Indigeneity and the intercultural city

Abstract

The historical erasure of Aboriginality from the settler city has now been well documented by Australian postcolonial scholarship. The increasing cultural diversity of cities such as Sydney, however, pushes Aboriginal claims to place beyond the now familiar settler/Aboriginal dichotomy and into a more culturally complex context. Through an empirical case study of Aboriginal participation in urban planning on Sydney's western fringe this article examines Aboriginal place in the intercultural city. Drawing on scholarship on interculturalism, Aboriginal participation in Sydney's urban planning is examined through the dual rights criteria: the right to difference and the right to the city. In addition, the research data also served to build on this criteria, gesturing towards a potential third condition for an intercultural city: the identification of issues such as urban sustainability that create common ground, connecting the city's diverse population. Rather than a return to a homogenizing ‘common good’, this article argues that the adoption of a more intercultural ethos in urban planning requires a re-visioning of the city from an exclusionary colonial urbanism to an amalgamation of diverse ways of life and land use that together will sustain its population into the future.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Professor Kay Anderson, Dr Ruth Nicholls, Dr Diana James and Adam Trau for their comments on earlier versions of this article. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers and the editorial team for their insightful and constructive comments. Responsibility for the contents of the article remains solely with the author.

Notes

1. Brenda Yeoh, ‘Postcolonial Cities’, Progress in Human Geography 25(3), 2001, pp 456–468; Melissa Lovell, ‘Settler Colonialism, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Postcolonial Identity’, paper presented at Australasian Political Studies Association Conference, Monash University, Melbourne, 2007.

2. Phil Wood and Charles Landry, The Intercultural City: Planning for Diversity Advantage, London: Earthscan, 2008, p 22.

3. The debate over the relative importance of redistribution and recognition is best illustrated by the works of Nancy Fraser and Iris Young: see Ruth Fincher and Kurt Iveson, Planning and Diversity in the City: Redistribution, Recognition and Encounter, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

4. Jane Jacobs, Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City, London: Routledge, p 24.

5. George Morgan, Unsettled Places: Aboriginal People and Urbanization in New South Wales, Kent Town, SA: Wakefield Press, 2006.

6. Jacobs, Edge of Empire, p 22.

7. Kay Anderson and Affrica Taylor, ‘Exclusionary Politics and the Question of National Belonging: Australian Ethnicities in “Multiscalar” Focus’, Ethnicities 5(4), pp 460–485, p 472, emphasis added.

8. See, for example, Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge, Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Postcolonial Mind, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1991; Bain Attwood and John Arnold (eds), Power, Knowledge and Aborigines, Bundoora, Vic.: La Trobe University Press, 1992; Kay Anderson, ‘Place Narratives and Origins of Inner City Sydney's Aboriginal Settlement 1972–3’, Journal of Historical Geography 19(3), 1993, pp 314–335.

9. See, for example, Ian Keen (ed), Being Black: Aboriginal Cultures in Settled Australia, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1998; Gillian Cowlishaw, The City's Outback, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2009; Grace Karskens, The Colony: A History of Early Sydney, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2009.

10. See, for example, Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society, Annandale: Pluto Press, 1998; Ien Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese: Living between Asia and the West, New York: Routledge, 2001; Greg Noble and Scott Poynting, ‘Neither Relaxed nor Comfortable: The Affective Regulation of Migrant Belonging in Australia’, in Rachael Pain and Susan Smith (eds), Fear: Critical Geopolitics and Everyday Life, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2008, pp 129–138.

11. Hage, White Nation; Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Talkin’ up to the White Woman: Aboriginal Women and Feminism, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2000; Wendy Shaw, ‘Ways of Whiteness: Negotiating Settlement Agendas in (Post)colonial Inner Sydney’, PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, 2001.

12. Hage, White Nation; Shaw, ‘Ways of Whiteness’.

13. Catherine Nash, ‘Cultural Geography: Anti-Racist Geographies’, Progress in Human Geography 27, 2003, pp 637–648, p 641.

14. Nick Couldry, Inside Culture: Re-Imagining the Method of Cultural Studies, London: Sage, 2000.

15. Joseph Pugliese, ‘Migrant Heritage in an Indigenous Context: For a Decolonizing Migrant Historiography’, Journal of Intercultural Studies 23(1), 2002, pp 5–18; Anderson and Taylor, ‘Exclusionary Politics and the Question of National Belonging’; Lovell, ‘Settler Colonialism, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Postcolonial Identity’.

16. Australian Bureau of Statistics, Regional Population Growth, Australia, 2009–10, Canberra: Commonwealth Government of Australia, Cat. No. 3218.0, 2011.

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18. Australian Bureau of Statistics, Population Distribution, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians, Canberra: Commonwealth Government, Cat. No. 4705, 2007.

19. NSW Department of Planning, City of Cities: A Plan for Sydney's Future, Sydney: New South Wales Government, 2005.

20. Laurie Cosgrove and Beverley Kliger, ‘Planning with a Difference: A Reflection on Planning and Decision Making with Indigenous People in Broome, Western Australia’, Urban Policy and Research 15(3), 1997, pp 211–217; Sue Jackson, ‘A Disturbing Story: The Fiction of Rationality in Land Use Planning in Aboriginal Australia’, Australian Planner 34(4), 1997, pp 221–226.

21. Larissa Behrendt, ‘Aboriginal Urban Identity: Preserving the Spirit, Protecting the Traditional in Non-Traditional Settings’, Australian Feminist Law Journal 4, 1994, pp 55–61; Gaynor Macdonald, ‘Does “Culture” Have a “History”? Thinking about Continuity and Change in Central New South Wales’, Aboriginal History 25, 2001, pp 176–199; George Morgan, ‘Autochthonous Australian Syncretism’, Current Sociology 51(3/4), 2003, pp 433–451.

22. See, for example, Laura-Jane Smith, ‘“Doing Archaeology”: Cultural Heritage Management and Its Role in Identifying the Link between Archaeological Practice and Theory’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 6(4), 2000, pp 309–316; Tony English, ‘More than Archaeology: Developing Comprehensive Approaches to Aboriginal Heritage Management in NSW’, Australian Journal of Environmental Management 9(December), 2002, pp 218–227.

23. Dennis Byrne and Maria Nugent, Mapping Attachment: A Spatial Approach to Aboriginal Post-Contact Heritage, Hurstville, NSW: Department of Environment and Conservation (NSW) and Heritage Council of New South Wales, 2004, p 63.

24. Jo McDonald Cultural Heritage Management, Archaeological Investigation of the Turner Road and Oran Park Precincts within the South West Growth Centre, Camden, NSW. Stage 1, Sydney: New South Wales Department of Planning Growth Centres Commission and Camden City Council, 2007.

25. Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History, New York: Knopf, 1988, p 345.

26. Nancy Fraser, ‘Rethinking Recognition: Overcoming Reification and Displacement in Cultural Politics’, New Left Review 3, 2000, pp 107–120.

27. NSW Department of Aboriginal Affairs, Two Ways Together: NSW Aboriginal Affairs Plan 2003–2012, Sydney: New South Wales Government, 2003.

28. Louise Johnson, ‘Colonizing the Suburban Frontier: Place-Making on Melbourne's Urban Fringe’, in Sophie Watson and Katherine Gibson (eds), Metropolis Now: Planning and the Urban in Contemporary Australia, Sydney: Pluto Press, 1994, pp 46–59.

29. Geoffrey Britton and Colleen Morris, Colonial Landscapes of the Cumberland Plain and Camden, NSW, Sydney: National Trust (NSW), 2000.

30. Pugliese, ‘Migrant Heritage in an Indigenous Context’.

31. Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, Cities: Reimagining the Urban, Oxford: Polity, 2002.

32. Kevin Frawley, ‘A “Green” Vision: The Evolution of Australian Environmentalism’, in Kay Anderson and Fay Gale (eds), Inventing Places: Studies in Cultural Geography, New York: Longman Cheshire, 1992, pp 215–234; Richard Roddewig, Green Bans: The Birth of Australian Environmental Politics: A Study in Public Opinion and Participation, Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1978.

33. Michael Aird, Brisbane Blacks, Southport: Keeiara Press, 2001, p 28.

34. Heather Goodall and Allison Cudzow, Rivers and Resilience: Aboriginal People on Sydney's Georges River, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2009.

35. English, ‘More than Archaeology’.

36. See, for example, Gary J Smith and Jennifer Scott, Living Cities: An Urban Myth? Government and Sustainability in Australia, Dural: Rosenberg Publishing, 2006; Jeffery R Kenworthy, ‘The Eco-City: Ten Key Transport and Planning Dimensions for Sustainable City Development’, Environment and Urbanization 18(1), 2009, pp 67–85.

37. Leonie Sandercock, Cosmopolis II: Mongrel Cities of the 21st Century, London: Continuum, 2003.

38. Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990, p 119.

39. Amin and Thrift, Cities.