Geographies of Publicity and Privacy: Residential Activism in Sydney in the 1970s

Abstract

In Australian cities in the early 1970s certain sections of the trade union movement banned work on inner-city construction projects considered detrimental to the urban environment: trade union ‘black bans’ were transformed into so-called ‘Green Bans’. Associated with the union action was a ground swell of resident opposition to demolition and redevelopment. There has been much documentation of this important moment in Australian history: Green Bans have been celebrated as a class-based urban social movement and as the birth of environmentalism in Australia. We begin the process of critically reevaluating Sydney's Green Bans, drawing on feminist-inspired reworkings of publicity and privacy. In this cultural geography of the Green Bans we argue that resident participation restructured the very terms of democracy and, along with this, a range of citizens' rights. This reading shows that the categories ‘private’ and ‘public’ are far from fixed: they are sociospatial categories that take a multitude of forms and configurations in time, in process, across space.