Emplaced Displacement and Public Housing Redevelopment: From Physical Displacement to Social, Cultural, and Economic Replacement

This article reports on a study of the Waterloo public housing estate in Sydney, Australia. In 2015, the state government announced the inner-city estate would be redeveloped to accommodate some affordable/social dwellings (30%) but with the majority of new dwellings being private market housing (70%). Based on ethnographic research conducted with residents of Waterloo between 2010 and 2017, we analyze the Waterloo redevelopment as an example of emplaced displacement. We draw on the work of geographer Doreen Massey and legal scholar Sarah Keenan to understand place as more than physical space, allowing us to conceptualize displacement as something more than simply the movement of people from one physical place to another. We bring to the fore the subjective experience of place, as articulated by public housing tenants, demonstrating that although they remain physically in place, the threat of eviction posed by the redevelopment significantly alters tenants’ spatial, sociocultural, and temporal relationship to place (i.e., the spaces tenants carry with them). The concept of embodied displacement seeks to capture the spatiotemporal diversity of low-income public renters’ experiences of loss of place.