1 Optimism, Happiness and Revenge – emotion and the politics of ‘urban renewal-speak’ in an Australian suburb Dr Maree Pardy Gender Studies, School of Social and Political Sciences University of Melbourne Abstract This paper argues that through an examination of the affective and emotional dimensions of ‘urban renewal-speak’ we can see how the political mood of the present is underwritten by an investment in future happiness (often to the detriment of the present). Situating the revenge of urban renewal within this frame throws new light on the motivations of such revenge, which is cast here, not so much as retaliatory retribution, but as a desperate attachment to the optimism of renewal in the face of an unpromising neoliberalism. Keywords: Urban renewal, Footscray, revenge, revanchism, cruel optimism, happiness Introduction This paper examines the affective dimensions of urban renewal in Australia. It focuses on how emotion circulates through ‘urban-renewal-speak’ in Footscray, an inner western suburb of Melbourne. Urban renewal, considered here as a paradigm of market-led remediation, both orchestrates and coheres with an ambience of the historical present— what Raymond Williams called a ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams, 1977). As the social conditions of advanced capitalism fluctuate in the face of large scale de- industrialisation, economies increasingly turn to real estate (re)development to drive growth (Harvey, 1989; Swyngedouw, Moulaert, Rodriguez, 2002). In this precarious context, urban renewal is optimistically cast as a strategy for happy futures. This optimism is however paradoxically entwined with a host of gloomier emotions, and this paper attends in particular to the entanglement of revenge and optimism in the urban renewal of one Melbourne suburb – Footscray. I suggest the optimistic attachment to urban renewal by local and state government, and by those who are charged with its design and implementation, is one that depends on revenge to sustain it.