‘Any place to raise children is a good place’: children, housing and neighbourhoods in inner Newcastle, Australia

Abstract

Neighbourhoods are important spaces of interaction for children. This paper explores the perceptions of residents from seven suburbs in the inner area of Newcastle, Australia concerning what makes a good neighbourhood for children. Key factors identified by residents include the types of dwellings found in the neighbourhood (with detached houses being seen as preferable for children) and the quality of neighbourhood resources. Another important feature was social interactions within the neighbourhood, including interactions between children and adults and interactions between groups of children. The paper examines how different features of neighbourhoods interact to create adult perceptions about whether a neighbourhood is appropriate for children. The paper also points to the ways that children are seen to actively produce the neighbourhood in which they live.

Keywords:

• neighbourhood
• home
• houses
• apartments
• tenure
• intergenerational relations

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to the residents of inner Newcastle and Hamilton South for their participation in the research. The Northern Region office of the NSW Department of Housing also provided substantial support in the conduct of the research. The ideas of the paper took shape partly during conversations with Robyn Dowling and Pauline McGuirk, which were extremely helpful. An earlier version of this paper was presented in the seminar series of the Department of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow. The author thanks the audience members for their feedback, which improved this paper. The author wishes to extend particular thanks to Chris Philo for his feedback and encouragement. The Department of Urban Studies at the University of Glasgow provided space and support during the writing of this paper which is also gratefully acknowledged. Thanks to Tanya Judd for highly skilled and enthusiastic research assistance and many useful discussions that contributed substantially to this paper. The author also thanks Claire Freeman, two anonymous referees and Louise Askew for thoughtful feedback which considerably improved this paper.

Notes

Despite this many tenants identified themselves in the way they completed their form. Most commonly they identified the exact location of their dwelling, as part of a description of their neighbourhood and its characteristics. Many tenants also signed their questionnaire, or wrote their name and address at the end of the form. I have not used any of this identifying information in presenting my analysis. Tenants are identified in this paper by their gender, the suburb where they live and their age group when quoted. These categories proved important in the analysis of the data, but are sufficiently broad that no individual tenant could be identified.

Given the way that the questionnaire was distributed and the anonymous nature of the questionnaire it was impossible to tell who had returned the questionnaire. It was considered inappropriate by DoH staff to send a reminder letter to all tenants. I therefore have no information about the characteristics of non-respondents.

Townhouses were generally two-storey semi-detached houses (often in a row of 4–5 dwellings) with a small yard in the public housing stock of inner Newcastle.

In Australia the word suburb is used to indicate a particular area of land, as well as to describe a pattern of urban development characterised by detached houses. Thus Australians would describe Newcastle East that has very few detached houses as a suburb, as well as Merewether and Hamilton South, which have many detached houses. Only Merewether and the private parts of Hamilton South would be described as ‘suburban’ due to the amount of detached houses within these suburbs however.

I have only calculated percentages for the four biggest suburbs due to the low number of responses from The Hill and the suburb of Newcastle.

Many of the comments about parenting in inner Newcastle were positive, but some comments were quite critical and more similar to remarks in Hamilton South (public).