Cities on the edge
NB. A large block of text was unfortunately missing from the print version of this article. The editors apologise for the omission which is corrected here.
The End of the Good Times?
A prolonged period of Australian prosperity ended with the advent of the global financial crisis in 2008. Since then Australia has fared comparatively well amongst countries but has still registered significant rises in unemployment and underemployment. The continuing pain of the downturn is unlikely to be evenly distributed across the population or across our communities. But surely the legacy of the miracle boom is that most communities are fattened enough to lose a few kilos to a recession? This is a sadly misleading view which ignores how vulnerable much of Australian society is to the current downturn. For many communities, recession is not a threat; it’s all they have known for a long time.
Perhaps the inhabitants of the gated wealthy enclaves that now pepper major cities like Sydney and Brisbane will weather the economic stress with ease. But what about the communities that didn’t fare so well during the so called “miracle economy” of the past decade? Some are hardly small – much of Adelaide shared a sense of prolonged recession and hardship during the so-called boom years. For many regional centres, especially those dependent on industry like Newcastle, Whyalla, Geelong, and Wollongong, the “miracle economy” is a parallel universe they haven’t visited yet. And our larger cities contain many poor and excluded communities that are as much a testament to the unevenness of the growth surge, as are the bright new master-planned estates of affluence.
Analysing deprivation in the eight capital cities by using 2006 Census data, Griffith University’s Scott Baum exposes what he terms the “suburban scars” that mark decades of economic restructuring. More than 10 per cent of localities comprise highly deprived “poverty traps” where multiple disadvantages – poor neighbours, poor services, dispiriting environs, isolation – have combined to lock inhabitants into long-term poverty. At the other end of the deprivation scale, Baum finds a wealthy mirror image: just over 10 per cent of suburbs containing high concentrations of wealth in established older areas of affluence and in the newer bastions of gentrified privilege in the inner cities. Within suburbia, the same polarities are revealed. Gated republics celebrating order, similarity and privilege are juxtaposed with the dystopian localities studded with syringe-littered parks, payday lenders, sex shops, takeaways and two-dollar bargain bins.
These metropolitan sinkholes include some of our most neglected public housing estates, where many socially dependent people live in the twilight of anxiety and disrepair. Public housing in Australia used to serve a much broader segment of the populace, including working families. In the late 1970s a well intentioned but disastrous decision was made to target public dwellings for the poorest and most disturbed members of our community.
After this, people with the highest social needs were herded together in crumbling public housing estates, which had been originally designed for working families. Positive role models were few, and the design and layout of estates included many poorly maintained areas with low visibility. Kids roamed without supervision, parks became increasingly degraded, a minority of “bad neighbours” terrified the rest and whole communities began to spiral downwards in a cycle of fear and neglect. Some public housing estates avoided this fate, but many didn’t.
The Rudd government’s unprecedented determination to tackle homelessness is admirable, but the task of dealing with decades of national social neglect is truly daunting. There are around 100,000 homeless people in Australia today. This is more people than we have in all our armed services combined. Many of them are children and young people. About half of them are under the age of 24. Some 70 to 80 percent of them have mental health issues.
Those able to avoid the streets languish on lengthening public housing waiting lists. Many find themselves in substandard private rental housing, including the degraded urban caravan parks that lurk quietly in our cities. Outside these poor communities, other whole neighbourhoods are sinking into the economic sands. Think of the desolate congregations of ageing 1960s and 1970s “six pack” unit blocks in the working-class regions of our cities – north and western Melbourne, western Sydney, etc. These areas were characterised by ageing, poor quality rental housing, much of it over-priced, a crumbling public domain, and a lack of public transport services.
Suburban Vulnerability
“Oil vulnerability” deeply threatens the suburban landscape, which unlike inner metropolitan areas, has limited recourse to quality public transport services. The analyses of two of my other Griffith colleagues, Jago Dodson and Neil Sipe, shows how metropolitan oil vulnerability, car dependency, mortgage debt and low household income all combine to place further burdens on outer suburban communities in Australian cities. The onset of recession in 2008 added serious injury to the insult of “petrol pain”, especially for the many self employed “independent contractors” who are the life supports of working and lower middle class suburbia. These people – tradies, domestic helpers, home deliverers and the like – are utterly car dependent in ways that many of us don’t comprehend. The car isn’t simply a means of getting to work, it is largely their place of work. The cheerful assumption that fuel would be endlessly cheap is no laughing matter for them as they struggle with the soaring costs of car ownership and use.
One concern is that rising mortgage foreclosure and unemployment will increase crowding in our cities. The US is well down the track of recession. The Australian commentator Guy Rundle reports that in the US “. . . multiple occupancy – moving in with your parents or your kids or sharing, or sleeping in your cousin’s living room – has risen by 45% in the last 3 years ”. In April 2009, some 324,000 US households received a foreclosure notice. About 1 in 5 American homeowners were in negative equity, meaning that their mortgage was larger than the value of their house. The negative equity epidemic was expected to get much worse.
It is doubtful that Australia will experience quite the same levels of mortgage default and crowding because our home lending system wasn’t given over to market chaos to the same extent. But it’s a matter of degree. There’s plenty of evidence that housing pain will be long and deeply felt in Australia. This suggests the need for an aggressive affordable housing program, especially in already stressed cities like Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.
There’s one other dimension of urban default that bears urgent reconsideration. A widely shared, if not unanimous, assumption in scholarly and policy circles is that suburbs are at once the source and the worst reflection of the sustainability crisis. The view has resonated with increasing strength in some domains of popular culture – and perhaps more strongly in elite cultural circuits.
At best, the suburban critique may reflect a serious over-estimation of the influence of urban form on sustainability. Recent Australian analysis points to the consumptive neo-liberal lifestyle, not the nature of one’s dwelling, as the root of our environmental woes. The 2007 urban consumption analyses produced for the Australian Conservation Foundation turns conventional eco-criticism of suburbia on its head. The Main Findings report accompanying the Atlas summarises: “despite the lower environmental impacts associated with less car use, inner city households outstrip the rest of Australia in every other category of consumption. In each state and territory, the centre of the capital city is the area with the highest environmental impacts, followed by the inner suburban areas.”
The point is that total household energy consumption, and therefore greenhouse emissions, are made of both direct and indirect components. The former is the energy used to maintain everyday lives – petrol, gas and electricity – and the latter is the energy embodied in goods and services consumed by households. While most, if not all, of the focus of urban commentary and policy is on direct energy use, in reality, “direct household and person use accounts for only 30 per cent of our total greenhouse gas pollution, 23 per cent of our total water use, and just 10 per cent of our total eco-footprint”.
So the energy use most influenced by the size of our house and its location only accounts for a small share of our greenhouse emissions. It’s our free-ranging consumption of goods and services produced well outside our life-worlds that’s causing the problem. Shoving everyone into high-rises won’t solve it. In fact, if every Australian household switched to renewable energy and stopped driving their cars tomorrow, total household emissions would decline by only about 18 percent.
An equally silly proposition is the idea that our suburbs are sustainable, and their outward expansion should continue forever. All our urban lifestyles are over-consumptive and unsustainable. There was a long time when suburban expansion was a powerful means for social opportunity and improvement for the many, if not all. This is simply no longer the case. The dependence of urban residents on direct energy, especially oil, makes them deeply vulnerable in an age of scarcity and environmental threat. And our metro fringes are now pushing into water catchments and regions that supply critical environmental amenities to cities. There remains limited potential for further suburban growth around our major cities, but it must be done differently, with sustainability and resource security as guiding objects.
Towards a progressive suburban view
Our cities are on the edge of environmental and economic default. Neglect and faith (in the freewheeling market) brought them there. The suburbs are not the overwhelming source of the crises, as some green critique supposes. But they are most prone to its consequences, especially oil default and economic recession. The wealth of the inner cities (and richer suburbs) renders them safer – for now – from the storms upon us. It also, however, implicates them deeply in its origins and suggests that they should bear the largest share of adjustment “costs” and pain.
Australian suburbia gave birth to our environmental movements. The potential for progressive social change in the suburban landscape should not be underestimated. A new basis for progressive politics is the increasing social heterogeneity of the suburbs, which are now broadly reflective of the wider diversity of the Australian population. We can expect to find hidden and not so hidden yearning for new forms of cultural expression and environmental ambition in these national heartlands. The recent popular interest in “relocalising” everyday life is resonating strongly in the suburban landscape. This suggests some promise for a politics that would debate and trial new economic arrangements based on citizen participation and local ownership. Our cities and suburbs are stressed by years of neo-liberal reform. They may also, however, be on the edge of new social and environmental possibilities.
Brendan Gleeson is Director of The Urban Research Program at Griffith University in Brisbane. His book ‘Australian Heartlands: Making Space for Hope in the Suburbs’, (2006) was the inaugural John Iremonger Award for Writing on Public Issues.
Further reading
- ACF Consumption Atlas: http://www.acfonline.org.au/consumptionatlas/
- Brendan Gleeson (2008) “Waking from the dream”, Griffith Review, no 20.
- Jago Dodson & Neil Sipe (2008) Shocking the City, UNSW Press, Sydney
Source: Australian Options, Issue 59, Summer 2009/10, pp. 5-7.