Despite Australian multicultural policy that asserts the right of all citizens to maintain and practice their religion, formal citizenship has not guaranteed the welcome or belonging of migrant religious groups at the neighbourhood scale. This is most starkly reflected in contests over the inclusion of minority religious spaces in the Australian landscape, which increasingly take place in the rural-urban fringe of metropolitan areas. This work examines the controversy over a proposed Hindu temple in metropolitan Sydney and reveals insights into the way that rural-urban fringe space is imagined, understood and experienced by land use planners, residents and temple members. Critical discourse analysis of policy documentation along with interviews reveals that land use planners circumscribe belonging in the landscape through the use of zoning ordinances and design controls, local residents mark the boundaries of white privilege through narratives of heritage and cultural difference and temple members claim rights to citizenship based on assertions of sameness.

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This article examines land-use development applications for minority religious facilities in two local government areas on the ruralÁurban fringe of metropolitan Sydney, Australia. Using critical discourse analysis and underpinned by Lefebvre's (1991) conceptual triad of space, the work interrogates the way in which place identity is generated and codified both by land-use planners and local residents through spatial representation. This representation is revealed in discourses around the compatibility of minority religious facilities for particular zones, lack of a sufficient minority population and social disruption. These discourses reveal a construction of periurban space that is aligned with particular elite Anglo-Australian activities (horse riding and gentleman farms) and land uses (rural residential, small-scale agriculture and the 'bush-church'). These case studies illustrate the potential for the creation of exclusionary, abstract space by urban planners but also the ways in which local residents use discoursive strategies to ensure the stability of their position as elites in rapidly changing spatial situations.

This article examines the ways in which a group of Gujarati migrant women in Sydney, Australia, negotiate belonging within the context of their religious community or satsang. Using multi-sited ethnography in India and in Australia, the work interrogates the religious community as the institutional site in which boundaries of belonging and identity are delineated. It reveals that women negotiate belonging in the temple space around three primary areas: foodwork, bodily practices such as headcovering and information communication technologies or virtual space. Results indicate the ways in which women construct themselves as cultural gatekeepers around foodwork practices and the way in which headcovering becomes a site of contestation over claims of doctrinal or cultural authority. Finally, the study reveals the way in which women's participation in virtual religious space opens up possibilities for multi-layered ways of belonging and new ritual practices that challenge gendered norms.

This article undertakes a case study analysis of an Islamic school development application in Sydney, Australia. Discourse analysis situates collaborative planning within a realized sociopolitical context that impacts on the possibilities for this form of action. It reveals that planners and residents understood public participation as a measure of the legitimacy of the planning process, as a means to uncover local knowledge, and as an indicator of communication and collaboration. However, highly uneven networks of power found in actual practice as well as deep-seated anxieties about ethnoreligious "others" actively excluded supporters of the Islamic school from participation.