Community centres as social infrastructure: how managers strategically maintain diversity while funders invest in homogenisation
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Keywords: Infrastructure, social inclusion, diversity, community centres, investment regimes
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract
Authors:
Ellen van Holstein, RMIT University, Melbourne
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Abstract
Community centres are an essential form of social infrastructure in Australian cities and internationally, because, unlike community spaces that are designed to provide a particular service, community centres can welcome anyone. As a result, community centre staff are a first port of call for people who experience isolation or who require support. The open-door policy of community centres provides a unique space for neighbourhood residents to meet and develop alliances across axes of difference. However, government and philanthropic funders increasingly encourage community centres to develop specialised programmed activities for specific disadvantaged user groups such as migrants or people with disability. The paper presents the findings from focus groups with community centre managers from three Australian metropolitan regions whose residents experience relative disadvantage. In these focus groups, managers contrasted their strategies for maintaining diversity in their centres. This paper analyses the government policy settings to which they respond as a form of infrastructure investment and views the work of protecting the conditions for participation in community centre activities as infrastructure maintenance. As such, the paper offers an analysis that works across the domains of government and the community sector to foreground the multiple practices that shape conditions of infrastructure use. It argues for attention in research on social infrastructure for the investment and maintenance work that transforms neighbourhood spaces into places in which connections and belonging can be forged and the role this work plays in shaping infrastructures that support inclusion and diversity.
Community centres as social infrastructure: how managers strategically maintain diversity while funders invest in homogenisation
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Paper Abstract