McKenzie Wark on Judith Butler on Assembly and The Street

Street sculpture and tents, Hong Kong 2014. Source: Mapping the Umbrella Movement

McKenzie Wark has written a great review of Judith Butler's 2015 book "Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly" over at Public Seminar.

Butler's book includes a chapter called 'Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street', that appeared online a couple of years back as a talk given by Butler in the wake of events like Tahir and Occupy. Once I got over my initial jilted geographer's reaction of 'hey, you realise a few other folks have been thinking about public space and politics since Hannah Arendt?', I got heaps out of the Butler piece (it's *Judith Butler* writing about public space and politics, after all!). In particular, I really like the way she works with (and past) Arendt's approach to the 'space of appearance', focusing attention on the 'infrastructure' that is produced and sustained to support that appearance: as she puts it, "the material supports for action are not only part of the action, but they are also what is being fought about".

Anyway, one of the passages in Wark's review that really stuck out for me was this:

For Butler, “the media have entered into the very definition of the people.” (20) Might it not rather be the other way around? There is a sort of latent Platonism at work here, where the bodies gathered in and as a body, come first, and their mediated double second. But surely it is the other way around in any modern polity. The media are the primary space; public squares and so forth are sets for media performances. One cannot simply add media onto some fantasy of the Greek polis and call it modern politics. The thing to occupy is media time; the way to do it is to take space. It is not the case that “the media extends the scene.” (91) The scene is a retroactive production of media. If an assembly gathered and nobody noticed, did it make a sound?

This is a great provocation about the relationship between the urban and the media in public formation and politics. I can get with the idea that maybe the bodies don't come first, prior to some subsequent mediation, and I think Wark's point here is really important. But I'm not sure I can get with the follow-up claim Wark makes here that: "the thing to occupy is media time; the way to do it is to take space", and that argument that urban public spaces are now primarily "sets for media performances".

Sure, many occupations and assemblies are indeed 'staged' with their 'screening' in mind, and media narratives clearly shape and frame actions staged in the streets -- so I agree that efforts to claim media space/time are a constitutive element in the production of many political events in public spaces, not a secondary or subsequent process.

But in the occupations that we have witnessed across this decade, I think there are plenty of things going on that don't conform to this formulation either. Sometimes, the bodies assembled together are constantly moving between practices that sustain the physical space of occupation, and practices that reach out beyond that space in the process of representation and claim-making. 'Urban' and 'media' spaces are mixed together in different combinations to achieve these dual ends. Just as some actions are clearly staged in a physical public space in a manner calculated to find an audience via mass/niche/social media as Wark argues, so too various media are put to work in the service of maintaining what Butler calls the 'infrastructure' of assembly/occupation (eg via social media call-outs for resources/food, defence against police, etc). Theses processes of social reproduction in an assembly/occupation are not exclusively undertaken just to sustain the space that can occupy media time. They are also frequently understood as prefigurative experiments with different (more just) ways of being together, and therefore as political ends in themselves (for some great images of this in action at Occupy Wall St, see Alison Young's blog post over on Images to Live By).

So, as I tried to argue in this short piece written a little while back, I think it's a dead end to get into an argument about 'which comes first?', the city (ie Butler's bodies in a physical geography) or the media (ie Wark's mediated presence with its virtual geography). An approach that focuses on interaction and co-production seems much more promising.

Wark's review comes under the title "what the performative can't perform", meaning that for him Butler's frame is too focused on embodied performativity at the expense of a consideration of the performativity of infrastructure (including media). But in Publics and the City, when I was trying to think through the co-constitution of embodied and mediated forms of 'being public', I actually found some work in Performance Studies very helpful - in particular, Philip Auslander's 1999 book Liveness - Performance in a Mediatized Culture. Writing to a performance/theatre studies audience, he argued against the idea that live theatre has more 'radical' potential than mediatised performance on the basis of its 'liveness' and the embodied co-presence of performers and their audience. Rather, he insists, the very idea of 'liveness' is a function of mediatisation, precisely because "mediatisation is now explicitly and implicitly embedded within the live experience" (eg think about the way live events incorporate media, the way they are staged with mediation in mind, etc). In Auslander's book, this passage really stuck out for me:

any distinction [between live and mediatised performances] needs to derive from careful consideration of how the relationship between the live and the mediatized is articulated in particular cases, not from a set of assumptions that constructs the relation between live and mediatized representations a priori as a relation of essential opposition.

I think this is a great warning against any theoretical prioritisation of embodied co-presence or mediatisation.

In this vein, one of the points I took from Butler's book was her linking of bodies and media in assemblies. In noting that assemblies circulate via media, she also points out that:

there remains something localized that cannot and does not travel in that way; and the scene could not be the scene if we did not understand that some people are at risk, and the risk is run precisely by those bodies on the street. If they are transported in one way, they are surely left in place in another, holding the camera or the cell phone, face to face with those they oppose, unprotected, injurable, injured, persistent, if not insurgent. It matters that those bodies carry cell phones, relaying messages and image..." (9).

This passage brought a bunch of memories flooding back for me ... of sitting at my computer in Sydney, transfixed by the #ows twitter stream during the infamous march across the Brooklyn Bridge in which hundreds were arrested, half a world away. I was there in one sense, and they were with me ... but in another sense, of course, we really were worlds apart. Me, in a comfy office, reading live media accounts from people being violently blocked and arrested by police.

Now, Wark might say this is exactly his point (ie that those bodies were taking risks in public space precisely in order to capture media time). Fair enough. But I guess I feel as though taking a little of both Butler and Wark together could actually be quite fruitful for those of us trying to think through the urban/media interface in politics right now.

In any case, Wark's review is going to have me dipping back into some of his previous writing on media, vectoral power, etc. (I just read his latest book Molecular Red, which I loved for many reasons ... not least for some unexpected and evocative personal recollections on his time in the offices of the Communist Party of Australia back in the day when the green bans were in full swing!).

Dear Greater Sydney Commission, my idea for Sydney is ... democracy

Last weekend, my fam and I popped in to Canterbury Racecouse, where a food market has just started up on Sundays. Empanadas and stuff. Right on.

At the far end of the market sat a parked bus that announced itself as a 'Talk Bus'. People with black t-shirts and balloons covered in hashtags were trying (and mostly failing) to connect with passers-by. They wanted to know what we loved about living in Sydney, and our ideas for making it better.

Someone from the bus tried to give one of my kids a balloon. It kinda freaked her out and she grabbed her mum's leg. Exactly, girlfriend. They also tried to stop my Mum for a chat. Mum's nice, and she politely declined. But in a classic spruiker move, that politeness was twisted into an invitation to talk some more. Mum tried to escape by telling them she was old, and that if it was all about the future, maybe they should be asking younger people. The frustrated spruiker then had a crack at her -- "what, younger people like the ones you're here with? They just walked past without talking to me!". End of engagement. I wonder what box got ticked on the woman's clipboard...?

It turned out the Talk Bus people were from the newly-established Greater Sydney Commission.

Here's a tweet of a picture of a camera filming a moment of consultation in front of the Talk Bus, with a guy with one of the hashtag balloons in the background:

The Greater Sydney Commission in action, working with some people and their dog to "co-create a more prosperous and liveable Sydney"
Image source: GSC Twitter Feed

Apparently, the Talk Bus will be travelling around Sydney for the next few weeks. Planning Minister Rob Stokes says it's all about "hearing directly from the local community to help shape the future of Sydney".

My blood is starting to boil just from typing out those words ... honestly.
 
I don't know anyone who works at the Greater Sydney Commission. They might be lovely people, for all I know. But I do know some bullshit when I smell it.

With the recent establishment of the Greater Sydney Commission, a bunch of appointed Commissioners have acquired incredible powers to shape this city. They've been given those powers by a Tory NSW Government that claims Sydney's problems are caused by the lack of a metropolitan planning authority. Apparently we need such an authority to make 'strategic' decisions for the city as a whole. Reduce silos! Cut red/green tape! Blah blah blah.

But the things that are most wrong with my town are not going to be fixed by the creation of the Greater Sydney Commission. In fact, the way that the NSW Government has gone about establishing the Greater Sydney Commission is a perfect example of what's most messed up with the way this city is governed.

When my mum extricated herself from the Talk Bus, she suggested maybe I should go talk to them and tell them what I thought. Best if I don't, I said. I'm not a fan of tokenistic consultation, and had no interest in contributing to their 'engagement' statistics. I was also a little annoyed that they had tried to get to me through my kid, and then made my Mum feel bad about not talking to them. And I had spotted the empanadas. 

But I probably should have stopped for a yarn, because I just ended up spending the rest of the afternoon being a little distracted, thinking of the kinds of things I coulda-shoulda-woulda said. You know the feeling, right?

Then I remembered I have a blog...

**

I don't have a problem with the idea of a planning for the city as a whole. In fact, I spend a lot of my time thinking about 'the city as a whole', and how it might be organised and represented and made more just, beyond local initiatives.

But as I've argued elsewhere on this blog, when people make claims to be representing 'the city as a whole', we have to ask some critical questions about the kinds of authority on which those claims are based.

Cities of Equals? Rethinking Urban Politics with Jacques Rancière (... and my buddy Mark Davidson)

For quite a while, I've been wanting to write a post about Jacques Rancière's work on politics and its potential usefulness for those of us interested in the relationship between cities and citizenship. Most of that material has subsequently ended up in stuff I've written elsewhere, so rather than write a long post here, I figured I could at least say a few brief things about why I've found his work so interesting, and what I've tried to do with it...

I first encountered Rancière's work while reading Kristin Ross's awesome book May '68 and its Afterlives. There, she used some of Rancière's work on politics and police in two ways. First, her analysis of the politics of  '68 is heavily influenced by the notion that these events involved a radical form of 'displacement' in which people refused to be reduced to the 'proper' activities associated with their identification as 'students', 'workers', 'farmers, etc. Second, she draws on Rancière to analyse the ways in which revisionist accounts of the events tended to 'police' them by insisting that they were part of an emergent consensus about the need to modernise French society, rather than events which introduced dissensus about the nature of French society. Mustafa Dikeç's book Badlands of the Republic also used Rancière to demonstrate the ways in which people from the banlieue were denied a political voice in French society.

So, for a little background on Rancière, I can highly recommend this piece from the Critical Theory blog: Who the fuck is Jacques Rancière? Rancière's particular approach to politics developed out of frustration with the 'laughable' distance he perceived between the events of May 1968 in Paris and the structural Marxism associated with Althusser (with whom Rancière worked on Reading Capital). This frustration initially sent him into the archives, looking for the ways in which working people had confronted their circumstances in nineteenth century France.

Two key ideas that emerged out of this work were his particular approach to equality and democratic politics, and the associated notion of politics as challenging the 'partition of the perceptible'. To explain briefly (and probably badly!), a key claim now associated with Rancière is the notion that in democratic politics, equality is not so much something that one strives towards (as in, "the world is unequal, so we need equality!"), but something that we enact in a given situation (as in, "we are equals, and society isn't recognising our equality, so we are going to make another world that does!"). By tracing the meaning and consequences of equality in a situation, democratic politics involves a confrontation with the 'partition of the perceptible' that polices the social. The 'partition of the perceptible' describes the situation in which only some things seem to be 'sayable' or 'doable' in any given society. Of course, this concept is not something original to Rancière! But I do kinda like the particular way he discusses this, and the challenge it poses for politics. His emphasis on politics as a process in which people manage to make "another time with that time, another space within that space" sits nicely with the ways in which I understand the challenging of making counter-public spaces and spheres.

Anyways ... I'm excited to say that the fruits of some of this reading, thinking, talking and research are making it into print. Mark Davidson and I have written two papers together, both of which are now available. And I've done a few more on my own. So, in an act of shameless self-promotion (but hey, it's my blog I guess...!), here's some brief info about the papers and what they are trying to achieve.

1. "Recovering the politics of the city: from the 'post-political city' to a 'method of equality' for critical urban theory", Progress in Human Geography (with Mark Davidson).

This piece was written Mark and I were getting deeper into some of Rancière's work, and finding it really exciting because we felt that it helped us chart a path between 'politics is everywhere' and 'politics is nowhere'. In this particular paper, we warn against the idea of the 'post-political city' ... not by saying that 'hey, everything's political, and there's politics everywhere!', but rather by focusing on  situated enactments of equality through processes of political subjectification as the basis of democratic politics. Rancière suggests his approach can be defined as a 'method of equality', one that seeks to draw out the connections between enactments of equality that take place in different historical and geographical contexts.

2. "Occupations, Mediations, Subjectifications: Fabricating Politics", Space and Polity (with Mark Davidson).

This one is part of a collection of papers on Rancière. We were really excited to be asked to contribute, and it was a great opportunity to apply (and extend) some of the thinking we'd done for our other paper to engage with the inspiring political mobilisations that have been going on in several cities over the past few years. The article draws on Rancière to examine the relationship between urban space and politics in these events ... both to help us make sense of the events, but also to build on Rancière's work to trace out the geographical dimensions of politics.

3. "Policing the City", in Urban Politics: Critical Approaches, edited by Mark Davidson and Deborah Martin.

This chapter riffs on the relationship between politics and police (a central relationship in Rancière's work), but unlike the two pieces above, this one is focused on the 'police' end of the spectrum. Thinking through the practice of graffiti (I can't help myself!), the chapter draws on Rancière's approach to policing to demonstrate the broad range of actors involved in efforts to put graffiti in its 'proper' place, from urban authorities like police and urban designers to youth workers and graffiti artists themselves. Rancière, Rudy Giuliani, Banksy and Robbo all make appearances. This one was fun to write too ... and hopefully illustrates the usefulness of Rancière's work in helping us to think through the practice of policing beyond the actions of the uniformed police.

4. "Cities within the City: Do-It-Yourself Urbanism and the Right to the City", International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. 

This one came out of a presentation I gave ages ago at a conference on the right to the city organised by Lee Stickells and Zanny Begg. With all the excitement about the 'micro-spatial' interventions of DIY urbanists in hacking and reclaiming urban spaces, the paper sets out to ask about the kinds of 'right to the city' that are being enacted. Conceptually, the paper draws on both Rancière and Lefebvre to develop a framework for interrogating the politics of DIY practices. Empirically, I discuss both BUGAUP and the Public Ad Campaign as examples of DIY urbanism that enact a democratic right to the city premised on the equality of urban inhabitants. There's some hopeful speculation at the end about how various DIY practices might begin to add up to more than the sum of their parts, through a shared commitment to democratic urban politics.

5. "Building a City for 'The People': the politics of alliance building in the Sydney green ban movement", Antipode.

I've already mentioned on the blog that I have a piece included in a special issue of Antipode on Grammars of Urban Injustice. I kinda feel like I've had Rancière hovering over my shoulder while in the archives doing this project - as noted above, his 'method of equality' emerged from archival research. While the paper takes issue with some of Rancière's blind spots (especially on the question of political organisation), this paper is particularly influenced by his work in its content and its form. In particular, I was really keen to structure the paper around the voices of diverse green ban activists, who had their own analysis of the forms of politics they practiced.

As ever, if you'd like copies of any of these and can't get hold of them, drop me a line...

New blog: 'politics of location'

London 'Spy Bin' ... now disabled.

As I've mentioned before, I'm starting up some research on the ways in which applications of locative media are being put to work in urban governance by a range of actors in cities. There are lots of incredibly interesting and important things happening at the digital-urban interface ... indeed, it's kinda hard to keep up!

The first phase of the research is primarily information gathering ... and given that we are being generously funded by the Australian taxpayer to gather the information, it seems only fair to share. So, as Sophie Maalsen and I find interesting stuff, we are going to post about it at a new blog called 'The Politics of Location'. It's a good way for us to talk to each other, and hopefully might be useful to others too. There's a bunch of posts over there now, including an introduction piece here.

So, if you're interested in that kind of thing, check it out and say hi....

Building a City for 'The People': the green bans in pictures

I'm very excited to say that I've got an article on the green bans coming out soon in the journal Antipode. The article is part of a Special Issue on Grammars of Urban Injustice that has been put together by Gordon MacLeod and Colin McFarlane -- big thanks to Gordon and Colin for including the piece. Here's the abstract:

How can we act to contest urban injustice? This article grapples with this question through an analysis of the green ban movement that emerged in Sydney in the 1970s. For a time, this unruly alliance of construction workers, resident activists, and progressive professionals powerfully enacted a radical right to the city, blocking a range of unjust and destructive “developments” worth billions of dollars and proposing alternative development plans in their place. Drawing on archival research, I demonstrate how the figure of “the people” was crucial to their action. The article examines the rights and the authority that was invested in “the people” by green ban activists, and traces the work of political subjectification through which “the people” was constructed. “The people” was not invoked as a simple majority or as a universal subject whose unity glossed over differences. Rather, in acting as/for “the people”, green ban activists produced a political subject able to challenge the claims of elected politicians, bureaucrats and developers to represent the interests of the city. The article concludes with reflections on the implications of this construction of “the people” for urban politics today.

The article is available on now on Antipode's 'early view'. If you want to read it and can't access that, please get in touch!

Anyways, this post is not (just) an exercise in self-promotion. There was no room to include any illustrations with the piece, and I promised in the article that I would post some illustrations here at Cities and Citizenship. I think these images add quite a lot to the story. They're annotated here with some basic notes, so they might be of interest regardless of whether or not you read the article. These images are all courtesy of the very generous Meredith Burgmann, who has made her papers on the green bans available for researchers at the Noel Butlin Archives in Canberra, and who also shared some pictures with me. Enjoy...

Demonstrators stopping demolition at The Rocks, 1973. Jack Mundey (who was at that point Secretary of the NSW Branch of the Builders Labourers Federation) in foreground, Meredith Burgmann on right of picture wearing very snazzy suit. The green ban at The Rocks was one of the most dramatic and successful of the bans ... although as Evan Jones has written recently, working class housing in the area is once again under threat.

Jack Mundey gets arrested at The Rocks, 1973.

NSW BLF Journal article about the green ban in the Rocks ... "People or Profits"? A big part of my article talks about the way that various green ban activists invoked the needs of 'the people', and considers the importance of this figure in the building of alliances between building workers, residents, and others.

Joe Owens (Secretary of the NSW BLF who took over from Mundey in 1973) negotiates with police in Victoria Street, Kings Cross, January 1974. The Victoria Street ban was another of the most high profile bans, and involved squats and barricades against developers and their hired thugs. For a great accounts of the squat, visit Ian Milliss' webpage, where there copies of a couple of great articles from the City Squatter that he wrote at the time.

Juanita Nielsen, Victoria Street resident and editor of the community newspaper Now!, disappeared in 1975 at the height of the conflict over Victoria Street.

Joe Owens (NSW BLF Secretary) and Bob Pringle (NSW BLF President) speak with BLs occupying a crane at Institute of Technology site, Broadway. The crane was being occupied in a dispute over coverage between the NSW Branch and the Federal Branch of the union, which launched an 'intervention' against the NSW leadership in 1974.

Joe Owens addresses a crowd, with Bob Pringle (NSW BLF President) looking on (on his right as you look at the picture)

Graffiti in Woolloomoolloo

Anti-expressway graffiti, Glebe

Col James, an architect/planner who worked closely with residents to develop People's Plans and who died recently, with Mary Kristensen, Woolloomoolloo, 1974. The green ban here bought previous time for the development of alternative plans which did not evict low income residents from the area. Col was funded by the Commonwealth Department of Urban and Regional Development to work with 'loo residents to come up with alternative development plans for the area.

NSW BLF Christmas Card, 1971, listing a range of causes to be supported in the following year. Right on...

Female BLs march at International Women's Day March 1974, Left to Right: Glenys Page, Lyn Syme, Rhonda Ellis, unidentified, Michelle Fraser, Janne Reed, Caroline Graham. The NSW BLF was very active on women's liberation issues, including the 'working in' of female workers onto building sites that I describe in more detail in the article.

'Moratorium for Black Rights' banner flying from crane. The NSW BLF were also very active supporters of Aboriginal rights. This included enabling activists from the Aboriginal Tent Embassy to address workers on building sites to talk about their protest and raise money for their cause.

Broadsheet newsletter produced in support of the green bans, 1973

Broadsheet newsletter produced in support of the green bans, 1973. Here again, we see the explicit reference to the people. If you click on this picture, it should be large enough to read...

Master Building Association full page anti-BLF advertisement, 1973. During a very fractious dispute in 1973, the Master Builders Association took out several full-page newspaper advertisements against the NSW BLF. Coupled with editorials in some of those newspapers, these constituted a sustained attack on the goals and tactics of the union.

Master Building Association full page anti-BLF advertisement, 1973

Master Building Association full page anti-BLF advertisement, 1973

Master Building Association full page anti-BLF advertisement, 1973

Mick Fowler, one of the residents of Victoria St in Kings Cross, entertains a crowd at an anti-Gallagher rally. Norm Gallagher was the Secretary of the Federal Branch of the Builders Labourers Federation that expelled green ban activists from the union after working with the Master Builders Association to have the NSW Branch of the union deregistered.

Advertisement in support of NSW BLF, 1974. This advertisement exemplifies the way in which the union had become a 'pole of attraction' for many dissident groups in the process of alliance-building, to quote Sydney Gay Liberation activist Richard Wilson.

Protesters in support of NSW BLF outside Master Builders Association office, Sydney. Their banner reads "The Master Builders and Gallagher are colluding to destroy the only socially conscious union in Australia. NSW Builders Labourers care about people. So we care about NSW Builders Labourers"

Flyer advertising rally in support of NSW BLF, 1974

Builders Labourers for Democracy was formed by supporters to try to protect the NSW Branch against the Federal Branch intervenion

Advertisement taken out by expelled NSW BLF leadership after the Gallagher intervention

Badges in the Bob Pringle collection at the National Library, Canberra

Who stands for Sydney? On the construction of 'the city' as a subject...

In writing about the Founding Assembly of the Sydney Alliance a while back, I said that Alliance was an attempt to "create a new political subject in and of the city of Sydney". I'm really interested in the formation of groups who claim to stand for the interests of 'the city' ... and in the case of Sydney, the Sydney Alliance is not the only group currently claiming to stand for the interests of Sydney. In the last month, we have seen the launch of two separate campaigns in the name of Sydney. What do these claims to the city look like, and how should we judge them?

The Daily Telegraph's "People's Plan"

The Daily Telegraph, a daily newspaper in Sydney, has recently published a special series of articles on planning for Sydney under the banner of The People's Plan. The notion of 'people's plans' has an interesting history in Sydney, not least as a term that was used by green ban activists for their alternative plans in the 1970s. So, what does the Tele's People's Plan involve? First, the Tele surveyed their readers to identify a set of big issues they believed to be facing Sydney today. Having identified these issues with the input of their readers, the newspaper then assembled a 'cabinet' of experts in these various fields to write opinion pieces, which take the form of proposals for planning and policy. Editor Paul Whittaker asked these experts for "fresh thinking" and "practical and workable solutions".

In explaining the People's Plan concept, Whittaker referred back to the Sydney masterplan devised almost a century ago by engineer John Bradfield (most famous as designer of the Sydney Harbour Bridge). Bradfield's plan, says Whittaker, was bold and visionary, but never came to be implemented due to a combination of war, depression and the usual "political wrangling and bureaucratic inertia". Where are the visionaries today, he asks? Only a bold and coherent vision for the city will "give people of Sydney the truly global city that they deserve". (His short video launching the series can be found here). To date, the Tele has published articles by experts on a wide range of topics which include: health; safety; affordability; transport; youth; driving; tourism; education; environment; ageing; families; commerce and; western Sydney. These articles by experts are accompanied by another dozen or so articles written by people on the 'front lines' of some of these issues - such as commuters, carers, pensioners and homeless young people. Many of these contributions are fascinating reading, and I think the Tele's People's Plan has attempted to put a range of very important issues on the public agenda through this campaign.

Screen grab from the Daily Telegraph's "People's Plan" website

The Property Council of Australia's "Make My Sydney Work"

At around the same as the Tele launched its People's Plan, the Property Council of Australia launched a national campaign called Make My City Work.  It describes the campaign as a "call to action" designed to "direct attention to cities and engage the community on growth". Material has been produced for each major Australian city, including a Make My Sydney Work campaign devoted to "fixing Australia's global city". There's a set of materials under five campaign headings: housing; jobs; lifestyle; infrastructure, and; sustainability. At present, these materials are much briefer than those in the People's Plan. But Peter Verwer, CEO of the Property Council, launched the campaign with a lunchtime address to the National Press Club at which he spoke about the need for a 'New Deal' for cities in Australia.

Screen grab from the Property Council of Australia's Make My Sydney Work website

Alongside these two claims to stand for Sydney, and the Sydney Alliance, we also have the Committee for Sydney, Ten Thousand Friends of Greater Sydney, and most recently Occupy Sydney, to name a few.

Standing for the city: some critical questions...

How should we critically interrogate these different attempts to stand for the interests of the city of Sydney? We could ask several kinds of questions...