting about the Vietnam War, they were extremely aggressive people
and rightly so. Many of us were part of that, perhaps not as violent as some. Also the
Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Journal, Vol.3, No.1, 2011 11
environmental movement. The women and environment movements were the two most
important [activist] movements.
And at that time in our inner city the big thing was that the older suburbs were part of a town
planning process that was about the demolition and slum clearance… that policy had been
around for many years and Northcott [a housing department site in Surry Hills] was created
as part of that policy. When asking the building labourers to come in [reference to the Green
Bans of the 1970s], everything there was aggression. Aggression against outmoded ideas, but
that was the only way in which we could get through, we had to be aggressive in our own
way.
‘It’s always been like that’, is the existing rationality that the activists have had to approach.
I think it is one of the most difficult things working at local level you hear people say - ‘It’s
been like that for years and that’s the way we like it!’
It takes a skilled person, or a lot of activists and guerrillas to come in and say; ‘look this is
another way of doing it - it can be different!’
This story, like that of Neil’s, which follows, is about contesting authority. Enid describes the
shaping of the activist identity as arising out of engagement in social processes and political
discourses. Enid describes the identity position of the activist as being shaped and re-shaped,
necessarily fluid in the context of her own social practices. Enid addresses the kinds of
questions raised by Clifford (2001), recognising that by adopting different identities and
subject positions e.g. one moment ‘urban guerrilla’ and next moment ‘urban guerrilla as a
member of the establishment’, that the existing rationalities could be challenged and that real
social change could happen through combined activist struggles.
Neil’s Story of the ‘Social Activist’ Position
Neil described what he meant by social activism. Contrary to any notion of ‘heroic activism’,
Neil suggests that the subject position of the activist is an inevitable place to be situated if
one is to engage with ‘authority’ in particular forms. It is a place where people are often
positioned when they make an attempt to shift systems of power. Because ‘difference’ and
‘authenticity’ are often denied in social processes, this forces those who are different, or who
act with authenticity, into a contest with those who try to deny differences and ‘struggles for
freedom’. Neil tells his story of the experience of being positioned as an activist and
dissenter. Neil says that these positions are constructed in a particular discursive field.
However, he argues that it is by recognising the way that the construction of the activist
position occurs, that is, by a continual process of deconstruction, that it is possible to open up
12 Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Journal, Vol.3, No.1, 2011
and continually re-construct and re-enliven the social activist position. Neil wrote the
following to explain what he meant:
For me to talk about being an activist, about community work or community action means to
say these things:
1) having an intent to act collectively in the midst of and focussing on the collectivities that
do arise and which might arise within our society, these being the sites where
society/social beings are shaped
2) deconstructing the social shaping/the social conditioning or identity making which takes
place – particularly exposing the apparentness of that social shaping i.e. it is not natural,
not essential, and passes away – which embraces calling into question all assumed
authorities and titles, including my own – particularly calling into question the
corruptness of the social shaping
3) saying “yes” to alternative social identities – this is the act of dissent – it is made out to
be “no-saying” but that is the language of the Master – it is actually “yes saying” for
those with the ears to hear – it is about maintaining the alternative identities – a process
of continual coming out, a continual affirmation
4) doing some work together – a project – preferably some work which is sweaty, requiring
great effort and attention, and demanding that we work together.
I’ll speak briefly about what this means in being an activist. It’s to do with the collective
work I’ve mentioned above. I suppose we can talk about being a dissenter in private,
although I really think to talk in that way is to talk nonsense. What I’m saying is that to
be a dissenter is to also be a contester i.e. to be public, to be out. What brings me into
being a dissenter also brings me into being a contester – what we call an activist. What
brings about or triggers me into being a social activist is not my desire to colonise those
I’m said to dissent from, not
my desire to impose on those people a compliance for
themselves with my alternative – no, what brings me into the arena of contest is when I
experience the acts/utterances of these other people as not respecting me as I am, and
desiring to conform me and my world from as it is, to what they want it to be. It is when
my difference, my authenticity, is denied.
Neil suggested that one of the roles of activism is that of ‘deconstructing’ the social shaping,
conditioning and identity making that takes place, and, of seeking out and saying ‘yes’ to
emergent social identities which often means acting in non-compliant ways in the social
arena. According to Neil, in assuming the social activist position, as an authentic expression
in struggling with power, social activists are made vulnerable because the authentic
difference of those who dissent is denied.
For Enid and Neil their identification with the activist position has happened through
necessary engagement in a variety of political contests. They see themselves as contesting
authority; both describe how they were positioned as aggressive, or how in attempting to gain
attention and bring about change they had to adopt an aggressive or oppositional posture.
Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Journal, Vol.3, No.1, 2011 13
Rutherford (1990) describes identity construction as a search for some kind of personal
coherence. Rutherford uses the image of identity as a ‘home’; that is place where people
‘speak from’. The identity work above does not support this way of understanding identity -
the activists have not suggested that the activist identity provides any support or the kind of
comfort that the image of a ‘home’ sets up. Perhaps the stories above have more in common
with the kind of ethical citizenship and identity practices described by Watney which have at
their core a ‘... refusal of both the values of capitalism and the institutions of
parliamentarianism as it is currently practiced and understood’ (1990, p.159). For the
activists, those identity positions of social activist and urban activist have been more closely
aligned with a ‘practice of freedom’ (Watney 1990) than an interest in shaping identity for
identity’s sake. Neil and Enid would probably agree with the criticism that Bauman (2001)
makes of ‘identity games’.
My aim in this section has not been to interpret what the activists have said about their
identities but to show that they think ‘identity work’ is an important part of their practice.
This is an argument I have developed, that a feature of practising place, is the ability to work
with different identities but to work in such a way that opens up different and varied identity
formations rather than having the effect of ‘fixing’, ‘stabilising’ or ‘concretising’ identities.
The Critical Community Worker Position
In the dialogic conversations and semi structured interviews the community workers often
said that the motivation for their actions came from a desire to bring about some form of
social change. They described their attempts to intervene and to shape social arrangements in
a way that re-arranged power structures. These desires to bring about change are an important
part of the identity of the community workers. In talking with them, recognising their
powerful sense of agency, and hearing their descriptions of what they set out to do, and what
they hoped to achieve, I was reminded of the description used by Weedon of ‘conscious
thinking subjects’ who are attempting to give some ‘meaning to the material social relations’
(Weedon 1997, p.26) in which they find themselves. Weedon goes on to say, that the ability
to live like this depends on the ability to access ‘social power and discourses’ that have some
political strength. The community workers talked often about trying to achieve that political
strength.
14 Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Journal, Vol.3, No.1, 2011
The community workers talked about what they set out to do, what they intended in their
community work practices. They describe their work as existing within a mesh of political
discourses and power relationships. They analyse the operation of power and how it
manifests at a local level. Quotes demonstrating this are set out below. They talked about
government, communities, developers, funding processes and their own interventions to
balance or rebalance power. The community workers are suspicious of power used by
bureaucracies or the private economic interests of developers. They described political and
personal decisions they made along the way. They talked in detail about the forms of
community practices they wanted to enact. They talked about using ‘institutional power’ and
the possibilities of ‘direct action’ when other forms of intervention are failing. They talked
about their desires for ‘social justice’ and ‘equality’ and their understandings of the methods
by which this might be achieved.
As with the community arts workers interviewed by Rose (1997) the community workers
involved in my research had a ‘left liberal literacy’ and a suspicion of the hegemonic
practices that they see as present in contemporary Australian society. Below is material from
the transcripts where the community workers talk about what they were doing and through
this a picture develops of how the community workers understand their various identities.
Carla: I think it’s more about what we were really doing was trying to predict the
future…You know I think what really goes on is looking at what the funding bodies want to
fund; and assessing what you really need funding for and trying to match that need to what’s
available and try to satisfy both sides. And so I think that what we were really doing was
about trying to predict the future in a way.
Sarah: Well I guess we thought we were about opposition. But I suspect we were probably
partly about social control. That’s my take on it now looking back at that time. At the time I
thought that what we were doing was empowering people on the estate by informing them
about what was really happening.
Michael: I was certainly attracted to the community sector ten or twenty years ago,
because of the range of activities, the nature of the strategies they were using, those
commitments to inclusive processes…it was personally empowering and politically
empowering. Those social movements at the time, whether you look at issues around gender
or race or environmentalism and the questioning of social order in the early and mid
seventies, I then found the community sector in the period that I first saw it in the eighties as
being a field where those ideas came into practice.
Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Journal, Vol.3, No.1, 2011 15
Monica: Well we were trying to change things. I mean we were trying to make things
better for those people. We thought we knew what would be better for those people. And we
wanted there to be more justice. You know we wanted there to be more equality, that’s what it
was all about. We started off by talking about equality for women and that made us realise, or
certainly made me realise, that it wasn’t just women who weren’t equal, but there were a
whole lot of people who weren’t equal.
Tevi: Being the meat in the sandwich...that’s what it felt like…I was trying to get
the best outcome I could for the communities. Sometimes I don’t think that was actually right,
we compromised, but it was the best possible outcome. So trying to mediate between
community expectations and what developers, governments, organisations wanted to do. Your
personal political views quite often need to be set aside and so that’s why the meat in the
sandwich sort of thing.
The community workers, like the activists were also narrating their identities. They were
describing how their sense of ‘self’ both shaped the work in which they were involved and
how they were in turn shaped by those experiences and practices. While there were doubts
expressed about what was actually achieved through these practices there is a clear sense of
how these community workers saw themselves – they saw themselves as ‘oppositional’,
‘committed to inclusive processes’, ‘questioning of the social order’, ‘trying to change things
politically’ and ‘mediating’ between communities, developers, government and other
organisations.
These community workers saw themselves as having a ‘critical awareness’ in the sense of
having an orientation to critical theory in their analysis of society and social structures. They
were familiar with and identified strongly with feminist and socialist traditions. They saw
themselves as active (although not always ‘successful’), in engaging in political processes
and working with power.
Dimensions of Practising Place
Practising Place – a Suspicion of Fixing Identities
The activists and critical community workers said quite often that their social identities were
imposed upon them. Their activism and alternative community work practices placed them in
agonistic relationships with power structures, and they were often then labelled or positioned
in ways they did not necessarily identify with. They argued that their identities arose in the
‘performance’ of their activism and community work and some were identities that were
ascribed by others rather than identities they wanted to claim. One of the critical community
16 Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Journal, Vol.3, No.1, 2011
workers when talking about the subject position of ‘left wing feminist’ said that is not always
where she would position herself however, ‘…that’s where the language of the culture
positions us…’
The activists, when talking about their work said that at times they were positioned as
‘aggressive’ and as ‘trouble makers’ by those who held some form of institutional power but
in fact their own strategies were ones that tried to avoid ‘outmoded’ methods such as acts of
aggression. The activists and community workers in the ‘performing’ those roles were often
given identities that did not want to claim – they did not want their identities fixed.
Research participants expressed a reluctance to see either their own ‘selves’ as fixed in terms
of being activists or community workers and were suspicious of defining community or
community participation in a way that ‘fixed’ either their own identities or the identities of
those with whom they worked. ‘Practising place’ remains suspicious of attempting to fix or
make ‘concrete’ identities. As suggested by Agemben (1993) the way to ‘becoming
community’ may be through a search for ‘non-essentialised identities’ and may rather be
understood as a practice of ‘un-working identities’.
Practising Place – a Suspicion of Utopias
Whilst each of the research participants voiced, during some stages of the research, their
imaginings of social futures and perhaps even their social utopias, some of the participants
remained sceptical about mapping out what that utopia may be. There was a suspicion stated
about utopian thinking and certainly an argument was developed (similar to that proposed by
Sandercock 1998) that ‘my utopia is not yours’. There was an acknowledgement by the
research participants that history and the history of some community development work
projects demonstrate the dangers and rigidities of utopias forced upon others. Castells (1997),
Dirlik (1996), Massey (1993, 1999) and Sandercock (1998) argue that utopias cannot be
imagined alone and are always unfinished, contested and necessarily characterised by a space
for differences, differences which are positively upheld, within that imagining. The research
participants seemed to concur with this approach, supporting the view that one should be
suspicious about utopian thinking and be aware that a view of utopia held by one person will
not necessarily be the utopia held by another.
Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Journal, Vol.3, No.1, 2011 17
Practising Place - the Importance of Becoming Communities
Agamben (1993) inserts the notion of ‘singularities’ into his analysis of becoming
communities, arguing that new forms of ‘collectivisation’ wherein ‘new types of non-
individuated subjectivity’ are always forming. These will arise and coalesce regardless of the
intervention or non-intervention of the state apparatus. The state cannot tolerate or control the
fact that there is always this ‘birth-to-presence’ and always ‘becoming communities’.
Agamben argues, humans will ‘co-belong’ whether state apparatus allows them to or not.
This is because the State cannot, ultimately do anything about the ‘becoming-ness’, the State
cannot stop the inevitable and potential co-joining of singularities. As Tevi, one of the
research participants said ‘...the other will always connect, even if it is to the next stage’.
One of the research participants made this summary statement, ‘I don’t have a definitive
social future. And there are many people like me and more and more of us. We don’t have
any definitive social future because it is so diverse.’ Through their refusals to describe the
shape of their imagined social futures, the activists and critical community workers continue
to inhabit their own diverse and resistant geographies – such resistance is also a dimension of
practising place.
Community Development, Activism and Emergent Identities
This paper, based on my research, describes a particular location which is always in a state of
flux, of change, of impermanent social arrangements and social identities. I have proposed
another way of talking about activist and community development work in inner city Sydney
– I called that practising place. The identity of the community activist, resident activist, social
activist and the local community worker emerged in the last forty years and practising place
will need to stay alert to other emergent identity positions. Those who wish to maintain
progressive activist politics and community development work in these places will need to
adopt a position of ‘becoming’; wherein identities and relationships must, necessarily remain
in a state of constant of negotiation and change; wherein the identities of the activist and
community development worker, to be productive into the future, will need to resist being
essentialised and will need to be critically un-worked and re-worked.
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Introduction
Community and Urban Social Movements
The Importance of Place
Research Context
Dialogic Conversations with Activists and Community Workers
The Activist Position
The Critical Community Worker Position
Dimensions of Practising Place