Creative suburbia: Rethinking urban cultural policy – the Australian case

The suburban fault-line in contemporary urban debates

The 2000s were marked by a resurgence of critical research into cities. This was driven in part by the sheer scale of rural–urban migration, which saw the majority of the world’s population living in cities for the first time in human history by the mid 2000s (Worldwatch Institute, 2007). A renewed focus on cities was also reflective of the extent to which globalization has come to be linked, not to a flattening of spatial differences and a decline in the role of cities, but rather by their growing importance in a world economy where services, information and creative industries are coming to play a greater role. As the geographer Ash Amin has observed:

There appears to be little evidence to support the claim that cities are becoming less important in an economy marked by increasing geographical dispersal.… [They] assert, in one way or another, the powers of agglomeration, proximity, and density, not perhaps less significant for the production of mass manufactures than for the production of knowledge, information and innovation, as well as specialised inputs. (2003: 120)

Alongside the growing attention being given to cities is what has been termed the spatial turn in social research. Ed Soja has described the spatial turn as involving ‘an unprecedented diffusion of critical spatial thinking across an unusually broad spectrum of subject areas’, leading to ‘radically new ideas … emerging from an understanding of socio-spatial causality [and] the powerful forces that arise from socially produced spaces such as urban agglomerations and cohesive regional economies’ (2010: 13, 14).

Debate about cities and suburbs has been triggered in recent years by the work of Richard Florida on the special role played by cities in the incubation of what he refers to as the creative class (Florida, 2002, 2007, 2008). Florida’s core proposition was that talented people seek out cities that offer a high level of diversity, tolerance, cultural resources and urban amenity, and that there exists a mutually reinforcing relationship between the density and diversity of inner urban areas and the conversion of individual talent into economic opportunity. Policy makers were very attracted to this thesis, as it has dovetailed with:

Part of the appeal of this discourse was that it focused upon investment in the ‘soft infrastructure’ of arts and culture, presenting a low-cost alternative to investing in big events and high-cost fixed infrastructure. At the same time, critics have argued that ‘whether or not this will stimulate creative economic growth … is quite another matter’ (Peck, 2005: 749). Authors such as Joel Kotkin (2006, 2010) have argued that a more significant trend in cities worldwide has been the new suburbanisation, and the outward expansion of cities to accommodate young families seeking stand-alone residential blocks. Others have identified a pervasive lack of concern in creative cities arguments for questions of social justice, as well as the displacement of lower-income communities arising from ‘reinvestment designed for the middle-class colonisation of urban neighbourhoods’ (Slater, 2006: 756). In their review of urban cultural development strategies in North America and Europe, Grodach and Loukaitou-Sideris (2007) argued that those advocating progressive urban cultural development strategies should see their role as being about furthering provision to under-served communities, as opposed to entrepreneurial strategies focused on developing tourism and entertainment sites, and creative class strategies that concentrate on lifestyle amenities and the ‘buzz’ of the city to attract knowledge workers and the professional-managerial classes.

These debates are testament to a particularly lively discourse surrounding urban cultural policy in the 2000s, but it is notable that, with the exception of Kotkin – who is viewed as a political conservative – they are debates from which the suburbs are largely absent. The tendency has been to reproduce a dichotomy between diverse, hip, creative and culturally rich inner urban areas, and boring, homogeneous and largely unproductive suburbs. This is certainly the case with creative class strategies, with their focus upon urban cultural amenities, which promote the further concentration of cultural resources in inner urban areas, on the tenuous assumption that the creative class is more mobile and ‘footloose’ in its choice of where to live, requiring a unique blend of urban experiences in order to set root in any place. As Richard Florida puts it, ‘creative people choose regions … they think of Silicon Valley versus Cambridge, Stockholm versus Vancouver, or Sydney versus Copenhagen’ (2007: 10). In such discourses, the suburbs only feature either in so far as their residents travel into inner cities to take advantage of cultural and entertainment options, or they provide the incubation sites for future creative workers, service sector workers, or possibly urban activists.

At the same time, Florida’s radical critics are often no less dismissive of suburban life. To take one prominent example, Marxist geographer David Harvey’s well-known essay ‘The right to the city’ (2008), identifies the suburbs as places where political activism is pacified by mortgages, debt and consumerism – ‘pacification by cappuccino’ – and where ‘the soulless quality of suburban living’ oppresses all and most particularly oppresses women, but may yet foster a spirit of rebellion among the young against their boring suburban environment (Flew, 2011a). Given these negative associations, one could hardly imagine residents demanding the right to the suburb, in the same way as Harvey projects the right to the city as a rallying cry for a more democratic social order.

Australia presents an interesting point from which to consider such debates, for reasons related to its history, its contemporary demographic trends, and the nature of the cultural debates that have surrounded suburbanization. The journalist and essayist Donald Horne, in his 1964 book The Lucky Country, referred to Australia as ‘the first suburban nation’, and many of the trends towards suburbanization that have been occurring in countries such as the United States, Canada and Great Britain were prefigured in Australian cities (Clapson, 2003; Harris and Larkham, 1999). The historian Graeme Davison observed that suburbanization was ‘deeply rooted in Australian colonial experience … [and] was consciously promoted by the country’s founders’, who ‘anticipated a sprawl of homes and gardens rather than a clumping of terraces and alleys’ (1995: 42, 43). Indeed, Governor Arthur Phillip, who bought the first convict ships to Sydney Cove in 1788, may have been describing what came to be known as the ‘quarter-acre block’ back in 1790 in his instructions for the urban planning of Sydney:

[Streets shall be] be laid out in such a manner as to afford free circulation of air, and where the houses are built … the land will be granted with a clause that will prevent more than one house being built on the allotment, which will be sixty feet in front and one hundred and fifty feet in depth. (quoted in Davison, 1995: 43)

Australian cities were part of an urban planning experiment to identify whether lower-density living would lead to fewer social problems than those in 19th-century industrializing Britain, which were attributed by many social reformers of the time to high-density urban living. Strongly supported by colonial administrations in the 19th century, and by both federal and state governments in the 20th century, suburbanization has deep political, economic and cultural roots in Australia that have remained centrally important in shaping national identity into the 21st century.

Australia is one of the most urbanized countries in the world, with 75 percent of the Australian population living in 17 major cities with populations over 100,000, and over 50 percent living in five cities with populations of over 1 million: Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth (Infrastructure Australia, 2010). This urban concentration will continue, in the context of a population expected to grow from 22 million in 2010 to 35 million by 2050 (Infrastructure Australia, 2010). This focus on urbanization disguises the extent to which what is occurring is in fact suburbanization, with Australian suburbs being the cornerstone of current planning for urban population growth. It is envisaged that the cities of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane will need to construct 2 million new dwellings in the period from 2010 to 2030, to cope with population increases of up to 2 million for each of these cities during this period, while the mining boom will drive further population growth in Perth. The development of new suburbs will be central to managing this population growth.

Central to this expansion will be the development of new master-planned communities (MPCs) on the urban fringe. Developing rapidly in Australia since the 1980s, and a response in part to prior concerns about unchecked suburban sprawl (McGuirk and Dowling, 2007), MPCs are characterized by: large land areas intended to accommodate large populations (Springfield in south-east Queensland is expected to have 70,000 residents by 2025); a diverse mix of land uses, including a variety of housing types, retail, service and employment centres, and recreational and entertainment facilities; schools, hospitals, government service agencies and university campuses on or around the site; control by a master developer who retains involvement with the site over periods of up to 25 years; and close cooperation between the master developer and federal, state and local governments, as well as managed community input into site development. Critics of MPCs, such as Gwyther (2005) and Gleeson (2006), argue that these new developments act to create class distinctions in the outer suburbs, with their semi-privatized modes of governance, and the actively promoted perception of superiority to neighbouring mixed-tenancy suburbs, where there are higher numbers of people in public housing or private rental accommodation. They have also been associated with what are derisorily termed ‘McMansions’, the large houses developed on these estates that critics see as indicative of environmentally unsustainable middle-class over-consumption (Hamilton and Denniss, 2005).

The debate about MPCs and McMansions, which is also played out in popular culture in television programs such as the popular comedy Kath and Kim (Turnbull, 2008), is emblematic of long-standing cultural debates about Australian suburbia, described by Ian Craven as ‘a term of contention and a focus for fundamentally conflicting beliefs’ in the Australian national imaginary (Craven, 1995: 48). The Australian economist and urban planner Hugh Stretton succinctly summarized this tension in his 1970 book Ideas for Australian Cities, when he observed that:

Most Australians choose to live in suburbs, in reach of city centres and also of beaches or countryside. Many writers condemn this choice, and with especial anger or gloom they condemn the suburbs. (1970: 7)

There is little doubt about the continued attraction of suburban life, and particularly home ownership, among large sections of the Australian population. The ‘New Prosperity’ in Australia in the 2000s saw a boom in suburban residential construction (Fagan, 2002; Flew, 2011a; Randolph, 2004), even as there was also the promotion of new residential construction in inner city areas. In his historical account of Australian anti-suburbanism, Gilbert (1988) identified five key criticisms made of Australian suburbs:

Mark Gibson (in this volume) identifies some of the bases of the continued appeal of suburban living in Australia, but a significant point is that generations of migrants have continued to aspire to suburban home ownership, seemingly regardless of the dominant housing arrangements in their own country. Indeed, in his study of the large Singaporean population in the city of Perth – colloquially referred to as ‘Singaperth’ – Lee (2006) argues that it is precisely the opportunity to own homes on large blocks of land with multiple bedrooms and garages that forms the basis of appeal of Perth to Singaporeans, as land is what cannot be acquired with ease in Singapore, irrespective of income.

Creative suburbia: research findings from Brisbane and Melbourne

The empirical findings of this article draw upon work undertaken through the ‘Creative Suburbia’ project, funded by the Australian Research Council through its Discovery-Projects program (see Introduction to this issue). One underlying hypothesis of this project was that the literature on ‘creative cities’ and the ‘creative class’ routinely overstated the extent to which the creative workforce in Australia was concentrated in inner urban areas. There was some evidence already around to support the proposition that the creative workforce was more geographically dispersed than was commonly assumed. Gibson and Brennan-Horley (2006) found that while the majority of Sydney’s creative industries workforce lived in the eastern suburbs, the inner west and the inner northern suburbs of Sydney, as would be predicted, the fastest rates of growth in where such workers were locating were in outer suburban and peri-urban regions such as the Central Coast, the Blue Mountains-Hawkesbury region, Camden-Wollondilly and the Illawarra. Their conclusion, which was consistent with wider studies of employment trends in Australian cities (e.g. Baum et al., 2006), was that a complex mosaic of suburban employment and diversified labour markets has emerged, meaning that the old binaries of inner city and outer suburbs are becoming less applicable. If this was the case, then the underlying assumptions about the need to focus on the provision of inner urban cultural amenity – a shopping list of required developments from bike paths to ‘incubation sites’ to hip venues for after-hours networking and socializing – to attract this experience-seeking ‘creative class’, which had become something of a mantra in urban cultural policy in the 2000s, needed to be rethought. There were also the related questions of how these suburban creatives operated in the absence of densely clustered urban agglomerations, and whether they were being forced to the suburbs by rising housing costs or were actively seeking out life in suburban areas.

The project drew upon this evidence about the limits of the creative city/creative class thesis, and undertook a series of qualitative and quantitative studies of the creative industries workforce in selected outer suburbs of Brisbane and Melbourne. The quantitative methods drew upon the ‘creative trident’ methodology developed by researchers at the Australian Research Council Centre for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI) (Cunningham, 2011; Cunningham and Higgs, 2008; Higgs et al., 2007). The creative trident methodology scans across both creative industries and creative occupations, recognizing that there are ‘embedded creatives’ (people in creative occupations but not in creative industries) and ‘support workers’ (people in non-creative occupations in creative industries) as well as ‘core creatives’ (people in creative occupations in creative industries). The CCI work also helps to clarify what creative industries and creative occupations are by working through data developed by the Australian Bureau of Statistics and classifying firms, workers and occupations into six segments: (1) music and performing arts; (2) film, television and radio; (3) advertising and marketing; (4) software development and interactive content; (5) writing, publishing and print media; and (6) advertising, design and visual arts. The fact that this work had already been done enabled our project team to undertake empirical analysis with some of the larger conceptual questions about what the creative industries are, and who is a creative worker at least provisionally resolved.

The qualitative findings drew upon interviews conducted with 133 workers in creative occupations over the period 2009–10. Interviews were undertaken in the Brisbane suburbs of Redcliffe (an established coastal suburb in Northern Brisbane), Springfield and Forest Lake (MPCs in western Brisbane), and in the Melbourne suburbs of Frankston (an established coastal suburb in south-east Melbourne), Dandenong (a highly multicultural suburb in eastern Melbourne) and Caroline Springs (a new MPC in western Melbourne). We were looking to develop an in-depth understanding of the appeal of particular locations, seeing this dimension of attachment or otherwise to a place as an element of decisions made by creative workers about where to live and work that could not be captured in purely quantitative studies. The project also sought a mix of well-established suburbs, where the ‘feel’ of the place was known and the population relatively stable, such as Redcliffe and Frankston, and newer MPCs, where forms of cultural amenity and a sense of community are both being actively constructed (Walters and Rosenblatt, 2008). One reason for undertaking a close analysis of particular suburbs was to challenge the assumption that suburbs are ‘generic in character … they all look the same, from city to city, and nation to nation’ (Harris and Larkham, 1999: 2). We were also interested in how people in creative industries and occupations who live and work in outer suburbs develop business and personal networks, given that density of links is often postulated as a reason why creative industries workers cluster in particular inner urban locations.

The headline quantitative findings are consistent with Gibson and Brennan-Horley’s (2006) observation in the case of Sydney that, while creative industries employment has greater density in inner urban areas, the numbers of those employed in outer suburban areas are quite significant. The full data is provided in Appendix 1 to this article. In Brisbane, the numbers employed in creative industries and creative occupations in outer suburban areas ranged from 1.75 to 2.5 percent of total employment in these areas, or about 25–40 percent of the numbers working in inner Brisbane (6.75 percent) in these occupations. In the Moreton Bay Shire area, which includes Redcliffe, the creative industries workforce accounts for almost 2.5 percent of total employment. In Melbourne, the percentages of those employed in the creative industries and creative occupations were very high for inner Melbourne (9.23 percent), and the percentage range for the outer suburbs considered was from 1 to 2.63 percent. The disparities between the Melbourne suburban regions studies were greater than those for Brisbane regions, and figures were particularly low for regions such as Greater Dandenong and Hume City (which includes Caroline Springs). The patterns here are that creative industries workforce numbers in these suburban areas are significant, and they are greater in the more established suburban regions such as Moreton Bay Regional Shire in Brisbane or the Yarra Ranges Shire in Melbourne, and lower in the newer suburbs. Reading across the six creative industries sectors, the most concentrated in terms of inner urban locations was Software Development and Interactive Content (Mean = 0.981; SD = 1.088), and the least concentrated was Music and Performing Arts (Mean = 0.127; SD = 0.152).

Qualitative research involved a series of open-ended questions particularly focused on the experience of working in an outer suburb, and an exploration of the relationship between work and locality. Participants were sourced from phone book listings, local directories and organizations, web searches and recommendations from colleagues, ‘snowballing’ from one interviewee to others, and occasionally expressions of interest from potential interviewees. The majority of interviewees were engaged in the design, music and visual arts fields, but people from all creative industries sectors were engaged, including urban futures analysts such as Bernard Salt, and cultural policy animateurs such as Marcus Westbury. One of the challenges of the interview process was to ensure an appropriate mix across the more commercially oriented creative industries and those with more of a non-profit, artistic orientation: it was often easier to secure interviews with artists and musicians than with those in the advertising or software design industries. A summary of the occupations of the people who were interviewed and their geographical locations is provided in Appendix 2.

The strongest and most consistent finding was that these creative industries workers were based in suburban locations as a result of personal choice rather than economic necessity. They did not view a suburban residence as a lower-cost dormitory; indeed, 80 percent of those interviewed did not commute a significant distance from home to their place of work. Eighty-one percent of interviewees were satisfied with their place of work, and 68 percent were satisfied with where they lived, with the highest levels of satisfaction in the more established suburbs such as Redcliffe; among those who would prefer to live or work elsewhere, as many were nominating a more rural residence as an inner city location. This was consistent with what they saw as the primary attractions of a suburban location, which included environmental amenity, lower costs of living and less resultant stress, more ‘headspace’ in which to engage in creative activities, and fewer pressures to conform to peer norms and expectations (Flew, 2011b).

These findings are comparable with studies which are finding that intangible elements associated with place are attractive to creative workers, such as Drake (2003), as well as Brennan-Horley et al. (2010) for Darwin, Australia, and Chapain and Comunian (2010) on Birmingham and Newcastle in the UK. It also contributes to the need, identified by Chris Gibson, to develop academic work on creativity and its impacts that ‘move[s] beyond a new familiar set of cities where shorthand policy ideas (café culture, “the buzz”, small firms co-located in refurbished warehouse “creative hubs”) have become clichéd’ (2010: 3). They do not support the proposition that creative workers seek out trendy inner urban locations that offer higher levels of cultural amenity and urban ‘buzz’ in the context of high levels of agglomeration and clustering in high-density accommodation. This workforce had relatively low levels of professional networking. The problems with existing business associations arose at two levels, with relevant industry associations tending to hold all of their events in inner city locations, and suburban business associations tending to be poorly equipped for or not adequately understand the nature of self-employment in these sectors, where business plans are frequently short-term and unstable, and significant cultural differences exist between these workers and the older, more ‘clubby’ atmosphere of some of these associations. In some instances, there was a trade-off acknowledged between choice of a suburban location and the availability of work and sales opportunities, but many of these people – some of whom had moved out of inner city locations – were prepared to accept that as a necessary cost for a perceived greater level of serenity offered by the suburbs.

Cultural policy implications

The first implication of the research findings is acknowledging that the empirical mapping of where creative workers are located in Australian cities does not match the imagined geography of ‘creative cities’ theories. The evidence simply does not match assumptions about a non-creative suburbia coexisting with a vibrant and creative inner city bohemianism that is often assumed by creative cities entrepreneurs, cultural planners, politicians and social critics. The interview findings from this research also do not identify a group of workers driven out to the suburban peripheries by the lack of affordable housing, and yearning for the ‘passionate quest for experience’ (Florida, 2002: 166) provided by densely clustered and amenities-rich urban culture. They find, to varying degrees, people who are happy to be living in suburban areas, and appreciative of the space, the amenity, the relative ease of access and the serenity offered by these suburban locations. This clearly varies from place to place: more established suburbs with proximity to somewhere such as a beach produce larger and more stable creative communities than are found at present in the ‘green field’ MPCs. There are also variables related to the age and family situation of people, with children being a major factor behind decisions to locate in suburban areas for all sections of the population, including creative workers.

Almost in spite of the available evidence, urban culture still commonly presents itself as more tangibly appealing to creative people than that of the suburbs. At the level of official culture, large cultural icons such as Melbourne’s Federation Square or Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art are intuitively appealing to cultural policy makers. They provide highly visible symbols of governments investing in culture, and they feature prominently in tourism and city branding strategies. At the more grassroots level, urban areas have long been associated with subcultural identity formation and resistance, whether it be the racial/ethnic community enclaves of major cities, the development of predominantly gay urban zones such as Oxford Street in Sydney, or the reclaiming and occupying of urban spaces by artists and activists. By contrast, suburban cultural policy suggests a focus on bike paths, pram ramps, libraries, community theatre groups and outdoor cinemas. It is both too governmentalized and ‘safe’ to be seen as resistant and therefore interesting to cultural theorists, and too small-scale and decentralized to engage cultural policy makers.

Some of the themes developed in this research are consistent with the arguments made by Marcus Westbury and Ben Eltham (2010) in their critical assessment of the state of cultural policy in Australia. Westbury and Eltham argued that Australian cultural policy remained tied to the ‘core arts’ and flagship cultural organizations, at a time when creative work and cultural activity have become more and more dispersed and decentralized in their sites of production and consumption:

Immigration, demographic change and new technologies and communications media have transformed the spectrum of cultural choices available. The large-scale infrastructure and mass subscription model that underpins the logic of many funded arts organisations is poorly equipped to respond to the plethora of new artists, art forms, audiences, genres, and subcultures emerging in a rapidly changing cultural dynamic. (2010: 42)

The importance of digitally networked ICTs to this cultural transformation is gestured to in cultural policy documents (e.g. Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, 2011), but its full implications for rethinking cultural policy are typically not worked through. In the Australian context, this draws attention to the split between arts and cultural policy on the one hand, and media and communications policy on the other. Napoli (2008) has argued for the growing need to bridge the divide between cultural and media policy, with the growing importance of access to high-speed broadband as an enabler of participation in the cultural sphere being one reason for this. In terms of the research findings from the ‘Creative Suburbia’ project, opportunities for cultural participation that are not contingent upon geographical proximity to established clusters clearly comes through as a priority of creative workers. For policy makers, this has the attraction of potentially identifying new forms of competitive advantage in the digital content industries, based upon distributed access to high-speed broadband networks.

With the rise of creative industries and creative occupations as important economic sectors, and the highly urbanized nature of populations worldwide – and particularly in Australia – the question of where people in the creative workforce choose to live and work has become an increasingly significant policy question. It has been the contention of this article that this question warrants closer empirical analysis than has thus far been the case. Many of the assumptions about creative workers’ propensity to cluster in amenities-rich inner urban areas is based upon an implied geography that associates creative work with a bohemian lifestyle, just as the artist-entrepreneur has often been taken to provide the cultural template for those working in the creative industries. Given that the empirical evidence for Australian cities finds that creative workers are considerably more spatially dispersed in the suburbs than is commonly assumed, a question that has framed research in the ‘Creative Suburbia’ project has been whether this is primarily a reflection of economic necessity (accommodation becoming too expensive in the inner city) or personal choice. While the evidence is not definitive, it is apparent that the preference for suburban locations is strongly driven by personal choices, including ‘creative’ influences such as ‘headspace’ for engagement with creative activities and fewer pressures to conform to peer norms in the creative community.

One implication for cultural policy is that it is perhaps time to question the heavy investment in inner urban cultural amenities that has accompanied ‘creative cities’ discourses, with their search to find the right cultural settings to attract an allegedly globally footloose ‘creative class’. More positively, it also indicates that creative workers are very likely to be the beneficiaries of investments in digital infrastructure that better enable distributed cultural participation, such as high-speed broadband services. More generally, it points to some of the limitations of thinking about creative workers as the bearers of a hyper-modern Zeitgeist; in relation to thinking about cities, this too often simply marks a reversion to more long-standing statements of disdain for suburban culture and everyday life.