New Communities, New Attachments: Planning for Diversity in Melbourne's Outer-Suburbs

Abstract

This article reflects on the cultural policy and planning challenges raised by the changing demography, particularly the increasing cultural diversity, of new, outer-suburban Australian communities. While there is much scholarly thinking about the forms of spatialised belonging that exists in urban, multicultural Australia, there is less discussion of Asian identities in more dispersed suburban communities that have a very different relationship with the cultural infrastructure of the inner-city. Asian presences in Australian cities have been discussed in terms of racialised discourses of dysfunction and strategies of ethnic commodification, but these do not account for the practices of belonging and self and community-making that take place in these outer-suburban areas. An analysis of cultural programmes and urban planning documents surrounding a residential development in outer-suburban Melbourne – the proposed Quarry Hills precinct – reveals that these instruments mobilise limited frameworks of knowledge about these communities. Such governmental discourses struggle to account for the implications of cultural diversity, and the forms of belonging and attachment that are enacted in these areas.

Keywords:

• Cultural Planning
• Multiculturalism
• Belonging
• Growth Area
• Whittlesea

Funding

This work was supported by an Australian Research Council Linkage [grant number LP110100039].

Notes

[1] The 2005 Cronulla riots refer to a serious of violent clashes that were instigated by a confrontation between Anglo-Australian surf lifesavers and young men of Middle Eastern background in the beachside suburb of Cronulla, Sydney. The riots spread to other parts of Sydney, with continuing tension between groups attempting to assert belonging to both Sydney's beaches and an imagined Australian identity. In 2009, there was significant public controversy surrounding a number of robberies and violent attacks on Indian tertiary students in Melbourne, and their perception as racially motivated crimes. Both of these incidents prompted intense public debate and scholarly discussion about racial conflict in urban Australia and the status of Australian multiculturalism.

[2] For example, Clark et al.'s Culture and the Metropolis Report, which forms part of the Victorian state government's Melbourne Metropolitan Strategy, incorporates these arguments about the civic benefits of cultural diversity into a statement about the importance of ‘cities’ as the site of communal cultural activity (2001: 3).

[3] See, for example, the Victorian state government's recent policy statement, Vision for Citizenship in a Multicultural Victoria which restates the economic contributions of multiculturalism (Department of Premier and Cabinet 2012: 3).

[4] There have been some efforts to examine the ways in which ‘creative cities’ frameworks might be expanded to acknowledge the creative production of the outer-suburbs. Luckman, for example, examines the place of the natural environment and how spaces outside of the city might contribute to creativity (2009). There has also been some recent interest in the sorts of meanings and uses that can be attached to open space within urban developments. One study, for example, is concerned with ethnic communities’ uses of open space and the practice of converting small parks into community gardens in the City of Darebin, another northern municipality of Melbourne (Freestone and Nichols 2004: 118).

[5] The Urban Growth Boundary (UGB) clearly distinguishes land that is designated urban, to be used for housing, industry and commerce, from non-urban land. Non-urban land is to be used for activities such as conservation, agriculture, resource development and suitable community infrastructure like airports, water supply and sewage treatment facilities that require large areas of open land.’ (Growth Areas Authority – Urban Growth Boundary, n.d.)

[6] The report anticipates a population of between 5600 and 7500 people for the population area (City of Whittlesea and Growth Areas Authority 2012: 27).

[7] The report states that the ‘provision ratios’ used for these quantitative assessments of infrastructure needs were derived from standards used by Federal and State Government Departments and Agencies, and the Growth Areas Authority Precinct Structure Planning Guidelines (City of Whittlesea and Growth Areas Authority 2012: 28).

[8] In this document ‘Neighbourhood Activity Centre’ refers to a commercial centre including a supermarket, ‘specialty’ retail and other non-retail floorspace (City of Whittlesea and Growth Areas Authority 2012: 27).

Additional information

Funding

Funding: This work was supported by an Australian Research Council Linkage [grant number LP110100039].