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.

Keywords

Australia disadvantage dumping ground migrant mobility neighbourhood stigma theory

Introduction

Dumping ground: a place where rubbish or unwanted material is left.

(Oxford English Dictionary)

The drivers of spatial sorting that concentrate poverty in certain parts of the city are multiple and complex. Economic and labour market restructuring induced by global trends and national policies have led to high unemployment in formerly productive areas, particularly those reliant upon manufacturing. Immigration has led to the convergence of (low-income) migrants in ‘gateway’ cities and suburbs where migrant support services and ethnic networks are strongest. Through gentrification affluent groups have colonised inner city areas and displaced incumbent populations to the ageing middle and outer suburbs. While housing market trends are a reflection of these processes, they also have their own generative mechanisms. As stocks of public housing are depleted, only households with the greatest need are eligible for public housing, leading to a growing concentration of social disadvantage in neighbourhoods containing either public, or low-cost private rental, accommodation.

Objectively classified as disadvantaged on the basis of the low social outcomes of the people who live there, the places where disadvantage congregates suffer dual insult, first through the inscription of a stigmatised identity and second through their branding as ‘dumping grounds’ for society’s most undesirable and dysfunctional populations. While research on the creation, effects and management of a stigmatised neighbourhood reputation has been extensive (Allen et al., 2007; Hastings, 2004; Kearns et al., 2013; Permentier et al., 2007; Wacquant, 2010), the idea that places function as some sort of dumping ground has been subject to much less critical and conceptual attention. This is despite the frequency with which the term has been used to describe and account for the concentration of ‘urban outcasts’ in poor neighbourhoods (Blake, 2001; Lupton, 2003; Stenson and Watt, 1999; Wacquant, 1993, 2008). The aim of this paper, then, is to place the idea of a residential dumping ground under a conceptual and empirical spotlight. Drawing on the work of Bauman (2004) in Wasted Lives, the first part of the paper engages theoretically with the concept in an attempt to identify its component features. These include the designation of certain populations as human waste or detritus; the demarcation of particular areas as suitable dump site destinations for those populations; the allusion of mobility (enforced or acquiesced) as problem populations are exported into disadvantaged areas; the exercise of power by actors or institutions thought to orchestrate this process; and the anxiety generated among the incumbent population at being forced to live among such undesirable groups.

In the second half of the paper, these processes are examined empirically through a case study of the city of Logan in south-east Queensland, Australia. In the opinion of some residents and stakeholders, the presence of low-cost housing in the social and private rental sectors, and the status of the city as a low-income area, has induced governments to use the city’s more disadvantaged neighbourhoods as a dumping ground for undesirable social groups, notably refugees and other ethnic minorities. The effect, as they see it, is a raft of social problems within their neighbourhoods, including a heavily stigmatised identity and ethnic tension among migrant groups. That local residents locate the source of these problems in the importation of problem populations rather than any other set of factors is a reminder of the anxieties that can generate among those who see themselves as forced to live alongside the ‘other’. Yet the case of Logan also acts as a reminder that the dumping ground is a social and political construct which becomes a dominant place narrative only under certain conditions and not without internal debate and contestation by those advancing alternative meanings of the processes observed. Acknowledging the presence of counter narratives, even when they are marginal, helps dispel the taken-for-grantedness of the urban dumping ground in terms of its physical existence and its discursive power.

Designated dumping grounds: The marginalisation of urban areas

Academic studies are replete with images of places becoming dumping grounds for ‘unwanted’ populations who, on the basis of their low class and/or ethnic and racial minority status, are signified as rubbish, waste and potentially polluting if not properly managed (Reay, 2004; Skeggs, 1997). One of the richer accounts, albeit outside the field of urban studies, is Blake’s (2001) monograph A Dumping Ground which documents how the Aboriginal township of Cherbourg in Australia began its days as an Aboriginal reserve, designed to serve two purposes. The first was a ‘social distancing’ function to ensure Aboriginal contact with white people was kept to a minimum while the second was to subject some of the more problematic members of the Aboriginal community to greater government control through spatial containment. As Blake wrote, this dual function rendered the reserve a ‘dumping ground for the lame, the halt and the incorrigible’ (Blake, 2001: 245).

In a different context, Wacquant (1993, 2008) applies the dumping ground metaphor to the ‘neighbourhoods of exile’ (Wacquant, 1993: 369) that comprise the American black ghetto and the working class French banlieue. While the dynamics of these two places are quite distinct, what they share in common is the way their run-down public housing, their economic and social decline, and a growing concentration of minority ethnic populations render them home to the ‘urban outcasts’–‘poor people, downwardly mobile working-class households and marginal groups and individuals’ (Wacquant, 1993: 368). Writing of the French banlieue, Wacquant (1993: 369) describes how a powerful stigma is attached to these neighbourhoods which readily transfers onto residents, leaving them acutely aware of their misfortune at being stuck in a place routinely described as ‘a “dumpster”, “the garbage can of Paris”’.

By many accounts, public housing estates are the quintessential dumping ground for the poor and the unwanted, prompting researchers to consider how social housing policies have contributed to this process. Earlier studies focused on the role of allocation policies as housing managers allocated less desirable properties in less desirable areas to less desirable tenants (Cowan et al., 2001; Gray, 1976; Murie, 1997; Stenson and Watt, 1999). In a study by Murie (1997: 29), a process of sorting was observed among housing providers, such that ‘rough or non-respectable’ applicants and those from minority ethnic groups were channelled towards problematic estates, partly because it was thought that they would not make the place any worse, and partly because they were the only people likely to accept a tenancy there. For Murie, this form of discrimination was borne from the pressures housing managers faced: a point Cowan and colleagues (2001) illustrate in their study of the growing use of video surveillance for managing anti-social behaviour on problem housing estates. They demonstrate how housing managers were pressured by police and parole officers to accommodate sex offenders in particular public housing estates because they could be effectively monitored on estates where video surveillance is in operation. While some housing managers were reported to accept this justification, they were nevertheless concerned that this affirmed the status of these estates as social dumping grounds.

In recent decades, a reduction in the provision of public housing, along with a concomitant shift in allocation policies, has led to the ‘residualisation’ of public housing so that it is now available only to those with the greatest needs (Atkinson and Jacobs, 2008; Fitzpatrick and Pawson, 2014). The impacts of this process in creating so-called ‘dump estates’ are twofold. One the one hand, the declining availability of local council housing stock has reduced the discretionary scope of housing managers, thereby limiting the potential for problem housing tenants to be moved from one area to another (Hulse and Burke, 2005; Stenson and Watt, 1999). At the same time, restricting public housing to the most vulnerable has concentrated disadvantage in these estates even further. In the words of Atkinson and Jacobs (2008: 1), this has caused public housing to deteriorate into a social dumping ground that ‘collects the excluded’. According to Lupton, such areas also have a disproportionate share of specialist accommodation and services for homeless people, people with mental health problems and those recently released from prison, which further compounds the level of disadvantage and corresponding identity as a problematic place.

Finally, similar sets of discourses have also been shown to circulate around the kinds of schools that children of these so-called dump estates attend. As Reay (2004; see also Reay, 2007; Reay and Lucey, 2003) illustrates in her study of inner city schools in working class areas of London, not only are the schools demonised as ‘rubbish dumps’ and ‘shit heaps’, but the children who attend them are defined in equally derogatory terms, as expelled waste:

Through metaphors of waste, refuse and rejection, demonized schools also become repositories for ‘stupid’ and ‘thick’ pupils – the ones that the ‘good’ schools do not want. (Reay, 2004: 1011)

Unwanted populations, undesirable spaces: Power, mobility and fear of the ‘other’

From the studies described above, it is clear that the dumping group metaphor is well-used to describe how ostensibly undesirable or unwanted populations end up in the least desirable neighbourhoods. In all cases, the focus of inquiry has been directed at the mechanisms through which this occurs. For Wacquant (1993, 2008), these include macro-level processes of rising inequality in advanced capitalist states; the deterioration of low-skilled jobs and the rise in unemployment; and the retraction or reconfiguration of the welfare state. Alternatively, housing researchers have located the cause within public housing systems that concentrate problem tenants into so-called ‘dump estates’. Only in limited cases has there been any engagement with the concept of a dumping ground on its own terms in order to shine a light on the problematic assumptions and inferences that underpin it.

What follows is an attempt to fill this gap by identifying the component features of the dumping ground. While the term has been used to describe a range of problematic spaces, be they slums, public housing estates, ghettoes or Aboriginal reserves, it is not synonymous with any one of them nor, like these other terms, does it designate a specific urban formation. Rather, it is a metaphorical device, a place-narrative, formulated from a range of assumptions and assertions about the way spaces are made and used, that becomes a social fact with real and material effects when it is said often enough and enacted by those in power (Shields, 1991).

In beginning this unpacking process, a useful starting place is a conventional dictionary definition where a dumping ground is ‘a place where rubbish or unwanted material is left’. Most apparent from this definition is the inference that populations are reducible to the status of ‘rubbish’ or ‘unwanted material’. The first aspect of the dumping ground, then, is that it involves the identification and labelling of groups as having no discernible function, such that they are conceived as unwanted waste or detritus whose only destiny is to be discarded or dumped. This idea has been developed most extensively by Bauman (2004), although Wacquant’s (1993, 1999, 2008) discussion of a new regime of urban marginality also incorporates the creation of ‘urban outcasts’ as a by-product of this regime. Bauman argues that an inevitable outcome of the global project of modernity is the creation of a redundant and surplus population – the unemployed and unemployable, the refugee, the welfare-dependent and other members of equally marginalised groups – who are unable to fulfil their obligations as either producers or consumers in a consumer society. Marked as ‘functionless’, ‘superfluous’ and ‘redundant’, these are the leftover populations that Wacquant (1999) sees as rendered surplus to requirement by advanced capitalism and abandoned by an increasingly residualised welfare system. While their inability to reciprocate or contribute to society bestows on them a low social value, it is their identification as a burden on the state’s already scarce resources that causes their rights to societal membership to be challenged (Reidpath et al., 2005) and for their status as outcasts to be legitimised and institutionalised. Unwanted, and no longer guaranteed sympathy or support for their plight, these groups have become a problem in need of a solution.

The second feature of a dumping ground relates to this management issue, beginning with the question of where they might be accommodated. The selection and designation of particular areas as dump site destinations is not an accidental process, but is based on the classification and selection of city areas or neighbourhoods as suitable spaces for the containment of unwanted social groups. This suitability derives from several characteristics. The first is the prior labelling and stigmatisation of these areas as undesirable places to live by virtue of their concentrations of public housing, high unemployment, complex social problems, high crime and perceptions of anti-social behaviour. These are the places that people with the means to do so avoid, rendering them a neighbourhood of both last resort and first choice for those with no alternative. Second, in what Bauman (2003: 101) calls the ‘new hierarchy of domination’, only some neighbourhoods have the power to resist the in-flow of unwanted populations. For neighbourhoods at the lowest end of the hierarchy, this social off-loading is difficult to contest, not only because residents lack the resources to mobilise or be heard, but also because they are already so stigmatised that the addition of yet more ‘rubbish’ is unlikely to be noticed or yield complaint.

Further, designated dumping grounds are often selected as much for their abundance of institutional infrastructure as they are for their stigmatisation and marginalisation. This may seem incongruous with the notion of a dumping ground, but even in countries with a residualised welfare system, such as Australia, the US and Canada (Esping-Anderson, 1990), it is rare for surplus populations to be banished to a governmental void and left to fend for themselves. Instead, they are channelled into areas 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, even if it remains poor (Osborne and Rose, 1999). Often described as ‘service rich’ or even ‘over-serviced’, dumping grounds thus serve three functions. First as processing sites for society’s outcasts; second as places of reinstatement where lives can be given renewed meaning, allowing those who reform to ‘springboard’ into mainstream society and a better neighbourhood (Musterd and van Kempen, 2007); and finally as spaces where those beyond help can be immobilised and contained.

The third feature is one of mobility and the idea that problem populations are exported into disadvantaged areas. This is based on an inference that so-called human waste is externally, rather than internally, produced and that, regardless of the prior circumstances of dumping grounds (difficult as they may be), it is this importation of rubbish that causes, or at least compounds, their problems. Wacquant (1993: 369), for example, describes inhabitants’ indignation at being stuck in a place conceived as a garbage can. Whatever they were before, it is the dumping of unwanted populations into these areas that cements the sense of alienation, marginality and stigma experienced by those who live there. The basis of this perception is twofold. First, it is evident that advanced capitalism has increased the rate and scale of mobility in urban spaces, including among disadvantaged and immigrant groups who relocate for low-skilled jobs, housing and support networks. Given the precariousness of their economic circumstances, it is invariable that they end up in the poorer and more undesirable neighbourhoods where housing is cheapest and the requisite services are available (Musterd and Deurloo, 2002).

At the same time, there is a discursive aspect to this notion of the mobile ‘other’ whose arrival brings trouble to otherwise tolerable places. As studies on the management of stigma have shown, inhabitants of neighbourhoods tarnished with a negative reputation often adopt various discursive strategies to contest or evade the imposed blemish in order that it be transferred to ‘others’, but not ‘us’ and to ‘there’, but not ‘here’ (Hastings, 2004; Wacquant, 2007; Watt, 2006). For autochthonous inhabitants, the stigma of living in a place that is widely viewed as undesirable can be partially managed by attributing the problem to external actors and processes rather than to the internal dynamics of the place and its incumbent residents. The construction of a discourse around the active ‘dumping’ of problematic populations into an otherwise ‘normal’ area may thus assist residents in shrugging off any stigma by association.

A fourth observation unpacks the mobility theme further by highlighting the presence of power relations that are thought to be in operation whenever problem populations are ‘dumped’. Implicit in the act of dumping is the exercise of power by some actor or agency that selects the groups to be dumped, the spaces in which they are to be offloaded and the mechanisms through which this process of reordering occurs. Such observations reflect recent debates among mobility scholars about the way mobility is bound up in the production and exercise of power (Cresswell, 2010; Hannam et al., 2006) where power is exercised more by those who make choices about mobility – including the mobility of others – than by those who exhibit mobility, particularly when that mobility is controlled and enforced or, at the least, acquiesced (Wiesel, 2014). As demonstrated later, local references to dumping grounds often allude to an omnipotent ‘they’ who are endowed with the authority to sort and mobilise problem populations. While it can broadly be inferred that this means the ‘state’ or the ‘government’, governmentality theorists remind us that power is rarely exercised as a single orchestrated activity by a sovereign ‘state’ power. Rather, as Gill (2009) and Darling (2011) have demonstrated, mobility is governed through a constellation of decentred and localised techniques, actors and agencies. Aside from ‘state’ actors, this includes accommodation providers, support workers and charitable organisations who ‘manage … [problem populations], make decisions about them, ensure their well-being and advocate or demonstrate on their behalf’ (Gill, 2009: 187). While the intention of these agencies may well be to support vulnerable populations, they nevertheless operate within a network of power that conspires to spatially fix them in designated and governable spaces.

These practices are seldom coercive, though, and rarely are problem populations forcibly rounded up and transported to an incarcerated environment unless they are thought to have breached some codified law. Instead, power is most effective when it involves a reshaping of subjectivities and mobility interests, such that mobility is seen as an exercise of volition and freedom (Gill, 2009). In effect, any study of the processes through which problem populations are dumped should not limit itself to a search for the actors or institutions who actively direct and enforce their movement, but also examine the indirect drivers or mechanisms that shape the choices available to them, albeit from a limited range of options. These mechanisms may include the provision of affordable housing, services for the disadvantaged, low-skilled jobs and ready-made ethnic networks that draw minority groups into particular areas and, perhaps unwittingly, offer a vehicle for their regulation and containment.

The final feature of contemporary dumping grounds is the anxiety they generate among the incumbent population about the effects of living alongside those considered undesirable and even more disadvantaged than they. These anxieties, as Bauman (2004: 71) recounts, are heightened by the need for localities to find their own local solutions to the (global) problem of human waste, which cannot be quarantined in some distant location but ‘stays inside and rubs shoulders with the “useful” and “legitimate” rest’. Where global city theorists have posited that economic restructuring has sharpened inequality and divided cities along ethnic, occupational and class lines (Sassen, 1991; Walks, 2001), the ‘social ecology’ of cities is more complex and fine-grained than previously thought and patterns of residential differentiation are highly influenced by the institutional, cultural and historical contexts of individual countries (Musterd and Deurloo, 2002). In particular, Musterd and Deurloo (2002: 502) point out that the ghettoisation of poor and ethnic minorities is far less pronounced in European countries than in the US, with the effect that ‘socio-spatial contrasts turn out to be more moderate and spatial patterns turn out to be relatively dynamic’, especially among those who are less affluent (Musterd, 2005). What this means is that the territorial exclusion of redundant or undesirable populations is not immutable. Rather, residential ‘dump sites’ are located perilously close to otherwise respectable working class neighbourhoods, forming part of ‘a finely-differentiated congery of “micro-locales”’ (Wacquant, 1993: 369) which may be separated only by arterial roads or rail lines (Forster, 2006). Contamination of one space can readily transmit to another.

As a result, incumbent residents can be fiercely defensive of their neighbourhood and anxious about what they see as an unstoppable flow of minority, unemployed and undesirable groups. This anxiety may stem from two sources. The first, as noted, relates to concerns about the effects of a stigma by association and the potential impacts on property values, local business investment and resident employment prospects if their neighbourhood is tarnished with a reputation for accommodating the most marginal and troublesome. But there may also be a broader process at work, which Bannister and Kearns (2013) identify as a reduction in the willingness of (urban) populations to engage with the ‘other’, and a concomitant increase in fear of those considered different or dysfunctional. This is particularly so if these groups are encountered within the familiar and parochial space of one’s neighbourhood and not simply in urban public spaces where contact with strangers and difference is altogether more expected and fleeting. While Young (2007) and others (Atkinson, 2006) have illustrated how fear of the other manifests among affluent groups through a desire to maintain social and spatial distance from those who pose risks to their prosperity, low-income groups may be more resentful of other minorities (especially immigrants), through fear they will compete for scarce resources and further reduce their already vulnerable situation (Bilodeau and Fadol, 2011; Watt, 2006).

Destination dumping ground: The case of Logan, Queensland

Combined, these five observations encapsulate the mechanisms by which already disadvantaged neighbourhoods are viewed as convenient sites for the disposal of the poorest and most undesirable populations by those with the power to orchestrate this social and spatial sorting, and their subsequent effects upon and within those spaces. In the remainder of this paper, these elements are illustrated through a case study of Logan City in Queensland, Australia, where the moniker of a dumping ground has been powerfully articulated, both as a means of insult by outsiders who look upon the city with derision, and as a form of complaint among residents and political figures about the settlement of unwanted populations in their city. Drawing on the framework above, the analysis examines five core issues that relate to residents’ construction of Logan as a dumping ground: first, an understanding of which groups are seen to constitute the human rubbish that Logan collects; second, an explanation of why Logan has been selected for this purpose; third and fourth, questions of power and mobility relating to the mechanisms through which problem populations are thought to be exported to Logan; and finally expressions of anxiety and resentment among incumbent populations at having these people ‘dumped’ on their doorstep.

The research setting and methodology

The city of Logan, located half way between Brisbane and the Gold Coast in south-east Queensland, is the sixth largest local government area in Australia with an estimated 2012 population of 293,485 (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2011). The city is ethnically diverse in terms of the proportion of residents from non-English-speaking backgrounds (26.8% in 2011) and the absolute number of ethnic groups represented within this figure (some boast of Logan accommodating 215 different ethnicities while others see this as the source of Logan’s problems). A freeway running from north to south dissects the city in half, both spatially and socially. Whereas the eastern side contains the city’s commercial areas and affluent suburbs, the western side hosts areas of significant disadvantage and public housing, including three of the most disadvantaged suburbs: Logan Central, Kingston and Woodridge. These are also the most stigmatised suburbs and are often held accountable for Logan’s poor identity and social problems. In the early 1970s, the Queensland Housing Commission built significant stocks of public housing in Logan for low-income families. Some 40 years on, as policy determines public housing be available only to those with the most complex needs, the legacy is a concentration of social disadvantage in these suburbs. Census data, for example, place Logan Central within the lowest decile of disadvantaged suburbs in the Brisbane Metropolitan Area while data from the Queensland Department of Housing and Public Works (2012) indicate that 80% of all households managed by the Woodridge Housing Service rely on welfare as their principal source of income. A small number of high-profile crimes in these suburbs have also captured national attention in recent years and further served to brand the entire city as an unsafe place to live.

While the geography of disadvantage in Logan, as with all cities, is spatially uneven and concentrated in particular neighbourhoods, the stigma attached to this disadvantage is not contained within these areas, but impacts upon the whole city. The slang word ‘bogan’, meaning an uncouth person of low social status, has obvious alliterative appeal as a catch-term for all that is wrong with Logan and illustrates the stereotyping and stigma that the city frequently faces. This is a source of considerable consternation among residents of the affluent, eastern suburbs who point out that Logan is not a single (disadvantaged) suburb, but a diverse city containing neighbourhoods with million dollar homes. While residents of these suburbs campaign to have them reclassified as part of the more respectable neighbouring shire of Redlands (Courier Mail, 2014; Ticket to Redlands, 2013), the city council has sought to enact various initiatives to revitalise Logan’s more disadvantaged areas and promote the positive features of the city as a whole.

A number of data sources were utilised for this paper. The first was a review of all demographic and documentary material from local and state governments and not-for-profit organisations on the kinds of problems Logan is seen to face, where they are most concentrated, and what sorts of initiatives are enacted to address them. Following this, primary data were generated through two sources. First, interviews were held with 19 local stakeholders from key organisations such as government agencies, schools, the not-for-profit sector, police/justice and housing providers. Participants were selected for inclusion either because they were readily identified as central figures in a given field (such as key local council personnel) or because they had been recommended as such by others. Second, three focus groups with a total of 34 local residents were held. Participants were recruited through local community organisations and with the assistance of the Logan City Council which sent an invitation to 100 randomly selected local residents. Those who agreed participate were diverse in terms of age and ethnicity, although women dominated by approximately four to one. That most were long-term residents of 20 years or more is likely to explain the veracity with which they expressed their views about neighbourhood change and the presence of problematic populations. A much smaller proportion of interviewees presented dissenting views although they tended to be local service providers who worked with ethnic minority and refugee groups. As well as highlighting the benefits to Logan of accommodating disadvantaged groups, they also contested the dumping ground label itself on the grounds that it was foolish to portray the city in such negative terms.

‘Our neighbourhood has become a dumping ground’

Frequently denigrated by its bogan tag, Logan suffers from an externally-imposed stigma of undesirability based on perceptions of the city as crime ridden, ‘full of no-hopers’ and ‘the dumping ground of Queensland’. In large part, residents’ responses to these stereotypes are fairly typical and range from outright rejection of what they see as inaccurate and unfair judgements to distantiation involving acceptance of external critiques, but only as they apply to others (Hastings, 2004; Wacquant, 2010). Often, there is little to distinguish the internal derivatives of place from those that circulate externally, but they function in very different ways. Whereas non-local proclamations of Logan as a dumping ground are intended as an insult to the place, local residents use the same language as a defence mechanism by attributing the source of the city’s problems to external processes and actors. The following excerpts illustrate how the dumping ground metaphor is deployed in this way:

Resident A:

It’s been the dumping ground. [Name of politician] will tell you that our Federal and State governments have not stood and done the right thing by Logan. It is the dumping ground and [Name of politician] will be the first to say it. Too many people, too fast and they tried to slow it down and they got opposition because they needed somewhere to put a lot of people and that’s just where they all put them. Into Logan.

Resident B:

The most housing commission around Brisbane is in Logan, so that’s where they’re going to put the people in the housing.

Resident A:

Exactly, that’s my point.

Resident B:

It’s not the fault of the people, it’s the fault of the government.

The worst thing they ever did in Woodridge was put up all those [public housing] units. Like one after the other in 1973. It’s like we get everyone from overseas … I’m an Australian citizen now but it’s like what do you do? … Chuck everyone here. I mean what do you expect is going to happen? Yeah right. Come on, go into the affluent areas. You know, chuck them over there. (Resident)

The focus should be on the first people of this nation. Logan seems to be the dumping ground for immigration. (ABC Local Radio, 2009)

While the first quote suggests that Logan is suffering the effects of rapid population growth, the suggestion that this has rendered the city a dumping ground makes it clear that the problem is not the sheer volume of new arrivals, but the categories they are thought to occupy as society’s most unwanted and undesirable social groups. Indeed, in the excerpts above, focus group residents explain that the reason these new arrivals are troublesome is because they are ‘immigrants’, because there are ‘too many of them’ and because they have been sent to Logan because more affluent and desirable neighbourhoods do not want them. The perceived need to stop this influx of migrants was articulated more forcefully in the following exchange which echoes Australian government policy mandates to ‘stop the boats’, meaning stopping the practice of asylum seekers being smuggled into Australia by boat:

Resident C:

Do you think we need a rabbit fence? Like they have out West? Don’t let any more people in?

Group:

[Laughter]

Resident D:

No! Stop the boats!

Resident C:

We should be able to say, shut the gate we’ve had enough!

To some extent, these views about immigrant arrivals reflect Logan’s status as a multicultural city with a large mix of ethnic groups. However, its 27% overseas-born population is not large compared to urban areas in Sydney that have proportions of over 40%, or considering that 55% of Logan’s immigrants are from English speaking countries (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2011). Instead, they are most likely a reflection of the fact that a significant proportion of newly-arrived migrants into Logan in recent years are refugees and humanitarian visa holders. A recent report by Hugo and Harris (2013) observed that among the 25 fastest growing urban regions in Australia, Logan is shouldering the greatest burden of humanitarian visa holders (20% of Queensland’s intake) relative to its share of the state population (6.3%). More acutely, 47% of all immigrants to Logan are a Settlement Target Group, meaning that they are eligible for a range of settlement services on the basis of being permanent settlers with low English literacy and hence poorly integrated into the community (Hugo and Harris, 2013). In order to ensure the requisite services are readily available to these groups, the former Federal Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC) earmarked certain areas as designated settlement regions for refugees and humanitarian visa holders. Logan, as one such area, has been receiving these groups since 2005 (Harte, 2010).

The view that there are ‘too many of them’, then, does not apply to the majority Anglo-Saxon migrant population, but to the non-white asylum seeker who has been disproportionately offloaded into Logan. For Hage, (1998: 38 emphasis in original), ‘categories such as “too many”… are primarily categories of spatial management’, meaning that those who claim dominance over the national space by virtue of their Whiteness see themselves as having the right to assert a ‘managerialist gaze’ over that space and determine how the non-white ‘other’ can access and move around in it. As the first quote above illustrates, the promulgation of these discourses appears to have begun with city officials who have bestowed them with an air of authority and shaped ‘the perceptual field … through which citizens position their own views, orientations and actions’ (Darling, 2013: 1791). In Hage’s view, residents’ assertions that they ‘should be able to say “enough”’ suggests their power to do so is weakening and it is the loss of privilege to control their country that has prompted this fear and resentment to emerge. In Hage’s analysis, this worry encompasses multiculturalism in all its non-white forms, but there are some groups, such as asylum seekers, who are deemed more harmful than others. In Bauman’s (2004) schema, not only are asylum seekers the exemplar of a globally-created human waste problem, but they have also become the most repellent and contentious in the search for local solutions to this global problem with their presence generating fears about challenges to national security and social cohesion (McAdam, 2013). For places selected to collect such an objectionable group, questions arise as to why they have been chosen.

Generally, it is typical for newly-arrived migrants, including refugees, to settle in areas with a ready supply of cheap and vacant housing, as well as the requisite social and community services to ease the settlement process (Colic-Peisker and Tilbury, 2008). Inevitably, the spatial logic of urban capitalism dictates that these areas are likely to be spaces of existing disadvantage and low desirability. In Logan, residents and stakeholders understood this logic and justified Logan’s selection as a reception area for newly arrived humanitarian migrants on the pragmatic basis that it contained many of the elements required for such a role:

That’s why DIAC picked us. Low cost accommodation, close to the city, lots of low paid jobs. (State housing provider)

As controversial as that may be in the media at the moment, this is one of the location areas [for refugees and humanitarian entrants]. So we’ll have those people coming in here and slowly increasing the population of the city … Because we have high incidence of rental housing, government housing, here, then they’ll be relocated to this area. (Police/justice)

In addition, there was a perception that the selection of Logan to host refugees went beyond mere institutional logics and occurred because Logan was a place that did not matter and was already so poorly ranked that the addition of yet more detritus would hardly make a difference:

Interviewee:

I think it’s somewhere in the order of 24 per cent or something like that come through Logan.

Interviewer:

Why’s that? Do you know? Or do you have an idea?

Interviewee:

Oh, it’s ‘chuck them in there. They [the people of Logan] wouldn’t know the bloody difference’. Why wouldn’t you? (Business representative)

In all the excerpts so far, there is a sense among research participants that the process of exporting low-income immigrant groups to the city is a deliberately orchestrated one and that there are clearly identifiable actors who are responsible for it. As outlined earlier, the idea that groups or individuals can be ‘chucked’ into particular areas implies a set of power relations whereby power is exercised by those with the authority to decide who goes where, often at the expense of the populations to be discarded and the residents of areas forced to accept them. In some of the quotations, there is reference to an abstract ‘they’ as a set of sovereign actors explicitly responsible for Logan’s poor treatment. Others are more specific and identify federal and state governments as being at fault while expressing sympathy for those who have been dumped on their doorstep, troublesome as they may be. This apportioning of blame is even more straightforward when residents can directly attribute their woes to a particular agency, such as the Department of Immigration and Citizenship which targeted Logan through an explicit set of policies. But in many cases, the mechanisms for funnelling problem populations into problem areas are neither direct, nor easy to attribute to a single actor, particularly when they are seen to pull, rather than push, migrants into those places. In Logan’s case, the large numbers of humanitarian visa holders are as much the outcome of secondary migration by migrants themselves in the search for affordable housing, local services and ethnic community networks as they are of initial resettlement programmes enacted by the state (Harte, 2010). In this sense, there would seem to be a degree of volition and agency among refugees in selecting where they live regardless of where they are initially settled, although the earlier point about power operating through the shaping of individual subjectivities continues to apply.

In turning, then, to the perceived effects upon Logan of playing host to the undesirable populations who have been unwittingly dumped into it, there are two observations. The first is that even as residents acknowledge the various social problems Logan is known to encounter – ethnic conflict, crime, anti-social behaviour and high unemployment – they consider these to have been generated by the problematic migrant communities who have been dumped there rather than by an autochthonous population. As outlined earlier, this may be a discursive tactic deployed by residents from ‘respectable’ social groups in otherwise ‘respectable’ neighbourhoods to allow them to distinguish themselves from more problematic populations and neighbourhoods and cast off any stigma that might stick to them simply because they live in Logan (see Watt, 2006 for a similar argument in a UK council housing estate). The quotes below illustrate the way these discourses operate, not only to attribute blame for Logan’s troubles to the migrant communities themselves (i.e. that they are the outcome of inter-ethnic conflict between migrant groups), but also to normalise the ensuing social problems by suggesting that affluent suburbs would encounter these same problems if the migrants had been dumped there instead.

They [migrants] cause trouble amongst themselves and with other cultures that come from overseas somewhere. That’s where the problem is. (Resident)

Resident E: But I do think there’s 200 and something different nationalities in Woodridge … I think that’s a shame. I mean we are all different but I think to put all that many people in one place – if you took that many people and dropped them in St Lucia¹ what would happen?

Resident F:

Oh yes.

Resident E:

They’d have big problems wouldn’t they?

Resident F:

Yeah.

Resident E:

I mean we can’t help but have a few problems here with so many different people. I mean you can’t live like that.

Second is the point made earlier about the anxieties created among those whose neighbourhoods become home to populations ejected or unwanted from elsewhere. With research showing that the taint of living in a stigmatised area has real and profound effects (Link and Phelan, 2001; Permentier et al., 2007; Wacquant, 1993), and that the arrival of new migrants into already disadvantaged areas can actually exacerbate existing levels of deprivation (at least in the short term) (Phillimore and Goodson, 2006), it may be unfair to cast judgement on what appears an intolerance among Logan residents for more vulnerable social groups, or to reduce their anxieties to a simple fear of the other.

For those who are affluent, the means to separate themselves from undesirable groups are more readily available and the creation of dumping grounds may work to their advantage by containing groups who may otherwise blight their own neighbourhoods. But for low socio-economic groups, middle-class homogeneity is not an option and the arrival of populations who are even more needy and disadvantaged than they can generate fears of scarce resources being reallocated elsewhere. What scholars have termed ‘conflict theory’ helps explain this by suggesting that negative attitudes towards ethnic minorities are more likely to arise in ethnically diverse places like Logan because any advancement by minority groups is perceived to occur at the expense of the incumbent and dominant white majority (Bilodeau and Fadol, 2011). In particular, as Colic-Peisker and Tilbury (2008: 42) report, when it comes to refugee groups, there is an assumption that they are welfare-dependent ‘and therefore in competition with the more legitimate/deserving native born’. In Logan, this was most frequently expressed through the view that public housing was now largely inhabited by refugee groups while other, supposedly more legitimate, households languished on decade-long waiting lists (see also Watt, 2006 for a similar argument). This is despite the fact that refugee groups fail to fit the ‘priority needs category’ required for public housing eligibility unless they have other problems such as poor mental health (Harte, 2010). Nevertheless, both residents and service providers acknowledged that one of the fundamental sources of resentment towards refugees was the belief that they received the bulk of housing and other forms of social support while ‘Australians’ were left to struggle:

But what I find is that the other kids are going, ‘Oh they get rent paid for a year for nothing living there. They get all their food provided for one year. They get AUS$25,000 a year per family and in that year they’ve got to find a job. But why are they getting the housing? Why are they getting all the white goods? Why are they getting free accommodation and why are they getting the food paid for and they’re living like that when the Australians are struggling and don’t have accommodation.’ (Resident)

… yet the policies – and they have to target specific groups, because specific groups will have specific needs – but that runs the risk of fragmenting the community into thinking, ‘Well, the refugees get this, why don’t the pensioners?’ (NGO community worker/service provider)

This discourse of Logan serving as a dumping ground for problematic asylum seeker groups is easily the most dominant form of place narrative that circulates in Logan, not only because it coincides with, and unwittingly reinforces, externally imposed representations of Logan as a dumping ground, but also because of the legitimacy bestowed upon it by claims that it is shared by political leaders. Drawing on Shields (1991: 261), this grants such narratives with ‘a degree of robustness, despite internal schisms and margins of opposition, which allows them to be treated as social facts’. But this does not mean that claims of Logan’s dumping ground status are subject to no opposition at all. While promulgated mainly by those who work closely with Logan’s refugee groups, and expressed more privately through interview, alternative views are advanced by some who reject the labelling of asylum seekers as a problem for Logan and question the wisdom of describing the city in such pejorative terms. During interview, for example, one local service provider vehemently rejected Logan’s dumping ground narrative on the grounds that it was damaging for the city to internally validate a negative, externally-imposed label and that it was misguided to view refugees as harmful to Logan when their presence created so much economic activity for the city.

I think even from our highest levels within Logan, people are actually not talking the right language to talk up [Logan] … That’s not the terminology and in fact it’s wrong; I mean it’s just wrong. There’s no way of disguising it, it’s not a mistake, it’s just wrong … To call us a dumping ground. There is so much economic benefit for what we do with the immigration and how we handle things here that people just don’t realise that you take away the biggest employer. We are generating tens of millions to Logan, tens of millions – no one looks at that. (NGO community worker/service provider)

Conclusion

The aims of this paper have been twofold. The first was to place under the spotlight a metaphor that is frequently used to describe neighbourhoods that have become home to some of the most marginalised and vulnerable social groups in the advanced western world. Whatever national variations exist in the social and ethnic composition of these neighbourhoods, in the mechanisms that produce them, or in their physical location on the outskirts of city regions or inner-city estates, there is a sense that the creation of deprived and marginal urban spaces has its own logic and that the ‘dumping ground’ is now a permanent feature of the urban landscape. While frequently used as a term of derision by outsiders who fail to appreciate the debilitating effects of poverty, stigma and social exclusion experienced in these localities, its adoption by residents as a form of defence against external judgement, and as an explanation for what has gone wrong, suggests that there is more to this concept than flippant insult. Indeed, as has been shown here, bound up in the concept of the dumping ground are a range of complex issues and assumptions that have not previously been articulated or explored.

In unpacking this metaphor more thoroughly, this paper has identified five key features. First, and drawing on Bauman (2004), is the constitution of people as waste or detritus with lives that have become so meaningless and useless that their only fate is to be discarded. Second, is the need to accommodate this form of waste within city areas and the logic by which places are selected, such that it is inevitable they should be neighbourhoods already experiencing poverty, stigma and exclusion where the dumping of more rubbish will hardly be noticed. Third, are the mechanisms by which the spatial sorting of undesirable populations occurs and the mobility this entails as problem populations are moved to their ‘rightful’ place where they can be contained away from affluent areas. Fourth, is the existence of relations of power which enforce or encourage these ‘mobilities of disadvantage’ (Wiesel, 2014), either indirectly through the operation of housing and employment markets which have a magnet effect in drawing disadvantaged groups to disadvantaged places, or more obviously through deliberate policies that intentionally place them there. Finally, there are the effects upon the neighbourhoods themselves of being compelled to host undesirable groups and the reactions of incumbent residents in being forced to accept, and live alongside, the other. While the anxieties this breeds are indicative of a wider loss of tolerance to those who are different (Bannister and Kearns, 2013) and an inability to control where they are placed (Hage, 1998), its presence among low-income groups may also be fuelled by a sense of injustice, not only that they – and not affluent populations – have been dumped on, but also that those who have been foisted upon them might be receiving more in the way of assistance.

The second aim of this paper was to apply this concept in an empirical setting, both as a means of illustrating and testing its utility, but also as a way of understanding how residents conceive and respond to external processes of urban change over which they have no control. Rather than confirming external stereotypes of their city as low-class and crime-ridden, residents of Logan City draw on the dumping ground metaphor for different purposes – in this case to account for the problems Logan faces; to attribute responsibility to those who have orchestrated this outcome (usually government); and to explain why, even though they may feel pity for their new neighbours, they are unhappy about their presence. Stakeholders who work with these new arrivals attempt to counter such claims and highlight the positive features of their presence in Logan, but the language of the dumping ground endures.

But Logan is only one place and while its experiences may resonate with other disadvantaged city areas outside Australia, further empirical work is needed to refine and test the conceptual framework offered here. In what other ways, for example, is the dumping ground metaphor used, and in what other contexts? What processes, other than the ones observed here, are bound up in its construction and adoption? How is it contested, negotiated and resisted more effectively by other local stakeholders who hold alternative, and potentially competing, visions of how their cities and neighbourhoods should be, including those that strive to make them more inclusive of difference and socially just? And, perhaps most importantly, when is it not used? When is the presence of difference and disadvantage not viewed as an insult or imposition; when new arrivals are made to feel welcome rather than resented; and when low-income areas do not feel that they alone have to accommodate the city’s outcasts? While the construction of cities as embodying particular moral values that render them sites of sanctuary or hospitality for asylum seekers and refugees has been subject to critique for the tendency to demarcate between ‘deserving and legitimate’ asylum seekers who should be welcomed, and those who, by means of their illegitimate arrival or intent, should not (see Darling, 2010, 2013), the willingness of some cities to adopt a more progressive approach to asylum seeker settlement by reframing their own identity as welcoming of asylum seekers and engaging in wider political debate about asylum seeker policy has been viewed a positive step (see Malpass et al., 2007 for a similar argument around ethical consumption campaigns). As residents and stakeholders of cities and neighbourhoods formulate local narratives and cultures of place, how can we support the former while engaging critically with the latter, including in Logan where an alternative, but still-marginal, place narrative that recognises the virtue of the city’s diversity is struggling to be heard. These are bigger questions than can be answered here, but they question the inevitability, rather than simply the utility, of the urban dumping ground.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the financial support of AHURI and the leadership of Professor Hal Pawson who headed up the research team. They would also like to thank colleagues from the UQ HAUS readership scheme and the anonymous referees of this journal for their excellent feedback on previous versions of this paper.

Funding

This paper was produced as part of a multi-year research project funded by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) entitled ‘Addressing Concentrations of Social Disadvantage’ (Grant no. 11/MYRP/1).

Notes

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