Suburbia : the utopian myth

I sit here watching children play, parents conversing over waist-high fences and blokes huddling around a popped-up Holden bonnet. I think back to my days as a child growing up in the heartland of white suburbia and I remember the long summer nights of playing cricket with my neighbours. I wonder if this still happens. I butt out my cigarette and imagine the scene of this rural streetscape occurring somewhere in Melbourne today, and I fail to conjure up a street, road or avenue where this might happen. The suburban culture that I grew up with (knowing your neighbours, borrowing milk for a morning’s coffee), has now disappeared. Lost somewhere behind the white picket fences, jungle gyms and two-point five kids are the ideals that originally enticed people to move to the suburbs. The perception that the Australian dream is represented in suburbia is critically fl awed, because instead of producing a catalyst for unity it provides a breeding ground for further division between social groups.

The basis for this division can be seen in the way that Melbourne’s suburbs have been created physically, culturally and socially. A utopian view of Melbourne’s suburbs would see everyone dispersed equally, regardless of their background, heritage or beliefs. A multicultural, melting pot stream of thought takes into account the same factors, ignoring individual differences between people. For a single or multiple cultures to thrive and retain it’s individual characteristics that make it a separate social entity, there must be a platform for social networking to occur. This networking involves people getting together, usually of the same background, interests and/or beliefs. So when looking at the way Melbourne’s suburbs are structured, not geographically, but in terms of culture relative to geographic locale, one must undergo the assumption that ‘birds of a feather flock together’.

When we look at Melbourne’s suburbs with a cultural magnifying glass it doesn’t take long for assumptions and generalisations about the type of people that live in one area to the next. Typical stereotypes of social groups within regions in and around Melbourne’s suburbs can be represented by superimposing an imaginary compass with the four points, north, east, south, west, over the entire map. At first glance we can already make generalisations about suburbs in the west; the racial stereotype of people living in the northern suburbs; the differences between people in the southern suburbs to those that live in the outer eastern areas. Although these assumptions may be based relative to personal experience, it becomes apparent that there is some relevant evidence behind these stereotypes. Without making a misleading or disparaging comment in regards to an area or suburb, I will ask the reader to think of areas that you know that might be labelled as Asian, or Italian for instance. These first impressions are often based loosely on a stereotype that originally may have had some value. Defining an area by the culture of its dominating populus is always fraught with danger, but is often centred on a historical perception we have from that area.

This perception is changing today. Now the early generations of immigrants are gone and their legacy is nearly forgotten as an ever-mobile community, changing socially and culturally, envelops the original culture. With their descendents at the wheels we are seeing a changing of the guard. They are no longer interested in the dated ways of their parents and their parents before them, but are contemporising with social shifts and changes. Perceptions of the role of the family, size of the family, and types of families are changing progressively and this further indicates a breakdown of segregation of social groups from one another, and destabilises the ability to pigeonhole certain regions. It can be said that these stereotypes still exist today, but weakened, with their centrality dispersed or moved elsewhere.

To investigate the breakdown of the family one can look deeper into the issues addressed by the concept of suburbia. Zoom in from the holistic view of Melbourne and focus on a particular street or neighbourhood. Remember the “typical” suburban house; letter box, frontyard, backyard, nature strip, picket fences, gardens, garden gnomes. Like the stereotyping involved in categorising an entire group of people by the area they live in, Australians have also found it necessary to identify people by the appearance of their house. Do you remember the house on your street that had the messy front yard and neglected Azaleas? Their fence was falling down and they had a car on blocks under tarpaulin in their driveway for years? Yes, we called them the crazy people. They were crazy because they didn’t put out their bins every week, or because they didn’t mow their nature strip fully. They were always aloof and no one ever saw them. Do you know the ones? Well they are all doctors now and we look stupid. We thought they were fucked up because they didn’t maintain their yard, or we thought they were mafia because they had a concrete garden. We’re always looking for that easy way to define someone without having to get to know them completely. This leads to a further distancing of communities, dividing them rather than bringing them together at the streetscape level.

The suburban house itself represents a fracturing of the family, in terms of traditional ways of functioning and operating by the way of its design. The model house used to entice new homebuyers is a good example. Once, houses were divided simply into dining, eating and sleeping quarters. Now, we find that suburban homes have become a series of retreats. These retreats like the ‘rumpus room’ have created a divide between families, specifically parents and children. Today the parent’s room is situated a far as possible from the children’s bedrooms, with designated areas for them both to spend their time separately. We can the development as the kitchen into an informal dining area where the family can come together to eat. This divide has increased by the installation of intercoms. Face to face communication is now just a thing of the past.

This division in the suburbs may just come with the passing of time, the progression of society, and a shift in ideals related to the family. Both parents are now looking for work and there doesn’t seem to be the ‘community’ we all come to think of it as. Caught somewhere between the rural ‘Other’ and the urban lifestyle of the city, suburbia finds itself in a liminal place. It is neither here nor there, and continues to unravel contradictions about where it lies in terms of its original social goal. Do the suburbs bring us together or distance us further from one another?

First published in Rabelais.

Insomnia

Sunday:
No sleep,
Half alive.
Eyes closed at five.

Monday:
More of the same.
More mundane
loss of my brain.

Tuesday:
The harder you try,
The harder to die.
Square eyes? Mine are fucking cubes.

Thursday:
Things creeping
Over my skin.
Memories slipping, Wednesday forgotten.

Friday:
Buy some steak knives.
Saved some kid’s life.
The insignificance of night.

You don’t feel like crying
When you feel like you’re dying.
You don’t want to weep
When you just want to sleep.