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Housing futures are increasingly diverse as they are reshaped by the intersecting forces of unaffordability, labour precarity and digital disruption. Despite this diversity, the way we think about housing has largely remained tied to frameworks that fit traditional housing markets and governance. While these give valuable insights into the structural form of housing systems, they are less appropriate for understanding the myriad of ways these changes are responded to and experienced on the ground. In this essay, I argue that we need more-than political economy approaches to understand the rapidly changing housing landscape. I pose the housing hack as a way of theorising housing from the minor, assisting in identifying ruptures in housing experiences and taking them seriously as a way to think between major narratives on housing, to show desires and possibilities previously unaccounted for, and to glimpse alternative housing possibilities. I propose the housing hack as useful for doing conceptual, analytical and speculative work demanded of thinking through these changes in housing. While hacks do not always do good, they are useful for revealing what is broken and in their workarounds can point to generative possibilities and alternative housing futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The affinity for tech-driven solutions of 'smart cities' has been critiqued at length, as has the gender disparity in technology firms. This paper draws these literatures together along with our own data on Australia's innovation economy – one that includes its spaces (incubators, accelerators and co-working hubs), events ('hackathons'), and places (innovation districts). These three components are ubiquitous among smart city strategies across all levels of government. In this paper we examine the gendered landscape of the innovation economy and the strategic urban agenda to which it is tied. The paper draws on data collected through interviews conducted with women entrepreneurs around their experiences in Australia's innovation economy. Drawing from policy documents and further interviews, our discussion mirrors their vignettes with an examination of the three innovation economy components using case studies from Australian smart city planning. In doing so, we illuminate how the gendered experiences of women in the innovation economy are entwined with the smart urbanism imperatives of high-growth, technology-focus, and the attraction of 'talent'. Existing attempts to grapple with discrimination in the innovation economy are shown to reinforce gendered hierarchies, resulting in 'smart cities' designed for men. We argue that the gendered nature of the tech industries that underpin the innovation economy has implications for who the smart city is for. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic pressures, demographic changes and digital technologies are reshaping housing pathways as rented, shared and digitalized. In Australia, a growing proportion of adults are renting in the private market, often in shared accommodation. We know little about shared housing because the shared rental sector remains largely "hidden". Online shared housing platforms offer insights into how people seek homes in a market where personal attributes are marketed alongside properties and rent. We use over 9000 Flatmates.com.au listings to identify the demographic features of shared households and potential tenants, with a smaller subset used to illuminate the characteristics that are sought after and marketed by people searching for a shared home. Our analysis reveals that the "ideal flatmate" is one who contributes to social relations in the home while rarely being at home. These insights highlight the limits of shared housing markets for long-term tenure because ofconstraints on home-making practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2022 Sophie Dyring and Samantha Donnelly published A Design Guide for Older Women's Housing.1 The guide addresses older women's housing needs through the lens of design and architecture and places women and their needs at the heart of the design process. It is based on conversations with women about different housing types and their experiences of space, safety, belonging and connection. Sophia Maalsen and Cathy Smith met with the authors to talk about women, housing, design, and architecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Home is a vital site and subject for feminist research. This introduction to the special issue of Australian Feminist Studies on 'Home' begins by reflecting on domestic spaces and routines as they unfold through contemporary art and performance. This reflection maps home as both a material space and an imaginary: a complex realm of constraints and possibilities. The discussion on this complexity of home is then situated within the contemporary context of the gendered experience of housing, from its precarity to its porous boundaries, ideas which are engaged with throughout the special issue. Taken together, the articles in this special issue show how questions of creativity, care, labour and technology, all pivot around home as a significant and (still) politicised site for feminist thought. Research into gender, housing and homelessness, and human-centric ideas about home also provide key insights into home as an unfixed, relational and political space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does 'informal' housing offer more affordable choices for low-income renters in expensive cities? This paper investigates this question with reference to Sydney, Australia, where planning reforms have sought to deregulate housing development including 'informal' and low cost market accommodation, in response to chronic housing affordability pressures. Examining rental advertisements, housing supply and affordability data, and through interviews with local government personnel, we find that informal secondary units and room rentals dominate Sydney's lower cost market, but rents remain high relative to incomes. Further, and despite reforms to encourage new secondary dwellings and low cost rental supply, substandard and non-compliant housing persists, exposing tenants to serious risks. The findings suggest that in high cost cities such as Sydney, the informal sector occupies an important and unrecognised role in housing low-income renters, but that more systemic reforms beyond the planning system are needed to improve housing outcomes for disadvantaged groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary advances the 'hack' as an urban concept. While the hack transcends existing literatures on the digital and informality, it is a distinctive concept and is being used systematically in new domains. I situate the hack conceptually, outline its empirical and methodological value and propose a framework to research the urban hack. Importantly, it is not just the technologies of hacking but the translation of computational logics to the urban that underpins the importance of the hack, as well as the critical need to set out a research agenda surrounding the hack within urban studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emergencies such as COVID‐19 trigger calls for innovation and invoke forced experimentation. They can shift what is thinkable and thus licence social and institutional change, opening space wherein new sociopolitical arrangements might emerge. Cities are at the heart of the COVID‐19 emergency, in terms of impact, management, and solutions. This commentary considers the implications of COVID‐19 for urban governance innovation. Incrementally, innovation has become a "new normal" across multiple fields of social, economic, technological, and environmental endeavour as disruptive enhancements are sought to address complex problems: urban governance is no exception. In cities, diverse new ecosystems of innovative urban governance have been emerging with the potential to reshape the politics and parameters of urban decision making, produce new institutional settings, reconstitute cities' multiscalar relations, and invoke new forms of power. This commentary considers urban governance innovation in COVID times. Drawing from Australian and international examples, we reflect on the actors taking centre stage as cities' responses to the pandemic take shape and consider the governing mechanisms being evoked. As these innovations embed more deeply the distributed nature of urban governance, we close with thoughts on the risks and opportunities that COVID‐19 presents for seeking inclusive innovation in the field of urban governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on urban productivity and affordable rental housing supply in Australian cities and regions. Topics include the low-income (Q21) households are a critical sector of the workforce, but increasingly struggle to find affordable rental housing near employment centres of Australia's major urban areas, and the shortage is most acute in inner and middle ring areas which offer higher accessibility to greater concentrations of employment opportunities.

Although aspirations for the 'smart home' have existed since the 1950s, the recent understanding of smart technological interventions as ecosystems of policy, material, people, ICT and data that drive social and spatial change, suggests we need to revise the smart home. From increased leisure time to increased energy efficiency – the smart home has promised, and frequently failed to deliver its utopian promises. First, this paper argues the smart home can be conceptualized as an assemblage of social, economic, political and technological apparatuses. Thinking about the smart home as assemblage allows us to see the network of relationships which constitute it, the work they do in the world, and the subsequent possibilities of becoming. Second, the paper offers innovative methodologies for researching the smart home that draws on the agentive capacities of 'smart' technologies. Such unpacking is critical to understand the work and possibilities of the smart home. The methodologies are productive for thinking about the future of housing research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concerns have been raised regarding smart city innovations leading to, or consolidating, technocratic urban governance and the tokenization of citizens. Less research, however, has explored how we make sense of ongoing appropriation of the resources, skills, and expertise of corporate smart cities and what this means for future cities. In this article, we examine the summoning of political subjectivity through the practices of retrofitting, repurposing, and reinvigorating. We consider them as civic infrastructure to sensitize the infrastructural acts and conventions that are assembled for exploring inclusive and participatory ways of shaping urban futures. These practices, illustrated by examples in Adelaide, Dublin, and Boston, focus on capabilities not only to write code, access data, or design a prototype but also to devise diverse sociotechnical arrangements and power relations to disobey, question, and dissent from technocratic visions and practices. The article concludes by suggesting further examination of the summoning of political subjectivity from within established institutions to widen dissent and appropriation of the corporate smart city. Key Words: citizen, infrastructure, political subjectivity, smart city, urban future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobility practices are one of the central labours of family, through which the relations of kin and non-kin are negotiated. In many cities, the private car has been and is central to familial mobility through the transportation of objects and people, as well as enabling the accomplishment of familial social activities. Recent technological disruptions to transport systems and the increased popularity of non-car modes are challenging such tight interleaving of cars and family. In this paper, we investigate this decoupling of family and private-car-based mobility through a focus on two relatively novel modes: car sharing and electric bikes. Drawing on a qualitative engagement with car sharers and e-bike cyclists in Sydney, Australia, we document how these non-car modes become valued and effective forms of travel for families, and in particular how they facilitate three of the key affordances of the private car for families: carrying, cocooning and convenience. We find that car sharing affords families independent and flexible mobility through a recalibration of convenience. Electric bikes, especially cargo bikes, more easily accommodate the familial needs of carrying objects and people, and are understood as time saving. These two cases, we conclude, help specify the cultural conditions in which the decoupling of family and cars can be more successfully pursued. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional housing careers are being re-configured. Home ownership is declining and a parallel increase in renting has lead some commentators to suggest that this is creating a generation of renters. I argue that there is a further significant housing shift that deserves our attention – share housing. Share housing in the twenty-first century is different as evidence shows that people are sharing for longer and across widening age demographics; and that access to and experience of share housing is increasingly mediated by the digital. However, scant attention has been paid to share housing beyond its stereotype as transitional housing for young people between the family home and individual home ownership. Here I provoke geographers to take seriously, 'Generation Share' and the digitalised geographies of shared housing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consciously or unconsciously, urban inhabitants in digitally networked cities leave traces of themselves every time they interact with the digital devices and infrastructures that have become taken-for-granted parts of daily life. There have been lively discussions about the nature of social control and modes of power in such urban contexts. According to some, modulatory mechanisms of power characteristic of the digitally networked city have superseded disciplinary modes of control. This is said to involve the fragmentation of individuals into discrete units of dividual data. We argue that the shift from disciplinary to modulatory control should not be overstated. Rather, disciplinary and modulatory modes of control work together across a spectrum of personhood, from individual to dividual. Understanding the co-existence of, and the relationships between, these two forms of social control is essential for thinking through the urban politics of data and control. Our article illustrates this contention with three vignettes of how the dividualised data associated with discrete digital infrastructures and systems are also being 're-assembled' by various authorities seeking to discipline the behaviour of individuals. It concludes with a discussion of such powers of re-assembly and their critical importance to the politics of control in digitally networked cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]