Today’s technology will produce different suburban cultures again. The outcome was a distinct culture, a new pattern of living, being, making. 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. So, as ever, the key urban dynamics concern technology (the tools we make) and culture (what we make the tools for). And in this world, we are all suburban, living in more or less intense concentrations of foodshed, of watershed, of nature, of culture. ![]() ” 3 We are all caught up in the same entangled hyperobject. ![]() 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. Suburbs have nothing to be “sub” about.Įqually, the pretence that the city is innately superior to the country can also be overcome in these moves. “Urbs” – exemplifying the urban condition – is no longer defined so sharply as a counterpoint to “suburb” – that which is somehow beneath the urban condition. We might do better to think about cities in this respect, moving on from these previously fraught battles between urban and suburban. 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.Ĭonversely, 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. We need to actively, urgently and inventively re-imagine the individualistic and extractive modes of which most Australian urban systems remain a crude diagram. It should not take pandemics, bushfires, floods and mass extinction to force the issue. 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. More fundamentally, of course, we cannot wait for a dawning realization, or hope for a slow managed demise. 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 displace-ment capabilities of contemporary tech rather than the pandemic. 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. 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-billion-dollar campuses. New York’s future is similarly challenged. London may have lost almost 800,000 inhabitants during 2020 and is facing an “existential crisis,” according to its mayor. 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. Cities are where our systems converge, after all. ![]() ![]() 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.
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