Urban Renewal and the Creative Underclass: Aboriginal Youth Subcultures in Sydney’s Redfern-Waterloo

ABSTRACT:

Redfern-Waterloo, on the edge of Sydney’s CBD, has long been an important center for the city’s Aboriginal population, as a place to live, socialize, work, and/or access services provided by the area’s numerous Aboriginal organizations. State plans to regenerate Redfern-Waterloo, to realize its latent potential, far from seeking to displace the socially disadvantaged Aboriginal community and erase its cultural legacy, stress the importance of a continuing indigenous presence. Planning and policy documents generally suggest that Aboriginal people can contribute to, and reap the benefits of, the area’s renaissance. This article will explore construction of minority cultures in planning discourse in Sydney and in particular the way indigenous culture and citizenship is delineated in the discourses of urban renewal. The vision of Aboriginal culture (and residual communal presence) is narrow and circumscribed by conventional “touristic” representations (fine art, dance, and other performance) around national heritage and consumption. This excludes many of the area’s youth who, like their counterparts throughout the world, identify more with street culture—hip-hop, graffiti art, skateboarding, etc.—than with traditional arts/high culture. These activities have little place in the vision for urban renewal. This article will argue that civic booster strategies that fail to recognize the complex and ambiguous character of public spaces and their importance as sites of resistant/underground/avant-garde/youth subcultures will inevitably generate sterile landscapes; their vision of local communal heritage is little more than tokenistic.

Notes

1 Redfern and Waterloo are contiguous districts each of which has significant indigenous populations and high levels of social disadvantage. It is common to refer to them as a single district and they are treated as such in state-led urban redevelopment plans. Census data greatly understate the extent of the RW’s Aboriginal residents because many refuse to complete forms.

2 The term underclass is controversial. It has commonly been used to refer to those without steady employment living in depressed urban districts, many of whom rely on semi-illegal activities and on welfare to survive (Anderson, 1990; Wilson, 1987). In the United States, underclass is usually used to refer to black residents of depressed inner-urban areas, although in Australia such concentrations of poverty and (what has commonly been seen as) social dysfunction are also found in multiethnic outer suburban districts (Peel, 2003). Several commentators have rightly argued that the academic sociology of the underclass has been picked up by reactionary commentators intent on demonizing urban minorities—blaming them for their situation—and that the term has little value in grasping wider social and political relations (Gans, 1996; Wacquant, 2008), I use creative underclass in part polemically: to invert the conventional view of the urban poor as dysfunctional and inert; to reclaim the agency of marginal urban citizens; and to suggest that they are engaged in significant symbolic and political activities. It challenges the view of ghetto dwellers as abject/criminal/immoral, encouraging us to see them as authors of oppositional cultural practices and engaged with urban inequalities and change.

3 This protest took place in front of Parliament House in Canberra but involved many young people from RW.

4 All interviewee names are fictional.