City dreamers
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 20: Cities on the Edge
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Wendy Steele
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For the first time in history, the number of people living in urban areas has outstripped those in rural areas – an urban reality that jostles uneasily with the iconic image Australia presents to the world. But beyond the wide outback spaces and sandy beaches are the houses, suburbs, master-planned estates and high-rise buildings where most Australians actually live. Within this there is diversity, creativity and resilience. Yet the uneven costs of urban progress and development are emerging as deeply felt, highly inequitable outcomes of reduced public planning. It seems ironic that, in the wake of an era defined by market-driven logic and minimal government intervention, some including Alan Moran in his book The Tragedy of Planning (Institute of Public Affairs, 2006) continue to blame urban planning for the loss of the ‘Great Australian Dream'.
Not everyone agrees. One of the most striking themes to emerge from the 2007 State of Australian Cities Conference was the need to address urban issues within the national policy agenda by ‘planning with a light touch' – using what keynote speaker Ruth Fincher describes as the principles of ‘redistribution, recognition and encounter' to provide both conceptual and practical guides. It is over twenty years since Australia had a coordinated and strategic national vision and agenda for urban planning and development. In the years that have followed the dismantling of the Department of Urban and Regional Development and later the Better Cities Program, there have been few attempts to produce urban-focused policy.
‘Communities are distinguished by the style in which they are imagined,' Benedict Anderson suggests in Imagined Communities (Verso, 1991), his study on nationalism. He argues that ‘out of estrangement comes a conception of identity which, because it cannot be "remembered", must be narrated'. The urban form and planning of Australia have been imagined and narrated by a small community of Australian scholars who have reframed the ‘Australian Dream' with an urban cast. A significant number are women.
Female urban scholars have provided insightful and often provocative research and commentary on Australian cities, urban processes, policy and planning. They have contributed critical analyses of inequalities, and highlighted issues related to gender, diversity and the built environment. In many ways, they have been at the forefront of challenging dominant planning practice and research paradigms by drawing from feminist critiques and historical frameworks.
An early article for the Journal of the American Planning Association by antipodeans Leonie Sandercock and Ann Forsyth highlights this ‘gender agenda' in planning, and the way contemporary Western feminism has largely emerged from within a particular urban form – the capitalist city. Grounded with examples from Australia, they draw attention to five key areas where feminist theory can inform and enrich urban planning: spatial, economic and social relationships; language and communication; epistemology and methodology; ethics; and the nature of the public domain.
Australian female urban planning scholars, including Sandercock and Forsyth, have argued for the need to theorise the ‘multiplicity of voices' that constitute ‘the urban' and redefine the paradigms on which planning is based. They have sought creative ways of to embrace the inherently political questions of redistribution, sustainability and equity that lie at the heart of the way cities evolve.
These scholars have been strong advocates of multidisciplinary approaches to planning, and new tools and methods that engage cultural development and participatory techniques – storytelling, multimedia and action research – that have opened new ways of developing diversity in planning. Mary Field Belenky describes this in Women's Ways of Knowing (Basic Books, 1986) as ‘connected ways of knowing' that foster relationships and redirect the focus of urban planning towards questions of social, economic and ecological justice in more personal and inclusive ways.
Yet, despite these substantial contributions, many of these women no longer live or work in Australia. What has driven this apparent geographical and intellectual diaspora – particularly in urban planning? Is it a result of gender (there is no similar male diaspora in Australian urban planning), or just the search for a bigger pond?