Ani Landau-Ward
Bio:
Ani Landau-Ward teaches in the Bachelor of Arts; International Studies (BAIS) and is a Research Officer at the Centre for Urban Research (CUR), at RMIT University in Melbourne/Naarm, on the unceded lands of the Kulin Nations. She is currently pursuing her Ph.D. and holds an MA in International and Community Development, as well as a number of years experience working across interdisciplinary research settings at RMIT. She brings to her academic work a background of professional and practical experience in housing justice advocacy, participatory architectural design, community/social centre organising, and land conservation. She has a strong commitment to the role of careful scholarship and research in ‘holding to account’ and questioning powerful interests and ideas across the political spectrum, especially those related to housing and land law, and administration. She sees academic work as important in contributing productively to debates in the public sphere.
Research:
Her recent research projects, with teams in the Centre for Urban Research (CUR) and associated communities of practice, have focussed on; seeking pathways towards improved opportunities for indigenous land governance; interrogating the policy and governance implications of digital transformations in the housing sector in Melbourne; and, asking political questions of ‘urban greening’ practices in cities. Her individual scholarly research is at a different scale, and focuses on the transnational politics of land and property administration as it is taken up in the name of ‘development’. Especially in spaces of transnational regulation, such as the development of international standards, multilateral agreements brokered in the UN system, and the emergence of private interests in regulatory spaces. She brings to this work a critical development studies and international relations lens, with particular attention to world histories, ongoing dynamics of decolonisation and their manifestations in international law, and the changing political economies of global inequality. Her previous research analysed the history (genealogy) and promotion of property rights institutions in the UN system. Her current PhD project moves to critically examine recent technological changes, and the role of data, in transnational land administration practices and their governance.
Pubs:
Ms Landau-Ward’s research has been presented internationally at the annual meetings of The Association for Law, Property, and Society (ALPS), and the International Academic Association on Planning, Law, and Property Rights (PLPR), as well as in numerous other academic forums. She has contributed scholarly writing to the volumes; Springer Global Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Public Policy, and Governance, and Urban Asias: Essays on Futurity Past and Present with Jovis: Berlin. As well as in academic Journals, such as; New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies; and the two Taylor and Francis Journals Australian Geographer and Planning Theory and Practice. She has recently published a co-authored book with colleagues in global studies entitled Monsters of Modernity: Global Icons for our Critical Condition (2019), with the ethical academic publisher Kismet Press: Leeds.
Teaching:
Alongside her research activities Ms Landau-Ward has tutored, lectured, and course coordinated across undergraduate courses in the School of Global Urban and Social Studies, with a particular focus on the Bachelor of Arts in International Studies (BAIS) program. This has included teaching introductory courses in sociology, critical social theory, globalisation, intercultural communication and social research methods, as well as more advanced courses in Digital Sociology and Globalisation, Global Governance and International Law, and International/Global development theory and practice. Her teaching is a major focus of her academic life and she considers her responsibilities in the classroom as an educator and mentor very seriously indeed, striving to foster intellectually challenging, and highly inclusive learning communities, and is always learning herself. She has an open door, and inbox, policy for student inquiries.
Ani Landau-Ward teaches in the Bachelor of Arts; International Studies (BAIS) and is a Research Officer at the Centre for Urban Research (CUR), at RMIT University in Melbourne/Naarm, on the unceded lands of the Kulin Nations. She is currently pursuing her Ph.D. and holds an MA in International and Community Development, as well as a number of years experience working across interdisciplinary research settings at RMIT. She brings to her academic work a background of professional and practical experience in housing justice advocacy, participatory architectural design, community/social centre organising, and land conservation. She has a strong commitment to the role of careful scholarship and research in ‘holding to account’ and questioning powerful interests and ideas across the political spectrum, especially those related to housing and land law, and administration. She sees academic work as important in contributing productively to debates in the public sphere.
Research:
Her recent research projects, with teams in the Centre for Urban Research (CUR) and associated communities of practice, have focussed on; seeking pathways towards improved opportunities for indigenous land governance; interrogating the policy and governance implications of digital transformations in the housing sector in Melbourne; and, asking political questions of ‘urban greening’ practices in cities. Her individual scholarly research is at a different scale, and focuses on the transnational politics of land and property administration as it is taken up in the name of ‘development’. Especially in spaces of transnational regulation, such as the development of international standards, multilateral agreements brokered in the UN system, and the emergence of private interests in regulatory spaces. She brings to this work a critical development studies and international relations lens, with particular attention to world histories, ongoing dynamics of decolonisation and their manifestations in international law, and the changing political economies of global inequality. Her previous research analysed the history (genealogy) and promotion of property rights institutions in the UN system. Her current PhD project moves to critically examine recent technological changes, and the role of data, in transnational land administration practices and their governance.
Pubs:
Ms Landau-Ward’s research has been presented internationally at the annual meetings of The Association for Law, Property, and Society (ALPS), and the International Academic Association on Planning, Law, and Property Rights (PLPR), as well as in numerous other academic forums. She has contributed scholarly writing to the volumes; Springer Global Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Public Policy, and Governance, and Urban Asias: Essays on Futurity Past and Present with Jovis: Berlin. As well as in academic Journals, such as; New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies; and the two Taylor and Francis Journals Australian Geographer and Planning Theory and Practice. She has recently published a co-authored book with colleagues in global studies entitled Monsters of Modernity: Global Icons for our Critical Condition (2019), with the ethical academic publisher Kismet Press: Leeds.
Teaching:
Alongside her research activities Ms Landau-Ward has tutored, lectured, and course coordinated across undergraduate courses in the School of Global Urban and Social Studies, with a particular focus on the Bachelor of Arts in International Studies (BAIS) program. This has included teaching introductory courses in sociology, critical social theory, globalisation, intercultural communication and social research methods, as well as more advanced courses in Digital Sociology and Globalisation, Global Governance and International Law, and International/Global development theory and practice. Her teaching is a major focus of her academic life and she considers her responsibilities in the classroom as an educator and mentor very seriously indeed, striving to foster intellectually challenging, and highly inclusive learning communities, and is always learning herself. She has an open door, and inbox, policy for student inquiries.
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Papers by Ani Landau-Ward
As in many other cities, the proliferation of these technologies is occurring in a context of housing crisis where land prices are escalating and producing significant housing unaffordability. The confluence of these factors highlights the importance of examining the urban governance implications of the emergence of what is often termed ‘Prop-Tech’ (Shaw 2018) – new technological applications in real estate. Greater understanding of PropTech is vital to sharpen the legal and policy response to the emergent urban governance aspects of digitisation. In this essay, we present results from an initial scoping study into the proliferation of these technologies in Melbourne, Australia.
Monsters of Modernity explores the contemporary human condition through a selection of globally iconic monsters. In each chapter, the authors explore monsters for what they reveal about the world in which we live and for the ways that they enable us to address critical issues facing humanity. Although monsters might be feared and thought of as threatening, the authors show how each monster brings us to a deeper appreciation of various aspects of our troubled world, from gender relations, to the lasting impacts of colonisation, to neoliberalism, to the fragility of humanity’s place in the world in the Anthropocene.
Monsters of Modernity explores new ground in the conventions of authorship and scholarship, including through the highly personal and subjective perspectives in each chapter, and even the absence of an Introduction. This book will be a valuable companion to anyone interested in the study of monsters as well as those seeking engaging ways to explore and teach key global issues.
Join the authors as they explore the critical condition of our age through their explorations of Chimera, Leviathan, Vampires, Bunyips, Predator and the Xenomorph Alien, Pokémon, Dragons, and Godzilla.
In this context it is crucial to ask what new intersections of property and precarity are produced, and pay close attention to the emerging rationalities that underpin their administration. The politics of property for the poor, for better or worse (and quite probably both) will be increasingly caught up in the spatial and temporal webs of these technologies, and the rationalities that they, and their owners, designers, and regulators embed and assume. As such, it is increasingly important to pay attention to the registration and titling of property rights as the production of information that is socially embedded and political, and inquire into its subsequent digital social relations.
Home to more city dwellers than any other region, and the locus of many of the world’s most populous metropolitan areas, Asia is moving to centre stage in popular and academic debates about planetary urban futures. Among diverse urban Asias are landscapes, images, visions and aspirations that conjure new forms of the future. This volume comprises essays examining intersections of the urban and futurity. While attentive to emergent forms of urban Asia, contributors also examine futures past, the afterlives of historical projects, and archaeologies of the future. While authoritative forms of future city-making feature in several essays, others focus on everyday engagement with futurity. Many essays provide ethnographic and field-based empirical insights into urban lifeworlds that are coming into being, while others explore the theoretical and political implications of urban futures from Asia.
Chapter intro:
What happens in capital cities often serves as a metonym for that city’s nation. Politicians and protestors alike seek to make their presence felt in capitals not just out of convenience, but because what happens there makes a statement. Visionaries build landmarks there to impose their vision on the country, and to send a message to the world.
We seek here to explore Kuala Lumpur for what it says of Malaysia and its imagined future. In the space that this essay allows, we bring five foci, each intended to reveal a further layer or element to an understanding of the ways in which people have sought to impose themselves in the na- tional imaginary. We explore the imposing Petronas Twin Towers for what they say about ethnicity, the razing of slums for what it reveals about class, protests and graffiti for what they show about democracy, and sexual minor- ities for what they demonstrate about the visibility of diversity in Malaysia.
Concurrently, as outlined in the SDGs and in the extensive literature on land grabbing, there has never been a time when the role of land and property in safeguarding precarious populations, and environments, in order to ensure sustainable and equitable futures, has been broadly considered more pressing. Indeed the importance of land for those people counted as marginalised, precarious, or living in conditions of subsistence, is increasingly lauded as paramount to social justice and human development concerns.
However these two are increasingly combined. The logic of the latter justifying the promotion and application of the former. This brings to the fore pressing new tensions and gaps in policy and research of crucial importance to those interested in the practices and struggles of land, property and place.
Exemplifying the above tensions is the way that new digital titling capabilities are completely revolutionising the rapidity and ease with which new property can be registered. And are presented as enabling bottom up and grassroots property practices. These titling platforms also create new markets, not only in land, but in titling itself, changing the role of land programs, for some actors (stakeholders), to be tied up with the creation of new global markets. These must be understood in the light of new terrains of big data and networked governance.
Little research has been completed in this area. This paper presents an initial overview of these emerging platforms, through a critical development studies and digital sociology lens, arguing that the politics of property and land must, at least in part, be understood as intersecting with the emergence of new digitally enabled interests and spheres of rule.
Introduction: Urbanization is said to be the hallmark of the contemporary era. The majority of people, as itis widely stated, now live in cities (UN2014). Cities are variously seen to epitomize the peaks and troughs of development, house and provide playgrounds to the wealthiest elites, and, in their vast sprawls, contain the majority of humanity. More generally, the global future of humanity, as far as one can be described, is now widely under-stood and presented as an urban future. A future of cities and their successes and failures that is tied into global processes, social, economic, cultural, and environmental. These processes are often, also, political and enmeshed in globalization. While cities are increasingly seen to create transnational networks and alliances, they also become islands differentiated from their regions in political as well as economic terms. Cities, and the processes that influence them, are broadly understood as now caught up in increasingly global flows of capital and culture that dislodge them, at least partially, from the politics of the nation-state. This presents new forms of territory and politics beyond and alongside the state, both in the sense of politics as contests of interest and in the more nuanced sense of politics as differing ideals of social organization, rule, and imagining, as defined above. This is always, however, a manifestly partial account, because cities are not constant, or able to be bounded, or defined consistently, across time and space. From within, cities are lived and known in disparate ways. As such, statements and frameworks that describe cities in the above terms risk conflating vastly different contexts through the label of the city. These frameworks and understandings of the city, in turn, inform policy and governance and are increasingly global. Accordingly they wield great power in both influencing the direction of cities, through globally circulating policy approaches, and in defining what is counted as valid and desirable. As such the politics of describing cities must also be engaged. The field of spatial approaches to cities, globalization, and their politics, while certainly established as of crucial relevance across a range of academic and practice domains, is not a discipline containing a discrete body of knowledge or theory. Indeed the hallmark of many spatial approaches is that they necessarily bring together interdisciplinary perspectives. As such, like the processes and contexts engaged, scholarship in this area is hotly debated and contested and is rapidly emerging. It is also extremely extensive. In order to address this topic adequately, yetwithin the scope of this chapter, the following text introduces a diverse set of recent work at this juncture and explains important current debates and scholarship at the nexus of cities, globalization, and politics. These contain contestation and rarely lend themselves to singular dis-courses, overarching frameworks, or straightforward conclusions. However, as geographer Doreen Massey asserts,“an insistence on complexity leaves open more opportunities for politics”(2007, p. 11), and it is in this spirit that the following text introduces the topic.
As in many other cities, the proliferation of these technologies is occurring in a context of housing crisis where land prices are escalating and producing significant housing unaffordability. The confluence of these factors highlights the importance of examining the urban governance implications of the emergence of what is often termed ‘Prop-Tech’ (Shaw 2018) – new technological applications in real estate. Greater understanding of PropTech is vital to sharpen the legal and policy response to the emergent urban governance aspects of digitisation. In this essay, we present results from an initial scoping study into the proliferation of these technologies in Melbourne, Australia.
Monsters of Modernity explores the contemporary human condition through a selection of globally iconic monsters. In each chapter, the authors explore monsters for what they reveal about the world in which we live and for the ways that they enable us to address critical issues facing humanity. Although monsters might be feared and thought of as threatening, the authors show how each monster brings us to a deeper appreciation of various aspects of our troubled world, from gender relations, to the lasting impacts of colonisation, to neoliberalism, to the fragility of humanity’s place in the world in the Anthropocene.
Monsters of Modernity explores new ground in the conventions of authorship and scholarship, including through the highly personal and subjective perspectives in each chapter, and even the absence of an Introduction. This book will be a valuable companion to anyone interested in the study of monsters as well as those seeking engaging ways to explore and teach key global issues.
Join the authors as they explore the critical condition of our age through their explorations of Chimera, Leviathan, Vampires, Bunyips, Predator and the Xenomorph Alien, Pokémon, Dragons, and Godzilla.
In this context it is crucial to ask what new intersections of property and precarity are produced, and pay close attention to the emerging rationalities that underpin their administration. The politics of property for the poor, for better or worse (and quite probably both) will be increasingly caught up in the spatial and temporal webs of these technologies, and the rationalities that they, and their owners, designers, and regulators embed and assume. As such, it is increasingly important to pay attention to the registration and titling of property rights as the production of information that is socially embedded and political, and inquire into its subsequent digital social relations.
Home to more city dwellers than any other region, and the locus of many of the world’s most populous metropolitan areas, Asia is moving to centre stage in popular and academic debates about planetary urban futures. Among diverse urban Asias are landscapes, images, visions and aspirations that conjure new forms of the future. This volume comprises essays examining intersections of the urban and futurity. While attentive to emergent forms of urban Asia, contributors also examine futures past, the afterlives of historical projects, and archaeologies of the future. While authoritative forms of future city-making feature in several essays, others focus on everyday engagement with futurity. Many essays provide ethnographic and field-based empirical insights into urban lifeworlds that are coming into being, while others explore the theoretical and political implications of urban futures from Asia.
Chapter intro:
What happens in capital cities often serves as a metonym for that city’s nation. Politicians and protestors alike seek to make their presence felt in capitals not just out of convenience, but because what happens there makes a statement. Visionaries build landmarks there to impose their vision on the country, and to send a message to the world.
We seek here to explore Kuala Lumpur for what it says of Malaysia and its imagined future. In the space that this essay allows, we bring five foci, each intended to reveal a further layer or element to an understanding of the ways in which people have sought to impose themselves in the na- tional imaginary. We explore the imposing Petronas Twin Towers for what they say about ethnicity, the razing of slums for what it reveals about class, protests and graffiti for what they show about democracy, and sexual minor- ities for what they demonstrate about the visibility of diversity in Malaysia.
Concurrently, as outlined in the SDGs and in the extensive literature on land grabbing, there has never been a time when the role of land and property in safeguarding precarious populations, and environments, in order to ensure sustainable and equitable futures, has been broadly considered more pressing. Indeed the importance of land for those people counted as marginalised, precarious, or living in conditions of subsistence, is increasingly lauded as paramount to social justice and human development concerns.
However these two are increasingly combined. The logic of the latter justifying the promotion and application of the former. This brings to the fore pressing new tensions and gaps in policy and research of crucial importance to those interested in the practices and struggles of land, property and place.
Exemplifying the above tensions is the way that new digital titling capabilities are completely revolutionising the rapidity and ease with which new property can be registered. And are presented as enabling bottom up and grassroots property practices. These titling platforms also create new markets, not only in land, but in titling itself, changing the role of land programs, for some actors (stakeholders), to be tied up with the creation of new global markets. These must be understood in the light of new terrains of big data and networked governance.
Little research has been completed in this area. This paper presents an initial overview of these emerging platforms, through a critical development studies and digital sociology lens, arguing that the politics of property and land must, at least in part, be understood as intersecting with the emergence of new digitally enabled interests and spheres of rule.
Introduction: Urbanization is said to be the hallmark of the contemporary era. The majority of people, as itis widely stated, now live in cities (UN2014). Cities are variously seen to epitomize the peaks and troughs of development, house and provide playgrounds to the wealthiest elites, and, in their vast sprawls, contain the majority of humanity. More generally, the global future of humanity, as far as one can be described, is now widely under-stood and presented as an urban future. A future of cities and their successes and failures that is tied into global processes, social, economic, cultural, and environmental. These processes are often, also, political and enmeshed in globalization. While cities are increasingly seen to create transnational networks and alliances, they also become islands differentiated from their regions in political as well as economic terms. Cities, and the processes that influence them, are broadly understood as now caught up in increasingly global flows of capital and culture that dislodge them, at least partially, from the politics of the nation-state. This presents new forms of territory and politics beyond and alongside the state, both in the sense of politics as contests of interest and in the more nuanced sense of politics as differing ideals of social organization, rule, and imagining, as defined above. This is always, however, a manifestly partial account, because cities are not constant, or able to be bounded, or defined consistently, across time and space. From within, cities are lived and known in disparate ways. As such, statements and frameworks that describe cities in the above terms risk conflating vastly different contexts through the label of the city. These frameworks and understandings of the city, in turn, inform policy and governance and are increasingly global. Accordingly they wield great power in both influencing the direction of cities, through globally circulating policy approaches, and in defining what is counted as valid and desirable. As such the politics of describing cities must also be engaged. The field of spatial approaches to cities, globalization, and their politics, while certainly established as of crucial relevance across a range of academic and practice domains, is not a discipline containing a discrete body of knowledge or theory. Indeed the hallmark of many spatial approaches is that they necessarily bring together interdisciplinary perspectives. As such, like the processes and contexts engaged, scholarship in this area is hotly debated and contested and is rapidly emerging. It is also extremely extensive. In order to address this topic adequately, yetwithin the scope of this chapter, the following text introduces a diverse set of recent work at this juncture and explains important current debates and scholarship at the nexus of cities, globalization, and politics. These contain contestation and rarely lend themselves to singular dis-courses, overarching frameworks, or straightforward conclusions. However, as geographer Doreen Massey asserts,“an insistence on complexity leaves open more opportunities for politics”(2007, p. 11), and it is in this spirit that the following text introduces the topic.