• Slumburbia (crisis, displacement, another cycle of flight)
• Repair and retrofit (urbanise, localise, infill, pedestrianise etc)
• Suburbia 2.0 (teleworking, technology parks. mobility etc)
• Edible/Green suburbs (permaculture, agriculture, forest)
• Global suburb (a relationship to the global city and the global slum, cultural diversity/ethnoburb)

I’m keen to flesh these out. I can see some signs in my own locality already – the introduction of NBN, changing demographics, the clusters of aged and low income folk, various gardening and conservation efforts, increasing density.

A small child offers her old toys and a free drink.

A household offers a place to rest and explore on the footpath.

A handmade seat in the shade.

It connects with other texts that have some bearing on writing place and Enabling Suburbs. The former relates to this project, while the latter relates to Chiara Camponeschi’s work, The Enabling City, which makes reference to the ‘power of the everyday’. This stuff of the everyday is formidable. An arts journalism experiment by a group called Engine29 observes that arts writers spend their time in venues and cultural institutions rather than “on the sidewalks, in the storefronts, throughout the neighborhoods that wrap around the white fortresses of museums”. They say that art is about place. For Moving Experience, Engine29 celebrated “the importance of context and the power of place in a way that served artists, audiences, and publications in a more relevant and valuable way”. Their methodology involved flipping the car culture and car narrative of LA, exploring the city on bicycles, on foot and on public transit for four days. It was about developing a new way of working and ‘getting closer to the culture of the city’ they were covering.

When applied to writing, ‘covering’ is a funny word isn’t it?

Sharing their learnings, they discovered the interconnectedness of the arts with places, writing with transit, writer with artist, art with community. It has linkages to slow journalism and other practices with explore the relationship between writing, depth, experience and speed. It also is about a kind of place based writing that considers community, culture and neighbourhood. They proposed a movement called street journalism (#streetjourno), a practice that may have existed once when journalists walked a beat.

Considering recent conversations about place blogging and a writing focused on changescaping, social media seems to make it more meaningful, more resonant. Thinking about my local newspaper and the comments made by the Cane Toad Times founder, I recall an earlier comment about how local events rarely attract analysis in the local press. There are other permutations of this connective kind of writing – a journalism of the everyday, of the local, of place – and what it means for suburbs, their solutions and their poetries.

In a recent article on the failures of climate change communication, Sunny Hundal offers the following advice – “focus on the economic case, drop the activist-speak, talk about solutions rather than doom – and don’t rely on politicians.” Poll indicates that attitudes to climate change have not just remained static but actually worsened. Public opinion is not evolving. In an annual survey, British Social Attitudes, public support for tackling climate change is dropping, especially if behaviour change costs money, time or effort. This hardening of attitudes is worrisome. As Hundal points out, “This failure to connect with the public is already having a dire effect on political will to deal with the problem.” It also highlights the problems of communication as it relies on rationalist and positivist approaches. Hundal points out that there is an issue of identification, a recoiling from crisis and doom, and a need to rethink strategy. There is a powerful agenda for change, but a dissipation of energies to address it.

Saskia Sassen examines how the ‘open city’ is under attack at the same time it is gaining acceptance. She says “both the urbanising of war and the direct threats to cities from climate change provide us with powerful agendas for change … Cities face challenges that are indeed larger than our differences. If we are going to act on these threats, we will have to work together, all of us. Could it be that here lies the basis for a new kind of open city, one not so much predicated on the civic as on a new shared urgency?” Urgency is different to panic and fear, though it can have that effect. Fear is crippling. Urgency is about need and timing, about the possibility of futuring, about a possible future. For Sassen these kinds of problems are larger than our differences.

Climate change and sustainability needs to be embedded in all our communications, in everything we design, in everything we built, in everything we do. Can we talk about place – at any scale – or planning without talking about climate change? I would think not, yet there are many who refuse to engage or adopt a sceptical outlook. As if scepticism or denial makes it go away. Yet these are the decisions made by our neighbours, our colleagues, our family members and our friends. Deliberation and decision making are hard work. So there are new languages and practices to develop in the face of this mounting disavowal, such as the Debunking Handbook. Conversations and campaigns are riddled with a kind of irrationality or cognitive bias, so communicative rationality or positivism is not necessarily the counter. Words like resilience and adaptation probably mean nothing to most people, but liveability and price do. Increasingly this discussion seems to run like Zeno’s Paradoxes. Changing minds, if that’s really the point, takes time and urgency is an idea which means time is running out.

A recent article in Public Agenda identified seven stages of public opinion, stressing that public opinion is not static and that our position on complex issues takes time to develop. A colleague notes the seeming impassability of stages 3 and 4 and the effort it takes to get beyond wishful thinking. Sassen argued for the collaborative and collective approach, and that could possibly support the formation of public opinion through governance and deliberative decision making. Stephen Healy argues that such deliberation might be better pitched at preferred ‘forms of life’ rather than ‘preferences’. Healy explains that “‘Forms of life’, a term borrowed by STS scholars from Wittgenstein, correspond to the complex interdependencies between culture, the specificities of everyday life, and the technoscientific achievements and factual claims constituting these things.” In recognising the way citizens act, he cites the example of the Transition Town movement, where ‘forms of life’ are evaluated and where citizens can get to the heart of matters.

Given this, there is potential to develop the kind of deliberative design approaches that would might mean a more integrative approach to, say, my local area’s ‘streetscaping’. Or to planning more broadly. Or to the kinds of opposition that arises in suburban communities opposed to change. This can be a kind of changescaping. The idea of ‘forms of life’ is a resource for a whole of community approach (see also Janette Hartz-Karp) represents a shift from an entrenched notion of a way of life.

There are contradictions at play – on the one hand there is an expectation that people will live in higher densities on transit corridors (and this area will benefit from rapid bus transit in the next decade or so) but on the other there is no commensurate commitment to place making and urban design. The local area plan indicates that the main roads where these ‘streetscaping’ is underway should be developed and treated as boulevards and enhance local amenity (see this Book of Boulevard Precedents). Let’s also point out that not one tree has been planted along these roads, with the exception of those planted outside MacDonalds when it was redeveloped, in the ten years or so of that plan. So what is the point of the local area plan? It’s mistaken on at least one issue, it promises a community facility on privately owned land (a bus station and mobile library don’t count) and it affirms low density.

Streetscaping is one way of creating coherence in otherwise ad hoc and poorly developed suburban areas, like Aspley, which have been subjected to ever increasing road widenings and traffic increases for decades. The term boulevard evokes images of a wide street or road (a thoroughfare) that is framed by buildings and trees (as below and this is not a particularly good example, just slightly better). It’s a way of treating or dealing with the problem of wide transit corridors because a boulevard can also valorise the pedestrian experience. While Gympie Road is a major transit corridor, there is a need to recognise that there are communities and businesses around it.

I reading the National Urban Design Protocol recently. My concern about some of the big and broad policy initiatives is the way in which they are interpreted or applied locally both for new and retrofitted developments – the line of sight approach can sometimes mean diffusion at the local level or the affimation of hierachies. Retrofitting, I believe, needs to be part of maintenance and governance in established areas. So fixing a cracked and unevent footpath in a suburban centre on a corridor should have a higher purpose. It should mean a retrofitted footpath rather than more of the same.

Design and street layout aren’t the only considerations. I’ve just been reading about a report titled Retrofitting the Suburbs to Increase Walking. It found that “while traditional urban design elements such as inwardly focused street geometry may encourage walking, our results suggest that a more critical factor is the concentration of business activity in a compact commercial center.” The authors note that this is not without its problems given that the business concentration is greater than suburban neighbourhoods can sustain. Centres on transit corridors, however, should be able to sustain some increased residential density (and this is planned for Aspley). It’s tasty food for thought as the centre and shopping centre show their age, facing the real possibility of redevelopment, especially as several shopfronts remain empty.

In the centre, two shops were empty for most of last year, after a well intentioned fruit, veg and coffee venture failed. That failed and refitted store left a legacy of timber framed windows and doors. It’s an addition that changes the look and feel, adds warmth and welcome. In the last few months, the shops were gutted with renewed efforts for leasing. They are not moving in a hurry. It’s one of those situations where the property owners would be better off leasing it for next to nothing to encourage a co-working, cultural or social use. On several occasions I have considered using the space to host a community speakout type event or to somehow bring it into use for the Enabling Suburbs project, so that issues like the Council’s approach to ‘streetscaping’ can be scrutinised and negotiated.

24.4% on groceries (vegetarian)
9.8% on communications
12.2% on the car including petrol and servicing
7.3% on energy (green plans mean no carbon emissions)
4.9% on water

Of course, measuring consumption in terms of expenditure isn’t an indicator of impact. However, our water and energy bills always show consumption below the local area average. This of course doesn’t take into consideration the energy and water embedded in the goods we consume i.e. food represents a quarter of our household expenditure. As Brendan Gleeson explains, food, including dining out, and other goods we consume have a significant impact on ecological footprint.

Last year, a largish residential block in my local area was subdivided into three (above, outlined in red). An oversized lowset family home, probably built in the 60s/70s, was demolished and three two-storey family homes were approved (below, two of the three houses are built). I’ve wondered if that house and the one two doors up (green roof) once presided over larger properties that swept down to the main road, gradually cutting away land to sell for development.

As far as I can see this development is more of the same kind of resource intensive housing that occupies most of a block of land, leaving nothing for mitigation (i.e. stormwater drainage and carbon capture), no solar panels either. Granted, the white roof plays a part in deflecting heat. Is this really an image of sustainable planning as per the provisions of the Act or is it an incremental compromise or is it about addressing projected housing shortages and infill quotas? While I recognise that this technically represents an increase in density from one family to three close to transport, green spaces and centres – prioritised in various planning instruments – I find myself asking ‘what does sustainability really look like?’ Surely it doesn’t look like this.

Postscript
It’s easy to point to suburban lifestyles and housing as unsustainable and to recognise the McMansion as an inappropriate and resource intensive housing form, especially when replicated en masse across large tracts of single use land. However, walking around inner city suburbs like New Farm, I can’t help but ask this question again as I look at the often architect designed renovations of Queenslanders which sees them double, even triple in size. The pattern of development is, of course, more diverse than suburban areas which results in greater intensity and density. Recognising that house size isn’t the only indicator of sustainability and that wealth is a key indicator, there remains questions about that kind of lifestyle, especially given that the inner city suburbs, like New Farm, tend to have a greater environmental footprint from their consumption habits than suburban areas.

There’s a tight relationship between this kind of figuring and memetics. Memes are understood as a kind of ‘cultural DNA’, and memeplexes are understood as meme complexes or as memecomplexes. A design fiction doesn’t do much until it joins a network of signs, symbols and representations. There are other ways of talking about cultural tranmission e.g. social pyschology, sociology etc. Futuring is part of this picture; not just in the sense of casting things and ideas into the future but in terms of ‘making time, making a future’. The material and the semiotic are tangled.

I was watching Kevin McCloud’s Slumming It on ABC. In this two-part documentary series, he spends some time in Dharavi, a slum in Mumbai. There’s a tendency in some commentaries to valorise life in the world’s slums and informal settlements – that despite the deprivations and chaos, there is a sense of ‘community’ – there’s television, safety, education, culture, opportunity and enterprise. That it somehow works as an ecology or system as a village might, as theorists Saskia Sassen, Jeb Brugmann and Mike Davis explore. Watching his reactions to the place and the people is both interesting and telling. As he (un)settles into living with a largish multigenerational family residing in a small house, he is aghast at the lack of space, sleep and privacy, the nightly encroachment by rats and the excess of risk (disease, fire). He is hypersensitive about his whiteness. He is confronted by the living and working conditions. In particular, the recycling and reconditioning industry where consumerism begins and ends, barefooted and unprotected for less than a pound per day. This is our supply chain; this creates our comfort.

Watching this mediation of Dharavi (or perhaps a simulacra), McCloud seems trapped in western design/architectural fictions about home and place (the stories we tell ourselves), and the power of the meme it produces (expectation and cultural preference). Other design fictions – not just scenarios or plans – are required. A history of town planning in London reads like a fairytale somehow delivering a deterministic happily ever after. A design fiction of London, the design fictions of world cities and world slums, a world of urban stories (Saskia Sassen). The design fiction of world suburbs too? The rise of the ‘slumburbia’ meme in the wake of the mortgage and environmental crises; another narrative for recounting urban poverty. In community consultations for urban development, opposing residents reject higher density and social housing proposals in suburban areas – it creates slums, they declare. The meme of slum travels in strange ways to unlikely places.

In the New York Times, Michael Kimmelman muses about opportunities for carparks. Apparently, there could be as many as two billion parking spaces in the USA. He notes a forthcoming study on parking, Rethinking a Lot, in which Eran Ben-Joseph, a professor of urban planning at MIT, points out that “in some U.S. cities, parking lots cover more than a third of the land area, becoming the single most salient landscape feature of our built environment.” In my local area, parking is indeed a dominant feature of the suburban landscape, just another manifestation of sprawl. These austeer asphalt expanses bake in the summer heat, impossible to walk across as the heat rises throughout the day. Laid over the top of a swampy area, the asphalt cracks regularly.

Kimmelman says that we need to take these parking lots seriously and recognise that they are a kind of public space. He cites a number of examples of parking lots having been used for farmers markets, street hockey and teen parties. He also cites John Brinckerhoff Jackson, a landscape writer who pleaded that the parking lot be treated like the city common, with its own community values. For the privately owned parking spaces of shopping centres, their diverse communities may have something to offer. For example, as I have noted many times, the car park at Aspley’s Hypermarket is ordinarily no more than two thirds full. It’s an opportunity and is already used as a community resource e.g. mobile community services such as the blood bank and library. Prior to the anti-hoon campaigns, young people would gather and socialise in that car park, showing off their cars and attitude. However, as noted previously, the largest shopping centre developer now charges parking fees, a move that clearly disowns and alienates the community by manipulating the intent of regulations for parking provision.

Landscape design and materiality is vital. Plantings, stormwater management, renewable energy, water senstivity, footpaths. Kimmelman describes various projects as examples of both “green design … [and] also of treating parking lots the way people actually experience them: as the real entrance to a building.” Aspley’s local area plan calls for better pedestrian and cycle pathways as well as community infrastructure in the Hypermarket’s parking lot, built over the top of a creek. The plan makes a small and pointless overture to better integration of the centre with the surrounding area. There is negligible landscaping on this site – trees and grass perished and were never replaced, while a harshly kept hedge, rather than shade trees, bounds it. I agree with Kimmelman’s proposition that parking lots don’t have to be dead zones. However, in most instances planning, centre management practices and regulations keep them that way.