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Australia’s cities are at a historic turning point. For almost two centuries our dreams of the good urban life were powerfully shaped by the suburban dream. A detached house standing in its own ground, preferably owned by the householder, and secluded from the noise, stench, over-crowding and pollution of the inner city, was the goal of most Australian families. It was not only our dream; more than any other society on earth we realised it. Our cities were among the most suburbanised on earth.
The word ‘suburb’ – sub-urb_ originally meant a region outside or literally under the city. In pre-industrial times it was kind of wasteland beyond the city walls reserved for gaols, military barracks, cemeteries and lunatic asylums. Only in the first half of the nineteenth century did the suburb become respectable. It was rescued by four great contemporary ideas: Evangelicalism made the family home into a haven against a heartless world. Contemporary medicos preached the benefits of living beyond the smoke and stench of the city. Romanticism praised the beauties of nature and semi-rural seclusion. And the middle class responded to the threat of working class crime and political turmoil by retreating to the safety of the suburbs.
England invented the modern suburb: Australia’s achievement was to democratize it . As early as the 1830s, real estate agents in Sydney and Melbourne were pitching their advertisements for new suburban estates to workingmen as well as shopkeepers, merchants and landowners. Rates of home-ownership in Australian towns and cities were higher than in any other society on earth. We built our cities around railways and tramways rather than having to superimpose them on already built-up areas. By 1890, Melbourne had higher per capita rates of public transport usage than London or New York. Cars may have helped our cities to spread but they were not the primary reason for it, nor, I would argue, will making our cities denser necessarily do much to make us get out of our cars.
Almost from the first, the suburbs had their enemies. Interestingly the anti-suburbanites often accepted the logic of the suburbanites; they just applied a different value system. Where the suburbanites saw domestic bliss the anti-suburbanites saw domestic captivity. Where the suburbanites saw security, the critics saw insularity. Where the suburbanites saw social harmony their adversaries saw suffocating conformity. In the last chapter of his monumental History of Australia, written no doubt in the upstairs study of his house in suburban Forrest, Manning Clark castigated the outlook of the people among whom he nevertheless chose to live most of his life. The Australia suburb, he tells us, echoing the intellectual prejudice, was ‘the Kingdom of Nothingness’.
I’m not for or against the suburb, but I’m sceptical of some of the common prejudices against it. The besetting sin of both the friends and the enemies of the suburb is their uncritical attachment to a kind of physical determinism. They attribute too much to physical form, too little to social function. It is surprising how many intellectuals who would be indignant if you suggested that their terraces in Newtown or Fitzroy were slums, still sneer at the suburbs as refuges of all that is dull, insular, conformist and politically brain-damaged.
By the early twentieth century, the ideals that created the Victorian suburb began to fade. Evangelical religion secularised into respectability. The nuclear family ceased to be the standard of domestic life. Medical science discarded the belief that density produced disease. Romanticism was challenged by modernisnism.
In the 1970s the enemies of the suburban idea began to get the better of its friends Gentrification persuaded the babyboomers that density was more delightful than dangerous and in reaction they damned the suburbs they had left. Most Australian cities are now committed to policies of urban consolidation, designed to meet new economic, environmental and political agendas. Neo-liberal doctrines of small government have made federal, state and local authorities reluctant to provide infrastructure to support new suburban developments. Urban consolidation is a marriage of convenience between dries and Greens. Until the 70s both federal and state governments subsidised suburban expansion. Babyboomers living in built-up suburbs continue to enjoy their bounty with good parks, schools, kindergartens and health services. But their children, who seek in the time-honoured way to settle in the new suburbs, get no such support. The landscape of the Australian city, once a map of class and ethnic difference, now provides startling evidence of generational inequality.
Declining birthrates, rising rates of female employment and increasing numbers of single-member households have curbed the demand for the traditional suburban house and garden. But, most importantly perhaps, the suburbs now have to meet a new and more serious accusation: global warming and oil depletion have made them now seem as wasteful and dangerous as they were once believed to be safe and boring. Yet although the sins of the suburb are no longer what they were, the sneering and the stereotyping continue. Once it was Sandy Stone and Edna Everage, now it’s Kath and Kim. Once it was burgundy axminister and ducks on the walls; now it’s McMansions and cookie-cutter architecture.
The truth, of course, is that our cities are actually no longer really ‘suburban’ at all. Very few so-called suburbanites commute, in the traditional way, from the edge to the centre. The central city may be the single most important centre of employment but many more city-dwellers now range across the city in complex patterns of movement between centres of employment, education, shopping, recreation and health. Automobile-dependence is just one facet of something much bigger: the reorganisation of our entire economy and society around more looser, more flexible patterns of movement, communication and exchange. Many critiques of the car are implicitly an appeal for a return to the railway age of tightly choreographed patterns of employment, movement and residence. At the moment, and perhaps for the foreseeable future, our main form of urban transport relies on a rapidly wasting, highly polluting fuel, gasoline. But trying to cut our dependence on the car by changing the physical form in which it is embedded is like attempting to tow away the iceberg rather than steer the Titanic.
In the land of malls and freeways, multiplex cinemas and festival markets, science parks and industrial estates it’s no longer quite clear what’s city and what’s suburb, much less that there’s anything you could call a ‘suburban way of life’. The new estates springing up on the fringe of the metropolis, like Melbourne’s Caroline Springs or Adelaide’s Golden Grove, are built at much higher densities than most traditional suburbs. Their two-storeyed town houses with family rooms, entertainment centres, triple bathrooms and garages sit behind a thin ribbon of lawn, just a few metres from their neighbours. Recently I heard Lily Brett, interviewed from New York, decrying the soulless expanses of the Australian suburbs. ‘What children need’, she quipped, ‘is not a garden but a restaurant’. The residents of Caroline Springs get neither gardens nor restaurants. When I visited recently I found children playing, as best they could, on the aprons of concrete drive-ways.
Advocates of urban consolidation sometimes point to an alleged correlation between low-density cities and high per capita levels of gasoline consumption. Sprawling cities like Dallas and Houston cluster at one end of the graph while skyscraper cities like Singapore and Hong Kong are at the other. London and Paris are closer to the Hong Kong end; Melbourne and Sydney nearer the Dallas end, though still well below it. If you increased Melbourne or Sydney densities to something like London’s, they argue, you would increase public transport usage and lower petrol consumption.
It’s a superficially plausible argument, but is it valid? You can demonstrate a rough correlation between low urban population densities and high petrol consumption but it doesn’t mean that the relationship is causal. Even if it is causal it is far from clear that changing the physical form of our cities is the best way of tackling the problem. The suburban sprawl is the consequence of long-term, complex and deeply engrained forces. Australian cities were suburbanised long before the car came along. It would cost a lot of money, use up a lot of energy, and take a long time, even if we could do it, to achieve the kind of population densities that would support London or Paris-style public transport services, and even more to superimpose them on an already built-up environment. It’s often more expensive and environmentally wasteful to retrofit old suburbs with new roads, pipes and schools than to build new ones.
Densifying doesn’t necessarily reduce automobile dependence. You may create more parking problems without getting people out of their cars. Even if densifying did reduce auto-dependence, it may exacerbate other environmental problems or reduce our capacity to deal with the old ones. For example, villas and flats are much less able to produce their own energy, harvest their own water and dispose of their own wastes than detached houses, which can more easily fit solar heating, photo-voltaic arrays, rainwater tanks and grey water systems.
Everyone knows the story about the Irish traveller who stops to ask an old-timer the way to Cork. ‘Well’, the old fellow says, scratching his head, ‘if I wanted to go there I wouldn’t have started out from here’. If we had anticipated the high costs of automobile dependence perhaps we would have built our cities differently. But that doesn’t mean that the best or shortest way to correct them is to start all over and build them like New York or Paris. The suburb was once an Australian ideal. Then it became an object of dread. Now, I think, it may be time to discard the term altogether and start to think more clearly about the increasingly complex economic, social and environmental values that lie behind that outworn stereotype.