Destination dumping ground: The convergence of ‘unwanted’ populations in disadvantaged city areas

Abstract

Academic and lay discourses around disadvantaged urban areas often draw on the language of 'dumping grounds' to encapsulate the poverty, marginalisation and social problems often found there. Yet the concept of a dumping ground remains insufficiently theorised. This paper addresses this issue by identifying five constituent features of the dumping ground: the perception of people as waste whose fate is to be discarded; the need to accommodate this human 'waste' and the logic by which places are selected for this purpose; the mechanisms through which this spatial sorting occurs as problem populations are moved to their 'rightful' place; the relations of power which enforce or encourage this mobility; and finally, the reactions of incumbent residents in neighbourhoods that are compelled to host unwanted social groups. In the second part of this paper, these themes are illustrated via a case study of the Australian city of Logan where residents complain that their city has been treated as a dumping ground in order to explain its poor reputation.

Re‐thinking urban infrastructures as spaces of learning

“…For example, and contrary to Sanyal's (2012) observation about refuge in informal urban settlements, Cheshire and Zappia (2015) note that in Western countries like Australia, Canada or the United States urban refugees often find themselves in infrastructural rich urban quarters with cheap housing, community services, economic development projects, neighbourhood renewal initiatives, employment and training programmes and similar projects, all of which are designed to turn a functionless and redundant population into a contributing and respectable sector of society (Cheshire & Zappia, 2015, p. 2085.…”

“…Tourists, expatriates, regional, international and internal migrants, displaced people, international students move to urban centers, albeit for different reasons and differentiated by legal entitlements (Nail, 2015). Among the diverse scholarship that researches the living conditions of these mobile groups, refugee studies in particular have attended to the increasing amount of urban settlements and the role of urban life and the built environment for the experiences of refuge (Cheshire & Zappia, 2015; Crisp et al., 2012; Darling, 2017; Sanyal, 2012; Tuitjer & Batréau, 2019). Thinking about the challenges that newcomers encounter in the “arrival city” (Saunders, 2011) in unfamiliar infrastructural contexts, learning emerges as a key aspect to study.…”

“…cheap housing, community services, economic development projects, neighbourhood renewal initiatives, employment and training programmes and similar projects, all of which are designed to turn a functionless and redundant population into a contributing and respectable sector of society (Cheshire & Zappia, 2015, p. 2085).…”

Place, disadvantage and the project of the self: pursuing a better life in outer metropolitan Australia

“…In a similar way, Australian researchers see disadvantaged places as locations where people have been left behind by the new economy, suffering structural unemployment, and/or struggling to get by with more casualised and part-time work (see Badcock, 1984;Hunter, 1996;Gregory & Hunter, 1995Stimson, Baum, Mullins, & O'Connor, 2001;Beer & Foster, 2002;Baum et al, 2006, Baum, 2008. For these reasons, disadvantaged places in Australia have sometimes been described as 'dumping grounds' for people unwanted in this new economic order (Cheshire & Zappia, 2016).…”

“…From his perspective, the island's "nice" natural environment offered a "sort of peacefulness" to those islanders who he saw were like his father and other people in his former neighbourhood who had become exhausted and depressed by long term unemployment. As a counterpoint to the Dole Island story (Channel 7, 2012), he understood that unemployed islanders were people who had found themselves unwanted rather than work shy in the new economy (Wacquant, 2007, Cheshire & Zappia, 2016.…”