Wilful ignorance at Waterloo: public housing quality and political stigma in Sydney's largest estate renewal

Michael Zanardo, Alistair Sisson, Cameron Logan and Rebecca McLaughlan

Planning Perspectives, 2024, vol. 39, issue 6, 1207-1239

Abstract: Sydney's Waterloo estate is one of Australia's largest and most concentrated areas of public housing. There has been an almost two-decade-long effort to renew the estate, with successive governments persistently making the case that the demolition and mixed-tenure redevelopment must happen. In the process, the quality of the housing on the estate has been denigrated and misrepresented. This paper combines a detailed examination of the architectural qualities of the Waterloo estate with a critical analysis of historical and contemporary policy settings and political decisions driving the redevelopment project. It identifies the phases of development at Waterloo since the first buildings were constructed in 1948, describing the key characteristics of the dwellings that were part of each phase and situating them within in the wider story of public housing in NSW. It then evaluates the qualities identified in the buildings on the estate against the government's own guidelines for new apartment development. This evaluation reveals the extent to which the state government has avoided a good-faith assessment of the architectural quality of the estate. The paper concludes by reviewing planning and policy objectives and highlighting that tenant interests and housing quality have been obscured through the stigmatzation of the estate.

Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/02665433.2024.2337268 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rppexx:v:39:y:2024:i:6:p:1207-1239

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rppe20

DOI: 10.1080/02665433.2024.2337268

Access Statistics for this article

Planning Perspectives is currently edited by Michael Hebbert

More articles in Planning Perspectives from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().