Research Reflection : September 25
The Architecture of Dispossession:
Public Housing, First Nations Futures,
and the Failure to Close the Gap.

Dana Moussaoui

In the aftermath of successive governmental promises to "Close the Gap" between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, the 2024 Annual Data Compilation Report by the Productivity Commission offers a confronting truth: the gap is not closing—it is widening in critical areas.

Suicide rates, incarceration, out-of-home care, and early childhood development outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have not only failed to improve but have, in many instances, worsened (Productivity Commission, 2024). The state’s continued incapacity—or unwillingness—to implement the Priority Reforms embedded within the National Agreement reflects not just a political impasse but an ontological failure in how governance, planning, and built environments are understood and enacted.

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At the epicentre of this failure is housing.

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In Victoria, the State Government's redevelopment of public housing estates—many of which are in the process of being demolished and replaced by mixed-use private developments—offers a stark illustration of this crisis. The justification is couched in the language of "renewal," "density," and "economic viability." Yet, as scholars like Lisa Fiske and Libby Porter (2020) have shown, urban renewal policies in Australia often operate as veiled instruments of dispossession, particularly impacting First Nations and migrant communities whose histories of residence are tightly woven into the social and spatial fabric of these estates.

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Rather than investing in the existing stock and prioritising community co-design, these programs replace collective memory with private capital. They replace affordable homes with inaccessibly priced apartments. And most tellingly, they displace communities whose lives have been systematically shaped by state-controlled land relations since colonisation. The architectural implications are not merely aesthetic or functional—they are ideological. The disappearance of public housing reflects a disappearance of care as a structural value.

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This is not just a housing issue; it is a continuation of settler-colonial spatial logic.

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Indigenous families are overrepresented in public housing waiting lists and face significant barriers to stable, culturally appropriate shelter. According to the Closing the Gap report, the target for appropriately sized housing (Target 9A) is not on track, with severe overcrowding and structural inadequacy prevalent in First Nations households (Productivity Commission, 2024). Meanwhile, land rights and Native Title claims (Targets 15A and 15B) are progressing, but the coexistence of these legal recognitions alongside declining housing security reveals the contradiction at the heart of contemporary state policy: symbolic recognition without material restitution.

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Where, then, does architecture intervene?

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It must do so with deep reflexivity. As Blatman-Thomas and Porter (2019) argue, the role of planners and designers in Indigenous contexts must shift from one of authority to one of accountability. Architecture must resist its complicity in colonial spatial projects and instead become a tool of truth-telling and repair.

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To do this, architecture must also contend with the immaterial. It must design for memory. Public housing is not just a site of tenancy; it is a system of intergenerational survival. The demolition of these spaces is not only the loss of walls and roofs, but the erasure of sovereign urban narratives that remain undocumented by planning frameworks. As Pascoe (2014) has demonstrated in Dark Emu, settler myths of “empty” or underdeveloped land have long erased the complexity of Indigenous place-making. In the city, this erasure continues through displacement masked as progress.

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We cannot separate dispossession from design.

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Nor can we separate the material violence of inadequate housing from the psychosocial consequences that manifest in incarceration, suicide, and child removal—all of which are sharply rising, as the 2024 Closing the Gap report makes painfully clear. Indigenous housing must be understood not just through metrics of supply and demand, but through relational, land-based ethics. As Memmott et al. (2003) have long argued, culturally responsive housing design demands the integration of kinship systems, mobility, and spatial sovereignty—elements consistently missing from top-down public housing policy.

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To build well, to design ethically, is to know this history.

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Architecture must refuse to be neutral. It must ask: who is being housed, and who is being moved? Whose stories are being scaffolded into our cities, and whose are being rendered invisible?

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In aligning with Global Indigenous Dialogues, my own research argues that housing must be redefined—not as commodity, but as kin. Not as enclosure, but as encounter. Only then can we begin to imagine an architecture that truly “closes the gap”—not just by metrics, but by meaning.

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Because until housing is just, reconciliation remains a lie.

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References

• Blatman-Thomas, N., & Porter, L. (2019). Planning in Indigenous Australia: From Imperial Foundations to Postcolonial Futures. Routledge.

• Fiske, L., & Porter, L. (2020). "Planning and the Politics of Dispossession." Planning Theory & Practice, 21(2), 269–273.

• Memmott, P., Long, S., Chambers, C., & Spring, F. (2003). Categories of Indigenous 'Homeless' People and Good Practice Responses to Their Needs. AHURI.

• Pascoe, B. (2014). Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture. Magabala Books.

• Productivity Commission. (2024). Closing the Gap Annual Data Compilation Report 2024. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia.

• Pholeros, P., Rainow, S., & Torzillo, P. (2000). Housing for Health: Towards a Healthy Living Environment for Aboriginal Australia. Healthabitat.