In Absence: Exploring urbs nullius and decolonising urban landscapes in ‘Australian’ cities

Abstract

In Australian urban contexts, I argue that gentrification cannot be understood solely as a class-based process but must be recognised as a continuation of colonial dispossession, where urban redevelopment reasserts settler claims to land through the logics of improvement, ownership and spatial control. Drawing on Indigenous scholarship and the concept of urbs nullius, the article shows how Aboriginal presence is framed as decline while neighbourhoods are recast as ‘wastelands’ awaiting renewal. Through the case of Redfern, I demonstrate how contemporary urban planning and property regimes reproduce the erasure of Aboriginal sovereignty, restricting mobility, belonging and cultural continuity. By centring Aboriginal law, story, and relational ethics, the paper argues for a decolonial reimagining of urban design, one that restores accountability to Country and challenges the dominance of settler-colonial systems of value, ownership, and urban progress.

Introduction

Redfern, in inner-city Sydney, has long stood as both a site of Aboriginal survival and a target of redevelopment. From the 1970s onwards, grassroots organisations such as the Aboriginal Medical Service, the Aboriginal Legal Service, Murrawina, National Black Theatre and the Aboriginal Housing Company asserted self-determination in the heart of the settler city. These Aboriginal organisations emerged from the community’s refusal to be erased and assimilated, transforming Redfern into a national centre of Aboriginal political and cultural life (Perheentupa, 2020). Yet, in recent decades, the community has been reframed through the language of ‘decline’ and ‘renewal’, as state-led redevelopment and speculative investment displaced residents and advanced the colonial project of reclaiming Aboriginal land as colonial property.

This trajectory captures the central argument of this article: in settler-colonial contexts such as Australia, gentrification is not merely a class process but a continuation of colonisation. It reproduces the displacement of Aboriginal peoples through the intertwined logics of property, enclosure and ‘urban progress’. What appears as regeneration or revitalisation is, in fact, a spatial strategy that extends the original violence of dispossession into the urban ¹ present, repackaged through the languages of planning, urban renewal, sustainability and economic growth.

Marxist urban theory, most notably in the work of David Harvey and Neil Smith, offers valuable insight into how capitalism commodifies urban space through cycles of investment, displacement, and renewal (Harvey, 2008; Smith, 2002). Yet these frameworks remain limited when applied to settler-colonial contexts. In cities such as Sydney, the foundations of capitalism were laid upon already stolen land, its value created through the dispossession and erasure of Aboriginal sovereignty. As a result, gentrification in settler societies cannot be understood merely as an economic process; it is a spatial continuation of colonisation. Recent scholarship has reframed urban transformation as a form of ongoing settler accumulation and racialised governance (Blatman-Thomas and Sisson, 2024; Dorries, 2021; Ellis-Young, 2022; Fallon, 2020; Fraser & Addie, 2019; Kent-Stoll, 2020; Porter, 2017) Yet within the Australian context, Aboriginal epistemologies remain marginal to these debates, even as the physical and cultural erasure of Aboriginal spaces continues to define urban development (Moreton-Robinson, 2015; Watson, 2015).

This article responds to that absence by developing a decolonial reading of gentrification grounded in Aboriginal law, memory and relationality (Graham, 2014). It argues that land theft, the cadastral grid and property functions as a key nexus between capitalism and colonialism, sustaining the invasion of Country ² through legal, financial and aesthetic means (Blomley, 2003; Coulthard, 2014; Jackson, 2017). This article reframes urban transformation not as inevitable progress but as the continuation of frontier violence in contemporary form. More importantly, it proposes that decolonising colonial placemaking requires more than recognition of its colonial past and token gestures towards its traditional owners, it requires the renewal of relational thinking, a structural and ethical reorientation of urban design, planning, and governance toward Aboriginal sovereignty and care for Country (Watson, 2015).

As an Aboriginal scholar of Tanganekald, Bunganditj, Potaruwutj and Meintangk ancestorst, my work foregrounds narratives of place grounded in lived and ancestral connection to Country. These connections are not abstract, they are embodied through family histories and community relationships that carry the enduring weight of colonial disruption. My family’s history of genocide and dispossession in the Southeast of South Australia speaks to the intimate realities of displacement, surveillance, and cultural silencing that continue to disrupt Aboriginal life across generations. These experiences are not isolated but shared across our communities; they form part of a collective memory of survival within a landscape continually reshaped by colonial violence. Within this context, colonial city-building and contemporary processes of ‘urban renewal’ reproduce the same logics of removal and control that have long sought to sever Aboriginal people from our Country and the relational connections to our lands and kin. Through an autoethnographic lens, I challenge the portrayal of gentrification as a neutral or progressive force, revealing instead how it perpetuates the erasure of Aboriginal sovereignty, belonging, and ways of living with Country and kin under the guise of ‘progress’ and ‘development’.

This article unfolds across four interconnected sections that together build a decolonial reading of urban transformation. The first section traces the colonial foundations of urban space, examining how property law, and cadastral mapping transformed relational landscapes into commodified territories (Blomley, 2003; De Angelis, 2004; Watson, 2002). The second section explores how these spatial and legal instruments continue to shape contemporary urban life, showing how cadastral systems and planning regimes discipline Aboriginal presence and restrict access to Country (Uşak et al., 2024). The third section situates gentrification as the latest iteration of these colonial logics, engaging recent critical urban studies while centring Aboriginal epistemologies of place and relation through the case of Redfern. Finally, the fourth section turns toward practice, proposing that decolonising urban space requires design frameworks grounded in Aboriginal law, story, and memory, approaches that reorient architecture and planning toward reciprocity, truth-telling and care for Country.

Aboriginal law of country: Settled and unsettled spaces, where are we free to roam?

Tanganekald, Bunganditj, Potaruwutj and Meintangk woman and legal scholar Irene Watson asks:

When we are speaking into a colonised space, how are Aboriginal voices captured, echoed, ricocheted, distilled? Where does that voice of our old people go? In looking at the question of settled and unsettled spaces, who is it that is free to roam? What is the continuing Aboriginal connection over roamed spaces and what space do Aboriginal peoples occupy in this one-nation Australia? (Watson, 2007, p.15).

Watson’s question goes to the heart of Aboriginal sovereignty under colonial occupation. It exposes the paradox of living as sovereign peoples within a state that continues to deny our Aboriginal laws, languages, and relationships to Country. Within this structure, we are never free to simply be, our movements, voices and presences are mediated through colonial boundaries of ownership, governance and legitimacy. The city, as the ultimate expression of colonial order, reproduces this condition spatially, through zoning, policing, property, and planning systems that regulate where and how Aboriginal life may exist.

Gentrification renews this dispossession through what Glen Coulthard terms urbs nullius (Coulthard, 2014), the reimagining of urban neighbourhoods as ‘wastelands’ awaiting improvement. Within this logic, Aboriginal presence is recast as disorder, and Aboriginal cultural life as incompatible with urban modernity. The rhetoric of ‘urban renewal’ thus becomes the contemporary language of conquest, reasserting colonial control through the very mechanisms of development and design.

This logic of urbs nullius, of spaces imagined as empty and awaiting renewal, finds legal expression in the frameworks that continue to govern land in Australia. The colonial state’s capacity to remake Country as property and erase Aboriginal presence did not end with the formal rejection of terra nullius. As Watson argues, the very legal and economic systems that claim to recognise Aboriginal rights remain structured by dispossession (Watson, 2007). Her critique of native title exposes this continuity, as she states, although Mabo removed terra nullius from Australian law, it did not restore Aboriginal authority over Country (Watson, 2002). Instead, terra nullius re-inscribed colonial jurisdiction, forcing Aboriginal peoples to prove continuity of connection in courts that still operate through the logic of ownership and alienation.

Watson likens this extractive logic of colonialism to Tiddalik, ³ the greedy frog whose insatiable thirst drained the waterways of life. This story becomes a potent metaphor for Western colonial relationships to Country this extractive logic consumes land, resources, and Aboriginal culture without limit or reciprocity. In Aboriginal law, Tiddalik’s act of drinking all the water represents an imbalance in the natural order, a warning against greed, accumulation, and the severing Aboriginal laws of relationality that sustain life. Only through the collective efforts of the other beings, who work together to make Tiddalik laugh and release the waters, is balance of the natural order restored. This cycle of the frog’s consumption and renewal is not merely a mythic story but a philosophical framework for understanding the ethics of relation and the consequences of excess (Watson, 2002).

When the story is told through this lens, Tiddalik exposes the moral and ecological structure of colonial placemaking and urbanism. Contemporary cities, particularly those shaped by colonial histories, operate through a similar thirst for growth and accumulation. Country becomes a commodity and is drained of its vitality through endless damaging development. Like Tiddalik, colonial planning and architecture consume space and resources without giving back, absorbing everything that sustains life, water, soil, ecology, memory and community, in pursuit of capital and progress. Yet unlike Tiddalik, Western systems rarely release what they have taken; the waters of reciprocity are held back behind property boundaries, corporate profit and bureaucratic control (Watson, 2002).

In settler-colonial cities such as Sydney, this insatiable urban appetite manifests through the redevelopment of Aboriginal lands, rising rents, and the displacement of communities under the guise of ‘renewal’. It extends to the ecological realm through the draining of wetlands, the redirection of rivers, and the sealing of soil for infrastructure, severing the hydrological and cultural cycles that once connected people and animals to Country (Shaw, 2006; Uşak et al., 2024; Watson, 2002). This is not only an environmental crisis but a spiritual and relational one, a drought of meaning and connection created by systems that refuse to recognise the living law of Country.

Extending this analysis, Irene Watson deepens the critique of colonial legality itself, asking: Who authorises the law? Whose lives does it protect, and whose interests does it serve? (Derrida, 1997; Watson, 2002). These questions expose the racialised violence embedded in Western legal sovereignty, the same logic that justified invasion and continues to legitimise urban dispossession through the rhetoric of urban renewal and development. Transposed to planning and gentrification, this critique reveals how law, policy, and property work together to naturalise displacement, presenting it as renewal or public benefit. Making these colonial frameworks visible unsettles the assumed neutrality of colonial placemaking though urbanisation, exposing it as a contemporary iteration of colonial occupation and spatial control (Coulthard, 2014; Moreton-Robinson, 2015).

The legal fiction of terra nullius, the claim that land was empty and thus available for possession, continues to underpin Australia’s legal and political systems, shaping how authority and belonging are imagined (Blatman-Thomas and Porter, 2019; Edmonds, 2009; Watson, 2015). Its legacy is embedded in the city’s built form and governance structures, where colonial hierarchies persist through planning, property, and policing (Blatman-Thomas and Porter, 2019). In Sydney – the nation’s largest and most urbanised city – these hierarchies are spatially encoded, Aboriginal visibility is permitted only in controlled or symbolic forms, while everyday practices of living on Country are constrained by regulation and surveillance (Blatman-Thomas and Porter, 2019; Watson, 2007). These are not incidental social outcomes but spatial consequences of a colonial urban order that continues to deny Aboriginal law and sovereignty.

Such dynamics remind us that colonial violence has not disappeared; it has simply been reshaped through the logics of urban modernity (Jackson et al., 2018). Redevelopment and renewal projects extend the colonial work of managing Aboriginal land, labour, and culture as resources to be controlled and exploited within a capitalist framework of improvement (Coulthard, 2014). The gentrification of Redfern and the removal of its Aboriginal community is not an isolated urban phenomenon but a contemporary repetition of terra nullius/urbs nullius a city space imagined as vacant and awaiting transformation through white ‘improvement’ (Coulthard, 2014; Jackson et al., 2018). Within this logic, Aboriginal spaces must first be cleansed of their communities, languages, and histories before they are deemed valuable or liveable. Just as the colonial state once depicted terra nullius lands as ‘waste’ awaiting cultivation by settlers, the modern city casts undervalued neighbourhoods as empty canvases for renewal, erasing the sovereignties, relationships and living histories that already exist there. In this sense, urbs nullius operates as both a spatial and ideological project; it reasserts settler future through urban design and policy while concealing the deep continuities of dispossession.

The colonial legal mechanisms such as native title do little to restore Aboriginal authority or enable the care of Country from within an Aboriginal worldview (Watson, 2002). Although the Mabo decision overturned the fiction of terra nullius, it left intact the colonial legal order through which state power continues to alienate Aboriginal people from land, now compounded by the reach of transnational corporate interests (Watson, 2002). In contrast, Aboriginal law articulates a relational jurisprudence in which obligations to kin, land, and more-than-human life are reciprocal and enduring (Graham, 2014).

Our relationship to Country is far more intricate than the colonial logics of ownership and development can contain. When our lands were invaded, colonial sovereignty was asserted through ‘acts of state’, the planting of foreign flags, the mapping of territories, and the unlawful claiming of Aboriginal land (Bellone et al., 2020; Benson et al., 2023; Watson, 2007). These acts enslaved Country, transforming it into a consumable resource and a unit of property. Yet Aboriginal law endures as a living archive of relation: ‘We are the natural world; it is a mirror of our self… so how can we sell our self?’ (Watson, 2002, p.256). To think with Watson is to move from possession to reciprocity, to unlearn the habits of colonial modernity and recognise that Country is not a backdrop to human activity but an active, sentient participant within it (Graham, 2014; Hromek, 2019; Tuck and McKenzie, 2014; Watson, 2002).

Through imperial planning templates and architectural typologies, colonial ideology continues to overwrite Aboriginal space with metropolitan forms that mirror European notions of order and progress – forms that seldom engage with the ecologies, histories or Traditional Owners embedded within place (Blatman-Thomas and Porter, 2019; Ellis-Young, 2022). Within this paradigm, Aboriginal presence is permitted only when it serves or reinforces the colonial project (Coulthard, 2014; Fanon, 1967; Watson, 2002). This spatial order, sustained through what can be termed spatialised whiteness, reproduces European aesthetics, naming practices, and hierarchies, normalising erasure and embedding dispossession into the everyday texture of the city.

The argument developed here of colonial law as dispossession, terra nullius as legitimacy, and spatialised whiteness as urban order, establishes the framework for the analyses that follow.

Law, land and the afterlife of dispossession

Some of the history of land privatisation is identified in England’s enclosure movement, which fenced off common lands and reshaped European conceptions of property and sovereignty (Angus, 2021). This history matters not for its own sake, but because it somewhat underpins the Eurocentric baggage that colonists carried into ‘Australia’, where ‘Aboriginal lands’ were conceptually subsumed under terra nullius and Crown authority. Yet in practice, land titles often lagged occupation, frontier wars, pastoralism, and squatting created de facto settlements well before Crown grants were issued. The Torrens Title system, introduced in South Australia in 1858 was gradually adopted by other colonies and states, it simplified proof of ownership. Registration of title became the definitive source of ownership. Although registration did not entirely displace Crown grants (land still had to be alienated from the Crown prior to registration) once land was brought under the Torrens system it was no longer necessary to trace ownership through a chain of deeds back to the Crown. Torrens title consolidated ownership, enabled land to function as secure collateral for lending, and embedded a speculative property market within the legal framework of the colony. As the Torrens system institutionalised land title in law, its underlying colonial logic continues to structure contemporary urban life. The transformation of sovereign Country into property is not a historical event but an ongoing process of colonial control that persists into the present. In settler cities such as Sydney, colonial laws, zoning codes, and surveillance regimes define who can belong and whose movement through space is deemed legitimate (De Angelis, 2004; Mignolo, 2011). The criminalisation of Aboriginal habitation in public areas exemplifies this continuity. Aboriginal people are still arrested for ‘loitering’ on their own Country, and policies such as the Northern Territory’s ‘paperless arrest’ laws continue to disproportionately target Aboriginal populations (Grealy, 2017). This manifests not only as territorial exclusion but as the policing of our presence itself, is a spatialised coding of control that regulates visibility, access, and belonging.

These practices extend beyond the colonial frontier into the urban fabric. In Sydney, for instance, Aboriginal mobility, housing, and cultural practice are continually constrained by ownership regimes and redevelopment pressures. The suburb of Redfern illustrates how such processes are renewed in the present. Once a centre of Aboriginal political and cultural life, Redfern has been systematically transformed through state-led interventions in housing, health, and land tenure (Sherwood-Spring and Munroe, 2019). Aboriginal organisations have been dispossessed of land and stripped of decision-making authority (Moreton-Robinson, 2015; Watson, 2015). This pattern mirrors broader national trends, the defunding of social housing, the forced closure of Aboriginal communities, and the framing of resource extraction and speculative development as ‘progress’. In each instance, the rhetoric of ‘revitalisation’ or ‘public interest’ disguises an enduring colonial logic, the ongoing conversion of Aboriginal land, culture and presence into colonial capital (Coulthard, 2014).

Building on this critique, Aboriginal scholars such as Watson and Coulthard reveal that these colonial acts persist in modern settler states through new legal and economic mechanisms. Recognition itself, they argue, becomes a renewed form of dispossession. Native title, often heralded as a corrective to colonial injustice, embodies this paradox: rather than restoring sovereignty, it facilitates continued accumulation by dispossession (Coulthard, 2014; Watson, 2015). The recognition of native title operates as a ‘displaced mediator’ that sustains settler legal authority by translating Aboriginal law and connection to Country into the restrictive language of colonial property and recognition (Coulthard, 2014; Watson, 2007; Young, 2021). Coulthard terms this the cunning of recognition, the state’s apparent acknowledgment of Indigenous rights serves not to restore sovereignty but to renew its own legitimacy, commodifying land under a façade of justice (Watson, 2015). In places such as Redfern, this logic is starkly visible, where the rhetoric of ‘urban renewal’ re-packages colonial appropriation as of our cultural spaces and communities as progress (Coulthard, 2014; Sherwood-Spring and Munroe, 2019).

What masquerades as inclusion or recognition thus becomes another form of colonial dispossession, one that confines Aboriginal presence within the limits of state and market control (Watson, 2002, 2015). These processes are not incidental but are embedded within the ongoing patterns of domination that underwrite modernity, capitalism, and Western knowledge systems. In cities, coloniality materialises in the built environment itself, in urban grids, property lines, zoning codes, and planning regimes that structure social and spatial life according to the logics of capital accumulation and the aesthetics of whiteness (Coulthard, 2007; Fitzpatrick, 1992; Jackson et al., 2018). What appears as neutral infrastructure or administrative order is, in fact, a spatial expression of colonial power, continuing to regulate Aboriginal presence and authority within landscapes that were never ceded.

Aboriginal ethics of reciprocity which are grounded in an understanding of land as alive and relational, are displaced by colonial logics that render place divisible, abstract and commodifiable. Coulthard, expands this point, showing how capitalist colonialism reterritorialises land and subjectivity alike, transforming Indigenous lands into property. They, the white settlers, then create the narrative of Indigenous peoples as the ‘drunken, dazed savage’ in need of salvation (Coulthard, 2014) to justify the theft.

This process of erasure and objectification not only severs relationships to land but also distorts the ethical foundations of how we live with it. Aboriginal stories, by contrast, hold deep ecological and moral teachings about balance, accountability and restraint – as seen in the story of Tiddalik, who drinks all the water until Country dries and cracks, revealing the consequences of greed and excess. This story finds sharp resonance in contemporary urbanism, where cities continue to consume beyond their ecological limits, draining the social and environmental systems that sustain life.

Across the world, many modern city plans reflect this imbalance, designed not in dialogue with Country but in defiance of it. Mexico City, built on the dry bed of Lake Texcoco, now experiences catastrophic flooding because its design ignored the hydrological rhythms of the land. Cape Town faces recurring water scarcity after decades of over-extraction and uneven access, while Los Angeles, sustained by vast water diversions, continues to deplete distant ecosystems to feed its urban sprawl. These examples, to name only a few, embody the same lesson as Tiddalik, when systems of power take without giving back, the waters of life – literal and symbolic – recede. In this sense, Tiddalik becomes a profound design critique, where the drive for possession, growth, and profit overrides reciprocity, care, and ecological balance. The drying of Country is not only a metaphor but a material reality, seen in cities that exhaust their own life sources.

Building from these critiques of unsustainable urban design, my work extends the conversation by grounding it in Aboriginal law, memory, and lived relation to Country. Rather than viewing ‘urban renewal’ as improvement or progress, I approach it as a question of return, of how design and planning might reawaken the relationships that colonial modernity has severed. This is not a metaphorical return, but a material and ethical one, it becomes a process of restoring balance between people, land, and the systems of governance that shape them.

As an Aboriginal architect and scholar, my work argues that thinking beyond the colonial property paradigm requires centring Aboriginal relationships to Country within every act of building and planning, even, and especially, in urban contexts where our authority and belonging are continually rendered invisible, illegitimate or less than. This shift means moving urban design away from extraction and toward reciprocity, care, and interconnectedness (Government Architect NSW, 2020; Hromek, 2019; Moran et al., 2018; Watson, 2007). In practice, this is not simply a philosophical stance but an ethical and methodological one. Design must begin by listening to Country, guided by law and relational accountability rather than market imperatives (Moran et al., 2018). My own trajectory as a Tanganekald, Bunganditj, Potaruwutj and Meintangk woman, whose family has experienced both displacement and community rebuilding, grounds this argument in lived experience. Through my work with Aboriginal communities, and within my own community, I have witnessed how Aboriginal law continues to breathe beneath the layers of colonial duress (Watson, 2002), sustaining forms of governance, kinship, and care that persist despite structural constraints. Designing with Country at the centre offers not only resistance to the extractive and destructive logics of colonial city-building but also a living alternative, a mode of design that is community and Country centred, founded in reciprocity, story and law.

At the policy level, Australia has begun to gesture toward such change. In Victoria, Registered Aboriginal Parties are consulted on land under Aboriginal Heritage overlays, and at the national level, architectural registration competencies now require engagement with First Nations design principles. Several states have also initiated Treaty and truth-telling processes, signalling a broader shift toward recognising Aboriginal authority. Yet these developments remain largely procedural rather than transformative, focused on consultation rather than decision-making, and inclusion rather than structural change. They acknowledge Aboriginal knowledge but often leave untouched the colonial frameworks of property, planning, the extraction of Country and profit that determine how land is valued and governed. So, the question remains how do we work in the matrix of these colonial frameworks?

To move beyond symbolic recognition, decolonising urban space must involve a reorientation of power, a reconfiguration of planning and property systems to embed Aboriginal law and governance at their foundation. This paper argues that such transformation cannot occur through policy reform alone. It must emerge from lived practice, from the stories, memories, and community-led projects that demonstrate what designing for and with Country looks like in action. This being Country centric design not human centric, bringing back our local ecology diversity bringing back our language and stories that belong to that place and looking after our community kin this being human and non-human which is what happens when you centre Country not humans in the centre of all of your decision. These grounded practices reveal that justice for both people and place lies not in the inclusion of Aboriginal perspectives within colonial systems, but in re-establishing urban design as an act of care, accountability, and lawful relation to Country.

Gentrification and private property: Redfern: Blueprint and caution

As stated previously, property, planning, and finance continue to operate as tools of possession, translating place into profit while erasing the sovereignties that make it meaningful. The city thus becomes a frontier once again, where whiteness is remade through the cleansing of Aboriginal presence and the rebranding of Country as investment.

Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation, the violent conversion of communal lands into private property and the subjection of people to market dependence, helps illuminate how dispossession underpins both the birth of capitalism and the formation of settler cities (Jackson, 2017; Marx, 2000). Yet Marxism remains limited by its Eurocentric ontology, treating land as a productive resource rather than a living relation. From an Aboriginal perspective, socialism, capitalism, and fascism all emerge from the same Western logic that renders land alienable, standing in direct opposition to Aboriginal law, which understands Country as sentient and governed through reciprocity and obligation.

As Liza Jackson argues, critical geography frequently marginalises Indigenous epistemologies and sovereignties, leaving it ill-equipped to account for how property and power operate through settler frameworks (Jackson et al., 2018). Similarly, Herbert and Brown demonstrate how state-led redevelopment in deindustrialised areas reproduces colonial hierarchies under the rhetoric of progress and revitalisation, displacing racialised and working-class communities while reaffirming settler control over land and belonging (Herbert and Brown, 2025).

Together, these critiques reveal that in settler cities, gentrification is not only a class process but also a continuation of colonisation, a spatial mechanism through which ownership, whiteness, and accumulation are continually renewed. Together, these analyses reveal that in settler cities, gentrification is both classed and colonial, a process that reshapes ownership, whiteness, and accumulation through the continuous displacement of Indigenous peoples and the erasure of their spatial authority.

Aboriginal presence, then, is permitted only on terms that align with colonial values (Coulthard, 2014; Watson, 2002). Spatialised whiteness not only determines who occupies space but also codes how space itself is imagined, regulated, and valued (Bates et al., 2018; Blatman-Thomas and Porter, 2019; Shaw, 2006). These colonial logics underpin the ongoing exclusion of Aboriginal people from secure housing, equitable access to land, and public visibility. Through property law, planning systems, and policing, urban environments continue to restrict Aboriginal mobility and belonging (Blomley, 2003; Grealy, 2017; Watson, 2007). Settler cities were never neutral terrains of progress, they were designed to reproduce dispossession, embedding the management and containment of Indigenous and racialised bodies as a structural function of their urban order.

Neoliberal urbanism continues the colonial project through new forms of dispossession. The forces of speculative finance and redevelopment convert Indigenous land into instruments of accumulation (Fraser, 2021; Fraser and Addie, 2019). What is framed as sustainability or inclusivity often conceals deeper colonial hierarchies, as Ellis-Young and Fallon reveal, these projects which use this branding for their own benefits frequently displace Indigenous communities while invoking the moral language of environmental progress (Ellis-Young, 2022; Fallon, 2020). On Turtle Island, Anishinaabe scholar Heather Dorries exposes a similar pattern, where planning regimes appropriate Indigenous imagery and the rhetoric of care for Country even as they deny First Nations authority over land (Dorries, 2021). Wiradjuri artist and activist Lorna Munro also exposes how this same extractive logic manifests through the appropriation of Aboriginal names, symbols, and motifs in large-scale developments such as Barangaroo. She describes this as a ‘culture of extraction’, (Munroe et al., personal communication) where developers for example have ‘flogged Barangaroo’s name wherever they can’ (Munroe et al., personal communication) to lend cultural legitimacy to projects that continue to displace Aboriginal people, exclude their involvement and erase living community presence. As Munro explains,

They’re constantly looking to immortalise people that have been dead a long, long time, while we have people still alive today that deserve that platform … so people understand that we still have a living culture, a living community. (Munroe et al, personal communication)

Munro’s critique reveals how recognition is aestheticised rather than enacted. The symbolic gestures for the development, the native landscaping, Aboriginal naming, interpretive signage, function as branding tools that trade on Aboriginal cultural capital while excluding Aboriginal people from governance, authorship and decision-making in the design process. In these spaces, Country is commodified, and Aboriginal presence is transformed into architectural ornament, its value extracted to legitimise settler-led development. Across these contexts the settler city’s gestures of recognition – its native plantings, heritage plaques and curated symbolism – mask the ongoing extraction.

Urban renewal thus becomes a globalised mode of colonisation, aestheticising Indigeneity while consolidating white possession.

This extractivist use of culture mirrors the economic processes of gentrification itself, both convert Aboriginal life and land into forms of capital while maintaining the illusion of reconciliation. The result is a cityscape that appears inclusive yet remains governed by the same colonial hierarchies of property, race and belonging. Munro’s words therefore cut to the heart of settler urbanism: the city consumes and cherry picks Aboriginal culture as a resource, while refusing to recognise Aboriginal people as sovereign custodians of place.

These extractive processes are not only economic or rhetorical, they are also spatial. The very geometry of the settler city encodes the logics of possession and exchange that underpin colonial modernity. One of the clearest expressions of this logic is the cadastral grid, the legal-spatial system that partitions Country into measurable, ownable parcels and underwrites speculative value (Blomley, 2003). Far from a neutral tool of governance, the grid is an active technology of enclosure; it translates land from a living relation into a commodity that can be traded, mortgaged and accumulated. Contemporary analyses show that title regimes and parcel systems continue to shape redevelopment and exclusion in distinctly neoliberal ways, ensuring that property remains the primary measure of value (Gallagher et al., 2023; Uşak et al., 2024). Within this spatial order, ‘urban progress’ becomes synonymous with the ongoing colonisation of Country, as the settler city continually remakes itself through the conversion of relation into property and place into profit.

The justificatory narratives underpinning this system are profoundly colonial. Enlightenment theorists, such as John Locke, embedded within Western thought the notion that land attains value only through human improvement and ownership (Locke, 1952). Locke’s labour theory of property framed ‘unimproved’ land as idle or ‘waste’, thereby legitimising its seizure under the guise of productivity and progress. This ideology provided the moral and legal foundation for colonial expansion, rendering Indigenous lands available for appropriation. The philosophies of Immanuel Kant (1997) and G.W.F. Hegel (1991) further entrenched this logic, grounding ownership in notions of rationality and productive activity. For both, the act of transforming land through labour was seen as the expression of human reason and freedom, an idea that not only naturalised possession but also cast those who lived differently, including Indigenous peoples, as irrational and therefore without rightful claim to land or terra nullius. Transposed into the urban context, these Enlightenment principles persist today as planning common sense. Neighbourhoods not yet ‘improved’ are seen as stagnant, their ‘highest and best use’ imagined as redevelopment. This being the urbanisation of terra nullius or urbs nullius (Coulthard, 2014), the city imagined as an unclaimed wasteland awaiting settler renewal. These are not abstract philosophies, but operational planning logics embedded in law, finance, and design briefs, continuing to code Aboriginal absence as prerequisite to urban progress.

These dynamics are made starkly visible in Redfern, inner-city Sydney, where the long arc of Aboriginal sovereignty, survival, and dispossession unfolds. Redfern was never granted by the settler state; it remains unceded Gadigal land. Redfern was established to serve the nearby railway workshops, the suburb initially housed working-class families, but as white residents moved to the suburbs after World War II, Redfern became increasingly neglected and stigmatised. Aboriginal families displaced from missions, reserves, and welfare institutions gravitated to the area from the 1940s onward, drawn by the availability of cheap housing and employment opportunities in the rail yards. By the 1960s and 1970s, as many white residents left, Aboriginal families began informally occupying and purchasing the abandoned terraces houses (Perheentupa, 2020). The settlement of the community was only tolerated by the colonial state, precisely because the land held little value, enforcing that we as Aboriginal peoples can only occupy the unwanted spaces.

Within this neglected pocket of the city, a powerful form of urban sovereignty emerged. Families transformed Redfern into a centre of cultural resurgence and political resistance. It became a place where kinship networks reassembled, languages and songs were reawakened, and the first Aboriginal-controlled organisations took root. During the 1960s–1990s, Redfern had one of the highest densities of Aboriginal people in Australia, with estimates of more than 20,000 living in and around the suburb.

From this critical mass grew a generation of thinkers, activists, and community leaders who redefined what Aboriginal self-determination could look like in an urban context.

The establishment of the Aboriginal Legal Service (1970), Aboriginal Medical Service (1971), Aboriginal Housing Company (1973) and National Black Theatre (1972) built a dense infrastructure of care, advocacy, and creativity (Perheentupa, 2020). Redfern became the living heart of Aboriginal political and cultural life in the city, a space of collective governance and renewal that proved sovereignty was not extinguished by colonisation, only reshaped in form (Shaw, 2013). For decades, this community sustained itself against structural neglect, transforming what the state had dismissed as a ‘slum’ into a thriving site of resistance, education, and healing (Foley et al., 2014). Throughout the years, the Aboriginal narrative of Redfern has been one of Black strength, excellence, and collective resistance. Yet colonial narratives painted a starkly different picture, one marked by deficit framings of violence, crime and alcohol abuse (Mercer, 2010). This representation worked hand in hand with over-policing and systemic neglect to justify further state intervention and displacement.

As property values rose through urban redevelopment in the 1990s and 2000s, Aboriginal sovereignty in Redfern proved conditional upon land value. The same neighbourhood once dismissed as undesirable was suddenly reimagined as an investment frontier. The community’s success or its cultural revival in art, activism, and self-determined housing, became the pretext for removal (Shaw, 2013). As gentrification accelerated, ‘revitalisation’ replaced ‘decline’ in public discourse. State and market forces reclaimed the land, and the Aboriginal residents who had built Redfern’s identity were steadily displaced. What had once been tolerated when unwanted was enclosed again when the land became profitable, this being a repetition of the colonial cycle of taking, devaluing, and taking again.

What was once envisioned as a self-determined village providing homes for local families, the Aboriginal community imagined The Block ⁴ as a place of cultural strength, a continuation of Redfern’s legacy of kin-based housing, shared gardens, and communal space rooted in care and connection to Country (Foley et al., 2014; Sherwood-Spring and Munroe, 2019; Perheentupa, 2020).

Yet under sustained financial and political pressure – compounded by government neglect and over-policing – The Block was transformed into a 20-storey private student housing complex accommodating more than 500 international students, alongside luxury apartments (Munroe et al., personal communication). Only a handful of units remain designated for Aboriginal tenants, and even these are conditional upon full-time employment and clean criminal records (Munroe et al., personal communication). Such conditions reproduce the logic of assimilation, where the right to belong is measured through productivity, compliance and proximity to whiteness (Randell-Moon, 2017; Watson, 2002). This transformation underscores how settler urbanism redefines Aboriginal sovereignty through conditional inclusion, this being recognising our presence only when it aligns with colonial values of whiteness, labour, order, and property, while erasing the communal, cultural, and relational foundations upon which Redfern’s Aboriginal community once stood.

Furthering this, the architectural language of the redevelopment of the Block, mirrors this transformation. The original plans for low-rise, community-based housing were replaced by large towers which create wind tunnels, that have no connection to place, sanitised façades, manicured landscapes of non-native plantings that have no connection to the community or Country and erase the community’s ecological and cultural depth. What was once a living expression of Aboriginal sovereignty and kinship has been absorbed into the city’s real-estate aesthetic, an object of speculation rather than relation. The few remaining Aboriginal dwellings now exist as symbolic concessions within a development that commodifies Aboriginal land while excluding Aboriginal life.

Redfern’s transformation represents more than a change in land use; it is the reassertion of colonial control under the guise of progress. The erasure of The Block exemplifies how state and market forces collude to re-enclose Aboriginal land, converting spaces of cultural continuity into zones of consumption. This is not an anomaly but the latest phase of the settler project, the converting of Aboriginal land into capital while rendering Aboriginal people invisible within their own Country.

Redfern thus stands as both caution and blueprint. It demonstrates how Aboriginal-led design and governance once flourished under conditions of structural marginalisation and how these practices continue to offer models for an urbanism grounded in relation rather than possession. If communities such as The Block had been resourced and protected rather than displaced, a different kind of urban future might have emerged, one guided by reciprocity, collective care, and accountability to Country, rather than by the imperatives of capital.

Renewing relation: Toward decolonial urban futures

Throughout my education and professional practice, I have observed how architecture in Australia continues to build upon – rather than reckon with – the nation’s violent colonial foundations. The discipline has long concealed these truths beneath layers of cultural amnesia, sanitising histories of dispossession through aesthetics and development (Page, 2021). This denial is made tangible in the built environment itself, where renovations and new projects operate as both literal and metaphorical cloaks (Alexander and Berbary, 2021), covering the scars of colonial violence embedded in Country. In doing so, the profession perpetuates an ongoing erasure which obscures the ecocide of the land and the genocide of its First Peoples, while constraining our collective capacity to imagine ethical, sustainable, and just futures.

Within this country of Australia our Architectural profession gestures toward ‘Australian identity’ or ‘connection to land’ but is too often manifest as surface-level symbolism, a curved wall evoking the ‘organic forms of the landscape’, or façades decorated with stylised ‘Indigenous motifs’. Although these expressions are important to be included into the design, they cannot just be empty gestures. When these design motifs, are detached from community authority or relational responsibility, it reproduces the colonial order they claim to disrupt (Co-Design Counter-Mapping, 2021). Without embedding Aboriginal law, knowledge and governance within the design process itself, such projects remain tokenistic performances of inclusion and gestures of recognition that leave power, ownership and authorship unchanged.

If colonial placemaking and gentrification of our communities renews the colonial project, then decolonial design must renew relation. Where the colonial project fragments and commodifies, relation reorients design toward reciprocity, collective memory and accountability to place. To move from coloniality to relation requires reconstituting the very foundations of urban practice, its ethics, processes and forms of authorship.

Across the world, Indigenous architects, planners and communities are already modelling this shift. Métis architect David T. Fortin describes architecture as a living expression of story, ceremony and care, rather than a static object (Cheng, 2023; Fortin, 2023). In projects such as the Round Prairie Elders’ Lodge and the Whitefish Lake First Nation #128 Innovative Housing, buildings emerge from collective governance and ecological interdependence. Here, design itself becomes ceremony: gardens nurture kinship between species, spatial forms take shape through dialogue with Elders, and material choices follow ecological rhythms rather than market demands. These practices reveal Indigenous-centred design as culture in motion, a living expression of relational ethics, community accountability and ongoing dialogue with Country. In Australia, this shift is being advanced through frameworks such as Designing with Country (Government Architect NSW, 2020) and the Indigenous Design Charter (Russell Kennedy et al., 2016), both of which assert that design must begin from Country, not from the brief, the client, or the site boundary. These frameworks affirm that Aboriginal people must lead decisions about how Country is understood, engaged, and cared for within the built environment. Yet, as noted earlier, genuine engagement cannot occur within existing colonial systems of property and governance unless authority, not just consultation, rests with Traditional Owners and sovereign Aboriginal organisations.

Increasingly, the field is moving beyond symbolic inclusion toward structural accountability, demanding that decision-making, authorship, and benefit-sharing be grounded in Aboriginal governance and law. This evolution marks a broader shift toward what scholars’ term ‘designing with accountability’ (Dorries, 2021; Hromek, 2019), a practice that refuses to separate design and planning from responsibility to Country. In practice, this means embedding cultural custodians within project teams, appointing Aboriginal design leaders at every stage of delivery, and enshrining cultural governance mechanisms within policy. Across Australia, universities, planning authorities, and professional institutes are beginning to align accreditation and registration standards with these principles, signalling that relational design is becoming central to professional ethics rather than peripheral to it.

This transformation also requires reconfiguring urban systems at every level. Aboriginal land trusts, housing organisations, and cultural institutions must be secured through inalienable tenure, particularly in urban areas such as Redfern and Fitzroy, where Aboriginal communities continue to face displacement. Preventing displacement is fundamental to any decolonial urban future: without the ability for Aboriginal people to remain on and care for their lands, relational design cannot take root. Planning approvals and major developments should be tied to cultural tenancy frameworks that guarantee community-preference policies, long-term tenure and affordability. These spaces must be protected from market speculation and recognised as zones of living sovereignty, places where law, culture, and care can be actively practised.

Reform must also reach the legal and cartographic infrastructures that underpin the city (Bellone et al., 2020; Benson et al., 2023). The cadastral grid, which partitions Country into property, must evolve to reflect cultural, ecological, and linguistic dimensions of place. Emerging technologies in geospatial design and digital mapping are increasingly being used by Indigenous communities to make visible their governance systems and place-based knowledges, offering new models of planning that centre Country as sovereign (Olson et al., 2016).

Equally, the procurement, funding, and evaluation mechanisms that shape the built environment must be transformed. Designing with Country must become a foundational requirement, not an optional add-on. Design briefs should be authored and governed by Aboriginal organisations to ensure that cultural protocols, intellectual property, and timelines are respected (Government Architect NSW, 2020). Both public and private projects should demonstrate measurable cultural outcomes, such as traditional visibility, native species restoration, and community access, alongside conventional performance metrics like cost and delivery (Watson et al., 2024). In this framework, success is not defined by efficiency or aesthetics but by continuity of care, the health of the community and place and intergenerational benefit.

In this vision, decolonial design does not mean rejecting existing institutions outright, but redirecting them toward Country. Heritage overlays, reconciliation action plans, and planning policies can all serve as instruments of accountability, if grounded in Aboriginal governance rather than bureaucratic performance. Without such accountability, however, recognition risks collapsing back into the capitalistic and remaining stuck within coloniality. Relational design therefore requires a structural and ethical reorientation of the built environment, where every document, contract and building are accountable to Country as the ultimate authority. In this approach, memory becomes method and design becomes pedagogy. Counter-mapping re-inscribes Country beyond cadastral boundaries; oral histories guide the placement of paths and gathering spaces; language shapes wayfinding; and planting restores ecological law. Architecture and design then can become a keeping place, a living record of relation enacted through time.

To renew relation, then, is to make space remember. It is to design with the understanding that Country holds both the first and final authority. It is to listen before building, repair before remaking, and measure success not in growth or profit, but in the slow return of reciprocity. As Elders remind us, the process must move carefully. Each act of making retraces the ground we stand on, repairing what was broken and returning what was taken. Through these practices, the city can begin to unlearn its colonised being and relearn how to live properly, with memory, with law, and with the living ground beneath it.

Conclusion

Gentrification in settler cities cannot be understood apart from the colonial histories that made these cities possible. What appears as urban renewal or market revitalisation is, in truth, a continuation of the colonial project that began with invasion, the conversion of Aboriginal lands into private property, of Country into capital. This paper has traced how colonial logic remains active in the urban present, where Aboriginal land, labour, and life continue to be appropriated through planning, policy and development framed as progress.

Through the case of Redfern, these dynamics become tangible. The transformation of The Block demonstrates how Aboriginal self-determination and community governance are continually undermined by state and market interests that treat communal land as real estate. Redfern’s history, its activism, cultural networks and kinship economies, reveals that Aboriginal people have long sustained complex systems of care, design and governance within the settler city. Yet as gentrification advances, these relational structures are dismantled in favour of a new urbs nullius and rebranded as a site of investment. In this way, gentrification functions not merely as class displacement but as an ongoing colonial project of spatial cleansing and replacement.

Against this, Aboriginal design and governance offer a fundamentally different proposition, one grounded in relation rather than a colonial enclosure. Relational design reorients architecture and planning toward Country’s law, where space is understood not as property but as a living system of obligation, memory, and reciprocity. These practices demonstrate that Aboriginal-led design is not an aesthetic addition to urbanism but a sovereign mode of spatial governance, one that holds Country, story and people in right relation.

If property is the mechanism through which colonial modernity secures control, then relational design is the method through which decolonisation is enacted. This requires both structural and ethical transformation. Structurally, it calls for the establishment of Aboriginal land trusts and community-controlled housing secured through inalienable tenure; for co-governance frameworks that embed Aboriginal authority within planning processes; for cadastral reform that recognises cultural and ecological values as active layers of law; and for design protocols authored and led by Traditional Owners. Ethically, it demands a reorientation of professional and institutional practice, an understanding that planning is not the management of space but the continual negotiation of relation between people, law, and land.

In such a framework, listening to Country becomes the first act of design rather than a symbolic gesture of consultation. Story, language, and ecological process become recognised forms of planning knowledge, equal to and guiding alongside policy and code. Heritage and development cease to be opposites; both are reframed through the principle of care. Here, decolonisation is not an event but an ethic, a way of working that renews relationship through everyday practice.

By bringing Aboriginal law and memory into conversation with urban theory, this article has argued that the future of just cities lies not in inclusion within colonial systems, but in their re-founding. Decolonising urbanism is not a project of recognition or reform, but a process of renewal, a return of authority to Country, a reactivation of memory as law, and a refusal to treat land as resource or commodity. These principles imagine an urban future grounded in truth rather than denial, relation rather than possession, and care rather than extraction, a future in which both people and Country may once again live well together.