What's Happening in the Suburbs?

I've been asked to answer the question: "What's happening in the suburbs?". I have two broad answers to this question.

We Don't Really Know.

The first answer is "who really knows?". Certainly not many of our policymakers and policy analysts. The evidence for this is the constant effect - mostly perverse - of spatially blind policy making. One such effect is the misdirection of public resources to communities that are simply not as needy as many of the places and peoples in our cities.

There are two main reasons for spatial blindness in our policy realms. First, because the public sector at all levels has withdrawn from research and relies heavily on apsatial consultancies for information about social trends. Amongst the few consultancies that purport to be spatial, most lack rigour and substance. Market research has overtaken social scientific enquiry.

Second, the spatial social sciences in Australia have withered and no longer provide input to policy. To some extent they only have themselves to blame for their increasing policy irrelevance. Empirically based scholarship has been supplanted by theoretical introspection.

Policymakers have often looked on in horror but have largely done nothing to help. Significant public investment in spatial scientific research could have prevented much of this. My centre, the Urban Frontiers Program, is now the only dedicated place of spatial research in Australia. Australia, the world's most urban, indeed metropolitan, of nations lacks this most basic ability to understand itself.
What We Really Know

The few spatial social scientists still working in Australia (you can count them on two hands) have struggled in the past decade to map and forecast social trends. Some larger vectors of change, especially in the cities, have been charted and some attempt, in the context of resource impoverishment, has been made to survey these shifts at a closer level.

The suburbs of our major cities may be the crucible of Australian life, but they are poorly understood and their dynamism is so often underappreciated. Most Australians live in metropolitan suburbs - if governments simply made policies based on this assumption public endeavour would be much more effective than it presently is.

So what are the major patterns of change in our suburbs?

First, self-containment is strengthening at the regional and subregional levels, for reasons we don't yet fully comprehend. Put simply, people who live in suburbs are increasingly likely to work and recreate in their own regions and neighbourhoods.

Unfortunately, most of our state and federal policy settings continue to assume that our major cities are monocentric (they never really were). The resulting investment and policy intervention patterns are contributing to a process of increasing socio-economic inequity at the local and regional scales. They are also exacerbating environmental stresses, especially greenhouses emissions, because the urgent need for improved intra-regional mobility is so misunderstood by our governments.

Second, socio-spatial polarisation is strengthening at the regional and local scales within our cities. There's no time here to provide an exhaustive definition of social and socio-spatial polarisation. In broad terms, however, we note strengthening residential segregation between the three main social groupings that have emerged through structural change in the last two decades: the wealthy, the coping and the lost. Geography matters as it never has before: a household's life chances are increasingly defined by the place, not the region, in which it lives.

Broadly, the new geography of suburban segregation includes the following elements:
- public housing estates with residualised and high need populations;
- new concentrations of the disadvantaged and excluded in private housing areas, often crowded together in degraded medium density housing stock;
- increasingly decrepit and underserviced middle ring suburbs that continue to host a large intake of new migrants;
- 'privatopias': new exclusionary residential developments both within the older suburban fabric (enclaves) and at the outer suburban edge (exclaves)
I want to close with a few comments on the privatopias that have received a lot of popular and political attention in the wake of recent elections, but whose origins are so poorly understood. My remarks are referenced against the contemporary social geography of Western Sydney that is, I believe, reflective of broader patterns of change in other metropolitan regions.
The Decline of the Public Domain and the Hidden Subsidies of Privatism

The American Economist J.K. Gailbraith long ago noted the increasing qualitative divergences between the private and public spheres in market societies, captured in his memorable depiction of 'private affluence and public squalor'. The observation resonates in Western Sydney where a myriad landscape is emerging through new patterns of social and physical change: degraded or neglected public facilities and infrastructure increasingly contrast with their well resourced private equivalents whose use is confined to those with the ability to pay.

A private constellation of health, education, human service and recreation facilities is emerging to cater for the needs and desires of the more affluent and the more anxious. Many of the new users of such facilities are not affluent but seem willing to put themselves under considerable financial pressure to avoid use of public services and facilities.

A culture of anxiety about public facilities and services has been encouraged by sensationalist media reportage about 'dysfunctional' public hospitals and schools. For some, the mood of anxiety is reinforced by actual experiences of degraded and neglected public services. However, even in fringe areas with newer public infrastructure a mood of suspicion and avoidance is mounting, all of which helps to perpetuate the decline of the public sphere as schools struggle to fill enrolments, health services are left to treat a residualised population, and public transport services are abandoned to the excluded and the angry.

An increasingly assertive mood of privatism pervades new release areas. The pleasures of order, homogeneity and amenity are celebrated; the provision of high quality social and urban services acknowledged as the rightful reward for individual effort. But the reality is quite different. The paradox is that this form of privatism is induced, in some instances explicitly encouraged, by government endeavour. The public contribution to the creation of these new 'model communities' is, however, not acknowledged and/or understood.

A complex and expensive matrix of public initiatives - financing, regulation and service provision - shape and support these privatopias. Long term planning and investment by public agencies has created the amenity and value that are captured in private estate development. The privatised infrastructure and services that support new residential communities remain heavily dependent upon direct and indirect government subvention and risk sharing, though this fact is not generally appreciated in the community. Sydney's private motorways, for example, benefit from government risk sharing and from new public investments that can deliver windfall revenue gains.

Far from being simple testimonies to the rewards for individual effort and thrift, these 'landscapes of self-reliance' are in fact heavily dependent upon public subsidies and public endeavour for their creation and maintenance. The fiction of self-provision is a simple story that is readily digested by those already anxious about the state of publicly provided facilities and services. It happily neglects the hidden subsidies of privatism. The contribution of public endeavour to private wealth remains largely unsigned and unheralded.

In a context of strong regional population growth, the internal migration from established areas to new release areas does not result in a depopulation of older places. In this sense our patterns of urban decline contrast with those observed in US and some European cities where depopulation is a key dimension of change.

A more subtle but nonetheless powerful shift is underway in Western Sydney, involving an exodous of wealthier, Australian born residents for newer residential estates and their replacement by poorer households, with a preponderance of tenants, recent migrants, Centrelink 'clients' and people with high support needs. This twin process of cultural and economic segregation is reinforced by uneven and frequently inequitable patterns of service provision and infrastructure development.

The overprovision and underprovision of services and infrastructure to different communities is both complicated by and powerfully reinforced by federal policies and programs that have shifted large amounts of public resources into privately provided health and education services. Private health and education services are strongly spatially patterned, meaning that their provision is reliant upon and related to distinct geographic catchments whose boundaries are defined by demand thresholds and by spatial concentrations of client households.

Commonwealth policies that favour the provision of such private 'collective' services therefore tend to channel significant public resources to the wealthier communities that are able to capture them. In Western Sydney, these forms of federal public subsidies are being largely diverted to recently developed residential communities where new and existing private education establishments and health-fund supported facilities are flourishing.

The Commonwealth's First Homeowner Grant Scheme has provided a vast public subsidy to the construction of new 'model' communities. Perversely, the receipt of such housing support helps recipient households to qualify for further subsidies. Having been supported into homeownership, many recipients will in time access taxation related subsidies - notably the negative gearing provisions - to further enhance their wealth and increase thereby their 'social distance' from the poorer households that will never qualify for major forms of public financial assistance.

Many Australian households receive federal housing assistance, not just the poor. The wealthy however tend to receive asset, and therefore wealth, enhancing assistance whilst the poor receive 'life-support' aid (income supplements, accommodation) that does little to improve their life chances. In Western Sydney, as in other suburban regions, these forms of assistance are spatially patterned: the former captured by the residents of newer homeowner areas, and the latter supporting growing concentrations of the needy in older localities.

Apart from new subsidies and policy shifts, Commonwealth funding cuts to human services and labour market programs have been a further driver of social differentiation in Western Sydney. A study commissioned by WSROC in 2001 found that the rising cost of childcare - largely a result of Commonwealth cuts since 1996 - had impacted differentially in two Sydney case study areas, one in Lower Northern Sydney and one in Western Sydney (Fairfield-Liverpool). The study showed that shifts in childcare funding and delivery were associated with a weakening labour force participation rate amongst women in the Fairfield-Liverpool area.

Many women who stayed in the labour force were forced to make informal and inferior arrangements for child care. By contrast, women in the wealthier Northern Sydney suburb were less likely to succumb to rising cost pressures by leaving the labour force. Finally, childcare costs relative to average family income were actually lower in the Northern Sydney suburb than in Fairfield-Liverpool. Within Western Sydney, there is an uneven pattern of access to childcare. The situation in many wealthier new release areas is doubtless closer to North Shore conditions than those evident in Fairfield-Liverpool or in other older middle suburbs.

Generally, these new and established federal government policies have tended to reinforce powerfully the process of residential segregation described above. If the Commonwealth is at least partly responsible for rising socio-economic stresses and widening geographical cleavages in Western Sydney, it is ludicrous to argue that their amelioration is simply a state responsibility. Alternative Commonwealth policy settings that reinforce the public sphere and public services instead of undermining them would do much to arrest the drift to social segregation in Western Sydney.

Overall, we observe in Western Sydney the erosion of what Europeans call 'social solidarity'. Social solidarity means an absence of exclusion and the presence of mutual respect within and between geographic and social communities. Social solidarity for the European Union is a key political value, not for misty-eyed philosophical reasons, but because the Europeans recognise it as a precondition for prosperity and happiness. Solidarity means not uniformity but the type of social integrity that emerges from diversity and tolerance.

As such, social solidarity needs a rich and mixed societal 'soil' if it is to survive and thrive. Practically speaking, this means communities that contain a balance of different views, skills, cultures and resources. My assessment of the state of social solidarity in Western Sydney is not encouraging. The strengthening moods of separatism and privatism amongst the region's growing number of affluent communities are mirrored by the deepening gloom and illhumour of its excluded and poorer residents.

Australia's cities and its patterns of urban change are distinct. It is a common failure of analysts and policy-makers to assume that our urban problems simply mirror or follow those observed in US or European cities. The misuse of the terms 'ghetto' and 'underclass' to describe Australian urban conditions are cases in point. Nevertheless, our patterns of urbanisation share some broad causal pressures and outcomes with those observed in other developed nations.

In Europe, the problem of social exclusion has been linked to patterns of socio-economic change that produce increasingly segregated cities. The loss of 'social balance' in established working and middle class urban areas and their fragmentation into separate concentrations of wealth and poverty are recognised as key problems for democracy and social solidarity. In the UK, the social scientist and commentator Anne Power makes the following comment:

...we have now reached the point where urban areas have become too physically dispersed, too traffic bound and too socially polarized to be attractive to many groups. People often leave cities today because they are too depleted. On the whole, it is the better-off who move out, leaving behind marginalized communities with little power to tackle negative conditions. Yet cities need a mixture of incomes and activities if they are to thrive economically. People will live in well-planned, well-designed, well-managed city neighbourhoods, but only if crime, traffic, schools, other core services and environmental conditions are more equal.

Just so. In Western Sydney I have no doubt that everyone aspires to live in "well-planned, well-designed, well-managed city neighbourhoods". This ideal is surely a universal aspiration shared by all those who vote and all those who cannot. The problem is that universal aspiration requires universal access to key public goods and amenities. Our governments have become increasingly unwilling to guarantee such universal access and thus it is only those with market power who have the ability to satisfy their aspirations.

The private form of "well-planned, well-designed, well-managed city neighbourhoods" are the masterplanned showpieces of new urbanism that rejoice in their privileged homogeneity. Left behind are the deteriorating older suburbs with their increasingly residualised, and in some cases desperate, populations. Only those ground down by prolonged exclusion and poverty have surrendered up their aspirations for a good home, a good neighbourhood and the other resources necessary for a good life.

On the other side of the ledger, the winners have their social aspirations and their material appetites fed and inflated by the enormous public subsidies that have been directed towards them. Over time, the aspirations become greater: no longer will a four bedroom house suffice when a mansion with a pool seems the minimum; no longer will a family sedan meet the needs of a family, and when a four wheel drive diesel seems affordable and necessary. From a societal perspective, 'aspiration dependency' is an expensive habit that is difficult to break by political means. Once hooked on subsidies, affluent households are not likely to support policies that seek a more egalitarian and sustainable distribution of social resources and life opportunities.
Wanted: New Ideas for Australian Cities

I have described above the new imbalances that are emerging in the social geography of Western Sydney. These are emblematic of a wider social and geographic resorting that is underway in other parts of metropolitan Australia.

These shifts raise profound issues for our democracy because the drift away from socially balanced communities produces new imbalances of perception and outlook. Sociologists remind us that interaction - that is meaningful human contact at a personal and daily level - is the key to ensuring tolerance, harmony and contentment in dynamic multicultural societies.

I venture to say that the 'culture of anxiety' that pervades public debates and private behaviour in Western Sydney might well be dissipated if we were to reestablish public spaces, facilities and services that invite participation and interaction by all. These need to be reinforced by non-government civic resources that are similarly inclusive and which invite a continuous discovery of differences. Governments cannot create such public and civic spaces on their own but they must lead and invest in the processes that will produce them.

This paper was originally presented to the Evatt Foundation's breakfast seminar series along with Mark Latham's much reported paper that appeared in the last edition of "It's Time".