UHPH Keynotes

Simon Barber Papatūānuku (Earth Mother) and the Grammar of Private Property 

Robert Freestone Imagining and contesting planned urban futures: The legacies and lessons of an unbuilt Sydney

Julie McIntyre

Title TBA

Simon Barber (Kāi Tahu) is a lecturer in Sociology at Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka | University of Otago. He is a student of Indigenous thought and politics, Marxist and critical theory, black studies, communism, and conjunctions thereof. He completed his Masters at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London and his doctorate in the Centre for Research Architecture, also at Goldsmiths. As part of his doctoral research he undertook a postgraduate diploma in Ahunga Tikanga (Māori Laws and Philosophy) at Te Wānanga o Raukawa in Ōtaki. Simon co-edited a book with Miri Davidson (Through That Which Separates Us, 2021) centred around themes of deportation, incarceration, and colonialism. In a series of academic articles he continues to think through and describe possible contours of an Indigenous historical materialism. Simon is a researcher for Economic and Social Research Aotearoa and is a member of the Māori Association of Social Science

Robert Freestone is Professor of Planning in the School of Built Environment at the University of New South Wales. He is uniquely a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences of Australia, Australian Academy of Humanities, Planning Institute of Australia, and the Institute of Australian Geographers. His sole-authored and collaborative books include Community Green (2024), Campus (2023), Iconic Planned Communities and the Challenges of Change (2019), Designing the Global City (2019), Planning Metropolitan Australia (2018), Place and Placelessness Revisited (2016), Urban Nation (2010), Urban Planning in a Changing World (2000), and Model Communities (1989). He is a former president of the International Planning History Society and in 1993 convened a symposium in Sydney on ‘The Australian Planner’ which led to the UHPH conference series.

Julie McIntyre is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Newcastle. She researches the relationship between commodity production, distribution and consumption centred on grape wine, people, plants and place. Research for her new book for Princeton University Press on Australia in global context has led to her interest in the origins of land title regulations as an instrument for enabling settler colonial agriculture while excluding Indigenous people from their ancestral lands.