The Challenge of Suburban Cultural Research: Can we Generalize from the

Australian Case?

Paper presented to ACS Crossroads 2010, Lingnan University, Hong Kong, 17-21 June 2010

Professor Terry FlewARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of TechnologyBrisbane, Australia – t.flew@qut.edu.au

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Australia as a Suburban Nation

60% of Australians live in five cities of 1-3m people, and 75% in 22 city-regions of >250,00080% of Australians live within 50km of the coastlineContrast to Europe, where 70% of people live in cities of <500,00072% of future Australian population growth expected to be in major cities

Infrastructure Australia, State of Australian Cities 2010, p. 50

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Australia as a Suburban Nation

Majority of population continue to live in detached houses

Size of houses in growing while number of occupants is declining

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Australia as a Suburban Nation

Australian cities remain highly car-dependent

Rising house prices are seeing fast growth of lower-cost homes in outer suburbs

Jobs growth is increasingly outside of CBDs

Australian universities are highly suburbanised

Distribution of Australian university campuses shows a strong suburban presence alongside CBD campuses and “university towns”

Suburban universities can struggle for recognition even among their own representatives – University of Western Sydney and “pram city”

Number of campuses

Percentage (%)

CBD/Inner urban 33 30Suburban 35 32Rural/regional 42 38

100

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Suburban Tropes in Australian Popular Culture

Governor Arthur Philip instructed Sydney city planners in 1791 that streets be laid out “… in such a manner as to afford free circulation of air, and when the houses are built … the land will be granted with a clause that will prevent more than one house being built on the allotment, which will be sixty feet in front and one hundred and fifty feet in depth.”The “vast suburban tundra” of Australian TV comedy (Sue Turnbull) – Dame Edna, Kath & Kim, Kylie Minogue, Eric BanaSuburban themes in Australian cultural studies (Meaghan Morris on shopping centres, Fiske, Hodge and Turner, Myths of Oz (1987)“In Australia, our houses aren't all joined together like yours to stop them from falling over.” Dame Edna Everage to Michael Parkinson, 2001.

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Australia’s Creative Workforce is large and growing …

5% of total workforce

In top 10 Australian industry sectors

Creative Trident approach (Cunningham & Higgs) – mapping both industry sectors and occupations

Large “hidden” workforce – unpaid, hobbyists, second jobs

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… but is generally assumed not to be suburban

CLUSTERING SCRIPTStresses co-location of related firms and industries – Hollywood as exemplar

Seems do-able at sub-national government levels – fits with urban redevelopment agendas

Conceptually confused – conflates agglomeration with clustering

Low-cost CIs generate few direct benefits from co-location

Top-down urban planning approaches

CREATIVITY SCRIPTFocus on the consumption activities of mobile creative workforce

Low-cost sub-national cultural policy targeted at urban middle classes

Neglect of production networks in amenities-based urban growth models

Paradox of generic “cookie-cutter” approaches – generating sameness in search of difference

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Creative Suburbia: Challenging the Dominant Scripts

DOMINANT DISCOURSES1. Creative industries

development is best fostered in inner-urban creative clusters

2. Creative workers locate primarily in inner-urban areas for professional networking purposes

3. Creative workers seek an “experiential lifestyle” uniquely found in inner-urban areas

COUNTER-PROPOSITIONS1. There is no clear relationship

between CI development and inner cities – de-clustering of jobs and industries

2. Creative workers are dispersed throughout cities and their numbers in outer suburban areas are comparable to other industries

3. A range of locational ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors influence creative workers’ decisions on where to live and work

Creative Suburbia: Australian Research Council Discovery Project 2008-2010

Research team based at QUT (Brisbane) and Monash (Melbourne)

Interviews with 130 creative industries workers across commercial CI sectors, digital media and design, arts, music and performance, policy officers, analysts and ‘animateurs’

Sites of research:– Established suburbs (Frankston (VIC), Redcliffe (QLD))– Master Planned Communities (Springfield, Forest Lake

(QLD))– New suburbs (Dandenong, Caroline Springs (VIC))

Research Questions

How do creative workers organise and network in suburban environments? – challenge to the inner-urban sociality thesis

Are creative workers living and working in the suburbs by necessity (high costs of inner-urban locations) or choice (preferences for space, suburban amenity etc.)?

What are the implications of recognising the significance of “new suburbanism” for urban cultural policy?

Preliminary Research Findings

Choice features more strongly than necessity in choice of suburban locations – serenity, space, time to think

Competing push and pull of digital media technologies (support decentralisation) and time/costs of getting around (support inner urban locations)

Suburbs are not homogeneous

Master Planned Communities struggle to develop creative workforce relative to more established suburbs

Many outer suburban communities are much more ethnically diverse than inner-urban ones

Culture: a Complex Term

1. Culture as lived and shared experience (community, identity, nation)

2. Culture as mediated symbolic communication (media)3. Culture as resource for economic accumulation

(George Yúdice, Expediency of Culture)4. Culture as policy discourse and governance (Tony

Bennett – culture as governmental)

From Terry Flew, Understanding Global Media (Palgrave, 2007).

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Mapping the Four Definitions of Culture

1. Culture as lived and shared experience

3. Culture as resource

2. Culture as mediated symbolic communication

4. Culture as policy discourse

Suburban Culture and its Representations

Problem of “suburban derision” vs. “suburban realism” is that it rests upon binary oppositions between inner-urban and outer suburban zones

Suburban business and community organisations remain curiously inappropriate for creative workforce

Suburbs, Creative Industries and the GFC

Impact of GFC and economic recession largely understood in terms of inner-urban areas, the high-profile arts and consumption

CIs performing stronger that rest of the economy in the downturn (Andy Pratt on UK CIs) – relationship between cultural production and the rest of the economy remains poorly understood

Focus on the high-profile arts overstates relationship between CIs and finance capital – part of the infrastructure of modern capitalist economies, not the superstructure

Any lessons for Asia?

Does it make sense to think of Asian cities as increasingly suburbanised – “suburbanisation of Hong Kong”?

CIs/cities relationship being largely understood by World Bank (East Asian Renaissance, Innovative East Asia) in terms of inner-urban creative clusters and provision for lifestyle amenities and consumption patters of urban middle classes

Better mapping of creative workforce, combined with qualitative research into networking practices, likely to reveal a more small-scale and “suburban” profile