Journal articles on the topic 'Branded housing'

Concerns about housing affordability in Australian capital cities have captured the public and political imagination. How, then, do ordinary citizens discuss the causes of and solutions to the increasing unaffordability of housing? This article examines evidence that branded Facebook channels provide a space for citizens to engage in everyday engagement and interaction on housing issues. We argue that studying branded, public Facebook pages, despite data access limitations, is an important way of tapping into broad citizen sentiment and understanding media influence on topical issues. We also find that different ways of framing housing affordability within news reporting are associated with different patterns of citizen engagement and interaction on Facebook. In particular, generational frames (critically linking housing affordability to either older people’s entrenched economic advantage or young people’s inability to save) are associated with high levels of user engagement, but the lowest level of discussion about policy solutions within dominant comment threads.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to determine the significance of branding management by property developers in the Malaysian housing market and to examine the pivotal brand identity traits of property developers. Design/methodology/approach An explanatory sequential mixed-methods research approach was adopted. The quantitative data from the questionnaire survey were subjected to descriptive statistics, and the ranking with category of significance of the hypothesised branding traits was determined using relative importance index technique. The findings were further validated through semi-structured interviews with five experienced industry practitioners. Findings Results showed that the extremely significant (ES) branding identities are value for future investment and location, while the very significant (VS) traits are quality assurance, near to supporting infrastructure, reliability, professionalism, experience, warranties and technical ability. Industry experts affirmed the prospect of exploiting branding in enticing property buyers. Research limitations/implications It is reasonable to infer that good branding positively stimulates buyer’s decision-making on purchasing residential property. This study attempts to discover the critical brand identity traits for property developers apt in the context of Malaysian housing market. Practical implications Apart from the archetypal locational and financial factors, the findings suggested that top developers should emphasise innovative family-oriented design with an acceptable level of quality score for brand differentiation to further enhance the future value of their end products. Originality/value The efficacy of brand management in the housing market has not yet been fully explored in research. This paper is expected to offer more profound insights into the strategic brand management towards “branded” property developers in the context of Malaysia and perhaps other countries with comparable backgrounds.

Urban authorities and a range of private and civil society actors have come to view housing as a key arena in which to address climate change whilst also pursuing wider social, economic and environmental objectives. Housing has been a critical area for urban studies, but often considered in sectoral terms and work on urban responses to climate change has followed this positioning. By contrast, an Urban Political Ecology (UPE) perspective would position housing in more integrated terms as part of the metabolism of the city. Yet so far there has been relatively little written in UPE about either housing or climate change. This paper therefore seeks to bring UPE into dialogue with the emergent literature focused on governing climate change through housing. It does so through a detailed study of the ‘Retrofit Philly “Coolest Block” Contest’. We argue that this contest highlights the ways climate change is changing the way housing is embedded in the circulations of the city, pointing to changes in who is governing housing, how housing is being governed and who is able to access the benefits of (climate change-branded) action on housing.

A company’s brand can be considered its most valuable asset. The known impact of branding has inspired a number of Korean construction companies to initiate a new marketing strategy, apartment branding, in the competitive market since the 1990s. As a result, the market-leading brands had stronger sales performances over non-branded apartments in the same residential district. However, major companies with well-known apartment brands still face challenges in managing brand equity constructs, particularly brand loyalty, due to the distinctive characteristics of constructed products (i.e., durability and costliness). To address this issue, this research develops qualitative system dynamics models to analyze the core mechanisms and problems of apartment brand equity building process and proposes long-term managerial strategies to overcome the problem of obtaining apartment brand loyalty. The research outcome is expected to support the strategic decision-making processes of apartment brand managers and to provide implications for further branding applications in other metropolitan areas anticipating a sharp increase in apartments.

Globally, cities have been experiencing neoliberal urbanization processes since the 1970s, while also contributing to the production of the neoliberal condition per se. The neoliberal state plays a core role in such processes, which have deepened the commodification of urban space via various mechanisms such as the privatization of public land and key urban infrastructure. This article critically investigates the direct involvement of the neoliberal state in the commodification of urban space by focusing on its triple role as a restructuring mechanism, a land developer and a volume housing developer in Turkey. The research develops and applies a theoretical framework based on Lefebvre’s production of space and Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. The paper examines the development of branded housing projects, which are private neighbourhoods, by analysing national legislative and organizational changes leading to the production of this type of development and illustrates this using four example projects in Istanbul. The paper contributes to the international evidence of the variegated characteristics of the neoliberal state in relation to urban development, and the neoliberal state’s role in the accumulation of capital in contemporary capitalism.

In recent years there have been significant discussions and arguments raised relating to the position and behaviour of those who live in Britain's poorest neighbourhoods, however there has been little in the way of solutions put forward by any of the political Party's. August 2011 was a flashpoint in the history of these debates, the civil unrest which took place during that month has led to further and continuous on-going social and political debates relating to welfare, unemployment and a sense of disenfranchisement within specific neighbourhoods in the UK. This paper focuses upon a community in Nottingham, St Ann's, a council estate housing 15,000 people, who rely upon social housing and public services to as they say to ‘keep their heads above water’. The families who rely upon public services, welfare benefits and social housing are the poorest and most disadvantaged people in Britain, and since 2010 are being subject to harsh cuts in their welfare benefits. They are also the most vulnerable to unemployment caused by shrinking the size of the public sector, as they were to the loss of the manufacturing industries in the early 1980s under the Thatcher Government. This paper examines the lives of those who live on this council estate; rely upon social housing, local services, and when the employment market shrinks welfare benefits. The paper addresses the key argument that there has been a significant change in representation of how council estates and working class people who live in them have been negatively re-branded and stigmatised over the last 30 years. Although the focus of the riots has centred around five days in August 2011, this paper introduces families, and individuals who have been part of this ethnographic research over an eight-year period. Thus arguing that the disturbances in 2011 were an unintended consequence of a significant neighbourhood and community decline over a generation, but which has been exacerbated since 2010 with the Coalition Government's austerity measures.

Purpose This study aims to measure the association between local retail grocery provision and private residential rental prices in England. Renting is an important sector of the housing market in England and local grocery provision is an important aspect of service provision and consumers are known to be highly sensitive to the branding of this type of retailing. Design/methodology/approach This research uses a novel data source from a property rental Web platform to estimate a hedonic model for the rental market. These models incorporate information on the nature of the properties and their neighbourhoods, with an emphasis on how different retail brands are associated with rental prices. This retail brand is captured on two scales: the provision of local branded convenience stores and the provision of larger stores. Findings The study finds clear differentials in how the local grocery brand is associated with rental prices. When controlling for commonly explored confounding factors, “Luxury” retailers such as Waitrose and Marks and Spencer are associated with higher rental prices, while “Discounter” retailers are associated with lower rental prices. This finding has many implications, particularly in relation to potential price changes in an already challenging housing market for many people. Research limitations/implications This is an observational study and as such only associations (not causation) can be implied by these findings. Originality/value The focus of this research is on the private residential property market, an important market in England but one that has enjoyed less scrutiny than the sales or socially rented markets. Rather than using general accessibility to retail, this research has differentiated the association by the retail brand and store size, two very important aspects of consumer choice.

Objectives Cohort studies must implement effective retention strategies to produce internally valid and generalizable results. Ensuring all study participants are retained, particularly those involved in the criminal legal system, ensures study findings and future interventions will be relevant to this group, who are often lost to follow-up: critical to achieving health equity. Our objective was to characterize retention strategies and describe overall retention among an 18-month longitudinal cohort study of persons on community supervision prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods We implemented various retention strategy best-practices (e.g., multiple forms of locator information, training study staff on rapport building, study-branded items). During the COVID-19 pandemic, we developed and describe new retention strategies. We calculated overall retention and analyzed differences between those retained and lost to follow-up by demographic characteristics. Results Prior to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, 227 participants enrolled across three sites (N = 46 North Carolina; N = 99 Kentucky; N = 82 Florida). Of these, 180 completed the final 18-month visit, 15 were lost to follow-up, and 32 were ineligible. This resulted in an overall retention of 92.3% (180/195). While most participant characteristics did not differ by retention status, a greater proportion of those experiencing unstable housing were lost to follow-up. Conclusion Our findings highlight that when retention strategies are flexible, particularly during a pandemic, high retention is still achievable. In addition to retention best-practices (e.g., frequent requests for updated locator information) we suggest other studies consider retention strategies beyond the study participant (e.g., paying participant contacts) and incentivize on-time study visit completion (e.g., providing a bonus when completed the study visit on time).

The Brazilian rural communities concentrate a significant fraction of the population exposed to deficient conditions in water supply, sanitary sewage, and solid waste management, which, combined with housing conditions, directly impact the quality of a healthy environment. Few studies have evaluated the salubrious conditions of a rural environment, and in the searches carried out, the use of branched hierarchical techniques was not verified. The objective of this work was to create a branched hierarchization of those variables that are the cause of unhealthy conditions of the housing environment. Initially, all the variables that affect the salubrity of the housing environment were listed, to later order them in a ramified form. Afterwards, and based on the technical literature, the parameters of adequacy and/or inadequacy of these variables were defined. This methodology was tested in a rural dwelling in order to exemplify its applicability. The application of the proposed tool has demonstrated a satisfactory practical use, with low time spent for its conclusion, besides providing a realistic characterization of the environment evaluated. This work provides an easily applicable methodology for obtaining a detailed report on the degree of adequacy of a wide range of variables that influence the healthiness of rural dwellings.

Los procesos de gentrificación en el centro de Madrid y distritos de su entorno atraviesan nuevos estadios vinculados a la intensificación de fenómenos como el turismo y las economías digitales que suponen nuevos frentes de batalla. Este artículo explora el caso del edificio situado en la calle Divino Pastor número 9, en el madrileño barrio de Malasaña. En él se produce la venta y reforma de una antigua sede pública, antes okupada y reivindicada como centro social, y que termina finalmente convertida en pisos de alquiler turístico y una hamburguesería de marca que sólo sirve comida a domicilio. En Divino Pastor confluyen y se juegan buena parte de las dinámicas que están marcando los procesos de transformación urbana en economías avanzadas. A partir de un mismo punto, este caso nos concede la oportunidad de enlazar (1) las disputas por el espacio urbano en el corazón de las ciudades con la desposesión en el marco de políticas neoliberales urbanas, y (2) procesos avanzados de gentrificación, que tensan el problema de acceso a la vivienda, con fenómenos de turistificación y la gourmetización más características de la quinta ola, y que a su vez (3) están siendo fuertemente transformados por la presión de ciertas modalidades de lo que se conoce como capitalismo de plataforma, nuevas formas de economía y trabajo urbano precario suyos efectos espaciales topan con la falta de herramientas urbanísticas de regulación. Metodológicamente consideramos esta situación como un universal concreto a la manera hegeliana, permitiéndonos comprender lo general o abstracto de la realidad a partir de lo particular o específico de un contexto. Se trata de un estudio de caso único o singular, que resulta particularmente significativo para contrastar teoría y realidad de un mismo fenómeno. El trabajo se desarrolla a modo biográfico y se apoya en documentos oficiales de acceso público del Ayuntamiento de Madrid, y en el análisis de datos del censo de locales, del catastro, y del mercado inmobiliario. Finalmente, componer la radiografía exhaustiva del edificio nos permite comprender los mecanismos de articulación de las nuevas economías urbanas y anticipar el funcionamiento de tendencias que han aterrizado en las ciudades con visos a consolidarse. The gentrification processes in the center of Madrid and surrounding districts are going through new stages, linked to the intensification of phenomena such as tourism and digital economies, that represent new battle fronts. This article explores the case of the building located on Calle Divino Pastor nr 9, in the Madrid neighborhood of Malasaña. In it, the sale and reform of an old public headquarters takes place, previously squatted and claimed as a social center, and which finally ends up converted into flats for tourist rental and a branded hamburger restaurant that only serves delivery food. In Divino Pastor, a good part of the dynamics that are marking the processes of urban transformation in advanced economies come together and play out. Starting from the same point, this case gives us the opportunity to link (1) disputes over urban space in the heart of cities with dispossession, in the framework of urban neoliberal policies, and (2) advanced processes of gentrification that worsen the problem of access to housing, with phenomena of touristification and gourmetization, more characteristic of the fifth wave, and which in turn (3) are being strongly transformed by the pressure of certain forms of what is known as platform capitalism; new forms of economy and precarious urban work, whose spatial effects collide with the lack of urban regulation tools. Methodologically, we consider this situation as a concrete universal in the Hegelian way, allowing us to understand the general from the particular, and relying on the analysis of data from official sources to contrast what we intuit are trends that came to stay.

In the aspect of the European integration aspirations of Ukrainian society and the social development of the nation state, the issues of its service function formation in the form of public services are becoming more and more relevant in Ukraine. It is worth noting that the functioning of the service state model in Ukraine is only at its initial stage and requires improvement of the institutional arrangements for the public services delivery, which involves taking into account existing problems of their delivery by public authorities in the process of deepening the local government reform and long-term restructuring of the national economy. The purpose of the article is to state the areas of concern in the system for providing administrative, social, housing and public utility services, and to define and elaborate on long-term trends for improving their functioning, as well as their common features and characteristics. The modern general and specific scientific research methods have provided the methodological basis for the research. Their use is based on a systematic approach. The analytical method was used to identify the problematic area of the branched public service delivery system. The comparative-functional and analytical methods were used to identify modern trends in improving the provision of administrative, social, housing and public utility services, their functioning, as well as their common features and characteristics. The research process has provided a comprehensive grounding and articulation of promising trends in improving the system of providing administrative, social and housing and public utility services in Ukraine and identifying their functional features and common characteristics

Crassothonna moniliformis is described as a new species from the Eastern Cape province, South Africa. The species is a prostrate, succulent-leaved perennial herb distinguished from Crassothonna capensis in having slender, weak, trailing, distantly branched stems, with nodal adventitious roots developing precociously, forming diffuse patches to ±50 cm diam., with erect to ascending, usually red-purple, globose-obovoid to obovoid to subclavate leaves 10–25 mm long, and a more slender synflorescence bearing fewer capitula (1–4 per flowering shoot) with fewer ray florets (7–9) and functionally staminate peripheral disc florets. The species is geographically localised, with the known Extent of Occurrence and Area of Occupancy <10 km2, and is habitat-restricted, growing in shallow sandy sediments overlying exposed sandstone pavements among coastal thicket. The single known population is threatened by sand mining and informal housing encroachment. Based on the IUCN Red List categories and criteria, a conservation assessment of Vulnerable (VU – D2) is recommended.

The paper is about the role of the African middle class as a base for entrepreneurship development. The key question is what the growth of the African middle class means for the emergence of an entrepreneurial class in Africa. In this context, the «missing middle» in Africa, the gap in small and medium sized companies between microenterprises and large companies, is of interest. So far the theoretical work and the empirical evidence on the relation between middle class growth and entrepreneurship development are quite scarce. First, the main concepts of defining and measuring the African middle class - via income and consumption, assets, vulnerability, and livelihoods - will be discussed. These differences in definition and measurement have implications for the assumed developmental implications of the growth of the African middle class and the growth of an entrepreneurial class. There are so many statements in the literature about the developmental potentials and the impacts of the African middle class. It is argued that the African middle class is a seedbed of entrepreneurship and management staff; a base for start-ups and high tech companies; that it has an impact on market competition and labour mobility; an impact on level and structure of consumption and marketing, on housing, car and finance markets; an impact on local saving, local investment and on a more long-term investment behaviour; a role in developing a new consumer society based on higher quality and branded goods; a role in participation, empowerment and the formation of economic interest groups; a role in the redistribution of income, assets and economic power; that it leads to a widespread use of new technologies and has a tremendous role in technology diffusion; that it is creating space for upward mobility and societal change; that it pushes the transition from survival firms to growth-oriented firms; that it has a role in pushing for more rational economic policies and that it is also demanding public goods and fair taxation; and that it is providing stability to the political regime, etc. Most of these arguments lack so far empirical evidence, and there is tremendous speculation and experimentation based on the way of defining and measuring the African middle class and the entrepreneurial class which is coming forth on this basis. A main instrument used for this endeavour is aggregation of some few data over Africa; but this is not enough to draw strong conclusions. Second, the scarce evidence on the assumed role of the African middle class as a seedbed of entrepreneurship and managerial competencies is discussed and evaluated. The main issue is the role of the African middle class in overcoming the «missing middle» of small and medium sized companies. There is a general discussion about Africa’s «missing middle», the assumed gap in terms of small and medium sized companies between the many mostly informal microenterprises and the large public and private companies. It is argued that the concepts of the African middle class used in the literature and the ways of defining and measuring it do not allow a deep investigation of entrepreneurship development and the identification of a growing entrepreneurial class in Africa. The main reason is that the economic lives of the various segments of the African middle class are so different. Also, the poor and the rich classes in Africa have distinct economic lives which partly overlap with those of lower and upper segments of the African middle class. Third, there is a lack of differentiating the African middle class with regard of the potential for entrepreneurship development, the establishment of entrepreneurial value systems (education, health, saving and investing), and the role in developing local industries (based on increasing middle class consumption). Any change towards the development of growth oriented small and medium-sized enterprises - between survival and micro enterprises at the lower end and large capitalist and conglomerate enterprises at the upper end - is of interest. Most important is to know more about the role of the African middle class in developing growth-oriented enterprises. It is also of interest to see how governments in Africa can support entrepreneurship and management competences based on specific African middle class segments, along with strategies to use the entrepreneurial potential of the poor and the rich classes. The purpose of the paper is to give evidence on the developmental role of the African Middle Class, by focussing on the «missing middle» of enterprises in Africa and the types of entrepreneurship being associated with the growth of the middle class. After the Introduction in Section 1 there is in Section 2 a discussion on Defining and Measuring the African Middle Class: What about Developmental Implications and Prospects? In Section 3 is a presentation on Africa’s Middle Class and the «Missing Middle» of Enterprises: New Potentials for the Growth of Enterprises? In Section 4 there are Conclusions and Policy Recommendations. This is an economists’ view, but much more interdisciplinary work is needed to cover the issues (and this is done in the collection of essays by Henning Melber, Editor, 2016).

This study aimed to analyze the effect of land cover types to micro-climate of and analyze the effect microclimate to the trees and open land towards amenities environment for human. The City of Bitung has selected as a research site because it planned for mega projects. They are Special Economic Zones (KEK), International Relations Ports and Manado-Bitung Highways. The research used primary and secondary data. The parameters measured for each land cover includes the elements of microclimate namely: Air Temperature, Humidity and Solar Radiation. Data analysis using techniques T test, F test and Analysis of amenities based on the data of air temperature and humidity, it can be calculated by Temperature Humadity Index (THI). The measurement results microclimate taken at four different land cover that is at the city park, Central Business District (CBD), housing and industry. The results of this study prove the hypothesis that there are differences in the average value of the temperature and humidity in the trees, open land. Tree vegetation structures more effectively reduce the air temperature. The structure of the vegetation canopy of trees that have rounded and more densely branched patterns, height being between 6-10 m and serves to overshadow proved more effective in improving amenities in the surrounding area. Based on the value of THI, all land cover both parks, CBD, residential and industrial categorized uncomfortable because the average is at a value> 27. Housing area has very little green space. One of the efforts to improve the quality of the microclimate in order to enhance the user experience is to provide a good environment garden by planting vegetation predominant tree combined with shrubs and grasses to balance and harmonize between buildings and the environment also have aesthetic value. In the industrial area, the high levels of air pollution resulting from the production process so that recommended a good landscape arrangement, by expanding area of town forest and planting vegetation of trees that can absorb large numbers of pollutants result in healthy and fresh air for the region.

This study investigated whether the inclusion of a stimbiotic (STB) can improve performance, influence intestinal microbiota and fermentation activity, and reduce pro-inflammatory cytokines in piglets fed a low zinc oxide diet without antimicrobial growth promotors compared to fructo-oligosaccharide (FOS) and mannan-oligosaccharide (MOS) when housed either in good sanitary (GS) or poor sanitary (PS) environments. One hundred forty-four male pigs (28-day-old) were sorted by initial body weight (BW) and allocated to one of six experimental treatments: 1) GS environment without any additive (GS-CTR); 2) GS environment with 0.01% stimbiotic (GS-STB); 3) PS environment (without cleaning and disinfection of a previously populated room) without any additive (PS-CTR); 4) PS environment with 0.01% STB (PS-STB); 5) PS environment with 0.1% MOS (PS-MOS); and 6) PS environment with 0.2% FOS (PS-FOS). Each treatment had six replicates, with four animals each. Three feeding phases, based on corn, wheat, and soybean meal were available ad libitum for the 42-days of the study. Housing piglets under PS conditions negatively influenced performance, increased plasma tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α), affected the fecal microbial populations and increased concentrations of branched-chain fatty acids (BCFA) compared to GS. Stimbiotic improved 42-d-BW under PS conditions (P < 0.05) whereas MOS or FOS had no effect. On d35, plasma TNF-α was reduced with STB in PS (P < 0.05). The ratio between VFA:BCFA increased (P < 0.05) with STB, MOS or FOS in PS, and under GS condition, STB also increased the ratio. Stimbiotic increased the proportion of Clostridiales Family XIII Incertae Sedis and Clostridiaceae, while MOS and FOS increased Selenomonadaceae, Catabacteriaceae and Fibrobacteraceae. These results indicate that STB shifted the intestinal microbiome to favor fiber fermentation which likely contributed to reduced inflammatory response and improved performance, particularly in piglets reared in PS conditions.

A contractor firm, which strategically positioned itself in the housing market as a "sales firm, independent of its industry" introduced a patented product innovation, the Foldhome, to the Turkish housing market in 2010. The idea behind Foldhome was adding a set of social facility areas (or, 'Folds') to core accommodation units which include a bedroom, a living space and wet spaces. The firm gained a commercial success in the branded housing market with an annual turnover about 300.000.000 USD and 400.000.000 USD in 2016 and 2017 respectively. While researchers have reported that a significant portion of the variance in firm growth in construction can be explained by corporate entrepreneurship, empirical evidence on 'how' this process leads to organizational growth is scarce. This paper presents findings from a qualitative research study of the Foldhome case which aimed an in-depth investigation of the role of entrepreneurship on firm growth and value creation. A content analysis was conducted to analyze data from 31 in-depth interview with firm managers and employees, according to the input-process-output model of strategic entrepreneurship. A process-based analysis of the case show that leveraging can be a more critical managerial capability than bundling and structuring in the early life cycle phase when young entrepreneurial companies orchestrate their resources for survival, growth and value creation. Paper contributes to construction entrepreneurship literature by unpacking the circumstances under which a holistic entrepreneurship framework that surround a product innovation through the integration of corporate functions. Lessons learned are highlighted for the entrepreneurial contractor companies.

The article describes the socio – economic situation of the Semipalatinsk region in the 1980s and 1990s, i.e. the problem of economy and industry and housing of the population of the region, the contribution of enterprises, collective farms and state farms to the development of the region. The main directions of economic development of the Soviet Union until 1990. Development of Agriculture, opening of branded stores. It is planned to strengthen industrial discipline, as well as the life and health of the population of the region. "I don't know," he said, " but I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. National Education in the region, including the presence of a small number of clubs that study in the Kazakh language. It is reported about the production of products in the region during this period, the pace of development of transport activities, and the opening of stores that provide goods.

Constructed from scratch on land reclaimed from the sea, Songdo was planned to embody new ‘smart city’ life. In reality, it has come to exemplify enclave urbanism that commodifies securitised living for upwardly mobile middle classes. While the political economy of this urban project is by now well studied, the sociological ethnography of the resultant space and its experiential correlates remains less developed and imperfectly contextualised. One needs to connect the dots of power and space. The present paper aims to do that and thematises the ‘design of everyday life’ which rests on (1) the intensification of privatised digital surveillance of mass housing compounds which in turn occasions (2) the remaking of spatial markers and symbolic boundaries between private/public, inclusive/exclusive, inside/outside. As such it is a combination of two different registers of visibility that gets jointly orchestrated by the public–private partnership of Korean state and corporate actors. In order to recognise these regimes as strategic visions of controlled social life we extend James Scott’s notion of ‘seeing like a state’ to include the corresponding regime that we call ‘seeing like a corporation’. This allows us to show that they are mutually elaborative in Songdo through a hybridised fabrication of its lived environment, particularly in the case of one branded housing typology located in the city’s centre called International Business District. This elucidates not only the local entrepreneurial urbanism that gave rise to the controlled environment of Songdo but also more general logics of the ‘compressed modernisation’ in the region which sets a global mode for production of space and re-territorialisation of power.

Migrant populations have been consistently more vulnerable than others, with their vulnerability being exacerbated in crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic. In the meantime, in their effort to “flatten the curve,” governments have been adopting policies that have significantly impacted migration in various ways. The effect of these policies has found migrants suffering disproportionately from the social and economic consequences of the pandemic crisis. Mobility restrictions have stranded them in the host countries, often without decent housing conditions, exacerbating xenophobic and discriminatory treatment of migrants. The study focuses on the case of Portugal and, more specifically, aims to provide a contextual feature of historical discussions of migration in Portugal and explore the perceptions and branding of migration policies in a crisis environment during the Covid-19 pandemic through the framing lens. Using empirical evidence from a frame analysis of parliamentary debates, the article investigates how immigration policies are branded and framed within Portugal, while it also evaluates the role of branding in migration policy-making, particularly in crisis scenarios. Overall, the article underscores the importance of branding in shaping migration policies, emphasising its significance in policy making.

Children's engagement with blocks is a vital and joyful aspect of childhood shared across the world. While the physical manipulation of blocks is a core part of children's development (i.e., LEGO), there are also online platforms and apps available that provide virtual play experiences with blocks (i.e., digital building apps, virtual worlds). The open-ended nature of block play allows children to explore their creativity, experiment with different designs, and learn from trial and error. Furthermore, this type of play promotes imagination, encourages independent thinking, and enhances communication and collaboration as children engage in shared building experiences. The hands-on and interactive nature of block play also enables researchers to utilise this medium with children to learn about their perceptions and experiences in a participatory and active way. On a different front, blocks can also refer to different forms of stopping, including lies. Due to the wide variety of excellent responses to the initial call for papers focussing on ‘toys’, this issue complements the previous 'toys' issue by focussing further on children’s engagement with play forms and artefacts, specifically blocks (both physical and digital). The editorial team drew on a range of complementary knowledge and experience to put together the ‘blocks’ issue. Louise Kay was a key researcher within the EU-funded MakEY – Makerspaces in the Early Years: Enhancing Digital Literacy and Creativity project. She is currently working on the Maker{Futures} project at the University of Sheffield, which supports schools, museums, libraries, and community spaces to set up makerspaces, providing playful and creative ways to develop digital and STEM skills through a STEAM approach that integrates science, technology, engineering, and mathematics with the arts. Lelia Green is a Chief Investigator in the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child, and lead CI (after Donell Holloway’s retirement) on the ARC Discovery Project DP180103922 – The Internet of Toys: Benefits and Risks of Connected Toys for Children. For Lelia, the ‘blocks’ issue raises matters of concern that might, could, or (possibly) should raise issues around consent, ethics, and children’s data flows. Essentially, the questions asked by this ‘blocks’ collection include whether the balance of risk and benefit relating to certain toys might give parents cause to pause, blocking access to some younger children’s (under 13) engagement with connected toys. Tama Leaver brought critical analysis to the table, informed by his Chief Investigator (CI) role within the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child. In addition, Tama’s personal interest in LEGO is shared with his children, and they collaborated on the cover image for this issue. In our feature article “The Toy Brick as a Communicative Device for Amplifying Children’s Voices in Research”, Kylie Stevenson, Emma Jayakumar, and Harrison See document the use of the LEGO brick toy as part of participatory play-based methods in the research project Digital Safety and Citizenship Roundtables, conducted with industry-partner the LEGO Group, Edith Cowan University, and the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child. The use of multiple play-based, child-friendly participatory methods is explored, and how children’s views about digital safety and citizenship in India, Korea, and Australia were collected and conveyed. The article explains how such toy play is an empowering communicative strategy that gives children agency so that they can creatively interject their voices into ongoing discussions about children’s digital citizenship. In “Platform Rhetoric and Fan Labour as the Building Blocks of LEGO Ideas”, Travis Holland and Beck Wise examine the LEGO Ideas platform and its Guidelines as ways of positioning and constructing the relationship between the LEGO Group and fan builders, especially adult fans of LEGO. The combined infrastructures of the Ideas platform and other LEGO online properties is argued to provide the LEGO group with significant data about LEGO fans and users that the LEGO group can exploit commercially. Aligned with many studies of fan cultures, Holland and Wise see fan labour and the infrastructures around it as extracting commercial value from fans, even while fans take pleasure in this labour. Along similar lines, in “LEGO and the Infrastructural Limits of Open Play” Nick Taylor explores the impact of the LEGO Group buying the Bricklink Website and platform, housing the largest LEGO adult fan community and their significant aftermarket trade of LEGO bricks, parts, and minifigs. Taylor argues that the LEGO Group is exercising a form of platform logic whereby it can utilise this digital infrastructure to impose and police ideological boundaries of what LEGO’s values are, and how these values should be enacted in both official and fan spaces. While the patents that protect LEGO’s monopoly on interlocking bricks have long since expired, purchasing Bricklink has solidified the LEGO Group’s material and digital reach, reifying the point that “LEGO encourages connection, openness, and creativity—so long as we use its platform, and its platform exclusively, to do so”. Gemma Blackwood in "Roblox and Meta Verch: A Case Study of Walmart’s Roblox Games" examines the two Walmart Roblox games (Walmart Land and Walmart Universe of Play) through an analysis of their gameplay, focussing on the ways that both games are incentivising play and how they link to in-game purchases and the Walmart brand. She argues that the games are designed to link gameplay with a highly personalised shopping experience, which blurs the boundaries between games and branded advertising. Issues are raised that link to broader debates regarding the commodification of, and impact on, children’s gaming experiences. Finally, Jo Ann Oravec’s article “Promoting Honesty in Children, or Fostering Pathological Behavior? Emerging Varieties of Lie Detection Toys and Games” problematises the process which constructs lie detector technology as the stuff of children’s games. Noting that these toys typically use physiological cues that regulate human responses to stress – generally beyond conscious control – the article asks about the ethics of children learning to lie. It speculates that such lie detector ‘play’ might be constructed as teaching children to lie more effectively. Are children learning to block their stress symptoms, or might parents and children choose instead to block out the possibility that such games are appropriate ‘child’s play’? Whether blocking stress, or blocking as lying, this article wraps this issue with a novel exploration of blocks. Acknowledgments The work on this special issue was partially supported by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council. Professor Lelia Green and Dr Louise Kay (together with Professors Bieke Zaman and Giovanna Mascheroni) were Investigators on the ARC Discovery Project DP180103922 – The Internet of Toys: Benefits and Risks of Connected Toys for Children (2018-22), and they acknowledge Dr Donell Holloway’s past leadership of this grant. Professors Tama Leaver and Lelia Green are both Chief Investigators in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child (CE200100022), which is led by QUT and also involves Curtin University, Deakin University, Edith Cowan University, University of Queensland, and University of Wollongong. The Centre of Excellence is funded through to the end of 2027. Tama would also like to thank his children for their input in to the design of the cover photo, and for letting their Lego figures be part of it!

Introduction Since the early 2000s, and especially since the onset of COVID-19 and long periods of lockdown, board games have seen a revival in popularity. The increasing popularity of board games are part of what Julie Lennett, a toy industry analyst at NPD Group, describes as the “nesting trend”: families have more access to entertainment at home and are eschewing expensive nights out (cited in Birkner 7). While on-demand television is a significant factor in this trend, for Moriaty and Kay (6), who wouldn’t “welcome [the] chance to turn away from their screens” to seek the “warmth and connection you get from playing games with live human family and friends?” For others, playing board games can simply be about nostalgia. Board games have a long history not specific to one period, geography, or culture. Likely board games were developed to do two things – teach and entertain. This remains the case today. Historically, miniature versions of battles or hunts were played out in what we might recognise today as a board game. Trade, war, and science impacted on their development, as did the printing press, which allowed for the standardisation of rules. Chess had many variations prior to the fifteenth century. Similarly, the Industrial Revolution allowed for the mass production of board games, boosting their popularity across nations, class, and age (Walker 13). Today, regardless of or because of our digital lives, we are in a “board game renaissance” (Booth 1). Still played on rainy days, weekends, and holidays, we now also play board games in dedicated game board cafés like the Haunted Game Café in America, the Snakes and Lattes in Canada, or the Mind Café in Singapore. In the board game café Draughts in the UK, customers pay £5 to select and play one of 800 board games, including classics like Monopoly and Cluedo. These cafes are important as they are “helping manufacturers to understand the kind of games that appeal to the larger section of players” (Atrizton). COVID-19 caused board game sales to increase. The global market was predicted to increase by US$1 billion in 2021, compared to 2020 (Jarvis). Total sales of board games in Australia are expected to reach AU$86 million in 2023, an almost 10 per cent increase from the preceding year (Statista "Board Games – Australia"). The emergence of Kickstarter, a global crowdfunding platform which funds new board games, is filling the gap in the contemporary board game market, with board games generating 20 per cent of the total funding raised (Carter). Board games are predicted to continue to grow, with the global market revenue record at US$19 billion dollars in 2022, a figure that is expected to rise to US$40 billion within 6 years (Atrizton). If the current turn towards board games represents a desire to escape from the digital world, the Internet is also contributing to the renaissance. Ex-Star Trek actor Wil Wheaton hosts the popular Web series TableTop, in which each episode explains a board game that is then played, usually with celebrities. The Internet also provides “communities” in which fans can share their enthusiasm, be it as geek culture or cult fandom (Booth 2). Booth provides an eloquent explanation, however, for the allure of face-to-face board games: “they remind us of our face-to-face past, and recall a type of pre-digital luddism where we can circle around the ‘campfire’ of the game board” (Booth 1-2). What makes a board game successful is harder to define. Phillip Orbanes, an American game designer and former vice-president of research and development at Parker Brothers, has attempted to elucidate the factors that make a good board game: “make the rules simple and unambiguous … don’t frustrate the casual player … establish a rhythm … focus on what’s happening off the board … give ‘em chances to come from behind … [and] provide outlets for latent talents” (Orbanes 52-55). Orbanes also says it is important to understand that what “happens off the board is just as important to the experience as the physical game itself” (Orbanes 51). Tristan Donovan contends that there are four broad stages of modern board games, beginning with the folk era when games had no fixed author, their rules were mutable, and local communities adapted the game to suit their sensibilities. Chess is an example of this, with the game only receiving the fixed rules we know today when tournaments and organisations saw the need for a singular set of rules. Mass production of games was the second stage, marking “the single biggest shift in board game history – a total flip in how people understood, experienced and played board games. Games were no long[er] malleable objects owned by the commons, but products created usually in the pursuit of profit” (Donovan 267). An even more recent development in game boards was the introduction of mass produced plastics, which reduced the cost of board game construction and allowed for a wider range of games to be produced. This was particularly evident in the post-war period. Games today are often thought of as global, which allows gamers to discover games from other regions and cultures, such as Catan (Klaus Teuber, 1995), a German game that may not have enjoyed its immense success if it were not for the Internet. Board game players are broadly categorised into two classes: the casual gamer and the hobby or serious gamer (Rogerson and Gibbs). The most popular game from the mass production era is Monopoly, the focus of this article. The History of Monopoly Monopoly was designed and patented by American Elizabeth Magie (1866-1948) in 1902, and was originally called The Landlord’s Game. The game was based on the anti-monopoly taxation principles of Henry George (1839-1897), who argued that people should own 100 per cent of what they make and the land should belong to everyone. Land ownership, considered George, only benefitted land owners, and forces working people to pay exorbitant rent. Magie’s original version of the game was designed to demonstrate how rents enrich property owners and impoverish tenants. Renters in Australia’s property market today may recognise this side of ruthless capitalism. In 1959 Fidel Castro thought Monopoly “sufficiently redolent of capitalism” that he “ordered the ­destruction of every Monopoly set in Cuba” (McManus). Magie, however, was not credited with being the original inventor of Monopoly: rather, this credit was given to Charles Darrow. In 2014, the book The Monopolist: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal behind the World's Favorite Board Game by Mary Pilon re-established Magie as the inventor of Monopoly, with her role and identity unearthed by American Ralph Anspach (1926-2022), an Adam Smith economist, Polish-German refugee, and anti-Vietnam protestor. According to Pilon, Magie, a suffragette and progressive economic and political thinker, was a Georgist advocate, particularly of his anti-monopolist policies, and it was this that informed her game’s narrative. An unmarried daughter of Scottish immigrants, she was a Washington homeowner, familiar with the grid-like street structure of the national capital. Magie left school at 13 to help support her family who were adversely impacted upon by the Panic of 1873, which saw economic collapse because of falling silver prices, railroad speculation, and property losses. She worked as a stenographer and teacher of Georgist single tax theory. Seeking a broader platform for her economic ideas, and with the growing popularity of board games in middle class homes, in 1904 Magie secured a patent for The Landlord’s Game, at a time when women only held 1 per cent of US patents (Pilon). The original game included deeds and play money and required players to earn wages via labour and pay taxes. The board provided a circular path (as opposed to the common linear path) in which players circled through rental properties and railroads, and could acquire food, with natural reserves (oil, coal, farms, and forests) unable to be monopolised. However, she created two sets of rules – the monopoly rules familiar to today’s players, and anti-monopoly rules in which tensions over human greed and altruism could be played out by participants. Magie started her own New York firm to manufacture and distribute the game, continued the struggle for women’s equality, and raged against wealthy monopolists of the day such as Andrew Carnegie (Pilon). By the late 1920, the game, mostly referred to as the ‘monopoly’ game, was popular, but many who played the game were playing handmade versions, likely unaware of the original Landlord’s Game. In 1931, mass-produced versions of the game, now titled Finance, began to appear, with some changes, including the ability to purchase properties, along with rule books. Occurring at the same time as the emergence of fixed-price goods in large department stores, the game, which now included chance cards, continued to be popular. It was Charles Darrow who sold Monopoly to Parker Brothers, even if he did not invent it. Darrow was introduced to one of the variants of the game and became obsessed with the game, which now featured the Community Chest and Free Parking, but his version did not have a set of rules. An unemployed ex-serviceman with no college education, Darrow struggled to provide for his family. By 1932, America was in the grip of the Great Depression, with housing prices collapsing and squatting common in large American cities. Befriending an artist, Darrow sought to provide a more dynamic and professional version of the game and complete it with a set of rules. In 1933, Darrow marketed his version of the game, titled Mr Monopoly, and it was purchased by Parker Brothers for US$7,000 in 1935. Magie received just US $500 (Farzan). Monopoly, as it was rebranded, was initial sold for $2 a game, and Parker Brothers sold 278,000 games in the first year. In 1936, consumers purchased 1.7 million editions of the game, generating millions of dollars in profits for Parker Brothers, who prior to Monopoly were on the brink of collapse (Pilon). Mary Pilon’s The Monopolists also reveals the struggle of Ralph Anspach in the 1970s to sell his Anti-Monopoly board games, which Parker Brothers fought in the courts. Anspach’s game sought to undermine the power of capitalist monopolies, which he had witnessed directly and negatively impact on fuel prices in America in the early 1970s. Hence the aim was to produce a game with an anti-monopolist narrative grounded in the free-market thinking of Adam Smith. Players were rewarded by breaking monopoly ownerships of utilities such as railroads and energy and metal reserves. In preparing his case against Parker Brothers, Anspach “accidentally discovered the true history of the game”, which began with Magie’s Landlord’s Game. Magie herself had battled with Parker Brothers in order to be “credited as the real originator of the game” and, like Anspach, reveal how Parker Brothers had changed the anti-capitalist narrative of the game, making it the “exact opposite” of its original aims (Landlordsgame). Anspach’s court room version of his battle with Parker Brothers was published in 2000, titled Monopolygate: During a David and Goliath Battle, the Inventor of the Anti-Monopoly® Game Uncovers the Secret History of Monopoly®. Monopoly Today Monopoly is now produced by Hasbro. It is the highest selling board game of all time, with an estimated 275 million units of Monopoly sold (Lee). Fan bases are clearly large too: the official Monopoly Facebook accounts report 9.9m likes (Facebook), and 68% of American households report owning a version of Monopoly (Statista "Which"). At the end of the twentieth century it was estimated that 550 million, or one in 12 people worldwide, had played the game (Guinness World Records "Most Popular"). Today it is estimated that Monopoly has been played by more than one billion people, and the digital Monopoly version has had over 100 million downloads (Johnson). The ability to play beloved board games with a computer opponent or with other players via the Internet arguably adds to the longevity of classic board games such as Monopoly. Yet research shows that despite Monopoly being widely owned, it is often not played as much as other games in people’s homes (d'Astous and Gagnon 84). D’Astous and Gagnon found that players in their study chose Monopoly to play on average six times a year, less than half the times they played Cluedo (13 times a year) or Scrabble (15 times). As Michael Whelan points out, Magie’s original goal was to make a statement about capitalism and landlords: a single player would progress round the board building an empire, whilst the others were doomed to slowly descend into bankruptcy. It was “never meant to be fun for anyone but the winner” (Whelan). Despite Monopoly’s longevity and impressive sales record, it is perhaps paradoxical to find that it is not a particularly popular or enjoyed game. Board Game Geek, the popular board game Website, reports in 2023 that the average rating for Monopoly by over 33,000 members is just 4.4 out of 10, and is ranked the 23,834th most popular game on the site (Board Game Geek). This is mirrored in academic studies: for example, when examining Orbane’s tenets for a good board game, d’Astous and Gagnon (84) found that players' appreciation of Monopoly was generally low. Not only is appreciation low for the game itself, it is also low for player antics during the game. A 2021 survey found that Monopoly causes the most fights, with 20% of households reporting “their game nights with friends or family members are often or always disrupted by competitive or unfriendly behaviour”, leading to players or even the game itself being banned (Lemore). Clearly Orbane’s tenet that the game “generates fun” is missing here (Orbanes 52). Commentators ask why Monopoly remains the best-selling board game of all time when the game has the “astonishing ability to sow seeds of discord” (Berical). Despite the claims that playing Monopoly causes disharmony, the game does allow for player agency. Perhaps more than any other board game, Monopoly is subjected to ‘house rules’. Buzzfeed reported 15 common house rules that many people think are official rules. In 2014 the official Monopoly Facebook page posted a video claiming that “68% of Americans have never read the official game rules” and that “49% of Americans had admitted to playing with their own ‘house rules’”. A look through these rules reveals that players are often trying to restore the balance of power in the game, or in other words increase the chance that a player can win. Hasbro has embraced these rules by incorporating some of them into the official rules. By incorporating players' amendments to the game, Hasbro can keep the Monopoly relevant. In another instance, Hasbro asked fans to vote on new tokens, which led to the thimble token being replaced with a Tyrannosaurus Rex. This was reversed in 2022 when nostalgic fans lobbied for the thimble’s return. Hasbro has also been an innovator by creating special rules for individual editions: for example, the Longest Game Ever edition (2019) slows players down by using only a single dice and has an extended game board. This demonstrates that Hasbro is keen to innovate and evolve the game to meet player expectations. Innovation and responsiveness to fans is one way that Hasbro has maintained Monopoly’s position as highest-selling board game. The only place the original Monopoly rules seem to be played intact are at the official competitions. Collecting and Nostalgia The characteristics of Monopoly allow for a seemingly infinite number of permutations. The places on the board can be real or fictional, making it easily adaptable to accommodate different environments. This is a factor in Monopoly’s longevity. The number of Monopoly editions are endless, with BoardGameGeek listing over 1,300 versions of the game on its site. Monopoly editions range from collector and commemorative editions to music, television, and film versions, actor-based editions, sports club editions, editions tied to toy franchises, animal lover editions, country editions, city editions, holiday editions, car brand editions, motor bike editions, as well as editions such as Monopoly Space, editions branded to popular confectionary, Ms Monopoly, and Go Green Monopoly. Each of these contain their own unique modifications. The Go Green version includes greenhouses, dice are made from FSC-certified wood from well-managed forests, tokens are made with plant-based plastic derived from sugarcane, a renewable raw material, and players can vie to have monopolistic control over renewable energy firms, solar farms, and bike paths. Licencing agreements allows Hasbro to leverage two sets of popular culture fans and collectors simultaneously: fans of Monopoly and its different versions, and fans of the Monopoly branded collectable, such as the Elvis Collector’s edition and Breaking Bad Monopoly. Apart from licencing, what else explains the longevity of Monopoly? Fred Davis demonstrates that nostalgia is an important sociological phenomenon, allowing consumers to re-imagine the past via iconic items including toys. Generation Y, also known as Millennials or digital natives, a cohort born between 1982 and 1994 who have grown up with technology as part of their everyday lives, are particularly interested in ‘heritage-inspired’ goods (Marchegiani and Phau). These consumers enjoy the past with a critical eye, drawn by the aesthetic properties of nostalgic goods rather than a direct personal connection (Goulding 575). Popular culture items are a site of widespread collecting behaviour (Geraghty 2). Belk argues that our possessions are used to construct our social selves. Collectors are a special kind of consumer: where consumers use and discard goods as needed, collectors engage with goods as special objects to be maintained and preserved (Belk 254), which is often achieved through ritualistic behaviour (McCracken 49). This is not to say that items in a collection are removed from use entirely: often being used in the normal manner, for example, clothing collectors will wear their items, yet take care of them in the a way they see akin to conservatorship (Hackett). Collections are often on display, often using the flexibility of the Internet as showground, as is the case with Neil Scallon’s world record collection of Monopoly’s 3,554 different versions of the game (World of Monopoly). Monopoly has low barriers to entry for a collector, as many sets retail at a low price-point, yet there are a few sets which are very expensive. The most expensive Monopoly set of all time retailed for US$2 million, and the cost was mainly borne out of the luxurious materials used: “the board is made from 23 carat gold, rubies and sapphires top the chimneys of the solid gold houses and hotels and the dice have 42 full cut diamonds for spots” (Guinness World Records "Most Expensive"). Conclusion The recent resurgence in board game popularity has only served to highlight Monopoly’s longevity. Through clever marketing and leveraging of nostalgia and popular culture fandoms, Hasbro has managed to retain Monopoly’s position as the number one board game, in sales figures at least. Despite its popularity, Monopoly suffers from a reputation as a conduit for poor player behaviour, as one person triumphs at the downfall of the other players. The game dynamics punish those whom fortune did not reward. In this regard, Elizabeth Magie’s initial aim of teaching about the unfairness of capitalism can be considered a resounding success. In re-establishing her role as a feminist and inventor at the turn of the century, embraced by progressive left-wingers of the 1930s, her story as much as that of Monopoly is a valuable contribution to modern popular culture. References Atrizton. Board Games Market – Global Outlook & Forecast 2023-2028. 2023. Belk, Russell W. "Collectors and Collecting." Handbook of Material Culture. Eds. Christopher Tilley et al. London: Sage, 2006. 534-45. Berical, Matt. "Monopoly Is a Terrible Game. Quit Playing It." Fatherly 4 Mar. 2020. Birkner, Christine. "Get on Board." Adweek 3-10 Apr. 2017: 7. Board Game Geek. "Monopoly." 2023. Booth, Paul. Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games. Bloomsbury, 2015. Buzzfeed. "15 Monopoly Rules That Aren't Actually Rules: Settled That 'Free Parking' Debate." Buzzfeed 27 Mar. 2014. Carter, Chase. "Tabletop Games Have Made over $1.5 Billion on Kickstarter." Dicebreaker 13 Dec. 2022. D'Astous, Alain, and Karine Gagnon. "An Inquiry into the Factors That Impact on Consumer Appreciation of a Board Game." Journal of Consumer Marketing 24.2 (2007): 80-89. Davis, Fred. Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia. New York: Free Press, 1979. Donovan, Tristan. "The Four Board Game Eras: Making Sense of Board Gaming’s Past." Catalan Journal of Communication & Cultural Studies 10.2 (2018): 265-70. Facebook. "Monopoly." 1 Mar. 2023. Farzan, Antonia Noori. "The New Monopoly ‘Celebrates Women Trailblazers,’ But the Game’s Female Inventor Still Isn’t Getting Credit." Washington Post 11 Sep. 2019. Geraghty, Lincoln. Cult Collectors. Routledge, 2014. Goulding, Christina. "Romancing the Past: Heritage Visiting and the Nostalgic Consumer." Psychology and Marketing 18.6 (2001): 565-92. Guinness World Records. "Most Expensive Board Game of Monopoly." 30 Jan. 2023. ———. "Most Popular Board Game." 30 Jan. 2023. Hackett, Lisa J. "‘Biography of the Self’: Why Australian Women Wear 1950s Style Clothing." Fashion, Style and Popular Culture 9.1-2 (2022). Johnson, Angela. "13 Facts about Monopoly That Will Surprise You." Insider 27 June 2018. Landlordsgame. "Landlord's Game History, Monopoly Game History." 2021. Lee, Allen. "The 20 Highest Selling Board Games of All Time." Money Inc 11 Mar. 2023. Lemore, Chris. "Banned from Game Night: ‘Monopoly’ Leads to the Most Fights among Family, Friends." Study Finds 2021. Marchegiani, Christopher, and Ian Phau. "Personal and Historical Nostalgia—a Comparison of Common Emotions." Journal of Global Marketing 26.3 (2013): 137-46. McCracken, Grant. Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988. McManus, James. "Do Not Collect $200." New York Times, 2015. 10. Moriarity, Joan, and Jonathan Kay. Your Move: What Board Games Teach Us about Life. Sutherland House, 2019. Orbanes, Phil. "Everything I Know about Business I Learned from Monopoly." Harvard Business Review 80.3 (2002): 51-131. Pilon, Mary. The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World's Favorite Board Game. Bloomsbury, 2015. Rogerson, Melissa J., and Martin Gibbs. "Finding Time for Tabletop: Board Game Play and Parenting." Games and Culture 13.3 (2018): 280-300. Statista. "Board Games – Australia." 25 Mar. 2023. ———. "Which of These Classic Board Games Do You Have at Home?" Statista-Survey Toys and Games 2018 (2018). Walker, Damian Gareth. A Book of Historic Board Games. Lulu.com, 2014. Whelan, Michael. "Why Does Everyone Hate Monopoly? The Secret History behind the World's Biggest Board Game." Dicebreaker 26 Aug. 2021. World of Monopoly. "Neil Scallan's World Record List of Official Monopolu Items." 2016.

Russell Belk,in an amazing 1995 essay on consumption (where 22 of the 38 pages are references, demonstrating hyper-consumption in action), argues that the 1990s heralded a new understanding of consumer behaviour. In the shifting paradigm identified by Belk, the analytical focus of consumer behaviour research became translated from 'Economic/Psychological' to 'Sociological/Anthropological', and from a 'Focus on buying' to a 'Focus on consuming' (61). This made intuitive sense in a world of postmodern marketing (Brown), and it re-enforced an idea that had been put forward by Dallas Smythe that audiences are sold to advertisers . The value of an audience lies in its potential to consume, and Virginia Nightingale subsequently explored this dynamic in her argument that consumption is work: "It is because of the relationship between advertising and television that watching television is work. Watching television is a leisure activity in the pursuit of which viewers are asked to lose themselves, to blur the distinctions between reality and fantasy. They are asked to forget that watching television is also work, to see television advertisements not as a continual reminder of the work of purchasing, but as entertainment. They are asked to believe that what they see on television is what they want to see, specially selected to please them." (33-4) Nightingale had previously argued that consumption in the domestic context was not only work, but quintessentially women'swork: Commercial television is an integral part of the modern shopping world. In this age of image advertising, it is from television that the meanings of brands are learned. If women learned to shop in the nineteenth century, they had to be taught to shop for others in the twentieth. The unpredictable woman of the nineteenth century had to be transformed into predictable, programmable 'Mum' one hundred years later. The branding of food commodities and the establishment of television as an efficient system of brand information assisted a change in the mode of address of the shopping world to women purchasers. In the cut-price world of the 50s and 60s seduction was out and value was in. In a shopping world of comparable brands, Mum has to learn not only the meaning, the lifestyle connotations of branded products from television advertising, but their meanings for the members of the family destined to consume her purchases (33). This way of looking at the world although illuminating begged the question as to an appropriate definition of work. Why did watching television seem so much less like work than, say, typing an article, or working as a waiter? Staying alive breathing, metabolising requires work at some level; what differentiates the 'going to work' side of working: and how does this relate to a consumer society which (as Belk identifies) increasingly involves an emphasis upon consumption rather than production? Greg Hearn, Tom Mandeville and David Anthony estimate that "consumption now accounts for about 60 per cent of GDP ... mass communication, advertising and the consumer economy form a nexus that is centrally implicated in the operation of Western societies" (104). They go on to argue that the "central assertion of postmodern views of consumption is that social identity can be interpreted as a function of consumption" (106). Citing Lunt and Livingstone, Hearn et al. suggest that "fuelled by their ability to modify and process the building blocks of identity (images, visual codes, phrases and ideas), our current mass media, via identity construction, have expanded consumption in advanced industrial societies" (107). Identity construction, however, is a given of existence it is impossible to live without some kind of identity, and impossible to adopt an identity in a vacuum, with no relationship to the social world in which the individual lives. Given that identity-construction is a necessity of existence, and will also necessarily reflect an individual's social practices and their consumption characteristics, can it be seen as 'work'? (And, if not, why not?) One way this problem can be investigated is through changes in work patterns in contemporary societies. Among the most dramatic socio-economic developments of the past two generations has been the changing role of women in the workforce. Some women still in employment are members of the generation which, as recently as the 1960s, were obliged to surrender their jobs upon marriage. Many were subsequently re-employed on a casual basis, but others were unable to resume a career of any sort given that they now had 'family responsibilities' (even if that 'family responsibility' was their spouse alone). The reason behind the compulsory female resignations was the patriarchal view that it was the husband's role to provide financially for his wife. For a married woman to hold a job was akin to double dipping the job was there to support a woman who had no husband to support her; or for a man with a wife (and sometimes other family) to provide for. When women successfully campaigned against this discriminatory practice, and later in favour of equal pay for equal work, the ultimate result was that the real wages of men fell. Two-income families do not earn twice a 'living' wage; they earn a living wage between them. The advent of equal pay for women means that only a small proportion of women (or men) have the choice of making domestic and community-based unwaged labour the focus of their daily life, without the effect of this choice being a much smaller financial engagement in consumer society. The gender dimension to money-earning remains considerable, even in this age of equal opportunity legislation. In particular, the 'wages for housework' campaign has been all but lost over the past thirty years. Further, although it is now unlawful for women to receive less money than their male counterparts for equal work, women's average pay continues to lag significantly behind that of men (WEL). This is one way of demonstrating that traditional women's work tends to be less well paid than men's work. Nursing, teaching and office work all remain low-paid compared with executive occupations, although compulsory post-schooling study requirements might be higher in the female areas. And it is commonplace to note that in traditionally female occupations (like primary school teaching) although males might be out-numbered 5:1 it tends to be a man who gets promoted. (Less a case of the glass ceiling: more a case of the invisible escalator.) In capitalist societies, the original source of monetary wealth lies in power the power to control labour/work for the profit of an individual other than the labourer. This is a hangover from feudal agrarianism, and a precursor to the information age (Bell). In all human society, power confers advantage, including the capacity to direct the work of others. While this was true of the feudal lord, the merchant prince and the early industrialist, it achieved its purest form with the introduction of monetary rewards for labour. Frederic Jameson (77) comments that: "technology may well serve as adequate shorthand to designate that enormous properly human and anti-natural power of dead human labour stored up in our machinery, an alienated power, what Sartre calls the counterfinality of the practico-inert, which turns back on and against us in unrecognizable forms and seems to constitute the massive dystopian horizon of our collective as well as our individual praxis." What Jameson says of technology in general would be equally true of the particular technology of money. Accumulated capital, and its constituent parts of coins, notes, currencies and data sets represents 'dead human labour', in the sense of work expended in the past in the production of goods and services. It is this stored human labour which buys the carrots, or the magazine subscription, and which represents an exchange for the time and energy that would have been required to grow the carrots, or produce the magazine. Similarly, the income paid to the carrot-grower, the journalist, the designer and the advertiser represents to them a distilled recompense for their work. Arguably, the energy that produced the labour for which one is paid is 'dead' energy controlled by another and exchanged for money. At an individual level, the roles played in the personaeof a person earning money, or a person spending money (a common indication of consumption) are very different: with the role of the person earning money much more circumscribed. Joshua Meyrowitz (29-31) spends some time in explaining Goffman's analysis of the roles of the waiter, using metaphors from drama of front/back region/stage: Waiters for example are in a front region when they serve people in a restaurant dining room. In the front region waiters are usually polite and respectful. Their appearance and manner is one of cleanliness and efficiency. They do not enter into the dinner conversations of restaurant patrons. They do not comment on their customers' eating habits or table manners. They rarely, if ever, eat while in the sight of patrons. When waiters step from the dining room into the kitchen, however, they suddenly cross a line between the onstage and backstage areas. In the kitchen waiters are in an area which is hidden from the audience and they share this area with others who perform the same or similar roles vis-a-vis the audience. Here, then, waiters may make remarks to each other about the 'strange behaviour of the people at table seven', they may imitate a customer, or give advice to a 'rookie' on methods of getting big tips. In the kitchen food may be handled and discussed with somewhat less respect than in the dining room, and waiters may 'get out of costume' or sit in a sloppy position with their feet up on a counter... We expect to be treated differently in a restaurant than in a doctor's office. We expect the doctor to appear confident, concerned, patient and professional and slightly superior. We expect a waitress to be efficient, respectful and nonintrusive. And we demand these differences in 'character' even if the waitress is a student earning her way through medical school. This analysis indicates that where behaviour is related to money where a person is paid to fulfil a role; the production of the goods or services the behaviour is more constrained and circumscribed by the expectations of the employer/consumer. The behaviour of people who are paying for a service, whose intention is to consume, is the least constrained. It may be that Kerry Packer has awful table manners, but few restauranteurs would fail to be pleased to see him walking through their door. At the level of the individual producer/consumer in consumer societies, money is seen to exert decisive control in the lives of workers. Is it possible to think of a better, less obviously coercive way to get people into cars, and onto freeways and clocking into the office on such a regular, reliable basis: other than their being paid to do so? American academic Camille Paglia does not think so: "Capitalism, whatever its problems, remains the most efficient economic mechanism yet devised to bring the highest quality of life to the greatest number... Because I have studied the past, I know that, in America and under capitalism, I am the freest woman in history" (Menand 27). Paglia obviously considers herself sufficiently well paid. Since access to money limits access to goods, to some experiences and to travel, money is a potent incentive to behave in a way that is rewarded by society. Even so, not everyone is able to exhibit the work behaviour that social systems are most inclined to reward. The stresses of unemployment lie in its curtailing of options; in its implications for health, housing, leisure, and educational opportunities; and in the fact that the need to get more money monopolises the time of the unemployed. The old adage 'time is money' is only partly true. In some respects the two share an inverse relationship: 'free' time is inversely related to money. For the vast majority of the population, the opportunity to convert work/labour into money significantly limits the time available in which to enjoy consuming the rewards for their labours. When people have 'free' time, it is frequently because the opportunity to earn money by the production of goods and services is absent. Consequently possible consumption activities are also severely limited. There are no hard and fast rules in Jameson's late capitalist society, but the general case might be that we are paid to produce goods, services and information through our controlled work, while consumption is generally constructed as a voluntary activity. It is partly that voluntariness which implicates consumption in identity construction, makes it an expression of individual difference, and renders it potentially pleasurable. Arguably, however, the voluntary nature of consumption together with the impossibility of notconsuming prevents it from being categorised unambiguously as 'work'. The relationship of work to money helps explain why it may be work to watch television, but it's a different kind of work from that performed at the Coles check-out. Identity-construction may be a major consumer project using raw materials provided by the mass media, but it is not work we're paid to do. No-one else is prepared to use their stored labour to recompense us for our everyday work as non-professional television viewers, or for our project of self-individuation as expressed through the production of our personal identity. References Belk, Russell. "Studies in the New Consumer Behaviour." Acknowledging Consumption: A Review of New Studies. Ed. D. Miller. London: Routledge, 1995. 58-95. Bell, Daniel. The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society. Rev. ed. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Brown, Stephen. Postmodern Marketing. London: Routledge, 1995. Goffman, Erving. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organisation of Experience. New York: Harper and Row, 1974. Hearn, Greg, Tom Mandeville and David Anthony. The Communication Superhighway: Social and Economic Change in the Digital Age. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1997. Jameson, Frederic. "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism." New Left Review146 (1984): 53-92. Lunt, Peter, and Sonia Livingstone. Mass Consumption and Personal Identity: Everyday Economic Experience. Milton Keynes: Open UP, 1992. Menand, Louis. "Sexual Politics with Snap, Crackle and Pure Paglian Pop." The Australian3 Feb. 1993: 27. Meyrowitz, Joshua. No Sense of Place. New York: Oxford UP, 1995. Nightingale, Virginia. "Women as Audiences." Television and Women's Culture: The Politics of the Popular. Ed. M.-E. Brown. Sydney: Currency Press, 1990. 25-36. Smythe, Dallas. Dependency Road. New Jersey: Ablex, 1981. WEL. 12 Nov. 2001 <http://www.wel.org.au/policy/00pol1.htm>. Links http://www.wlu.ca/~wwwpress/jrls/cjc/BackIssues/17.4/melody.html http://www.onemoreweb.com/soapbox/paglia.html http://www.wel.org.au/policy/00pol1.htm http://www.business.utah.edu/~mktrwb/ http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/jameson/ Citation reference for this article MLA Style Green, Lelia. "The Work of Consumption: Why Aren't We Paid?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4.5 (2001). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0111/Green.xml >. Chicago Style Green, Lelia, "The Work of Consumption: Why Aren't We Paid?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4, no. 5 (2001), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0111/Green.xml > ([your date of access]). APA Style Green, Lelia. (2001) The Work of Consumption: Why Aren't We Paid?. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4(5). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0111/Green.xml > ([your date of access]).

The Creative City Unlike the terms ‘creative industries’, which nobody ever quite understood, and ‘creative class’, about which actual ‘creatives’ were always ambiguous, the ‘creative city’ has been an incredibly successful global policy meme, to which cities across the world continue to aspire. From the early 1990s, faced with de-industrialisation, rising unemployment, and the increased global mobility of capital, professionals, and consumer-tourists, the ‘creative city’ became an essential part of the new urban imaginary for politicians, planners, local growth coalitions, and advocates and practitioners in art and culture. In the later 1980s and early 1990s, much of this policy and practice work had progressive intent; as decaying parts of the city acquired new artistic and cultural uses, and neo-bohemian lifestyles and pop-cultural aspirations seemed to provide the grounds for future-oriented urban identities. Whilst investment in iconic cultural buildings and refurbished heritage sites repositioned cities as destinations for global tourism and finance (Peck et al.), new forms of creative production would provide employment and catalyse the wider urban economy. The creative city was to be a benign economy of innovative small businesses, working in projects and acting in symbiosis with the transformed urban landscape of the city (Pratt; Scott). If at first such a “creativity fix” (Peck, Creativity) was permeable to new actors and radical visions, it rapidly became a codified “cookie cutter” approach (Oakley), primarily concerned with revalorising decaying urban built stock as ‘vibrant’ spaces for upmarket urban consumption. This has stretched from visual arts to popular music (Bennett; O’Connor Music). The “creative imaginary” of entrepreneurial subjects—working in flat networks clustered around zones or milieux of intensified creativity (O’Connor and Shaw; O’Connor and Gu)—was quickly localised in spaces of real estate-led consumption, with production corralled into the ‘managed workspace’ whose image value—a shiny ‘creative hub’—was usually worth far more than any actual production taking place inside of it (O’Connor, Art). From the turn of the millennium, this global “fast policy” flowed through elite circuits of ‘policy transfer’ (Peck, Scale): unevenly distributed nodes assembling politicians, public administrators, planners, ‘cool’ developers, cultural consultants, branded arts institutions, and creative ‘thought-leaders’ (De Beukelaer and O’Connor). Global agencies such as UNESCO, through its Creative Cities Network, or consultancies such as Charles Landry and BOP, have attempted to frame this in a benign narrative of ‘hands across the ocean’ cultural globalisation. But we now know from two decades of creative economy proselytising that culture is a “driver and enabler” of development, not a normative standard against which it might be judged. And however inclusive ‘culture’ is made to sound, the creative city agenda remains firmly in the hands of local elites attempting to harness global flows of finance, media images, tourists, and ‘creatives’ for local development opportunities (Novy and Colomb; Courage and McKeown). By 2008 the creative city was already in trouble, as an increasingly brutal wave of gentrification came to be seen as the necessary corollary of the gleaming images of creative clusters, hipster hangouts, and iconic arts infrastructure. Predicated on a “spatial fix” (Harvey) for the decaying landscapes of the industrial city, the creative city was already producing its own ruins, as culture-led investment projects failed (Brodie). Since 2008, as the paper-thin walls between art, creativity, and real estate capital dissolved, it became increasingly clear that, though the script remained, the utopian moment was dead and buried. For many critics, both inside the cultural sector and out, it was time to roughly bundle it into the catch-all of neoliberalism and ‘gentrification’ and throw it overboard. Creative City RIP. The Ordinary City This critical take was performed early on by geographers such as Ash Amin and others (Amin and Graham; Amin, Massey, and Thrift), who suggested we re-centre the ordinary city—the one in which most people live—rather than fetishise some high-growth, hi-tech, gleaming Creative City. It was reiterated more recently by the Foundational Economy Collective, who argue that it is the everyday infrastructures and services of our towns and cities—and their mundane local economies of nail bars, cafes, and auto-repair shops—that should form the basis of our urban economic thinking (FEC). Jamie Peck, an early critic of the Creative City, had already cast doubt on the real economic weight of ‘creative industries’ and saw the whole thing as cover for the ‘entrepreneurial (read: neoliberal) city’, and a new kind of culturally-inflected growth coalition (Peck and Ward; Peck, Struggling). Similar dissent could be found amongst those writing within the cultural field. For every new city on the global creative smorgasbord, there were local artists and community activists who could show you a whole other side, excluded from the glass boxes and white cubes, from the funding and the hyped-up narratives lavished on the creative city. This mostly targeted the big iconic developments, led by global brands sucking the funding and the imagination from the surrounding city—what we might call ‘the Bilbao effect’. This cynicism toward the Creative City overlapped with a rejection of a ‘high art’ establishment and its elitist forms of culture. The ‘ordinary city’ here did not set the mundane against art and culture but reframed these as part of an everyday creativity. This could mean small-scale, neighbourhood-embedded art and culture, proposed by those in favour of ‘community arts’ and indeed those seeking localised popular culture such as music scenes. But it could also mean a valorisation of creativity writ large; a generalised urban creativity in which imagination and experimentation, but also subversion and contestation permeate the everyday. Following the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), critiques of the creative city concept became increasingly common. Oli Mould’s 2015 book Urban Subversion and the Creative City captures much of this, providing a distinction between the capitalised Creative City and the lower-case creative city. Mould distinguishes between the ‘Creative City’ ideology as extractive, and the ‘creative city’ as enabling citizenship. For Mould, the Creative City is “the antithesis of urban creativity” (Urban 4), and “shorthand for the capitalistic, paradigmatic (bordering on dogmatic) and meta-narrative view of how creativity can be used to economically stimulate and develop the city” (5). It is top-down creative planning at its worst. Against this, Mould evokes the lower-case concept of creative city, seeing some hope for it as a descriptor of urban spaces where “being creative is the very act of citizenship” (5). The Creative City imposed itself as a requirement of urban economic competitiveness (successful or not) and needs to be implacably opposed. Alternatively, the creative city persists in various forms of ‘urban subversion’, though whether the actual term—like creativity itself (Mould, Against)—can be freed from an association with its capitalised nemesis is, for Mould, still moot. Whilst Mould’s distinction allows us to evoke an urban creativity distinct from the commodified, extractive forms of the Creative City—one rooted in the ordinary, everyday creative practices of the city still open to themes of subversion and contestation centring cultural labour over cultural infrastructure—we also have some reservations. The C/creative couplet recalls de Certeau’s opposition of strategy and tactics, skyscraper and street, and has some of its problems. Baldly, this gives control of the city over to the powerful and condemns the rest of us to a game of endless evasion and subversion. For whilst the contemporary Creative City agenda may be largely as Mould describes it, its provenance is more complex than the extractive agenda which currently animates it. Understanding this provenance might give us some pointers beyond this binary impasse. Roots of the Creative City Although the Creative City eventually became integrated into the neoliberal urban script, the policy imaginary that birthed it emerged from the post-1960s rise of urban social movements, anti-development coalitions, new cultural practices (especially around popular music), artist co-ops, squats, and alternative cultures. Across the 1970s and 1980s one might say the C/creative City was an aspect of growing claims for cultural citizenship, the more explicit acknowledgement of a cultural dimension within T.H. Marshall’s ‘social citizenship’ (Marshall). The Greater London Council (GLC) of 1979-86 is exemplary here (Bianchini; Hatherley), but this was only the most visible case in which de-industrialising cities acquired aspirations to a different kind of city living. The utopian-romantic vision of a new kind of urban culture in which the transformative powers of art would abandon the ethereal world of the museum-gallery and take carnal form in the grotesque ruins of an industrial city was most literal in Wim Wenders’s 1987 film Wings of Desire. It was there in Berlin and New York as it was in Melbourne and Manchester, and a hundred other such cities (Whitney). As an industrial urban civilisation no longer seemed viable in the Global North, ‘culture’ became a central stake in anticipating what might come next. What new forms of working and living might be possible? What new identities, pleasures, desires might it accommodate? A new generation, immersed in what Mark Fisher called ‘popular modernism’ (Fisher), sought new forms of artistic expression within popular culture, making demands on the formal cultural system, on the infrastructure of the city, and on how the city could be re-imagined. In short, the C/creative City was not simply an invention of neoliberalism. It carried within it a utopian promise that should not be discounted. Perhaps we can see this in that most vilified of concepts, the ‘creative class’. The (Not-So) Creative Class By the 2008 GFC, the concept of the ‘creative class’—positioned as the primary driver and beneficiary of the creative city—was already coming apart. Unaffordable housing, rent hikes, rising debts, welfare cuts, reducing returns to ‘educational capital’ and the dominance of asset economies, precarious employment, culture budget cuts, and the integration of large sections of creative production into new platform economies have accelerated since that time. Global development capital has now built high-end leisure, entertainment, accommodation, and amenities into its core business model, one that does not require a prior process of valorisation by local creatives. Mould suggests the Creative City was a Trojan Horse and the creative class the Greeks inside (Urban 8). But whilst policymakers and city marketers embraced this term, it was never a class for-itself, with the clear strategic focus of soldiers waiting to pounce. Florida’s statistical fantasy netted a massive chunk of the population—almost 40 percent—as ‘professional, managerial and scientific’ (Florida, Rise). Meanwhile actual ‘creatives’ were always a poor relation and lived very differently to those others, most of whom preferred the suburbs and ex-burbs to the bustling city. Artists were not the storm-troopers of gentrification but its dupes, eventually evicted from the city they helped conquer. Meanwhile, since the advent of Florida and Landry, developers didn’t even need to use these ‘storm-troopers’ to soften up places for gentrification. They could now work directly with compliant city authorities to do the work for them. Creative cities could be deployed by toolkit (Landry) and, of course, measured via economic impact studies and a variety of other econometrics weaponised by corporate consultancies for hire. This was the social and political landscape upon which the Global Financial Crisis dealt an especially severe form of austerity, disproportionately affecting the cultural sector, and exacerbating many of the problematic areas of ‘creative city’ policy that had previously been abated and ameliorated by a veneer of hipster cool. Nonetheless, the ‘creative class’ also articulated a utopian promise, especially in places outside of the ‘Global North’ where more traditional forms of political power, gender roles, and religion remain in play. In a period of rapid globalisation, as relatively insulated economies became integrated into global capital flows, and cities bore the brunt of disruptive social and cultural changes, the C/creative City could stand in for a global modernity with a future. It could make available a new set of aspirations and identities; for a younger, more educated few perhaps, yet still real despite this. De Beukelaer, in the Indonesian context, talks about the “productive friction” between the two C/creative Cities, where the gap between the universal abstract and the local reality can form a site of negotiation. The C/creative City licences an encounter between new aspirations and identities, and the more traditional elites; an unequal struggle to define or give further content to the neoliberal nostrums of creative modernity that emanate from the Creative City meme. Yet it is not clear just why this negotiation is only made possible by the ‘apolitical’ notion of ‘creative’, or what’s at stake in that term. Is it a merely a cypher—or McGuffin—for a more complex conflict of interests? In what form would the “re-politicisation” of the creative city, called for at the end of the article, consist? What Next? We are not then talking about The City & the City (Mieville), in which two cities occupy the same geographic space but codify their separation by routinely ignoring each other and that which is deemed to belong to the other city. They are always in some kind of negotiation and contestation, but around what? We would argue that the imaginary of the C/creative City was annexed by, but not necessarily created by, neoliberalism. If the C/creative City articulated a future beyond a Fordist industrial civilisation, then we must take care in rejecting it not to abandon at the same time the power to imagine a different future. So, too, in attempting to assert the ordinary everyday city, we must also keep hold of a sense of the creative imagination that art and culture articulates, rather than dismissing this as part of the shiny glass palace on the hill. The absence of art and culture from the new progressive social and economic agendas that are currently finding their way into the mainstream—green new deals, doughnuts, well-being, community and ecological economics, and so on—is telling (O’Connor, Reset). In part this reflects the capture of arts and cultural policy by neoliberalism. This is not just ‘economic rationalism’ or market fundamentalism, for in the ‘creative economy’ art and cultural policy fused with neoliberalism at a deep DNA level, and the creative city imaginary was part of this. Mould is right to doubt whether the notion of ‘creative’, so closely enmeshed, could ever be retrieved. But regardless of whether art and culture have been condemned by this close association, the collapse of its romantic-utopian promise into a consumer leisure economy has left a void. If Jameson’s contention that we cannot think the end of capitalism is no longer the case (Jameson; Morozov), then culture is not present at this new moment of transition. So much well-being, community, and ecological economics speaks of culture whilst barely naming it. For us, the rearticulation of the place of art and culture in the contemporary city is crucial. We would even suggest that without art and culture, a full transformation of the contemporary city would be impossible. But how to think this? Any democratic cultural policy would need to reclaim both the ordinary and the creative city. This would entail the creative city of dissent and subversion, so closely aligned with the broad social movements to which we must look, in large part, to transform the city. It would also mean the right to a full participation in the imaginary of the collective city in which we all dwell and where we can imagine different futures. For this to happen, art and culture needs to be taken out of the hands of real estate, tourism, and economic development, and reframed as part of public service and public value. Just as new movements seek to reframe economic growth in terms of sustainability, equity, and human flourishing (Raworth), a radical creative city would be one in which art and culture were constitutive of the social foundations and part of how we live together as citizens, not simply another engine of the consumption economy. This process of re-embedding art and culture in the everyday foundations of the ordinary city is certainly underway. The ‘new municipalism’ (Thompson) has begun to make space for culture, with cities such as Barcelona and organisations such as the UCLG making a lot of the running. Notions of cultural rights, both individual and collective, have returned to challenge the urban consumption model. Just as art and culture try to position themselves alongside other foundational services—health, education, welfare—they also need to engage with new approaches to urban design, where technologies and infrastructures have been repositioned as cultural rather than technological. This suggests both that art and culture engage with the wider ‘cultural’—as in the anthropological, ‘whole way of life’—but that it no longer ‘owns’ this culture. Art and culture are not to be seen, as in the 1980s, as the ‘key’ to a total social transformation, but as one element only, however crucial. So too ‘creative’ needs to be unpicked and reframed, away from its association with ‘progress’ and absolute self-creation towards ‘slowdown’ (Dorling), sustainability, custodianship, care, incrementalism, and restoration – the kinds of values we now associate with First Nations. The shared DNA between creativity and capitalist modernity runs deep. Conclusion The COVID-19 pandemic has devastated large areas of art and culture, putting a question mark next to the urban use patterns that underpinned so much of the creative city model (Banks and O’Connor; de Peuter et al.; Tanghetti et al.; Whiting and Roberts). The Creative City of consumption, commuting, tourism, and entertainment stopped. Though some construction continued, the very purpose of the city centre—which over three decades had been rebranded as the Central Business District—was called into question. But the creative city was devastated too. Not just the collapse in income for cultural workers and business owners, but so too the filigrees of creative connection, the rhizomic mica that underpin the ecosystem of the city. Creatives already made no money, but at least they could go to openings and stay out late. Not anymore. This knockout blow was followed by the recognition that, for all the creative rhetoric, it was construction spending that counted most towards cultural funding budgets (Pacella et al.). Whilst talk quickly became one of getting artists and creatives to kickstart urban activity and animate deserted main street properties—‘build back better’—it is not at all clear where this endless supply of artists is going to come from. Now might be the time to explore how we might rethink art, culture, and the city rather than business as usual. As Arundhati Roy suggested, “nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next” (Roy). If art and culture don’t form part of that search for the new world, they will end up simply defending this one. 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Setting the Mood Weirdly, everything feels the same. There’s absolutely no distinction for me between news, work, walking, gaming, Netflix, rock collecting, scrolling, messaging. I don’t know how this happened, but everything has simply blurred together. There’s a dreadful and yet soothing sameness to it, scrolling through images on Instagram, scrolling Netflix, walking the dog, scrolling the news, time scrolling by as I watch face after face appear or disappear on my screen, all saying something, yet saying nothing. Is this the rhythm of crisis in a slow apocalypse? Really, would it be possible for humans to just bore themselves into oblivion? Because in the middle of a pandemic, boredom feels in my body the same as doom ... just another swell that passes, like my chest as it rises and falls with my breath. This opening anecdote comes from combining narratives in two studies we conducted online during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020: a global study, Massive and Microscopic Sensemaking: Autoethnographic Accounts of Lived Experience in Times of Global Trauma; and an Australian project, The Shut-In Worker: Working from Home and Digitally-Enabled Labour Practices. The Shut-In Worker project aimed to investigate the thoughts, beliefs, and experiences of Australian knowledge workers working from home during lockdown. From June to October 2020, we recruited twelve households across two Australian states. While the sample included households with diverse incomes and living arrangements—from metropolitan single person apartment dwellers to regional families in free standing households—the majority were relatively privileged. The households included in this study were predominantly Anglo-Australian and highly educated. Critically, unlike many during COVID-19, these householders had maintained their salaried work. Participating households took part in an initial interview via Zoom or Microsoft Teams during which they took us on workplace tours, showing us where and how the domestic had been requisitioned for salaried labour. Householders subsequently kept digital diaries of their working days ahead of follow up interviews in which we got them to reflect on their past few weeks working from home with reference to the textual and photographic diaries they had shared with us. In contrast to the tight geographic focus of The Shut-In Worker project and its fairly conventional methodology, the Massive and Microscopic Sensemaking project was envisaged as a global project and driven by an experimental participant-led approach. Involving more than 150 people from 26 countries during 2020, the project was grounded in autoethnography practice and critical pedagogy. Over 21 days, we offered self-guided prompts for ourselves and the other participants—a wide range of creative practitioners, scholar activists, and researchers—to explore their own lived experience. Participants with varying degrees of experience with qualitative methods and/or autoethnography started working with the research questions we had posed in our call; some independently, some in collaboration. The autoethnographic lens used in our study encouraged contributors to document their experience from and through their bodies, their situated daily routines, and their relations with embedded, embodied, and ubiquitous digital technologies. The lens enabled deep exploration and evocation of many of the complexities, profound paradoxes, fears, and hopes that characterise the human and machinic entanglements that bring us together and separate the planetary “us” in this moment (Markham et al. 2020). In this essay we draw on anecdotes and narratives from both studies that speak to the “Zoom experience” during COVID-19. That is, we use Zoom as a socio-technical pivot point to think about how the experience of liminality—of being on/off screen and ambiently in between—is operating to shift both our micro practices and macro structures as we experience and struggle within the rupture, “event”, and conjuncture that marks the global pandemic. What we will see is that many of those narratives depict disjointed, blurry, or confusing experiences, atmospheres, and affects. These liminal experiences are entangled in complex ways with the distinctive forms of commercial infrastructure and software that scaffold video conferencing platforms such as Zoom. Part of what is both enabling and troubling about the key proprietary platforms that increasingly host “public” participation and conversation online (and that came to play a dominant role during COVID19) in the context of what Tarleton Gillespie calls “the internet of platforms” is a sense of the hidden logics behind such platforms. The constant sense of potential dis/connection—with home computers becoming ambient portals to external others—also saw a wider experience of boundarylessness evoked by participants. Across our studies there was a sense of a complete breakdown between many pre-existing boundaries (or at least dotted lines) around work, school, play, leisure and fitness, public and media engagement, and home life. At the same time, the vocabulary of confinement and lockdown emerged from the imposition of physical boundaries or distancing between the self and others, between home and the outside world. During the “connected confinement” of COVID-19, study participants commonly expressed an affective sensation of dysphoria, with this new state of in betweenness or disorientation on and off screen, in and out of Zoom meetings, that characterises the COVID-19 experience seen by many as a temporary, unpleasant disruption to sociality as usual. Our contention is that, as disturbing as many of our experiences are and have been during lockdown, there is an important, ethically and politically generative dimension to our global experiences of liminality, and we should hold on to this state of de-normalisation. Much ink has been spilled on the generalised, global experience of videoconferencing during the COVID-19 pandemic. A line of argument within this commentary speaks to the mental challenge and exhaustion—or zoom fatigue as it is now popularly termed—that many have been experiencing in attempting to work, learn, and live collectively via interactive screen technologies. We suggest zoom fatigue stands in for a much larger set of global social challenges—a complex conjuncture of microscopic ruptures, decisions within many critical junctures or turning points, and slow shifts in how we see and make sense of the world around us. If culture is habit writ large, what should we make of the new habits we are building, or the revelations that our prior ways of being in the world might not suit our present planetary needs, and maybe never did? Thus, we counter the current dominant narrative that people, regions, and countries should move on, pivot, or do whatever else it takes to transition to a “new normal”. Instead, drawing on the work of Haraway and others interested in more than human, post-anthropocenic thinking about the future, this essay contends that—on a dying planet facing major global challenges—we need to be embracing liminality and “staying with the trouble” if we are to hope to work together to imagine and create better worlds. This is not necessarily an easy step but we explore liminality and the affective components of Zoom fatigue here to challenge the assumption that stability and certainty is what we now need as a global community. If the comfort experienced by a chosen few in pre-COVID-19 times was bought at the cost of many “others” (human and more than human), how can we use the discomfort of liminality to imagine global futures that have radically transformative possibilities? On Liminality Because liminality is deeply affective and experienced both individually and collectively, it is a difficult feeling or state to put into words, much less generalised terms. It marks the uncanny or unstable experience of existing between. Being in a liminal state is marked by a profound disruption of one’s sense of self, one’s phenomenological being in the world, and in relation to others. Zoom, in and of itself, provokes a liminal experience. As this participant says: Zoom is so disorienting. I mean this literally; in that I cannot find a solid orientation toward other people. What’s worse is that I realize everyone has a different view, so we can’t even be sure of what other people might be seeing on their screen. In a real room this would not be an issue at all. The concept of liminality originally came out of attempts to capture the sense of flux and transition, rather than stasis, that shapes culture and community, exemplified during rites of passage. First developed in the early twentieth century by ethnographer and folklorist Arnold van Gennep, it was later taken up and expanded upon by British anthropologist Victor Turner. Turner, best known for his work on cultural rituals and rites of passage, describes liminality as the sense of “in betweenness” experienced as one moves from one status (say that of a child) to another (formal recognition of adulthood). For Turner, community life and the formation of societies more broadly involves periods of transition, threshold moments in which both structures and anti-structures become apparent. Bringing liminality into the contemporary digital moment, Zizi Papacharissi discusses the concept in collective terms as pertaining to the affective states of networked publics, particularly visible in the development of new social and political formations through wide scale social media responses to the Arab Spring. Liminality in this context describes the “not yet”, a state of “pre-emergence” or “emergence” of unformed potentiality. In this usage, Papacharissi builds on Turner’s description of liminality as “a realm of pure possibility whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise” (97). The pandemic has sparked another moment of liminality. Here, we conceptualise liminality as a continuous dialectical process of being pushed and pulled in various directions, which does not necessarily resolve into a stable state or position. Shifting one’s entire lifeworld into and onto computer screens and the micro screens of Zoom, as experienced by many around the world, collapses the usual functioning norms that maintain some degree of distinction between the social, intimate, political, and work spheres of everyday life. But this shift also creates new boundaries and new rules of engagement. As a result, people in our studies often talked about experiencing competing realities about “where” they are, and/or a feeling of being tugged by contradictory or competing forces that, because they cannot be easily resolved, keep us in an unsettled, uncomfortable state of being in the world. Here the dysphoric experiences associated not just with digital liminality but with the broader COVID-19 epidemiological-socio-political conjuncture are illustrated by Sianne Ngai’s work on the politics of affect and “ugly feelings” in the context of capitalism’s relentlessly affirmative culture. Rather than dismissing the vague feelings of unease that, for many of us, go hand in hand with late modern life, Ngai suggests that such generalised and dispersed affective states are important markers of and guides to the big social and cultural problems of our time—the injustices, inequalities, and alienating effects of late capitalism. While critical attention tends to be paid to more powerful emotions such as anger and fear, Ngai argues that softer and more nebulous forms of negative affect—from envy and anxiety to paranoia—can tell us much about the structures, institutions, and practices that frame social action. These enabling and constraining processes occur at different and intersecting levels. At the micro level of the screen interface, jarring experiences can set us to wondering about where we are (on or off screen, in place and space), how we appear to others, and whether or not we should showcase and highlight our “presence”. We have been struck by how people in our studies expressed the sense of being handled or managed by the interfaces of Zoom or Microsoft Teams, which frame people in grid layouts, yet can shift and alter these frames in unanticipated ways. I hate Zoom. Everything about it. Sometimes I see a giant person, shoved to the front of the meeting in “speaker view” to appear larger than anyone else on the screen. People constantly appear and disappear, popping in and out. Sometimes, Zoom just rearranges people seemingly randomly. People commonly experience themselves or others being resized, frozen, or “glitched”, muted, accidentally unmuted, suddenly disconnected, or relegated to the second or third “page” of attendees. Those of us who attend many meetings as a part of work or education may enjoy the anonymity of appearing at a meeting without our faces or bodies, only appearing to others as a nearly blank square or circle, perhaps with a notation of our name and whether or not we are muted. Being on the third page of participants means we are out of sight, for better or worse. For some, being less visible is a choice, even a tactic. For others, it is not a choice, but based on lack of access to a fast or stable Internet connection. The experience and impact of these micro elements of presence within the digital moment differs, depending on where you appear to others in the interface, how much power you have over the shape or flow of the interaction or interface settings, or what your role is. Moving beyond the experience of the interface and turning to the middle range between micro and macro worlds, participants speak of attempting to manage blurred or completely collapsed boundaries between “here” and “there”. Being neither completely at work or school nor completely at home means finding new ways of negotiating the intimate and the formal, the domestic and the public. This delineation is for many not a matter of carving out specific times or spaces for each, but rather a process of shifting back and forth between makeshift boundaries that may be temporal or spatial, depending on various aspects of one’s situation. Many of us most likely could see the traces of this continuous shifting back and forth via what Susan Leigh Star called “boundary objects”. While she may not have intended this concept in such concrete terms, we could see these literally, in the often humorous but significantly disruptive introduction of various domestic actants during school or work, such as pets, children, partners, laundry baskets, beds, distinctive home decor, ambient noise, etc. Other trends highlight the difficulty of maintaining zones of work and school when these overlap with the rest of the physical household. One might place Post-it Notes on the kitchen wall saying “I’m in a Zoom meeting so don’t come into the living room” or blur one’s screen background to obscure one’s domestic location. These are all strategies of maintaining ontological security in an otherwise chaotic process of being both here and there, and neither here nor there. Yet even with these strategies, there is a constant dialectical liminality at play. In none of these examples do participants feel like they are either at home or at work; instead, they are constantly shifting in between, trying to balance, or straddling physical and virtual, public and private, in terms of social “roles” and “locations”. These negotiations highlight the “ongoingness” of and the labour involved in maintaining some semblance of balance within what is inherently an unbalanced dialectical process. Participants talked about and showed in their diaries and pictures developed for the research projects the ways they act through, work with, or sometimes just try to ignore these opposing states. The rise of home-based videoconferencing and associated boundary management practices have also highlighted what has been marginalised or forgotten and conversely, prioritised or valorised in prior sociotechnical assemblages that were simply taken for granted. Take for example the everyday practices of being in a work versus domestic lifeworld; deciding how to handle the labor of cleaning cups and dishes used by the “employees” and “students” in the family throughout the day, the tasks of enforcing school attendance by children attending classes in the family home etc. This increased consciousness—at both a household and more public level—of a previously often invisible and feminised care economy speaks to larger questions raised by the lockdown experience. At the same time as people in our studies were negotiating the glitches of screen presence and the weird boundarylessness of home-leisure-domestic-school-work life, many expressed an awareness of a troubling bigger picture. First, we had just the COVID lockdowns, you know, that time where many of us were seemingly “all together” in this, at home watching Tiger King, putting neighborly messages in our windows, or sharing sourdough recipes on social media. Then Black Lives Matters movements happened. Suddenly attention is shifted to the fact that we’re not all in this together. In Melbourne, people in social housing towers got abruptly locked down without even the chance to go to the store for food first, and yet somehow the wealthy or celebrity types are not under this heavy surveillance; they can just skip the mandatory quarantine. ... We can’t just go on with things as usual ... there are so many considerations now. Narratives like these suggest that while 2020 might have begun with the pandemic, the year raised multiple other issues. As many things have been destabilised, the nature or practice of everyday life is shifting under our feet. Around the world, people are learning how to remain more distanced from each other, and the rhythms of temporal and geographic movement are adapting to an era of the pandemic. Simultaneously, many people talk about an endlessly arriving (but never quite here) moment when things will be back to normal, implying not only that this feeling of uncertainty will fade, but also that the zone of comfort is in what was known and experienced previously, rather than in a state of something radically different. This sentiment is strong despite the general agreement that “we will never [be able to] go back to how it was, but [must] proceed to some ‘new normal’”. Still, as the participant above suggests, the pandemic has also offered a much broader challenge to wider, taken-for-granted social, political, and economic structures that underpin late capitalist nations in particular. The question then becomes: How do we imagine “moving on” from the pandemic, while learning from the disruptive yet critical moment it has offered us as a global community? Learning from Liminality I don’t want us to go back to “normal”, if that means we are just all commuting in our carbon spitting cars to work and back or traveling endlessly and without a care for the planet. COVID has made my life better. Not having to drive an hour each way to work every day—that’s a massive benefit. While it’s been a struggle, the tradeoff is spending more time with loved ones—it’s a better quality of life, we have to rethink the place of work. I can’t believe how much more I’ve been involved in huge discussions about politics and society and the planet. None of this would have been on my radar pre-COVID. What would it mean then to live with as well as learn from the reflexive sense of being and experience associated with the dis-comforts of living on and off screen, a Zoom liminality, if you will? These statements from participants speak precisely to the budding consciousness of new potential ways of being in a post-COVID-19 world. They come from a place of discomfort and represent dialectic tensions that perhaps should not be shrugged off or too easily resolved. Indeed, how might we consider this as the preferred state, rather than being simply a “rite of passage” that implies some pathway toward more stable identities and structured ways of being? The varied concepts of “becoming”, “not quite yet”, “boundary work”, or “staying with the trouble”, elaborated by Karen Barad, Andrew Pickering, Susan Leigh Star, and Donna Haraway respectively, all point to ways of being, acting, and thinking through and with liminality. All these thinkers are linked by their championing of murky and mangled conceptions of experience and more than human relations. Challenging notions of the bounded individual of rational humanism, these post-human scholars offer an often-uncomfortable picture of being in and through multiplicity, of modes of agency born out of a slippage between the one and the many. While, as we noted above, this experience of in betweenness and entanglement is often linked to emotions we perceive as negative, “ugly feelings”, for Barad et al., such liminal moments offer fundamentally productive and experimental modalities that enable possibilities for new configurations of being and doing the social in the anthropocene. Further, liminality as a concept potentially becomes radically progressive when it is seen as both critically appraising the constructed and conventional nature of prior patterns of living and offering a range of reflexive alternatives. People in our studies spoke of the pandemic moment as offering tantalizing glimpses of what kinder, more caring, and egalitarian futures might look like. At the same time, many were also surprised by (and skeptical of) the banality and randomness of the rise of commercial platforms like Zoom as a “choice” for being with others in this current lifeworld, emerging as it did as an ad hoc, quick solution that met the demands of the moment. Zoom fatigue then also suggests a discomfort about somehow being expected to fully incorporate proprietary platforms like Zoom and their algorithmic logics as a core way of living and being in the post-COVID-19 world. In this sense the fact that a specific platform has become a branded eponym for the experience of online public communicative fatigue is telling indeed. The unease around the centrality of video conferencing to everyday life during COVID-19 can in part be seen as a marker of anxieties about the growing role of decentralized, private platforms in “replacing or merging with public infrastructure, [thereby] creating new social effects” (Lee). Further, jokes and off-hand comments by study participants about their messy domestic interiors being publicized via social media or their boss monitoring when they are on and offline speak to larger concerns around surveillance and privacy in online spaces, particularly communicative environments where unregulated private platforms rather than public infrastructures are becoming the default norm. But just as people are both accepting of and troubled by a growing sense of inevitability about Zoom, we also saw them experimenting with a range of other ways of being with others, from online cocktail parties to experimenting with more playful and creative apps and platforms. What these participants have shown us is the need to “stay with the trouble” or remain in this liminal space as long as possible. While we do not have the space to discuss this possibility in this short provocation, Haraway sees this experimental mode of being as involving multiple actants, human and nonhuman, and as constituting important work in terms of speculating and figuring with various “what if” scenarios to generate new possible futures. As Haraway puts it, this process of speculative figuring is one of giving and receiving patterns, dropping threads, and so mostly failing but sometimes finding something that works, something consequential and maybe even beautiful, that wasn’t there before, of relaying connections that matter, of telling stories in hand upon hand, digit upon digit, attachment site upon attachment site, to craft conditions for flourishing in terran worlding. This struggle of course takes us far beyond decisions about Zoom, specifically. This deliberately troubling liminality is a process of recognizing old habits, building new ones, doing the hard work of reconsidering broader social formations in a future that promises more trouble. Governments, institutions, corporate entities, and even social movements like Transition Towns or #BuildBackBetter all seem to be calling for getting out of this liminal zone, whether this is to “bounce back” by returning to hyper-consumerist, wasteful, profit-driven modes of life or the opposite, to “bounce forward” to radically rethink globalization and build intensely localized personal and social formations. Perhaps a third alternative is to embrace this very transitional experience itself and consider whether life on a troubled, perhaps dying planet might require our discomfort, unease, and in-betweenness, including acknowledging and sometimes embracing “glitches” and failures (Nunes). Transitionality, or more broadly liminality, has the potential to enhance our understanding of who and what “we” are, or perhaps more crucially who “we” might become, by encompassing a kind of dialectic in relation to the experiences of others, both intimate and distant. As many critical commentators before us have suggested, this necessarily involves working in conjunction with a rich ecology of planetary agents from First People’s actors and knowledge systems--a range of social agents who already know what it is to be liminal to landscapes and other species--through and with the enabling affordances of digital technologies. This is an important, and exhausting, process of change. And perhaps this trouble is something to hang on to as long as possible, as it preoccupies us with wondering about what is happening in the lines between our faces, the lines of the technologies underpinning our interactions, the taken for granted structures on and off screen that have been visibilized. We are fatigued, not by the time we spend online, although there is that, too, but by the recognition that the world is changing. References Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke UP, 2006. Gillespie, Tarleton. Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media. Yale UP 2018. Haraway, Donna J. “SF: Science Fiction, Speculative Fabulation, String Figures, So Far.” Ada New Media 3 (2013). <http://adanewmedia.org/2013/11/issue3-haraway>. Lee, Ashlin. “In the Shadow of Platforms: Challenges and Opportunities for the Shadow of Hierarchy in the Age of Platforms and Datafication.” M/C Journal 24.2 (2021). <http://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2750>. Markham, Annette N., et al. “Massive and Microscopic Sensemaking during COVID-19 Times.” Qualitative Inquiry Oct. 2020. <https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800420962477>. Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Harvard UP, 2005. Nunes, Mark. 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