Please Sir, I’d like something more: Response to Brendan Gleeson’s Australian Heartlands
Crisis? What crisis?
I would like something more than a cliché filled soup – with all the usual ingredients, a bit of Salt [Bernard], a dash of Birrell and Bolt, a bit of Fairfax on the side. I’m probably not the ideal reviewer for a work like this because, in Jim Schembri style, I bring my ideological baggage with me on the ride. So I’ll word this as a response, not a review.
Gleeson continues a thread of romanticism about suburbs that Fairfax and News promote every day in their different ways, but a narrative which glosses over several pertinent matters – stones in the collective shoe. The glossing over includes quotes from cultural commentators over the years, a few demographic snapshots for ‘reinforcing’. Probably catering to a market of what people want to read. But for me, I wanted something more.
Does the concept ‘suburb’ actually capture anything of note?
A suburb is not just a suburb. It isn’t here, nor is it in the real and supposed comparator countries, the Anglophone cultural source countries.
All cities have suburbs, or districts, or quarters, or whatever. Almost sine qua non. And I’ve yet to see a city that didn’t have dense bits and spread out bits; well-to-do bits and less-well-to-do bits. And most cities would have satellite settlements – bequeathed by history or of more recent, or even deliberate creation.
Some suburbs look mass-produced. Some are poor. Some have people in them who could be fairly categorised as ‘disengaged’ from the cultural movements that have captured media attention. In both senses – some might be disengaged from high-cultural pursuits, others might be disengaged by mass consumption entertainment.
Gleeson mixes the terms ‘urban’ and ‘suburban’ with careless abandon, in so doing, blurs any point he could reasonably make about suburbs. An urban area and a suburban area must by definition be different, and the latter is not shorthand for the former.
Is there a suburb versus ‘city’ distinction in Australia? Australia has no Manhattan Island, no Westminster or “The City” in the London way. No postcode 75 that the Parisians would fetish. And apart from a few core districts around the CBD grids that predate the rail and tram systems, the Surry Hills or Carlton equivalents in each, there are few suburbs that don’t owe their existence to powered transport.
Much of the false ‘attack/defence’ to which Gleeson alludes in his commentaries on suburban life over the years, the unfairly maligned, the Great Defence – relate to issues of class and status rather than suburban life per se.
Mosman and Kew are suburbs too. And no Londoner or New Yorker would disparage, from their supposed high position of attainment, life in such settlements.
The Anglophone source countries have two points of difference that are relevant though. One has worn its class and status differences openly and the other has a well developed entertainment industry that promotes an environment of prosperity and conspicuous consumption. We are far more aware of the lifestyles of the rich, famous or merely propertied of the UK and USA than we are even of our own.
That has generated a ‘vacuum’ which is filled with self-doubt and criticism in Australia.
It’s not that we lack a robust middle or working class culture – but that we have not developed an upper or ruling class with their own strong presence. Money has a habit of hiding in Australia – it hides in the rural squattocracies and the huge land banks, it hides among the semi-criminal classes of spivs and small time property developers. Some of it is probably hiding overseas, in Switzerland or China. Those who show it rarely have it, and the reverse is also true. The entertainment and sporting industries would be the rare exceptions.
I then infer the suburbs are only conspicuous in the absence of something else. Something that our own culture would place on a higher pedestal. Because we lack that thing, we are inclined to both rush to import something to fill that space, and to pull the suburbs down a peg, as if they are pretenders to an Australia that isn’t there.
Second, Gleeson romanticises the idea of life in the suburbs. Again, writing for a market I suspect. There is nothing romantic about life in suburbs; nor is there anything romantic about its putative ‘antithesis’ – life in the “City” whatever that means. People can romanticise their own lives, for their own reasons. There will always be people for whom life is hard – perhaps romanticism is their escape, or at least their reconciliation with their own tough pasts.
But others live the life of Riley. There is nothing ‘suburban’ or otherwise about these realities. You can live the life of Riley in a Sydney CBD penthouse, or in a Mosman, or Vaucluse mansion, or in a large ‘ranch-style’ house on a hilltop overlooking the ferals of Macquarie Fields or Campbelltown.
My ideological baggage includes an ‘anti-romanticism’ and a preference to choose economic explanations for behaviour over cultural ones, if the choice is there.
I am surprised he writes from a Melbourne, rather than Sydney, perspective. Suburban life in Sydney is at least genuinely tribal. Some of it is class and status, but not all of it. The different ‘well-off’ zones are known to take pot-shots at each other, and even a tribal North Shore person’s disdain for the Sylvania Waters set in the Shire would come not from the issue of money as such, but how it was obtained. In Melbourne geographic tribalism seems weaker.
And for public transport – what does Australian life actually mean for the public transport question? I would have framed and executed Roger Rabbit years ago. Far from arguing suburbia has been bad for Australian public transport, I would argue it has enabled it, and given it succour.
Of course the onset of the motor vehicle has transformed what sorts of areas could be suburbanised, and the spatial and economic relationships between city centre and suburbs.
Even then, for Australians you could argue we even received an “Indian Summer” of public transport well into the 50s and 60s that was cut short in the USA in the twenties by the earlier success of the motor vehicle there. Perhaps this Indian Summer was long enough for the suburban electric railway, a concept not widely adopted in the USA, to become entrenched.
Perhaps too long though – with electric tramways and suburban electric railways displacing from the urban ecology their natural successors, the light rail system and the heavy rail metro, which are now viable options in the USA.
The suburban railway and tramway created Australian suburbia. Those provincial cities that lacked either (and there aren’t many of those) were themselves too small to be truly cities during the relevant period, and only came of age with the motor car. I’m thinking of Canberra or Darwin.
The car versus train/bus argument has been conflated with the inner versus outer, high versus low arguments out of necessity, a false cultural conflict. I doubt there are many people in either environment who really WANT to take the train. The question is really about our collective choices.
What is economically rational – Soviet style road planning, socialistic rail and bus provision, or third world style non-provision of either mode resulting in gridlock and paralysis? None of them would be my answer. It will not be economic to provide rail to every street corner. Nor will it be economic to not provide rail at all and provide exclusively roads for private motor transport.
It may not be the “Australian way” to promote high density, rail dependence transport, but its alternative, basically the non-provision of transport as our record on roads is pretty bad too. This is the “Philippine way” or the “Thai” way if you’ve ever had to travel in either country before urban rail was instituted. There is something fundamental to the existence of a city; and that is transport.
The poor will always be with us
Much of Gleeson’s rant relates to gated communities, the rich choosing to live away from the poor as if that was not true in ancient Rome (whose Palatine Hill, the Vaucluse of the place, gave us the words Palace and Palatial) or in mediaeval London. Community cohesion is always great fun, except no-one wants to actually do it, least of all the poor.
I get the sense from the Australian polity now, that apart from a few beggars on the street corners hassling for a dollar to “get home” or whatever – the poor don’t actually ask for money. There is no broad base among the poor for income redistribution or socialism more generally. You’ll get the odd reflexive response against a public asset sale or whatever, but my sense is the middle and upper classes are just as socialised to demand subvention as the poor are.
Crisis, what crisis?
A lot of people may find they are unable to afford to buy a house, as they might have in the past. But this constant reference to the language of crisis is fatiguing, though it sells books and newsprint. There are structural changes going on to cities, and the market is sometimes failing (for example, failing to give due credit to the value of mortgages over apartments, while at the same time increasing their cost through overcapitalisation). Gleeson presents a whole set of ‘scenarios’ that require instant judgement from armchair politicians.
Back to the crisis – there is enough evidence that in fact it was quite hard for a 1950s Australian to purchase 15 squares of crudely thrown up weatherboard or blond brick. Now they whinge if they can’t have 35 squares with three bathrooms right now.
The facts also speak – how difficult it was to count a woman’s income to a mortgage, to get a home bigger than you needed, to borrow from any bank other than the one that held your own long term savings account, the lending margins and ratios were worse. And so it goes. This confected crisis suits the Right as much as the Left – the Australian ‘identity’ being compromised by faceless bureaucrats who are restricting the God-given right to buy a house.
But there are real conflicts at play
Societies are in conflict – from the trivial and mundane fight for resources that we call a market economy, to the broad brush political fights that occupy both the election space and the media/cultural space.
Many cultural commentators, Gleeson included, seem to think that a giant group hug will make these conflicts go away. It won’t, and worse, it only serves to entrench and legitimise potentially unjust positions which are the status quo. Whenever someone tells me they want a truce, a breather, from a political conflict, they only mean they want to consolidate their position; take profits; regroup to continue the battle later.
My own thinking has been heavily influenced by William Shawcross’ landmark “Deliver Us from Evil” on peacekeeping and peacemaking in the modern era. He contrasts classic peacekeeping: a neutral army interposed on the front line of two warring armies, specifically to stop skirmishes and the odd-angry shot from reigniting combat; from peacemaking – trying to stop state and non-state entities from fighting. His views are paleo-con but still persuasive: peacekeeping in the mould of the 1970s Sinai deployments or holding armistice lines in Cyprus or Korea can be effective, if the sides are generally state or quasi-state entities, if one or both parties are ‘exhausted’ or have reached a natural point of success or failure in their campaign.
The peacemaking in Bosnia, Kosovo or Congo is less effective, Shawcross argues – if the passions are unresolved, if the defeated party has yet to actually taste their own defeat, and if the victorious party has yet to actually taste victory and its perverse consequences of responsibility or opprobrium.
Of course I’m drawing a long bow to compare warfare with suburban life and the contest for the cultural/media space – but I share Shawcross’ displeasure with placing veneer over real conflicts. Conflicts represent real interests and are not stopped by group hugs.
Some is tribal, but even the tribe can have a commonality of purpose that brings it into real conflict with another tribe. Gleeson suggests the inner urban dwellers (the modern day original sinners against the “Australian way”) come out to the outer suburbs and ‘understand’ the outer types. Not sure how you can ‘understand’ people better.
He doesn’t really suggest a quid pro quo – the outer burbs people trying to ‘understand’ the inner urban crowd. A bit unfair, but a greater sign of how unrealistic he really is. A group hug is not going to make it go away.
If you want a fluffy bunny for Christmas, you should get your letter to the North Pole off pretty quick. I don’t expect fluffy bunnies in my urban planning/transport reading, and Gleeson has done his best attempt of being one.
“… the Australian ‘identity’ being compromised by faceless bureaucrats who are restricting the God-given right to buy a house”
Maybe it’s not so much the right to buy a house, as the right to secure housing. If, for instance, there was a lot more public housing, and renters had the option of long-term leases and more say in modifications to their residences, home ownership might not be held up as the be-all and end-all.
Thanks Brent. Excellent point.
I identify two points though – the ‘buy’ (why does it have to be buy?) and ‘house’ (why does it have to be house?)
Rent and buy seem to be two extremes with not much in the middle (which is not the case in commercial landholding, where contracts can specify any number of owner or tenant interventions during the lease, and the lease can be long).
And apartments are a bizarre creature in Australia. Either marketed to the very top of the market (eg Melbourne’s Docklands) or the very bottom (student boxes). And banks increasingly not accepting them as security, restricting supply further. Definitely a place in the market for government to build them, and sell them to the lower and middle parts of the market, and to investigate some sort of co-ownership (maybe a deposit paid off over 5 years)
Apartments also give another clue to the transport/planning puzzle. They are not cheap to build, but should be cheaper by the sqm than freestanding housing. Most are built on sites close to transport (consistent with govt policy) but not really delivering massive cost savings to buyers.
That suggests to me, in part, that sites close to transport are worth considerably more than those away from transport. This land value flows through to final prices.
And then if sites close to good transport are worth considerably more than those not near good transport, perhaps the market is getting jittery about future transport costs and reliability. We can’t keep consuming our transport ‘capital’ for ever.
Riccardo,
Another good post, although as usual, I don’t agree with everything you say.
I think the most glaring ommission in your analysis is that for the 71% of Australians at the 2006 Census who were born in Australia, the vast majority of them are the products of the suburban lifestyle in our major cities (for good or ill). Even many of the much-stereotyped inner-city dwellers come from the suburbs (although they escaped at the first opportunity). Thus for good or ill, most of us bear the legacy of a suburban upbringing.
For all Gleeson’s faults, he is at least one of the few public intellectuals in this country who is talking about the social (and geographical) polarisation taking place in Australian cities over the last 20 years of the bipartisan pursuit of economic rationalist social and economic policies.
And most of all, whether you agree with his thesis or not, Gleeson’s work has polarised people into comment about the state of the vast hinterlands of our capital cities. I will be taking my copy with me to read again over Christmas to keep his thoughts in mind on my biennial return to Sydney. Especially as I drive through its tired western and south-western suburbs of my youth as we quite literally survey the topography that puts aspirationals in their heavily mortgaged Macmansions perched precariously (in more ways than one) on the hills and the entrenched disadvantage of the vast reservoirs of public housing merely existing (?) over the next rise and down the next slope.
LS
Thanks LS.
I just don’t think the concept ’suburb’ has any special meaning – from either direction. Neither a term to disparage the poor or upwardly mobile, neither a badge or pride or praise.
A “false dichotomy without the dichotomy”. There is no “City” to compare it with. CBD dwellers are numerically few, politically non-influential (mostly overseas students on temp visas) and don’t enjoy a lifestyle substantially different from anyone else (except perhaps, not having a garden).
I would rather see Australian class politics “stipped bare”, naked for all the world to see. That would at least pay homage to our UK ancestors and our American cultural suppliers – both of whom are happy to bare their class differences in public. Because this isn’t really about suburbs. It’s about social class – the great taboo.
I’m a Marxist at heart. I don’t sound it sometimes, but accept Marxist fundamentals – class struggles and so on. I don’t identify suburbs with class struggles except in so far as the relevant classes have chosen to live in different ones, according to their wealth and their desire to live with like-minded people.
I’m glad Gleeson published his book – a springboard to my own thinking rather than a scaffold.
Nice to see some life here again.
Indeed, I truely am confused by Loose Shunter’s “for the 71% of Australians at the 2006 Census who were born in Australia, the vast majority of them are the products of the suburban lifestyle in our major cities (for good or ill)”. What does that mean? Is living in a suburb like Brunswick or Coburg “suburban”? Comparing them to outer suburbs and they’re nothing alike, in Australian terms (altho indistinguishable when compared to European or American cities). If you join them, then Shunter’s statement is reduced to almost meaningless (it’s true but you gain no insight from it, and learn nothing about what needs to be done or how to do it): If you separate them, then it’s false (regarding “vast majority”).
I dislike (living in) the outer suburbs. You don’t get anything you wouldn’t get if you lived in the inner or middle suburbs, but you lose proximity to, well, everything—from footy ovals and parks to the shops and the city where so many still need and want to work. You also get a street design that makes public transport workable. It forces families to need two cars, to need three or four cars. (And the wide, windy streets are harder to drive on and seem far less safe then the narrower, straight streets you find where trams are common; and the dependency outer suburbs force teenagers into does nothing to help parent-adolescent relationships; and …).
When I’ve talked to people who’ve been very excited about moving out to the middle of nowhere, they’ve only been able to say “well, at least we can afford it”—couples who want to start a life together but could never afford to buy closer in. (Mostly tho, when this happens, people very quickly work out my opinion, and might just be giving me a rational-sounding answer to get me off their backs.)
But in reality, there’s not even real cost savings to living in the outer suburbs. I think you just pay less upfront to live in the middle of nowhere, and take the rest in reduced quality of life (especially for families) and additional costs. (How much do parents actually value the extra hour a day they could spend with their kids if they lived closer in? — Of course, we could decentralise and have (more) business parks in the outer suburbs too, but unless everything else is changed that will only be of minimal help.)
Now, of course there’s no way all four million Melburnians[1] could live in the inner and middle suburbs, and still have them as inner and middle suburbs. And I’m definitely not claiming to have a workable solution, let alone a panacea (if I did, I wouldn’t be posting pseudonymously on blogs). But some aspects of solutions would be to encourage four or five storey terraces (or similar buildings) along roads with trams with some combination of ground-floor retail, commercial and residential use; real high-speed trains between Melbourne and one—at most two—major provincial cities[2]; and the introduction (by the state government) of trams—or some other high-capital public transport—into the major provincial city, to signify that the government is determined to bring it up to national significance. Increased rates in new and existing estates that reflect the true personal and social costs of living in these areas would also be worthwhile. The unprovided outer-suburban and exhausted inner-suburban infrastructure—that led to the creation of this blog and others like it—are just some of these.
[1]:—I know this is meant to be a national blog, but I prefer only to talk about what I know, and let others draw what generalisations they can—
[2]:—I would suggest starting with Ballarat, and letting Geelong continue to develop on its own, until Victorians are accustomed to the idea of multiple major and independent cities,
Riccardo, I’ll have to get back to you on substantives here, because I’ve no more than flicked through my Gleeson, and you didn’t leave page/chapter numbers for me to reference where you are critiquing him.
On the meaning of “suburb” though… the original definition is a useful one I think – of a dormitory community economically dependent on a central area. The question is: to what extent are Australian “suburbs” actually suburbs, in that sense? There are numerous works that argue that outer areas of cities are increasingly economically independent – William Bogart’s “Don’t Call it Sprawl” is a good example, and the (sometimes shoddy) work of Kevin O’Connor here.
I would argue that the true suburbs are actually the middle urban areas – Kew, Camberwell, Brighton – where people do commute into the city in high numbers, and daily life rotates around the CBD. One of the big misconceptions of people in the inner/middle suburbs (and Alexander’s comment above is a good example) is that people in outer areas are living like them, dependent on the CBD, and therefore travelling long distances to work; that that distance separates them from cultural influences (and therefore makes them ignorant). Whereas the stats show that in the outer suburbs 80-90% of people are working or going to school in adjacent municipalities, their cultural influences are local (but important to them) and they travel only rarely to the CBD and surrounds.
What that means for transport I am not sure. Good, fast transport has both a decentralising effect (people can live further away in general without a reduction in travel times) and a centralising effect (the value of living close to a transport node is higher). The car-dependency of the outer areas derives from the uniformity of its density, and the scale of its small trips. Whereas a true suburb, being dependent is better suited to public transport, connecting the suburb to its core.
So coming back to the original question: I think the term suburb is useful, carefully defined, but I don’t know if it is relevant. Were true suburbs a brief trend of the early 20th century, economically destined to diversify, and through car-travel to sprawl? Can we recreate a true suburban system? Would we want to?
One of the big misconceptions of people in the inner/middle suburbs (and Alexander’s comment above is a good example) is that people in outer areas are living like them, dependent on the CBD, and therefore travelling long distances to work
I was basing my comment only on my own experience, as I said; I doubt there’s any misconceptions, except perhaps that you’ve overgeneralised it. Everyone I’ve known who’s moved to the outer suburbs, and the majority of people I’ve known who’ve lived there, lived in the city as a whole, and not just their local area. This includes people who work a ten minute walk from where their house is in outer parts of town.
I have known people who’ve lived in inner and outer parts of town, who had ties predominantly in their local area. It’s probable this is more common in outer areas, and it’s also highly likely that I’m not going to meet anything like a representative sample of these people wherever you’re talking about, because (as I establish below) I live in the whole city, not just one corner of it, and have for my whole life.
In any case, overcrowded trains and freeways and outersuburban car dependence say “something’s wrong”.
(I for my part have lived in both the middle and the outer suburbs, went to school in the inner suburbs, went to uni in an outer-ish suburb, and worked in inner and outer-ish suburbs.)
[Concerning your "original question", I'm uncomfortable using "suburb", in Australia, with any but its conventional definition. Trying to extend foreign/"original" understandings to Melbourne or Australian cities is probably just going to lead to confusion. In particular, we haven't had the same political circumstances that's given American cities/suburbs like Washington DC or European cities like Paris their particular distinctions. I doubt Australia's ever had "true suburbs".]
THanks to all.
Russ, I’m troubled by the idea that the people in the outer zone don’t ‘depend’ on the city. Clearly they do.
If they didn’t, they should be indifferent between living there and in some other settlement eg a provincial city with the same lifestyle characteristics, employment and so on. They don’t appear indifferent at all, they seem very much like they are depending on the city.
It maybe a degrees of separation thing.
A city needs a Supreme Court for example. The court needs judges, who may well live in Bri11ghton and Kew (I’ll use Melbourne examples, but maybe insert Killara, Kenmore, the Adelaide Hills or whatever takes your fancy). Some lawyers who might also live in Brighton or Kew, Some clerks and staff who are probably less well paid. Probably Mitcham or Mentone for them. Still highly dependent on the CBD for their daily work.
Now you could get on your Alan Jones/Neil Mitchell soapbox and rail against such people ‘out of touch’ blah blah blah with the salt of the earth in Narre Warren or whatever. Fact is, you may not be one yourself, or have one move in your social circles.
But you are unlikely to be more than 2-3 degrees of separation from them, and if you run a business in the outer burbs, or do some other outer suburban thing, you are fundamentally dependent on the society that institutions like the Supreme Court maintain.
The working class and the modern day ‘aspies’ can fantasise they can survive without the middle class, just like Douglas Adams Gulgafricham with their Ark B full of middle class people being expelled.
The paradigm of cities was always that the rulers needed a class of literate, consistent and stable advisers and managers to manage the wealth and prosperity, to leave the rulers free to rule. The unfortunate side effect of employing an auxiliary class is their habit of consistency (disliking arbitrariness), their literacy (meaning no conveniently short memory).
Also what’s the whole Pakenham thing about if there is no dependency on the CBD? Why are the Hills in Sydney whinging about transport to the city if it is not needed (only local)
Why are they whinging that the trains are full if no-one needs them?
Sounds like they do, and sounds like the government actually thinks large numbers of middle class, CBD dependent people may well end up at the 60km mark, with no plan from government on how to move all these people about.
For all its faults, there was at least a plan a few years ago for a third track to Dandenong, which would have provided considerable express train potential in peak times (I’ll ignore the downside of this for the moment). Now that’s gone, but no let up to the amount of development east of Dandenong.
Alexander
Thanks for your comments.
I think it is more pertinent to ask yourself if you don’t like life in the outer suburbs, and it is because of things ‘missing’ that would be in an inner suburb – why are these things missing?
Transport being front and centre.
I tend to lean towards Mees “Very Public Solution” view that there was a post WWII belt that just didn’t get the same level of public transport provision that the pre WWII belt got.
A lot of Melburnians point to the tramway network as a sign of a not quite-TUAG service provided 18/7/365 and indicate that is the benchmark. In fact, pre WWII, that was what all genuinely suburban services (train and bus too) would have been like, excepting odd services like White City.
Much of 1960s onwards developed-Melbourne was never provided with this level of service, and this continues to this day. South Morang, as far as we know, will continue this trend, as Cranbourne and Westona extensions did. And they sing and dance about providing the 900 series bus routes, as if that level of service was something special.
And what about other services. Again, many of the post-WWII suburbs never got strip shops, that provide SOME retail diversity that is otherwise lacking. They never had the little picture theatres which, though gone now mostly from cities, at least left behind in some cases the sorts of cafe and eaterie strips that are now popular.
While I’m convinced sprawl is bad from a transport and environment p.o.v, I’m not necessarily convinced it is bad from a soci-cultural p.o.v (but that’s not to say it is good either). Many traditional cultures in Europe and Asia retain their cultural habits in their ’sprawls’ – Thai food in Bangkok’s suburbs is still Thai, after all. But you won’t be looking in Bangkok’s suburbs for their high-achievers, their cultural icons, their people with good taste. They’ll be in the social class that can afford better.
Can we have some Brisbane or Perth examples people? I’ll try and skip Melbourne for a while.
Are there cost savings from living in the outer suburbs? I think so. A mortgage on $700,000 isn’t exactly DOUBLE one of $350,000, but it’s probably not far off. A yearly train ticket in Brisbane from Cleveland would be about $2200, I suspect one tenth of the difference between the two mortgages. If two people travel, then one fifth. There would be other cost differences too, probably more minor.
The difference is though that you need to earn three dollars to be able to pay off one dollar worth of mortgage (income to debt repayment rules from the banks), while you only need to earn a single dollar to be able to pay for a single dollar worth of transport costs.
I am a supporter of sprawl, and I am of the view that the major problem has been that transport has not been put in place prior to the houses going up. My support mostly stems from a desire for house prices to go back down to levels that we saw in the late 1990s; in Auckland, for instance, an average three bedroom house of around ninety square metres, goes for over $400,000 – to service the sort of associated mortgage, you need an annual household income of over $100,000. Of course, that is at the lower end of the spectrum and can be extremely hard to find – a higher priced house obviously requires a much larger income, and annual incomes of over $60,000 in New Zealand are still reasonably rare.
Alexander,
There’s nothing confusing about what I said, just an assumption that in Australia we could reasonably call growing up on a detached house on a block of more than 3-400 square metres a ’suburban’ upbringing. That definitely encapsulates my experience growing up in the outer suburbs of Sydney (and my wife’s experience in the outer suburbs of Melbourne) and the majority of my friends from school and university who I still see. I see the kind of housing in parts of nominally inner suburbs such as Coburg (or Preston for that matter) as suburban, with the detached house on a decent sized block. And the dwelling types and lot sizes are similar to the places in Sydney I grew up in like Marayong and Ingleburn which were much further out than where I live now in Melbourne. And look at the Census data. It tells that story about where the children live and it’s not the inner city – it’s the middle and outer suburbs, even the migrant kids. Thus most of us are products of a suburban upbringing (that is living in detached houses on reasonable sized blocks of land).
I agree with Russ’ assertion that the assume that people living in the middle and outer suburbs are focused on the CBD through employment and other factors is a fairly tenuous one. People’s worlds tend to be more tightly geographically focused as they grow older, as family and children tie them to schools or support networks or employment ties them to make locational decisions that place them near the centre of their ‘world’. The ‘living in the whole city’ tends to be an exception rather than the rule. For example, in the four years I’ve lived in Melbourne, I’ve travelled more to the east and south of Melbourne for work than for leisure. Similarly, when I lived in Sydney, I rarely went north of the Harbour unless I had to for work and only went back to the outer south-west to visit family. My world was mostly south of the harbour and within 10kms of the CBD.
Just as you claim I make unsupported assumptions, you assume that people living in the outer suburbs:
pay less upfront to live in the middle of nowhere, and take the rest in reduced quality of life (especially for families) and additional costs.
So that writes off the professional class (doctors, solicitors, public servants, executives, etc) and the self-employed tradespeople and contractors that live in the outer suburbs and urban fringes for the ‘lifestyle’ benefits of living in a good, 2-storey house on a larger than average block that’s a short drive to work and ‘quality’ private schools – places like St Andrews, Prariewood, bits of Camden or Macquarie Links in Sydney for example. For those people, living where they live is a lifestyle decision that puts a higher value on the bigger ‘new-style’ house on a good-sized block of land with room for 2-4 cars and other lifestyle ‘vehicles’ (trail bikes, jetskis, etc) than public transport, ‘cafe culture’, ‘high culture’ (opera, theatre) and the like. I’m not saying that those decisions are right or wrong in that context, they’re just the decisions people make.
The thing is, that while many of us grew up in the ’suburban’ lifestyle (detached house on reasonably-sized block of land, etc), many of us don’t necessarily want to go back there for a myriad of reasons that could be social, cultural, economic or otherwise. But that upbringing still guides people’s housing choices and locational decision making even in pushing against that lifestyle (to living in more compact townhouses and flats) because that was where our attitudes and opinions were formed.
LS
Also, in thinking some other thoughts on the city/suburb divide, travel statistics tell an interesting story. The Origin-Destination (OD) travel data for Melbourne (from VATS and VISTA) has consistently showed over the last decade that the majority of travel in Metro Melbourne is intra-regional travel.
At an aggregate level, that means that (for example) 78% of travel on the metro fringe, 80% of travel within the middle suburbs and 66% of travel within the inner suburbs (CBD excluded) of Melbourne takes place wholly within those areas. The role of the CBD and the inner core of Melbourne accounts for relatively little (about 7%) of overall travel demand in Melbourne as a whole. This is the market that PT dominates, but it is relatively small in terms of the rest of the economic and travel activity taking place in Melbourne.
LS
If I might add my thoughts on the issue of ’suburbia’ and ’sprawl’, I think it is important to make a few distinctions.
Is the suburb defined by its housing stock of separate single family homes set on lawns and gardens? Is the suburb defined by monofunctional residential zoning? Is it simply defined by the age (post WWII perhaps?) or location within the metropolis? Is it defined by the makeup of its residents, the tendency toward nuclear families of parents with young children? Is it defined by a curvilinear, cul-de-sac street layout with a strong hierarchy or roads, and the resulting dependency on private cars and difficulties with walking, cycling and the provision of public transport? Is it defined by easy road access but a lack of good train, tram or bus services? Is a suburb growth anywhere on the edge of the city? Or is a suburb just anywhere that isn’t the once central commercial district?
Any of these things can really make a place a suburb in my opinion, and when you get all of them in the one place it starts to become ‘sprawl’. But like John-ston I don’t think suburb or sprawl is necessarily a bad thing (although I don’t agree with his ideas on housing affordability), or to put it another way I don’t have any particular issue with the concept of urban expansion or primarily residential areas per se. I think the current problem facing Australasian cities is that suburban growth occurs without older concepts that made the suburb more of a village, that is to say local shopping and services that were accessible on foot, effective public transport connections to nearby suburbs and the city at large, and a level of employment opportunities within the local area.
The family home on a full sized section regularly gets demonised among ‘progressive’ planning circles, but I think this is the least problematic part of the suburban composition. People seem to get so hung up on gross residential population density and backyards that they seem to forget all the other factors of land use and transport that make up a suburban area.
LS, I would say the market in which PT dominates (or at least has the easy potential to) is not just those trips to the CBD and inner core, but trips along the radial corridors that head toward the centre. From my own quick analysis of census journey-to-work data in Melbourne, it seems that the vast majority of work trips that go beyond the local area still follow the radial corridors. I would like to see some more rigorous analysis on this topic, because at first glance it appears the idea of modern journeys (to work at least) being widely dispersed cross town and ’suburb to suburb’ trips is largely a myth. I recall hearing that only one in three trips on the Melbourne rail network has an origin or final destination on the city loop, two thirds of trips don’t involve the CBD.
From the last quarter of the 19th century until the car started sprawling US cities, Melbourne was one of the most spread out cities in the world because it spread along the railways and later the tram lines. This is often forgotten. It is possible to have non-small gardens and PT.
I think Tom has cut straight to the heart of the problem in respect to Australian cities (and cities around the world) – it is the technologies of mechanical transport (trains, trams, cars, buses even bicycles) that allowed the spread of our cities beyond walking distance in the 19th and 20th centuries.
I’m reading Christian Wolmar’s The Underground Railway at the moment, and he draws quite well the link between the construction of the Metropolitan Railway’s lines to link up with some of the mainlines north of London through what was effectively ‘countryside’ provided the means for property developers to cross the idealistic urban planning of Ebenezer Howard and his ‘Garden City’ with capitalist property development to create the kind of suburbia (large blocks of land with detached or semi-detached housing linked by rail to the central core) that transplanted easily to Australia and the US.
LS
On housing affordability -I still think it is somewhat a furphy – and that’s as someone who finds it as much of an impost to pay off the mortgage as the next guy.
But fundamentally there is a market for housing.
Some market failure, admittedly, but sellers and buyers are exchanging at the market price and market clearing quantity.
Who’s buying? (given we are told no-one can afford to, this can’t be right?) Who’s selling? I go to Melbourne’s fringe there are thousands of blocks for sale, whole developments like Lakeside at Pakenham or Hunt CLub at Cranbourne and so on.
They sell well but there are still plenty left and plenty more on the drawing board.
I’m just not convinced there is a land shortage.
What I DO see though is the price of developing land is higher than it once was, because sealed roads, phone on, compulsory sewerage, stuff that wasn’t mandatory in the 70s, now is.
I won’t buy into the development levy issue.
Frankly, if there is an extra tax/municipal rate that wasn’t there before, then that’s the end of the matter. Demand being suppressed by a tax. Nothing new there and even that is a partial analysis.
What other taxes would be raised, or services suffer, if this tax wasn’t there?
As for the houses themselves, people ARE demanding bigger and better houses than before. This is a capitalisation issue.
With money becoming worthless as central banks print more of it (and I’m not being simplistic, this is actually what’s going on) people see the tangible value in houses (though they are depreciating asset, the house has ‘positional’ value, ordinal value, against other houses in the market) and want to store value in houses.
And the old Salt is probably right about one thing – why wouldn’t you capitalise a lot of social value into your own house (your ‘lifestyle’) while governments underinvest in the public sphere?
If our transport system does end up as bad as Bangkok in future and you can’t move anywhere, the middle and upper classes will need more activities they can undertake at home.
This is what jacks me off about Australia. Underinvestment. It’s not that we prefer road over rail. We ‘prefer’ neither. It’s not that we prefer quantity over quality. We ‘prefer’ neither. It’s not that we spend money on ourselves at the expense of on our community – compared with other societies I am familiar with, I see neither.
When Dave Warner from the Suburbs sang his one hit wonder in the 1970s “Suburban Boy” he used the line “I’m just a suburban boy…I’ve been rejected every night…I’m sure that it must be, easier for boys from the City”
Do people agree that is a bit artificial (and was in the 70s)? I mean there’s no Manhattan v New Jersey/Connecticut/Long Island split here in Australia. Or is there? And does it matter?
Can anyone speak with experience that their 1970s home in Fitzroy or Darlinghurst or the Valley somehow gave them some cred with the ladies/whoever that Lindfield or Balwyn or Fig Tree Pocket wouldn’t have done?
In response to your post Riccardo, I would suggest that there is a very strong split on this side of the Tasman, particularly in Auckland and Wellington. In Wellington, for instance, you have a very strong split between the Hutt, Porirua and Wellington itself. In Auckland, again, there is a very strong split between South Auckland, the North Shore, Remuera/Epsom, the Eastern Bays/Eastern Beaches and West Auckland.
For overseas readers, in Australia it’s much harder to define The City vs The Suburbs, due to the main cities consisting of several small local council areas (Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth), or most areas within the city boundary being suburban by any measure (Brisbane, Qld Coast, Canberra). Three cities have areas which are unambiguously the inner city, corresponding with the ABS definitions: Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Beyond this, it gets subjective, often based on arbitrary measures such as radius from the GPO, or which side of a major road you’re on (such as Warrigal Rd in Melbourne).
Whoops, “Qld Coast” should be “Gold Coast”
Thanks BP and John-ston
Wellington really has it in some ways – the road and rail runs along a bayside ’shelf’ to get to Hutt with little or no housing along that corridor, and tunnels through the mountains to get to Porirua, complete separation from the suburbs in a way paralleled in Australia only by the NSW Central Coast and Sydney.
Auckland I’m not so sure about. I think it’s a bit of the “Logan” effect, people get so used to trashing the reputation of a couple of areas like West and South Auckland that it starts to stick. Reminscent of Los Angeles. Suburbs that area as much part of the city as any other suburbs but socially labelled to make them sound as if they aren’t.
And like Los Angeles, you can smell racism on the lips of Aucklanders when they talk about suburbs. Even watching the Maori TV dramas where the words “Ministry of Social Welfare” such things are voiced in English between the Maori lines. I got the impression this is the big deal in Waitakere and Manukau, and not in North Shore or the East.
Agree with BP that Brisbane, despite being a unitary LGA, is no better able to split out the City from the Suburbs than the others. And the borderlands around Goodna, Eight Mile Plains, Strathpine and so on, don’t appear any different on one side of the boundary or the other.
I would suggest the ‘mythology’ of a City is basically a few uni students who, like myself, managed to live in the likes of Glebe for a while and pretend it was so much more fashionable than other places. And it was. It had all the things an inner urban teeming with students would be expected to have. Stuff that Macquarie Uni and even UNSW missed out on.
But I suspect it is making a virtue of a bad situation. We were crammed together in old houses for lack of money. There is a romance to that lifestyle but it is only because lack of money and desire not to commute from the outer burbs or beyond for Uni. If I and my friends had had more money, we might have chosen better housing in Glebe (the wonderfully named Forest Lodge is where I was).
Auckland is currently split into LGA’s that follow major geographic divisions. The so called “Auckland City” is on the central isthmus, while North Shore City is across the harbour to the north, Waitakere City (West Auckland) across the Whau River and creek to the west, the Howick side of Manukau City is across the Tamaki river/inlet to the south east and the rest of Manukau across the Manukau harbour to the south.
There is also a very clearly defined border of the CBD, due to the barrier formed by the encircling motorways and the cuttings and gullies they run through.
However, none of these definitions really separates the city from the suburbs. The legal boundary of the Auckland City Council is far too broad, while it contains the CBD and the central area it covers some 200 sq.km of suburbs and industrial parks also. Likewise the common border of the CBD is to narrow. Certainly this takes in most of the office towers, but it leaves out the office and retail precinct of Newmarket, the mixed use fringe area of Eden Terrace, the old village of Parnell and the hip ‘inner city’ residential zones of Ponsonby and Grey Lynn.
There seems to be tacit agreement among Aucklanders that an area like Ponsonby is ‘inner city’ while a place such as nearby Westmere is not.
I think the definition is actually very simple, and I imagine this holds true for any Australasian city: anywhere within the initial ‘walking city’ bounds of the old town is considered the city, i.e. basically anywhere within 3-4 kilometres of the main street/first commercial and retail precinct and the old docks
This isn’t just a case of drawing a line on a map, it is a functional border formed by the extent a contiguous city can grow without mechanised transport. It is characterised by an often chaotic fine-grained street grid, mostly exant compact dense housing with historical value and resulting ‘coolness’, mixed uses including former light industry and a general lack of large roads and highways (or at least only those that have been ‘bowled through’ after the area had already developed). Riccardo, I assume that uni students flock to true inner city areas not only because they tend to be adjacent to major premier universities, but also because they were originally built back when cars and buses did not exist, people walked for travel and there were plenty of local amenities. Those inner city areas were designed for car-free residents and low travel distances/times, and thus they are perfectly suited to impoverished young students.
I’d suggest this is true for Sydney, where Paddington is in the city but Bondi Junction is in the suburbs, Glebe is ‘city’; but I assume Leichardt is ‘suburb’ (albeit an old one). And Melbourne too Richmond is in but Hawthorn out, Clifton Hill in and Northcote out.
Officially Paddington is in the Eastern Suburbs, by virtue of being in Woollahra Council’s area.
Thanks NickR and BP
NickR, I had assumed Newmarket would be ‘core’ – and it is your second railway station for Auckland, the confluence of 2 lines and a major destination in its own right.
Parnell looked very wild to me, far more trees than I was expecting and a bit rough and abandoned from the rail line. I know there is contention about where the steam locos are going, it didn’t look much of a place for them. Better to see some development at Parnell. I gather the rail line is too steep for a station, is that right?
Newmarket isn’t usually considered part of the Auckland CBD by virtue of being on the wrong side of the motorway and the Domain, but in terms of it’s form and function it very much is
The Parnell debate is whether to build the station adjacent to the Mainline Steam workshops in the section of forested gully between the old village main street and the Domain, or whether to build it on the elevated section 400m further down the track, just before the rail line overpasses Carlaw Park Avenue. Apparently either site is feasible in terms of grade and constructability.
In my opinion the Carlaw Park site wins hands down on all fronts.
The ‘Parnell Gully’ camp argue that the station should first and foremost service the Parnell Village and the Domain, so they want it stuck between the two and redevelop the old steam sheds as some kind of T.O.D.
However this location in the bottom of an often dark, isolated tree filled gully with no direct road or bus accessibility. The foot access up to the main street is a very steep climb up some narrow back streets, while the foot access to the Domain involves a 500m hike up a hill on dirt path through the bush. If you put a classic 400m radius around this site about half of it is bush covered reserve land, a quarter historic residential cottages and only a quarter is mixed use industry/apartments/main street.
On the other hand, the Carlaw Park site is elevated, open and directly adjacent to major ‘Link’ bus routes on Parnell Rise. It is a slightly longer but more direct and less steep walk up to the Parnell Village, and access to the Domain path network is just as close (that is to say still not very good). This site is immediately next to the large development site of the old Carlaw Park stadium, and more importantly it is only some 300m as the crow flies from the university campus. If you put the 400m radius down here you get the university, part of the legal precinct, a much larger proportion of existing intensive mixed use, a small portion of park reserve and also a large swathe of land shceduled for redevelopment around The Strand and lower Stanley St.
I saw Brendan Gleeson on
http://news.sbs.com.au/insight/episode/index/id/167
recent Insight program on housing issues
He came across as a strong, knowledgable and credible speaker – so I’m very surprised his book was an attack of the fluffy bunnies.
If he’d mounted the substance of his comments tonight as his main argument in his book, would have come across a lot better.
A much more empirical argument rather than appeal to an Australian nostalgia that’s run its course.