Urban consolidation involving increasing densification around existing nodes of urban infrastructure is a strategy pursued by all levels of government for addressing rapid population growth in urban regions. This has both positive and negative impacts on the everyday lives of residents (or their urban liveability as perceived by them), even though urban consolidation is commonly resisted by residents. This paper aims to better understand impacts of urban consolidation on liveability by comparing similarities and differences in impacts between two Brisbane suburbs: an outer fringe suburb (Wynnum) and an inner city suburb (West End). Wynnum residents generally expressed less resistance to urban consolidation, with some residents willing to trade additional densification for additional amenities. Two issues concerning residents in both suburbs were aesthetics of high-rise development and traffic congestion. Building heights more than a few storeys above surrounding buildings were commonly seen as detracting from urban liveability, though buildings up to 30 stories were accepted by some if close to the Commercial Business District. Traffic congestion was seen as a problem in both suburbs reflecting widespread car dependency. Other impacts differed between suburbs, reflecting their different values and ways of living. For example, most West End residents were concerned about losing social diversity with declining housing affordability while many Wynnum residents were concerned about gaining more public or social housing and disadvantaged residents. The impacts of urban consolidation on liveability differ between suburbs, and local neighbourhood plans should be sensitive to local notions of urban liveability because residents often stay after urban consolidation, even if they perceive negative impacts on their liveability. These interviews reinforce liveability as primary focus for urban planning, and thus urban consolidation at the expense of liveability is a poor outcome for both local residents and urban planning.

Public space is being increasingly managed by defensive architecture, surveillance and other subtle filtering mechanisms to make it more palatable and attendant to the needs of capital. This reinforces social boundaries, making space inhospitable to those people whose presence is not welcome, and serves to ‘discipline’ city inhabitants into primarily consumption based modes of interacting with and in the city. However, disenfranchised urban populations still find ways to exist in and navigate these spaces. The purpose of this article is to highlight these ways by introducing the concept of ‘desire lines’ as a means of overcoming or re-imagining defensive space. We use Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of desire as productive force, combined with De Certeau’s notion of ‘walking the city’, to explore how individuals and social movements might practically, and in a metaphorical sense, create new collective paths, creating ‘desire lines’ of resistance and change within what is often an increasingly unforgiving and dominated urban environment, created by and for capital at the expense of a vibrant public realm.

Master planned estates offer package dreams of homeownership to those wanting to live among others who share their lifestyle aspirations. Yet we show in this paper how divisions can arise between housing tenure types, with owner-occupiers constructing private rental tenants as a problem. Extending Bauman’s concept of the flawed consumer using Rose’s writings on ethopolitics, we show how renters are viewed as failing in three domains of social life: aesthetics, ethics and community by undermining the aesthetic value of the neighbourhood and by failing to demonstrate an ethic of care for themselves and others. As a result, the homeowners in this study try to avoid living among rental properties and are disappointed to find that, contrary to expectations, moving to a master planned estate does not guarantee this.

With many cities in the Global South experiencing immense growth in informal settlements, city authorities frequently try to assert control over these settlements and their inhabitants through coercive measures such as threats of eviction, exclusion, blocked access to services and other forms of structural violence. Such coercive control is legitimized through the discursive formation of informal settlements as criminal and unsanitary, and of the residents as migrants and as temporary and illegitimate settlers. Using findings from ethnographic research carried out in two informal settlements in Dhaka, Bangladesh, this article explores how informal settlement residents engage with and resist territorial stigma in a rapidly growing Southern megacity. Findings show residents resist stigmatising narratives of neighbourhood blame by constructing counternarratives that frame informal settlements as a “good place for the poor.” These place-based narratives emerge from shared experiences of informality and associational life in a city where such populations are needed yet unwanted. While residents of these neighbourhoods are acutely aware of the temporariness and illegality of unauthorised settlements, these narratives produce solidarities to resist eviction and serve to legitimise their claim to the city.