Governing disassembly in Indigenous housing

Without proper attention, houses disassemble. In public housing, property management regimes are charged with performing the repairs and maintenance necessary to combat this entropic tendency. This article argues that such governance regimes can accelerate housing’s disassembly, through rules that restrict housing interventions, bureaucratic technologies that misrecognize housing failure, and processes that defer and delay necessary fixwork. It analyzes Indigenous housing in the Northern Territory of Australia, in terms of three specific legal-bureaucratic instruments and the temporalizations they constitute: the lease and promise; the tender and repetition; the condition report and waiting. The article considers the effects of these pairings in Alice Springs town camps and the challenge of thinking beyond bureaucratic housing regimes.