‘This is our home’: young residents’ representations of Melbourne’s public housing towers during ‘hard lockdown’
Patrick O’Keeffe, Kathryn Daley
Abstract
On 4 July 2020, in response to a developing ‘second wave’ of COVID-19 cases, Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews announced that a hard lockdown would be immediately implemented in nine public housing towers in Melbourne, Australia. Approximately 500 police were dispatched to implement this lockdown, with residents prevented from leaving their buildings. Over the next fortnight, young residents in these towers, often from socially- and economically-marginalised communities, emerged as advocates for their fellow tenants, using various social media platforms to broadcast their experiences. In this article, we analyse social media posts published by 28 social media users throughout June and July of 2020, which reported on the experiences of people living within the public housing towers during the hard lockdown. We draw on the concept of territorial stigmatisation tounderstand and frame how a traditionally stigmatised physical space is reclaimed via a digital medium. We explore the potential for young people to use social media to challenge territorial stigmatisation and construct alternate representations of place and community.