- Title
- More-than-useful geographies of gardens in public housing: (e)valu(at)ing everyday practices and stories of gardens, home, and community
- Creator
- Vaughan, Nicola Therese
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2013
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- Gardens in public housing have been theorised as spaces where tenants can be managed, monitored, up-skilled and encouraged to participate in their communities. Such features of gardens, and the analysis of these features, are undoubtedly useful in a multitude of ways. However, gardens in public housing are more than just spaces of tenant participation. They are also critical everyday spaces where gardeners make home, make community, and forge connections with neighbours, families, and practitioners. This thesis takes Horton and Kraftl’s (2005) conceptualisation of the more-than-useful into the garden. More-than-useful geographies are open to accounts of everyday experience that are sometimes overlooked or undervalued in framings directed by an interest in problem solving or policy relevance. At the same time, such geographies recognise that the useful and more-than-useful are, in many ways, co-constitutive. By building a framework that gathers together insights from literature on everyday life, gardens, and housing studies and home, the thesis is alive to the possibilities of garden stories outside of a policy relevant framing. It reveals the ways in which, while policy and programs can be a vital part of the experiences of gardens, there are always other, just as valuable, goings-on in gardens that warrant consideration for their own sake. The thesis examines these goings-on through a case study of gardens in public housing in two very different areas of NSW, Hamilton South, in Newcastle, and Bidwill in Western Sydney. It explores what gardens do and how they are made from several different angles that collectively extend the more-than-useful into housing studies via the garden, while also making contributions to everyday life literature. Firstly, it analyses how Housing NSW has historically positioned gardens in public housing as ‘useful’ spaces. The thesis then turns to more-than-useful stories from the gardens, unpacking how garden spaces are produced through everyday material practices contingent upon different dwelling structures and the varying agency involvement in each of the case study sites. As well as material practices, storytelling practices about gardens are also critical to how gardens are brought into being and valued. Through the practices that make and maintain the gardens, gardeners also make particular types of spaces. Gardeners make homey spaces and community spaces, enrolling gardens in a variety of domestic and communal performances that are meaningful and valued. Such performances are inherently leaky: the formal and informal, the everyday and extra-ordinary, the garden and the non-garden all work together in the performance and experience of everyday life. Through conceptualising ‘leakiness’, the thesis makes claims about the powerful and vital understandings made possible through the more-than-useful approach, its capacity to enrich the useful, and moreover, the unexpected ways such understandings matter.
- Subject
- gardens in public housing; garden stories; tenant participation; Housing NSW; housing studies; Hamilton South; Bidwill
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1039324
- Identifier
- uon:13638
- Rights
- Copyright 2013 Nicola Therese Vaughan
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
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| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT01 | Abstract | 597 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download | ||
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT02 | Thesis | 4 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |