There’s no question ‘suburbia’ gets a pretty negative rap around the place and yet for all of that the vast majority of us live there. There has to be something that we like about it, or some advantage to suburban living… you’d think… Right?…

Its easy to throw mud at suburbia for its blandness and uniformity but is there something latently attractive about it that actually lures us in? Or have we just sold our soul to convenience, security and beige?…

However its a complex question because when we are speaking of suburbia we need to delineate between types of suburbs also. Just to name a few categories in my part of the world, there are:

– the wealthy western suburbs of Perth with lots of ‘old money’ (think Cottesloe & Floreat)

– the inner east where houses are older, cheaper and there is a legacy of being a homeswest ghetto (think Koondoola, Lockridge),

– the ‘new estates’ where aspirational families build, sell, build, sell and climb the ladder to wealth and true happiness… (think Butler, Canning Vale)

– the hills where large blocks still abound and where alternative living is more prevalent (think Kalamunda, Chidlow etc)

Chances are your suburb won’t fit any of the four categories above. How would you describe it?

When we speak of ‘suburbia’ we inevitably need to speak in generalities and perhaps even caricatures for a meaningful conversation to occur. Otherwise we will be forever qualifying and defining what we mean.

Certainly in our part of the world suburbia is so diverse (as shown from the 4 examples above) that it is impossible to describe it uniformly.

So what do you think actually constitutes ‘suburbia’?

Can we even speak that generically?

Do you ever think of suburban people as courageous pioneers?

Chances are you don’t.

I certainly don’t equate suburbia with courageous living in untamed environs, yet that is something of how the suburbs began here in Oz. As a nation that lived either in the bush or the city, the ones who pushed out to the fringes and lived in the suburbs were often the ones who went without and did it tough as they ‘pioneered’ those new developments.

They were the ones prepared to be uncomfortable as they set up house in areas that didn’t have the same amenities and services as the city. (See ‘Suburban Pioneers’, in The Cream Brick Frontier: Histories of Australian Suburbia for more discussion on this idea.) They lived where roads were poor and infrastructure was non-existent, so in many ways they really did take some risks compared to the urban dwellers.

Of course that was ‘then’.

Nowadays I think we’d be hard pushed to see suburban living as pioneering. Even when we came to our own home here in Brighton it didn’t feel like we were doing it tough. Its true that public transport is poor (but then that’s Perth in general) and there are few public services, but the way in which new estates are managed tends to almost give a feeling of luxury rather than struggle.

Community development companies bend over backwards to provide events for residents and all sorts of activities to engage in. The savvy developers do their bit in creating suburbatopia by giving everyone front landscaping and by providing beautifully landscaped parks and surrounds. Of course this beautiful landscape does not last, but it does the job to convince people that this estate is heaven on earth.

I doubt too many people moving to new suburbs would see themselves as pioneers these days!

Perhaps a couple of questions that flow out of this are:

– where do the pioneers go now?

– what does it do to the pioneering spirit if there are no longer any ‘frontiers’ to settle? Do we simply become more and more comfortable and less and less adventurous?…son of rambow movie