Urban Policy and Research

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Stuck in a Cul-de-Sac? Suburban History and Urban

Sustainability in Australia

Aidan Davison

To cite this article: Aidan Davison (2006) Stuck in a Cul-de-Sac? Suburban History
and Urban Sustainability in Australia, Urban Policy and Research, 24:2, 201-216, DOI:
10.1080/08111140600704137

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Urban Policy and Research,
Vol. 24, No. 2, 201–216, June 2006

Stuck in a Cul-de-Sac? Suburban History

and Urban Sustainability in Australia
AIDAN DAVISON
School of Geography and Environmental Studies, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

(Received May 2004; accepted March 2006)

ABSTRACT Debate about urban sustainability is in some danger of splitting into narrow, technical
disagreements in which value-laden questions about the purposes, meanings and lived reality of
cities are easily lost. As one way of anchoring debate about urban futures in foundational questions,
this article focuses on the history of suburban ambivalence towards modern development that has
helped shape Australian cities. This history offers important insights into contemporary suburban
aspirations and environmentalist critique of them. It is presented here as a contribution to efforts to
constitute urban sustainability as viable democratic projects built on more than expert discourses of
efficiency and risk.

KEY WORDS: Sustainability, suburbs, anti-suburbanism, history, modernity, values

Introduction: Value, Technique and Urban Sustainability

Choosing a system—a set of relationships for a particular city—is partly

technical. . .. But with the best technique in the world the critical questions are still
questions of value. (Stretton, 1976, pp. 66 – 67)

Hugh Stretton’s observation that arguments about urban systems turn on questions of
value and not on questions of technique is now a generation old. Yet it is more relevant
than ever as debate about urban sustainability runs the risk of splitting into narrow,
technical disagreements between experts. This shift toward technique is, in part, a
consequence of welcome efforts over the last 20 years to translate the often diffuse and
radical sentiments of early post-war environmentalism into policy-relevant agendas. The
danger, however, is that basic, value-laden questions about the purposes, meanings and
lived reality of cities may be easily lost in the growing din of clashing data-sets.
That the ideal of sustainability can encompass divergent social aspirations and opposed
political interests is at once its greatest strength and its greatest weakness (Jacobs, 1999).
This ideal is commonly translated into the goal of sustainable development, with its call

Correspondence Address: Aidan Davison, School of Geography and Environmental Studies, Private Bag 78,
University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania 7001, Australia. Fax: þ 61 3 6226 2989; Tel.: þ 61 3 6226 7590;
Email: Aidan.Davison@utas.edu.au
0811-1146 Print/1476-7244 Online/06/020201-16 q 2006 Editorial Board, Urban Policy and Research
DOI: 10.1080/08111140600704137
202 A. Davison

for thorough and intergenerational integration of cultural, social, economic and

environmental objectives in policy. This goal promises much as a way of organising
the mediation and arbitration of different interests gathered together by the ideal of
sustainability (Dovers, 2005). But it can only realise this promise if questions of value and
questions of technique are allowed to overlap in democratic policy debate in ways that
reflect the messy complexity of social reality. The promise of sustainable development
rests, in the end, with its ability to guide public debate over the rough ground of practical
deliberation, as distinct from technical calculation, where scientific rationality and wise
judgement are joined together (Davison, 2001).
With broad public and scientific interest in environmental issues now well established,
the challenge facing urban sustainability advocates is that of holding together essentially
contested questions of what ought to be done with technical questions about what can
feasibly be done next. In Australia, these technical questions are often focused upon the
benefits and costs of urban consolidation (e.g. Newman, 1999; Birkeland, 2002; Fay et al.,
2002; Moriarty, 2002; Troy et al., 2003; Mitchell & Wadley, 2004; O’Connor & Healy,
2004; Searle, 2004; Troy & Holloway, 2004; Wulff et al., 2004; Bunker et al., 2005; Buxton
& Tieman, 2005). Debate on this issue has done much to divide Australian urban scholars,
planners and urban residents (Lewis, 1999) into opposing camps defined by their attitudes to
suburban patterns of development. It is a debate refuelled by new policy initiatives, such as
the latest metropolitan plans for Melbourne and Sydney, and in the nation’s newspapers
(e.g. Hope, 2005; Horin, 2005; Lane, 2005). Despite the heat and extent of this debate,
however, there has been remarkably little discussion about the idea of suburban
sustainability, although there are recent signs that this may be changing (e.g. Low et al.,
2005). Staunch critics of suburban development reject the idea of suburban sustainability
out of hand as an oxymoron. It is less clear why those advocating positive suburban futures
in Australia have been reluctant to articulate expressly suburban visions of sustainability.
Suburbs have been a convenient scapegoat in Australian discussion about urban
sustainability. While convenient, this approach has helped deflect attention from the
historically layered complexity underlying contemporary urban problems. It has helped to
create the illusion that these problems are amenable to more or less straightforward
technological fixes, and that new futures are to be built by erasing the past. This is not to
say that all is well with Australian suburbs: far from it. The goal of sustainable
development brings with it profound implications for all Australian resource use and
settlement patterns (Yencken & Wilkinson, 2000). Environmental issues relating to
climate change, biodiversity and energy, water and food security will become increasingly
pressing and continue to move to the centre of urban policy and planning. At the same
time, the need for integrative management will ensure such issues become harder to
disentangle from social concerns, such as those of economic productivity, justice and
security. Equally hard to disentangle will be spatial scales from the local to the global as
fluid, transnational flows of capital, resources, risk and desire continue to redefine the
nation – state and urban governance (e.g. Dovey, 2005).
Mindful of the complex biophysical and social forces now at work within and on
Australian cities, this article aims to contribute to a fuller appreciation of the value-laden
histories that have shaped them in debate about urban futures. It is focused on the
ambivalent character and paradoxical consequences of suburban ideals in the making of
Australian modernity. Informed more fully by this history, debate about urban
sustainability stands to produce less polarising conclusions. Given that the majority of
 Stuck in a Cul-de-Sac? 203

Australians continue to live in suburbs, such understanding is a precondition to the

implementation of sustainable development in cities as viable democratic projects built on
more than expert discourses of efficiency and risk. For this reason, it is to the beginnings of
the modern suburb that this discussion heads before working back towards questions of
value in Australian debates about urban sustainability. The final section offers an example
of the upshot of this approach by reconsidering the relationship between suburbanisation
and environmentalism in Australia.

Modern Progress, Suburban Retreat

The creation of suburbs was a defining preoccupation of Australian society in the 20th
century. During this period the suburban population increased from less than 1 to more
than 11 million in the capital cities alone. Depending upon how they are defined, a difficult
matter addressed later in the article, somewhere in the order of 70 per cent of Australia’s
population now live in suburban environments (Salt, 2001; ABS, 2003).
The roots of this preoccupation reach back into the heart of the European Enlightenment
that challenged the authority of Church and aristocracy in the 18th century. This period of
intellectual reform built a moral and economic agenda for social progress and individual
emancipation on the foundations of scientific reason laid down in the previous century.
It was an agenda played out in the following century through a bloody mix of revolution,
colonisation and industrialisation. An academic division of labour between the history of
ideas and the history of practice has obstructed understanding of the ways in which ideas
and practices co-evolve (Taylor, 1989). It has been easy, therefore, to overlook the two-
way causality moving back and forth between new ways of living, such as the modern
suburb, and new ways of thinking. Yet, as the following discussion shows, suburbs were
indeed sites of real significance in the evolution of modernity in Britain and its colonies.
Suburbs were simultaneously a product of and a reaction against the advance of the
physical and moral sciences. Emerging initially out of the unplanned choices of London’s
growing merchant middle class from the mid-1700s (Fishman, 1987), suburban
experiments reveal the interplay of progressive and reactionary ideals that has shaped
and that continues to shape much in modern societies. In particular, they provided one of the
means by which Protestant emphasis on personal religious conviction, rather than on the
political authority of the Church, progressed during the development of secular capitalism
(Davidoff et al., 1976; Fishman, 1987). The bourgeois family home was represented as a
chaste centre in modern life to be kept separate from the materialistic excesses of the city.
Drawing upon biblical stories of urban evil, Protestantism—especially Evangelicalism—
imbued women, children and rural life with a spiritual innocence vulnerable to corruption by
the uncontrollable energies of the city. Men, lacking this innocence, moved between the
worlds of the city—in which moral advance was sought in material achievement—and
the suburban home and garden—in which the virtue of the family could be protected and
the spirit renewed. Alongside the Enlightenment ideal of childhood education, and the
increasing life-spans and decreasing infant mortality rates that altered parenting and
marriage, bourgeois containment of women and children in suburbs helped establish the
centrality of the closed nuclear family in Anglo-Saxon societies.
The invention of home as a private Eden worked together with the antipathy toward
industrial technology expressed in the Romantic revival of classical pastoral themes
(Marx, 1964; Williams, 1973). The aesthetic of the picturesque that informed Romanticism
204 A. Davison

emphasised a passive enjoyment of natural scenery that lent itself to suburban retreat from
utility into purity. The cultivated ‘natural’ order of the English countryside stood in contrast
to the urban chaos characteristic of the early decades of industrialisation. The urban
proportion of Britain’s population tripled to over 60 per cent over the course of the 19th
century (Weber, 1969, p. 151). Earlier decades of mercantile capitalism had prepared the
ground for this shift by worsening and extending rural poverty, with cheap produce from the
colonies seeing domestic agriculture contract to account for only 4 per cent of economically
active men (Williams, 1973, p. 2). As industrial capitalism developed, many could not
afford to resist the economic pull of the city. In The Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels
(1967, pp. 82, 84) observed that the bourgeoisie “put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic
relations” by subjecting “the country to the rule of the towns”, in the process creating
“enormous cities”. Yet, Fishman (1987, p. 71) points out, in

suburbia the conquering bourgeoisie has chosen to re-create an invented version of

the ‘feudal, patriarchal, idyllic’ village environment it was destroying. . .. At the
same time that bourgeois economic initiatives were swelling the metropolis and
undermining the traditional balance between man and nature, this class was creating
a private retreat that expressed tradition, domesticity, and union with nature.

The suburb was no simple rejection of the emerging modern order. The separation of public
and private life it embodied played an important role in the separation of political and
religious authority. The sentimental private order of the bourgeois suburb developed hand in
hand with the dispassionate public order of reason in the making of British modernity. In the
suburb, male agents of progress were sustained by a daily rhythm of release into the succour
of family, spirit and nature. Women, religion and ‘the garden’ were subordinated to the task
of providing private comfort amidst benign order. Suburbs embodied the Enlightenment’s
founding principle that reason and emotion belonged to separate orders of existence.
They helped fracture everyday life into public and private realms in which applied
fundamentally different motivations of behaviour, modes of thought and moral codes.

Australia: A Suburban Experiment

Graeme Davison has suggested that “Australia may itself be regarded as the farthest
suburb of urban Britain” (1995, p. 52). This claim draws attention to two efforts to claim
margins in British invasion of Australia: colonisation and suburbanisation. Although
Australia’s 19th-century free settlers brought with them dreams of property, wealth and
freedom, a good many harboured nightmares borne of their experience of severe social and
environmental problems in Britain’s industrialising cities. Given that many living in
Britain’s dangerous urban slums had been uprooted from rural origins, it was likely a small
step for some to head off in search of a new world reminiscent of their lost rural past.
Liberal use of deportation meant, of course, many slum dwellers were given no choice.
In Australia, anti-urbanism interacted with the urbanisation inherent in mercantile
capitalism to propel the colonies toward suburban experiments that grew rapidly during
second half of the 19th century (Davison, 1978, 1995, 1997). During the boom years of the
1880s, the populations of Melbourne and Sydney increased by 77 and 78 per cent to
473 000 and 400 000, respectively. The centres of these cities each accounted for only
4 per cent of this growth as suburban impulses redefined, again and again, the boundaries
 Stuck in a Cul-de-Sac? 205

of the city. By the recession of the 1890s, Melbourne stretched over 164 000 acres at an
average density of three people per acre. Sydney, with its older and marginally more
compact form, housed four people per acre over 96 000 acres (Weber, 1969, pp. 139, 472;
McCarty, 1974, pp. 21, 27; Davison, 1978, p. 7).
The 1891 census revealed Australia to be “not only the second most urbanised land on
earth (next to Britain), but the most suburbanised of all” (Davison, 1997, p. 12). Not only
were Australian colonies leading the race to become suburban, however, they were
experimenting with the very form, function and meaning of the city. Conventional
assumptions that suburbs exist between city and country were misleading from the
beginning in Australia where the “capitals developed suburbs before their centres were
built up” (Frost & Dingle, 1995, p. 21). As in Britain, Protestantism and Romanticism
combined with the new science of public sanitation and emerging forms of capitalist social
stratification to fuel suburban desire. However, the particular chemistry of early Australian
society gave suburban experiments “a radical democratic twist” (Davison, 1995, p. 58),
setting them apart from the suburban frontiers of Britain and North America. Official
concern about the public health risks of high population densities, for instance, interacted
with higher average disposable incomes and lower public investment in residential
infrastructure than in either Britain or North America to impose a structural imperative of
“forced self-sufficiency” (Mullins, 1981b, p. 38). By the end of the 1880s, well over half of
all houses in the colonies were owner- or purchaser-occupied (Butlin, 1964, p. 259). The
urban working classes effectively constituted a suburban peasantry in their achievement of
a high degree of self-reliance, economic independence and relative affluence. Private
homes and yards became important spaces of vegetable, fruit and meat production, food
preservation and processing, clothes making, home and furniture building and repair,
water collection, waste disposal and cottage industry (Mullins, 1981a). The result
was (a racially circumscribed) democracy founded upon the “self-contained man”, as
Victoria’s Attorney-General of the 1920s put it: a landholder whose “hedges are his
frontiers” (Eggleston, 1932, pp. 330 – 331). It is not difficult to see why Garden City ideals
of a rational marriage of town and country were influential in Australia in the early
decades of the 20th century (Freestone, 1987). Understanding the privatised nature of early
Australian democracy, it is also not hard to see why many garden suburb developments
were designed to turn a quick profit rather than to create socialist utopias.
Students of Australian intellectual history have overlooked the role of suburbs in
reproducing and altering social beliefs and values. Take, for example, John Gascoigne’s
(2002) claim that Australia provided less of the friction that dragged at the wheels of
Enlightenment reforms in Europe. Observing that conflict between Evangelical and
Enlightenment goals was less pronounced in the colonies than in England, Gascoigne
reports the Evangelical leader William Wilberforce urging the British Home Secretary, in
1792, “to introduce and keep alive amongst the bulk of the people [of the fledgling colony
of New South Wales] such a sense of religion as will make them temperate and orderly,
and domestic and contented” (cited in Gascoigne, 2002, p. 20). Gascoigne doesn’t note
that Wilberforce, the most prominent of London’s bourgeois suburban pioneers, had an
inherently suburban vision of domestic contentment. While Wilberforce’s spiritual hopes
for the rum-soaked colony were initially frustrated, over the long term a distinctively
proletarian ideal of suburban order was to prove decisive in Australia. Suburban retreat
was linked to the accelerated advance of Enlightenment rationalism in Australia. Settlers
sought refuge in the religious, aesthetic, economic and social autonomy on offer in
206 A. Davison

a suburban order that existed between the wild strangeness of indigenous order and the
novelty of the nascent modern order that sought to dominate them. Romanticist distrust of
progress was not so much less acute, as Gascoigne concludes, as it was played out in the
pursuit of an essentially private and essentially pragmatic vision of Eden.

Writing Off the Suburbs

At the turn of the 20th century the world’s first suburban nation seemed unaware it was
embarked upon a remarkable experiment. Its citizenry was to be found writing, singing
and painting itself into existence through figures such as the bushman and the drover
(McAuliffe, 1996). The anti-urban sentiment that “in the cities, not in the bush, . . . the
national fibre is being in a hundred ways slackened and destroyed”, was widespread
(Stephens cited in Turner, 1968, p. 250). As the pragmatic necessity of the city grew,
however, more and more were drawn into the ambivalent world of the suburb. And as the
city grew around them, the more suburban Australians perched on the coastal rim seemed
attracted by stories and images of a nation that rode upon a sheep’s back.
Although a highly visible feature of Australian life and long the butt of intellectual
derision, it is only relatively recently that suburbs have attracted sustained study as interesting,
complex and rich cultural sites (e.g. Ferber et al., 1994; Johnson, 1994), although they have
not been without earlier eloquent champions (Horne, 1966; Stretton, 1989). The Great
Australian Dream has seemed to many a self-evident compromise lacking its own essential
character. The complex and contradictory responses to modernity encoded within suburbs and
rehearsed in everyday practice have commonly remained beneath public awareness.
That discussion of suburban values has often been superficial and dismissive is not
surprising given the semantic confusion that surrounds this subject. Dictionaries and
public discourses continue to hark back to the origins of the adjective ‘suburban’ as a
description of the depraved inhabitants of the slums that ringed medieval London. They
thus define it pejoratively as a reference to those people, things and phenomena that are
less than or beneath the urban. Habits of non-specific, catch-all criticism built on this
inheritance have helped to jumble together critique of the environmental and cultural
dimensions of suburbs. Such habits have tended to establish physical boundaries between
urban, suburban and rural environments so poorly that anti-suburban and anti-urban
critique are also commonly jumbled together. This is especially the case in Australia
where the anti-urban energies that motivated suburban experiments turned against suburbs
themselves in the early 20th century as the city limits continued to be pushed outwards,
effectively drawing older suburbs into the urban reality of the city.
Anti-suburban feeling grew paradoxically powerful in the world’s first suburban nation
(Gilbert, 1988). The “suburban home must be destroyed”, decried socialist playwright
Louis Esson (1973 [1912], p. 73) in 1912, for in them “all is repression, stagnation”. Such
anti-suburban feeling tells of intellectual snobbery in a country where working classes
pursued cut-price versions of bourgeois utopia. It tells also, however, of the self-defeating
character of suburban development as it intensified the repellent social forces from which
it was intended to ensure escape.
No one put the case that the Great Australian Dream was becoming a nightmare more
pithily than Robin Boyd, who asked, in 1952 (pp. 115– 116): “In ten years at most, at the
present rate of expansion, will not our big cities choke themselves out like over-stimulated
weeds?” Yet, far from choking themselves out, brick and tile frontiers spread further over
 Stuck in a Cul-de-Sac? 207

the next two decades than even their most influential proponent, Prime Minister Menzies,
could have hoped, although his government urged them on by making home ownership
more widely accessible (Troy, 2000). At the end of the Second World War, Australia, as
with other Allied nations whose infrastructure remained largely intact if strained by the
needs of returned servicemen, experienced heightened levels of technological innovation,
nationalism and immigration. Optimism produced in these conditions joined anxiety fed by
the cold war, and particularly by urban panic in the age of the atomic bomb (Farish, 2003), to
motivate suburban dreams of refuge. Writing in the middle of the insecurities of war,
between stints as Prime Minister, Menzies (1992 [1942], pp. 7 –8) lauded the instinct
“which induces us to have one little piece of earth with a house and a garden which is ours, to
which we can withdraw, in which we can be among friends, into which no stranger may
come against our will”.
After the war, the link between private and national borders was drawn tighter still.
Suburbs became a symbol of democratic freedom and of capitalist virtue over communist
tyranny. As with earlier forms of anti-suburban critique, the accelerated production of
suburbs during the post-war boom was accompanied by an acceleration in the production
of representations of ‘suburban tundra’ as landscapes of mindless banality. Often coming
from those who had grown up in them—such as Barry Humphries and George Johnson—
and from some who continued to live in them—such as Thomas Keneally and Patrick
White—representations of suburbs not as spaces of autonomy but of conformity were
influential in shaping Australian self-understandings, but did little to dampen suburban
aspirations (Stretton, 1989, pp. 9 –13).
Within only a few years, car ownership was added to the list of house and garden as a basic
democratic aspiration of most Australians. The rapid increase in private motorised transport
from 1945 to 1975 accelerated the centrifugal forces operating on Australian cities,
transforming as it further entrenched suburban forms of life (Davison, 2004). Together with
new communication technologies, and especially television, post-war suburban form
simultaneously enabled new forms of social introversion and individualism as it enabled
new forms of social control and coordination. The autonomy of the suburban peasantry was
effectively dismantled and replaced by a pursuit of suburban comfort and leisure
reminiscent of earlier bourgeois aspirations. Australian suburban homes were transformed
from self-contained sites of production and reproduction into spaces for consumption
(Mullins, 1981a,b; Gaynor, 1999; Mullins & Kynaston, 2000). The movement of women
into the formal economy was accompanied by structural economic forces working to
maximise consumption. From child rearing and care of the aged to home agriculture and
food preparation to domestic cleaning and maintenance the private sphere became webbed
into and dependent upon the capitalist economy in new ways. This is not to say that domestic
production and particularly women’s informal economic work is no longer significant.
Equally, older traditions of suburban self-reliance were combined with new (especially non-
Anglo-Saxon) traditions of self-reliance introduced by post-war immigration to remain an
important feature of the early post-war period. Over a third of new dwellings in the decade
after the war were built by their owners (Frost & Dingle, 1995, p. 35). But while such
resourcefulness and domestic production is not absent from today’s suburbs (Dingle, 2000;
Mullins & Kynaston, 2000), it is increasingly a component of rather than an alternative to
dependency on the formal economy.
While suburbs have seen a shift from production to consumption in the private sphere,
they have become ever more significant sites of formal economic production. The noun
208 A. Davison

‘suburb’ denotes a growing variety of landscapes, often although not always predominated
by detached housing, that lie beyond the urban core or that constitute novel forms of
decentred or polycentred urban form, integral to the functioning of the urban whole.
In particular, suburbs are becoming important sites of employment, economic innovation,
technological production and global flows of capital. Writing of the US context, Larry
Bourne noted in 1996 (pp. 163– 164) that the “simplistic city – suburban dichotomy”
is “outdated and increasingly unsuited to the complex realities of contemporary
metropolitan life”. In his view, both terms “need to be replaced by a new and yet undefined
lexicon”. Edward Blakely (2003, p. 49), for one, has recently proposed ‘middleburb’ as
a label for Australia’s 21st-century globally competitive suburban communities.
However, while the wish to leave behind semantic confusion is understandable, movement
toward a new lexicon should not be used to mask the important threads that run through
suburban history and into the present. Blakely’s (2003, p. 47) conclusion that earlier suburbs
were somehow “passive agents”, in contrast to today’s active middleburb hubs, for instance,
once again downplays the active role suburbs have played and continue to play in the
historical negotiation of modernity in Australia.

Suburbs versus Sustainability?

Lousie Johnson (2003, p. 4) suggests that Australian anti-suburban narratives went
through a transformation during the 1970s from being “the creation of literary
imaginations” to becoming “sociological and ecological facts” needing to be addressed by
policy. Over the next three decades, anti-suburbanism was to become a complex political
phenomenon as it brought together the overtly opposed forces of radical social movements
and neoliberal economic reform. On the one hand, the political left has drawn from
feminist, environmentalist, socialist and civil-rights critique to present the suburb as a
locus of white, male privilege, ecological recklessness and social alienation (Richards,
1990; Newman & Kenworthy, 1992; Trainer, 1995; Bryson & Winter, 1999), although
often with little agreement as to how suburbs ought best be reformed. On the other hand,
starting with the Fraser government, Australia’s strong public investment in suburban
infrastructure during the middle decades of the 20th century has come under increasing
pressure from neoliberal forces pushing for smaller government and an expanded role for a
deregulated and global market in the provision and distribution of social goods (Stretton,
1989; Gleeson & Low, 2000).
Beginning to alter the face of Australian cities by the late 1980s (Baker et al., 2000), urban
consolidation promised precisely the integration of environmentalist and economic
objectives—and the mainstreaming of environmental politics that went with this—then
taking hold in the imaginations of policy makers in the form of the idea of ecologically
sustainable development. The 1990s, not surprisingly, saw urban consolidation presented as
a technical strategy capable of realising sustainable development objectives. Urban
sustainability discourses have often implicitly drawn upon older anti-suburban themes.
The physical determinism evident in Robert Riddell’s Sustainable Urban Planning
(2004, p. 195) is typical of much of this literature:

Given a plot –house –car lifestyle structure as dominant, plot-holding, home-owning,

appliance-operating and car-running concerns take over suburban lives, pattern their
consumption and condition their thinking. The living –consuming –thinking pattern
 Stuck in a Cul-de-Sac? 209

which has evolved is defined by child needs (pap food), child pleasure (low-
gratification television), and child consumerism (plaything cars and dinky houses).

The rhetoric of ‘suburban sprawl’ has been appropriated from its original use as a
description of unregulated forms of tract development in the USA to become shorthand in
Australia for the many perceived environmental and social failings of suburbs (Troy, 1996).
In combination with a technological determinism pervasive in popular culture, the idea that
suburbs sprawl has conveyed the impression that they are a cancer growing uncontrollably
in the social body, rather than being the product of ongoing negotiations and choices.
In this discourse, Australia’s suburban experiments appear as an evolutionary dead-end:
a cul-de-sac that must be broken open to make way for sustainable, that is, authentically
urban, paths of development. This discourse displays little understanding of the
ambivalence of suburban ideals toward technological progress. It overlooks the practical
role of suburbs as places of emotional, moral and spiritual refuge from the excesses and
risks of modernisation. Critiques of consumerist ‘sprawl’ therefore commonly
discount possibilities for distinctively suburban responses to the 21st-century challenge
of sustainability.
Anti-suburban energies have helped drive urban consolidation in practice. While the
resultant effects have been complex and subject to local variation (Bunker et al., 2002,
2005), there is evidence that they have to date deepened inequality in Australian cities
(Troy, 1996; Lewis, 1999; Randolph, 2004a; Searle, 2004). In addition to this erosion of
what is a basic prerequisite of social, economic and cultural sustainability, the impacts of
these policies on the environmental and ecological sustainability of Australian cities appear
to have been both limited and mixed (Fay et al., 2002; Moriarty, 2002; Troy et al., 2003).
The glamour of inner city renewal in Australia over the past 25 years, driven substantially by
the flight of middle-class professionals from childhood suburbs into bohemian terraces and
gated vertical communities, has dominated media representations of consolidation
processes despite accounting for only a relatively small demographic shift (Salt, 2001). The
link between consolidation processes and the “suburbanisation of disadvantage”
(Randolph, 2004b, p. 488) is much less visible in the media. Middle-ring suburbs are
becoming important spaces of disadvantage, with deteriorating public infrastructure and
residential densities driven higher by private land speculation rather than by coherent social
policy. At the same time, poorer groups are becoming excluded from the centres of large
cities revitalised by substantial public investment aimed at opening the city to global flows
of capital (Dovey, 2005). So too are they lately being excluded from many (especially
coastal) parts of the suburban and peri-urban fringe as private wealth is translated into land
values in a search for scenic refuge from social and environmental problems in commuter
range of metropolitan areas (Burnley & Murphy, 2004).
Despite attention given to suburban out-migration in pursuit of cosmopolitan
sophistication or Arcadian tranquillity, suburbs—albeit in continually evolving forms—
seem likely to hold their majority share of the Australian population for at least the next
few decades (Salt, 2001; Wulff et al., 2004). In this context and despite his subsequent
political demise, Mark Latham’s (2003, pp. 9 – 10) message that most of “Australia’s
political debate comes from the inner city, from people living in a tiny part of Sydney and
Melbourne”, making politics no longer “a question of left and right, but a struggle between
insiders and outsiders”, has electoral clout. It is a message that speaks to anxieties grown
alongside new patterns of social (and racial) segregation in cities becoming more exposed
210 A. Davison

to global patterns of desire, control and conflict (Gleeson, 2003). Such suburban anxieties
are increasingly wrapped up with 21st-century anxieties about terrorism through the
potential of this new set of fears to be shaped by older fears of high population densities
and public space and older symbolic connections between private and national forms of
border protection. They are also entangled with 21st-century fears about global ecological
insecurity, raising the prospect that dire warnings from environmentalists may provoke
new forms of suburban introversion and retreat from a disturbing world, an outcome likely
to only fuel environmentalist scorn of suburban ‘apathy’. This prospect may be made less
likely and new strategies for encouraging the Australian population to adopt more
sustainable practices may be developed if it becomes widely understood that
environmentalist critique of suburban aspirations is itself indebted to these aspirations.
For, as the final section indicates, past ideals of suburban retreat and present ideals of
sustainability have a good deal in common.

Suburbs and Environmentalism

Adam Rome’s (2001) account of the suburban-industrial complex that emerged after the
Second World War in North America—sibling to the world’s most powerful military-
industrial complex—poses intriguing and to date largely un-addressed questions for the
Australian case. Rome describes how the political and economic interests bound together in
the suburban-industrial complex orchestrated an unprecedented increase in resource
consumption and waste production. His purpose is not to restate the well-known ecological
impacts of post-war suburbanisation, however, but to show how environmentalist concerns
emerged from within these suburbs in parallel with these impacts. Rome’s study
puts empirical flesh on the bones of Samuel Hays’ (1987, p. 91) earlier observation that
“there was a paradox in suburbanization. . .. The world seemed to close in and destroy what
one had sought to secure. This experience shaped much environmental concern.”
Suburban history shows this paradox to be neither unique to the post-war suburb nor
incidental to it. From the beginning, suburbs “kept alive the ideal of a balance between
man and nature in a society that seemed dedicated to destroying it. That is its legacy”
(Fishman, 1987, p. 207). The interplay of progressive and reactionary impulses in
suburban ideals produced what Leo Marx (1964, p. 360) so well described as a “strange
compound of sentiment and criminal aggressiveness”. With the rise of the suburban-
industrial complex this compound became vastly more potent, but also more unstable.
Warnings of a ‘silent spring’ spoke to growing suburban disillusionment with the suburban
dream of claiming the benefits of the modern technological order while living at least
partly beyond its reach—and especially beyond its noise, dirt and dangers—in the
autonomy of a private Eden. New subdivisions held the edge of the city just long enough
for many children within them to experience powerful loss as the next wave of bulldozers
arrived, prompting a good number of them to unquestioningly join anti-suburban
sentiment and environmentalist politics as adults (Rome, 2001, pp. 119 –152). The now
heavily populated field of environmental philosophy, for instance, was pioneered in the
years following this boom by scholars from the suburban nations of Australia and
North America. While championing the virtues of wilderness and criticising
Enlightenment ideals, these scholars have typically ignored the suburban environments
in which many of them grew up, except to employ them as prime examples of the loss of
nature (Light, 2001; Kirkman, 2004).
 Stuck in a Cul-de-Sac? 211

The neglected question of whether the rising importance of wilderness as a space of

autonomy from modernity is related to a 20th-century loss of suburban innocence in
Australia merits empirical study. What, for example, is to be made in the Australian
context of Paul Sutter’s (2002) case that it was antipathy toward the car and not ecological
criteria that defined the early wilderness preservation movement in the USA? This question
is crucial, for while it was the car more than any other single innovation that led to the
destruction of suburb illusions about domestic refuge, and while perceptions of ecological
purity have often depended upon the exclusion of cars and roads, it was the car itself that
joined wilderness tightly to suburban experience by placing it within easy weekend reach,
rendering wildness with a familiar, domestic surface.
Studies of Australian environmentalism have established that environmental activism
has had, until very recently, a decidedly urban demographic—which is to say, a decidedly
suburban demographic—since its origins in the second half of the 19th century (Hutton &
Connors, 1999; Doyle, 2000). Broadly speaking, it is possible to identify two forms of
environmental discourse, ‘brown’ and ‘green’, beginning with these origins and
continuing into the present (where recent evidence suggests they now meet a new, third set
of discourses) (Pakulski & Tranter, 2004). Beginning with the concerns of sanitarians and
town planners, brown discourse has been largely managerial and preoccupied with
problems such as pollution associated with industrial, and especially urban, environments.
Brown concern has been typically local in scope, informal in social organisation and
concerned more with risk than with questions of nature. In contrast, and reaching back to
the early naturalist and national parks movements, green concern has developed around
the goal of understanding, celebrating and preserving nature. Global in scope, these
discourses have underpinned the rise of formal environmentalist organisations and broad-
scale environmental protest. Often anti-modern and anti-suburban these normative and
aesthetic discourses become, over the second half of the 20th century, preoccupied with
the goal of wilderness protection.
Suburban history is important here for it reveals an important way in which
brown, managerial concerns about environmental risk and green, normative and aesthetic
concerns about nature have overlapped in everyday Australian aspirations. One of very
few scholars to recognise that “the dominant ecological imaginary in Australia is suburban”
is Trevor Hogan.

While it is a workable generalization to speak of Australian suburbia as a reaction to

the city, this has to be tempered with the caveat that Australia’s is a strictly
transposed, retrospective and novel reaction to European and North American
industrial city experience. Of far greater importance to the shaping of suburban
consciousness in Australian cities is the experience of domestic natural ecosystems
and the ‘socialization’ of these ecosystems through gardening, garden economies,
stakeholder democracy, back-shed poiesis, network utilities, leisure pursuits, and so
on. (Hogan, 2003, pp. 54, 69)

Accepting that early Australian suburban aspirations were as much pragmatic as expressly
cultural does not mean they should be understood as a straightforward manifestation of a
modern desire to dominate nature. The accommodation sought with nature in suburbs was
indebted to countermodern traditions that mingled utilitarian and non-utilitarian sources of
responsiveness to and respect for the non-human world not encompassed by ideas of
212 A. Davison

domination. Certainly, the economic and environmental self-sufficiency once practiced

widely in Australian suburbs has contributed to present ecological problems, not least
through the transplanting of European practices, conceptions and aesthetics in very foreign
and poorly understood environments. It is worth noting, however, that standard
environmentalist accounts of Australian suburbs as ecological wastelands may tell more of
anti-suburban prejudice than of suburban reality. Tim Low (2002), for one, makes a case
for thinking that the unheralded innovations and associations currently being forged by
‘nature’ in suburbs may be as important to the prospects for ecological sustainability in
Australia as is the protection of wilderness.
It is no accident that the level of self-sufficiency once achieved in Australian suburbs
bears uncanny resemblance to many anti-suburban environmentalist visions for a
sustainable future. Some critics of Australian suburbia implicitly acknowledge this fact
when they suggest only minor physical changes to suburban landscapes could realise
profound improvements in sustainability (e.g. Trainer, 1995). Nor is it an accident that
many environmentalist critiques of suburbia and prescriptions for urban consolidation are
launched from quasi-rural subdivisions, bush blocks and hobby farms in the commuter
belts girding Australian cities. Similarly, recent and little-studied environmental social
movements such as permaculture and urban landcare have been critical of suburban sprawl
and yet seem to be finding their heartlands in suburban environments. An appreciation of
the origin of suburban ideals in ambivalence about modern development helps make sense
of such movements and broader phenomena such as ‘downshifting’. It also helps make
sense of the growing popular interest in suburban nature evident, for example, in the
Australian Broadcasting Commission’s Wildwatch surveys and its Gardening Australia
program and related publications about ecological gardening (Davison, 2005).

Conclusion
The forgoing brief discussion of the relationship between environmental concern and
suburban aspiration is offered as an invitation to comprehensive analysis of ways in which
suburban history is relevant to contemporary debate about urban sustainability in Australia.
It has been argued that suburban aspirations have acted as a mechanism of escape from
forces they have paradoxically intensified. Not only are Australian suburban aspirations
informed by contradictory impulses, they share many of these impulses with sustainability
advocates who criticise them. This is not to absolve suburban environments or suburban
communities of responsibility as past and present sources of unsustainable ideas and
practices. It is, however, to counteract unbalanced criticism of them as irretrievably,
constitutionally unsustainable. Awareness of and research into the paradox at the core
Australian suburban experience can help to inform and enrich efforts currently underway to
recast sustainable urban planning as an exercise of participatory governance; efforts such as
the Dialogue with the City process in Perth (WADPI, n.d.) and, more generally, the revival
of interest in metropolitan planning (Gleeson et al., 2004). Such research promises
strategies for softening rigid, dogmatic interpretations of sustainability, shifting the focus
of discussion about sustainability and planning from technical attempts to design the future,
to genuine dialogue about practical ways of negotiating and embodying shared aspirations
for the future.
The determination and achievement of urban sustainability objectives cannot be
advanced in Australia as viable democratic projects if suburban environments are
 Stuck in a Cul-de-Sac? 213

demonised, their populations patronised and homogenised, or new challenges understood

as independent of historical legacies. Technical information about flows of resources,
wastes, people, capital and risk is crucial to the determination and achievement of these
objectives. But data alone is not sufficient to the task. It may in fact be detrimental if it is
employed as a means of side-stepping potentially fraught and often slow public
deliberation over contested questions of value, especially those questions bearing on the
sources of anxiety and fear that continue to energise suburban desire for private refuge.
Australian desire for predictable, securable private borders exists side by side with policies
that assist in an intensification of global flows, including flows of environmental risk, that
have eroded many shared borders. While the details of this situation are new, the desire it
generates to keep a rapidly changing world at arm’s length has a long-standing presence in
Australian society. In this regard, interest in urban sustainability promises not techniques
by which to prove the best way to live, but skills of informed debate and wise judgement.
These are skills vital to the maintenance of a democratic imagination about what it means
to live well in Australia and to nurture the personal and political courage required to
change entrenched forms of life.

Acknowledgements
The author acknowledges improvements made to this article with the aid of suggestions from two anonymous
reviewers and Greg Bamford, James Boyce, Matt Bradshaw, Pete Hay, Keith Jacobs, Allan Johnson, Mark
Sagoff, Elaine Stratford and Peter Wilde. The views expressed and any failings of the article remain the
responsibility of the author. This research was supported by the Australian Research Council (Discovery-Project
0344074).

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