Given the increasingly polarising debate (not least within Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities) over how recognition might look, this is a prescient and timely book that considers coexistence in both the Australian and Canadian urban contexts.

It considers the experiences of four Indigenous communities in British Columbia and Australia that are testing and renegotiating the use of traditional but now urbanised lands and how governments and planning authorities respond.

They write: “Our aim ... is to examine what actually happens when planning systems meet the claims and struggles of Indigenous peoples, as well as when they interact with now well-established settler-state mechanisms that purportedly seek to redress these claims.”

In tackling the coexistence anomalies between Indigenous cultures and state bureaucracies, the authors’ starting point is an acknowledgment of the “contradiction that underlies the contemporary situation of every settler-colonial state: Indigenous people and non-Indigenous settlers co-occupy place, and yet they do so in a ways that are rarely common with each other and often fundamentally different”.

Chapter two – the aptly named “A Meditation of Discomfort” – sets the scene for the practical examples of how urban coexistence actually looks, at their best and for their faults, in Australia and Canada. And it is the uncomfortable question of what forms recognition of Indigenous presence might take in urban coexistence and land use that forms the framework for this examination.

They talk of a pervading deep inequity in power relationships between Indigenous interests and planning bodies, even though authorities do have ways of recognising Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and Native Canadian interests.

“The asymmetry of these power relations runs deep, producing and reproducing colonial ways of being seeing and acting. Under these conditions the struggle for coexistence is reduced to a struggle for inclusion: something that can be recognized through a procedural or institutional fix and can accommodate an Indigenous Other within an existing legal or political order.”

Porter drills into the experience of Indigenous people in Melbourne, “built on the unceded and unrecognised country of Aboriginal nations, with Melbourne’s built-up area largely over the country of Wurundjeri people”.