PhD in Urban Planning Lecture: Libby Porter

The 2025 PhD in Urban Planning Lecture, “The Trouble With Land and Housing Justice: Views From a Settler Colony” will be delivered by Libby Porter (RMIT), with a response by Tom Slater (GSAPP).

Planning for land and housing in settler colonial cities is structurally ruined. Devised as a regime to spatialise settler-colonialism, urban land-use planning continues to enable dispossession, expulsion and extraction at scales from the mundane to the spectacular. Drawing inspiration from the Indigenous concept of Country in so-called Australia and the fact of Indigenous sovereignty-never-ceded, the lecture will examine contemporary housing and land politics and struggles, and trouble the view of land, planning, housing and justice from a site of structural ruin.

Professor Libby Porter is Director of the Centre for Urban Research at RMIT University where she researches and educates on planning and urban geography. Motivated by social and ecological injustice, her work is about how urbanisation creates forms of dispossession and displacement and what we might do about it. Her research aims to sharpen our understanding about the relationship between land and housing justice, the displacing effects of urban renewal, critical questions of urban governance and the politics of property. As someone living on stolen lands and benefiting from the dispossession of First Peoples, her work grapples with displacement and dispossession processes in cities. She has contributed to debates about the responsibility of planning and urban development to First Peoples sovereignty, as well as the displacement and unjust housing outcomes of urban regeneration. She is author of many books and papers including Unlearning the Colonial Cultures of Planning (2010, Ashgate), Planning for Coexistence? with Janice Barry, and Planning in Indigenous Australia: From imperial foundations to postcolonial futures, with Sue Jackson and Louise Johnson.

Libby has worked in planning and urban policy practice and taught in planning and geography schools at the Universities of Birmingham, Sheffield, Glasgow, Monash and RMIT. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy UK and has helped found and been active in many grassroots collectives and initiatives to catalyse action in the face of urban injustice including Planners Network UK, the Save Public Housing Collective, and the International Network of Urban Research and Action.