The post-political state? The role of administrative reform in managing tensions between urban growth and liveability in Brisbane,Australia

Introduction

Contemporary cities face a range of problems, not least of which is how to manage rapid population growth. Such problems raise important political questions about the kinds of cities citizens are willing to live in, as growth tends to undermine the ‘liveability’ of urban neighbourhoods: the overall quality of life that people derive from the urban environment, including housing, neighbours, traffic or access to open spaces (McCrea and Walters, 2012; Searle, 2004). However, rather than acknowledging that growth-related problems are political issues that require public deliberation, governments are increasingly likely to represent them as technical issues that can be addressed through better management. In the parlance of contemporary urban governance theories, this tendency reflects a shift towards a ‘post-political’ approach to the administration of cities. Post-politics refers to a mode of urban governance wherein fundamental disagreements about the nature and direction of urban life are suspended (Swyngedouw, 2009). The shift towards post-politics is problematic because it means that the pro-growth discourses of the entrepreneurial state (Leitner, 1990) maintain a relatively unchecked influence over urban policy and planning, despite the problems that they produce.

In this article we investigate how government responses to problems arising from urban population growth perpetuate post-politics in cities. We do this through a case study of Brisbane, Australia. Brisbane markets itself as a ‘New World City’: a medium-sized metropolis that balances a growing economy with a level of urban liveability not found in larger cities. However, this purported balance is being undermined in Brisbane’s residential neighbourhoods by the combination of high population growth – driven by the entrepreneurial policies of the City Council – and increasing density – driven by State Government mandates that population growth be consolidated in designated areas. The ensuing tension between growth and liveability is manifest in a rise in urban nuisances and neighbour disputes and, concomitantly, increasing demand for the Council’s compliance services.

Drawing on the literature on urban post-politics, we analyse how the City Council recasts these symptoms of urban overload as a ‘techno-managerial’ problem (Swyngedouw, 2010) that can be addressed by improving ‘efficiency’ and ‘customer focus’ within its compliance branch. We argue that responding to the issue in this way enables the Council to assert the possibility of balancing growth and consolidation with liveability without acknowledging the tensions that exist between these different policy objectives. In this respect, our work adds to a growing body of research on urban post-politics that documents how tensions between economic growth and other policy objectives are eschewed through consensus-orientated, technocratic governance processes (Allmendinger and Haughton, 2012; Deas, 2013; Oosterlynck and Swyngedouw, 2010; Tarazona Vento, 2017). However, our analysis also extends this work by demonstrating how the City Council employs ‘new public management’ (NPM) discourse to reduce the problem of rising urban nuisances to a service delivery problem. We argue that this constitutes a de-politicisation strategy that has not been well documented in the literature on urban post-politics to date.

Post-politics is frequently associated with the expansion of ‘governance-beyond-the-state’ (Swyngedouw, 2005: 1992), entailing hybrid institutional arrangements made up of associations between stakeholders from the state, civil society and market spheres (Allmendinger and Haughton, 2012; Deas, 2013; Swyngedouw, 2005; Tarazona Vento, 2017). As Swyngedouw (2009: 609) argues, under these arrangements the political is rendered marginal as stakeholders are selected on the basis of their technical authority and legitimacy and dissent ‘is reduced to debates over the institutional modalities of governing, the accountancy calculus of risk and the technologies of expert administration and management’. In contrast, this article focuses on the mobilisation of a distinct set of governing practices enacted within government itself as it reorganises its own administrative processes and ways of relating to its citizens in ways that mirror and augment the dynamics of post-political governance more broadly. By shedding light on these strategies, this article expands our understanding of the variety of strategies and processes that perpetuate the post-politicisation of contemporary urban governance.

The article begins with a discussion of current debates around urban post-politics, followed by an outline of the methodology used to conduct the study. We then present the findings from our analysis of Brisbane city. First, we outline the policy discourses and frameworks that form the context in which the problem of rising urban nuisances has emerged, most notably the tension between the City Council’s representation of Brisbane as balancing growth with liveability, and Queensland State Government planning frameworks of urban consolidation. Second, we show how the City Council seeks to manage the ensuing challenge of rising urban nuisance that emerges from these policy tensions. Specifically, we describe how the Council deploys NPM notions of efficiency and customer focus to recast the problem of rising nuisances as a techno-managerial problem; namely, a problem of how to manage increasing demand for compliance services within the constraints of existing budgetary resources. Thirdly, we show how the customer focus ‘solutions’ pursued by the Council perpetuate the post-politicisation of urban governance in Brisbane by foregrounding the economic over the political dimension of the relationship between the city’s citizens and the local government.

Urban entrepreneurialism, post-politics and new public management

Urban post-politics is associated with important changes in the administration of cities. As is well documented, the last decades of the 20th century saw a shift in urban politics away from Keynesian-welfarist concerns with redistribution and service provision to a neoliberal concern with boosting local economic growth (Brenner, 2004; Jessop, 2002). Corresponding to this shift, urban governance has taken on an ‘entrepreneurial’ form wherein cities compete to attract investment and tourism, to host prestige events and to appeal to the professional and creative classes (Hall and Hubbard, 1996; Harvey, 1989; Leitner, 1990). In order to secure competitive advantages for their city, entrepreneurial urban governments endeavour to create a ‘good business climate’ (Harvey, 1989: 11) by loosening planning regulations and incentivising investment through tax-breaks and public-private partnerships (MacLeod, 2011; MacLeod and Goodwin, 1999). They also endeavour to construct an attractive image of the city through place creation and place marketing strategies (Hall and Hubbard, 1996; Tarazona Vento, 2017). Whilst individual cities actively deploy these entrepreneurial strategies, their capacity to do otherwise is limited by the structural conditions in which they operate. As Harvey (1989: 3) has pointed out, ‘the process of city making … is both product and condition’ of capitalist development, meaning that ‘even the most resolute and avantgarde municipal socialists will find themselves, in the end, playing the capitalist game and performing as agents of discipline for the very processes they are trying to resist’ (Harvey, 1989: 5).

The success of entrepreneurial urban governance strategies is premised to a large degree on the acceptance of economic growth as the paramount objective of urban governance. However, the pursuit of economic growth is associated with a range of urban problems that often provoke challenges from urban populations or interest groups to particular growth-focused policy and planning decisions. For example, previous studies of Brisbane describe local residents’ opposition to the government-facilitated densification of their neighbourhoods on the basis of concerns about overloaded transport infrastructure and the loss of social diversity (McCrea and Walters, 2012; Walters and McCrea, 2014). Other studies document public opposition to the noise pollution caused by large road developments (Parker and Street, 2015); the intensification of air-traffic from a city airport (Oosterlynck and Swyngedouw, 2010); a proposed road tunnel (Legacy, 2016); and the displacement of homeless people by urban authorities because they are deemed a blight on a city’s image (Mitchell et al., 2015).

From the perspective of urban authorities, the exigencies of global interurban competition mean that these kinds of political obstacles to growth-facilitating policy decisions can lead a city to lose its competitive advantage and create a perception of risk amongst investors. Thus, it has become common for urban authorities to try to avoid political disputes over policy/planning decisions through consensus-orientated modes of governance. Following the work of Swyngedouw (2009, 2010), urban scholars have come to refer to this tendency as ‘post-political’ urban governance. The concept of post-politics derives from a movement in political philosophy that posits that the dominance of neoliberal capitalism has led to the suspension of political/ideological contestation over the basic organising principles of society (Mouffe, 2005; Rancière, 1998; Žižek, 2000). Central to theories of post-politics is the distinction between ‘the political’ and ‘politics’. Following Mouffe (2005), ‘the political’ is understood as an ontological concept that refers to ‘the dimension of antagonism which … [is] constitutive of human societies’ (Mouffe, 2005: 9) and which is manifest through the confrontation of ‘different hegemonic political projects’ (Mouffe, 2005: 3). ‘Politics’, on the other hand, is an ontic/empirical concept that is roughly synonymous with the concept of ‘governing’ in that it refers to ‘the set of practices and institutions through which order is created, organizing human coexistence in the context of conflictuality provided by the political’ (Mouffe, 2005: 9).

‘Post-politics’, then, refers to a way of governing – that is, of doing ‘politics’ – that obscures the fundamentally antagonist nature of ‘the political’ by presupposing and seeking to maintain consensus about how society ought to be organised (Derickson, 2017). It does this through ‘technocratic mechanisms and consensual procedures that operate within an unquestioned framework of representative democracy, free market economics, and cosmopolitan liberalism’ (Wilson and Swyngedouw, 2014: 6). These practices are designed to support the single hegemonic project of neoliberalism by marginalising the ‘counter-hegemonic’ narratives and activities that Mouffe (2005) asserts are necessary to the antagonistic nature of ‘the political’. As Swyngedouw (2010: 215) states, neoliberalisation and post-politicisation are ‘parallel and intertwined’ processes. They overlap, support and extend one another; however, they are ultimately distinct in that neoliberal governance centres on the promotion of economic growth and market competition, whereas post-politics is orientated to depoliticising those objectives or the problems they beget.

In urban studies research, the theory of post-politics has been used to analyse how urban authorities address the problems produced by the urban growth agenda whilst attempting to shield entrepreneurial policies from critical scrutiny. Studies demonstrate how post-political strategies are used to reframe tensions between economic growth and other political objectives, such as social justice and environmental sustainability, as a technical problem that can be worked out through consensus-orientated deliberation between experts and other responsible stakeholders. For instance, Allmendinger and Haughton (2012: 95) describe how New Labour’s urban planning framework ‘emphasised partnership and consensus as ways to help resolve or “balance” sources of potential tension, positioning itself as a means for reconciling differences and achieving social justice and sustainable development alongside economic growth’. Similarly, Oosterlynck and Swyngedouw (2010) describe how the national government of Belgium sought to reconcile its decision to approve a drastic increase in the number of night flights from Brussels airport (to boost economic activity in the region) with its promise to promote environmental sustainability and limit noise pollution.

These empirical studies on ‘actually existing urban politics’ (Beveridge and Koch, 2017: 32) have also subjected the concept of post-politics to empirical scrutiny, prompting researchers to suggest that claims of dissent and conflict being suppressed or disappearing from cities are overstated. As Deas (2013), McLeod (2011) and others (Beveridge and Koch, 2017; Legacy, 2016) have noted, it is erroneous to suggest that contestation has disappeared from cities since citizens and marginalised groups continue to assert their rights to the city in the face of a diminution of those rights. Legacy (2016), for example, insists that urban planning remains a political activity, albeit an increasingly undemocratic one, since attempts to bypass public deliberation around key urban policy decisions are, in themselves, political decisions that have the potential to trigger public backlash and dissent. Swyngedouw himself (see Oosterlynck and Swyngedouw, 2010) acknowledges that the post-political project cannot avoid antagonism and resistance, arguing that attempts to negate what are constitutive features of the political only result in tensions within, and the ultimate failure of, the post-political project.

In this sense, it is useful to conceive of post-politics as a political strategy rather than a political condition (Beveridge and Koch, 2017); one made manifest through a range of governmental practices, discourses and arrangements that, while unable to suppress urban dissent, seek to marginalise it, delegitimise it and reduce it to ‘noise’ (Oosterlynck and Swyngedouw, 2010: 1581). The point about post-political forms of governance, then, is not that protest groups or actions that have historically mobilised in cities are no longer present or are repressed through the deployment of post-political strategies, but rather that their voices and agendas are excluded from the institutional and deliberative arenas where policy-making plays out. Discursively, this occurs through strategies that present growth as imperative for the good of the city, thereby closing off discussion about alternative models of urbanisation in favour of technocratic and administrative deliberations on how decisions should be made and enacted. It also involves dismissing dissident voices as irrational or self-interested by framing them as mere ‘NIMBY opposition’ (Legacy, 2016: 3112) or some other vexatious response that does not warrant serious consideration.

Institutionally, one of the key post-political mechanisms through which urban authorities seek to reconcile economic growth with competing objectives is through participatory forms of ‘governance-beyond-the-state’ (Swyngedouw, 2005), wherein the state invites various ‘stakeholders’ to participate in deliberations about planning frameworks, development projects or other urban governance issues (Allmendinger and Haughton, 2012; Swyngedouw, 2009). Despite their veneer of democratic inclusivity, participatory processes are viewed as highly stage-managed affairs ‘in which the scope of possible outcomes is narrowly defined in advance’ (Wilson and Swyngedouw, 2014: 6). For example, studies show how public consultation is usually conducted after key decisions have been made in closed-door meetings between governments, technocrats and private investors/developers who all already agree on the necessity of entrepreneurial projects (Legacy, 2016; Oosterlynck and Swyngedouw, 2010; Tarazona Vento, 2017). The function of participation is therefore not to deliberate about the desirability of a project or about the relative value of competing projects, but instead to bestow a sense of legitimacy on governmentally preordained projects and to negotiate a ‘fair’ distribution of the costs and benefits associated with them among relevant stakeholders (Oosterlynck and Swyngedouw, 2010). Furthermore, parties who refuse to accept the decision, or who raise questions outside of the pre-defined terms of reference for debate, are excluded from participatory processes and forced to pursue their political agendas through informal means, such as protest and forms of direct action (Legacy, 2016; Parker and Street, 2015).

The extensive examination of governance-beyond-the-state practices in the urban governance literature has been highly productive for our understanding of urban post-politics. What is not well understood in this literature, however, is how internal changes within the state itself – both as a means of enabling participatory governance and as a way of managing its own administrative processes – are reflective of the post-political project within cities. Since the 1980s, the institutional and administrative structures of representative government have been under attack for their purported bureaucratic rigidity, inefficiency and unresponsiveness to the public qua consumers of government services (Clarke and Newman, 1997; Du Gay, 2000). These critiques gave rise to the ‘new public management’ (NPM) (Hood, 1991), a global reform movement that drastically changed the administration and delivery of government services (Christensen and Lægreid, 2011a). One tendency in NPM has been the decentralisation, privatisation and marketisation of government services, a practice which established the conditions for the proliferation of network/partnership governance arrangements discussed above (Christensen and Lægreid, 2011b; Clarke and Newman, 1997). The other tendency has been to reconfigure public administration in accordance with the principles of ‘business-type managerialism’ (Hood, 1991: 5), which entails the promotion of business values, such as efficiency and customer focus, and the downplaying of politico-administrative values, such as impartiality and hierarchical accountability (Du Gay, 2000).

It is this second aspect of NPM, the adoption of business-type managerialism, that we suggest is an understudied aspect of contemporary government reform that is contributing to the post-politicisation of cities. One common critique of NPM generally, and of the adoption of business values/practices in particular, is that they de-politicise public services by foregrounding questions about how services are delivered rather than what services are provided and the broader social purposes that they serve (Clarke and Newman, 1997). For example, NPM reposes the problem of the divergence between ‘shrinking resources’ and ‘rising public need’ as an efficiency problem – i.e. a problem of doing ‘more with less’ – rather than a political question about what is an acceptable trade-off between low taxes and adequate services (Clarke and Newman, 1997: 148–149). NPM also redefines citizens as ‘customers’ of government services, meaning that governments relate to them less as political subjects with a stake in collective problems and more like self-interested market actors who are only concerned with whether services are provided to them in ways that satisfy their individual preferences (Aberbach and Christensen, 2005; Fountain, 2001; Schram et al., 2010). In our case study, we examine how NPM discourses and public-sector reform strategies perpetuate the post-politicisation of cities. We suggest that NPM enables governments to reduce problems produced by urban growth to service delivery problems that can be addressed by reconfiguring the internal administrative processes of the state itself.

Research methods

The findings presented in this article are drawn from a case study of how problems arising from population growth, and the use of urban consolidation to cope with that growth, were managed in the city of Brisbane, Australia. The case study has two parts. The first entailed analysis of policy discourses and frameworks governing population growth and related problems in Brisbane. This entailed examination of policy, planning and corporate documents produced by Brisbane City Council (BCC) which outline its vision for the city, its medium-term policy objectives and its current planning and administrative practices. It also included examination of the State Government’s South-East Queensland Regional Plan, a planning framework that shapes and constrains the planning activities of BCC and surrounding councils, and which mandates the consolidation of population growth in specific areas. We analysed these texts in order to understand the policy context within which the problem of rising urban nuisances and neighbour complaints emerges, and to identify how these policies are shaped by broader discourses, such as urban entrepreneurialism.

The second part of the case study derives from a larger study conducted by the first author that investigates how ‘customer focus’ discourse is reconciled (or not) with the compliance practices of city authorities. The study involved ethnographic fieldwork with BCC and focused on reforms undertaken by the Council’s compliance branch that aim to improve customer focus amongst its frontline compliance officers. Fieldwork was conducted between January and December 2014. The data presented here is drawn from 22 interviews conducted with Council staff in managerial, strategic and ‘business improvement’ roles. Interview participants were selected purposively based upon the role they played in helping initiate, develop and/or implement the compliance branch’s customer focus policies. The interview questions focused on participants’ understandings of why the customer focus policies were developed, the problem that they were intended to addressed and what it means to be customer focused in the compliance context. For confidentiality purposes, all names have been replaced with pseudonyms and job titles with generic descriptors.

Managing population growth in a ‘New World City’

Located within the south-east region of Queensland, Brisbane is Australia’s third largest city. Once recognised as a ‘booming frontier town’ (Hamnett, 1984) that serviced the state’s mining and agricultural industries, Brisbane has experienced rapid growth from 1.1 million residents in 1986 to 2.3 million in 2004 (BCC, 2015). Current projections suggest it will reach 3 million by 2030 (BCC, 2013). Unusually for Australia, Brisbane is governed by a single local government – BCC – which was initially set up in 1924 as a unitary authority for the broad metropolitan region (Gleeson et al., 2010). Where other cities contain multiple, smaller municipalities, BCC has retained its large jurisdictional scale despite the introduction of regional governance frameworks in the south-east Queensland region (encompassing a 200km stretch of coastline from the Sunshine Coast in the north to the Gold Coast in the south). BCC thus remains the largest local government authority in Australia, covering a land mass of 133km² (Greenop and Darchen, 2016). As analysts have noted, the size and power of the Council means that it has often been in a position to compete with State Government urban planning decisions and exert a significant degree of power and autonomy in determining the priorities for the city (Gleeson et al., 2010).

The observed shift in political rationalities from a managerialist to an entrepreneurial form of local state action is reflected in the efforts of BCC over the last four decades to recast Brisbane’s identity as more than just a large rural service centre and to stimulate growth in its post-industrial economy. Brisbane exemplifies claims by earlier scholars that entrepreneurial local governance is particularly prevalent among ‘sunbelt metropolises’ (Guhathakurta and Stimson, 2007) which demarcate themselves as landscapes of urban consumption through the promise of a particular kind of sub-tropical urban lifestyle and tourist experience. Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, for example, place marketers promoted Brisbane as a site of international and domestic tourism, prompting an influx of international investment and interstate migrants seeking a place in the sun. Such ambitions were aided by Brisbane hosting the 1982 Commonwealth Games and the 1988 World Expo which led to the redevelopment of key industrial waterfront sites as spaces of outside dining, leisure and tourism.

From the early 2000s, however, BCC, in concert with the Queensland Government, adopted a ‘high-tech variation’ of urban entrepreneurialism (Hollands, 2008) through the adoption of a new economic development policy that promulgated Brisbane as a ‘smart city’ and Queensland as the ‘smart state’. Along with other aspiring smart cities around the world inspired by the promise of luring scientists, professionals and artists to their shores, city marketers sought to reframe Brisbane’s identity from that of a tourist destination to that of a city that could service high-tech, knowledge-intensive industries in the fields of education, biosciences and the creative industries. Accompanying the smart city strategy of economic development was a programme of urban renewal involving, first, the creation of concentrated ‘knowledge hubs’ through infill development at key sites near the city centre; and second, a programme of state-led gentrification of previously industrial suburbs along the city’s riverfront to refashion them into sought after suburbs where the discerning creative class could reside.

While Brisbane remains unable to compete with Sydney or Melbourne as Australia’s pre-eminent city, it retains an aspiration to elevate itself as a global city that ranks higher in the global urban hierarchy than comparable cities such as Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai. Galvanised by the city’s success in hosting the G20 World Leaders’ Summit in 2014, Brisbane’s current economic development strategy seeks to position it as a consummate ‘New World City’, as outlined in the Council’s Brisbane 2022 New World City Action Plan (BCC, 2015). This document provides the ‘economic blueprint’ for the city’s restyling into a top-10 global lifestyle city with a high-performing economy that has deep economic and cultural links with the Asia-Pacific region through a range of high-growth industries (BCC, 2015). Critics of the manifesto, however, point out that this new economic vision treats the city as a ‘tabula rasa upon which businesses and internationally mobile individuals are able to make their mark in an “open” city where capital flows freely’, unimpeded by any acknowledgement of Brisbane’s ‘problematic colonial, or dull suburban, past’ (Greenop and Darchen, 2016: 390).

Brisbane’s profile as a rapidly growing city with a diversified and fast-developing economy sits uneasily with the Council’s simultaneous claim in the New World City Action Plan that it also offers a highly desirable lifestyle to current and potential residents via generous green spaces, an easy commute to work, readily accessible leisure activities and a healthy environment (BCC, 2015). Indeed, much of Brisbane’s historical development has been characterised by low-density, car-dependent urban sprawl, with growth largely occurring in the outer suburbs and peri-urban areas (Minnery and Barker, 1998). This has prompted concerns among scholars and State planning authorities that this low-density pattern of development is inherently unsustainable, both in terms of the impact on landscapes and local ecosystems as former greenfield sites are converted to outer-suburban housing developments, and in social terms as residents experience increased traffic congestion, commuting times and car dependence (QDIP, 2009).

As Gleeson et al. (2010) point out, responsibility for managing rapid growth in urban regions primarily sits with State rather than local governments. Integrated planning acts determine that State Government planning schemes take priority over all other planning instruments, including those of local councils. In the case of Brisbane, concerns over the social and environmental impacts of urban sprawl have led to the formulation of policies of urban consolidation by the State Government in an attempt to promote a more compact urban form through urban infill and other forms of redevelopment in established urban areas. The State Government’s South-East Queensland Regional Plan, 2009–2031 (QDIP, 2009) set the parameters for Brisbane’s future development by stipulating an increase of 50 percent in the proportion of new dwellings constructed through new development or redevelopment in existing urban areas. More precisely, of the expected 156,000 new dwellings in Brisbane by 2031, at least 138,000 must occur through infill redevelopment (QDIP, 2009). Describing these targets as ‘ambitious’ (BCC, 2016: 3), it is nevertheless incumbent upon the Council to accept these state directives – despite their unpopularity among local residents in targeted infill neighbourhoods (McCrea and Walters, 2012) – and to strive for so-called ‘strategic, smart growth’ (BCC, 2015: 1) that balances economic and population growth with the preservation of the city’s liveability: something that remains key to achieving its New World City vision (BCC, 2015: 84).

Recasting rising urban nuisances as a service delivery problem

Despite localised opposition to urban consolidation in targeted neighbourhoods, as manifest in resident petitions, letters to Council and submissions to planning authorities, the dominance of urban consolidation as a planning objective, alongside that of continued economic growth, has not received serious challenge. This has placed strain on Brisbane’s promise to balance growth with liveability, as manifest in the rising number of nuisance complaints and neighbour disputes reported to the Council. Nuisance is a relational phenomenon that arises when the conduct or property of one party disturbs or annoys that of another (Valverde, 2011). The relational nature of nuisance means that it is often exacerbated by population density, as more people in close proximity to one another means greater exposure to potentially disturbing conduct. Nuisances afflicting Brisbane residents include noise pollution, such as residential building noise; animal management issues, such as barking or wandering dogs; visual amenity issues, such as overgrown yards; parking issues, such as cars parked across driveways; and littering, primarily the incorrect disposal of cigarette butts.

Critics of urban consolidation have long argued that it risks disrupting the character and amenity of affected neighbourhoods (Bunker et al., 2005; Searle, 2004), and recent research confirms this. Data provided by BCC (Cheshire et al., 2017) on the volume of neighbour complaints received by its compliance branch, for example, reveal that from 2007 to 2014, reported complaints to Council increased from 13,305 complaints per year to 22,885. The most common sources of complaint were residential noise pollution (25% of all complaints), nuisance pets (13.5%), parking (12%), vegetation (11%) and buildings (9.5%). Moreover, the spatial distribution of complaints indicates a clear association between their frequency and population density, with cases of neighbour complaints concentrated in the conurbations and the corridors between them. Analysis of these patterns teases out the relationship between urban consolidation and urban nuisance further. Suburbs encountering high densification relative to the rest of the city are twice as likely to encounter a high volume of complaints than a low volume, particularly with regard to complaints around noise, but also parking, building, vegetation and animals (Cheshire et al, 2017).

The link between the rise in urban nuisances and the growth and consolidation of the city’s population is also highlighted in BCC’s 2013/14 Annual Report:

Due to population growth and a greater density of population in urban centres, there is a growing demand on compliance services. This has resulted in increased complaints regarding domestic animals, residential building noise, unsightly properties and other safety or amenity issues. These matters can have a significant impact on liveability for local residents and often take significant time to resolve. (BCC, 2014: 71)

Importantly, whilst the Council recognises that urban nuisances are exacerbated by population growth and increased density, these processes are largely taken for granted and there is little engagement with the question of whether either process is desirable or inevitable. In fairness, BCC has limited power to diverge from State planning mandates relating to urban consolidation. However, the acceptance of consolidation as a top-down policy direction, coupled with a refusal to question the growth-facilitating policies that create the need for consolidation in the first place, means that the policy dynamic driving rising nuisance complaints is treated as inevitable, thus making serious opposition difficult. The Council thus eschews the dual policy pressures driving the rise in nuisances and instead focuses its attention on how this problem might be managed within the constraints of tight council budgets. The following interview excerpt illustrates the extent to which growth, consolidation and rising nuisance complaints are viewed as a given by the Council, such that the key problem becomes meeting increasing demand for compliance services with restricted budgets:

We’re getting more and more people, we’re living on top of each other, and the level of complaint will go up and I think it’s reasonable to say, without putting the administration at risk, that I can’t see a commensurate level of increase in funding for enforcement officers. So we’ve got to do things differently … (Frank, manager)

There are clear resonances between the Council’s focus on the budgetary challenges caused by rising urban nuisances and the depoliticising operations of NPM discourse identified in previous research (Aberbach and Christensen, 2005; Clarke and Newman, 1997). Rather than treat rising nuisances as a social problem requiring a re-think of its pro-growth strategies, the Council treats it as a technical problem pertaining to its internal administrative processes that is amenable to business-like managerial solutions. Specifically, the Council formulates the problem as a matter of improving efficiency and customer focus in the compliance branch. As Frank, the interviewee quoted above, went on to explain, the Council has determined that the compliance branch wastes resources responding to customer complaints that could be avoided by improving customer focus:

So we’ve got to do things differently and we’ve got to do [customer focus] better, and … if we screw this up and we’re not responsive to a customer … what they do is write to the Lord Mayor and … every Lord Mayoral correspondence costs at least $400 to the organisation … So I’ve worked out we get thousands, probably over 1,500 pieces of Lord Mayoral correspondence a year. Not all of them because there’s been any errors but I’d say there’s probably $1 million worth of money within the branch that we are having to dedicate towards retrofitting bad customer focus experience. (Frank, manager)

Frank’s quote also indicates how the strategies to improve efficiency also serve to eliminate political heat from any dissident voices or unsatisfied ‘customers’ who may otherwise take their complaints to their local MP or the city’s Mayor. The tensions within local government between its primary functions of representing the interests of the people (via its elected local members) and delivering services (via employed bureaucrats) are well documented (Barnett, 2011), and have sharpened in recent decades under the pressures of NPM, which have caused local governments to shift from being ‘community-based political bodies to professional service producing agencies’ (Vabo and Aars, 2012: 7). Such pressures also create contests within local government as elected representatives engage in political debate around contentious issues within the community, while managers focus on developing solutions to technical problems as efficiently as possible (Vabo and Aars, 2012). In this sense, each piece of Mayoral correspondence from an unhappy resident not only creates a financial/efficiency cost for Council, but it also runs the risk of re-politicising resident concerns by bringing them out of the realm of the technocratic and administrative and into the arena of local politics. The deployment of strategies to improve customer focus thus preserves the status of resident complaints as service delivery concerns rather than matters of political deliberation that elected representatives need to be involved with.

In light of this, the Council has responded to the rise in urban nuisances through a range of measures aimed at helping the compliance branch to deliver what the 2013/14 Annual Report terms ‘responsive customer service’ (BCC, 2014: 71). One such measure is to ensure the ‘efficient prioritisation and scheduling and despatch of requests’ for the compliance branch’s first-response unit, the Rapid Response Group, to ensure that ‘Council delivers a timely regulatory response to the community’ (BCC, 2014: 71). This measure implies that the most important thing is the speed and order in which reports about urban nuisances are responded to, rather than consideration of their underlying causes.

A second measure is the provision of training to compliance officers so that they can better educate their customers on compliance matters. Previous research has noted that the push to citizens as customers is often accompanied by efforts to ‘educate’ them to ensure they have ‘reasonable’ expectations of public services and consume them in a ‘responsible’ way (Clarke et al., 2007: 119–120). For BCC, educating customers is primarily about preventing customer complaints that are based on a deficient understanding of local laws and how they are enforced. For example, an interviewee from the customer service branch described how the Council’s educational strategy is intended to work in the context of parking regulation:

I mainly met with parking people. The team leader would say, ‘Oh my God, they [parking officers] just go out and go, ‘There’s your ticket’, and then the customer will say, ‘But there’s four signs up there and I thought it was this sign’. ‘Too bad, there’s your ticket’, walks off. In our big workshop that we did, we used those sorts of examples, and said, ‘As a consumer, as a customer, would you write in and say, ‘I didn’t understand it?’ or could you [the compliance officer] have clarified it on the spot and been more customer focused? (Christine, business improvement officer)

As with the previous example, the focus here is on how compliance services are delivered, with the aim of reducing the volume of resources dedicated to responding to complaints made by dissatisfied customers. There is nothing essentially wrong with these endeavours. What we are drawing attention to here is how improvements in efficiency and customer focus are pursued in place of any effort to confront the fundamental tension between growth and urban liveability that lies behind the growth in urban nuisances. This demonstrates how NPM-style practices enacted in the domain of local government work to depoliticise problems emerging from the entrepreneurial growth agenda.

The public as taxpayers: The post-politicisation of urban citizenship

Alongside the depoliticisation of the manifest tensions between economic growth and urban liveability, the government reforms discussed in the previous section also contribute in a deeper and longer lasting way to the post-politicisation of urban governance in Brisbane. As noted above, previous studies suggest that the widespread adoption of terms like ‘customer’ and ‘consumer’ in the public sector signals a shift in the conception of citizenship that underpins how governments relate to publics (Aberbach and Christensen, 2005; Schram et al., 2010). Specifically, these terms foreground the economic basis of citizenship whilst simultaneously downplaying its political basis. As Schram et al. (2010: 743) explain:

The status of the democratic citizen, positioned as one who must decide and act collectively with others to gain preferred policy outcomes, has been eroded and partly displaced by the individualistic market roles of consumer, worker, and paying customer (Crenson and Ginsberg 2002). Citizens, in this guise, are synonymous with ‘taxpayers’ who have a contractual right to expect efficient and effective institutional actions that produce a good return on their investment.

This shift in the conception of citizenship reflects a key ideational function of NPM discourse, and of neoliberal governmentalities more broadly. NPM not only performs the pragmatic/strategic function of enabling authorities to depoliticise problems arising from the growth agenda in the manner described in the previous section; it also changes the basic concepts through which citizenship, the state and the relationship between them are conceived.

When BCC promotes customer focus as the solution to its urban nuisance problem, it endorses precisely the kind of economic citizenship that Schram et al. (2010) describe. As the following interview excerpts illustrate, the Council rationalises its customer focus policies by invoking the taxpayer (or ratepayer) status of the people that it serves:

… our customers are the people who live in and visit Brisbane; these people pay rates therefore Council owes them a service. (Brent, business improvement officer)

We are employed by rate payers and by people who use our roads and use our services. That’s why we are here. (Kelvin, manager)

Probably the biggest customer is the public … I think one of the things that we often forget is that we’re actually working for a whole great lot of taxpayers, residents of the city … (Meryl, manager)

As these quotes show, customer focus entails the reframing of the relationship between the Council and the public in a transactional, economic way, wherein the Council sees itself as owing citizen-customers a service because they have paid for it through their taxes/rates.

This economic conception of citizenship plays an important role in enabling the Council to justify its customer focus policies, particularly as they are applied to the compliance branch, for a range of tensions exist between customer focus and compliance. The most obvious is the tension between the customer focus objective of satisfying customer needs/preferences and the coercive and punitive practices that are used to enforce compliance (e.g. fines) (Alford and Speed, 2006). However, tensions exist even when customer focus is applied to citizens who are not subject to coercion or punishment, such as complainants or victims. Although these subjects ‘consume’ compliance services in a more customer-like fashion than regulatees or offenders, their preferences are usually still subordinated to other considerations, such as the public interest, due process and expert intelligence about how to use scarce resources in the most efficient and effective way. ¹

The Council invokes citizens’ taxpayer status in a discursive strategy aimed at circumventing these tensions between customer focus and compliance. As can be seen in the following interview excerpt, the notion of the citizen as taxpayer enables the Council to construct the public as a paying customer who the compliance branch owes a service, even if that service is compliance:

[Compliance officers] want to come to work and they want to do their job and this is a very general statement but they often see that customers can sometimes be an inhibiting factor in them doing their job … So [customer focus is about] really trying to change that mindset from ‘the customers are somewhat of a burden for us’, or some sort of a hindrance to them undertaking their work, to ‘without customers we don’t have a job, without customers we don’t provide services across Brisbane’ and to really reinforce that we need to constantly work with customers, even the challenging ones and the ones that don’t necessarily like to hear the service that we’re providing. (Kelvin, manager, emphasis added)

By foregrounding the citizens’ taxpayer status in this way, the Council is able to posit that, not only is customer focus compatible with compliance, but it is also required in an ethical sense because customers provide the compliance branch with its economic raison d’etre.

The idea that government exists to serve the public is not new. Indeed, it is perhaps the key principle of representative government. What is distinct – and distinctly post-political – about the economic conception of citizenship is that it conflates the status of individual ‘customers’ with that of the collective public in a way that the discourse of representative government does not. For the discourse of representative government, the public interest is incommensurable with the interests of the individual subjects that make up the public (Alford, 2002). This is because the public interest is defined through political struggle and compromise, and because it implies the provision of public goods, such as public order and public safety, which can only be consumed collectively (Aberbach and Christensen, 2005; Alford and Speed, 2006; Fountain, 2001). Construing the public as a collection of taxpayers obscures the incommensurability of the public interest and the interests of individual citizens by foregrounding citizens’ pecuniary contributions when rationalising why they are owed a service by government agencies. Unlike citizens’ political views, money is undifferentiated and commensurable. Thus, insofar as citizens’ interest in, and relationship to, government services is based upon their pecuniary contributions in the form of taxes, the public interest is redefined as a simple aggregation of the interests of the individual financial stakeholders that make up the public.

The reason we claim that the conflation of the public interest with the aggregated interests of individual citizens is distinctly post-political is because it obscures the fundamental antagonism between citizens’ political interests and conceptions of the public good – what theorists of post-politics call ‘the political’ (Mouffe, 2005). In contrast, the discourse of representative government recognises and maintains this fundamental antagonism by constructing the public interest as a provisional compromise between conflicting positions that does not foreclose their differences (Fountain, 2001). Therefore, insofar as customer focus entails the displacement of political conceptions of citizenship by an economic one, it contributes to the post-politicisation of the relationship between the Council and the residents of Brisbane.

Conclusion

This article has examined how government responses to problems arising from urban population growth perpetuate post-politics in cities. The findings contribute to the literature on urban post-politics by highlighting the role that changes to the traditional practices and relationships of government play in enabling urban authorities to depoliticise urban problems. Specifically, we have demonstrated how Brisbane City Council reduces the growth in urban nuisances to a service delivery problem which it seeks to address by improving efficiency and customer focus within its compliance branch. This approach has been adopted despite the Council itself acknowledging that the rise in nuisances is a consequence of population growth and increased population density; processes that are in turn driven by the Council’s entrepreneurial policies and the State Government’s urban consolidation mandates. We have argued that the Council’s use of NPM strategies to respond to the nuisance issue obscures the tensions that exist between growth and liveability that underlie the issue. We have also argued that the Council’s adoption of these strategies perpetuates the post-politicisation of urban governance in Brisbane by promoting an economic, rather than a political, conception of the relationship between the local government and urban citizens.

These findings expand our understanding of the variety of strategies and processes that reinforce post-politics in contemporary cities. Recent empirical research on urban post-politics has highlighted the role of governance-beyond-the-state strategies in driving urban post-politics, including participatory governance strategies and multi-sectoral partnerships (Allmendinger and Haughton, 2012; Legacy, 2016; Swyngedouw, 2005, 2009; Tarazona Vento, 2017). One of the reasons that these strategies are considered post-political is because they invite a range of unelected and unrepresentative actors into urban policy and planning processes and thus dilute the influence of the public as expressed through systems of representative government (Swyngedouw, 2005). What this article has shown is that government itself may too be taking on a post-political form, as strategies informed by NPM are taken up to reduce urban problems to technical service delivery problems and to recast citizens as the government’s paying customers. Given the powerful and far reaching influence of NPM in the developed world, it is highly likely that other governments are responding to challenges associated with urban growth using similar strategies to those observed here. Thus, our findings suggest that the post-politicisation of urban governance may be more comprehensive and multifaceted than previously thought.

Governments clearly face significant challenges in balancing local competitiveness and growth with the liveability of cities that are not (completely) within their control. However, we believe that reframing these challenges in purely techno-managerial terms that presume consensus around the hegemonic project of growth is not a sustainable way for them to proceed. As Mouffe (2005) states, refusal to allow for the confrontation of different hegemonic projects denies the antagonism inherent in human societies; and when this antagonistic tendency is not given a legitimate outlet it is likely to manifest in problematic forms. This can be seen in the NIMBYism that often drives neighbourhood resistance to urban consolidation, where people are committed to protecting their parochial interests regardless of what this means for other groups, such as those relegated to low amenity, sprawling outer suburbs (Fischer and Ayturk, 2011).

What is needed, we suggest, is the opening up of political debate in cities like Brisbane to foster the emergence of counter-hegemonic projects that can engage ‘agonistically’ (Mouffe, 2005) with the growth agenda, and thus provide people with something to identify with beyond their narrow personal or parochial interests. In Brisbane, as elsewhere, the seeds of counter-hegemonic projects already exist in the form of urban social movements that put forward an alternative political vision for the city, such as the ‘Right to the City: Brisbane’ movement (http://www.righttobne.org/) and the Save Our Suburbs network across Australia that seeks to oppose urban consolidation and effect ‘beneficial changes to planning policies’ (http://www.sos.org.au/). These movements explicitly challenge the privileging of economic growth in local politics and planning activities, and put forward alternative platforms centred on social justice and environmental objectives. However, in order for these movements to achieve recognition as legitimate political projects, local authorities must cease eschewing debate in favour of techno-managerial responses to local problems, such as the reforms documented in this article.