Prefiguration is fertile: Ecocultural change at the edges of property. A research study of eco-collaborative housing communities in Australian cities and towns.

Real property involves legal rights held in relation to land. This form of property is an ecocultural institution that, through its dominant enactments and in Western/ised contexts, produces ecologically maladaptive, individualised, settler-colonial, and anthropocentric human relations with land, and within their wider ecologies and society. This research applies ecocultural discourse as an analytical lens to understand ways that real property is already being, and might continue to be, performed differently to these dominant enactments. With an empirical focus on various non-dominant property practices that are collectively known as eco-collaborative housing communities, this thesis asks, “how do eco-collaborative housing communities produce ecocultural change?” In responding to this question, this thesis presents qualitative data collected from twenty eco-collaborative housing communities situated in Australian cities and towns to forefront how these communities perform and prefigure (that is, enact hoped-for futures in the here and now) real property in ways that are counter to its dominant enactments. These counter discursive practices include examples of ways that real property can be more adaptive to place, relational rather than separative, respectful of Indigenous land relations, and which move toward ecocentric ways of being and doing. Rather than framing real property as a fundamentally flawed ecocultural institution, this research illustrates ways that prefigurative performances of non-dominant property practices (such as through eco-collaborative housing communities) constitute important sites for production of counter-to-dominant ecocultural discursive practices that are implicated, in turn, in the ongoing production of regenerative ecocultural change. In so doing, this thesis contributes to property scholarship and practices that nurture such change through the reworking of property from within—albeit from the ecocultural edges of—the property system itself.