In the name of “renewal,” entire communities—mostly migrant, working-class, and often racialised—are being uprooted under the guise of progress. But what does progress mean when it severs continuity? When it replaces memory with market logic? When the story of a place is overwritten by private interest?

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Architecture, in this context, is no longer a vessel of care—it becomes a weapon of forgetting.

These towers, often maligned and misrepresented, have housed generations. They have held birthday parties, funerals, weddings, prayers. They have sheltered families who arrived with nothing but resilience. They have seen joy, violence, kinship, survival. And while they were never perfect, they offered something that the so-called market will never replicate: permanence without precarity.

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The proposed demolition of 44 public housing towers across Melbourne by 2051 mirrors a global pattern of state-led gentrification, often resulting in what urban scholar Loretta Lees calls “accumulation by dispossession”—where public assets are transferred into private hands under the pretext of urban revitalisation (Lees, 2008). We saw this in the mass clearances of London’s council estates, like the Heygate Estate in Elephant & Castle. There, promises of mixed-income communities and affordable return were broken; only 82 of the 1,200 original public housing units remained post-redevelopment (Watt, 2013).

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This is not an isolated misstep. In Sydney, the Millers Point evictions under the Baird Government saw elderly residents forcibly removed from historic public housing under similar claims of “efficiency” and “market opportunity”—displacing people from homes they had lived in for generations (Gibson, 2016).

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To displace these residents is not just to change their postcode. It is to destabilise their futures. It is to inform a whole generation that their presence in the city is conditional—that they may live here, but never belong here.

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The Victorian Government’s promise to replace these towers with a “mix” of public and private dwellings remains alarmingly vague. Public housing advocates have raised concerns that the so-called "social housing" replacing public stock will be owned and managed by non-government housing associations, which are not accountable in the same way the public sector is (Pawson et al., 2020). If land ownership shifts, and private developers dominate the build, who returns? Under what terms? What fraction of the original community?

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And for the current generation—young people already locked out of home ownership, rent-burdened, and disillusioned—what future does this offer? If public land becomes private asset, then shelter becomes speculative. If every corner of the city becomes a site of profit, where will equity live?

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We are told that high-density redevelopment is necessary. That the towers are obsolete. That public housing is a failed model. But who failed whom?

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The built environment reflects our deepest values. What we choose to demolish—and what we choose to preserve—tells us everything about whose lives are considered valuable. If we measure success by market growth rather than human thriving, then of course public housing seems like a problem. But what if we recalibrated our metrics? What if stability, affordability, cultural continuity, and collective care were the criteria by which we evaluated design?

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In Indigenous paradigms, housing is not a transaction. It is a relationship. Shelter is not separate from spirit. In the Gunditjmara aquaculture systems, in the carved rock dwellings of the Pitjantjatjara, in the seasonal movements of many First Nations peoples, we find an architectural ethic of reciprocity. Country provides, and in turn, we care.

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This ethic is diametrically opposed to the logic of real estate capital, which sees land as asset, not ancestor.

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So, in the shadow of demolition, we are called to reimagine. What would it mean to rebuild—not just in form, but in values? Could the redevelopment of these sites become an act of repair rather than erasure?

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To do so, we must centre the voices of those who have lived in the towers. We must treat them not as passive recipients of policy but as knowledge-holders, designers, storytellers. We must understand that architecture is not a neutral act—it is a choice to honour or to harm.

And we must ask: what are we preparing for? A city of luxury enclaves and gated affordability? Or a city that welcomes, shelters, and sustains all its people?

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The towers may fall. But what we build in their place will reveal whether we have learned anything from their presence.

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Because architecture, at its core, is not about walls. It is about values made visible. If we build only for capital, we will inherit cities that forget how to care.

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But if we build for dignity, memory, and belonging—we may yet create a home worth living in

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For everyone.

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References

• Gibson, C. (2016). Millers Point and the Politics of Urban Displacement. Sydney Review of Books.

• Lees, L. (2008). Gentrification and Social Mixing: Towards an Inclusive Urban Renaissance? Urban Studies, 45(12), 2449–2470.

• Pawson, H., Milligan, V., & Martin, C. (2020). Housing Policy in Australia: A Case for System Reform. Palgrave Macmillan.

• Watt, P. (2013). ‘It’s not for us’: Regeneration, the 2012 Olympics and the Gentrification of East London. City, 17(1), 99–118.

• Adnate, M. (2024). adnate.com.au and @adnate on Instagram.