13.3.13
Robert Nelson, "The grass isn’t greener in the outer burbs" (7.3.13)
"To be less well-off means to endure greater hardship: less fun time and more grind; and fewer amenities and opportunities for yourself and children. In a society with egalitarian traditions, this disparity of wealth is ugly." Find article: The Conversation.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
The suburban condition is cultural. The simplistic argument of sprawl versus density misses a much more complex discussion of the economy and the environment within a cultural and political system. Employment, transport and polycentric planning are the obvious steps to ameliorate the impact that the suburban form of urbanism has upon the ecological system. To acknowledge that a suburban culture exists and has a history is an important start before retiring to the corners and come out boxing with various forms of NIMBYism. Nelson's references to France and Paris obviously miss the Anglophone tradition of suburban development that is distinctly different to the European experience of urbanism (Fisherman). The relationship between the suburban condition for the first suburban nation (Horne) and its suburban cities (Davison) of Australia and the unique ecological environment of the driest continent on earth is complex but not incomprehensible. Part of this complexity is in the cultural relationship to nature that could perhaps be particular to place rather than a general urban solution bound up in an architectural rendering of convivial density applied to global new urbanisms.
The environmental movement has been highly success in drawing upon images of our relationship to nature that shapes our understanding of place and hopefully modifies our behaviours.
I find the article by Nelson simply feeds an historic anxiety and a re-established prejudice that was broken in the 70's for just a fraction of time and ironically at the peak of the new wave of suburban expansion brought about by the car. Reading Guy Rundell's thesis on Freeway development and social movements of the 70's and 80's (written in the 1980's) there appears to have been a greater social shift that was lost or was subsumed into the political process. The impact of social movements moved away from opposition to amelioration through co-option.
Urbanism as a study and profession to inform a national policy framework about major infrastructure development is sadly missing. Without a transport solution - an alternative to the car, the suburbs will remain at the whim of the coercive flexibility of automobility. Road infrastructure is self fulfilling in its perpetuation of horizontal urbanism. The cultural question of the relationship between urbanism and nature in the Australian ecology is the fundamental question of a suburban society. To posit 'inner city' against outer suburbs is to mistake a form of tenure for an urban culture that is suburban - have a look at how regulated and self regulating our use of public space is in general whether in the streets of Melbourne or the parks of Scoresby.
Home ownership is not mentioned in the article at all yet, this is the a central part of the Australian economy and culture. The overwhelming majority own their own house, have a mortgage or want one. Public housing (now called social housing) is as little as 6% of all housing. The rest is geared to a financial and economic system that makes us all investors with vested interests in housing prices, interest rates and petrol prices each setting the other in a cycle of horizontal expansion.
The level of spatial mobility offered by the car is accompanied by the movement of people through employment, location and housing types and the use of housing as the collateral for this movement through life. The house is not a home but an investment awaiting its dividend or realisation - whether the suburban or urban. This is the given tenure that the economy relies upon and as such has to be delivered within the larger economy.
Can we move beyond the discussion of a false opposition between inner suburban or outer suburban ways of life (which are both sub urban in the best sense of the word). We don't need this falsedichotomy as the basis for a discussion of sustainability.
Post a Comment