The suburbs as they are, and could be
Much of the dispersion we’re seeing in our cities has less to do with the pandemic than with underlying shifts in technology, environment and culture. It’s time to radically re-imagine suburban Australia, argues Dan Hill, by using new technology to reinforce the idea of the suburb as a shared condition and nature as something of which we are part.
And yet life itself seemed on hold. There was a great waiting though for what no one knew.
— Richard Flanagan, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams 1
Emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic, I am left with a nagging sensation that it is horrifying not only because of the death rate – which is in fact much lower than a pandemic has the potential to produce – but because it has revealed rather more fundamental underlying patterns.
They describe a set of deeper crises now finally here at scale, beginning to roil and roll around us. A global pandemic, almost certainly generated by rampant biodiversity degradation, appears hot on the heels of Australia’s continentscale bushfires and is, in turn, followed by devastating floods.
These crises, encompassing not only COVID and climate but also issues of social justice and chronic disease, are fundamentally part of the same entangled systems. Yet while Australia appears to have successfully “flattened the curve” on COVID-19 – at this point, at least – federal Australian policymakers, because of their traditional distance from the realities of people and place, will probably not make the mental leap that the country could also flatten the curve on these more fundamental concerns.
Perhaps it will take Australian cities to pursue bold and brave policy and practice, transforming on purpose and avoiding the horror of lockdowns and lock-ins, masks and vaccines, extinctions and ecosystem collapse. Cities are where our systems converge, after all. And given the pandemic’s role as accelerant rather than precipitant, those more firmly in the grip of COVID-19, like London, New York and San Francisco, are bellwethers of broader changes. London may have lost almost 800,000 inhabitants during 2020 and is facing an “existential crisis,” according to its mayor. New York’s future is similarly challenged. Large employers in San Franciso, such as Salesforce, Google and Facebook, have told their staff that they can work from wherever they like, whether a neighbourhood coffee shop or Kansas, rather than commuting to the companies’ newly built multi-billiondollar campuses.
This is not simply the pandemic at work. In early 2020, journalist Derek Thompson pointed out that half of all the luxury condominiums built in Manhattan over the last five years were empty and unsold.2 And while mainstream physical retail has been decimated in all these cities, alongside generic commercial office space,
this is largely due to the radical displacement capabilities of contemporary tech rather than the pandemic.
As sociology professor and writer Saskia Sassen suggests, cities are resilient, ultimately, because they are incomplete and indeterminate, constantly shifting. These bellwether cities appear to be already radically evolving their form, pattern and dynamic once again. These tentative patterns can be characterized as slowing down but in all directions: people are moving from centre to suburb, and from city to country, while others are welcoming a newly liveable centre, rather more enjoyable with half the population. What’s consistent in this swirling movement is this simple finding: that much traditional office and retail space and activity has rarely been sustainable, but now it is no longer viable, and barely desirable.
Australian cities will be a useful control group here. Notwithstanding the strict lockdowns and continuing restrictions on movement across international borders, our cities have mostly been spared the worst of COVID19’s clumsily forced behavioural experiments, and many policymakers will raise an eyebrow to the idea that shops and offices are in question. These deeper fissures have not been revealed so sharply yet. But they are little to do with COVID-19 and will be lurking below the surface of the stimulus- and debtreinforced carapace of faith that props up the current Australian city, slowly cracking open assumptions about those “givens” of urban development and their associated cultural patterns. These are the shifts in technology, environment and culture that change cities, rather than pandemics.
More fundamentally, of course, we cannot wait for a dawning realization, or hope for a slow managed demise. We need to actively pull those assumptions apart, looking for these cracks and prising them open, letting in light with which to grow other futures. It should not take pandemics, bushfires, floods and mass extinction to force the issue. We need to actively, urgently and inventively re-imagine the individualistic and extractive modes of which most Australian urban systems remain a crude diagram.
Flows
In this scenario of re-imagining the Australian city, a post-tech, post-COVID CBD could be retrofitted for sustainable settlement and production rather than transient consumption – more space to breathe, to live, threaded through with people and other forms of biodiversity, vivid cultural and natural infrastructures counterpointing the remaining retail and work spaces that are distinctive enough to thrive.
Conversely, a steady stream of people will reject the city entirely now that “working from home” could genuinely take place in a small town or near-off-grid country retreat, a rosy-tinted vision of space and nature, clean air and tight local community, viable if there’s decent broadband.
If a re-natured city centre and a re-populating countryside all become, in a sense, more suburban – balancing density, settlement and nature, with production and consumption displaced, scattered – perhaps cities tend towards Tokyo: no single centre but hundreds of them, walkable green neighbourhoods threaded together by public transport, gently densifying as they absorb the distributed energy from the former centre. Most Tokyo neighbourhoods do not fit the Australian definition of “suburb”; they are simply moments of city, more or less intense, just as they are also moments of greenery, more or less intense, or moments of conviviality, more or less intense.
We might do better to think about cities in this respect, moving on from these previously fraught battles between urban and suburban. “Urbs” – exemplifying the urban condition – is no longer defined so sharply as a counterpoint to “suburb” – that which is somehow beneath the urban condition. Suburbs have nothing to be “sub” about.
Equally, the pretence that the city is innately superior to the country can also be overcome in these moves.
That kind of “metronormativity” is ably countered in Xiaowei Wang’s Blockchain Chicken Farm, which draws on food systems to describe how we are “intertwined across cities, villages, and national boundaries, bound by material circumstance.” We are all caught up in the
3 same entangled hyperobject. And in this world, we are all suburban, living in more or less intense concentrations of foodshed, of watershed, of nature, of culture.
Dispersion
So, as ever, the key urban dynamics concern technology (the tools we make) and culture (what we make the tools for). While urban historian Dolores Hayden’s thorough research conveys that the suburban growth agenda was driven by corporate lobbying, it was an alignment of technologies, most obviously the car, that triggered and scaled this dispersion. The outcome was a distinct culture, a new pattern of living, being, making.
Today’s technology will produce different suburban cultures again.
The pandemic has accelerated what
NYU professor Scott Galloway calls the Great Dispersion: “the greatest reshuffling of stakeholder value in recent history,” a shift away from physical centres, producing massive returns for the likes of Amazon and Netflix, for remote learning and healthcare providers. Galloway warns that community itself could be at stake in this shift, as physical “dispersal is cousin to segregation.”4
But assuming a city still has some pull, the dynamics of tech-enabled dispersion could equally unlock something different: a colourful, undulating, polynodal pattern of gently densifying and diversifying 15-minute neighbourhoods.
If – and admittedly that’s an “if” the size of Queensland – we do not reinforce the extractive, centralizing dynamics largely seen in Big Tech’s first wave, tech could exploit the fact that its core protocols, like TCP/IP, are actually distributive in spirit.
Digitally infused forms of energy, mobility, water, waste, housing and food production can enable new forms of “social infrastructure” – social in the way that these infrastructures usually are not. The term typically means libraries, parks, museums, markets and so on: now social infrastructure could also be renewable and stored energies, mobility at the scale of autonomous shuttles and cargo bikes, and cooperative and co-designed housing. This super-local infrastructure of everyday life could provide a new detailing within the suburb, assemblages of “small pieces, loosely joined,”5 systems and spaces that describe a balancing act between the mass scale and stability of twentiethcentury systems and the lightness and adaptability of twenty-first-century systems. In this different dynamic, the economics and physics of these new infrastructures play to being locally and cooperatively owned, highly socialized in their governance and operations.
The tech for this vision – from bikes to bots to bookshops – largely exists, boldly colouring in the pattern books left by a century of garden city plans and solarpunk provocations.
But as with Ebenezer Howard’s original garden city vision, with its highly distributive cooperative ownership model, it is likely that the truly radical elements of these potential design choices concern ownership, politics and culture – the architecture of social relationships, rather than buildings.
Nature
The key questions here concern how we might design these technologies such that they reinforce the idea of the suburb as a shared condition, a broader public good at the meaningful scale of small communities. The suburb is predicated on people taking care of their own lot. What if “their own lot” is expanded to include these shared and co-owned infrastructures and spaces?
In this, these re-imagined suburbs could be the pivot for a fundamental reorientation, recognizing that we are nature, not separate to it. Due to its flirtation with the outer edges of the city, the Australian suburb has long been the site of intense battles with nature. Possums end up in dishwashers, carpet snakes hang from swings, cane toads dominate driveways. What new forms of architecture, new languages, different politics, will emerge from not fighting this nature, but genuinely being part of it?
In her book Lo—TEK, Julia Watson6 describes how the nature-based infrastructures found in indigenous practices could provide many of the cues we need here, effectively and powerfully producing more diverse forms of outcome than their contemporary equivalents’ attempts to perform simple engineering tasks. Could the sinuous natural patterns from deep-time stories be enriched by this new social infrastructure, these “small pieces, loosely joined”?
These suburbs would be enmeshed in nature-based tech peppered with locally run internet-of-things, bioswales and bots, streets merged with urban meadows flowing into wetlands, cellulose and nanocellulose-based materials, permaculture augmented by predictive analytics and pixel farming. Each requires a positive dependency: cultivation, care and repair; meaningful maintenance and adaptation. Zooming out, these suburban systems form part of vast nature-based infrastructures at the scale of bioregions.
We will need the architectural imagination to conjure this land. According to Tim Christophersen, head of the Nature for Climate branch at the UN Environment Programme, “People don’t have a problem imagining what a four-lane highway would look like. But to imagine a restored landscape of over a million hectares – nobody knows what that would look like because it hasn’t really been done before.”7
We had better start drawing, putting pens in as many hands as possible. The work of Olalekan Jeyifous gives us a sense of what an afro-futurist Brooklyn could look like, with fecund biodiversity running through vast hi-tech infrastructures, buildings that are half-robot, half-forest, and intensely convivial.
But what on earth would these Australian suburbs be like? As Timothy Morton writes, “It’s not easy to find all the right words for this yet. That’s a good thing. The ones that are ready to hand are part of the problem.”8
Practice
Everything is in place to enable the transformation of our urbs and suburbs, to redistribute our cities into richly diverse, equitable and sustainable patterns of habitation via new infrastructures of everyday life. We also have the desperate need to do so, due to the conjoined crises of climate, health and social justice, simply underscored by the current pandemic. Australian cities, stationed at the front line of these self-imposed crises, should be the first to demonstrate how we might live well within this bruised world.
Yet the missing element may be the transdisciplinary practices that can deftly imagine, design, build and host new forms of inclusion, representation, production and cooperation. Such teams must have as much facility with social and political interactions as with the material aspects of infrastructure, housing and ecology, being capable of wrangling both cultural imagination and procurement contracts. This is a form of design that explicitly recognizes a new politics of ownership and collaboration, and of nature and human nature continually re-balanced and re-thought.
We might choose to concentrate this new design practice on our suburbs because this is the most challenging environment in which to understand and articulate shared identities and civic values, weaving social fabric for “loosely joined” relationships, revealing something greater than the sum of the “small pieces.” In other words, a city.
The suburbs may have embodied a sense of dispersal in the past, a loose drifting apart unconstrained by the seemingly boundless Australian interior, and to some extent a rejection of both natural and civic sensibilities. This new Great Dispersion, after the combinations of COVID, bushfires and Big Tech have radically destabilized preconceptions about living and working in cities, could actually be an opportunity to finally bring such places, cultures and natures together in new ways, to look at the reality of our existing suburban conditions as they are and to re-imagine them from within.
One can feel confident about this challenge as, with the stakes this high, we actually have little choice but to do so.
And above all things, she wanted to see. She wished to once more observe the world not as people said it was, but as it is. She wanted to be attentive to this is, not panicked by what wasn’t. She needed to precisely know the world as it presented itself to her. And if it revealed a bruised, damaged universe, still, perhaps there would be in the very wound some hope.
— Richard Flanagan, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams 9
— Dan Hill is Director of Strategic Design at Vinnova, the Swedish government’s innovation agency.
His previous design leadership roles include Arup,
Future Cities Catapult, Fabrica, Sitra and the BBC. He is a visiting professor at UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose and Design Academy Eindhoven, and an adjunct professor at RMIT University.
Footnotes
1. Richard Flanagan, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (Melbourne: Knopf, 2020), 12.
2. Derek Thompson, “Why Manhattan’s Skyscrapers are Empty,” The Atlantic, 16 January 2020, theatlantic.com/ ideas/archive/2020/01/american-housing-has-goneinsane/605005/ (accessed 26 April 2021).
3. Xiaowei Wang, Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), 5.
4. Scott Galloway, “How the pandemic ushered in the Great Dispersion,” Marker, 8 December 2020, marker.medium. com/how-the-pandemic-ushered-in-the-great-dispersion1a21fee657da (accessed 26 April 2021).
5. In my writing, I have adapted this phrase, which was originally used by David Weinberg in his 2002 book Small Pieces Loosely Joined. For example, see Dan Hill, “Slowdown landscapes: Small pieces, loosely joined,” Slowdow Papers, 24 September 2020, medium.com/slowdown-papers/28small-pieces-loosely-joined-7e4bcf672b52 (accessed
3 May 2021).
6. Julia Watson, Lo—TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism (Cologne: Taschen, 2020).
7. Tim Christophersen, quoted in Steven Rose, “‘Our biggest challenge? Lack of imagination’: The scientists turning the desert green,” The Guardian, 20 March 2021, theguardian. com/environment/2021/mar/20/our-biggest-challengelack-of-imagination-the-scientists-turning-the-desertgreen (accessed 26 April 2021).
8. Timothy Morton, “Creativity or extinction? Extinction can be avoided,” The Journal of Architecture, vol 26 issue 1, 2021, tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13602365.2021.188 3304 (accessed 3 May 2021).
9. Flanagan, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, 239.