SYMPOSIUM: Creative Suburbia: Cultural Research and Suburban Geographies

In many parts of the world, we are seeing the rise of “suburban nations”, where the majority of their population residing neither in inner cities or rural and regional areas, but rather in the large suburban and peri-urban agglomerations around major cities. In countries such as Australia, the United States and Canada, people largely live and work in the suburbs, and suburbanisation is a trend occurring through Europe and increasingly in Asia.

The suburbs are increasingly complex demographic, social, economic and cultural assemblages, yet there is little cultural research that attends to quotidian experiences, cultural histories and suburban geographies. Indeed, there has been a history of anti-suburban sentiments, in both academic research and popular media. It can be found in traditions as variant as the focus on resistant inner-urban subcultures in British cultural studies, and contemporary discourses surrounding creative cities that champion the edgy cosmopolitanism of inner cities, as compared to the banal consumerist homogeneity of suburban life and culture. In Australian popular media, the suburbs are often taken to be havens of “brain-dead” consumers in shopping malls, “bogans” lacking in taste and cultural capital, or terminally prejudiced “aspirationals” living in McMansions that are destroying the ozone layer with their super-sized carbon footprints.

Significant shifts have taken place in suburban life from the late twentieth century onwards that have yet to be thoroughly investigated, and there is a need for new directions in research that capture the growing complexity and importance of suburban geographies: imagined, demographic, creative, economic, and cultural. The shift of the locus of multiculturalism from inner cities to suburbs, the rise of Master Planned Communities and “new suburbanism”, the migration of creative workers to lower-cost suburban bases where they can combine home and work, and the relationship between digital media technologies and the suburbs are among the changes that require new forms of cultural and social research.

We are also interested in changing representations of the suburbs in popular media such as reality TV, satirical Web sites and situation comedies, the political implications of suburbanization, such as the rise of “aspirational” discourses in Australia in the 2000s, suburban multiculturalism and anti-multiculturalist discourses, and the relationship between the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 and the promotion of home ownership.

The symposium will bring together researchers across field such as cultural studies, communication and media studies, cultural geography, urban planning and cultural policy, providing a space to share research and perspectives while collectively exploring issues around understandings of suburbia and suburban life, in ways that both enhance scholarship and can contribute to public policy debates, fostering research connections around the broad and important area of suburban studies, as a site for innovative and applied cultural research.

Symposium themes include:
• New suburbanisation: how suburbs have been changing since the 1990s, with the rise of Master Planned Communities, enhanced access to mortgages and consumer credit, and perceptions of the suburbs as the electoral battleground of Australian politics;
• Cosmopolitan suburbs: the relationship between patterns of migration and suburban development, and the increasingly multicultural nature of Australian suburbs;
• Cultural and creative spaces: how do those working in the cultural and creative industries operate in suburban locations, and what implications may this have for urban policy and cultural policy;
• Suburban practices and representations: are there changes in how Australian suburbs are represented in popular media and elsewhere, and what is the significance of new suburban social movements such as “green citizenship’;
• Creative workforce: where are creative industries workers located, and how does networking occur outside of the fabled inner-urban milieux of bars, cafes and nightclubs;
• Chinese cities in transition: are these developments of relevance to the most populous nation on Earth – the fast growing and rapidly urbanising People’s Republic of China;
• Trends and issues in suburban demographics: what do we know about the relationship between where people live and work, and are there moves away from clustering, both in the creative industries and the economy more generally.

Keynote speakers for this symposium are:
• Rob Shields, Henry Marshall Tory Research Chair and Professor of Sociology/Art and Design, University of Alberta, Edmonton Alberta Canada, and Founding Editor of Space and Culture;
• Louise Johnson, Associate Professor of Human Geography, School of History, Heritage and Society, Deakin University, and author of Cultural Capitals: Revaluing The Arts, Remaking Urban Spaces (Ashgate, 2009).

Other speakers include: Deborah Stevenson (School of Social Sciences and Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney), Fiona Allon (Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney), Andy Bennett (Director, Griffith Centre for Cultural Research, Griffith University), Chris Gibson (Australian Centre for Cultural Environmental Research, University of Wollongong), Tania Lewis (School of Social Sciences, La Trobe University), Alan McKee (Creative Industries Faculty, QUT), Mark Gibson (National Centre for Australian Studies, Monash University), Justin O’Connor (Creative Industries Faculty, QUT), Terry Flew (Creative Industries Faculty, QUT, and ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation), Christy Collis (Creative Industries Faculty, QUT), Geoff Woolcock (Urban Research Program, Griffith University), and urban planning consultants Alan Davies and John Montgomery.

Proudly supported by QUT and University of Wollongong