Ordinary and Extraordinary Harms in the City

This book, based on original research in Melbourne, Australia, explores the spatial politics of urban expansion both upwards and outwards as the city continues to colonize non-urban areas around its fringes. The everyday decisions and tools bound up in urban growth accelerate a malign colonization of land, resources, air and water, thereby exacerbating a broad variety of social and environmental harms. In addition to the quotidian nature of urban growth, this book also explores the ‘crisis’ in the form of extreme fire events in urban areas. Moving between local planning and national and international climate change mitigation policies and approaches, this book highlights various 'necropolicies’ - policies causing harm and death to more-than-human populations. Such death-bound policies are the result of neoliberal urban development, fueled by state-corporate relations and prosperity concerns. In sum, this book connects green and urban criminology, urban studies and planning to reveal how ordinary and extraordinary challenges are entangled in urban design, harm and, most importantly, imagining alternative futures and cities.