Becoming Urban: A Social and Cultural Study of Urban Change in Brisbane

Author Felton, Emma

Published 2007

Thesis Type Thesis (PhD Doctorate)

School School of Arts

DOI https://doi.org/10.25904/1912/299

Copyright Statement The author owns the copyright in this thesis, unless stated otherwise.

Downloaded from http://hdl.handle.net/10072/368080

Griffith Research Online https://research-repository.griffith.edu.au BECOMING URBAN: A Social and Cultural Study

of

Urban Change in Brisbane

Emma Felton

Master of Arts, Grad Dip Media (AFTRS), Diploma Teaching

School of Arts, Faculty of Arts, Griffith University

Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

May 28, 2007 This work has not previously been submitted for a degree or diploma in any university. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made in the thesis itself.

______May 25, 2007.

ii ABSTRACT

Becoming Urban is a study of Brisbane’s emerging urbanism in its inner­city areas. Its focus is on the psycho­social and experiential dimensions of urban change. At the beginning of the twenty­first century, Brisbane is poised on the brink of a significant period of its development as the city is transformed, both materially and imaginatively, from a regional town into an emerging global city. This transition has major social implications. The study rests on two main assertions: first, that Brisbane’s emerging urbanism is situated in a tension between its parochial, inward­looking past and its future — its development as a postmodern city, discursively framed as open, inclusive and tolerant to difference; and second, that Brisbane’s city space is significantly being reconfigured and that many people now inhabit the city in different ways than they did prior to urban regeneration. The growth in density and development of the inner city, of service amenities and cultural facilities means that new modes of engagement and ways of being in the city are offered and adopted. These new spaces and amenities are sites for increasingly differentiated forms of sociability, a mode of living which is representative of broader changes to the social structure (Bauman 2000; Maffesoli 1996). In its growth from regional town to an emerging global city, Brisbane’s new and recast spaces also present the opportunity for encounters with the Other and for the negotiation of difference.

Underpinning both assertions is the understanding that the city is a discursive space, in which discourses inform the types of identifications and attachments that people develop with space and place. Thus the nexus between the discursive and the material city is a major theme of the thesis.

A multi­method approach is used to explore the importance of the spatial in the formation of subjectivity, particularly as they relate to place attachment and the gendered nature of

iii spatial relations and subjectivity. With its focus on subjectivity and experience, the thesis emphasises the role of imagination in the experience of place (Donald 1999). As such, it examines several contemporary texts of the city to explore the links between imaginative accounts of the city, identity and experience. These texts are framed around the common themes of place and identity, and the city as a place which offers a growth in sites for social interaction and participation.

In addition to theoretical explorations of the city, the thesis includes analysis of qualitative data from residents who have recently moved into the case study area of Fortitude Valley, Newstead and New Farm, and from long­term residents who are experiencing rapid changes to their neighbourhoods. For this purpose, a short documentary ‘Everyone has Their Own New Farm’: Narratives of Neighbourhood Change, is included.

iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This has been a long­term project, and there are a lot of people I would like to thank for a variety of reasons.

First, many thanks are due to my supervisor Dr Ian Woodward, in particular for his unstinting encouragement, helpful advice and intellectual guidance. Ian somehow managed the delicate balance of critique and support which for me was critical to maintain my commitment to the project. I am also grateful to Dr David Ellison, who came late to the thesis but whose enthusiasm and perceptiveness were most valuable. Both Ian and David’s support contributed to a rewarding and productive experience. What’s more, our coffee meetings in the case study area of this study proved inspiration for some of the thesis’s material!

My gratitude extends to the following people who generously gave their time to read various chapters and provide insights and editorial advice: Sandra Hogan, Marguerite Nolan, Helen Yeates and Donna McDonald. Sandra, Maggie and Helen were also understanding and encouraging in other sustaining ways, important for such a long­term project. Likewise, Susan Johnson and Andrea Mitchell were there when they were needed, with the right words at the right time.

I would like to gratefully acknowledge Griffith University’s Faculty of Arts and the School of Arts Media and Culturefor financial assistance. A scholarship enabled me to complete the thesis and a travel grant has helped finance international conference attendance. Thanks in particular are due to Professor Kay Ferres, who instigated the rejuvenation of the thesis. Without Kay’s encouragement, the thesis could easily have languished. Professor Jennifer Craik and Dr Grahame Griffin were there at the beginning with ideas, advice and conversation, as was Dr Maureen Burns and for this I am

v appreciative. Sue Jarvis did afine edit on the work and thanks are due to Griffith University’s Centre of Public Culture and Ideas for their support here.

I am most grateful to the Australian Catholic University, in particular to Professor John O’Gorman and Associate Professor Paul Chesterton for study and other leave which helped make completion of this thesis possible. I am indebted to Donna Strahan and Des Matejka for their support and for keeping things ticking over during my absence from work. Thanks also to Ewa Lilpop for her research help while I was on leave.

I am of course, indebted to the respondents of surveys and to the people who agreed to participate in the documentary project. They gave their time willingly and generously.

Finally, but not least, I am thankful for the love and support of my family. To my husband Kevin whose interest and conversation in all things urban helped animate the project over a long period of time. For the many meals cooked, assumption of domestic life and endurance of long periods when I was occupied and absent in one way or another from the family. And to Imogen and Patrick for their patience: they have stoically endured a distracted mother for the past two years.

vi CONTENTS

ABSTRACT iii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS v

CONTENTS vii

INTRODUCTION 1

Approaches to the Study 3 The City in Context 5 Urban Space as Contested Space 9 Chapter Outlines 11

CHAPTER 1: DIFFERENCE, IDENTITY, THE SOCIAL AND THE CITY 15

Difference: Living with Strangers 16 Identity: Subjectivity and the City 20 Identity and Imagination 25 Sexuality and Gender 28 Affect and the City 33 The Social: The Collective and the City 36 Conclusion 39

CHAPTER 2: THE TIES THAT BIND: CONSTRUCTING MEANING THROUGH IMAGINATION AND EMOTION 43

The Imaginary City: City as Text 44 Semiotics and Cultural Analysis 45 Psychoanalysis and the Subject 50 Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity and the City 54 The Other 56 The Emotional Life of the City 59 Milton’s Ecological Model of Emotion and Environment 63 Memory and Place 65 Conclusion 67

vii CHAPTER 3: THE REPRESENTATIONAL CITY IN FILM, TELEVISION AND LITERATURE 70

Cinema and City Experience 72 City and Discourses of Identity 75 The Postmodern Social City 80 Communities on the Edge: The Australian City 83 Sex and Identity in Head On 87 Brisbane: From the Wilderness 91 Desperately Seeking Brisbane 96 Conclusion 98

CHAPTER 4: ON THE CUSP: BRISBANE’S EMERGING URBANISM 100

From the Suburbs 101 Constructing Brisbane’s Urbanism 105 Defined by Lack? 111 South Bank Parklands 114 The Cafe: The enabling of Civility 118 An Ethnographic Digression … 119 The Cafe and Sociability 120 The Cafe and Civility 126 Conclusion 129

CHAPTER 5: THE NEW BRISBANE: HISTORICAL LEGACIES 131

The Significance of Local Studies 132 A Contested Past 134 ‘It All Began with Expo’ 143 The New Brisbane: The Ledger 145 The Case Study Area: The Inner Northern Peninsula 150 Fortitude Valley: New Infrastructure 151 New Farm 154 Newstead 157 Demographic Change 158 Suburban Imprints 161

viii Conclusion 163

CHAPTER 6: NARRATIVES OF THE NEW BRISBANE: RESIDENTS’ EXPERIENCE OF CHANGE 166

Background to the Study 167 Methodological Approach 171 Lifestyle, Lifestyle, Lifestyle 173 Diversity 177 Community and Belonging 182 Affect and the Senses 186 A Sense of Place: Identity and Memory 190 Conclusion 196

CHAPTER 7: REFLECTIONS ON THE PRACTICE OF PRODUCING THE DOCUMENTARY ‘EVERYONE HAS THEIR OWN NEW FARM’ 200

Background to the Project 201 Genre Considerations 203 Reflections on Practice 206 Omissions 215

CHAPTER 8: CONCLUSIONS 218

Major Themes and Findings 219 Areas for Further Research 228

BIBLIOGRAPHY 231

APPENDICES 253 Appendix 1: Sun Apartment Survey 253 Appendix 2: Wool stores Survey 255

ix INTRODUCTION ______

This thesis is primarily about lived experience in the rapidly changing Australian city of Brisbane. With its emphasis on diverse forms of knowledge and perception, the thesis asserts the significance of experience, perception and the modalities of the imagination as legitimate ways of understanding the city.

The study is situated in the context of accelerated urban development in cities across the Western world from the latter part of the twentieth century into the twenty­first century, a period of urbanisation which is often described as postmodern (Dear 2000; Gibson and Watson 1995; Jameson 1991; Harvey 1990). It is an interdisciplinary study which constitutes a case study of Queensland’s state capital, Brisbane. Of all Australia’s cities, Brisbane has experienced the most profound change since the early 1990s. This is significant because, until recently, Brisbane was Australia’s most suburban city (Salt 2005), and for most of its history since white settlement was a place in which urbanism was kept at bay (Whitlock 1989: 80). Its political and social history has marked it as a place intolerant of difference and of outsiders (Fitzgerald 1984), and in the national imaginary Brisbane was regarded as a parochial and inward­looking town. However, a massive growth in population and intense urban consolidation have changed the city. This thesis investigates how change is experienced for people living in the city. What does it mean for the ways in which people form attachments to each other and their neighbourhoods in the transforming metropolis? How is difference perceived and negotiated in the city’s recast spaces?

The study rests on two main assertions. The first is that Brisbane’s emerging urbanism is situated in a tension between its parochial, inward­looking past and its future — its development as a postmodern city, discursively framed as open, inclusive and tolerant to difference. The second is that Brisbane’s city space is being significantly

1 reconfigured, and that many people now inhabit the city in different ways than they did prior to urban regeneration. The growth in density and development of the inner city, of service amenities and cultural facilities means that new modes of engagement and ways of being in the city are offered and adopted. One of the main platforms of the thesis is that the city’s new spaces and amenities offer sites for increasingly differentiated forms of sociability, which are representative of broader changes to the social structure (Bauman 2000; Maffesoli 1996). Moreover, in its growth from regional town to an emerging global city, Brisbane’s new and transformed spaces also present the opportunity for encounters with others and for the negotiation of difference. Although many of these spaces; such as cafes and entertainment venues; are consumer oriented, such amenities are also important in enabling the negotiation of social and civic competencies.

Central to the study’s focus on lived experience is the recognition that an imaginative engagement with the city is an intrinsic part of quotidian life. Cities are not simply material places, but are spaces that are animated through perception, imagination and performance. As Raban observes, ‘the city as a form is uniquely prone to erode the boundary between the province of the imagination and the province of fact’ (1974: 70). Thus discourses and representations of the city’s social life are an intrinsic part of our experience of the city. Accounts of the city in media, popular culture, novels, urban and social plans articulate desires and fears about city life and living with difference. As such, the study looks at the shifts occurring around discourses of the city in general, and of Brisbane in particular as it develops from a regional town into an emerging global city, through an examination of literary and popular cultural texts. The study is attentive to the ways in which texts articulate the social dimension of urban living.

The following sections of the Introduction chart the research rationale and methodologies used in the study, and place it in the broader context of urban change occurring across cities in the Western world.

2 APPROACHES TO THE STUDY

The thesis is in two parts, consisting of a written component of approximately 80,000 words and a work of creative practice, a 20­minute short documentary production titled ‘Everyone has Their Own New Farm’: Narratives of Neighbourhood Change.

The study employs a multi­method approach, using qualitative and interpretive methods to explore the complex relationship between the individual, the social and the city. This approach affords a comprehensive understanding of the multifaceted character of lived experience in a rapidly changing urban environment. As a site of study, the city does not offer a unified social reality common to everyone, and lived experience is informed by a diversity of subjective and social influences. Moreover, the study must be placed in the context of Brisbane’s history in order to understand both its present and the magnitude of social change occurring in the city. It is therefore more appropriate to explore the psycho­ social dimensions of urban change through a combination of disciplinary methods.

The written component of the study uses a conceptual and interpretive approach to explore the relationship between experience and place. Thus, for this purpose, the thesis engages with the intersection of theories of psychoanalysis, semiotics and affect to interpret survey data and interview participants of residents living in the case study area of Fortitude Valley, Newstead and New Farm. Similarly, this framework is applied to texts of the city in popular culture, and to the city’s new spaces for an analysis of their social and civic function.

Following Denzin and Lincoln (2000), the combination of multiple methods and interpretive approaches to the site of study adds breadth, depth and rigour to the investigation. Interpretive approaches argue for the uniqueness of human inquiry and prioritise the world of first­person subjective experience (Taylor, in Denzin 1994: 119). This approach positions meaning as central, and the processes by which meanings are created and sustained are interpreted in this study through an exploration of the survey data, and interview participants and city texts — that is, through language, text and discourse.

3 There is an embodied, sensual dimension to the ways in which we engage with the spaces of the city, and this helps shapes our attachment to place. Recent literature that foregrounds the ways in which emotion and embodiment are central to understanding the subjective and social in everyday life (Milton 2005; Sedgwick 2003; Maffesoli 1996; Pile 1996) adds texture and depth to an investigation of the relationship between place and lived experience. So too psychoanalytic theory is used to map out the relationship between the subject and space.

With an emphasis on the imagination’s role in the experience of the city, the study examines the ways in which desires, hopes and fears about city life — particularly in relation to the social — are circulated through literary and popular culture texts and in town planning discourse. Following Pile, Donald and others (1997, 1999), urban imaginaries are produced by the city’s materiality, its discourses and representations. An imaginative engagement with the city works in a relay of production and reproduction, and is actively constituted in the built form of the city; the way the city is imagined both influences city form and informs a response to urban living. The idea of an urban imaginary is particularly salient to Brisbane, a city with a limited tradition of urbanism and therefore with limited localised discourses of the urban.

The second part of the project, the short documentary ‘Everyone has Their Own New Farm’: Narratives of Neighbourhood Change is presented both as a work of creative practice and as an audio­visual record of neighbourhood change. The short documentary was produced in part with funds from a Local History Grant awarded to me by the Brisbane City Council. The main aim of the documentary was to produce an account of people’s attachment to, and experience of, a place that is transforming rapidly around them. The production consists of interviews with a cross­section of residents living in the case study area of New Farm, and is combined with contemporary and archival footage of the area. The interviews with twelve participants provide part of the project’s interpretative material in combination with two surveys conducted in the case study area. A background to the

4 project and reflection on the process of producing ‘Everyone has Their Own New Farm’: Narratives of Neighbourhood Change is provided in Chapter 7.

Finally, before moving on to the next section, dealing with the city in context, I should declare my status as a resident of fifteen years in the case study area of New Farm. This has no doubt contributed in some way to the complexion of this study. How this is manifested may be more apparent to the reader than myself, but my changing neighbourhood has certainly informed and sustained an abiding interest with the topic of urbanism. Although I have not actively inserted myself into the study as ethnographer, the particular interpretive approaches I have selected and used will be informed by my own subjective experience of change in the area. Thus elements of subjectivity may be more visible to the reader than myself. Very occasionally, when it appears to be relevant to do so, I make observations born of that tacit knowledge and experience of place.

THE CITY IN CONTEXT

There are two essential factors about city life that underpin this the focus of this thesis on lived experience. One is the consumer­focused characteristic of urban life, and the other is the fact that in cities we live in close proximity to strangers. Both phenomena of city life have been highly theorised (Patton 1995; Zukin 1995; Jameson 1991; Harvey 1990; Sennett 1970), from the modern to the postmodern city, in which the latter city is marked by a rapid increase of consumerism and changing demography due to global migration. Occasionally, scholars have asserted one or other view as the fundamental, singular condition of urbanity — David Harvey, for instance, elaborates his consumer­based ontology in his book The Condition of Postmodernity (1990), as does Frederic Jameson in Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. This thesis, however, gives priority to both aspects of urbanity and does not regard either as contradictory or mutually exclusive. In particular, for the case study of Brisbane, these two aspects of urbanity are the two areas that have been the focus of the most profound change and have had the most far­reaching consequences.

5 I will deal with each characteristic in turn to further contextualise the study. In the postmodern city, the range of possibilities for social engagement have markedly increased, as have the types of spaces in which such engagements occur. This has had significant consequences for the lived experience of the city, with attendant social and civic implications. A myriad of services and cultural amentities such as restaurants, cafes, bars, galleries, entertainment venues and retail outlets are the result of an acceleration in the cycle of production and consumption over several decades. The redevelopment of old waterside industrial areas into apartments and entertainment­style precincts, such as Sydney’s Darling Harbour and Brisbane’s South Bank, results in a mix of public, private and consumer spaces for locals and tourists alike. In addition to the growth the cultural infrastructure of cities, a range of festivals have also been introduced. While festivals serve several functions, they are primarily promoted as a way of differentiating and distinguishing cities. Festivals may promote a city’s attributes, such as Brisbane’s Riverfestival or Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, or play host to cultural activities such as reading and writing or film­making through writers and film festivals. Such events and spaces offer forms of identification with place through ways of engaging with the city and with others which are frequently consumer based. More importantly for this study, urban­based events and amenities are also sites of social interaction in which social networks are sustained and nurtured.

Critiques of the postmodern city’s accelerated consumerism argue that the urban subject is increasingly defined by an homogenising culture of consumerism which favours privileged patterns of consumption and lifestyle practices (Hage 1998; Zukin 1995). However, while this thesis acknowledges this trend, it seeks to demonstrate that this view overlooks the important social functions that the increasing number of city spaces offer, and which cut across gender, class and ethnic divisions. While many of the city’s new and transformed spaces are consumer oriented, they are also arenas which support a growth in modes of engagement and identification, and which have important social consequences. As Watson has noted, ‘social relations are constructed spatially. Spatial relations are structured socially’ (2005: 7) and city space is just as much about being with others as it is about consumerism. The spaces of the city — whether or not they are consumer focused —

6 support a profound shift in networks of sociability, altering the ways in which we inhabit and use city space. The proliferation of hospitality and entertainment industries, for example — in the form of cafes and restaurants — are the consumer­based social spaces in which new forms of sociability and attachment are nurtured and sustained. This is particularly relevant to the study’s focus on Brisbane, a city which had limited public or semi­public places in which to meet or mingle prior to urban consolidation.

While this thesis engages with consumerism in only a peripheral manner, it does so with the acknowledgment that consumerism is central to an ontology of contemporary urban life, to the meanings and forms of identification people make with place and with each other. New forms of social distinction cut across and elaborate old class­based social formations, and urbanisation is crucial to this social and cultural phenomenon. The thesis supports David Chaney’s (1996) view that postmodernity’s endemic concern with consumer­based style, taste and social distinction is not simply about mindless exploitation or self­indulgence, but rather is ‘an existential search for distinction in a deeply secular culture’ (1996: 17). Thus the ways in which individuals and groups engage with the cultural resources and commodities of their environment become invested with significance (1996: 8). In this context, the contemporary emphasis on the ‘creative city’, in which invention and creativity are expected to significantly contribute to a city’s economy and ‘buzz’ (Thrift 2004), supports the growth of niche industries and services which are based on artistic, technological or intellectual development. This trend has economic, cultural and social implications.

The second defining feature of city life which is relevant for the study of Brisbane as an emerging city, is the assertion of Raban (1974), Barthes (1982) and others that an essential condition of cities is that we live in constant and close proximity among strangers. Living among strangers demands particular skills and competencies, and has the capacity to produce particular modes of being (Bauman 2000; Sennett 1970; Simmel 1950). For long­ term Brisbane residents, one of the biggest impacts of urban change is in the growth and constitution of the city’s demography. Mass migration over previous decades has produced ethnically diverse, heterogeneous urban places across the world, including in Brisbane.

7 Since white settlement in the eighteenth century, Brisbane’s population has been overwhelmingly Anglo­Celtic. Until the latter part of the twentieth century, Queensland — of which Brisbane is the state capital — actively encouraged British migrants over other ethnicities (Fitzgerald 1982: 187). Furthermore, Brisbane’s small, predominantly Anglo­ Celtic population and its history of authoritarian government had earned it a national reputation for being an inward­looking place with an intolerance to difference. Yet living among strangers requires precisely the opposite: a tolerance to difference and diversity or, in Paul Patton’s words, ‘a creative competence’ (1995: 118). This study explores this changing feature of the city for Brisbane residents.

Diversity and difference — of ethnicity, style, food, culture, music — is the leitmotif of the postmodern city (Zukin 1995). Many cities frame their ethnic diversity in a celebratory rubric of difference, marking out ethnic precincts with foreign­language street signs and icons of other cultures, evident in ‘Chinatown’ malls or emphasising Italian, Greek and other ethnic precincts with festivals and so forth. The discursive framing of cultural diversity marks a significant shift for Australia — a country which, until the mid­1960s, had a ‘White Australia’ policy (Murphy and Watson 1997: 14). For Brisbane, its recently acquired ethnic diversity is even more notable. Underneath the celebratory discourse of difference in cities, another narrative emerges. Difference gives rise to tensions and affective responses, evident in the violent eruptions of Sydney’s Cronulla beach race riots of 2005. The high unemployment and poverty attributed to various ethnic groups, and disputes over religious difference, paint a bleaker picture of multiculturalism’s project. Moreover, the apparent ascendancy of religion following the September 11 attack on New York’s World Trade Center in 2001 points to a regeneration of religious and associated hostilities that are played out in the spaces of the city. Tensions and anxieties around difference are affective responses: they inform attitudes and behaviour with tangible consequences, and we do not have to look far to see examples of this. As a central modality in people’s relationship to place, affect — through its trajectories of desire and fear — is another concern of this inquiry.

8 URBAN SPACE AS CONTESTED SPACE

Conflicts over difference — ethnic, social, cultural or merely people who appear different — underscore the contested nature of urban space. Different groups of people lay claim to the public spaces of the city; its parks, malls and footpaths are the terrain where micro turf wars are played out. In this introduction to the study, my concluding point — a sort of caveat that underpins the thesis’s focus on the subjective, social and experiential relationship with the city — must be made. Although this study does not pursue the problem of urban conflict, it is nonetheless mindful of the understanding that space is both a site and source of social power, mindful of the contested and political nature of urban space, expressed aptly in Harvey’s observation:

Spatial and temporal practices are never neutral in social affairs. They always express some kind of class or other social content, and are more often than not the focus of intense social struggle. (1990:239)

Many other writers on the city, such as Lefebvre (1991), Zukin (1995), Soja (1988), and feminist scholars such as Rose (1993), Walkowitz (1992) and Wilson (1991) have detailed the explicit and implicit ways in which social power operates across the urban environment.

By emphasising the subjective, affective quality of experience, this study does not resile from such analyses, and is in fact informed by them — particularly the work of feminist writers. I have argued elsewhere that women’s occupation of public space has been circumscribed both by modernity’s masculinist assumptions of women in the public sphere and by discourses of fear. 1 It has to be acknowledged from the outset that social relations and the modalities of individual subjectivity discussed throughout this thesis operate within networks of power relations in the city. Thus, implicit in my focus on individual and collective experience in the case study area of Brisbane’s inner city — which is marked by gentrification — is the understanding of its social consequences: of the removal of low­ income and marginalised residents from their neighbourhoods and social networks, and of other well­documented consequences. In focusing attention on the everyday and on experience, I have endeavoured to steer a path clear of the idea that everyday life is, in

9 Nigel Thrift’s words, ‘both celebrated … and becomes an object of acute nostalgia’ (2000a: 400).

Finally, one more explanation of terminology needs to be made. Throughout the thesis, I use two terms in relation to the contemporary city. The first is the ‘postmodern city’, a term which relates to the current period and type of urban development emerging from the 1970s and the outcomes of which are largely the result of the forces of globalisation, characterised by intense restructuring and associated instability (Dear 2000: 1). The postmodern city is variously identified by a shift in demography through growth in global mass migration, new forms of consumerism — often referred to as ‘hyper’ consumerism for the intensity of activity — and increased urban investment through the redevelopment of inner­city areas and waterside precincts. Postmodernism in the urban context is also used to refer to a particular architectural style marked by spectacle, reference and wit (Harvey 1990). The other term is the ‘global city’, first coined by Saskia Sassen (1991) and used broadly to refer to cities which have some effect on global affairs through activities, innovation, socioeconomic, cultural or political means. 2 London, New York and Paris are the most frequently cited examples of global cities. Clearly Brisbane is not in the same league as these cities, but I suggest it displays some evidence of world city formation, given its population, economic and cultural growth since the early 1990s. Global cities are also places characterised by large and diverse populations, and in which a diverse array of beliefs, styles, values and attitudes originate and ferment (Clark 1996: 10). In combination with urban patterns of production and consumption, these produce distinctive lifestyles and social networks that are markedly different from those in regional centres. As incubators of attitudes, modes of thought, behaviour and activity, the city’s social values are readily transported, mediated through technology and reproduced to populations across the world (1996: 10). Thus the most profound social change occurs in the city, and it is this factor that makes the city of particular interest to this study.

10 CHAPTER OUTLINES

Chapter 1 outlines the main conceptual areas explored throughout the thesis. The chapter is part literary review and part archaeology, tracing ontologies of urbanism and ideas about the production of urban consciousness from Simmel and Benjamin to contemporary writers such as Lefebvre and Jameson. In contemporary writing, greater attention has been paid to the variegated nature of experience and everyday life, and is more alert to the operation and inscription of power across urban space. Attention to the different experiences produced by gender, class, ethnicity and sexuality are examples here, although the thesis only engages with divisions of gender and sexuality. In representations of the city, the tropes of fear and desire reveal less visible, but no less potent, grids of power relations across the city, a significant factor for the ways in which individuals inhabit and use the city. The chapter points to the ways in which shifting social divisions across gender of the past three decades are reconstituted in the city, resulting in the production of more feminised spaces in the postmodern city. Furthermore, a recognition of the embodied and affective ways in which the city is inhabited is particularly salient for many women.

Chapter 2 argues for the significance of the spatial in forms of identification and the social dimension, drawing upon theories of the subject in culture. The chapter introduces the three interpretive approaches that underpin the study: psychoanalytic theory, semiotics and theories of affect. I suggest that psychoanalytic accounts of subjectivity are critical for an understanding of the ways in which the individual both constitutes, and is constituted by, their environment — in this context, by the city itself (Pile, 1996). This approach points to the affect­laden motivation of human action, an important consideration in the civil life of the city. Michel Maffesoli’s work on the realignment of social networks in the latter part of the twentieth century and Eve Sedgwick’s work on affect is elaborated and taken up in the context of the city. As the thesis is also concerned with the imaginary city through representations and its relation to experience, this chapter introduces semiotics as the primary interpretive framework for discourses of the city. Semiotics provides another account of the way meaning is produced through the signs and language of culture.

11 Chapter 3 introduces the theme of the imaginary city and, following on from the previous chapter, and argues for the significance of representations in contributing to social thought and experience. Bridge and Watson note how `imagination and the city are mutually constitutive and interwoven in countless ways’ (2000:17) and this chapter explores the ways in which representations are part of our imaginative engagement with the city. They are complex formations of material, techniques and ideologies, and are in part constitutive of the city itself. New York is discussed as a dominant and enduring icon of metropolitan life and the chapter begins with an analysis of a New York based text. The chapter identifies common tropes of the city in relation to identity: ideas about sexuality, gender and consumption and how they are inscribed in the city through the analyses of several film and television texts. The latter part of the chapter examines Australian city based texts, beginning with Melbourne and concluding with literary texts of Brisbane, prior to the mid­ 1990’s period of urban consolidation. Analyses are alert to the ways in which contemporary representations articulate the city as a site of sociability.

Chapter 4 continues the textual exploration of Brisbane. It charts the historical oppositional discourse between the suburbs and the city in Australia which have shaped ideas about urban and suburban life. Brisbane’s legacy as a suburban city with a very limited urban tradition makes the emerging city an interesting site for analysis. As Brisbane carves out a new identity, contemporary discourses are contrasted with earlier literary tropes of the city, where it appears as a distinctly non­urban place. With its intensification of urbanism, how is the city being reimagined? The chapter also identifies two other semiotic sites which are emblematic of the city’s new social spaces, South Bank Parklands and the city’s many new cafes. Analysis of the cafe in urban culture supports the study’s two central assertions of urban change in Brisbane: that people inhabit the city in different ways, and that amenities such as cafes support networks of sociability and offer the opportunity for the negotiation of difference.

Chapter 5 places Brisbane in its historical and social context. It asserts the importance of local studies by exploring the significant changes to the city’s demography and infrastructure. Although the globally synchronous nature of change means that cities across

12 the Western world are subject to similar forces that shape them, every place has its unique sociocultural and political imprint on top of which change occurs. The chapter outlines the cultural, demographic and socio­economic changes occurring in the case study urban renewal area of Fortitude Valley, New Farm and Newstead. Brisbane’s rapidly growing demography, infrastructure and governmental policies have contributed to a city which now appears more metropolitan and outward looking than its provincial past suggests. Behind the emerging metropolis, however, is its ‘unmastered’ past (Glover and Cunningham 2003), where political and social legacies shaping Brisbane since white settlement have contributed to its status as a provincial backwater in the national context. It also provides the context in which to review the qualitative and interpretive data from residents in the case study area in the subsequent chapter.

Chapter 6 examines qualitative data collected in the case study area which identifies people’s responses to their changing neighborhoods’. Data and interviews from the documentary ‘Everyone has Their Own New Farm’ are explored using an interpretive methodology. The chapter draws upon previously discussed conceptual approaches from Chapters 1 and 2 to account for the ways in which people form attachments to place and to articulate the experience of urban change for a group of residents living in an area transforming rapidly around them. Data is analysed around a series of dominant themes emerging from resident surveys and interview participant responses.

Chapter 7 presents the background, rationale and a reflection on the practice and outcome of the documentary ‘Everyone has Their Own New Farm’: Narratives of Neighbourhood Change. This chapter also addresses conceptual concerns around documentary practice.

Chapter 8, the concluding chapter of the study, brings together four key themes in relation to lived experience and place identification arising from the inquiry. People’s experience of urbanism and urban change, expressed in the survey data and interview participants in the case study area, reveals several commonalities which support the thesis’s platform of the centrality of the city as a social site. Here the importance of people, of social networks and of appropriate amenities to meet with others is expressed in both qualitative data and

13 articulated in discursive framings of the city. Links to the representational city are considered for the ways in which discourse is produced by and reproduces the city. The chapter also identifies other areas of inquiry that might fruitfully be explored.

NOTES

1 Felton, Emma 1995, Public Spaces Private Fears unpublished Master of Arts dissertation, Faculty of Humanities, Griffith University.

2 Global cities are generally characterised by populations in excess of one million, recognisable by first­ name familiarity (e.g. London, not London, Great Britain), a major international airport, advanced transportation system, international firms where corporate headquarters are located and advanced technology systems. GaWC Loughborough University, , accessed 2/5/06.

14 CHAPTER 1

DIFFERENCE, IDENTITY, THE SOCIAL AND THE CITY

The polis was a living community, based on kinship, real or assumed — a kind of extended family, turning as much as possible of life into family life, and of course having its family quarrels which of course were the more bitter because they were family quarrels. (Kitto in LeGates and Stout 1996: 35)

The contemporary city appears a very different place from its ancient origins. Its built form and population density bear little resemblance to the polis from which it evolved. But the city’s principal function as the locus of social relations and organisation remains the basis upon which the material environment is constructed. Cities, foremost, are places where we live in close proximity with one another. This study is about the way we live together in cities, and the perceptions that inform our engagement with them.

The context of the study is the rapid economic, technological and social and cultural change of cities, brought about by processes of globalisation in the latter part of the twentieth century. The city is the crucible of social change and, unlike the ancient polis or the city of modernity, citizens of the postmodern city are less bound by ties of family kinship and more to affinity communities, communities of interest, to patterns of consumption and lifestyle practices and other fluid networks of social relations (Bauman 2003). These changes are representative of a seismic shift in the ways in which people live. The shift is explored throughout the thesis in a case study of Brisbane’s inner city presented through the perceptions and experiences of residents living in the area.

This chapter maps out the terrain of the study, and its three central platforms. The principles on which it is based is that the city is:

15 • a place where we live among strangers (the Other) and encounter difference; • a place of identity formation in which imagination has a key role; • a social site.

Difference, identity and sociability are informing characteristics central to the lived experience of urbanity. These characteristics manifest materially, imaginatively and in discourse, and underpin my analysis of Brisbane’s emerging urbanism and imaginative accounts of the city throughout the study.

DIFFERENCE: LIVING WITH STRANGERS

The first integrative theme is that in cities we live among strangers. Roland Barthes observed that the ‘city is a place of our meeting with the Other’ (1982: 96). A detailed explanation of the Other is provided in Chapter 2, but briefly it is a psychoanalytic term used to refer to people who are perceived to be different and whose differences may mobilise the psychic drives of fear and antagonism. Discursively, the Other is embodied in the idea of the stranger.

The importance of this fact to the study is twofold. First, following Simmel’s (1950), Sennett’s (1970) and Lefebvre’s (1991) assertions that the experience of urban life engages distinct psychological, affective and corporeal modalities, much of this has to do with the fact that in cities we live cheek by jowl among strangers. This means certain civil competencies are required, such as tolerance and attention to public behaviour and performance.

Second, the relevance of difference for the study’s investigation of urban change in Brisbane is highlighted because Brisbane’s history has marked it as a place with an intolerance of difference and because, in the national imaginary, the city has occupied a status similar to North America’s deep south as inward looking and parochial. Brisbane’s social and political history and the forces of change, as it has developed from a small regional town to an emerging global city, are discussed in Chapter 5. In

16 Chapter 4, I suggest that the city’s new public and semi­public spaces offer the environment and opportunity for the civil negotiation of the Other.

As a central distinction of city life, living among strangers is a condition that has accelerated in the postmodern city, where global migration has produced increasingly ethnically and culturally diverse populations. While diversity in the postmodern city tends to be framed in a rubric of ethnicity, diversity among gender and social divisions is also a significant characteristic of city life.

In encountering the Other in the spaces of the city, humanity, tolerance and compassion are tested. Equally, encounters with difference can generate psychological and affective responses such as fear, anxiety and anger, which result in the creation of boundaries and defences, and at worst violence. Bauman describes the polarities of responses to this characteristic of city life as ‘mixophilia vs mixophobia’ (2003b: 27).

In the more positive ‘mixophilia’ view, the city is offered as a site for knowing others as ‘different and gaining understanding of groups and cultures that are not one’s own … where residents come together and dwell side by side’ (Watson 2005: 6). Similarly, Young (1990) suggests that city life at its optimum embodies an ideal form of social relations between strangers, a coexistence which she calls ‘openness to unassimilated otherness’ (in Patton 1995: 119). Young’s analysis does not ignore the hierarchies of wealth and power that create barriers and inequities between segments of the population; rather, it steers a middle ground between liberal individualism and community as forms of social organisation.

Another enabling capacity of living among strangers is the view that it creates a psychic space for physical and psychological creativity and reinvention. The promise here is freedom from the constraints of an established social order typical of smaller, close­knit or traditional communities, where identity is known and tends to be fixed. The diversity and difference of social relations in the city — of age, class, ethnicity, sex and sexuality

17 —make change and opportunity appear accessible. This idea is predicated to some extent, on the ways in which the imagination engages with both the real and the representational city.

Opportunity and serendipitous possibility are hallmarks of living among strangers. Chance encounters, the unexpected, excitement and the promise of the unknown were enabling aspects of the city for writers on the modern city, such as Baudelaire and Benjamin. For them, the city ‘promised precious moments of epiphany’ through its ability to ‘administer shocks which disrupt perception and affect the subject’s ability to re­present her or himself’ (Thrift 2000b: 400).

This utopian view of living among strangers is contrasted by the constant and prevalent fear of difference (mixophobia). Sennett has noted that fear of strangers has produced an array of defensive responses to urban living, such as a retreat to homogenised and gated communities, and people living together in ‘communities of similarity’ (in Watson 2005: 42), a pattern emerging in American and to a lesser extent Australian cities. It is the unknown factor of the stranger which, according to Bauman, is unsettling:

The stranger is by definition an agent moved by intentions that one can at best guess but would not know for sure. The stranger is the unknown variable in all equations calculated when decisions about what to do and how to behave are made … and so the presence of strangers inside the field of action is discomforting … (2003b: 38)

Bauman argues that living among strangers is the one condition of urbanity that people find the most difficult. It requires constant vigilance to arrive at a sustainable way of cohabiting, involving regular, sometimes daily, negotiation. It is the constancy of strangers and the fact that they ‘remain strangers’ which is a specifically modern phenomenon. In pre­modern towns, strangers were either ‘familiarised’ or chased away (Bauman 2003b: 68). Mixophobia is a common response to the city’s difference, multiple stimuli, different lifestyles and social inequities. In Australia,

18 such defensiveness towards difference is not aided by political discourse and policies which promote the rhetoric and legislation of ‘border protection’ and ‘illegal refugees’. Underscoring an anxiety about strangers is the tacit knowledge that space is a site and source of social power, and that invisible but felt hierarchies of power, wealth, ethnicity and gender are mapped out across the city.

A defence against living with difference is the adoption of certain behaviours. The city’s inhabitants are performers, with people ‘given to acting, to putting on a show of themselves’, and performance contributes to an ‘intrinsic theatricality’ of the city (Raban, in Patton 1995: 117; see also Simmel 1950). Sennett uses the term teatro mundi, or theatre of the world, to describe a kind of self­dramatisation that is played out on the city streets, where the body — through adornment and display — is central to performance (Edensor2000: 122). Sennett suggests performance is a type of behaviour that allows strangers to express themselves to each other in comfort, to communicate emotionally with people whom they do not know (Sennett 2000: 385– 86). In acting out or performing in city space, it is the anonymity and the types of encounters to which we are subject — unknown, fleeting and fragmented, yet sometimes corporeal — that encourage the experience of ourselves as actors:

Yet our contacts may involve the most `personal’ parts of their lives or our own: our bodies touch in buses or in queues; we overhear snatches of conversation … if we live in apartments we are exposed to the sounds and occasional sights of others going about their daily lives. What we see are the fragmentary glimpses, snapshots of the lives of others, and on the basis of these fragments we extrapolate, identify and make judgements about them … In cities people identify other people on the basis of appearance, their social role or other singular characteristics. In turn, this mode of relating to others reacts back upon their own sense of self and they experience themselves as actors. (2000: 386)

Sennett and Bauman note an ethical dimension to performance where putting on a mask is part of the essence of sociability and civility. As Sennett observes:

19 Masks permit pure sociability, detached from the circumstances of power, malaise and private feelings of those who wear them. Civility has as its aim the shielding of others from being burdened with oneself. (cited in Bauman, 2000: 95)

As an antidote to self­absorption, masks help us orient outwards towards the common good, and are therefore ‘an act of engagement rather than one of non commitment’ (Bauman 2000: 95). In environments of increasing density, in which we live in close proximity to others, it is easy to be persuaded that forms of civility such as this are necessary for the maintenance of civil relations.

As Brisbane transforms from a large regional town to an emerging global city with more concentrated styles of inner­city living, encounters with difference and the Other are increasingly common. The acquisition of new civic skills and tolerances is required. The evolution of high­rise apartment living, a large increase in public spaces and civic amenities, as well as greater density as suburban blocks are carved up and small­lot housing is introduced, mean that Brisbane residents are more commonly exposed to strangers. This is the context of the study’s focus on Brisbane, a regional town with an historical antipathy to difference. Discourses of the new city embrace a rhetoric of cultural diversity and cosmopolitanism, but how is the rhetoric interpolated among people living in the city? The negotiation of difference in the lives of residents, and in discourse, is explored in Chapters 3, 4 and 6.

IDENTITY: SUBJECTIVITY AND THE CITY

The second integrative theme of the study explores the city’s relationship with formations of identity and the ways in which subjectivity is implicated in place attachment. Subjectivity is important for the study’s emphasis on lived experience and the ways in which people adapt to and negotiate change in their environment. Subjectivity is produced by the mobilisation of the psychological and the corporeal, which are situated in a social and cultural context (Muller 2004: 23). Moreover, the centrality of space and place in contemporary social and cultural theory has further

20 highlighted the relationship between self and city, and provided richer analyses of the experience of urbanity through the intersection of social, cultural and psychological approaches. The ways in which subjectivity is both produced by, and produces, the spaces of the city is of particular interest to writers such as Dear (2000), Pile (1996), Massey (1995), Jameson (1993), Thrift (1986) and Lefebvre (1974). In the current period of rapid urban change, with a major growth in urban populations through migration, the ways in which attachment to place and communities of identity are forged are of particular relevance.

The city is a shifting and unstable site, and the case study of Brisbane points to an interesting period in its development as it changes from a regional town into a city. New affiliations and forms of identification with the city are forged among both long­ term and more recently arrived residents.

This chapter has already identified some types of behaviour that city life is seen to encourage, and this is elaborated on by writers such as Simmel to account for a typology of subjectivity which is specific to urbanism. In contrast to rural and communal living, from which nineteenth century urbanisation developed, metropolitan life was seen to cultivate a particular form of consciousness, contingent on certain features of city life (Pile 1996; Sennett 1970):

• living among strangers; • (over) exposure to an abundance of stimuli; • the necessity to adapt to rapid technological change; and • an intensity of consumption practices, now more concentrated in the postmodern city.

Donald (1999) summarises how developments in the modern city were seen to be linked to the perceptual and psychological changes of its inhabitants, highlighting the ways in which features of urban life became internalised:

21 New means of transport, new modes of communication, and new forms of entertainment engendered perceptual and psychological changes through their reconfigurations of time and space. In such ways, the landscape, rhythms and dynamism of the city became internalized. Modern consciousness became urban consciousness. Inner space cannot be securely separated from the space of the streets. And vice versa. (1999: 51)

Given this study’s focus on lived experience, psychoanalytic theory and theories of affect are used to explore identity formations with in the city. The theoretical investigation of this relationship is discussed in greater detail in the following chapter, but it is worth signalling the key tenets that chart the connection between subjectivity and the city. For Donald (1999), Pile (1996) and Rose (1993), it is at the intersection of place and self that identity is forged across space. Pile asserts that our identity is constituted partly from our unique psychic modalities, the material of the city and the imaginative relationship developed between the two. For psychoanalysis, the unconscious is central to self­ formation, through the modalities of perception, emotion and cognition. The unique features of city life impact upon those modalities in particular ways.

There is also an embodied dimension to our relationship to city space, one in which corporeal experience is a constitutive component of identity (Pile 1996: 236; Grosz 1995). A type of embodied knowing is evident in de Certeau’s account of ‘Walking in the City’, where the movements of the pedestrian/flaneur through city streets embed a unique knowledge and logic of the city (de Certeau 1993). Although walking has no verbal language, and is a fleeting and evanescent activity, it nonetheless ‘mobilises other subtle, stubborn, embodied, resistant meanings’ (Pile 1996: 226).

Accounts of a typology of urban consciousness are simultaneously psychological, social and corporeal, and both individual and collective. In Metropolis and Mental Life (1903), Simmel suggests that the abundance of new sensory data in the modern city produced a fragmented and detached subjectivity in which individual identity was in danger of becoming destabilised. Simmel ascribes a blasé attitude to the urban dweller, an attitude adopted in a defence against the assault and rapidity of stimuli, which

22 prompted an incapacity to react to new sensations ‘with appropriate energy’ (1903: 413). This feature also cultivated a sense of psychological reserve and indifference, due in part to ‘continuous contacts with the myriad of people encountered’ (1903: 413).

The danger of psychologically ‘losing oneself’ in the city was a recurrent theme in writing about the nineteenth century city. The figure of the flaneur1 became emblematic of the citizen enchanted by the world of appearances, people and commodities, yet ignoring the bourgeois values and power grids etched into the city (Buck Morss 1986). The disengaged urban citizen in extremis is a common trope in representations of urban dystopias. Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis (1927) depicted the city’s inhabitants as dehumanised automatons manipulated by sinister totalitarian forces, and was a response to the rise of Fascism in Europe. Although dystopian representations of the city are enduring, they do not dominate in contemporary popular culture, a point pursued in Chapter 3.

Similar critiques of contemporary city life as detrimental to the development of a socially and politically engaged subject are offered by Jameson (1991) and Harvey (1990). For these writers, it is late­phase capitalism, technological development and a compression of time and space in the postmodern era that have contributed to cities which are hyper­consumption and image based. Cities are representational spaces laden with a semiotics of excess. Amongst the ubiquity of visual images and style, the urban subject is in danger of becoming too fragmented, self­absorbed and depoliticised. Such urban conditions, for Jameson and Harvey, create significant barriers to meaningful participation in the public realm and discourage active forms of citizenship. Echoing Simmel, Jameson, in his oft­cited article on getting lost in the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, emphasises the potential for disorientation and ultimately the loss of self. Raban (1974) is alert to similar dangers because, for him, the city is a uniquely imaginative space where the boundaries between fact and the imagination are easily eroded. This is both a source of freedom and a danger in which an environment that encourages performance and identity re­creation can mean that

23 the self is simply ‘collapsed into its manner of presentation’ (cited in Patton 1995: 117):

To the extent that the inhabitant of the (post)modern city is no longer a subject apart from his or her performances, the border between self and city has become fluid … a decentred subject which can neither fully identify with nor fully dissociate from the signs of the city. (Patton 1995: 118)

However, while this thesis acknowledges urban life’s potential for disengagement and anomie as outlined in critiques of the city, one of its central assertions is that its recast spaces — particularly in Brisbane, with its limited tradition of urbanism — offers increased opportunities for forms of identification and place attachment. Much of this is to do with the growth in urban amenity, which supports an expansion of social networks and sociability. Moreover, the study asserts that some of the new public and semi­public spaces in Brisbane have the potential to provide the negotiation of an ethics of civility. This point is pursued in Chapters 4 and 6, which map changes to the city’s infrastructure and investigate people’s experience of urban change.

A number of writers, including Simmel (1903), have asserted that the fragility of identity in the city results in a preoccupation with style, fashion and forms of distinction — that is, to be different. The assertion of self through forms of distinction is an act of self­preservation, produced by the necessity to declare one’s uniqueness. In Simmel’s words, the urban dweller does this ‘in order to preserve his most personal core. He has to exaggerate this most personal element in order to remain audible even to himself.’ (1903: 413)

Contemporary scholars argue that practices of distinction and lifestyles are related to identity and social location (Lury 1996; Chaney 1996; Giddens 1991; Bourdieu 1984). Giddens (1991) has mapped the ways in which modernity has produced new mechanisms of self­identity, arguing that the notions of lifestyle assume significance in a society less bound by tradition and kinship ties (1991: 5). Urbanisation is crucial to

24 this phenomenon in which new cultural forms and affiliations cut across and elaborate class structure and create new forms of social differentiation.

The term ‘lifestyle’ has become synonymous with urban­based forms of consumption offered by cafés, restaurants, entertainment and cultural venues, and other spaces of the city. Fashions and styles in clothing, music, housing, interior decor and other consumer items are signals of personal and collective affiliations, differentiation and distinction. Thus the ways in which people engage with the cultural order of their environment become invested with meaning and are evident in the study’s survey data from the Brisbane case study area. The discourse of lifestyle was often cited in resident surveys as a significant drawcard for inner­city living. This thesis argues throughout that critiques of the growth in urban­based bourgeois consumption practices, such as cafe culture, overlook other important social and civil functions performed by these practices and sites.

IDENTITY AND IMAGINATION

From the outset, this thesis asserts the importance of the imagination in subjectivity and in our experience of the city. The imaginary city is a potent factor in our experience of it, influencing the way in which cities are formed and developed and shaping how we live in them. The city of imagination operates subjectively but is also informed by, and produces, a collective repertoire of responses to metropolitan life: a projection of fantasies, desires and fears writ large across the cinema or television screen, articulated in the novel, magazine, news report or local town plan. In this context, cities are as much constituted of buildings and the material infrastructure as of representations and narratives of the metropolis.

Pile (1996) has noted how our mental map of the city is constituted of representational space in which imagery and symbolism add important dimensions to the experience of the city. This ‘psychodynamics’ of place is a dynamic process, changing with time and with subjective, perceptual and environmental changes. Lefebvre (1974) identifies the

25 ways in which mental life is projected outwards on to the city (Donald 1999: 13). For Lefebvre, space is conceived as well as perceived. Lefebvre draws attention to the distinction between the two types of representational space. There is the representational space of the city, which is mapped and controlled by ‘planners, scientists and a certain type of artist with a scientific bent’ (1974: 38). And there is the representational space in which we live, a more theorised development of Raban’s ‘soft city’, an inherently imaginative space. Here, discourses and representations can play a crucial role both in experience and in the forms of identification people make. Giddens suggests that a mediated experience is critical to self­identity:

Mediated experience, since the first experience of writing, has long influenced both self­identity and the basic organization of social relations. With the development of mass communication, the interpenetration of self­development and social systems, become ever more pronounced. (1991: 56)

In its examination of representations of the contemporary city, this thesis draws particular attention to the ways in which living with strangers is depicted and understood. One of the central questions of the thesis relates to Brisbane’s status as an emerging city, with its limited urban narratives. How is Brisbane being rearticulated as a city? What might discourses of the city mean for inhabitants of Brisbane? Through the images and stories of the city, its complexity and chaos is rendered into coherence and meaning. Narratives of the metropolis draw upon contemporary concerns and values of urban life, and also elaborate preoccupations about the collective and questions about how to live together.

The representational city is frequently the place for exploration of personal identity, a trope which emphasises the centrality of place in subjectivity. Woody Allen’s New York­based stories, the setting for a self­obsessive reflections and an imbroglio of characters, are almost a cliché of New York as the place for a type of therapeutically sanctioned narcissism specific to that city. The city as a site critical to personal identity can be traced in many New York­based films, and is identified by Mark Shiel (2003) when he compares Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver with Woody Allen’s Annie

26 Hall. Shiel suggests that Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle’s psychotic relationship with the city is more intensely dysfunctional, but not dissimilar to the ways in which Annie Hall’s Alvy Singer’s mildly neurotic one is essential to his identity For Shiel, both films share a belief in New York as:

… a deep well of authentic personal experience, a source of self, of tangible subjectivity, and of intense emotion, action and human interaction … (2003: 168).

In a more banal interpretation of this theme, PJ Hogan’s film Muriel’s Wedding presents Sydney as the locus for self­realisation. Muriel, of the film’s title, escapes the stiflingly parochial Porpoise Spit to move to the bright lights of Sydney, where she transforms from an ugly duckling to a swan: her ‘real’ self emerges. In a more complex way, in Ana Kokinos’s film Head On, Melbourne is central to the exploration of Greek homosexual identity through the character of Ari. 2

Representations of the dystopian city have been relatively scarce in recent years. More commonly, the postmodern city appears as a socially connected and vital place typically inhabited by youthful people who share similar values and lifestyles. It is more hospitable to women, too. As a marker of a seismic change in visions of the urban, the popular television series Sex and the City feminises city space. Here, the city is a playground for the fulfilment of feminine sexual desire and fantasy, a consumer paradise, a cornucopia of men and designer clothes. Contemporary discourses of the city as a site of pleasure highlight its value as a social space in which difference and diversity offer opportunity and moments of epiphany. In what ways might the imaginary Brisbane present itself as it emerges into urbanism?

Brisbane’s regional city status has meant that the city has predominantly been captured in literature rather than film. There are very few images of Brisbane in film and television; rather, the physicality of its subtropical climate, fecund vegetation and vernacular architecture has been captured in literature. Moreover, a legacy of anti­ urbanism has contributed to a limited sense of metropolitan life. In many ways,

27 Brisbane has been defined by its distinct lack of urban qualities. It is not a city in which one has found oneself amongst strangers. In Susan Johnson’s Brisbane­based novel, Messages from Chaos, Brisbane ‘gave you little choice about the people you wanted to see: it was inevitable you’d run into them somewhere. This group intersected with that group … they all intersected at some point.’ (1985: 25)

As Brisbane grows in size and complexity, the ways in which Brisbane is reimagined provide glimpses into the psychic evolution of the city and its inhabitants, the ways the drives of desire and fear are kept in check. For a city in which urbanism is nascent, representations may also function as models of urbanity.

SEXUALITY AND GENDER

In psychoanalytic theory, Freud articulates the ways in which sexuality is pivotal in the formation of identity. Sexuality is not a key concern of this study; however, because of its importance to psychoanalysis and subjectivity, it requires some ‘fitting in’ to the spaces of the city. Furthermore, the relationship between sexuality and the city is relevant to the study’s assertion that the city has become a more feminised place than it was historically, and this has a significant impact on the lived experience of the city for women. This relationship between sexuality and city can be understood in two distinct ways that are relevant to this study.

First, following on from Foucault’s project of discipline and sexuality, a number of writers have demonstrated the ways in which regulatory regimes are etched into public spaces and prescribe particular kinds of sexual or moral conduct. Most notably identified in the modern city (Mort 1999; Walkowitz 1992; Wilson 1991), these analyses have been pioneered from feminist and gay perspectives, and provide an insight into the subtle but potent forces of hetero­normative hegemonic control in city space.

Second — and in some ways this is a contrast to the first point — other writers suggest that it is the unique conditions and experience of urbanity itself that charge urban life

28 with a covert eroticism and are part of the appeal of city life (Dear 2000; Donald 1999; Pile 1996; Young 1990). This latter view draws upon psychoanalytic concepts of voyeurism, desire, pleasure and repression, and the ways in which they are mobilised in the spaces of the city. Furthermore, the intrinsic theatricality of city space suggests performativity may constitute a sexualised dimension.

Historical research is useful for illuminating the sexed nature of the city. Cultural geographers and historians have mapped the ways in which identity, specifically sexual and moral identities, are formed — and transformed — through the regulation, occupation and experience of urban space (Mort 2000; Walkowitz 1992; Wilson 1991). These writers draw attention to the ways in which relations of power and resistance operate across city space, both materially and through discourse. Judith Walkowitz (1992) and Elizabeth Wilson (1991), in their studies of women in the nineteenth century city, show how regulatory regimes of sexual and moral conduct were inscribed into city streets through literary, popular and medical discourses. Women’s sexuality became a public preoccupation and a ‘problem’ in the recast spaces of the nineteenth century city as women emerged from their containment in the private domestic sphere into the public domain (Wilson 1991: 15). Moral discourses framed the general disquiet over the shifting and unstable boundaries between gender and class in the city of modernity, highlighting the ways in which spatial relations of sexuality were constitutive of metropolitan modernity.

Similarly, Anthony Vidler (1993) has shown how, in the new medical discourse of psychopathology, the nineteenth century city became linked with newly discovered psychological diseases such as hysteria, agoraphobia and claustrophobia, which Vidler argues were invariably related to female subjectivity (Vidler 1993: 34). The public spaces of the city, with its rapid developments, population increase and overcrowding where physical disease was prevalent, were regarded as the locus of psychological diseases as well. The city was threatening not only to woman’s virtue, but worse still, to her mental stability:

29 In this space, all those considered prone to neurasthenic disease — the ‘weak’, the ‘enervated’, the ‘over­ stimulated’ … were bound to succumb to mental collapse … these disorders were thought of as fundamentally female in character. (Vidler 1993: 34)

Woman’s apparent vulnerability also made her more susceptible to the consumerism which was developing in the nineteenth century. Gillian Swanson (1995) and Gail Reekie (1993) have elaborated the ways in which the consumer spaces of the city, largely the domain and activity of women, were linked to a pathologised female subject whose instability and impulsivity propelled her to seek satisfaction in shopping. Susceptibility to passion and temptation were traits commonly associated with women. Such feminine instabilities prevented women ‘from gaining a mastery of rational forms of self­discipline and justice’, civil conduct espoused by eighteenth century liberal contract theory and required for effective citizenship (Swanson 1995: 81). This view was evident in public discourse, and in trade literature such as The Draper and the Warehouseman, female customers are described as ‘attracted to the city by their highly strung temperaments, fits of depression and craving for constant change’ (Reekie 1993: 15).

The intersection between female subjectivity, sexuality and the city was no more pronounced than in the rhetoric that circulated around the spectre of the prostitute. It was the prostitute who featured most frequently in discussions of modern city life. She became emblematic of everything that was disordered, passionate and irrational about women (Walkowitz 1992; Wilson 1991). The prostitute was the public symbol of female vice, as Wilson notes:

Unnerved at the sight of a new, rough, urban female proletariat thronging the streets, the nineteenth century developed an obsession with prostitution, a veritable paranoia, which viewed prostitution as the greatest scourge of the age, ‘the great social evil’ … (1991: 150)

Wilson asserts that the disquiet over prostitution and women in public spaces was ultimately about a ‘wider and less specified fear, the fear that arose at the sight of women crowding through the streets of the new great cities, women who were not properly in

30 patriarchal control’ (1991: 150). The city streets were the site in which an anxiety about threats to traditional gender roles, along with a blurring of class boundaries, were amplified and played out discursively.

The disjuncture between the regulation and discourse of social and sexual relations in the city, and the ways in which such relations actually operate ‘on the ground’, has been the project of some scholars. Foucault’s concept of ‘heterotopias’ (1967) has been influential for analyses of resistance to dominant use of spaces, and for a capacity to understand space as a site for the potential for social change. Although Foucault characterises heterotopias as spaces out of the ordinary — such as prisons, festivals, hospitals or brothels — his idea of ‘other spaces’ has been more broadly interpreted and applied as spaces where multiplicity and difference are enacted. Heterotopias are spaces that are ‘simultaneously home to conflicting performances’ (Mitchell, cited in Muller 2004: 25) and asserted in validating marginalised identities and the spaces in which they operate. Heterotopias have informed work on sites of resistance for groups marginalised by gender, sexuality, race or other types of exclusions (Foucault 1986).

In mapping out sexual identities in the twentieth century city, George Chauncy (1995), in his history of gay male culture in New York, reveals the porosity with which gay identities move fluidly among and across different ethnic and class divisions in the city. Focusing on the streets, private apartments, bathhouses and bars of various New York precincts, Chauncy charts the social networks of ‘homosociability’. Such studies point to the ways in which sexuality features in the competing cultures of the city, through the divisions of differential access to use of space (Mort 2000: 310). As a core component of identity, sexuality can be a defining feature of the kinds of lifestyle affiliations forged in the city.

The notion of heterotopias applied to city spaces in which ‘disordered’ sexuality is evident has particular relevance for the case study area of Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley. The Valley has been the main site of difference in Brisbane for many decades, as the locus of prostitution and gay male activity. Its association with disordered sexuality and

31 with alleged criminal activity made it a no­go zone for the city’s mainstream public for many years. Discursively, the Valley embodied everything that was wrong with urbanism. Its legacy remains despite gentrification, and it has now become very popular as a residential and entertainment precinct. This thesis asks how residents negotiate difference in this context.

My second point in this section is that there is an eroticism to the lived experience of the city. This eroticism underscores how cities are places where we live in close proximity to strangers. It is this characteristic that gives the city its erotic potential and expression. City streets are charged with a capacity for ambiguity, theatricality and the fleeting and chance encounter. Knopp describes this aspect of the city as:

a world of strangers, a particular life space with a logic and sexuality of its own. The city’s sexuality is described as an eroticisation of many of the characteristic experiences of modern urban life: anonymity, voyeurism, exhibitionism, consumption, authority (and challenges to it), tactility, motion danger, power, navigation and restlessness. (1995: 151)

Drawing upon psychoanalysis, Knopp argues that the concept of spectatorship is useful for understanding the city’s erotic potential, in which the city appears as a performance site. Similarly, the body as visual spectacle may be sexualised through dress, personal adornment, gestures and display. Aficionados of the city’s thriving sexual cultures rely on the adorned and marked body to recognise members of their tribes (Mort 2000: 313). Moreover, the way the body moves through the city expresses the sexual component of subjectivity, and it cannot be separated from the spaces of the city. Donald points to this phenomenon, ‘the experience of ourselves as sexual beings, supposedly our most intimate sense of ourselves, both inflects and absorbs the way we walk the streets’ (1999: 51).

It is, I suggest, the erotic component of city life that causes some writers to lapse into a utopian romanticism that renders the metropolis a storehouse of possibilities and pleasures. This view may at times appear to be wilfully oblivious to relations of power in which social performance is circumscribed (Pile 1996: 236), and the

32 highly differentiated ways in which people experience the city and eroticism. Informing our own experience are myriad conflicting sexual narratives of the city, which impact on the ways in which we negotiate and engage with the city. For example, Jack the Ripper type narratives of the malevolent male stranger are cautionary tales for women in the city (Walkowitz 1992), even though women are more likely to be attacked in the spaces of their own homes than in city streets. By contrast, contemporary popular culture frequently depicts the city as a romantic and sexual playground for women as well as men.

As a constituent of subjectivity, and therefore difference, sexuality can be critical to understanding the different ways in which people experience the city. Moreover, emotional states generated by fear of sexual assault can impact on the ways in which people use and engage with the city, limiting people’s usage of particular areas, or their use at particular times of the day or night. Political and social action carried out by grass roots organisations has legitimised the safety concerns of groups such as women and gay men. Vigilante strategies to protect gay men against homophobic intimidation on the streets and rallies organised by women’s groups such as ‘Reclaim the Night’ marches are approaches that have helped produce a greater awareness of the needs of different citizens. Policy initiatives such as better­lit streets and the use of CCT cameras in public places are responses to some citizens’ fears about their personal and sexual safety. Sexuality is now strongly featured as an integral part of contemporary urban lifestyles (Mort 2000: 313), existing in a tension between dominant and diverse ethnicities and value systems.

AFFECT AND THE CITY

Affect, or emotion, is another core constituent of subjectivity, and is explored in this study in relation to residents’ experience of their changing neighbourhoods. The thesis argues for the importance of emotion to the types of identification people make with place; this is an area which has received little attention in experiential accounts of everyday life.

33 Chapter 2 explores psychoanalytic explanations of emotion which account for the generation of feeling by the processes of the unconscious in relay with the external world. The external world of the city offers multiple sources for the mobilisation of affect: as a representational space, as social space and as imaginative space. A recent field of interest to sociology and cultural studies, affect is of interest in the way it shapes and determines behaviour and adds ‘texture’ to everyday life (Sedgwick 2003). The thesis supports Thrift’s (2004) assertion that emotion is the heart of social life, and that the city is a ‘maelstrom of affect’ which deserves greater attention than it has hitherto received (2004: 55).

Although the role of emotion in the environment — but not specifically the city — has been studied across several disciplines from environmental psychology to the social sciences, there has been little qualitative research in the area. Most psychological research has measured the affective responses to environments, or their affective meaning, using photographs as stimuli and affect checklists to record response (Smith 1992: 34). By contrast, this thesis uses an interpretive approach to understand the ways in which affect is implicated in a sense of attachment to place and of its pragmatic consequences in urban areas of increasing density.

Urban sociologists have not entirely ignored the emotional life of the city. Simmel (1903), and later Sennett (1994) in Flesh and Stone, offered accounts of emotion and its relationship with the city, as previously discussed. Kevin Lynch (1976) acknowledged the contribution emotion makes to understanding urban social behaviour, but he did not pursue the connection beyond a recognition of its relevance:

Feelings and ideas are not only troublesome intervening variables that must be passed through in order to understand visible behaviour … Feelings and ideas, and the actions and sensations that are part of them, are what it is like to be alive. (cited in Pile 1996: 40)

Thus far, however, as Thrift suggests, affect and the city have been the domain of novelists and filmmakers (2004: 55). I suspect that part of the neglect of affect in urban

34 cultural and social theory is because of its ontological slipperiness, and a lack of vocabulary and methodology to adequately investigate its role in city life. It is easier to talk about emotion and urban life when incidents such as terrorist attacks and the death of Princess Diana produce public demonstrations of cultural trauma. Yet emotional consequences are felt everywhere — in neighbourhood disputes, in complaints to local councils, at celebratory festivals and at picnics in the park. But how do we measure or even theories emotion in the social life of people?

In Chapter 2, the study draws upon Maffesoli’s (1997) assertion that emotion and feeling are the basis of new social formations he refers to as tribes, which are typically urban­based. In these social groupings, people are connected by shared affinities or lifestyles and emotion is the central cohesive element. Maffesoli suggests that ‘we are witnessing the tendency for a rationalised “social” to be replaced by an empathetic “sociality”, which is expressed by a succession of ambiences, feelings and emotion’ (1996: 11). Maffesoli’s analysis is reinforced by Watters’ ethnographic study, Urban Tribes: Are Friends the New Family? (2004), which details the ways members of the author’s ‘30­something’ generation form intricate and intimate friendship groups in an urban milieu. Watters is a journalist, but his book unwittingly provides an account of the lived experience of Maffesoli’s theory. Like Maffesoli’s tribes, Watter’s tribes intersect and cohere, they live and work together in various combinations, perform regular rituals together and provide emotional support. Both writers identify emotion as central to the stability of urban tribes.

Affect is also generated by the city’s sentient characteristics. The urban experience is an embodied, sensate one — we live cheek by jowl with strangers, with the myriad of sights, smells, noises and textures of the city. For Allom and Anderson (2004), encounters with the diverse range of stimuli in the city can activate:

very culturally specific, intimate, bodily responses and different states of sentient arousal, and in turn feed into emotional experiences as diverse as pleasure and joy, fear, revulsion, and disgust (2004: 90).

35 The affective, aesthetic, embodied qualities of experience are inseparable from a complete understanding of the city and what it means to live in the city. This corporeal, sensate dimension to city life has implications for this study. In Brisbane, a difference in styles of living is a distinctive feature of the city’s emerging urbanism. For instance, one of the significant features of Brisbane as a sub­tropical city is that, even in the inner city, one can live in close proximity to the elements and the city’s fecund environment. The intense heat and humidity of the long summer months and the unique features of the traditional timber and tin Queensland house with its verandahs, which enable an ‘inside/outside’ living experience, is described by many literary writers as a particularly sensual, embodied way of inhabiting the city. The strong corporeal quality of this way of living produces a range of embodied and psychological states: inertia, fatigue, lethargy and, for some, joy, pleasure and abandonment. What author John Birmingham observes as ‘a hot, close and sticky sense of immediately being in the world’ (2002: 7) still exists, but is also rapidly being replaced by more insulated apartment­style living, protected from the heat by air­conditioning and removed from the visceral intensity of a sub­ tropical garden.

Given the transforming nature of city spaces at the beginning of the twenty­first century, the significance of the subjective and social experience of the city has particular resonance. Citizens live in a tension between old and new neighbourhoods, old and new ways of living and being together. Strong affective responses are often registered in such an environment. For Brisbane, the transformation is even more profound. The city’s vastly increased public spaces and population offer quite distinct ways of experiencing the city from those that were possible prior to urban consolidation in the 1990s. How are people experiencing this shift?

THE SOCIAL: THE COLLECTIVE AND THE CITY

The concept of community is relevant to this thesis for two reasons. First, this study is interested in the way community functions imaginatively and symbolically and is pivotal

36 in the formation of subjectivity, in lifestyle practices and affiliations. Furthermore, representations of community as articulated in urban planning documents, marketing and popular culture are of particular interest for their symbolic and meaning­making associations.

Second, the notion of community featured strongly in the participants’ responses to the experience of city life in Brisbane, to their attachment to place and the meanings associated with the term. For many respondents, community is expressed as a vital experience of the city.

Explanations of community vary, and no unified definition exists (Byrne 2001). However, despite its uncertain ontology, the crucial role that community plays in symbolically constructing people’s sense of belonging is widely acknowledged (Cohen 1982; Anderson 1983, Crow and Allen 1994). It is because of its symbolic value that the notion of community is a repository of meaning and a referent to people’s identity, which will vary among different people (Blokland 2003; Cohen 1985). Anderson’s study of nationalism in his book Imagined Communities (1983) emphasises the ways in which the sense or image of communion can largely be an imagined one. Given its imaginative function and its application to social relations, for Williamson community embraces:

not just the idea of locality or social networks of particular kinds: it refers to the rich mosaic of subjective meanings which people attach to the place itself and to the social relations of which they are a part. (in Byrne 2004: 69)

It is this aspect of community that is of particular interest to the study — the ways in which people perceive and imagine their communities and the circulation of ideas of community in discourse. Actual communities of people may be united by shared lifestyles, tastes and values in which external attributes may serve as indices of affiliation. Style expressed through fashion, adornment, music tastes, hobbies, places frequented and social performance may not necessarily restrict us to one group, but these things nonetheless register as markers of broadly based social formations. Community

37 belonging requires competencies — a negotiation of the codes and habits of the particular groups to which one belongs and amongst which one moves.

Another way of viewing community in the contemporary city is through Maffesoli’s previously mentioned concept of tribes. The re­formation of communities in the city is indicative of a growth in new forms of social groupings, and signals a period of intense sociability, a central feature in our experience of everyday life. The strength of the tribes is simply the power of basic sociality, the sustenance encountered from ‘being together’ (Maffesoli 1996: 81). Indeed, sociological studies on kinship and friendship over the last two decades point to the historically high levels of social interaction (in Thrift 2000: 243, citing the work of Pahl 1995; Finch and Mason 1989).

This reframing of the collective is marked by membership of several groups, sometimes overlapping, sometimes singular, in which the role one plays becomes the source of ‘identification’. Thus, while tribes are porous and fluid, social status is not fixed. And, in a world in which people are increasingly mobile and less tethered to family, where work practices are transformed largely through technology, where there are new rules relating to sexuality and friendship, new lifestyles are emerging — largely in the spaces of the city.

Indeed, one of the central assertions of this thesis is that the postmodern city provides amenities which accommodate and encourage the growth in forms of differentiated sociability. A city’s cafes, restaurants and bars are the meeting places where sociability is expressed through ‘the exchange of feelings, conversation’ (Maffesoli 1996: 13). The growth in urban infrastructure of the past decade has witnessed an explosion in the provision of amenities and, although these amenities are consumer spaces, their other central use is as places for people to meet. The role that meeting places such as cafes perform, both for an experience of the city and as a site for the acquisition of urban competencies, is particularly relevant for the emerging metropolis of Brisbane, and is a topic pursued in Chapter 4.

38 Against the assertion of community and sociability is the porosity of contemporary urban life, which mitigates against the type of cohesion and stability that the term ‘community’ implies, as Byrne observes:

Community has always implied spatial stability and a high degree of spatial closure, of people living in a spatially delimited social system … they do not have external contacts to a significant degree and will stay where they are. The globalised world is the antithesis of this … Global cities … operate against the maintenance of stability of social relations over time … (2004: 70)

Mobile, diverse and growing urban populations mean we live in increasingly fragmented neighbourhoods and cities. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that community is often evoked as one of the most desirable aspects of urban life, a point corroborated by residents surveyed in the case study area of Brisbane.

Bauman observes that a moral or ethical dimension is implicit in nostalgic constructions of community:

‘Community’ is these days the last relic of the old time utopias of the good society; it stands for whatever has been left of the dreams of a better life shared with better neighbours all following better rules of cohabitation. (2000: 92, my emphasis)

Marketing and media representations of inner city living rework this utopian concept of community. In television programs such as America’s Friends and Australia’s The Secret Life of Us, groups of friends share lifestyles and intimacies in inner­city neighbourhoods. The working­class community of old inner­city neighbourhoods has been replaced by a series of communities based around lifestyle practices and friendship networks typical to the 20­ to 30­something age group. These groups are delaying marriage and long­term partnerships, but are connected by a web of friendships, work partnerships, love affairs and shared homes (Watters 2004: 24). In media depictions, the new communities are primarily friendship groups, their cohesiveness forged by a shared rejection of traditional family lifestyles. In television programs such as The Secret Life of Us, Friends and

39 Seinfeld, marriage and children are delayed while friendship networks provide social and emotional support through shared lives and living in close proximity to one another in inner­city neighbourhoods.

Indeed, while Australian outer suburbs are still the centre of family living, inner­city demographic patterns reflect a significant shift away from traditional family groupings to the kinds of social relationships just observed. For instance, in Sydney’s CBD, 45 per cent of households are single­person households, with its southern inner city area occupying 28 per cent of single­person households (Salt 2006: 37). In Brisbane, the statistics paint a similar picture, with 40 per cent of all households in the inner city occupied by single persons, a trend which is on the increase (2001, Brisbane City Council, ABS). As the inner city remains the locus for a changing social fabric, notions of community — both real and imagined — continue to be rearticulated in public policy, in popular culture and in the lives and imaginations of urban citizens.

CONCLUSION

This chapter has outlined the ways in which the three main integrative themes of the study — difference, identity and the social — are implicated in the lived experience of the city. Subsequent chapters apply these themes to contemporary texts of the city and to qualitative data collected in the case study are of Brisbane’s inner city. These themes are also evident in interview participants’ accounts of neighbourhood change in the documentary ‘Everyone has Their Own New Farm’: Narratives of Neighbourhood Change.

I have also drawn attention to the ways in which the same themes and concerns were manifest in the modern city. The modern and postmodern city, at particular stages of their evolution, share similar characteristics of rapid urban change. Concerns about the subject in the city — particularly a rapidly changing one — have maintained some of the same tropes across both periods of urban development: the fragility of self, over­ cultivation of personal style and the potential for anomie.

40 This historical review also reveals the significant shifts that have occurred in the postmodern city for women and other marginal groups. With the rise in the proportion of women in the workforce, and their increased participation in public life since the 1970s, the contemporary city’s public and semi­public space have become more hospitable to women. Large numbers of women patronise the city’s new and increased urban amenities, its cafes, cinemas and other entertainment venues. This has implications for the ways in which the city is both used and experienced.

Brisbane is poised at an interesting stage in its development, where its new public and semi­public spaces and rapid population growth provide greater opportunity for place attachment and encountering the Other. Prior to the mid­1990s, Brisbane had little of the infrastructure typical of larger cities, and the majority of people living in the inner city lived in houses with reasonably large gardens. Cultural amenities were scarce. But urban regeneration over a twelve­year period has changed all that, making some inner­city areas almost unrecognisable from their former iterations. The rapid development of apartment buildings across the inner city, a profusion of cafes and restaurants, and an increase in public parklands and boardwalks along the river have meant that many people inhabit the city in quite different ways. Increased urban density and amenity in inner­city areas make accessible the kinds of sociability Maffesoli (1996) and Watters (2004) have observed as a development of this contemporary period. Chapter 6 examines data which question how Brisbane’s inhabitants have responded to the transformation of their neighbourhood and city, including the negotiation of difference. Chapter 4 examines discourse of the city around the themes of difference, identity and sociability. In what ways are its inhabitants and its stories being shaped by change and in turn shaping the city? In what ways might the city’s non­urban past rupture and dislocate the spaces of the postmodern city?

Before attention is turned to the case study site of Brisbane, the next chapter further elaborates the complexity of our relationship to the city using psychoanalytic and cultural theories.

41 NOTES

1 The flaneur was a man characterised by his detachment and role as observer of developments in the nineteenth century city. He was enchanted by the city’s spectacles, distractions and developments. The term was first used by poet Charles Baudelaire and was later adopted by Walter Benjamin, who proposed that the flaneur was produced by modernity, an uninvolved bourgeois figure who was nonetheless highly perceptive. The term has been important in the academy for its relationship with the period of modernity as producing varied ontologies of being.

2 Kokinos’s film was an adaptation of the novel Loaded by Christos Tsloikas.

42 CHAPTER 2 ______THE TIES THAT BIND: CONSTRUCTING MEANING THROUGH IMAGINATION AND EMOTION

The city as a form is uniquely prone to erode that boundary between the province of the imagination and the province of fact. (Raban 1974: 70)

This chapter introduces the conceptual models used to explore the relationship between individuals, the social and place within the context of the contemporary city. Briefly, these are theories whose intersections offer fruitful insights into subjectivity and culture, and accounts are drawn from a combination of psychoanalysis, semiotics and theories of affect.

One of the key models used consists of psychoanalytic accounts of subjectivity, which I suggest are critical to understanding the ways in which the individual both constitutes, and is constituted by, their environment (Pile, 1996). The centrality of the unconscious in psychoanalysis, and its relationship with the external world, offer an account of meaning­ making and experience for individual and collective organisation and behaviour that can usefully be applied to city life. The use of psychoanalysis and theories of affect highlights the affect­laden motivation of human action, an important consideration in the civil life of the city. In this framework, the study argues for the ways in which the imagination is engaged in a relationship between self and city, and informs the experience of city life. Critical to this project is the recognition that subjectivity operates within a specific cultural and historical framework. In this regard, it is the city of imagination, constituted through representation and discourse and harnessing psychoanalytic tropes, which informs the experience of urban life. The imagined city is also a factor in our experience of it.

43 Exploring the complexity of the relationship between self and city demands a multi­ perspective approach, and what follows is a synthesis of three key theoretical perspectives. In combination, psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity (Chodorow 2004; Pile 1996; Freud 1921), semiotic and postmodern approaches to the social and cultural world (Jameson 1991; Soja 1989; Foucault 1969) and theories of affect and embodiment and their significance to the experience of everyday life (Milton 2005; Thrift 2004; Sedgwick 2003; Maffesoli 1996) usefully provide explanations of the subject and culture. It is at their overlaps and points of intersection that these approaches can usefully chart the theoretical terrain of the study.

The conceptual frameworks discussed in this chapter are applied in subsequent chapters to examine both the mediated and lived experience of the city. Thus Chapter 3 investigates the notion of the imaginary city through texts of the city, while Chapter 6 explores the experiential aspect of urbanism through participants’ responses to urban change in the case study area.

THE IMAGINARY CITY: CITY AS TEXT

The role of the imagination and imaginative representations is a common theme in writing about contemporary metropolitan life. How we imagine and perceive the metropolis is a potent factor in our experience of it (Watson 2000; Donald 1999; Jameson 1990; Davis 1987). The complexity and chaos of the city, part of which is living in close proximity to strangers, is rendered into coherence and meaning through the stories and images of literature, film and popular culture. Working in a cycle of production and consumption, the imaginary city draws upon a collective repertoire of responses to urban life, a projection of desires, fantasies and fears writ large across the cinema or television screen, the novel and the local town plan. The city, as Kevin Robins observes, ‘can be seen … in terms of a kind of psycho­geography: it is the scene of our collective emotional life’ (1996: 130).

However, the relationship between imagination and representation, and imagination and experience, is frequently taken for granted in analyses of the city, with little explanation of

44 the processes by which we engage imaginatively with the city and city text — and, moreover, what might be at stake. It is something that requires greater elaboration here, because the mobilisation of the imagination, fantasy and subjective experience in the spaces of the city is one of the key modes of engagement on which this study rests. How might an imaginative engagement with place occur, and what does it mean for people living in cities? There are two key concepts at stake here. The first is that our cultural world is symbolically constituted through the signs and language of culture; here, the city is constructed in discourse and representations, through the texts of popular culture, novels, urban and social plans and so forth. Following Barthes (1957) and Hall (1972), value systems, which may not be readily apparent, are inherent in discourse and representations, and it is this feature that highlights their significance in the ways we make sense of the world.

Second, we engage with the city through the subjective, intrapsychic process of the unconscious, which are to some extent grounded in the material and spatial landscape. In this schema, our conscious and unconscious fantasies are also constitutive of the city itself (Donald 1999; Pile 1996). Both are imaginative modalities — subjective and representational — and work in a relay of sorts, producing and reproducing the various tropes of the city. I will consider each proposition in turn, addressing their overlaps and intersections: first by identifying the mode of representation which operates in a semiotic framework, and second through the application of psychoanalytic concepts to the environment. Both approaches have been amply elaborated in writing about culture, so I will provide only a brief overview of the key tenets.

SEMIOTICS AND CULTURAL ANALYSIS

Semiotic and poststructuralist analysis offers an explanation of meaning­making through interpretation of the signs of culture, based upon Peirce and Saussure’s model of language and other cultural symbols (Fiske 1982). A building, a streetscape, a film or a complex novel constitutes a plethora of signs from which meaning is made and discourse produced. Central to semiology is the cultural and historical specificity of language and signs, and

45 therefore of representations — in this context, representations are ideologically charged and culturally contingent. One of the major strengths of semiotic analysis is that it makes visible the invisible, and has the capacity to reveal the values embedded in an apparently neutral object or representation. Semiotic analysis has predominantly focused on questions of race, gender and class to draw attention to the ways in which media representations of iniquitous power relations are reproduced in the social structure (see, for instance, Stuart Hall’s seminal work on race, 1972–79). The city text, then can reveal or point to cultural anxieties about urban living, about being thrust in close proximity to strangers and about the negotiation of difference.

The previous chapter referred to the commonality in representations of the city as a site that is central to explorations of personal identity. For example, dystopian accounts of the city in crime genres and some science­fiction scenarios express the alienation and anomie associated with the city. Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci­fi noir film Blade Runner is an oft­cited example of a futuristic city which was prescient in identifying the ethnic conglomerate of postmodern cities, not as evident at the time the film was made as it is today. By contrast, the texts discussed in Chapter 3 identifies several themes which focus on the contemporary city’s sociability: in which its amenities are the new meeting places for sustaining social and emotional networks. City texts not only reveal our collective desires and fears, but also point to social inclusions and exclusions — through representations or omissions of race, gender, age and so forth. Poststructuralist approaches to representations argue that values embedded in a text function hegemonically to support the interest and needs of the dominant power groups in society, typically feeding the over­arching demands of capitalism. As Lapsley (1997) observes, the discursive city is intrinsically political; it is connected to the socioeconomic reality of the city — it both reinforces and informs the way we live in the city, and the ways in which social relations operate:

The politics of the city is a matter not only of capitalism’s inequitable distribution of satisfactions and misery but also of struggles around issues of gender, ethnicity, age and religion, struggles in which images and representations informing our sense of self and reality are a crucial factor in the production and contestation of existing social practices. (Lapsley 1997: 187)

46 In this view, textual and other forms of discourse operate in a cycle of production and reproduction, in which we actively participate in the reproduction of discourse. Part of this is to do with how we both imaginatively engage with discourse, the ideas and values of the text, and how we reproduce its meanings through social practices and the practices of everyday life. In other words, if we are talking about representations, they are not simply ideologies or governing ideas embodied in discourse, they also help structure experience itself (Barcan 1999: 10). Shields emphasises the link between imagination and social practice:

representations are complex formations of material, techniques, and ideologies in which social practice is indissolubly linked to social thought and imagination. (2003: 14, emphasis added)

Despite its usefulness in exposing the often­concealed discourses of power in culture, poststructuralism’s failings to account for difference in subjectivity have been identified by a range of scholars, most notably by feminist writers such as Mary Ann Doane (1992) and Anne Kaplan (1992). Similarly, Donald (1999) alludes to its limitations when he describes our imaginative relationship with the city as an abstraction, an imagined environment which embraces, as he puts it, more than the representational city created by ‘architects, planners, builders, sociologists, novelists, filmmakers, politicians’. When he refers to the city as an abstraction, Donald is emphasising our unique, subjective interpretation of the city by making it into ‘the imaginary reality of our mental life’ (1999: 8). Thus, although he never offers a thorough explanation of how this might occur and what its consequences might be, he points to another modality which operates beyond the cultural reality offered by poststructuralism — that is, our personal narratives, histories and memories: in psychoanalytic terms, the intrapsychic process of subjectivity and identification, and their significance for experience and meaning­making. For Donald, this creative, imaginary process is neither ‘delusory nor solipsistic’ and works in a relay between the self and the social:

Imagining is neither simple reflection nor pure projection. The lesson

47 of Simmel, Park, Lefebvre and de Certeau — as well as the poets — is that imagination is always a creative but constrained interchange between subjectivities and the social … We do not just read the city, we negotiate the reality of cities by imagining the city. (1999: 19)

So, in combination, attention to the subjective, intrapsychic processes of identification can add depth to semiology’s cultural emphasis in understanding the semiotic structures of experience and meaning­making. Yet Donald’s reference to the types of philosophical explanations of identity and the city used by urban sociologists such as Simmel, Park and de Certeau are still problematic. Characterised by a transcendental and universalising approach to subjectivity, they pay scant attention to individual differences such as gender, age, ethnicity and so forth. There is no attempt to account for the ways in which different people experience the same environment in quite diverse ways. Again, feminist scholars (Wilson 1993; Rose 1993; Walkowitz 1992) have been at the forefront not only in highlighting the subjective quality of urban experience, but also in (following Lefebvre 1991) exploring the ways in which space is socially produced, inscribing grids of power across the city.

Some poststructuralist scholars looked further afield for a more comprehensive explanation of the subject’s relationship with culture, and the incorporation of psychoanalysis to semiology attempted to fill the gaps left by semiotics’ exclusive focus on the structures of language and signs. Thus Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theories of mental life and personality development were first applied within a cultural framework during the 1970s, in an attempt to reassert the individual as an active participant in culture (Hall 1980: 158). Jacques Lacan’s reworking of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of personality development proved fruitful for some feminist scholars, and for those working in the area of cinema studies (Flitterman­Lewis 1992). Lacan’s prioritising of Freud’s mirror stage of development, in which the realisation of self and difference is first encountered in the early stages of personality formation and experienced visually, bodily and symbolically, is used to account for our attraction to spectacle: ‘visual pleasure’ — particularly relevant with the growth of visual formations in culture throughout the twentieth century. This is relevant to this study for two reasons. First, in

48 the postmodern city image is paramount, and being in the city offers a diverse range of voyeuristic pleasures; it is part of the ontology of urbanism. Second, regimes of visual pleasure as experienced in the city are similar to those experienced in viewing a film (a point elaborated on in the following chapter), which is important to this study’s relationship with the film city text.

For feminist scholars, Lacan’s interpretation of the mirror stage was crucial to how the visual is implicated in knowledge. It offered insights into understanding unequal male and female power relations in culture. Explanations for voyeurism and the pleasure of ‘looking’, an activity directed by men at objectified models of feminine beauty, rested on Lacan’s development of the mirror stage (see Mulvey 1975). Similarly, it was through the ‘regimes of visual pleasure’ detailed by Lacan that Christian Metz’s work on the cinema sought to explain why cinema became such a pervasive and powerful cultural institution so rapidly. For Metz, one of the key areas of connection between the working of the psyche and cinema was the in act of spectatorship (viewing) and the pleasures this entails. Metz argued that watching film reactivates those very deep and intrapsychic workings of the conscious and unconscious mind, making connections between viewing and psychoanalytic concepts of identification and voyeurism. 1

However, in the context of representation, Lacan’s sophisticated explanation of the intrapsychic processes of development is not pursued in relation to a psychologised individual subject; rather, his ideas were taken up in a way which offers a general theory about how the imagination is mobilised through the processes of identification and the visual image. Hall’s (1980) critique of poststructuralist analyses of representations argues that, even with the application of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to the text and subject, we are still left with a universalising model of the subject who is ‘trans history and trans­ social’ (1980: 160). While poststructuralism and its attendant theories have been exemplary at exposing the ways in which reality is constructed, represented and mediated (Allon and Anderson 2004: 89), the over­arching emphasis on the subject as a product of culture and history, while indisputable, diminishes the nuances, difference and diversity of subjectivity.

49 In a similar vein, Chodorow (2004) critiques the ability of the social sciences, anthropology and, I would add, cultural studies to fully account for the individual in society, because no discipline has paid sufficient attention to individual experience and affect. Chodorow argues that the focus on the structures of society, including sociological frameworks such as ‘structure­agency’ which often have a complex and elaborated concept of culture and society, generally have an under­elaborated concept of the self, of the complexity of mental and emotional processes which are determinants of human action (2004: 25). A focus on structure does not account for the richness and variety of the individual’s inner life, and in particular the role of the unconscious in human behaviour and experience. For Chodorow, the individual’s meaning­making process is social, cultural and psychological:

People create and experience social processes and cultural meanings psychodynamically — in unconscious, affect­laden, non­linguistic, immediately felt images and fantasies that everyone creates from birth, about self, self and other, body, and the world — as well as linguistically, discursively, or in terms of cultural lexicon … All social and cultural experiences are filtered through a transferential lens. (2004: 26)

Chodorow urges us to take greater heed of people’s internal worlds. This does not, as she suggests, reduce the social to a set of individual experiences — rather, it provides ‘richness to what we see with a sociological eye’ (2004: 35).

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE SUBJECT

Groundbreaking studies in sociology, gender studies and urban studies show how psychoanalysis can be applied to culture and cultural phenomena. As an account of subjectivity that focuses on the role of the unconscious on human behaviour and action, psychoanalysis remains controversial. Perhaps one of the most contentious areas of Freud’s work is the underdevelopment at best, and misogyny at worst, in his accounts of female subjectivity, in which women were considered less capable than men of making a

50 successful contribution to a civilised society (Freud 1930: 293). Nevertheless, the reworking of Freud’s ideas by many key scholars, including feminists, over the course of the twentieth century has yielded fruitful insights into human behaviour and society, and Freud’s ideas continue to exert a profound influence on Western culture (see Elliott 1998). As such, there is no one cohesive model of psychoanalysis, and the perceived gaps, deficiencies and the incompleteness of Freud’s ideas continue to inform approaches to the topic. It is with this in mind that a model for understanding the subject in the spaces of the city is offered.

Given its usefulness as an account of individual development established in a dialectic with the social and external world, it seems surprising that few writers have explored in depth the nexus between subjectivity and the spatial environment (for exceptions, see Pile 1996; Rose 1993; Sibley 1992). Yet, as a theory of personality and mental life that draws attention to the material, embodied world we inhabit — its sanctions, repressions and civilizing necessities — the relationship appears obvious and noteworthy (e.g. see Winnicott, 1957). Moreover, the wider application of psychoanalysis to culture makes it a general model for the ways in which societies are structured and organised (Flitterman­ Lewis 1987: 204). Pile’s (1996) book The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space and Subjectivity applies key psychoanalytic concepts to account for the ways in which the urban environment is implicated in the relationship between individual development and the social world. What follows is not intended to provide either a definitive account of Freud’s ideas, if such a thing were possible, nor of Pile’s rereading of Freud. Simplifying such complex and well­developed concepts produced over a series of decades runs the risk of making them appear egregious or, worse, implausible.

Rather, I will discuss the psychoanalytic concepts most useful for this study — those which elaborate the relationship between individuals and their environment through modalities of the imagination, perception and experience. The latter is presented mainly as a summary of Pile’s take­up of psychoanalysis to account for the formation of subjectivity in relation to the spaces of the city.

51 Central to Freud’s theories is the role of the unconscious in human behaviour. As Freud argues in Civilization and its Discontents (1930), civilisation is built on the repression and renunciation of powerful drives and desires. These operate largely in the unconscious, and are mainly libidinal (sexual) or aggressive. The external world opposes these drives, partly because pleasure is transient and can only occur in contrast to tension, and partly because the satisfaction of sexuality and aggression are threats to civilised society, thus desire and pleasure are repressed (Freud 1930: 26). Moreover, the desire for pleasure threatens us with suffering — through sanctions imposed by society. For Freud, society is formed to curb its members’ drives, and is built on the denial of what we really want (1930: 26). We have three options here: to repress desire; to take refuge in fantasy; or to build a particular reality or ‘civilisation’. For Freud, the refuge in fantasy, for example, may be expressed in a culture’s stories and images, whose sub­text points to a culture’s desires and fears.

In this view, we are formed by a complex and intricate web of repressions and sanctions, whose dynamics are acted upon and played out in the unconscious. So the unconscious is not simply a receptacle of unfulfilled desires; it is actively produced in the mundane and daily process of repression. There is a constant transforming reciprocity between our conscious, rational self (ego) and our unconscious, dynamic self (id). Despite its dominance in our daily lives, the contents of our unconscious self are largely unknown to us, and reveal themselves only through the censored effects of its processes: through dreams, neuroses, symptoms, jokes and slips of the tongue (Stam et al. 1992: 126). The content of the unconscious is also evident in art — in narrative and image.

Freud develops his understanding of personality formation through his adaptation of Greek myths, the over­arching one being his explication of the Oedipus complex. Here Freud’s account of the stages the infant and child passes through to enter a socialised adult world is illustrative of the workings of the unconscious and its relationship to subjective formation. It is during the stage of infantile sexuality that the eroticism and pleasure of early childhood experiences — suckling, warmth, food and touch — are so intense and profound that they mark a lifelong desire, both symbolic and real, for a type of totalising satisfaction — of plenitude — which is impossible to achieve as we embark into childhood and

52 adulthood. The erotic component of this experience is later relegated to the unconscious because society, through the work of the ego and super­ego, prohibits us from acting out our primordial instincts. In this way, personality is constituted through ‘conflict, prohibitions, inconsistencies, broken across many boundaries and striated by many lines of meaning, identity and power’ (Pile 1996: 105). Hence, for psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, this experience — along with his elaboration of the mirror stage of development — makes lack or loss central to our experience as humans. In Lacanian terms, we are ‘born in division and marked by lack, a series of losses which define and constitute the self’ (Stam et al. 1992: 126–27). Lack also constitutes its corollary of desire — symbolically for the mother, for plenitude — and is thus registered in the realm of fantasy, of memory and of impossibility. The ways in which the circulation of desire marks the individual’s life are central to how we conceive our world imaginatively. Lacan develops this process of desire and lack in relation to language and society. He describes desire as ‘circulating endlessly from representation to representation’ (Stam et al. 1992: 128). From this perspective, desire is expressed in the process of imagining; it is both subjectively experienced and reproduced in culture, circulating the unconscious’s preoccupations through discourse, narrative and image.

When Donald says that ‘imagining is neither simple reflection nor pure projection’ (1999: 18), he is not talking about the imaginative construction of a cultural artefact; rather, he is referring to Freud’s theory of intrapsychic transference. For Freud, imagining is the psychic process of projection and introjection, which works in a complex relay and is constitutive of subjectivity. It is worth quoting Chodorow (1999) at some length here, as she ably summarises this characteristic of psychic life which is central to understanding how our imagination is mobilised and makes meaning through the process of transference:

Projection (sometimes called externalization) and introjection (sometimes called internalization), as these express unconscious fantasy, are the major processes of transference. In projection and projective identification we put feelings, beliefs or parts of our self into another, whether another person with whom we are interacting, an internal object … that has already been created through projective­introjective exchanges, or an

53 idea, symbol or any other meaning or entity. In introjection … aspects or functions of a person or object are taken into the self and come to constitute and differentiate an internal world and reshape the ego. All projection and introjection express unconscious fantasy, an affect­laden image or account, often nonlinguistic, nonverbal, and simply sensed … (1999: 15)

For Freud, transference is the intrapsychic process by which we give meaning to our lives — it is universal and not confined to the clinical situation. It is because of transference that, psychoanalysts argue, emotion is always intertwined with cognition, perception, language, interaction and the experience of our social, physical and cultural reality (Chodorow 1999: 25). Thus, through the lens of psychoanalysis, through mobilisation of the unconscious and of fantasy, desire and repression — the complex ways in which an individual’s imagination might engage with and produce their material world — greater depth is provided to existing interpretive frameworks of structural, cultural and historical formations.

PSYCHOANALYSIS, SUBJECTIVITY AND THE CITY

If psychoanalysis can provide insight into individual experience and meaning­making, in what way is the external world — the city, in this case — implicated in the process? This thesis supports Pile’s (1996) claim that, because subjectivity is formed through intrapsychic processes that work in relay with the external and cultural world, then as culture is important, so too is place. The spatial environment is intrinsic to the process of subjectivity; it is the location of the ‘contents’ from which we make meaning — that is, people, objects and signs. Pile uses Freud’s work on group psychology because it explores ‘the ties which are constituted psychically, socially and spatially’ (1996: 97). In this schema, it is Freud’s description of ‘object relationships’ and the process of identification which incorporates the Oedipus complex that are useful. The former helps because it describes the psychic mechanisms which operate between the subject and their external world, and the latter does so because it is the expression of an emotional tie with another person. Emotional ties allied to the unconscious’s mechanism of repression are initially

54 made with the father and mother, and they provide a continuing template that the unconscious reworks throughout an individual’s life.

Five key concepts are used to elaborate the process of identification: identification, incorporation, idealisation, introjection and internalisation — each marking a different mode through which individuals take on characteristics of their chosen ideal (Pile 1997: 104). The process marked by each modality involves a relay between the external world and the psyche, in which ‘objects’ from the external world may either be internalised, idealised or assimilated. For example, in identification the ‘subject assimilates an aspect of the object and this transforms the subject, wholly or partially, along the lines provided by the idealized ideal: personality is constituted through identifications’ (1997: 104). For Pile, these modes of identification are significant because they are inherently spatial. In Pile’s rereading of Freud, his ideas help to understand the relationship between the individual, the social and the spatial, whereby:

Space and place cease to be external to the individual but become the condition of the existence of subjectivity, where the subject is placed within multiple interacting geographies of meaning, identity and power. (1997: 108)

In this schema, space is not merely ‘a passive backdrop’; it is constitutive of relationships between self, others and place, and Freud’s modes of identification describe a relationship between body, mind and space that is always dialectical in some sense (1996: 104). Moreover, the centrality of loss in personality formation as described by Freud in the Fort/Da game for Pile is inherently spatial. Here the child is perpetually losing objects of desire, first and most importantly the mother. In order to defend themself against the loss, the child introjects or incorporates the lost object — and to some extent personality is formed upon mourning and melancholia (1997: 105). Although Michel de Certeau’s account of ‘Walking in the City’ (1993) does not explicitly state a psychoanalytic connection, he invokes the Fort/Da game when he refers to the Oedipal relationship in the experience of space and place:

55 the repetition … of a decisive and originary experience, that of the child’s differentiation of the mother’s body. It is through that experience that the possibility of space and of a localization (a ‘not’ everything) of the subject is inaugurated … The childhood experience that determines spatial practices later develops its effects, proliferates, floods private and public spaces, undoes their readable surfaces … (1993: 227).

For Pile and de Certeau, the city has an unconscious life, a psychodynamics of place which involves desire, love, loss and also movement, seeing and meaning (Pile 1996: 228). It is expressed in moments that erupt and disturb civil life, in acts of voyeurism, social performance and masquerade, and in the erotic life of the streets. The mechanisms of administrative rationality and urban planning attempt to impose order on people’s everyday social practices, but they are necessarily destined to fail (1996: 227). Here the super­ego’s role in repressing or sanctioning desire (the id) is never wholly successful, and works in a way that suggests it draws on influences from the surrounding environment (1996: 105).

THE OTHER

Fortitude Valley, one case study area of this thesis, has been the only significant site of difference in the hitherto culturally homogenous city of Brisbane. Like many inner­city areas, Fortitude Valley has for many years been the site of marginalised people, across ethnic, sexual and socioeconomic divisions. The Valley is the locale of gay male activity, sex workers, migrants and a small Indigenous population. Asian and Italian migrants have established many businesses in the Valley, most evident in the area’s ethnic eateries and cafes. Because of its affiliation with marginal identities and difference, from the 1960s onwards, the Valley was a place to be avoided by the majority of the city’s mainstream middle class. The concept of difference, of the Other is pertinent to this study, particularly for the case study area in which Brisbane’s shift from regional town to emerging global city, with its attendant growth in migration, increasingly provides encounters with difference.

56 Causes of social inequalities and marginalisations of groups are identified in economic and social analyses of the city. So too, psychoanalysis contributes insights to the real, imaginary and symbolic characteristics of the city experience, which also support practices of inclusion and exclusion. The usefulness of psychoanalysis here is best illustrated through the concept of the Other, referred to in the previous chapter with regard to the essential characteristic of city life as living among strangers. The concept of the Other is a psychoanalytic trope which has been adopted in cultural theory to understand the nature of difference, particularly as it is played out across ethnic, gender and sexual divisions. Geographer Gillian Rose (1993) argues that it helps account for women’s marginalisation in the public sphere, and Edward Said (1979) uses the concept in relation to the marginalisation of ethnic groups in society who are not part of the dominant Anglo group. Said points to the discursive characteristic of Otherness, where knowledge about Otherness is registered to alleviate a fear of the unknown and to justify domination of marginal groups.

David Sibley (1992) uses Freud’s concepts of object relations (elaborated on by Melanie Klein 1975) and social boundary formation to account for the marginalisation of gypsies in Europe, and the analysis could be applied to black urban oppression and other marginalised groups in Western cities across the world. In summary, the intrapsychic process of subjectivity involves the creation of boundaries between self and others, and is related to the Oedipal stage of development in which the child first experiences a profound sense of loss — in the first instance, typically related to the mother. 2 This results, to a greater or lesser extent, to an ambivalence between self and other, between love and hate, experienced as intense feelings which cannot be expressed because they are not socially acceptable and because, in the original drama of the psyche, the mother may withdraw her love altogether. Children learn to introject and/or displace dangerous or unwanted feelings on to others — others who are perceived as different. These feelings are ‘simultaneously social, bodily and spatial’ (Pile 1996: 90). Fears of loss and abandonment are projected upon others as loathing, reproducing the drama of the psyche. For Freud, this is a template that bubbles beneath the surface throughout our lives, and in the process of introjection and projection is continually reproduced (1996: 90).

57 The Other is one who, because of their perceived cultural, sexual or gender differences, arouses feelings of fear and loathing, sometimes so intense that in ‘the imagery of rejection, they merge with the non­human world’ (Sibley 1992: 107). The Other’s non­ human status legitimises their poor and at times inhumane treatment by dominant groups, and history provides us with many examples here. The psychoanalytic working of the Other in accounting for racial and other prejudices is frequently associated with the spatial environment because Others are people who are seen to have transgressed boundaries and be ‘out of place’ (Pile 1996: 88). For Sibley, a psychoanalytic interpretation helps explain the social construction of space, which operates in correspondence with the politics of economy and social inequality and whose results are more direct and observable:

space is an integral part of the outsider problem. The way in which space is organised affects the perception of the ‘other’ either as foreign and threatening or simply as different. The construction, maintenance and policing of spatial boundaries is not just a question of political economy, it relates to the ways in which people develop boundaries between self and other (following Keith 1987 and Smith 1990): these relationships are spatial, and they are also learned through childhood experiences. (in Pile 1996: 89)

Sibley’s account of gypsies’ marginalisation identifies the ways in which their communities are constructed as dangerous and disorderly, tapping into the unconscious tropes of disgust and the abject associated with the Other (Sibley 1992: 112). Their different way of living is perceived as a threat to the social order: they travel across borders, evade regulations and refuse to live a bounded, placed life. For Pile, the conflict between dominant society and outsider communities or people is about the control of space, but it is also a conflict which is felt as a mutual violation of the body and spaces — ‘the psychodynamics of violation works across the spaces of power and exclusion’ (1996: 89). We do not have to look far for contemporary examples of this psycho­dynamics of space that seeks to exclude others — parallels may be drawn between the treatment of refugees arriving on the boat Tampa to Australia in 2002, and the many instances following this. 3 For psychoanalysis, emotions such as disgust, fear and loathing are deeply felt responses to the Other which are mobilised by psychic re­enactments of the Oedipal

58 drama. The frequently unconscious characteristic of emotions makes them all the more potent, yet clearly they are a common experience in an individual’s everyday life.

THE EMOTIONAL LIFE OF THE CITY

Given the utter ubiquity of affect as a vital element of cities, its shading of almost every urban activity with different hues that we all recognise, you would think that the affective register would form a large part of the study of cities — but you would be wrong. (Thrift 2004: 55)

The role of emotions is a key factor in the study’s focus on the lived experience of the city; emotions are intrinsic to identity and experience, and are the drivers of much human behaviour. As discussed, psychoanalysis offers explanations for the origins of emotions and their significance in human behaviour and experience. For Freud, it is the unconscious, and particularly the id, where characteristics of the affect system are manifest (Tomkins, quoted in Sedgwick 2003: 21). In the everyday life of cities, it is through our sensory, affective and aesthetic modalities that we engage with, experience and come to know the metropolis, with all its practical interaction and complexity. Our daily encounters with the strangers of the city, along with the sensory phenomenon that assails us every day — the sights, sounds and smells — activate bodily responses and feed into emotional experiences ‘as diverse as pleasure, joy revulsion fear and disgust’ (Allon and Anderson 2004: 90).

As Thrift notes in the above quote, although emotion is central to the lived experience of the city, it is not commonly discussed. Yet its consequences can be seen everywhere — in the pleasures of urban life, in the popularity of festivals or, conversely, in neighbourhood disputes, complaints over noise, in surveillance techniques, and in the impetus behind urban planning policies. Moreover, it is this ‘felt’ experience of place through affect and embodiment, captured in the term ‘sense of place’, that for philosophers such as Heidegger and Merleau­Ponty makes for a sense of connection or ‘rootedness’ to place (in Smith 1992).

59 Although the connection between identity and place is evident in the language, customs and habitus that tie people to place — and emotion may be implicit here — these philosophical accounts tend to gloss over the ways in which emotion binds us to place and marks out our experience of it. Early writers on the city, such as Benjamin, Simmel and Sennett, provide schematic accounts of emotion and the city, yet subsequent analysis has focused more upon the city as a living space, rather than a lived space with the affective interactions that implies (Allon and Anderson 2004: 89). It is only recently that critical theory has turned its focus to the affective domain, perhaps partly because the concept is slippery and difficult to assess and even to find a language for. For social and cultural theory, the recent interest in affect represents a dissatisfaction with the limits of structural approaches to self and the social, to give full resonance to human experience. Structural approaches are perceived by many to be too socially deterministic. The recognition of the importance of affect in subjectivity and social relationships might offer another more flexible and nuanced understanding of human agency, choice and action.

I should point out here that I use the terms ‘affect’ and ‘emotion’ somewhat interchangeably throughout this section. Affect or emotion is a non­conscious experience of intensity, a moment of unformed unstructured potential (Shouse 2005: 1). Affect is the body’s way of preparing itself for action in a given circumstance — in which environment is heavily implicated. Further, because affect always precedes will and consciousness, it suggests that the body has a grammar of its own that cannot fully be explained in language (Shouse 2005: 1). For the purposes of this project, I draw on Kay Milton’s (2005) definition of emotion and feeling to differentiate the two areas of affect. In this view, emotion or affect is, as previously stated, a response to environmental stimulus, and feeling is the perception of the emotion — it is an experience that has been checked against previous experiences and labelled: for example, when we are crying (emotion) we feel sad (feeling) (see Figure 2.1).

60 Stimulus ­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­→ Emotion ­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­→Feeling (Physical response) (Perception of emotion) Source: Milton 2005: 201, based on Damasio’s model) Figure 2.1: Areas of affect

For Eve Sedgwick (2003), ‘affects can be and are attached to things, people, ideas, sensations, relations, activities, institutions … Thus we can be excited by anger, disgusted by shame or surprised by joy’ (in Thrift 2004: 59). In her book Touching Feeling (2003), Sedgwick argues that in order to understand and give credence to the texture of everyday life, an engagement with ‘what lies alongside or beside’ as she puts it, provides fuller resonance of the world we wish to understand.

Thrift’s work on affect focuses largely on the ways in which strategic interventions of affect are deployed for institutional and political purposes in the city and wider public sphere. He notes, for instance, the ways in which performance of affect is harnessed via the video screen and assumes a powerful public resonance in the spaces of the city. Moreover, for Thrift, contemporary discourse of creative cities is implicitly affective in which cities ‘must have a buzz … exhibit intense expressivity’ in the economic engineering of urban life (2004: 56).

However, more useful for the purpose of this project are Maffesoli’s and Milton’s assertions of affect. Maffesoli’s book Time of the Tribes (1996) emphasises the affective dimension of social life, and Milton (2005) offers an ecological anthropological model of emotion based on psychological principles. Both underscore the ways in which emotion underpins the social ordering of a city/environment, and they elaborate emotion’s role in place connection.

It is easy to see how Maffesoli’s ideas are transported to the spaces of the city — the social groupings and networks he describes united by shared lifestyles, tastes, sub­culture and other affinity­based groupings are frequently to be found inhabiting and/or using inner­city

61 spaces. The city’s amenities provide the location, venues and opportunities for increasing modes of sociability. Shops, cafes, parks, restaurants and other public and semi­public spaces are available in abundance in the postmodern city. Maffesoli emphasises the spatial dimension to tribes: how neighbourhood is the site of relationship networks of relationships, and how locale is allows social groupings to be cemented by affective, neighbourly practices.

Maffesoli’s thesis is an optimistic one, but it points to a profound shift in social organisation in Western culture. Rather than living in a world increasingly marked by individualism and anomie as some suggest, Maffesoli argues that new types of social structures are flourishing, and they have strong powers of inclusion and integration. These are types of ‘emotional communities’ (after Weber) and are based more upon an affective, life­affirming impulse of ‘being togetherness’ rather than an outmoded, rationalised social. In this schema, an empathetic sociability instilled with a Dionysian quality of the ‘transcendent warmth of the collectivity’ (1996: 4) is expressed by a succession of ambiences, feelings and emotions (1996: 11).

Members will belong to any number of tribes — membership is fluid and open — but what unites them is the power of basic sociality. Moreover, for Maffesoli, ethical rules emerge from the collective in such a way that suggests the maintenance of standards of behaviour, implicitly set and understood by members of the group. This type of self­governing ethic, or sense of self­regulation, helps prevent the possibility of members tipping over into narcissist types of behaviour (1996: 15). The emphasis on a positive sociability of ethics and emotion naturally raises questions about a negative corollary of collectivity encountered in Fascism and bigotry. This is acknowledged, but it is necessary to leave it to one side. Maffesoli’s analysis of the growth in forms of sociability is a compelling one when applied to the reorganisation of the social order and to the social and consumer spaces of the postmodern city.

62 MILTON’S ECOLOGICAL MODEL OF EMOTION AND ENVIRONMENT

Milton (2005) argues that the individual’s principal mode of engagement with their surroundings is emotional, and it is the connection between learning and emotions which is critical:

Emotions connect us with our surroundings, enabling us to learn from them, defining the quality of engagement, shaping our memories and therefore our knowledge. (2005: 207)

Milton proposes a model of ‘ecological emotion’ in which the environment — whether urban, rural or whatever type — is prioritised as the stimulus of emotional function. Although this model acknowledges the importance of the social domain and its connection to emotion, Milton argues that it is over­emphasised. Moving away from either strictly biological or cultural models of emotion, she suggests that it is essentially through the processes of learning that emotion and the environment are made explicit.

Drawing on the work of William James (1890) and Antonio Damasio (1999), Milton argues that the basic emotion of ‘interest’ or ‘attention’, assumed to be shared by all individuals and regarded as part of the process of perception, is the central link between individual and environment. The process of anticipating, being alert to information received from the environment and all its possibilities, is part of perception — but also a process in which the affective domain is engaged and the basis upon which learning may take place. Damasio has suggested that species which have feelings as well as emotions have the ability to develop a consciousness of self, and therefore have a greater capacity for survival. For example, an animal that has emotions (the body responds to stimuli), but is unaware of them, unable to perceive them, has very limited possibilities of escaping danger (2005: 202). Emotions and feelings arise, in Damasio’s perspective, in the relationship between an organism and the environment.

Thus emotions, or more particularly feelings, are critical to survival in the environment, and reflection and learning enhance the opportunity for survival. Some psychologists

63 have identified the ways in which emotion engages dialectically with cognition in the process of learning (Lazarus, cited in Milton 2005: 202) and can determine how we think about situations we encounter and the ease with which we learn things. Similarly, Prohansky, Fabian and Kaminoff (1983 cited in Smith 1992: 18), who first proposed the concept of place identity, claim that we learn about ourselves by discovering our competence at both manipulating environments and assigning meaning to places. There is a strong affective dimension to learning and experience, and for Milton this is primarily an ecological phenomenon, standing outside culture and biology (2005: 202). Although this is not the only the context in which emotion operates, it is perhaps the most fundamental.

Milton argues that learning, like emotion, cannot fully be understood through either biological or cultural approaches, and she makes a claim for an ecological model of emotion and the environment:

although other human beings may be the most important things in people’s environments, this is not the case for everyone, and our environments contain many non­human things, some of which have very deep significance for us … an ecological approach to emotion locates it in the relationship between an individual and their environment, whatever that environment may consist of: it does not privilege the social environment over the non­social. (2005: 202–3)

There is a link here between Milton’s observation of the importance of ‘non human things … which have deep significance for us’ in the external world and Freud’s account of object relations discussed earlier. The placement and psychic attachments we make to objects in both accounts, however symbolic, are significant in the mobilisation of affect, and thus in our quotidian experience. Where Milton leaves the whole question of subjectivity well enough alone, Freud and those after him provide a thoroughly comprehensive account of the dialectical relationship between self, the unconscious and the external world. Milton’s ideas work in congruence with psychoanalytic approaches by foregrounding the ways in which the spatial environment can be seen as a stimulus for emotions. Pile’s rereading of Freud similarly asserts the centrality of the spatial environment in the affective life of the individual. Neither approach is mutually

64 exclusive, and their intersections are evident in the spaces of the psyche and the city. Moreover, the environmental stimulus Milton refers to, but not does elaborate, is a highly complex one in the city. In this context, semiotic approaches to the city remain relevant alongside psychoanalytic and ecological accounts. The symbols, signs and discourses of the city cannot be separated from the intrapsychic processes of subjectivity if subjectivity both constitutes and is constitutive of the city.

MEMORY AND PLACE

If we’ve lived in a city long enough to have given our truest and deepest feelings to its prospects, there comes a time when — just as a song recalls lost love — particular streets, images and vistas will do the same. (Pamuk 2005: 313)

If the city is a crucible for feelings, it is frequently through the instrument of memory that feelings and meanings are generated. In interview data discussed Chapter 6, long­term residents in the case study area recounted vivid memories of their experience of place. It was evident that memories triggered affective responses and provided insights into the ways in which residents formed an attachment to their neighbourhood of New Farm. Orhan Pamuk’s (2005) literary interpretation of the city in his memoir Istanbul expresses a relationship with the city as one in which memory plays a key role in the psychodynamics of place, as articulated in the above quote. As a recollection of a city in which he has lived all his life, Pamuk recalls his experience of particular areas of Istanbul at different times. He surprises himself by discovering that feelings and meanings he had associated with certain precincts have shifted with time and experience. So he records how different he felt revisiting an old haunt of his youth, immersed at that time with the melancholy of lost love, and how as an adult with a greater sense of well­being this original association is eroded and the area takes on another complexion altogether.

Sight is perhaps memory’s most dominant of sensory triggers, certainly its most useful. This was evident in several interview participants’ recollections of their neighbourhood in which they lived as children, discussed in Chapter 6. It was the visual changes to the area

65 that produced the most striking memories. Francis Yates (1966), in The Art of Memory, details how memory training, with its origins in classical Greece, was grounded in the spatial through the application of spatial imagery. The poet Simonides is credited with the development of this rhetorical skill, in which loci (place) — in this case, the areas of a building — was linked to image through the technique of mnemonics. For the orator, this required imprinting in memory a series of places in a building and memorising images drawn from his speech, delivering the speech while moving through the building in imagination and recalling its component parts (Yates 1966: 18).

The city also provides plenty of olfactory and auditory stimuli that function both as prompts for recall and as stimulae for affect. The smells, sights and sounds of Istanbul, for instance, are quite distinct from those of Sydney. The senses’ cues are also prompts for the recollection of feelings, and in this way memory harnesses the emotions, all weighing into the experience of the city. Pamuk’s recollections of Istanbul are imbued with the twin psychoanalytic impulses of loss and desire — of a fragmented family, lost love and the cultural decline of a once­great Empire. He refers to the pervasiveness and dominance of this feeling of the city as huzun, the Turkish word for melancholy.

The function of memory in the psychodynamics of place or in place construction is implicit in the intrapsychic processes of subjectivity. However, it is worth elaborating its importance for this project because memory is one of the central modalities by which interview participants in Chapter 6 discuss their experience of their rapidly changing neighbourhood. Bachelard (1964) observed its significance in people’s attachment to the intimate spaces of the house, as places where memories are housed. In fact, pioneering psychoanalytic approaches to space and subjectivity, Bachelard noted that: ‘A psychoanalyst should, therefore, turn his [sic] attention to this simple localization of our memories.’ (1964: 8) For Bachelard, it is the motionless and static aspect of memory which once ‘securely fixed in space’ — in this instance, the spaces of the house — makes memory all the more potent as a vehicle for identification and experience. The same could be said for the spatial environment in which we live — such as the city. Although the city is a dynamic, adaptive place, it is nonetheless always there. We revisit places of

66 our past, reminders of our former selves and of the ways in which these places contributed to our identity and experience. Space is the integration for our thoughts, dreams and memories, in which past, present and future collide and give the space different dynamisms. In this schema, we remember and conceive of space in relation to dreams and the imagination, and in which memory is actively constituted. Similarly, Bridge and Watson have observed, ‘memory shapes the city at the same time as being shaped by it’ (2000: 9). The city is a different place for each of us.

CONCLUSION

This chapter has mapped out the theoretical terrain in which an understanding of the lived experience of the city, including the ways in which the city is imagined, can be comprehensively explored for the purposes of this project. The study pays attention throughout to the dialectical relationship between the imagined city, perceptions and our experience of it. Here, the combination of semiotic and psychoanalytic approaches is useful for understanding the nature of representation. The latter is specifically helpful for more complex understandings of the psychic processes of subjectivity in which place identification is recast as a central modality. Psychoanalytic explanations of the unconscious and its work in symbolically and psychically reproducing the drama of early childhood in a relay with the external world offer an account of subjectivity that Pile reworks and applies to the city, which is fruitful for this study. Our experience of the city, in this account, is determined by its materiality, but also by our own imaginary cityscapes, formed in part by unconscious and intrapsychic processes. On the formation of this phenomenon, Pile notes:

Through fantasy, whether conscious of unconscious, the urbanised subject creates an imaginary urbanised landscape, which is constructed partly by the material of the city, partly by the modalities of identification, partly by defensive processes and partly by the ‘contents’ of the unconscious. (1996: 236)

Thus, through the lens of psychoanalysis, the mobilisation of the unconscious and of fantasy, desire and repression — the ways in which an individual’s imagination engages

67 with and produces their material world and its representations, provides greater depth to existing interpretive frameworks of structural, cultural and historical formations.

Recent writing on the centrality of affect in subjectivity and quotidian life can usefully be applied to psychoanalytic explanations and to the lived experience of the city. The pursuit of affect for this study is twofold, and is explored in greater detail with participants in the case study area in Chapter 6. First, I suggest throughout that the postmodern city is the locus of increasing forms of sociability, the purpose of which is to some extent affective and therefore operates from an affective register. This shift is representative of a profound difference in ways of living, in which the ties of kinship are loosened and new social formations have emerged and continue to emerge (see also Bauman 2000). What binds us to each other now is quite different from the ties of modernity, and it is increasingly in the spaces of the city that these new relationships are performed, nurtured and maintained. Second, affect is intrinsic to subjectivity, and therefore to our experience of the city. Its impulse, through the enduring psychoanalytic tropes of desire, fear and loss, is inscribed in discourses of the city. These tropes underpin the current emphasis on the postmodern city of pleasure — their manifestations appearing in dreams of luxurious apartment living, groups of friends sharing interesting urban lifestyles, and heroic buildings that solve social problems. Powerful discourses reveal our hopes and fears of living among strangers, and this topic is explored further in the following chapter.

NOTES

1 For Freud, voyeurism was the libidinal or erotic component which made the act of spectating so pleasurable. See Christian Metz (1971, 1972). In his seminal work on cinema and the psyche, Metz argues that it is the apparatus of cinema: camera — sound editing and so forth, the conditions of viewing in a darkened theatre, the fantasy text of the film and the ‘mental machinery’ of the spectator — that reactivates the psychic processes of the circulation of desire and the pleasure principle. According to Freud, pleasure is an intrinsic human drive (actioned by the id), but one which is circumscribed by the ego. The act of watching a film engages our fundamental human drives and is linked to psychoanalytic concepts of transference, identification, the dream state and voyeurism.

2 The child’s self is constructed in relation to other objects — people, toys, body sensations and so forth. It is when the child first begins to realise that it is not connected to the mother’s body that this helpless feeling of separation, loss and abandonment produces an ambivalent response to the mother. On the one hand, the mother is a ‘good’ object providing food, warmth and so forth. On the other, when she leaves the child she is a ‘bad’ object because she withdraws those her love — she is both loved and hated. Since neither love

68 nor hate can readily be expressed, the child is forced to control and live with ambivalent feelings of love and hatred. These feelings structure responses throughout life: ‘aversion and desire, repulsion and attraction play against each other defining the border which gives self identity, and importantly these feelings are transferred to others during childhood’ (Sibley in Pile, 1997: 90).

3 In what has become the well­known ‘children overboard’ incident, Australian Prime Minister John Howard accused refugees from Afghanistan and Iraq of throwing their children overboard when they realised the boat they were in was sinking. In condemning the alleged incident, Howard condemned the refugees as the Other, as people not like us who would do heinous things to their children. It became apparent to many that this was cynical political strategy to shore up public opinion in order to support a very limited and punitive policy of refugee acceptance in Australia.

69 CHAPTER 3 ______THE REPRESENTATIONAL CITY IN FILM, TELEVISION AND LITERATURE

The city as we imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare is as real, maybe more real than the hard city one can locate in maps and statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture. (Raban 1974: 10)

The city is an imagined space as well as a material space: how we imagine and perceive the city are potent factors in our experience of urbanity. This chapter pursues in further detail the relationship between subjectivity, experience and the city introduced in the previous chapter by examining several representations of the contemporary city. One of the central assertions of this thesis is that the imaginary city, experienced partly through the discursive resources of the city, plays an important role in meaning­making and in the experience of living in the city. Operating in a cycle of production and reproduction, the imaginary city draws upon our collective responses to metropolitan life, a projection of desires and fears writ large across the cinema or television screen, novel and local town plan.

The chapter pays particular attention to two representational themes: first, the ways in which the city and personal identity are linked, particularly through notions of gender and sexuality. Here, the recast space of the postmodern city has become the site for the exploration and negotiation of gender and sexuality in quite distinct ways from the city of modernity. This has implications at the discursive, imaginary and material levels, particularly for women. Second, I suggest that in several popular city­based texts, the city is the crucible for the development and maintenance of Maffesoli’s (1996) and Watter’s (2004) ‘urban tribes’, social groups bound together by an essentially emotional affinity, as discussed in the previous chapter. In this sense, the postmodern city can be seen as offering a growth in sites for the negotiation, expression and regulation of its inhabitants’ emotional

70 life. The city, then, as Kevin Robins notes, ‘can be seen … in terms of a kind of a psycho­ geography: it is the scene of our collective emotional life’ (1996: 130, emphasis added).

This chapter is informed by semiotic and psychoanalytic models of meaning­making, As such, its aim is to explore the two themes of the thesis outlined above: identity and sociability, and the ways in which these are recast in the postmodern city. How do these themes manifest in representations of the city? The chapter does not purport to offer a detailed textual analysis of each text discussed; rather, it identifies the commonality and consistency of thematic representations.

I begin with North American representations of the city, specifically New York, and then move on to representations of Australian cities, with the final section focusing on the case study area of Brisbane. New York, along with other great cities such as Paris and London, is ubiquitous as a model of urbanity with myriad representations across literature, film and television. These cities’ representational presence and longevity make them symbolic and constitutive of metropolitan life; they are inscribed on to our mental map of cities and have become part of a collective urban imaginary.

In drawing on cinematic representations of the city, I begin with a brief discussion about the relationship between the city and the cinema — one that scholars have suggested is significant (Friedberg 1993; Jameson 1991; Harvey 1990). The relationship is relevant for this study because of the ways in which the city and film are said to contribute to changes in subjectivity. Parallel developments in the city and in film have contributed to what has been characterised as the postmodern condition. Briefly, the period of postmodernity, broadly agreed to have commenced around the 1970s, is recognised as an era where marked transformations across time and space have occurred (Jameson 1991; Harvey 1990; Soja 1989). Congruent with physical change, are subjective changes occurring across perceptual and psychological modalities. The city — screen — text offers a mimesis of urbanity in which the cinema and city intersect not just at the level of representation, but also at the experiential and subjective levels. This makes the relationship between the two a compelling and important one to the experience of both the imaginary and material city.

71 CINEMA AND CITY EXPERIENCE

Benjamin first noted the affinity between the city and film, recognising similar perceptual regimes operating in the cinema and in the subjective experience of the city. For Benjamin, the developments in the modern city produced transformations to time and space, which were paralleled in the experience of film viewing. Similar to the experience of urbanity, developments in film contributed to the changes in the psychic modalities of the subject:

With the close­up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended. The enlargement of snapshot does not render more precise what in any case was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new formations of the subject. (in Friedberg 1993: 47)

Contemporary writers such as James Donald (1999), David Clarke (1997) and Anne Friedberg (1993) have elaborated Benjamin’s ideas, and there has been an intensified recognition in film studies of the nexus between the city and film — of their similar visual, sensory and embodied experiences.

For Sobchack (1992), it is film’s compelling ocular focus and its activation of mechanisms of the psyche, which occur in the process of viewing, that provide the structural homology between cinema and the experience of a particular urban subjectivity. Sobchack argues that film ‘makes visible not just the objective world, but the very structure and process of subjective embodied vision’ (in Robins 1996: 131). Similarly, Friedberg (1993) emphasises the spectorial ‘gaze’ mobilised in cinema viewing and in urban life. She asserts cinema’s role in contributing to a ‘mobilized and virtual’ subjectivity, which she links to the activities and aesthetic experience of the urban flaneur, to strolling the city, shopping and other forms of consumption. Friedberg asserts the centrality of a mobilised and virtual gaze, a phenomenon that is fundamental to the experience of everyday life (1993: 4), and one that had its origins in the cinema and city life. For Friedberg, this has contributed to a diminished capacity to retain the past, and the ubiquity of cinematic representations has fostered a ‘derealised’ sense of ‘presence and identity’ (1993: 2). Like Simmel’s modern urban subject, and later Jameson, Friedberg’s (postmodern) urban subject is decentred,

72 derealised and detemporalised. Changes to the subject’s psychic modalities occur at the intersections of cinema and the urban experience.

In this view, it is the apparatus of the cinema and film — primarily through the use of camera and editing techniques and the ways in which images, sound and ambience are selected and narrative is constructed — that a perceptual and embodied experience is mobilised, which to some extent mirrors our experience of moving through the city. Both the city and the cinematic experience contribute to a fragmented, mobile identity, charged with a tension between immersion and detachment (Robins 1996: 131). Sitting in a darkened theatre watching the larger­than­life projection of images and sound made coherent through narrative engages modalities of the psyche that evoke an affective, embodied experience for the spectator. Donald identifies this embodied characteristic:

The imagined landscape of the city has become, inescapably, a cinematic landscape. But the city does not just operate as a backdrop … to use Lefebvre’s term, film presents urban space as itself representational, as simultaneously sensory and symbolic. (1999: 68)

Moreover, the film­city’s projection of urbanity is introjected and reworked by the unconscious forming part of the subject’s imaginary. Thus film is a form of fantasy that offers scopophilic pleasures and meanings (Dear 2000: 189).

Film scholars and human geographers state that cinema’s specular focus is significant for its contribution to place construction. Dear suggests that the link between film and space is ‘a critically important suture in understanding the creation of culture and places’ (2000: 183), and that representations are potent keys for unlocking the ground rules of the social order. Part of this is to do with the centrality of the image in contemporary culture, and its critical role in constituting a sense of place and self (2000: 184). On a representative level, the technologies of filmmaking give the medium of film the unique ability to capture the city — its multiple scenes, its movement, sounds, shifting moods and ambiences, as Rob Shield points out:

73 the cinema has long had a striking and distinctive ability to capture and express the spatial complexity, diversity, and social dynamism of the city through mise­en­scene, location filming, lighting, cinematography, and editing … (2001: 1)

The film­city text articulates and mobilises the psychoanalytic tropes of desire and fear, of living in close proximity to strangers, in a multiplicity of ways, from dystopian to utopian representations of the city. Representations of the city tend to fall into either utopian or dystopian tropes. The city of dystopia is rendered in crime and gangster genres such as LA Confidential (Curtis Hanson 1997), Taxi Driver, Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese 1972, 1973) and Serpico (Sidney Lumet 1973). Conversely, celebrations of the city are evident in the films of Woody Allen: Manhattan (1979) is an homage to New York. Similarly, Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004) are celebrations of Vienna and Paris respectively, exploited for their visual potential and romantic associations. For Watson and Bridge (2003), contemporary discourses that articulate the city as a site of pleasure are perhaps one of the reasons why Benjamin’s writing has received so much recent attention (2003: 9).

Although city texts may offer multiple meanings and interpretations, film and literary scholars have emphasised the ideologically charged nature of the cityscape, and the questions it raises about power and place and the social world. Despite the evolution of national cinemas, the dominance and domestic focus of Hollywood cinema throughout the twentieth and into the twenty­first century mean that the world has a repertoire of cinematic urban images and stories which are predominantly North American. Concerns and questions that circulate around urbanity, and living with strangers, are thus posed from the lens of Hollywood’s anxieties and fantasies. As Colin McArthur suggests, ‘there must hardly be a major city in the world that is not known primarily by way of Hollywood’ (199: 34). Similarly, Baudrillard has noted the proliferation of images of the American cinematic city:

The American city seems to have stepped right out of the movies … To grasp its secret, you should not, then, begin with the city and move inwards

74 towards the screen; you should begin with the screen and move outwards toward the city. (1998: 56)

It is no surprise, then, if we assume these concerns to be our own — typical of our own cities; however, they are not. The extent to which the city text can matter in our experience of the urban is highlighted in Baudrillard’s observation. It also points to the elision of the local — in this case, Australian — assertion of urban experience. Although the study is concerned with Australian cities, I make an initial deviation to New York because, as I claimed previously, its status as a great world city and its representational ubiquity make it a template for urbanism. In this capacity, New York articulates a metropolitan consciousness, embodying dreams of collective urban life realised in utopian and dystopian visions. These are transplanted and adopted across the world, so that in the Brisbane case study area of Newstead, advertising for the converted Wool Stores Dakota building boast that the apartments, surrounded by cafes and entertainment, offer a ‘New York’ style of living. Even the name ‘Dakota’ is reminiscent of that city, and musician John Lennon’s adoption of it. Less opaquely, an apartment block in the area is called Manhattan. For a city such as Brisbane, whose urbanism is nascent, the representational city is an important factor.

CITY AND DISCOURSES OF IDENTITY

Discourses of the city in which the city is a site for the realisation and performance of self were noted in the previous chapter and have implications for the ways in which we live in cities. Mark Sheil (2003) notes how, for filmmakers such as Spike Lee, Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese, New York functions as a ‘deep well of authentic personal experience, a source of self, of tangible subjectivity, and of intense emotion, action, and human interaction’ (2003: 168). It is hard to think of another cinematic city that connects subjectivity with the city so profoundly and insistently. For Lee, Allen and Scorsese, the city’s streets and buildings do not just represent the city, but are icons of the self, representing a set of relationships between the character’s past and present. Referring to Allen’s often troubled and neurotic characters, Sheil suggests that it is the authenticity and meaning of the their relationships which give them their emotional resonance. For him,

75 emotion in these films is as powerfully felt as the city’s monumental architecture and public spaces (2003: 169). Self­realisation which is connected to a sense of place is evident in representations of ethnicity and ethnic rivalries in Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973) and Gangs of New York (2002), as well as in the crime gangster genre in general. It is, necessarily in this genre, a sense of self realised through the acquisition of traditional masculine competencies: authority, physical prowess and aggression, control over city space.

In contrast, in HBO television’s Sex and the City, which first appeared in 1998, New York appears as a cornucopia of feminine consumerist pleasure and sexual possibilities. The series is significant for this study for the ways in which female subjectivity is inscribed the spaces of the postmodern city. Feminine subjectivity is understood in relation to the city and its inhabitants; the city defines who the women are, whom they encounter and the types of interactions and experiences they have. As Creed (2003: 51) observes: ‘The city is a key player in this series, which presents urban life as a crucial factor in its exploration of the postmodern female psyche.’

In a similar way to Allen’s films, Sex and the City’s four female characters are explored primarily through their affective relationship with each other and others. While Sex and the City presents an explicitly sexualised treatment of female subjectivity, its emphasis on the emotional aspects of relationships gives the episodes their focus and narrative drive. As in Allen’s films, the relationships in Sex and the City are ‘an addictive source of pleasure and pain’ (Sheil, 2003: 167), where the city itself is part of the problem of the relationships the women encounter, or seek. This is established from the outset in the first episode, as the women discuss whether or not love is possible in Manhattan, and where the distinction of Manhattan as a place of problematic relationships is made in contrast to Britain. An English colleague of the women is abruptly dumped by one of the city’s most eligible bachelors, even after he has ‘popped the question’. Carrie, the narrator, explains this as a cultural problem, specific to that city: ‘In England, looking at houses together would have meant something. Then I realized that no one had told her about the end of love in

76 Manhattan,’ she explains (cited in Creed 2003: 48). The city is portrayed as enabling and disabling particular types of relationships, particular types of subjectivities.

In her professional capacity as city chronicler, the central role of Carrie presents voice­over observations on the emotional life of the city’s inhabitants. Richards (2003) asserts that Carrie’s role as professional observer likens her to the flaneur or flaneuse of the nineteenth century city because, like her male counterpart, her life is marked by detachment; she is something of a voyeur, she rents an apartment despite being able to afford to buy one, and she is unwilling to commit to her boyfriend Aidan who wants to marry her. Moreover, throughout most of the series Carrie conducts an irreconcilable affair with a married man, Mr Big (Richards, 2003: 150).

While the parallels between Carrie and the female flaneur are apparent, I suggest that Carrie’s detachment is also to do with an ambivalent female subjectivity identifiable in discourses of the postmodern city, and with the actual city itself. For, although the city is a central factor in the women’s experience of their independence and their sexual, romantic and consumerist pleasures, their independence is not wholly reconciled with traditional feminine expectations of marriage and children. On one level, the series celebrates women’s autonomy, but on another level, finding a long­term partner or husband is an enduring theme for most of the women. The spatial distinction between female autonomy and dependence is made evident throughout the series by the contrast between the city and the suburbs, a common distinction elaborated in Chapter 4. It is illustrated in a scene that highlights the city’s distinction as a place of pleasure, in contrast to the dreariness associated with the suburbs.

Here, Charlotte — one of the four women — has recently spent time with her in­laws in an upper middle­class suburban enclave, where she was indeed driven to boredom. In visual flashbacks, she recounts to her three girlfriends the stuffy dinners and strained conversations she was forced to endure with her in­laws. The normally restrained Charlotte confesses that her only reprieve from boredom while stranded in the suburbs was provided by her sexual fantasies about the good­looking, muscular gardener who always appeared

77 stripped to the waist, and with whom she eventually has sex. She is racked with guilt over the incident, not least because she is married to the sexually non­performing Trey. At this point in the conversation, Samantha — whose voracious appetite for men and sexual derring­do are her hallmarks in the series — dismisses Charlotte’s concerns with the retort: ‘Well honey really, what’s the point of living in the suburbs if you can’t fuck the gardener?’

While on one level it is a witty throwaway line, at another level it encapsulates the importance of the women’s identity and their relationship to the city: the affirmation of sexual experience without the constraints of intimate attachment or commitment, the disregard for the conventions of marriage such as monogamy — and perhaps even marriage per se — and the city as a site of pleasure and freedom where, particularly for women, life is unimpeded by the apparently narrow conventions of the suburbs. Samantha’s contempt for the suburbs is also her contempt for the constraints that a domestic life has traditionally imposed on women, with such a life typically located in the suburbs. Naomi Wolf (2004) notes the effect of this spatial division when she comments on a scene in which the women visit a friend with a newborn baby in her new house in the suburbs. They fear they will appear like singles losers, but in the end can’t wait to get back to the city and their independence:

This shows the duality of the city versus the suburbs for women, representing the divide between urban independence, with its hardships and sacrifices, and suburban dependency, with its allure and its suffocation. (2004: 8)

In the postmodern city, women inhabit and have access to the city as residents, consumers, workers and businesspeople in ways previously denied them in the modern city. Female identities are forged in multiple ways across the city, in its streets, shops, cafes, parks, public buildings and so forth. Women now form a greater part of the social and economic fabric of the city than in any other historical period, yet they also retain their identification with the suburbs. Identity for the women in Sex and the City is inseparable from their acts of consumption. Their high­end consumerism, of fashion, art and the service industries,

78 helps to keep the economic development of the city alive. Consumer­based lifestyle practices, such as shopping, going to art galleries and to the theatre, are also ways for the women to build and maintain their relationships. Moreover, shopping offers a form of consolation from their relationship mishaps: it is through the act of consumption that wounds and hurts are temporarily ameliorated. As Richards argues, in one episode Carrie confesses she has a ‘little substance abuse problem concerning expensive footwear’ and in another episode ‘decides after a distressing meeting with her former lover’s ex­wife that her only recourse is to go shopping’ (Richards 2003: 149). The city as a consumerist cornucopia is central to the women’s identity. With their focus on consumption­based pleasure, sex too becomes a commodity, as Creed points out:

Like Coleridge’s Xanadu, postmodern Manhattan is an earthly pleasure­ dome, but one in which sex is aligned with commerce and women are free to try all forms of sexual pleasure. Sex is increasingly defined by the city: sex is a commodity, something to be ‘tried on’, discarded or purchased like a new outfit, enjoyed with a stranger or a group. (2003: 51)

On one level, the women’s sexual antics mark them as transgressive: they frequently appear as female predators, and sex is often disassociated from traditional feminine expectations of love and romance. Yet the women’s sexual transgressions are somewhat neutralised by their role as both producers and consumers of the city, which incorporates them into the economy of the city. Although the women challenge the sexual norms of monogamy and marriage, they do not threaten the economic basis of the city; rather, they are a significant part of it.

Creed suggests that the female protagonists of Sex and the City, freed from the regulations imposed on women in the modern city, model a free and experimental attitude to sex for their female viewers (2003: 52). However, I would argue that the women’s freedom is limited and circumscribed by their status — as predominantly heterosexual, white, middle­ class, high­end consumers and professionals. Money and power embed the women into the city’s economy and guarantee them access to the upper echelons of New York society. Not that this inures them from the peccadilloes of others’ off­beat fantasies — often a source of humour in the series.

79 The series articulates a new type of relationship between women and the city, one that is radically transformed from the strictures, regulation and social conduct expected of women in public space. Sex and the City foregrounds the city as an affective and social arena, and its legitimation of pleasure as a way of being in the city is consistent with a common postmodern urban discourse. What is new here is that it is a discourse that appears to apply equally to women and men. Sex and the City may be a fantasy of city life in which women are beautiful, powerful and rich, but it offers a space in which to imagine an experience of the city hitherto unknown to women.

THE POSTMODERN SOCIAL CITY

If Sex and the City evokes the postmodern city as a site of identity and affective, social and sexual pleasure, so too television programs such as Seinfeld (1990–98) and Friends (1994– 2004) emphasise the importance of the city in the development and maintenance of relationships, though in different ways. Relationships are central to these urban­based sit­ coms, and the city (again New York) is critical for the ways in which relationships are forged, developed and nurtured across urban space.

The characters in these series are connected by shared lifestyles, interests and values in ways similar to those articulated in the sociological studies of Maffesoli’s and Watter’s concept of urban­based tribes. As groups of friends, they provide the emotional sustenance and support traditionally associated with family or marriage. In these programs, ‘the warmth of the collectivity’ (Maffesoli 1996: 4) is constructed, in part through the evocation of nostalgic notions of community, the sense of neighbourhood belonging — city spaces are where the groups meet and intersect. The city’s centrality to the development of relationships is through its public and private spaces; its cafes, restaurants, streets and apartment­style living are the sites that enable a mode of interaction which is primarily social and affective.

80 The same focus on the city as a site that supports relationships and the emotional life of its inhabitants appears in the Australian series The Secret Life of Us (2001–05), a drama revolving around several characters living in an apartment block in the inner­city Melbourne suburb of St Kilda. City life has its problems, typically relationship based, but through the therapeutic technique of talk — in the cafe, apartment or restaurant — the force of problems can be displaced. In this way, the semi­public spaces of the cafe or pub become the confessional spaces for sharing intimacies, and they function in a similar manner in Sex and the City. In the city, the boundaries between private and public space are readily blurred: the cafe is semi­public space with multiple functions — as a home away from home, a work space, a solitary space, a social space.

Increasingly in the postmodern city, relationships are maintained and work is conducted in the city’s consumption­based spaces such as cafes and restaurants. The cafe frequently appears in city texts as a social space, the ‘ideal meeting place where people can come together and talk about life’s trivial problems’ (Richards 2003: 206). The centrality of the cafe in depictions of urban living developed in parallel with the rise of cafe culture during the 1990s, establishing it as central to the growth of sociability associated with the postmodern city. In the Practices of Space, Michel de Certeau (1985) suggests that ‘spatial usage creates the determining conditions of social life’ (1985: 129, emphasis added). Elevated to iconic status, the cafe is synonymous with urban life, a symbol of the city’s sociability. It is also a domesticated, safe space welcoming to women and men alike. Unlike the bar, or the Australian pub, the cafe is free of the weight of anticipated (or unanticipated) romantic or sexual transactions typically of more concern — lest they go awry — to women than men. It is an urban amenity that has granted women greater engagement with the city and, not withstanding its commercial purpose, the cafe is also a democratic space, a point elaborated in Chapter 4. In programs such as Seinfeld or Friends, the cafe is an extension of the apartment, conveniently located, sometimes directly underneath the apartment block as it appears in Friends.

Texts exist in a relationship with the conditions and context of their production. However, they are also arguably representative of the unconscious forces of desire. In this respect,

81 reframed ideas about ‘community’ also disavow anxieties around unsettling social shifts, in which the city is a test laboratory for new ways of living and where new types of strangers appear. The invocation of notions of community asserts the value of meaningful social experience. From this perspective, it recalls Bauman’s idea that notions of community refer to ‘the last relic of the old time utopias of the good society; it stands for whatever has been left of the dreams of a better life shared with better neighbours all following better rules of cohabitation’ (2000: 92).

Representations of communities who congregate in the consumption spaces of the city in programs such as Sex and the City are urban fantasies, but they nonetheless reflect real changes in patterns of living and the social structure. Bonds of sociability based on interest, affinity and friendship groupings are replacing traditional family ties. This is supported by sociological studies on kinship and friendship over the last two decades that point to historically high levels of social interaction (in Thrift 2000: 243, citing the work of Pahl 1995; Finch and Mason 1989). In consort with changing living arrangements, there has been a growth in the number sites of social interaction in the city, such as cafes, bars, sporting venues, nightclubs, performance spaces and galleries, operating beyond their functional remit as consumer spaces. Along with the city’s public space of parks and so forth, these spatial formations are intrinsically social spaces and have gained ascendancy as sites for the negotiation and development of social relationships, a topic pursued in the following chapter.

A city’s history and culture inform its representations and contribute to its identity and sensibility. While the ubiquity of American popular culture and its representations of the city convey fantasies of metropolitan life across the world, as transplanted imaginaries they are without the nuance and texture of the local. By contrast to the authority of American and European urban representations, the evolution of an urban imaginary in Australia has been an uneasy one. The following section charts this evolution, beginning with the Australian city of Melbourne and concluding with Brisbane.

82 COMMUNITIES ON THE EDGE: THE AUSTRALIAN CITY

Despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of Australia’s population has lived in cities from the eighteenth century period of white settlement (Hay 1994: 8), in film and literature the bush has remained remarkably resilient as a site and source of national identity. Even Melbourne’s prominence as one of the world’s great cities between 1860 and 1920 (McLoughlin 1994: 86) did not do much to dislodge nature from its governing position in Australia’s spatial imagination. The longevity of the bush mythology represented a stark dislocation between expressions of nation and identity and the majority of the population’s quotidian experience. Historians such as Kay Schaffer (1988) and Richard White (1981) have pointed to the ways in which the bush myth defines an Australian identity which is based on a pragmatic masculinity. Women, ethnic minorities and indigenous people appear on the margins of the imagined community of the Australian nation.

There are many analyses of Australia’s preoccupation with the bush as a site of national identity (see Collins and Davis 2004; Whitlock and Carter 1992; Fiske et al. 1987; Schaffer 1986; White 1981), and there is no need to contribute further to this extensively documented field of study. What is significant, however, is that towards the end of the twentieth century, and as cities across the developed world gained economic and imaginative ascendency, the bush legend began to relinquish some of its grip on the national imagination. The city featured more prominently in Australian film, literature and popular culture, and its diversity and complexity provided the locus for divergent meanings, fractured experiences, and renewed ideas about identity and nation. Spaces for previously marginalised groups were opened up. While Australian cinema has not captured a narrative of identity synonymous with the city in the way filmmakers such as Woody Allen charts a relationship with New York, representations of the city provided a counterpoint to the bush.

From the Australian film industry’s revival period of the 1970s, the city became the emerging site for the negotiation and contestation of personal and social meaning (Devlin

83 Glass 1994: 160). Some films emphasised the city’s social inequalities through the lives of ordinary and marginalised inhabitants, identifying the operation of power relations across city space through explorations of class, gender and, less frequently, race — and where morally dubious outcomes are often the result: prostitution and drug addiction in John Duigan’s Winter of our Dreams (1981), corruption through urban development in Phil Noyce’s Heatwave (1982), corporate greed in the film adaptation of David Williamson’s play Emerald City (1988), racial violence and hatred in Geoffrey Wright’s Romper Stomper (1992), macho masculinity and violence in Metal Skin (1995), and the callous face of capitalism in Spotswood (1992).

In these films, the city’s association with moral and social degeneration connects them with the trope of metropolis as dystopia. With their focus on the problems of urbanity, there are echoes of modernity’s fears — ineffectual and expanding bureaucracies, individual and corporate greed, and the breakdown of community and community values. Yet their discursive value lies in the fact that these urban­based narratives offer an alternative to the bush legend, and depict a more complex and nuanced Australia and Australian identity.

Australian texts that engage with the themes of personal identity and social relationships in which the city is central are exemplified in the genre of urban­based ‘grunge’ novels and films. Not dissimilar to the television programs Seinfeld and Friends, the centrality of social relationships in grunge novels and films is the impulse that drives their narratives. Although these texts depict a social and urban milieu that is the antithesis to the glamourous wonderland of Sex and the City, their focus on personal identity, meaning and sexuality is similarly navigated through the social and intimate relationships of their protagonists. The city in all its messy diversity, its tolerance of difference, its chance encounters, is the rubric through which identity is explored.

The majority of films mentioned below first made their appearance on cinema screens throughout the 1990s, although there were precursors before that time, such as Richard Lowenstein’s film Space Dogs (1987) and Helen Garner’s award­winning novel Monkey

84 Grip (made into a film by Ken Cameron, 1982). Garner’s semi­autobiographical novel, published in 1977, was seminal: it was the first account of an urban­based alternative way of living which arose from the 1970s period of radical social change.

Interestingly, these types of urban­based explorations of identity films were adapted from novels. In Christos Tsiolkas’s Loaded, retitled Head On for the film (Ana Kokkinos 1998), Andrew McGahan’s Vogel­winning Praise (John Curran 1998), John Birmingham’s He Died with a Falafel in his Hand (Richard Lowenstein 2001) and Helen Garner’s Last Days at Chez Nous (Gillian Armstrong 1992), the inner city is central to the social lives of the young characters who either share houses and apartments or live in close proximity to one another. Not dissimilarly, but not adapted from a novel either, Love and Other Catastrophes (1996) charts the lives and relationships of students in inner­city Melbourne. The protagonists in these narratives are typically — though not always — part of a youth subculture, characterised by self­experimentation and alternative ways of living. They share a rejection of or ambivalence towards conventional forms of commitment and attachment such as marriage, home­owning and steady careers. Sometimes positioned as ‘coming of age’ films (Collins and Davis 2004: 152), these movies have characters who are united by their experimentation and tolerance for group living, sexual expression and the excessive use of drugs and alcohol. These values bind the social groups as they intersect across the city in its sub­cultural and interstitial spaces.

The communities of friends in these narratives occupy an in­between, interstitial space, sociologically, psychologically and in the physical spaces of the city. On the threshold of adulthood, the characters are no longer adolescents. Not wholly inserted into the economy of the city, they are either students, on the dole or intermittent workers in industries that offer temporary and insecure employment, such as the cultural and service industries. Rather than meeting in the homey or chic cafes of Seinfeld or Sex in the City, their tribes congregate in the shabby pubs of ungentrified inner city areas, in seedier nightclubs and in the loud and messy social spaces of their open­house parties. As urban fringe dwellers, their characters are frequently seen in the city’s liminal spaces, its laneways and derelict industrial areas such as the character of Ari in the film Head On.

85 The specificity of their urban location connects these texts to a particular era in the evolution of the Australian city and its social and political history. For a start, speculative real estate investment had not reached its current heights: very few ungentrified inner city spaces exist in Australian cities by the turn of the twenty­first century (Gleeson 2006, Salt 2005). Rental accommodation in the inner city was very affordable at the time these narratives took place. Moreover, the period of social liberation and reform movements which emerged from the 1960s facilitated alternative types of living arrangements to traditional family­based ones. Groups of students shared houses and under the policies of Labor’s Gough Whitlam government (1972–75) financial support for youth was more readily available than it is today. Free tertiary education, greater accessibility to unemployment benefits and living away from home allowances made it financially possible for a generation of youth to live unencumbered by traditional social and parental expectations.

Texts such as Garner’s Monkey Grip are representative of social change occurring at the time, and changes were predominantly urban based. Monkey Grip’s group of like­minded people sharing houses and lives in inner­city Melbourne consists mainly of artists or would­be artists, eschewing bourgeois values and, by implication, suburban life. Garner captures the emotional affinity of the group in her opening paragraph, highlighting this aspect of shared living:

In the old brown house on the corner, a mile from the middle of the city, we ate bacon for breakfast every morning of our lives. There were never enough chairs for us all to sit up at the meal table; one or two of us always sat on the floor or on the kitchen step, plate on knee … It was hunger and all sheer function: the clashing of plates, and people chewing with their mouths open, and talking and laughing. Oh, I was happy then. (1977: 1)

On one level, texts such as Monkey Grip, in which the city is the crucible for communities of like­minded friends living with, or in close proximity to, one another, are antipodean precursors to programs such as Friends and Seinfeld. The same generic origins can be traced to Australia’s popular award­winning television series The Secret Life of Us

86 (commenced 2000), in which a group of friends inhabit an apartment block in Melbourne’s inner­city St Kilda. Although the genres of all the television programs, films and novels mentioned range from situation comedy to episodic drama, they share in common their narrative focus: the emotional needs and the intimate relationships of their protagonists, played out across the city’s spaces. Urbanity is the vector through which identity is explored, in encounters with others and through the sustaining or problematic relationships developed.

SEX AND IDENTITY IN HEAD ON

Sex and the City articulates a particular sexualised and feminised view of the city that is consumption and glamour based. In contrast to this, the Australian film Head On (1998), released the same year that Sex and the City made its television debut, presents a city eroticised by the homosexual desire and activities of its protagonist, Ari. In the tradition of the grunge genre as a coming­of­age story, consumption and pleasure in Head On are based upon sexual gratification and on large quantities of drugs and alcohol. Anna Kokkinos’s film, adapted from Christos Tsiolkas’s novel Loaded, is driven by the theme of ethnic and sexual identity, as Ari is both Greek and homosexual.

Located in Melbourne, the film was critically received in Australia and internationally. Although its confrontational portrayal of homosexuality, drug use and a visceral ‘kinetic style’ of filmmaking divided critics, Head On won five Australian Film Institute (AFI) awards in 1998, including best film, and went on to garner more awards at various international film festivals (Collins and Davis 2004: 159). Such was its critical reception that it was cited as a turning point in Australian cinematic history. Paul Fischer wrote: ‘It would be true to say that with first­time director Ana Kokkinos’ audacious work (Head On) Australian cinema has come of age.’ (2004: 158)

The narrative takes place over a 24­hour period in the life of Ari (Alex Dimitriades), its nineteen­year­old protagonist, an angst­ridden Greek Australian struggling with issues of identity, his homosexuality and the expectations of his tightly knit Greek family and

87 community. The film foregrounds the city as a site for both potential self­destruction and personal transformation. The public spaces of Melbourne, its streets, laneways, bars, clubs and inner city houses are not only implicated in Ari’s trajectory towards self­destruction, away from the safety of his Greek community, but the city also offers the space in which self­reconciliation is possible. In this sense, Ari’s existential crisis and ambivalence are both amplified and aided by the conditions of urbanity in which he lives.

In Ari’s attempt to flee from the weight of expectations of his Greek community and family, to ‘escape history’ and the oppressive forces of tradition, he is increasingly dependent on the resources of the city. In the city’s interstitial and public spaces, Ari finds the opportunity for anonymous casual sex, in its laneways and the back of buildings. Over the course of the 24 hours of narrative action, Ari is shown in constant motion through city streets, its clubs and bars, where he fuels his all­night alcohol and drug binge. His motility and the distractions of the city enable his detachment from family and those he loves, as Collins and Davis observe:

Ari’s life is lived in a permanent state of disconnection or as it is put by Christos Tsiolkas in his novel Loaded on which the film is based, in a permanent state of ‘fast forward’: ‘Fast forward past birth, early childhood, school … Fast forward … He ran to escape history. That’s his story. Press Stop. Tape is terminated.’ (2004: 161)

Ari’s experience is disorienting: gay and the son of migrants, he is situated in a globalised world of accelerated change, and for the authors the film captures something of the embodiedness of this experience through the techniques of filmmaking (2004: 160). With its fast­paced editing, use of contemporary music and hand­held camera techniques, a ‘decentring’ effect is captured, to some extent simulating a perceptual modality akin to the experience of contemporary urbanism — the collapse and confusion of time and space. If, as Collins and Davis argue, the ‘kind of alienation expressed by Ari in Head On and, more importantly, embodied in the film’s aesthetic of speed, takes us beyond the available identity politics’ (2004: 160), it is because Ari embodies a visceral experience of postmodern urbanity that is fast, fragmented and fleeting. Head On renders a mimesis of urbanity through the apparatus of film and the conventions of filmmaking, in a visceral

88 and acute manner. Ari’s perpetual mobility is shared by the spectator’s, embodied in the film viewing experience itself, highlighting the parallel between cinematic and urban experience.

Subjective experience in Head On is offered in contrast to notions of community, a theme strongly echoed throughout the film. Community here is grounded in the city, in the all­ male clubs and bars that Ari’s father frequents, and in the social spaces of the women’s homes where they perform as hosts for their extended family gatherings. Ari rejects what is for him the repressive and traditionally hidebound community of his Greek culture. His exploration of identity is rendered in contrast to the close­knit Greek community from which he is trying to escape.

The film’s opening scene establishes Ari’s ambivalent position as both inside and outside his Greek community through a spatial metaphor. He is first seen at a traditional Greek wedding, dancing in the centre of a circle, but soon catches the eye of a friend and extracts himself, and for the remainder of the dance stands watching from the outside. In the same way that he is both inside and outside the Greek community, so he is inside and outside the gay community, a position he simultaneously embraces and rejects. The audience is consistently reminded of the negotiations and contested nature of the migrant and homosexual experience, which is played out across city space. The film suggests that, for many people, the migrant experience and the experience of being a marginalised Other involve constant negotiation, contestation and compromise. Such a position can lead to violent encounters with dominant groups. A scene in which Ari’s Greek transvestite friend Toula is brutally bashed by a homophobic policeman is a reminder that the city of diversity is not necessarily a tolerant one.

For a moment, it seems Ari might find a place where his differences are accepted when he stumbles upon the Rembetica Club in inner­city Fitzroy, the hangout of young Greeks and Australians, seen dancing, drinking and discussing politics in an open­minded fashion. This space evokes Foucault’s heterotopia, in which places can operate as spaces of multiplicity and difference. Foucault uses the term ‘heterotopia’ to refer to ‘those singular

89 spaces to be found in some social spaces whose functions are quite opposite or different of others’ (in Rabinow 1984: 252). The club suggests a strong Greek identity — people are dancing Greek style to Greek music — but it is an exuberant hybrid of Greek/Anglo youth culture, in which the balalaika and electric guitar create a fusion of styles. It is a contrast to the traditional club of Ari’s patriarchal father, whose members seem to consist exclusively of middle­aged and elderly Greek men.

Ari’s constant movement through the spaces of the city ends at an abandoned wharf in Port Melbourne, back in the city’s liminal zone. Across the river from the wharf, the city CBD is visible — a reminder of Ari’s outsider status. Collins and Davis state that much has been made of this ending, with its vivid display of the centrality of shame in queer identification. The final image is of Ari dancing in circles, yelling abjectly at the world: ‘No one is going to remember me when I’m dead. I’m a sailor and a whore, and I will be till the end of the world.’ (Collins and Davis 2004: 161). Yet director Ana Kokkinos, in shooting this particular ending, states that Ari ‘returns to the collective’ (2004: 161), implying that some kind of reconciliation has occurred. Ari’s trajectory through the city’s liminal spaces, his exploration of identity, hints at the possibility of personal transformation. These heterotopic spaces suggest the possibility of resistance and the potential for change, ‘for experimentation, fluidity and disorder’ (Muller 2004: 25). In this sense, despite the hard edge of the city represented in the film, the utopian trope is evoked.

In both Sex and the City and Head On, the city is central to the exploration of sexual identity. City space is eroticised. The city’s distinction as a place in which we live in close proximity to strangers is pivotal to the sexual expression of its inhabitants. In these texts, the city is a place that offers seemingly unlimited encounters with strangers, in a generally benign and utopian manner. It is interesting that both texts explore identities who have previously been marginalised in the life of the city — women and homosexuals — and whose occupation of the city has been historically ambivalent. Sex and the City’s assertion of female sexuality and authority is, on one level, exercised through the adoption of conventional masculine connections to the city, through the protagonists acquisition of social and economic power. In contrast, Ari’s sexual identity in Head On is expressed in

90 the city’s liminal and heterotopic spaces, outside the dominant spaces of the city. These spaces invite the danger that is an implicit part of his sexual pleasure.

The discussion of cinematic representations of the city thus far is confined to cities other than the case study area of Brisbane, because Brisbane’s cinematic representations are few. He Died with a Falafel in His Hand (2001), Feeling Sexy (Davida Allen 1999) and 48 Shades (Daniel Lapaine 2006, adapted from the novel by Nick Earls) are among a handful of films located in Brisbane. This is largely due to economic and industrial reasons, and Brisbane’s status as a regional city, while Australia’s film industry is predominantly located in Sydney and Melbourne. Narratives of the city are more commonly found in novels, where a strong literary tradition has carved out a unique Brisbane identity by connecting the city’s physical, topographical and climatic differences with differences in the city’s inhabitants.

BRISBANE: FROM THE WILDERNESS

I would want to say that geographically, climatically, architecturally, but also in its social and political history, Queensland is different. I’m convinced that our notions of the world are determined by the earliest spatial forms we encounter … (Malouf in Baker 1984: 260)

Queensland’s and Brisbane’s mythology as places that are somehow different from the rest of the country is enduring in the Australian imaginary. Despite the diversity of stories about Brisbane at the end of the twentieth century, themes such as a politics of repression, the exotic, the eccentric, historical forgetfulness and denial, frontierism and conservatism versus radicalism remain constant (Sheahan­Bright and Glover 2002: 16). Chapter 5 identifies some of the political and social forces that have shaped the city and state, while the following section explores how this difference, until recently, has been rendered discursively, predominantly in literature in ways that emphasise Brisbane as a non­urban place. Many literary accounts of the city highlight the experience of living in the city as an embodied, sensory one that is closely connected to the natural elements.

91 It is impossible to talk about literary representations of Brisbane without reference to the oft­quoted Brisbane­born novelist David Malouf, who chronicled his childhood in the city in several novels and memoirs. Malouf was one of the first writers to carve out a regional identity for Brisbane, mapping the ways in which subjectivities are shaped by place — by its history, landscape, climate, topography and, for him, the spaces of the Queensland house. It is a distinction that has helped foster the mythology of Queensland and Queenslanders as somehow different from other Australians. For Malouf, Brisbane’s social and political history and its physical features contribute to the formation of ‘a different sensibility, a different cast of mind … a different sort of Australian’ (Malouf 1990: 263). Brisbane was a town of Victorian sensibilities, a place ‘that has been extraordinarily repressive’ (Malouf 1984: 259).

In particular, the Queenslander house, with its timber walls, tin roof and verandahs, is an icon of regional difference. But Malouf connects the house to its inhabitants in ways which shape formative experience and modes of subjectivity:

First houses are the grounds of our first experience. Crawling about at floor level, room by room, we discover laws that will apply later in to the world at large; and who is to say if our notions of space are not determined for all time by what we encounter there, in the particular relationship of living­rooms to attic and cellar (or in my case under the house), of inner rooms to the verandahs that are open boundaries? … The house is a field of dense affinities, laid down, each one, with an almost physical power … (1986: 8)

In this description, there is an organic relationship between house and self (Whitlock 1994: 176). The timber Queensland house with its flimsiness, close connection to the elements and open verandahs, blur the boundaries between public and private space. The tent­like form of the Queenslander, the precariousness with which the buildings appear perched on the hillsides on stumps with the ability to literally ‘up stumps’ and go, to move the house from one location to another, suggest a non­ urban dwelling, more suited to an itinerant or nomadic existence (Sullivan 2000: 124). For writer Rodney Hall, the Queenslander’s impermanence also works ideologically to expose the fragile veneer of white settlement

92 over the Indigenous owners, for ‘in some essential sense we are only perched on the land’ (in Sullivan 2000: 128).

The houses’ flimsiness and Brisbane’s sub­tropical climate thrust their inhabitants into an embodied, sensual relationship with the houses and beyond into the landscape of the city. In 12 Edmonstone Street, the house is represented as a ‘nest’ of open rooms, and the experience of habitation is like ‘living in a reorganized forest’ (cited in Whitlock 1994: 174). Author John Birmingham pursues the same theme some 20 years later when he laments the loss of traditional timber housing as it replaced by masonry apartment blocks and houses. For Birmingham, the loss represents a different experience of being in the city:

This style of living, a hot, close and sticky sense of immediately being­ in­the­world, whether inside or out, is contracting into gentrified yuppie ghettoes all over the city as old wooden houses disappear … there is no sitting on back verandahs … no stepping carefully in your bare feet on weathered boards … (2002: 7)

Birmingham’s evocation of the Queenslander experience renders by contrast, apartment living as undesirable. The apartment seals its inhabitant from the sensual Brisbane environment and the forces of nature. It is a romantic trope of the Queensland house and it is possible that the author’s account of loss is nostalgic; perhaps he is mourning his carefree and hedonistic youth.

Interestingly, the Queenslander as an icon of regional difference remains potent despite the fact that the majority of the city’s residents live in brick homes; the city’s suburbs are full of the brick and tile houses characteristic of all Australian suburbs. Nonetheless, living in a Queenslander requires certain habits of living, largely because the house provides little of the sense of privacy of more solid masonry houses. Unlike masonry, the Queenslander’s timber walls offer no protection from noise occurring inside its rooms, nor insulation from sounds outside the house: the sounds of neighbours, traffic and nature all impinge on the Queenslander’s inhabitants. Timber doors and windows warped from years of movement may be left open, inviting more unwanted sounds and sights. This openness requires discretion of its inhabitants and neighbours; noise is registered but not acknowledged.

93 The experience of living in Brisbane’s flimsy houses is enlarged to the city, so that the city itself is characterised in many novels by its shantytown look of impermanence. In his novel Johnno (1974), Malouf describes the town as ‘so shabby and makeshift … nothing seemed permanent here. Brisbane was a huge shanty­town, set down in the middle of nowhere.’ (1974: 23) While writers such as Malouf have claimed a regional identity for Brisbane, this distinction also carries the undertow of inferiority — the city is not a real city, it lacks the solidity and sense of permanence of larger cities. Such discourses have contributed to Brisbane’s status in the national imaginary as an inferior town. Brisbane’s lack of urbanity is emphasised by other Queensland writers who associate the city with wilderness and innocence as Whitlock notes:

Even when urban space enters Queensland narratives, it retains the qualities of wilderness, impermanence and excess, the ‘sprawling timber settlement’ as Astley describes it. (Whitlock 1984: 173)

Collapsed into a tropical wilderness, Brisbane lacks any signifiers of the city, and instead appears as a place vaguely imagined as ‘the north’. Sullivan, in her literary study of Brisbane, identifies the regularity that the trope of bountiful nature appears even in contemporary narratives set in Brisbane. ‘Green and growth’ is everywhere in the novels of David Malouf, Jessica Anderson, Peter Carey, Rosie Scott and Venero Armanno, who she suggests:

enthusiastically catalogue … the effects of form, scale scent and hue — the perfumed canopy of frangipani, the dense ball of the mango tree, the amorphous depths of the banyan fig, the dark silhouette of the hoop or bunya pine emerging from the ridge, the brighter feathered foliage of jacaranda and poinciana. (2000: 91)

Similarly, Thea Astley’s description of Brisbane inhabitants as ‘slow natives’ is a term that locates them within nature or the wilderness, a description devoid of urban associations (Whitlock 1984:89).

94 The imaginary city of an earlier Brisbane described by Malouf and others, is almost unrecognisable from the contemporary Brisbane. Yet despite the construction of many new apartment blocks and medium density housing, timber Queenslanders still dot the city’s hillsides and nature still encroaches into inner city areas. While Birmingham’s melancholy description of a lost way of life marked by a visceral, corporeal sense of place suggests that the new Brisbane deprives people of an embodied relationship with the city, Andrew McGahan’s new Brisbane described in his award­winning book Last Drinks (2000) is still a place of intense sensory experience. People are just as much exposed to the city’s stifling heat and humidity as they always were, it is just that they respond differently to it now:

And it was hot…My shirt was plastered to my back and the air shimmered up from the bitumen. But no one else seemed to notice it. In the old days, Brisbane would have fallen into a torpor on afternoons like this. But now…it was as if the heat didn’t matter. I saw shirtless bodies and bikinis. Eskies full of beer. Kids dashing about under their broad brimmed hats. And for some reason I couldn’t grasp, it bothered me. (2000:75)

Brisbane’s inhabitants have changed with the city in McGahan’s description. No longer the victims of the city’s intense summer heat, forced into the supine indolence that Birmingham describes, they have adapted to life in the new metropolis and acquired the indifference and busy­ness typical of urban dwellers the world over.

McGahan’s narrator George Verney in Last Drinks describes the shock of returning to Brisbane after a ten­year absence. He is particularly unnerved by the changes to his ‘beloved’ New Farm, one of the three sites of the case study area of the thesis:

Then I was turning down Brunswick Street into New Farm — my beloved, dirty, half­crazed and occasionally dangerous New Farm had disappeared completely. In its place was … I didn’t know what it was … I inched down Brunswick Street in a traffic jam. In my memory it was a long seedy street of boarding houses, pawnshops and streetwalking prostitutes. They had all been swept away. The entire street … seemed to be lined with cafes and art galleries, sushi bars and designer stores. There was barely a single building I could place. And then there was the park, which was still just a park but had it ever been that full of people? New Farm Park had always been for the junkies and alcoholics. What were families doing

95 there? What were people doing jogging there, or walking dogs or playing cricket? And what about the junkies and alcoholics and boarding house old men … where had they all gone? Where had all the fit bodies come from? All this wealth and tanned skin and good clothes? (2000: 76)

Verney’s description invokes a similar sense of loss to that of Birmingham’s earlier quote, there is a romanticism and nostalgia here which speaks of a particular affiliation and identification with the city.

DESPERATELY SEEKING BRISBANE

Brisbane is well represented in literature for a town of its size, but there are very few cinematic images or narratives of Brisbane in the panoply of Australian city­based films. The city’s distinctive aesthetic has largely evaded the filmmaker’s eye. This is partly because the majority of the country’s film and media production facilities, key funding agencies and creative personnel are all located in Sydney and Melbourne. Like all regional cities, filming in Brisbane in these conditions incurs significant additional cost to a film’s budget.

When Andrew McGahan’s Brisbane­based novel, the Vogel winner Praise (1992), was made into an award­winning film of the same name, it was shot in Sydney. The narrative is set in Brisbane’s inner­city New Farm of the case study area, and it charts the relationship between Cynthia and Gordon, two young urban fringe­dwellers. The novel evokes a corporeal and sensual Brisbane, highlighted by its grunge genre in which the sexual and drug­taking excesses of Praise’s protagonists are amplified. Its evocation of place, through its languorous pace and ambience, descriptions of torpid summer heat and descriptions of places with which a Brisbane reader would be familiar, made it a quintessential Brisbane novel. The lassitude which marks protagonists Gordon and Cynthia’s relationship can be seen on a larger canvas, as representative of the apathy of the city’s inhabitants. In a pre­ transformed Brisbane, the majority of its citizens turned a blind eye to a corrupt, authoritarian government where a laissez­faire attitude allowed events to run a destructive course.

96 The film was set in Sydney because of the additional costs shooting in Brisbane would have entailed. Efforts were made to recreate the city, but for many Brisbane residents who saw the film, it was clearly not their city and the response from locals to the city’s substitution was hostile (McGahan 2002: 40). The old Brisbane hotels and the timber housing that made the boarding house living of the story an impossible exercise in strategies of privacy were replaced by the solid brick architecture of Sydney. Brisbane’s sub­tropical hues and verdant foliage were substituted by the grey­green eucalypt vegetation of Sydney. Ironically, no one else in the country appeared to notice the change of location, with one interstate reviewer remarking that the film had ‘captured the Queensland atmosphere perfectly’ (McGahan 2002: 41). National imaginaries of ‘the north’ were captured by the film’s focus on landscape and heat; there is little evidence of the city, as Brisbane author McGahan observes wryly:

While we obviously hadn’t given an accurate representation of what Queensland is really like, we had indeed given an accurate representation of what the rest of the country thinks Queensland is like. (2002: 41)

It is interesting to note that, although Praise depicts the harsh lives of inner city kids on the margins, the literary trope of Brisbane as a non­urban and therefore a benign, innocent place is maintained by McGahan’s description of his two protagonists (see below). Although Gordon and Cynthia indulge in dangerous self­harming behaviour by their consumption of large quantities of alcohol and drugs, for McGahan they are somehow different from ‘toughened big city kids’:

Gordon and Cynthia are not toughened, cynical, big city kids … they’re living an idle and quite comfortable life in a warm, sunny and leafy green and completely non­threatening small city like Brisbane … whatever problems and neuroses they may have, they come entirely from themselves and from their own actions, not from their surroundings. Brisbane is not a city, in itself, that takes people and breaks them. (2002: 42)

McGahan’s impulse to portray Brisbane as a gentle, suburban town belies the fact that his characters are just as at risk in Brisbane as other inner­city kids in other larger cities. His

97 explanation of his characters’ self­harming behaviour is that their neuroses are entirely their own and their environment plays no part. Big cities, however, can make people tough and cynical.

Into the twenty­first century, Brisbane’s cityscape continues to transform rapidly. This section has charted a course through representations of the city primarily prior to the urban consolidation of the mid­1990s, in which representations of the city have highlighted its close association with nature, portraying it as a distinctly non­urban place. The following chapter begins the case study of Brisbane’s inner city with an exploration of contemporary discourses that frame its nascent urbanism. As the city evolves from a regional town to a city, the ways in which it is reimagined assert what is unique about the local, and what impulses are projecting the new city.

CONCLUSION

This chapter recognises the centrality of the representational city in our lived experience of urban life, and has sought to highlight the relationship between modalities of identification and the city through perception and imagination. Cinematic and to some extent televisual projections of the city offer a mimesis of the experience of urbanity — its mobility, visual focus, pleasures and fragmentation of experience add potency to our experience of cinematic and televisual representations and our experience of urban life. In the texts discussed, the city is the site for explorations of identity and personal meaning. Reconfigurations of urban space have occurred in consort with reconfigurations of the social structure and representations of the city such as Sex and the City and Head On, which underscore changes across gender, sexuality and ethnicity and the ways in which they are inscribed in postmodern city space.

The chapter has also demonstrated the ways in which social developments in the postmodern city are represented in city texts through narrative identification of social,

98 emotional and cultural networks. The texts discussed in this chapter emphasise this aspect of urban life, in which the city is central to the development and maintenance of social relationships and to the negotiation of the affective life of urban inhabitants. These texts articulate both real and imaginary changes in the city, and constitute important resources and discourses which inform the experience of urbanity.

By contrast, representations of Brisbane up until the latter part of the twentieth century, confined largely to literature, have described it as a distinctly non­urban place. How is the city being reimagined as it shifts from being a regional town to an emerging global city? The following chapter explores some key thematic areas.

In the continuous process of reimagining the city, its palimpsest is inscribed with the psychoanalytic tropes of loss and desire, of the dystopian and utopian impulse. We are both instrumental in constructing the city and constitutive of it.

99 CHAPTER 4 ______ON THE CUSP: BRISBANE’S EMERGING URBANISM

Australia was born urban and quickly grew suburban. (Davison 1994: 98)

This chapter marks a transition from the preceding chapters’ theoretical accounts of the experience and perception of cities to a case­specific analysis of the city of Brisbane. In this and subsequent chapters, the rapidly transforming Brisbane is explored through an interpretive framework — of the material, symbolic and discursive city. The case study of Brisbane continues the key themes of the study: living with difference; the ways in which identities and affiliations are produced in the city; and the socio­spatial dimension of gender relations.

This chapter discusses several sites and discourses of Brisbane central to its transformation and to the different modes of engagement, both real and imaginative, now offered in the city. Chapter 5 examines Brisbane’s historical legacies, which reveal the significance of its shift from a provincial town to an emerging global city, particularly in the national context. At the conclusion of Chapter 5, it is recommended that the reader view the documentary ‘Everyone has Their Own New Farm’, as it forms part of the interpretive material, along with resident surveys which were conducted in the case study area of Brisbane’s inner city, and which are the focus of Chapter 6.

This chapter is presented in two parts. The first half continues the textual explorations of the previous chapter, to examine common discourses of Brisbane which are prevalent in its popular press. I assert that these function as discursive resources, offering ideas about, and model ways of being in, the newly urbanised Brisbane. The second part of the chapter looks at the social use of two material sites in Brisbane to examine the ways in

100 which they present new ways of inhabiting the city. Here I suggest that the rise of the cafe in Brisbane supports a growth in patterns of urban sociability and that the cafe functions as a space which enables the negotiation of urban civilities.

Thus the chapter emphasises the importance of both the material and the imaginary city for the ways people form identifications and affiliations with place. In a city undergoing rapid change, such as Brisbane, I assert that new modes of engagement and ways of inhabiting the city are offered, and further that discourses are instrumental resources for the adoption of new ways of being in the city.

FROM THE SUBURBS

Brisbane, shaped by successive authoritarian and repressive governments for most of the twentieth century, has long occupied a place in the national imaginary as a place of conservative ‘difference’, eccentricity and insularity. As it transforms and acquires the characteristics of a larger global city, how is the new city being reimagined and experienced? In what ways does the city’s past disrupt and fracture its new discourses?

The magnitude of Brisbane’s evolution is best appreciated when placed in context. It is Australia’s most suburban city (Salt 2005: 5) and even its inner­city areas have had a range of small to large land allotments with houses and very few apartments. It has no real tradition of urbanism compared with Australia’s larger cities such as Sydney or Melbourne. For suburban living, the key mode is privacy and seclusion — and this feature is antithetical to the ways of living emerging in the newly urbanised inner­city Brisbane, where people live in increasingly densely populated spaces. New techniques of inhabiting space are required in the city, and space is registered in embodied sensory ways. 1

The previous chapter referred to the longevity of the bush myth and its centrality in discourses of nation and identity. But in between the bush and the city is the place where most Australians live: the suburbs. With Australia once described as ‘the first suburban

101 nation’ by Donald Horne (1964), it is difficult to talk about Australian cities without paying some attention to the suburbs, particularly for a study such as this which maps its way through the evolution of a distinctly suburban town as it emerges into a city. The significance of the suburbs as a site of lived experience and cultural meaning is important for understanding the momentous shift from suburban living to the adoption of inner­city living in Brisbane. Discursively, inner­city life has been imagined as distinct from life in the suburbs: the two sites embody different cultural meanings and values.

In contrast to the inner city, the suburbs are characterised by their requirement for space and land, and were developed as the antithesis to urban living — as a refuge and escape from the city, a legacy of the nineteenth century industrial city’s association with disorder and disease. For historical reasons, suburban living flourished in Australia from the eighteenth century. 2 Urban historian Graeme Davison (1994) notes how, when Governor Phillip drew up the first town plan for Sydney in 1789, it embodied the aspirations of ‘decency, good order, health and domestic privacy’, which Davison argues lie at the heart of suburban ideals (1994: 100).

The physical, health and moral impetus behind the establishment of the suburbs endows the site with an enduring set of cultural discourses. For Davison, the conditions in which the suburbs were established, removing people from overcrowding and the unhygienic conditions of urban slums, meant the suburban ethos was based on a ‘logic of avoidance’ that attempted to banish anything deemed dangerous and offensive (1994: 110). The suburbs were seen to offer a more natural, orderly and healthy environment. Space was considered important; a virtuous and happy life required plenty of room — thus a garden and the expectation of privacy was part of the ethos (1994: 100).

Differences between suburban and urban living are frequently cast in a binary manner. For critics of suburban life, the promise of order and privacy also guaranteed boredom and conformity, a point to which I will return shortly. Moreover, values attributed to suburban life, such as peace, order and privacy, can be antithetical to urban living and have

102 important implications for Brisbane residents moving from suburban areas to the inner city.

Some writers argue that the suburbs are the location of a unique Australian identity (Kinnane 1998; Stretton 1970). The suburbs are where the majority of Australians live and where many of our stories in popular culture, such as Neighbours, are located. Despite the economic and social force that gave the suburbs a central role in the Australian way of life, their ambivalent status remains resonant in popular and critical discourse. Critiques of the suburbs present them as dull places of conformity in comparison to the apparent vitality of inner­city neighbourhoods, a critical trope arising from the Bohemian movement from the early twentieth century. 3 This is a criticism that remains alive in the twenty­first century, and the discussion of Sex and the City in Chapter 3 shows that a disdain for suburban life is not just an Australian preoccupation. The ABC TV comedy series Kath and Kim animates this theme, a quasi­affectionate parody of suburban values. The preoccupation of characters Kath and Kel with the minutiae of life and consumer fads is parodied in a similar manner to that of Barry Humphries’ alter ego, housewife superstar Edna Everage. Edna first appeared in the 1960s, and her attention to housing decor, cooking and the lives of her family was portrayed with a fierce satire that trivialised traditional feminine competencies associated with suburban life.

Novelist Patrick White appealed to a similar logic of spatial differentiation when he described the mythical suburb of Sarsaparilla as a ‘a geographical hell ruled by female demons’ (in Duruz 1994). In The City in History, historian Lewis Mumford (1961) claimed that suburban life was ‘not merely a child centred environment: it is based on a childish view of the world which is sacrificed to the pleasure principle’ (1961: 563). Mumford’s psychoanalytic reference, to pursue the theme, reveals the ways in which suburban life calls up anxieties about the feminine, about the Other, and where derision and satire are strategies to neutralise the Other’s threat.

Discourses that frame the suburbs in some way as trivial, inauthentic or simply negative reveal the ways in which the tropes of gender and sexuality are inscribed across spatial

103 landscapes. Kay Schaffer’s (1988) analysis of the bush myth in Women and the Bush: Forces of Desire in the Australian Cultural Tradition points to the phallocentricity of the spatial imagination and the effect of this for the ways in which space and place are both imagined and experienced. The suburbs, for the most part, are still the site of predominantly feminine activity and competencies, and as Tim Rowse observes, the ‘negative image of suburbia is equally a negative image of women’ (in Fiske et al. 1987: 10).

Contemporary marketing for urban life relies heavily on the opposition between the suburban and the urban: the city’s vitality and diversity is contrasted with the suburbs’ apparent dullness and homogeneity. The city is reframed as inclusive, multicultural and multi­experiential, and diversity is one of its many commodified pleasures. This is a theme evident in a tourism brochure for the Sydney inner­city suburb of Newtown, one example of a generalised discourse of the postmodern city. In the brochure, the appeal of the area is precisely that it is not suburban. Accordingly, Newtown is presented as a spectacle afforded by its demographic diversity and difference, and is central to its performance as a tourist site:

Some cities are cursed with suburbs, but Sydney’s blessed with Newtown — a cosmopolitan neighbourhood of more than 600 stores, 70 restaurants, 42 cafes, theatres, pubs, and entertainment venues, all trading in two streets whose origins lie in the nineteenth century.

Newtown is the Catwalk for those with more style than money … a parade where Yves St Laurent meets Saint Vincent de Paul, where Milano meets post­punk bohemia, where Max Mara meets Doc Marten, a stage where a petticoat is more likely to be your grandma’s than a Colette Dinnigan designer original …

Newtown’s the impact point where the University of Sydney collides with the University of Life. This is the place where professors and students, the upwardly mobile and the down at heel, gay and straight, migrant and middle class, wealth and welfare, suits and spikes share a successful neighbourhood experiment in the new globalism.

Instinctively alternative and defiantly independent, Newtown welcomes everyone interested in the real and unexpected energy of Sydney — a

104 discount funkiness based on tolerance, diversity, and the knowledge that life’s too short to stuff an olive.

(NSW Tourism:www. visitnsw.com.au/Destination accessed Sept 3 2003)

The opposition between inner city and suburbs is established at the outset, with some cities described as cursed with suburbs. Casting the inner city in distinction from the (abject) suburbs, the brochure ignores the fact that Sydney is mainly suburban and that many of Sydney’s suburbs are more ethnically diverse than its inner­city areas. Cabramatta, Fairfield and most other suburbs have characteristically high numbers of ethnic groups such as Vietnamese, Korean, Lebanese and so forth. Recent events, however, have helped to reframe these places as problem areas, rather than epicentres of diversity. 4

Curiously, the diversity celebrated in the Newtown brochure is principally one of the area’s socioeconomic mix, rather than its ethnic mix. The mingling of social groups invites the tourist­flaneur to a performance of difference, ‘a parade where Yves St Laurent meets Saint Vincent de Paul, where Milano meets post­punk bohemia’ and where ‘the upwardly mobile and down at heel’ appear in what is presented as something of a theatrical extravaganza. In this discourse, Newtown is a product, its diversity a commodity. Consumed visually and corporeally via its divergent sights, sounds, smells and tastes — its 70 restaurants offering cuisine from all over the globe, Newtown is a ‘successful neighbourhood experiment in new globalism’. Interestingly, the area’s social inequities — which are implicit in the text, referred to as the ‘down at heel’ — are vanquished and celebrated, incorporated into the rhetoric of difference.

CONSTRUCTING BRISBANE’S URBANISM

By contrast, Brisbane, with its limited tradition of metropolitan life, has fewer urban resources with which to promote itself, and the city’s shifting identity makes it an unstable site. In manifestations of Brisbane’s new identity, at times the city becomes captive to postmodernity’s visual excesses, as in the site of South Bank Parklands

105 discussed later, while on other occasions promotion of the city relies upon the tropes of the European city for historical and cultural cachet. Across its various representational sites, the city is alternately defensive, authoritarian, confident and anxious. Occasionally, a distinctive sense of sub­tropical urbanity is asserted, mindful of the ways in which people inhabit a city immersed in heat and humidity for many months of the year, and this is also evident in some of the city’s new architectural sites. One thing that unites Brisbane’s emerging urbanity, however, is the semiological instability of the city’s identity.

The oppositional trope of suburban versus urban is one that remains constant in promotions of Brisbane, although this opposition acquires different meanings than those expressed in the promotion for Sydney’s Newtown. In a 2004 billboard advertisement in the case study area of Newstead, featuring images of architectural renderings of apartments for sale, a blunter approach is expressed. The words underneath the images — ‘Urban living NOT suburban’ — are free of any ambiguity about which kind of living is the most desirable. However, it is interesting to note the way inner­city living maintains its links to suburban living in a promotional brochure for Petrie Point apartments in Brisbane’s inner­city New Farm (2000). Although the area’s attributes are pitched in contrast to the suburb’s failings, suggesting the mass evacuation and rejection of suburban life, the text nonetheless maintains a resonance with the suburban way of life:

Discerning baby boomers and generation X’ers who prefer lounging over latte rather than mowing the quarter acre block, are abandoning suburban living in droves. Instead, hankering after a more cosmopolitan lifestyle without the mind numbing drive to work, they are retreating to the residential mecca, the inner city, for chic shops and a lively dining, arts and theatre culture.

Despite the brochure’s claims of a cosmopolitan inner city life, the choice of words is suggestive of the health and relaxation ethos of suburbia, revealing that suburbia might have retained a stranglehold on the Brisbane psyche. ‘Lounging’ over lattes and ‘retreating to a residential mecca’ 5 allude to notions of privacy, relaxation and health — a discourse

106 and a way of living not typically associated with the city. It is a dream­wish that certain features valued about suburban life, such as quiet and privacy, can somehow be transplanted to the city, and this is an issue with which planners and city administrators are constantly faced. Moreover, in search of models of urbanity, the brochure draws upon a traditional bourgeois collection of amenities and activities: arts and theatre culture, ‘lively dining’ and chic shops. The appeal to ‘discerning baby boomers and generation X’ers’ has the whiff of status and class, an association that disavows the postmodern city’s attention to inclusivity and tolerance, and which is the central focus of the promotion of Sydney’s Newtown. Both advertisements articulate the inner city and its cultural meanings in distinctly different ways, despite the fact that both advertisements have different purposes and audiences. Nonetheless Brisbane’s lack of urban tradition and culture, as well as its lack of diversity in comparison to Sydney, reveals itself here while Newtown brochure appeals to the idea of a consumer­based cosmopolitanism. As a sociological concept, cosmopolitanism may refer to a set of ‘subjective attitudes, outlooks and practices’ which can broadly be characterised by a ‘disposition of openness towards others, people, things and experiences whose origin is non local’ (Skrbis and Woodward 2007:1). 6 Clearly, the adoption of cosmopolitan attitudes does not have to be spatially located in either the city or the suburbs, but frequently the city is promoted as the locus of these values, as the Newtown advertisement suggests.

Attempts to remove the city from its suburban origins by framing the suburbs as dull places in which to live are an easy, shorthand marketing strategy. Marketing short­circuits the complexity of city life to create identities in ways that are heavily dependent on the visual and on visual associations. A recent tourism advertisement for Brisbane (see below) uses a juxtaposition of images in a way that highlights both the city’s visual malleability and the uncertainty about its identity.

107 Advertisement appearing in The Sydney Morning Herald, May 2005

Although attempts have been made to carve out a unique identity for the city through a form of product differentiation adopted by the Brisbane City Council, where Brisbane is

108 promoted as the ‘River City’, here the city’s river acquires a different meaning. Appearing in The Sydney Morning Herald colour magazine, 7 Brisbane is re­presented as a Venice­ like city. The advertisement might be read in a number of ways. It could be a postmodern self­parodying, ironic statement about the city, about global cities in general now that Brisbane has ‘come of age’. Referencing the primacy of the spectacle in culture, the advertisement is a salute to the city as theme park, a pleasure playground and a collective fantasy of escape.

Alternatively, Brisbane gains an instant historical cachet through its association with a classic European city. Imagining Brisbane as Venice, replete with gondolas and gondoliers flanked by the Customs House, the city’s only nineteenth­century riverside building, presents the city as cultured, and is a departure from the usual tropes of fun and sun previously associated with promotions of Brisbane. The assertion of culture in the advertisement, imported or not, is cognisant of culture’s value in the symbolic and economic hierarchy of the postmodern city. However the advertisement is interpreted — as postmodern irony or as the suggestion of Brisbane as a European­style city — it nonetheless presents Brisbane as somewhere else.

Similar themes of a transplanted urban culture are evident in promotions for the converted Wool Stores in the Newstead case study area. In a brochure for the Dakota apartments (see below) the words ‘A New York State of Mind’ and ‘New York style of living’ invite an imaginative association which is indicative of the porous relationship between the imagination and the city (Raban 1974; Pile 1996; Donald 1999). The evocation here is somewhat confused: a grab bag of references to world cities where access to cultural amenities such as cafes and restaurants that ‘would not be out of place in the most chic European cities’ becomes constitutive of the New York style of living.

The imprimatur of European history is registered in descriptions of the building’s heritage and fabric with its re­use of old timber and bricks re­presented in the international style typical of converted industrial buildings in cities across the developed world. Wealth,

109 trade and industry — other markers of great cities — are woven into the narrative of the building, one in which its history as a wool store is also dramatised.

Dakota apartments brochure (Meridien Pty Ltd)

Brisbane’s role as an important player in Australia’s wool industry and in the world of trade and commerce is signalled: ‘Fine Merino wool, much sought after throughout the world, was essential to Australia’s prosperity …’ With its connotations of heritage,

110 wealth, trade and European civic culture, the refurbished Wool Stores are positioned in a traditional, colonial discourse of urbanity. Such imaginative tropes are common enough in constructions of Brisbane. While the familiarity of Europe as the powerhouse of urban culture is effective for its re­presentation in marketing campaigns, the persistence and longevity of the trope illustrate the potency of imaginative practices to convince us that such a desirable experience of the city is possible.

Donald elaborates the intersection between the imagination and representation, and the ways in which they inform our experience of the city:

The way we experience cities is profoundly shaped by the immaterial city of word, image, and myth. It is through them that we learn not only to see the cities, but also how to live in them … The traffic between fabric, representation and imagination fuzzies up epistemological and ontological distinctions, and in doing so, produces the city between, the imagined city where we actually live. (Donald 1999: 47)

In this context, while Brisbane may lack an urban tradition, the postmodern city as a site of hyper­production and consumption is endowed with an excess of resources and commodities to engage the imagination. Benjamin’s claim that ‘commodities embody dreams’ (Buck­Morss, cited in Zukin, 1995: 189) points to the interplay between the imagination and the material world. Similarly, Jukes argues that metropolitan markets and consumption practices provide not only physical necessities, ‘but the imaginative requirements of existence: fantasy, escapism, glamour, magic, romance’ (in Larbalestier 1994: 187, my emphasis). The ‘between city’ to which Donald refers — the material city and the city of imagination — is where we actually live. It may well represent — even if only temporarily — an urban life lived elsewhere, or even another life.

DEFINED BY LACK?

It is interesting to note how Brisbane’s lack of urban tradition, discussed in earlier literary representations, emerges throughout the period of the city’s transformation. Some of the city’s new narratives are imbued with this sense of lack, while others adopt

111 a pedagogic function suggesting what urban life should be and some are instructive in the techniques and conduct required for urban living. Since the advent of Brisbane’s development into a fledgling global city from the mid­1990s, a surprising number of free magazines with glossy, image­laden high production values have been published and distributed across the inner city and other targeted areas of the city. These magazines are predominantly style and consumer guides to the emerging metropolis, yet they also chronicle the new city in a way that is alert to the specificities of its cultural, social and economic development. The majority of the magazines focus on the inner city, away from the suburbs into the burgeoning inner­city spaces of Fortitude Valley, West End, New Farm, Paddington and Newstead. Thus they foreground these areas’ new consumption and social spaces and the people who inhabit them.

Most notable of these is the Brisbane News, a glossy New Limited publication which first appeared in 1994. Other magazines, such as MAP, Time Off, City News, Brisbane Style, Brisbane Magazine and The Circle, are either newly created or have been transformed from tabloid weekly papers to colour magazines with the advent of desktop publishing technologies which combined high production values and cost effectiveness. Heavily dependent on advertising, the magazines feature myriad advertisements for local real estate and the booming property market, and other local businesses such as restaurants, fashion, jewellery and an increasing number of furniture and homewares shops typically located in inner­city areas.

The articles and reviews in The Brisbane News and MAP — of the city’s new cultural spaces, its restaurants, cafes, galleries, films and theatres — suggest a model of urban cultural consumption which is synonymous with ways of being in the city. In their presentation of urban style, with glossy advertisements for the latest fashion in interior design and clothing, the magazine proposes ways in which to fashion the self and the home, and anticipates the reader as embedded in the economy of the city. Local business people, artists and other prominent residents in the city are profiled in each edition. While MAP, The Brisbane Magazine and The Brisbane News audience’s demography may differ (MAP’s advertising and aesthetic appear to identify a younger audience than The Brisbane

112 News), the profiles are presented in a manner which suggests these people are models of urban style and living. MAP’s editorial makes this quite explicit, its moniker an acronym for ‘Motivated Australian People’ who embody the magazine’s ethos of personal growth and risk­taking, of ‘taking the road less travelled’ and who, on the basis of such criteria, tend to be mainly goal­focused entrepreneurs. MAP’s focus on ‘creatives’ and entrepreneurs advocates an active form of citizenship in the new city which is not just consumer oriented, but which is also based on an idea of citizen­as­producer who contributes to new modes of urban­based consumption.

The Brisbane News was the first of these magazines to appear (in 1994) and it is interesting to chart its articulation of city life since its inception. For example, an article in a 1995 edition helps establish The Brisbane News as an authority on urban life. The article, ‘Dining Tips: Dining Out Can Be Fraught with Uncertainty’, responded to the rapid growth in restaurant and cafe culture and provided advice on restaurant etiquette (3– 9 May 1995: 9). The article instructed novitiate diners on the required conduct for restaurants. In a somewhat authoritarian manner, diners were instructed to ‘arrive as close to the reserved time as possible’ and ‘don’t click your fingers to attract attention; a smile or wave will generally suffice’ (p. 9). Further information, such as ‘don’t stand around like shag on a rock if no one greets you [when entering a restaurant]’, display a curious mix of paternalism and colloquialism. The level of paternalism — or perhaps anxiety — evident in the article is unsurprising given the city’s legacy of provincialism and the authoritarian culture still hovering beneath the surface. As well as highlighting the significance of new ways of being in the city, such as the practice of regular dining out, the article registers a curious mix of authority and anxiety about the urban citizen’s ability to acquire the necessary competencies for this growing feature of urban life.

The instability of Brisbane’s identity and its lack of urbanism are underscored by postmodernity’s ocular focus and enchantment with the spectacle. The proliferation of the image throughout the twentieth century, enabled by technology, has facilitated a variety of visual practices and regimes. Among these, the juxtaposition of images — dislodging them from their original context — releases the image from its original meaning. Thus, in

113 this context, Brisbane morphs easily into Venice as it appears in the Sydney Morning Herald advertisement. Furthermore, the amorphous characteristic of the Brisbane identity, along with tax incentives, has encouraged overseas film production companies to take advantage of its malleability. So, in film, Brisbane has also appeared as the Czech capital of Prague in the first remake of Mission Impossible (1996), where brief glimpses of its Victorian buildings were used to signify Europe. By contrast, the suburb of Indooroopilly, with its patches of rainforest gullies some 7 kilometres from the city centre, was also used in the same film to represent Africa (Glover 2002: 46). The combination of Brisbane’s ambiguous identity and the ubiquitous appropriation of images, particularly in advertising, can create confusion.

Moreover, because there is something fluid about the city’s ontology, ‘the boundary between imagination and fact’ is more easily eroded than in other landscapes (Raban 1974: 10). Baudrillard’s concept of simulacra is also useful here, identifying the ethical strain that is placed on the real when images are dislodged from meaning and where reality is blurred or collapsed altogether. Discerning the real from the fake is increasingly difficult — perhaps only those with certain cultural skills or industries that produce such narratives can tell the difference.

The discussion thus far has focused on Brisbane’s shifting and unstable identity as it moves from its suburban and regional origins. The point is not to present this as a problem; rather, it is to highlight the momentous shift occurring at this period in Brisbane’s history and explore the ways in which concerns around change are discursively represented. New ways of inhabiting and imagining the city the city are being carved out, and as this thesis has argued from the outset, experience and imagination are inextricably linked. The boundary between the imagination and reality in the city is prone to porosity, impacting on the way we inhabit and experience the city.

114 SOUTHBANK PARKLANDS

This chapter now moves from the discursive city to the material city to examine two new city sites, South Bank Parklands and Brisbane’s cafe culture. This section elaborates the function of these additional public spaces for their meanings, and for the ways in which they enable new ways modes of engagement in the city.

Visual excess is synonymous with the postmodern city (Harvey 1990; Venturi and Scott Brown 2004) and Brisbane’s South Bank Parklands is a rich semiotic site typical of the postmodern city’s development of large­scale waterside precincts. Converted from an industrial site after Expo ’88, the Parklands are located across the Brisbane River from the CBD. (Chapter 5 charts the significance of Expo ’88 in the repositioning of Brisbane.) However, the difference between South Bank Parklands and other city spectacles such as Sydney’s Darling Harbour and Baltimore’s Harbor Place, is that the South Bank Parklands has a large amount of public space and limited retail outlets. A handful of restaurants, cafes and souvenir shops are dotted across the site, but the majority of the area is public space.

One of the distinctive features of the Parklands is the melee of multicultural appropriation used in its landscaping features: a Nepalese temple, a Piazza, European­style classical gardens with stone fountains, a Japanese­style bamboo garden. Its restaurants offer a variety of ethnic cuisine — Italian, Greek, Chinese, Lebanese. But the Parklands’ focal point is an Australian icon, a beach surrounded by palms, fig trees and boulders, with a rainforest to its west. Only the buildings across the river are reminders of the beach’s urban location. The beach is monitored by lifeguards, who wear iconic Australian lifesaver uniforms of red and gold. The beach has endured several name changes from Kodak to Breaka to Streets, representing the corporate sponsor who endows it, and suggesting a malleability that resonates with the city’s own fluid identity. John Macarthur (1999), in his critique of South Bank Parklands, interprets its reproduction of natural elements, such as its white sandy beaches and tropical rainforests, as a lack of confidence in the city:

115 The real beaches and rainforests are about 100 kilometres north and south of Brisbane. It seems a startling lack of confidence in the interest that the city itself might generate, to build in miniature a fair selection of the things Brisbane lacks, from Piazza to beaches. (1999: 178)

Streets Beach, South Bank Parklands

While the Parklands offers an eclectic re­presentation of natural and manufactured resources as Macarthur suggests, this is a convention which was part of the culture and establishment of large public parks in the nineteenth century city. Regarded as the ‘lungs of the city’, the provisioning of parks at this time was a response to the deleterious effects of industrialism; they were principally designed as places for health and relaxation. The nineteenth century view that parks might ‘satisfy that inextinguishable love for nature and fresh air and the bright face of the sun’ (a nineteenth century London priest cited in Clark, 1973: 31) is a view underpinning South Bank Parklands and manifest in its varied natural environments, from the classical gardens to its beach. Its long riverside and arbour

116 walkways provide ample space for leisure and exercise, such as walking, cycling and rollerblading. Moreover, the Parklands’ nineteenth century antecedent similarly appropriated architectural features and botany from the Classical world and the Orient. Rotundas, obelisks, cairns and greenhouses housing exotic botanical specimens were references to a world beyond the city and the country. The acquisition of such features was emblematic of the Empire’s power, but in the contemporary Parklands they assume multiple meanings. Postmodern appropriation is an obvious trope, but equally the incorporation of a Nepalese temple and other ethnic sites may also be representative of a recently acquired curiosity about a world beyond the city’s own provincial boundaries and a reflection of what is occurring in some outer suburbs, which have high rates of overseas migrants.

Moreover, as the Parklands’ centrepiece, the beach is attentive to the corporeal dimension of Brisbane living, to a climate that immerses its inhabitants for so many months of the year into an intense physical relationship with the city. Popular with tourists and locals, the beach offers new public spaces in which to experience this aspect of the city in a novel, embodied way. The beach is a curious performance site, a sort of sandy piazza for people to meet and hang out, where the display of semi­naked bodies is juxtaposed against the backdrop of the city’s corporate towers across the river. The beach transposes the embodied and sensual way of living in Brisbane in summer to the city, away from the privacy of back verandahs, gardens and hothouses — it offers the experience of a unique urban corporeality which is also an intensely public one.

As public space, the Parklands and its beach are part of the city’s expanded social space, offering sites for social interaction — arguably one which is well adapted to a sub­tropical climate. Moreover, the likelihood of encountering strangers in the public spaces of the Parkland presents the possibility for the negotiation of difference, albeit in a superficial manner.

Another addition to Brisbane’s social space which offers increased participation and engagement is the cafe. The following section explores the role of the cafe in Brisbane’s

117 burgeoning cafe culture for the ways in which it supports new modes of engagement and a growth in sociability — and what this might mean for the practice of urban civility.

THE CAFE: THE ENABLING OF CIVILITY

Coffee changes people. Moreover, it changes the way they interact with their friends, their fellow citizens and their community. The proliferation of coffee­house drinkers and the establishment of coffee­houses were the first signs of change. (Ellis 2004: 24)

The importance of the café for Brisbane revolves around two fundamental functions relating to the acquisition of urban competencies and the reproduction of social identities and networks. First, cafes are essentially social spaces where social interaction is facilitated by allowing people to meet, talk and pass the time. The café’s function as a social space connects on a broader level, with a growth in sociability that is representative of changes occurring at the structural level of society (see Maffesoli and Thrift in Chapter 2). Second, the cafe is circumscribed by its role as a place of hospitality in which the cultivation of civil behaviour such as reciprocity is coded into its spaces. Although cafes are consumer spaces — and, as some have argued, may be bourgeois spaces (Zukin 1995) — in both contexts they perform a number of important social and civic functions.

For a city such as Brisbane, where urbanism is nascent, the cafe may be seen to enable the negotiation of sociability and civility, facilitating a negotiation — albeit limited — of difference, of the Other.

The cafe is a ubiquitous part of postmodern city life. In Australia, the enthusiastic adoption of cafe culture has provisioned city and suburban streets and malls with a myriad of places to eat and drink — traditional­style cafes, slick postmodern cafes, funky cafes, cafe­bookshops, cafe­delis, franchise cafes such as Starbucks, those wedged artfully in small gaps between buildings. In Brisbane, a subtropical climate lends itself to a European­style cafe culture of outdoor drinking and dining. Since the Brisbane City

118 Council removed the prohibition on footpath dining in 1988, the footpaths of the inner city, and increasingly the suburbs, have become lined with outdoor tables and chairs. The rise of the cafe in Brisbane is also linked to rise of food culture and industry, as well as to increased leisure time, the rise of ‘aesthetic’ cultures and changes in work habits — especially amongst young people.

This following section examines the phenomenon of cafe culture in Brisbane from a semiotic, social and ethnographic perspective. The cafe is increasingly an intrinsic part of the experience of the city, and in this capacity it performs several important functions as a site for the negotiation of sociability and civility — significant for a city with a limited tradition of urbanism. Habermas’s conception of the bourgeois public sphere (1962) and its relationship to the modern city’s meeting places is a useful lens through which to examine the role of the cafe.

AN ETHNOGRAPHIC DIGRESSION …

On my daily walk around the streets of my neighbourhood, I sometimes pass the sidewalk cafes that have become synonymous with the area. On this particular day, I take a less familiar route and notice a new, small cafe wedged between a candle shop and an industrial building. At one of the two footpath tables sit a couple with their young child, conveniently (for them) asleep in a stroller. One partner is reading the Saturday paper, and the other has her nose in a book — there is coffee, muffins and newspapers strewn across the table. I am struck by this tableau of domestic ease and comfort, precisely because it is so domestic and yet the couple and child, with all the requirements of a relaxed Saturday morning, are situated outside the spaces of the home. It brought to mind an elegant phrase of Robert Hughes’ about the types of spaces that cities need, where ‘solitudes may lie together’ (cited in Miller 2001: 79). I could, of course, also have drawn my attention to other vignettes at the cafe — for example, people involved in animated or easy conversation — and this would support Hughes’ other dictum that cities need places where ‘people can gather and engage in energetic discourse’ (2001: 79), which is of course another way in which people inhabit and utilise the cafe.

119 The cafe’s ascendancy is congruent with an ontology of the city of modernity and postmodernity; it is semi­public space which supports either solitude — through anonymity — or sociability, within a social context. A central element in ways of being in the postmodern city, cafe culture is widely promoted as one of the city’s assets, and is prevalent in contemporary representations of the city (Sadler and Haskins 2005). In Brisbane, the cafe is emblematic of urban change; it is a new, social, semi­public space that has enthusiastically been embraced by the city’s residents. For most of the survey respondents and some interview participants discussed in Chapter 6, the big attraction of inner city life was its amenities such as cafes, restaurants and other entertainment and meeting places. Prior to the early 1990s in Brisbane, there were very few cafes or restaurants in the city. The case study area of New Farm and Newstead had no cafes, and Fortitude Valley had Brisbane’s only cafe in the continental style, the aptly named Italian­owned Cosmopolitan. Along with an exponential growth in restaurants, cafes have flourished not just in the inner city, but throughout the suburbs as well. Within the case study area, there are now at least 50 new cafes 8 since its period of urban consolidation of the last decade; there are almost as many new restaurants.

In Brisbane, the sidewalk cafe is ubiquitous: because of the city’s climate, all cafes offer interior and footpath seating. In a reconfiguring of the iconic Queensland house’s verandah, the enthusiastic take­up of outdoor eating and dining can be seen as an adaptation of its usage: it is the space in between the public and the private world, an outdoor­indoor space where people hang out together and look outward (Hayes 2000: 3).

THE CAFE AND SOCIABILITY

The coffee house antecedent of the contemporary cafe, from the sixteenth century on, was notable as a place of intense sociability and a space where people from all walks of life mingled. The rise of contemporary urban­based cafe culture, maintains the tradition of the early coffee house, and represents a significant site for the reconfiguration of social

120 relationships, a pattern of social development which is occurring at a broader societal level.

The first sixteenth century coffee houses in the Middle East served as social gathering places where men assembled to drink coffee or tea, listen to music, read books, and play chess and backgammon (Ellis 2004). Similarly, eighteenth century cafes in Britain and parts of Europe were centres of community for informal discussions and politics and, apart from the occasional female staffer, were the exclusive domain of men (Laegren and Stewart 2003: 358). The early coffee house, unlike all other social institutions of the time, was most singularly defined by its inclusivity of people from all walks of life (Ellis 2004: 59). Similarly, the espresso bars of the 1950s appearing in Europe, North America and to a lesser extent Australia, became known for their mix of customers from a diversity of classes, races and cultures, and now included women as their patrons (2004: 233). Such was the notoriety of the espresso bar’s diverse customer base that Architectural Digest magazine claimed the new coffee bars as ‘the greatest social revolution since the launderette in 1954’ (2004: 234).

Although I suggest that in similar ways to its precursors, the contemporary cafe is an egalitarian space with important social consequences in the postmodern city, and in particular for Brisbane, it has to be acknowledged that as social space, the cafe is governed by a set of rules. In this context, the cafe communicates meaning: it may specify who belongs and how they may behave, and may contribute to the production and reproduction of different social groups (Bourdieu 1984; LeFebvre 1991). Bourdieu’s conception of cultural capital accounts for the acquisition of cultural competencies and explains why some people feel comfortable in certain spaces while others may feel excluded. Knowledges and skills are required in social spaces, and subtle and sometimes not so subtle hierarchies of power and ownership operate, cutting across gender, ethnic and class divisions. Yet, despite this, the relatively low cost of obtaining entry into the cafe through the purchase of a drink gives it greater accessibility than a pub or restaurant, or many other consumer places central to sociability and place attachment. Moreover,

121 there are many styles of cafes in the case study area of Fortitude Valley, Newstead and New Farm, which cater to a diversity of people and different demographic groups.

Habermas’s conception of the public sphere (1962) is instructive for the ways in which semi­public places such as the cafe contributed to the development of civilised discourse in the eighteenth century and parallels may be attributed to the contemporary cafe. Habermas identified the eighteenth century coffee house and salon as instrumental to the rise of the public sphere – importantly, to the development of critical discussion and rational argument. The bourgeois public sphere for Habermas, is based on the development of a social mode of interaction that became normative through socio­ structural transformation during this period, and the coffee house or salon was an arena that facilitated a particular form of sociability and communication style.

A sociable mode of interaction flourished in a vibrant eighteenth century urban culture, and was supported by a burgeoning newspaper and publishing industry. For Habermas, meeting places such as the urban­based coffee house were the heart of sociability, where conversational rules based on reasoned exchange were established; the cultivation of conversation was aimed at the dialogical egalitarian (Johnson 2006: 23). 9 Habermas’s bourgeois public sphere is essentially and potentially a political one, ‘conceived … as the sphere of private people come together as a public’ (Habermas 1992: 27). It refers to a realm of social life in which something approaching public opinion can be found. I am not claiming that the contemporary cafe might be the site of political dialogue and civic activism of the type that Habermas suggests. Rather, what is useful here and what the cafe facilitates is a mode of interaction similar to the one proposed by Habermas — one which has the potential to be distinguished by its ‘open and inclusive character’ (Johnson 2006: 22). The expectation of a ‘patient, willing comprehension of sympathetic fellows’ (2006: 23) really refers to the cultivation of the art of conversation based on a reciprocity and is one that requires empathetic listening as well as dialogue.

122 The cafe’s role in the cultivation of reasoned conversation does not diminish its relevance for the emotional life of urban dwellers, significant for this thesis’s assertion of the centrality of emotion and experience as key elements of city life. In this regard, affect may usefully be negotiated in the cafe because social interaction enables the expression of the affective dimension. Parkinson (1995) asserts that ‘getting emotional is primarily an interpersonal activity’ in which people present their own images of themselves to each other (1995: 277, cited in Milton). For Parkinson, ‘emotions may be private, self feelings, but they are eminently social. They are about the self that emerged from participation in the social world.’ (1995: 277) Wentworth and Yardley also suggest that emotion finds an expression in social encounters (in Milton 2005: 200). In addition, social exchange — particularly in public spaces such as the cafe — may facilitate the negotiation of emotion whereby the accepted behavioural conduct in public space requires the control and regulation of affect.

Maffesoli’s tribes, based upon the idea that emotion is the critical, binding dimension to social groups, is expressed through ‘the exchange of feelings, conversation’ (Maffesoli 1996: 13), a social practice which is typical to the cafe. In this context, the cafe facilitates a mode of interaction which is at once both emotional and rational amongst one’s own tribes, and others with whom one may have less­established relationships.

The café provides a neutral, benign site predicated on its function as transitional or liminal space; it is neither domestic, work nor wholly public space. In this capacity, it offers a safe testing ground for relationships. For example, in encounters with those less known, the cafe provides an arena for ‘trialling’ relationships in such a way that the social codes inscribed in its spaces enables the easy negotiation of less familiar and new relationships. Its liminal status removes its inhabitants from the potentially anxious intimacy of the home and affords protection from the unknown threat of the street.

Decisions about whether to pursue a relationship beyond the semi­public spaces of the cafe and into the more intimate spaces of the home can be made in the cafe’s transitional spaces. Moreover, the café’s ‘safety’ is further reinforced because it is

123 temporally regulated by its central purpose of food and beverage consumption: the cafe provides a finite certitude to meetings, with the length of encounter largely being determined by the time taken to consume a drink or meal. In this way, the possible complexity or ambiguity associated with meetings with strangers in the more intimate spaces of the home is avoided, and meeting in a cafe may relieve the onus and anxiety that can be associated with entertaining.

Another of the cafe’s social function is as a site in the negotiation and maintenance of place attachment. A sense of place connectedness through habitual and regular usage of a specific venue, and through the types of social interaction encountered in that space, contributes to social meaning and forms of belonging. People patronise particular cafes over others, become regulars and get to know the staff. Moreover, the signs of the cafe, through its décor, style, layout, food and drink menus, all communicate meaning to people. People become regulars through the forms of identifications and affinities made with a place and which are produced by a cafe’s ambience, design style, the types of coffee or tea, the food and the service and because of its location — possibly because it is either close to home or close to work. In the case study area of New Farm, Newstead and Fortitude Valley, the various cafe styles (discussed in more detail shortly) enable reconfigurations of identity, belonging and individual affiliations.

The purposes for which people use the cafe, whether work or socially related, further support additional layers of identification and meaning. Just as the boundaries between public and semi­public space in the cafe are blurred, equally malleable are the boundaries between semi­public and domestic space where regular customers domesticate the space as their own, performing activities they might otherwise do at home, such as reading, writing or simply having a tea or coffee break. Magazines and newspapers are usually provided in cafes, and reading may relieve the anxiety which can be associated with being alone in the cafe. Adding to the notion of the café as domestic space, is a current trend in interior design. Some cafes reproduce the comfort and domesticity of the home with the installation of sofas, large padded armchairs and soft curtain fabric to partition off spaces or act as a backdrop, all work to convey a

124 homey, domestic ambience. When functioning as a proxy workspace, the cafe becomes a space for work­related meetings or for working in solitude. It is not uncommon to see people accompanied by their laptops or notepads. As a place for work­related meetings, the cafe offers neutral territory where participants are detached from workspaces typically inscribed with hierarchies of power. Removed from the workplace into the hospitable spaces of the cafe, people’s professional status may appear less apparent (perhaps less intimidating), and the meeting and subsequent interactions have the capacity to adopt a congenial tone which might not otherwise occur.

The cafe’s increasingly iconic status in the city is supported by images and scenarios from popular culture in which they are typically featured as pre­eminently social places. The ubiquity of the cafe in representations of urban living has developed in parallel with the rise of cafe culture of the 1990s, reproducing its centrality as a site of sociability in the postmodern city. In the Practices of Space, Michel de Certeau suggests that ‘spatial usage creates the determining conditions of social life’ (1985: 129, emphasis added). As this thesis has already asserted, the cafe is a site in which urban communities cohere and congregate, and where relationships are forged and developed. In television programs such as Seinfeld and Friends, the cafe is the ‘ideal meeting place where people can come together and talk about life’s trivial problems’ (Sadler and Hoskins 2005: 206). In these programs, the boundary between domestic and commercial space is blurred in the cafe so that it functions within a public–private nexus as a home away from home. In programs such as Seinfeld or Friends, the cafe is an extension of the apartment, conveniently located — sometimes underneath the apartment block, as it appears in Friends. In its spaces, relationships are fostered and the minutiae of day­to­day city life is expressed; the cafe is the confessional space for sharing intimacies through the therapeutic technique of talk.

The cafe and restaurant are the meeting places for the women in Sex and the City. Indeed, the cafe is a significant development in the social life of the city for women; its environment is more hospitable to women than some of the city’s other meeting places, and it is close to usurping the traditional meeting place in Australia, the pub. The pub’s social organisation has traditionally revolved around the interests of masculine

125 relationships and culture (Fiske et al. 1987) and until the late 1970s, women were excluded by legislation from its public bars. There were many other sociocultural reasons why women did not feel comfortable in the pub, even once legislation was removed. By comparison, the cafe — despite the bourgeois associations in some of its manifestations — is more egalitarian than the pub, and its egalitarianism rests to some extent on a greater emphasis placed on disciplined conduct than in the pub. In the pub, the consumption of alcohol, combined with a cultural tolerance of excess and alcohol’s effect of loosening inhibitions, also encourages the loosening of socially acceptable forms of conduct. A wider range of behaviour is therefore tolerated and sanctioned, which for women in particular, can present problems. Even when the cafe does sell alcohol, its code of conduct demands greater restraint and control of its patrons, suggesting that it remains a benign space, free of the undercurrent of the sexual intimidation or aggression that can be part of the pub­and­alcohol experience. The negotiation of male and female relationships in the pub is typically of more concern (particularly to women) lest they go awry.

THE CAFE AND CIVILITY

As well as offering spaces that support a growth in urban sociability, the exponential rise of cafe culture in Brisbane can be seen as an important factor in the production of urban civilities. The types of regulatory regimes and codes of conduct inscribed in its spaces enable the negotiation of practices of civility. Reciprocity is central here, and it is the cafe’s function as a place of hospitality that adds another dimension to its role in the cultivation of civility and sociability. Cafe culture requires the acquisition of competencies associated with etiquette and manners that are based upon on notions of hospitality. The protocol required for ordering food and drink, and for eating and drinking with others, encourages certain types of behaviour such as courtesy, patience, restraint and tolerance by all participants, including wait staff. Thus, in this context, participation in cafe culture can be seen to be premised upon certain types of cultural capital (Bourdieu 1984), which may vary slightly between cafes.

126 The hospitable modes of conduct operating in the cafe as a form of social practice might be translated to other areas of life. The serving of drink and food in a semi­public space in exchange for money is more than a commercial transaction, it also demands the language and behaviour of civility. Conduct such as not talking too loudly, not eavesdropping on others’ conversations — knowing where to look and what to hear — are considered necessary competencies when thrust into close proximity with strangers. More intimately, the techniques of conversation — of listening, responding, sharing information — are practised in the cafe. Because the cafe is a venue where people may meet with others less familiar to themselves, the techniques of conversation assumes particular salience, as illustrated by Habermas’s and Ellis’s historical research. Here, the establishment of coffee houses in seventeenth century London is attributed to the development of social discourse and urban networking. The diversity and egalitarianism of the coffee house mentioned earlier, was recorded extensively in the diaries of Samuel Pepys, and helped set the ground for conversational rules and exchange (Ellis 2004: 57). The cafe was a sanctioned space which allowed values to be challenged and differences revealed, but the continued practice of the rules of conversation enabled the negotiation of such social diversity. Demonstrations of civility and generosity are straightforward in the cafe because of its established codes of conduct in an environment that is focused upon hospitality. Paying for another’s drink, although not a great expense, is a simple gesture of hospitality; ‘taking someone to coffee’ has become part of the lingua franca of workplace and business culture, and is endowed with many meanings.

The cafe’s basis as an hospitable place presents the potential for the safe negotiation of friendship and reciprocity between people with different traditions of hospitality. Ambiguities which may be generated by different sociocultural practices around expectations and levels of hospitality may be diminished because the cafe imposes its own temporal and hospitality regimes. In the increasingly ethnically diverse postmodern city, this is all the more relevant as people from different traditions converge and meet.

127 The aesthetics of a cafe can offer examples of taste and style which might be instructive in the wider context of home decoration, and serve as something of a model for home decorators. Ellis notes how the espresso bar of the 1950s frequently showcased the latest modernist aesthetic and displayed modern furniture, curtains and wallpaper designs. It showed old materials in new settings, and new materials such as plastic and aluminum (2004: 232). Similarly, some cafes and more frequently restaurants in the case study area of New Farm, Newstead and Fortitude Valley have been quick to include the most recent trends in interior design: embossed and patterned wallpaper, sheer curtains and modern lighting styles. Critiques of urban cafe culture, which see it as serving the interests of taste­based bourgeois patterns of consumption, overlook the diversity of cafe styles which serve a variety of demographic groups, and the minimal cost involved in meeting in cafes. Cafe styles vary, but can broadly be categorised into three types in the case study area of this thesis. The first is a fashionable minimalist décor, which typically includes a mix of aluminium and timber veneer tables and chairs, the odd splash of colour, some paintings or prints on the wall and no strong design statements. A smaller number have adopted a homey but sophisticated style where comfortable leather sofas, original paintings, dark timber tables and shelving and textured wallpaper evoke a European tradition of comfort and a quasi­ aristocratic notion of domesticity, as in Newstead’s London Club. A third style of cafe, more predominantly in the Valley, pays little attention to current décor trends and is notable for a stylistic understatement which can veer into a ‘grunge’ aesthetic.

In Wickham Street, Fortitude Valley, the community service organisation Mission Australia has established Café One, a cafe specifically designed for its clients who may feel intimidated or uncomfortable among the other types of cafes in the area. Also in the case study area of Fortitude Valley, the home of Brisbane’s youth music scene, several cafes present a downmarket or ‘grunge’ style, appealing to the area’s youth clientele and other marginal groups. Décor such as that at Fat Boys and Ric’s suggests a cavalier disregard for bourgeois taste: shabby décor with brightly coloured plastic chairs and posters plastered over its windows and walls.

128 At a broader level, the cafe can be seen as supporting the growth in networks of sociability and facilitating the cultivation of urban civility. In order to be regarded as acting appropriately as a competent citizen, one must demonstrate the ability to be polite, restrained, considerate and civil — that is, to act in accordance with the social situation. This involves some elements of self­control and discipline, with social standards and expectations becoming self­monitored and controlled. In order to be perceived as acting in accordance with the needs of certain social situations, participants bend, limit and regulate their behaviour and affects. In summary, the widespread take­up of cafe culture in Brisbane, which is based on hospitality and reciprocity, encourages a mode of interaction which has implications for the development of a social and civic ethic that has the capacity to foster respect and tolerance.

CONCLUSION

This chapter examined both discursive and material sites of Brisbane to identify the ways in which the emerging city offers new modes of imaginative and social engagement. It began by charting discourses common to the city, primarily through marketing and the texts of the popular local press. The second half of the chapter looked at two material sites of the city, with a principal focus on Brisbane’s burgeoning cafe culture.

This analysis placed Brisbane in context. It is a city developing from a strong suburban ethos and tradition. Discourses of the suburban reveal the ways in which gender is inscribed across urban and suburban sites, and point to changes occurring in the contemporary city which are both discursive and material. Evidence of Brisbane’s small­ town legacy and its uncertain identity appear in the examples of the reimagined Brisbane; the city is a semiotically unstable site and presents challenges to the idea of the postmodern city as an open and inclusive one.

The cafe is another semiotic site, but the rapid growth and enthusiastic adoption of cafe culture also make it an important contribution to the social and civil life of the city, to ways of experiencing and belonging in the city. This part of the chapter argued that the

129 cafe offers a space which helps to develop and support a growth in sociability, and which has implications for women in the life of the city. The cafe is egalitarian space, and as such is an important site for the increased participation of women in the public sphere. In this context, I proposed that cafes also offer the potential for the cultivation of civility and limited negotiation of the Other.

The following chapter turns its attention to the material city of Brisbane, and the inner­city case study area of Fortitude Valley, New Farm and Newstead. With its intention of emphasising the magnitude of change in the city, Chapter 5 examines the main historical, political and social legacies that have helped shape the city since white settlement, and contributed to its status as a frontier town for most of the twentieth century. It charts the momentous demographic and cultural changes to the case study area, a place which has become renowned and popular for its cafés, restaurants and new cultural infrastructure.

NOTES

1 For the purposes of this thesis, the term ‘city living’ is used to refer to the inner city — that is, the 5 to 10 kilometre circumference which rings the central business district and is currently undergoing intensive gentrification. The suburbs are the areas beyond this ring.

2 According to Graeme Davison (1992), there were several reasons for this. Australia adopted the ideal of suburban life from European settlers disenchanted with the industrial city. Relatively high wages, cheap land, transport and other infrastructure built by a strong central government encouraged this type of living.

3 See Richard White (1995) for a detailed analysis of the influence of Bohemian thought and values in urban Australia. White suggests that the Bohemian movement was motivated by a rejection of Victorian values and the prevailing conservative British culture, and turned to France for its inspiration. Eventually, however, the Bohemians and those involved in radical republicanism turned to the bush and nature for their artistic inspiration. Henry Lawson is the best­known example here.

4 Riots occurred around Sydney’s Cronulla Beach in December 2005. These appeared to be instigated by local male beach­goers, predominantly Australian. Ringleaders of the riots claimed they were responding to long­term, continual harassment from members of the Lebanese community — towards women and other people on the beach.

5 The brochure appeared prior to September 11, 2001 when the term ‘mecca’ would have had more neutral meanings.

6 The concept of cosmopolitanism has re­emerged from the effects of global events and processes, and has been pursed across sociological, globalisation, politics and citizenship studies.

130 7 Sydney Morning Herald, 12 May 2006.

8 I undertook an audit of all the cafes in the three adjacent areas.

9 Feminist scholars critiquing Habermas’s concept of the bourgeois public sphere have argued that salon culture was too elite and the discourse too courtly — that is, polite — to support the democratic formation of public opinion (Johnson 2006: 34).

131 CHAPTER 5 ______THE NEW BRISBANE: HISTORICAL LEGACIES

The narratives of the new Brisbane have a truncated beginning … the new city is born immaculate. The unmastered past, whatever its unstated short­comings, is made right by change, and by the promise of the future. Paris, London, Cairo and Melbourne are made exciting by their history. Brisbane is made exciting by its future. (Glover and Cunningham 2003: 16)

Brisbane’s shift from a provincial town to an emerging global city is evident in imaginative accounts of the city and in the materiality of its built form and demography. Throughout the 1990s, and continuing into the twenty­first century, the cityscape of Brisbane’s CBD and inner city areas has dramatically been transformed through the provision and enhancement of its residential, commercial and cultural infrastructure. Significant change is also evident in Brisbane’s social composition: in its population and demography.

This chapter charts the major social, historical and political forces that have shaped the city of Brisbane and is important for understanding the magnitude of change occurring. Until recently, Brisbane held a unique place in the national imaginary, as a provincial backwater town (Salt 2005: 6), and many features of the ‘old’ Brisbane have situated the city in direct contrast to the idea of the contemporary city as diverse, tolerant and inclusive. Brisbane’s history has marked it as a parochial place with an antipathy to outsiders and strangers, a feature at odds with the type of urbanism in which the city is being recast. In what ways might the city’s history rupture and dislocate the socio­ spatiality of a contemporary postmodern city?

131 This chapter departs somewhat from the city of imagination and perception addressed in the previous chapter to attend to the ‘hard city’, the city described by demographers, planners, historians and its urban infrastructure (Raban 1974). However, as this study argues from the outset, no neat distinction exists between the materiality of a city and the experience of urbanity. The city’s inhabitants — their experiences, perceptions, feelings and aspirations — work in a dialectical relationship which contributes to the reproduction of the city’s spaces and its representations (Donald 1999; Bergin 1996; Lefebvre 1996; Harvey 1991). Despite this chapter’s focus on the city’s material form, then, it nonetheless continues to refer to the imaginary city — the aspirational city — as particularly relevant as Brisbane sheds its provincial past and is reframed in the postmodern city’s rubric as a place of tolerance and inclusivity.

This chapter has two main aims. The first is to locate Brisbane in its historical and political context; the second is to chart the demographic and infrastructural change in the case study area of Fortitude Valley, New Farm and Newstead — an inner­city area which has experienced profound change and is the focus of the case study in Chapter 6. Furthermore, as discussed in subsequent chapters, this provides the context in which to explore residents’ experience of their changing neighbourhood and account for the ways in which the palimpsest of history and culture is rendered in people’s experience of place.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF LOCAL STUDIES

A key outcome of urban transformation occurring in contemporary global cities, according to many critiques, is the homogenisation of culture. In this view, it is the strategies of urban regeneration and the encouragement of global arts and entertainment industries that have resulted in similar patterns of development across many of the developed world’s cities. Inner­city areas in global cities share similar patterns of growth in places of cultural consumption, with a proliferation of amenities such as restaurants, cafes, design­oriented shops, galleries and other entertainment and consumer­focused spaces (Evans 2003; Zukin 1995). The re­use of former waterside industrial precincts as apartment and warehouse­style living, and the adaptation and renovation of existing

132 housing, have created significant demographic shifts in inner­city areas. Once the home of the working class, migrants and other low­income groups, inner­city neighbourhoods have been reinvented and reimagined as middle­class, consumer­focused enclaves (Zukin 1995; Mullins 1991; Harvey 1990). Along with the forces of globalisation, this has resulted in an increasingly homogenised urban culture in the world’s metropolitan centres. Cities are recast as sites of consumption, leisure and entertainment in a ‘fantasisation’ [sic] of the everyday (Evans 2003: 417). In this view, the local has become global or vice versa, eliding what is individual and unique about a city.

However, in arguing for the significance of the local, this thesis asserts that such critiques of urban regeneration overlook four important factors which contribute to a city’s distinction. The first is the ways in which local adaptations of global trends and cultures pays attention to local conditions. This was illustrated in the establishment of South Bank Parklands (discussed in the previous chapter), an example of a waterside development that is alert to the sub­tropical climate in which it is situated.. Second, the heavy imprint of city’s history and culture cannot be ignored, and although it may be built upon and transformed, it is the basis upon which subsequent development and change occur. Reminders of the past are present in the bricks and mortar of the city, in its governing regulations and in its bureaucratic mechanisms established to order to govern and control the city. Buildings, amenities and the layout of a city all carry the imprimatur of its forebears and administrators. Third, public policy and planning mechanisms continue to shape cities in unique and complex ways. The types of city infrastructure, public and domestic buildings, building density and subsequent social change in a city can be seen as the outcome of successive approaches to planning and policy.

Finally, the city is a dynamic space in which the accretion of human activity, endeavour and relationships is etched into its fabric. As filmmaker George Miller observes, ‘approach any city, in any epoch, and at first glance you will know its people and their aspirations’ (Miller 2001: 77). A city says something about its inhabitants and their aspirations. While the skyscrapers of the twentieth century city are ubiquitous icons of commerce and industry, the postmodern urban spectacle — such as Sydney’s Darling

133 Harbour or Paris’s Disneyworld — is a signal of pleasure and fun. Human practices animate space and place in myriad ways, and thus give a city its texture and sensibility. It is the activities, sensibility and temperaments of inhabitants that give a city its ambience — a factor which can result in the stereotyping of a place and its people. New Yorkers, for instance, are commonly perceived as brash and abrasive, yet they also generate the city’s positive dynamism and give the city its identity. As Patton has noted, ‘public spaces are both the primary means by which social relationships are enacted and a metaphor for the relationships of city life’ (1995: 119). Human agency is revealing for the types of relationships people have with the city and their neighbourhoods, and ultimately with the types of cities that are created.

In a similar vein, Thrift argues that totalising views that limit urban change to analyses of homogenisation do not pay sufficient attention to the many and varied ways in which people experience and engage with the city. He argues that too great an emphasis on the commonalities of urban change obscures the interesting things that are happening in cities, ‘arising out of the sheer inventiveness of the cities’ inhabitants, blocking off emerging effects by trapping them in old theoretical amber’ (2000: 247). All forces — history, culture and human practices — are interdependent, yet it is human agency as creator of history and culture which has most significance in producing a psychodynamics of place.

The remainder of this study explores this aspect of urbanism: the assertion and importance of the local for understanding the ways in which global change impacts at local levels, and what this might mean for the significance of human experience of place — particularly in a period of rapid change. Following, then, is a brief overview of Brisbane’s political and social history, to show the context in which the city is being transformed. I suggest that this political and historical background — which is, after all, the site of human action and drama — informs the development and sensibility of the city.

134 A CONTESTED PAST

From its white settler origins as a prison for the colony’s harshest offenders to its displacement of the Turrabaul people and its location as the seat of power for the country’s most oppressive political regime in Australia, the National Party government led by Premier Joh Bjelke­Petersen (1968–87), Brisbane’s history has marked it out from other Australian capital cities (Hamilton 2003: 12). Like all cities, Brisbane has contradictory narratives of its past, but its overriding narrative — particularly in the national context — has been of a deeply conservative place lacking in cultural and educational resources and fuelled by reactionary, authoritarian politics.

However, despite its history of conservatism, it is also a city that boasts several world firsts in socialist objectives. It was in Brisbane that a political party announced the world’s first Labor government had come to power, and that the world’s first General Strike was called. It has also been the site of some of the most bitter urban rioting and democratic rights contests (Evans and Ferrier 2004: 17). It was the site of ‘wildly conceived affairs’ such as the Pineapple Rebellion and the Battle of Brisbane. 1 Further, as Stockwell has argued, because of its colonial heritage of authoritarian governance the city produced a culture of resistance, an ‘anti­political sentiment’ expressed in an antipathy and ambivalence to political authority (2000: 17). This antipathy erupted again during the 1960s and 1970s, when students led revolts against Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War and national conscription. Similarly, demonstrations against the repressive regime of Joh Bjelke­Petersen’s government during this period resulted in fierce — and at times violent — struggles with police in the streets of Brisbane. At this time, the hostility and brutality of the local police became notorious throughout the country, although it was an issue which the local media chose to overlook (Ferrier and Mansell 2004: 27). 2

In another city first, and as a testament to Brisbane’s orientation as a suburban city, Australia’s first large­scale suburban shopping centre at Chermside was built in 1957. Described as ‘an island of retail in a land of parking’, the concept was borrowed from the United States and heralded the beginning of a new era in urban development and retailing

135 in Australia (McBride and Taylor 1997: 57). A further gesture of progress was the proposal — not upheld due to vigorous opposition — to build the world’s tallest building in the city in 1987 (1997: 89). Such contradictions of the city, for historians Evans and Ferrier (2004), suggest that Brisbane is a different place to the sleepy docile one of the national imaginary. For them, the city is ‘an elusive and volatile place — a shape changer, not exactly what it seems’ (2004: 17).

While there is little historical record of Brisbane in the national context (Glover and Cunningham 2003: 17), Ross Fitzgerald’s two­volume History of Queensland (1984–86) still stands as the singular work on Queensland history, and his books include analysis of the social and political environment of the state’s capital, Brisbane. It is telling of the state’s political climate at the time that Fitzgerald’s book, which delivered a scathing critique of successive state governments, was initially pulped due to political and legal pressures (2003: 17). Perhaps Brisbane’s status as a non­urban city is a contributing factor to its omission from the canon of Australian city histories. For Fitzgerald’s book reveals how, from the outset, political governance in Queensland established a rural bias across the state that was an impediment to the development of an urban culture in Brisbane. This political development occurred in contrast to the cities of Melbourne and Sydney, where manufacturing had a far stronger base than Brisbane, where broader patterns of migration were encouraged, and in which ‘booster’ literature talked up the development of those cities’ urban commercial capacities (Glynn 1992: 234). During the 1970s, Premier Bjelke­ Petersen’s government appeared to cast its pro­development strategies to Brisbane as well as the bush, but the type of development pursued did not appear to consider the needs and interests of the city’s residents.

Fitzgerald’s assertion of the dominance of agrarianism in Queensland as hindering urban development can be seen in the larger context of the Australian bush ethos, a construction which informed the development of national identity and was a considerable factor in the federation of Australia (White 1992). While Melbourne and Sydney were quick to adopt the mantle of urbanism, however, agrarianism remained a strong influence in Queensland and its capital for nearly two centuries. Interestingly, a key contributor to the bush ethos

136 was writer Arthur Hoey Davis, who —writing under the nom de plume of Steele Rudd — wrote On Our Selection and the popular Dad and Dave series, and contributed regularly to the Bulletin. It is perhaps no surprise that Davis was a Brisbane­based writer for most of his life (McBride and Taylor 1997: 35).

The rural focus of the state’s economic development was promoted by successive state governments across all political parties, and it was imbued with an ‘agrarian ethic’ (Fitzgerald 1984: 187). The political rhetoric of agrarianism carried a moral undertone — certain virtues were associated with living in close connection with the land (Fitzgerald 1984: 181). As a discursive site, the city (typically Sydney and Melbourne) was frequently cast in opposition to the country: a degraded environment, harbouring suspect activities and where moral laxity had the greater potential to flourish. Generally, Brisbane escaped this moral stain with its small population and country town status. The evolution of Brisbane city as the country’s most suburban city also helped to keep it at a distance from the less desirable associations of urbanism, more commonly associated with Sydney and Melbourne. Fitzgerald notes an antipathy to urbanism evident in the values of several state premiers. Ned Hanlon, who became premier in 1946, was known as the ‘city bushman’ and Forgan Smith (1932–42) was a champion of ‘bush’ values:

For Forgan Smith, the son of a gardener, agriculture was the ‘natural’ human state. The agrarian rhetoric, espoused by Forgan Smith and his successors, contained a strong and persistent moral argument. The dignity of the man on the land and the virtue of manual labour were frequently contrasted with the overcrowding and degradation of Australian urban life. (1984: 181)

The idea of nature as virtuous and even transcendental space, promoted by premiers such as Forgan Smith and Hanlon, was part of an Enlightenment/Romantic discourse with its origins in eighteenth century Europe. A response to the deleterious effects of industrial urbanisation, it was a spatial logic transplanted to colonial countries positioned in opposition to the newly industrialised city. The idea of nature as somehow embodying the values of virtue and health remained an enduring one in some regions.

137 The promotion of agrarianism was a useful political tool in Queensland. It was a strategy for unification, to shore up the electorates’ allegiances and encouraged an ‘us and them’ attitude towards the southern cities of Sydney and Melbourne, who were cast as rivals for their commercial and political power (Whitlock 1989: 23). It was a tactic particularly evident during Premier Joh Bjelke­Petersen’s premiership (1968­87). Furthermore, this view and others of the government, including the alleged moral turpitude of the larger cities, was promulgated by a compliant and somewhat parochial media in Queensland (Fitzgerald 1984: 633). As successive state governments of all political persuasions continued to shore up their popularity among their constituents, an anti­urban rhetoric prevailed, right through until the early 1990s. At this time, racism and xenophobia were never far from the surface of urban discourse — a point pursued later in the chapter.

Other forces were at play that impacted on Brisbane’s development as an urban, cosmopolitan capital. Fitzgerald and others have commented on the city’s social and cultural climate from white settlement through to the latter twentieth century as one of ‘stifling conservatism and mediocrity’ (see also writers such as Shapcott, Malouf, McGahan, Birmingham). It was, for example, an environment from which, until the very late part of the twentieth century, most writers, artists and intellectuals fled. For a period, Brisbane expatriate writer David Malouf’s semi­autobiographic and oft­quoted novel Johnno (1975) became synonymous with the city and articulated why, for those wishing to pursue an artistic career, it was necessary to leave the city:

Brisbane was nothing; a city that blew neither hot nor cold, a place where nothing happened, and where nothing ever would happen, because it had no soul. People suffered here without significance. A place where poetry could never occur. (cited in Evans and Ferrier 2004: 14)

Another contributing factor to Brisbane’s parochialism, according to Fitzgerald — a ‘petit bourgeois decorum’ — was the uniform pattern and type of migration to Queensland established during the late 1800s. Queensland received more migrants from Britain than other states and these were, according to Fitzgerald, ‘intensely materialistic and ambitious’ (in Sullivan 2000: 78):

138 The presence of a strong petit bourgeois ideology among the ‘new chums’ had important consequences for Queensland colonial society — as a consequence, cultural mediocrity and a high level of social conformity were accentuated in the north. (Fitzgerald 1982: 305)

Patterns of migration in Queensland from the nineteenth and late twentieth centuries continued to shape the state and its capital. Migration to Brisbane was actively discouraged, particularly among non­British migrants throughout this period (1982: 187). Unlike Victoria and New South Wales, immigration to Queensland was related to its rural development rather than to industrialisation, the latter a pattern of migration common to other Australian cities. Fitzgerald points out that between 1947 and 1961, Queensland’s overseas­born population rose by only 58 per cent, against the Australian average of 139 per cent (1982: 187).

While restrictive immigration policies contributed to produce a social fabric that was less ethnically diverse than that of Sydney and Melbourne, the distinctive features of Queensland’s educational history and the low value given to secondary education contributed to a culture of anti­intellectualism. Sheahan­Bright (2002) notes that colonialist, Anglo­Celtic traditions survived in Queensland for a lot longer than in other states, with little teaching material in literature and history that related to students’ own experiences. The British Royal Readers for instance, were kept until 1912 — long after other states had created their own (2002: 88). The public provision of secondary education was neglected for nearly two centuries. Although the state government built a handful of secondary schools from 1912, the majority of secondary schools were not established until the 1960s. From this period, 79 per cent of Brisbane’s existing state high schools were built. 3 Prior to that time, the provisioning of that sector fell exclusively to the Catholic Church and independent schools. Moreover, the education system was notoriously conservative, and many Queensland writers recall their school life as inadequate (2002: 89). Sheahan­Bright observes how many writers’ school experiences were muddied by conservatism and narrowness:

139 Many Queensland writers hint suggestively at this ‘darker’ side of Qld schooling — the petty tyrannies of teachers; bullying and classroom rivalries; anti­intellectualism and the supremacy of sport; racism and disadvantage. (2002: 89)

The culture of mediocrity and conformity that Fitzgerald describes is echoed in other literary and historical critiques of the state. Barr and Sullivan (2005) refer to historian Lynn Strahan’s analysis of Brisbane’s intellectual deficiencies of the 1930s and 1940s:

education standards were low; public opinion was complacent; cultural institutions suffered from a malaise of ‘spiritual absenteeism’; and the Courier­Mail was obsessed with the bathroom teas and tennis parties of the local bourgeoisie … (2005: 4)

While many of the state’s and city’s social and cultural deficiencies are echoed in the broader context of the colonial nation, political factors contributed their intensity and longevity in Brisbane. The seventeen­year rule of the National Party’s Joh Bjelke­Petersen saw the city and state stagnate culturally and intellectually at a time when the rest of the country was building and developing capacities across cultural and social sectors. The expansion of civil liberties in other states, such as women’s rights and Indigenous self­ determination, did not receive the same support in Queensland and, in response, an active political and cultural underground movement developed in Brisbane in the 1970s. The civil liberties movement in the city had to fight harder than its counterparts in other states, fighting not only for the expansion of human rights, the movement’s members were also caught in the struggle against a repressive and authoritarian government which forbade such taken­for­granted liberties as the right to demonstrate.

During this period, progress and development were defined in Queensland in strictly economic terms, with little consideration of the social fabric. Economic development was given a boost under Bjelke­Petersen, but it came at a high price — an overriding insensitivity to architectural heritage and culture, a lack of public space and cultural amenity and lack of consultation with the city’s citizens. With no heritage legislation to protect the city’s past, many notable public buildings were lost prior to 1991, such as the Bellevue Hotel in George Street, the National Hotel in Queen Street and Cloudland in

140 Bowen Hills. Loss of heritage is commonly mourned by local writers, as author Gerard Lee observes:

The tragedy of Brisbane is that the city fathers failed to protect the old city, with its colonial buildings side by side along the riverbank of Moreton Bay figs and grass, and a dance hall that pushed out into the water where a freeway now roars. (2002: 58)

For many residents, Premier Joh Bjelke­Petersen’s government became synonymous with environmental vandalism, summed up in a popular bumper sticker at the time: ‘See Queensland before Joh sells it’ (Hoffie 2003: 28).

Not much had changed, it seemed, until the 1990s. With fewer migration influxes by comparison with other states, and with a small population that for many decades hovered below one million, the city lacked critical mass and shared similar demographic and social features to a country town. The city remained parochial. An ‘us and them’ rhetoric circulated around people from interstate and migrants from other countries; a hostility towards outsiders was a theme to which a provincial media was alert. In 1989 an article appeared in News Limited’s now­obsolete newspaper The Sun, inflaming the fear of urban degeneration and violence when reporting on alleged criminal activity in inner­city Fortitude Valley. The paper’s front­page headline declared: ‘GANG WAR FEAR — Asian thugs in battle for Valley’ and went on to claim:

Police are preparing for a vicious Asian gang war set to be fought in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley. Vietnamese from NSW and Victoria who specialize in ruthless standover and extortion tactics — are moving to Brisbane. (12 October 1989: 1)

Fortitude Valley, part of the case study area of this thesis, with its associations of crime, prostitution and gambling, loomed large in the local psyche as a place symbolic of all that was wrong with urban life. As if to reinforce this perception, the Valley — as it is commonly known — was revealed in the 1987 Fitzgerald Inquiry to be the site of long­ term police and political corruption and became more notorious through its exposure on national television. 4 An ABC national television report revealed how corruption through

141 gambling houses and prostitution networks established in the Valley operated through a network of payoffs and paybacks, and at the behest of certain politicians and members of the judiciary. The exposure of political corruption through the Fitzgerald Inquiry resulted in the imprisonment of several senior politicians of the Bjelke­Petersen government, police and members of the judiciary, and in the demise of the government’s seventeen­ year rule.

Until the mid­1990s, the Valley was the city’s main area which had a visibly diverse ethnic population and was also the locus of gay male activity. The Valley, as a place of Other, remains resonant in the local imaginary. Smith and Philips’ qualitative study (2001) reveals the perception of Fortitude Valley as ‘un­Australian’. Their data suggest that the area’s visible ethnic presence — its inclusion of a Chinatown precinct with Chinese street signs, as well as identifiable Italian and Irish ethnicities — marks it out as a foreign influence on Australian culture (2001: 333, 335). Interview respondents in the study regarded ethnic separatism or ‘ghettoisation’ negatively, and this was seen as a failure of immigrants to assimilate (2001: 336). Although urban renewal processes in the area have sought to change perceptions by paying tribute to the Valley’s ethnic diversity and repositioning the area in a postmodern rubric of multicultural inclusivity, it remains to be seen how successful this is.

Since the mid­1990s, Brisbane’s population has undergone significant change, with the CBD and inner city’s fabric changing profoundly in the 1990s (Salt 2006: 227). As its population expands to that of a global city, once relatively stable neighbourhoods are being transformed and the types of close social networks more commonly associated with country towns are loosened and eroded. Writing in 1995, author Errol O’Neill noted the ways in which Queensland cities’ social constitution and social connections differed from cities in other states:

Queensland’s cities have never become the impersonal, all consuming leviathans that other states have produced. Most family histories contain a special chapter on the shift to the metropolis, but in the state of

142 conservative family values … the story is frequently only a generation back. (in Sheahan­Bright and Glover 2002: xix)

Indeed prior to the late 1990s, Brisbane was the type of city in which the chance of an incidental encounter with someone you knew when out in the public spaces of the city was a common experience. This is no longer the case.

In his summary of the forces that shaped Brisbane and Queensland until the completion of his book in 1984, Fitzgerald concludes that authoritarianism, anti­intellectualism and lack of regard for culture have been antithetical to a vibrant and sustaining place:

The peculiar character of governance in Queensland with its pronounced tradition of authoritarianism and anti­intellectualism … historically low value placed on education and low levels of migration. Where migration has taken place in recent years, it has been largely the middle­aged elderly rich, and the upwardly mobile … cultural activities are undervalued and women and indigenous peoples are consistently denied positions of power and influence. (1984: 633)

Yet on the surface, the city now appears to be an entirely different place from the one he describes. But Brisbane’s political and social history situates it uncomfortably within the framework and values of the postmodern city. The construction of the postmodern city as a tolerant, diverse and inclusive place sits at odds with much of Brisbane’s history. Queensland’s and Brisbane’s political and social legacies are not easily elided in reconstructions of place. For most of its history, as Whitlock has pointed out, Brisbane was ‘a place where urban industrial society is kept at bay’ (1989: 80).

‘IT ALL BEGAN WITH EXPO’

Several turning points are linked to Brisbane’s ‘coming of age,’ but World Expo ’88 is widely perceived as the event which heralded change in the 1990s. Brisbane played host to World Expo in Australia’s bicentennial year. Key administrators in local and state government at the time seized on the event as an opportunity to develop Brisbane into an economically competitive city on the national and global stage. Politicians proclaimed the

143 event as a watershed in the history of the city. The Lord Mayor at the time of Expo ’88, Sally­Anne Atkinson, announced at its opening: ‘Today we formally and officially become an international city.’ Similarly, Expo organiser Sir Llew Edwards stated that: ‘Our basic aim has been to make World Expo ’88 the catalyst for a significant change in our lifestyle.’ (cited in Sanderson 2003: 66) Prior to Expo ’88, hotels had limited opening hours and outdoor dining was prohibited. Initiatives trialled at Expo included extended opening hours for hotels and restaurants, and the introduction of sidewalk cafes with outdoor eating facilities. These initiatives were subsequently adopted after the event (2003: 66). Brisbane’s daily paper, The Courier­Mail got behind Expo ’88 and the move to modernise the city — albeit somewhat paternalistically:

World Expo 88 will have worked to our best advantage if it leaves Brisbane, and Queensland, with less insularity, more global awareness, less intolerance of people who do not look, speak or eat in quite the same way that we do … (cited in Sanderson 2003: 66)

Expo ’88 has potency as a symbol of transformation in Brisbane; the event is commonly perceived as a harbinger of change. But, aside from the introduction of regulations to extend consumption practices such as extended trading hours, Expo’s impact on the city is not easily disentangled from broader changes occurring across the developed world’s cities at the time, and to which most governing authorities were responding. Situated in a framework of global economic and technological restructuring, Brisbane — like most cities in the latter part of the twentieth century — was being repositioned to take advantage of incentives offered by an increasingly globalised economy.

As the fabric of Brisbane transforms, the impact of a globalism in which ideas, identities and cultures are forged and embedded transnationally (see Skrbis et al. 2004: 116) is starting to be felt on the cultural life of the city, chipping away at its historical antipathy to urbanism. The adoption of the values of inclusivity and diversity was symbolised by the Brisbane City Council when it became the first government authority in Australia to fly the Aboriginal flag alongside the city and national flags on a daily basis (Hamilton 2003: 12). Important as these gestures are, to what extent is this a reflection of real cultural and

144 social change? While the changing fabric of Brisbane mirrors that of all postmodern cities, its ‘unmastered past’ remains in the memories, stories and lives of its inhabitants. This point is pursued through survey and interview respondents in Chapters 6 and 7.

THE NEW BRISBANE: THE LEDGER

Change has come, but what is real and what is chimera is hard to tell. (Glover and Cunningham 2003: 16)

What are the ways in which an emergent urbanism is manifest in Brisbane? It is not quite 20 years since Expo ’88 and the era of political repression and corruption left its mark on the city, yet on the surface Brisbane and its inner­city environs appear quite a different place from the ramshackle city of its former self. An intensity of development has created new types of urban dwellings and a myriad of additional amenities and consumption spaces — cafes, bars, restaurants, and entertainment and cultural venues. New enterprises, the growth of design­focused industries and a generation of artists present the city as transforming across several spheres — cultural, economic and lifestyle. This section describes the infrastructural and demographic changes that have occurred in the case study area of Fortitude Valley, New Farm and Newstead.

Since 1990, Brisbane has been outstripping all other state capital cities in its rate of population growth (Salt 2005: 11). The 2001 Census estimated Brisbane’s population in 2004 to be 1.7 million. The population increase from 1996–2001 in the Brisbane and Moreton regions accounted for 81.5 per cent of the state’s growth, with the majority of people (67.5 per cent) in the 25–34 years age category (ABS). This statistic belies the former perception of Brisbane and its coastal surrounds as a retirement destination, and is reflected in 2004’s Young Rich List, where 29 per cent of their wealth was based in the Brisbane–Gold Coast corridor (Salt 2006: 225). A shift from the city’s ‘branch office’ status is marked by businesses that have either established head offices in Brisbane, such as Virgin Blue and Boeing, or the establishment and success of locally based national and international business such the Flight Centre, Boeing, Billabong, City Beach and

145 Colorado. The table below shows the percentage growth in the resident workforce in the six state capitals over the fifteen­year period to June 2005. Brisbane recorded the greatest increase of all state capitals during this time.

Table 5.1: Growth in capital city workforce, 1990–2005

June 1990 (‘000) June 2005 %change Brisbane 602 942 56 Perth 539 765 42 Sydney 1754 2172 24 Melbourne 1522 1837 21 Adelaide 480 546 13 Hobart 84 93 11

Source: Salt (2006), from Australian Bureau of Statistics, Labour Force Survey 1990 and 2005.

Post­1990s, the Brisbane City Council (BCC) is credited as a key player in the city’s transformation, particularly in its role as cultural generator. As the largest city council in Australia, with the largest tax base, it has comparable influence to that of the state government (Hamilton 2003: 13). The council has mirrored the state government in many of its cultural initiatives, supporting the cultural development of the city through numerous grant schemes, a museum and art gallery, the Museum of Brisbane (MoB) and a venue for live arts, the Brisbane Powerhouse.

The Brisbane City Council has led a program of aesthetic improvements to many suburban precincts and public areas. The addition of two major city parks — The Roma Street Parklands from a train yard and South Bank Parklands, on the former Expo site — has increased the public spaces of the city.

146 The Bougainvillea Arbour, an iconic feature of South Bank Parklands, spans 1.6 kilometres of walkway The parkland is flanked on one side by a cultural precinct of museums, art galleries and performance spaces.

Brisbane’s city skyline has expanded upwards and outwards, its many new corporate towers signalling its shift in status from large country town to postmodern city. One of the most visible differences to its inner city environs, however — and one in which the city’s history as a sleepy suburban place is becoming extinguished — is the replacement of Brisbane’s vernacular timber housing with brick and concrete luxury apartment blocks. Heritage legislation introduced in 1991 has ensured that the ‘Queenslander’ style of housing has not become completely extinct, and this type of housing is still prevalent in many inner­city areas, although significant architectural icons were demolished or removed before this period. 5 Much has been written about the experience of living in a timber Queenslander house with its flimsy close­to­nature qualities, a characteristic discussed in Chapter 3 of this study.

Other physical changes have occurred around waterfront areas of the city. For many decades, the Brisbane River was ignored by planners and builders, except as a necessary

147 point of connection between the city’s south and north banks. Now recognised as an asset, since the early 1990s the Brisbane City Council has constructed a series of river boardwalks to connect the CBD with several inner­city areas. Former Lord Mayor Jim Soorley put an end to river dredging around the CBD, a practice undertaken for sand mining (Salt 2006: 226). River travel has been made more efficient with the BCC’s introduction of ‘City Cats’ — high­speed catamarans that service the various reaches of the river. In the contested nature of public space, such initiatives are frequently fought over, and private landowners and environmentalists have objected to the introduction of City Cats.

As well as providing amenity to residents, the development of public facilities such as parklands and river walks contributes to the process of identity­creation, a form of branding which differentiates one city from another in the symbolic hierarchy of place­ making (Evans 2003: 420). The construction of Brisbane as the ‘River City’ distinguishes it from other capital cities — from the Harbour City of Sydney or the Culture City of Melbourne. Brisbane’s discovery of its river also provides another means by which to know and understand the city. Through enactment and performance of a ‘tourist gaze’ (Urry 1990), the city presents itself as a spectacle, viewable from the city’s boardwalks, its ferries and city cats. The city’s new infrastructure — its parks, amenities and buildings — offers the type of spectral pleasure that has become synonymous with the experience of being in the city. Here the tourist gaze is seen to mobilise the psychoanalytic tropes of pleasure and desire. Urry (1990) suggests that the privileging of sight above the other senses in Western history casts it as the most reliable and discriminating of the sensual mediators between people and their environment. Sightseeing is also a form of knowledge. Because of this, both a city’s legibility and its visual construction in promotional material are central to its symbolic value and the economic cycle of global cities. Places, in this sense, are consumed visually.

Festivals such as Brisbane City Council’s annual Riverfestival underscore the ways in which visual pleasure is part and parcel of the economy and cultural life of the postmodern

148 city. Now in its sixth year, the festival is an extravaganza of flotillas and fireworks, climaxing with the roar of an F1­11 across the city sky, trailing a blaze of fire.

Floating Boardwalk at the New Farm reach of the Brisbane River

Further around the river in Newstead, to the east of the CBD, disused industrial buildings have been converted into riverside apartment dwellings. In the case study area of Newstead and New Farm, buildings such as the former Wool Stores have been redeveloped into warehouse apartment living. Again signalling Brisbane’s fledgling status as a city still in search of an identity (and as mentioned earlier in this thesis), these buildings have names such as Dakota, and Saratoga, connecting them imaginatively to the world’s great metropolitan centres.

As Brisbane continues to acquire the infrastructure common to global cities — population growth, greater urban amenity, denser forms of living, as well as the negative impacts such as increased traffic — so too it acquires the complexities and problems of larger cities. Changes to the city fabric do not always go unchallenged. The city as a social space is inevitably a contested space, where ‘the politics of place and of turf’ are played out and where different groups of people lay claim to its parks, malls, footpaths and river walks

149 (Harvey 1993: 27). Building developments, the introduction of City Cats, car parks and rerouted buses are just a number of initiatives or developments that have been contested over the past decade of change in Brisbane. At the same time, however, and for critics of urban regeneration and its homogenising effects, Brisbane’s historical legacies and the contested nature of urban space point to the city’s potential as a place through which, in the cracks and fissures of its new surface, an idiosyncratic and differentiated city might actually emerge. How the city continues to evolve will depend upon the matrix exposed by the intersection of its history, culture and politics — past and present.

THE CASE STUDY AREA: THE INNER NORTHERN PENINSULA

4005 … It’s not a postcode … it’s a lifestyle.

The inner­city area of this case study, encompassing Fortitude Valley, Newstead and New Farm — the latter suburb is the postcode of the above quote widely used by local real estate agents — has undergone the most momentous change of all inner city areas in Brisbane.

Inner­city areas of Brisbane: New Farm, Newstead and Fortitude Valley

150 The three precincts, adjacent to each other, are on a peninsula northeast of the city, approximately 3 kilometres from the CBD and indicated on the map below.

Each of the three precincts is distinctive for different social and historical reasons, and for the types of development occurring within the areas. The following features highlight the area’s distinction in Brisbane’s transformation, making it a compelling site of inquiry:

• New Farm, Fortitude Valley and Newstead were the first of Brisbane’s inner city suburbs to participate in managed urban renewal activity with the inception of the 1991 Commonwealth government’s Building Better Cities program, led by the Brisbane City Council’s Urban Renewal Task Force. • In a city dominated by Anglo­Celtic ethnicity, the area was one of the very few places where European and Asian migrant groups initially settled. A small Indigenous population has also lived in the area for many decades, particularly from the 1950s. • Its socioeconomic diversity has been a dominant characteristic. • Fortitude Valley has symbolic and material status in its recent history as a site of urban decay and criminality. • It is an area in which the first high­rise and multi­dwelling apartments were built. • A significant number of social services operate in the area, such as methadone clinic, a women’s refuge (one of only two in the city), a hostel for homeless people, an Indigenous hostel and numerous charitable organisations such as Red Cross and St Vincent de Paul. • Since gentrification, the three precincts have collectively become a declared Cultural Precinct, with several state and local government institutions established or expanded. • A large growth in cafes and restaurants has occurred in the area.

In addition, as this study is in part an ethnographic study, the author has lived in the area for sixteen years and has first­hand experience of changes to the area and the community.

151 FORTITUDE VALLEY: NEW INFRASTRUCTURE

The changes brought about through urban regeneration over a fifteen­year period are markedly more notable here than in other inner­city areas in Brisbane, such as Paddington or Woolloongabba. Fortitude Valley is the precinct closest to the city, and was a derogated area from the 1960s to the 1990s, with few residents and little public amenity. The area has a history of interstate and overseas migrant settlement, particularly since the 1950s, with a small community of Indigenous Australians living there. However, as a small area which is carved up by two main arterial roads that function to move traffic from the south to the north of the city, little domestic housing stock existed in the period prior to urban regeneration.

Fortitude Valley has a recent history as a site of criminal activity — of gambling, prostitution and links to organised crime, which was made public by the Fitzgerald Inquiry of 1987. The inquiry revealed the lines of corruption between the police, politicians and the judiciary, with much of this activity taking place in Fortitude Valley. The Valley has also been identified as a site of gay male activity for several decades, with a number of bars and clubs frequented by the gay community, embedding these socio­sexual relationships into the locale’s physical geography. 6 Mort (2000) has identified the significance of manifestations of sexuality in the city as sites of resistance, performance and spectacle in understanding an ‘ethnography of space’. With a visible gay community, the Valley reveals the contested nature of urban space. So, while the gay community is framed in the rubric of ‘diversity and tolerance’, a dominant and lingering homophobic culture has resulted in another recent round of gay bashings in the Valley (City News, 2006: 7), a phenomenon that is part of the area’s history. The Valley’s historical connections, both as a site of organised crime and the downfall of a corrupt government, and with regard to the shifting boundaries of sexuality expressed through its location as a place of prostitution and homosexuality, have rendered it an ambivalent and unstable site in which politics and turf wars were played out. In a strongly suburban city, for many years, it was symbolic of all that was corrupt and wrong with metropolitan life. This

152 perception spilled over to its neighbouring suburb of New Farm, which occupies the bulk of the peninsula it shares with Newstead, a former light industrial area.

Contributing to its revitalisation, the Valley has become a cultural precinct with the support of state government and city council initiatives. Several arts venues and administrative headquarters of cultural organizations, including The Judith Wright Centre in Brunswick Street, were opened in 2001 to accommodate the Institute of Modern Art and several other arts organisations. In addition, Museums Australia, The Queensland Crafts Council, The Potters’ Gallery, Visible Ink (a BCC youth arts space) and many privately owned galleries service the area. The area has a plethora of restaurants, cafes, bars and nightclubs — most of which have opened in the last decade. Fortitude Valley is renowned throughout the country as a music and entertainment precinct; it is the largest youth music precinct in Australia, and the majority of Brisbane’s live music venues are located there. Different types of venue cater for range of musical styles — there are jazz bars, an indie music scene and many nightclubs.

The Valley has become known for its designer boutique shops, which sell local and nationally based designers. The Valley Mall (see below) has had several makeovers and hosts a regular weekend market with an eclectic array of secondhand and craft stalls. The Valley Fiesta is an annual festival celebration of the area’s diversity, music and local food outlets. The BCC, in conjunction with the Valley Business Association, has promoted the area’s ethnic diversity and acknowledged its Chinese and Irish settlers through the creation of a Chinatown Mall, and the addition of Gaelic Irish street signs around the well­known Dooley’s Hotel precinct. As a locale of entertainment and amenity, the area attracts a large young population of international travellers, and is the home of the city’s largest and most popular backpackers hostel, Bunk.

153 The Valley Mall has retained some of its vernacular colonial architecture, adapted to outdoor cafes and restaurants

NEW FARM

The largest and most residential suburb of the three in the case study is New Farm, one of Brisbane’s oldest suburbs. It occupies the majority of the peninsula bound by the Brisbane River, with adjacent Newstead spanning the eastern reach of the river and Fortitude Valley situated between New Farm and the city. Approximately 9500 residents live in the suburb, historically a place of high ethnic and socioeconomic diversity. It had a strong Italian presence from the 1950s wave of national immigration. However, many of these families moved from the area once they became established in their adopted country. More recently, Chinese have been the largest migrant group after immigrants from Britain, New Zealand and Ireland (Brisbane Statistical Portrait 2001) Many boarding houses, workers’ cottages, some public housing and small studio apartments serviced lower income residents while large and iconic Queensland houses located on prime real estate on the peninsula’s riverfront and hilltop areas have ensured a residential diversity. Since urban

154 renewal, however, the suburb of New Farm in particular has become one of Brisbane’s most prestigious, with a median house price in the financial year 2002–03 of $550 000. 7

The suburb is home to New Farm Park, a large park with a distinctive rose garden that is widely used both by people from all over Brisbane and by tourists. The park is located at the end of the peninsula. Adjacent to the park on the tip of the peninsula is the Brisbane Powerhouse, Centre for Live Arts, a decommissioned power station. In 2000 it was transformed into a multi­purpose arts and entertainment site, which offered an alternative venue to the type of mainstream culture provided by the city’s South Bank cultural complex. Its establishment recognised and provided a space for what remains of a lively alternative and political arts scene which had developed in Brisbane from the 1960s and which was most active during the politically authoritarian regime of Sir Joh Bjelke­ Peterson. 8 In the redesign of the Powerhouse, its more recent and unauthorised use as a site for homeless youth and as a dance party venue was acknowledged in the retention of graffiti. 9 Similarly, in tribute to its past, the industrial look and feel have been heavily maintained throughout, including unevenly surfaced and finished walls, exposed steel girders and concrete. An initiative of Brisbane City Council, the site consists of performance spaces, galleries, a bar and restaurant and rehearsal studios. As a symbol of an underground and alternative Brisbane as well as its industrial past, the Powerhouse is a reminder for some of the city’s political and social struggles and inequities.

By contrast, further around the reach of the peninsula is quite a different refurbishment of another of New Farm’s historic buildings. The Colonial Sugar Refinery (CSR) opened in 1893 and closed in 1995. The former CSR land and some of the original heritage buildings have been converted into apartment dwellings and small­lot housing, into the popular and exclusive multi­million development ‘Cutter’s Landing’.

155 Brisbane Powerhouse New Farm: renovations included the retention of original industrial fabric.

Brisbane Powerhouse, New Farm, Foyer area

156 NEWSTEAD

The Newstead precinct, a former industrial area used due to its proximity to the river, is the place where the most visible change has occurred. Prior to urban regeneration, little residential housing or amenity existed there. Rather than being recreated as a revitalised residential hub, the area has been newly created, drawing upon its industrial past as a symbol of its history. Several wool stores line Macquarie Street and Vernon Terrace, refurbished in a style that pays homage to their heritage origins in the fashion of industrial buildings in global cities. As with the other two precincts of the study, many restaurants and cafes line the footpaths of Newstead. The area once housed a Coca­Cola bottling and distribution plant, a number of large­scale wool stores and a disused gas plant. The latter sits on a 17 hectare site that is earmarked for redevelopment by the Brisbane City Council as Newstead Riverpark. It will include residential, retail and business communities, and feature a plaza around the heritage­listed gasometer frame, a lake and 4hectares of parkland.

London Apartments, Newstead

157 DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGE

The wider area of Brisbane City has continued to have the highest population growth in Australia since 1990. In the year 2003–04, Brisbane experienced the largest growth (2.3 per cent) of all capital cities, at 1200 people per week. By comparison, Sydney grew by only 0.8 per cent and Melbourne by 1.3 per cent in the same period (ABS 2005). Similar population growth occurred in Brisbane’s inner­city region, in which the case study area is located, and has been growing at a rate of 8709 people, or 2.7 per cent, per annum since 1996.

Table 5.2: Population change, Fortitude Valley, New Farm, Newstead, 1991–2001 Population Average annual population change Estimated resident Census Census population counts ERP count 1991 to 1996 to 1996 to 1991 1996 2001(p) 1996 2001 1996 2001 2001 No. No. No. No. No. % % % City — inner 175 345 1017 2337 3,643 14.5% 24.1 9.3 City — remainder 1276 1401 1842 2641 3708 1.9% 5.6 7.0 Fortitude Valley— 153 139 1288 165 1508 ­1.9% 56.1 55.7 inner Fortitude Valley — 1124 1419 2012 1528 2270 4.8% 7.2 8.2 remainder New Farm 8839 9226 10 216 9118 9955 0.9% 2.1 1.8 Newstead 958 1350 2939 1330 2818 7.1% 16. 16.2

Source: Planning Information and Forecasting Unit; QDLGP: ABS; Brisbane City Council (2005).

The inner city region, as classified for statistical purposes, includes the suburbs of New Farm — the largest suburb in the region — Newstead, Fortitude Valley, West End,

158 Woolloongabba, Paddington, Spring Hill, Petrie Terrace, Red Hill, Herston, Kelvin Grove, Kangaroo Point, Milton and Dutton Park. Table 5.2 charts population growth in the case study suburbs from 1991–2001, reflecting the largest growth in Fortitude Valley and Newstead.

An overview of demographic trends in the area in the period of the latest Census at the time of writing (from 1996–2001) reveals demographic patterns that are typical of the processes of urban gentrification — for instance, a decline in the population of elderly residents, a decline in the number of residents with non­English speaking backgrounds and a decline in the number of low­income residents; and a concomitant rise in a younger population, less ethnic diversity and a greater number of professionals in the area. The area was also home to the highest number of single­person households in the city at 21 per cent (ABS). The 2001 Census reveals a snapshot of the realigned demography of the area:

• The area has experienced the city’s highest increase of professional and associate professional workers at a combined 63.3 per cent. • Some 27.5 per cent of households earn more than $1500 per week. • The median weekly income for the area was up by 37.7 per cent since 1996. • A further 15 per cent of households had incomes of between $1000 and $1499 a week. • In New Farm, more than half of all households were single­person households. • Over half of all family households (defined as couples with or without children) were without children. • Car ownership had increased by 25 per cent.

The population growth in the area has been paralleled by an increase in domestic dwellings of 22.2 per cent during the same Census period. These are predominantly apartment dwellings, and are also indicative of the late 1990s property boom and speculative development where an influx of investment capital contributed to housing changes in the area. At the same time, a minor drop in home ownership of 3 per cent is

159 perhaps representative of the younger age and lifestyle status of many of the residents who have moved into the area to live in rental properties in recent years.

Fortitude Valley, New Farm and Newstead contain the highest proportion of working­age people (15–64 years) of any region in Brisbane. Historically, the three suburbs have always had an active rental market, and continue to contain a high proportion of rental dwellings — between 52 and 64 per cent. The high ratio of tenants to people who live in houses they have bought or are paying off suggests a group of residents for whom an attachment to the area might be a relatively short­term one. Driven by lifestyle considerations such as the area’s close proximity to the CBD for work, entertainment and amenity, and the high costs associated with buying property in the area, New Farm, the Valley and Newstead are witnessing a high turnover of residents.

Brisbane’s inner­city area as a whole has historically been a locale for affordable and diverse housing through the provision of public housing, hostels and boarding houses for low­income households. However, between 1991 and 1997, there has been a 38 per cent reduction in boarding (Queensland Shelter Report, cited in The Northern News, 20 March 1997). In recognition of the changing character of neighbourhoods that accompanies gentrification, the BCC’s Urban Renewal Task Force has incorporated the provision of some affordable public housing into the area. Stimson and Taylor note that, while there has been a 70 per cent increase in the number of public housing dwellings in the inner city from 1986 to 1996, the actual number of dwellings noted is only in the few hundreds (1996, 1998).

Urban regeneration is highly visible in the case study area, with patterns of change typical of inner­city revitalisation in global cities. A significant increase in upmarket housing and growing amenity and cultural infrastructure have resulted in high population growth amongst middle to high wage earners and professionals. There is a subsequent visible decline in the socioeconomic diversity of the area, a well­documented outcome of urban regeneration (Sassens 1991; Watson 1995; Zukin 1995).

160 SUBURBAN IMPRINTS

The second half of this chapter has identified the key developments occurring in Brisbane which have contributed to the transformation of the city. In particular, its inner­city areas — once organised according to a suburban model that included predominantly single dwellings on middle­sized to large allotments — are the areas in which the most visible change is occurring. As the city continues to transform, however, beneath its surface remain other narratives of the city. The previous chapter discussed the stronghold of Brisbane’s suburban origins in discursive accounts of the city. This type of living emphasises an ethos of order, retreat and privacy. One of the concerns of urban gentrification, such as that occurring in the case study area, is that people’s expectations of order and privacy should be reproduced in newly gentrified inner­city areas. Yet, as this thesis argues, living in densely populated spaces requires different modes and habits of living from the suburban way of life.

There is strong evidence of suburban imperatives impacting upon the case study area of Fortitude Valley, Newstead and New Farm, and I will refer to three examples to illustrate this. The first is a noise issue, over which several residents in Fortitude Valley mounted a vigorous campaign, beginning in 1998, to the Brisbane City Council and state government to have noise levels from local nightclubs and bars reduced. Residents who objected to the noise failed to consider the impact of moving into an area which was already well known as the city’s premier area for music and entertainment venues. One of the resident campaigners had purchased an apartment in the Sun Building, in which one of the apartment walls directly abutted the adjoining nightclub, The Press Club. 10 The Valley’s location as a music venue is supported by the Brisbane City Council, who initially responded to residents’ noise complaints with its ‘loud and proud’ campaign. The focus of the campaign was to alert people moving into the newly converted apartments in the Valley to the existing use of the neighbourhood by musicians and music clubs. Now, in another iteration of this campaign, the council is working with owners of music venues to ensure the area remains a viable music precinct while implementing restrictions on noise levels.

161 Second, suburban life is dependent upon the car, and the take­up of inner­city living has not diminished this reliance on the car, despite the accessibility of public transport such as buses, City Cats, trains and the development of bike paths and boardwalks in Brisbane. In the 1996–2001 period of urban gentrification in the case study area, car ownership had increased by 25 per cent (ABS, Brisbane Statistical Portrait 2001). Moreover, currently in 2007 the Brisbane City Town Plan mandates that all new residences in inner­city areas have two car spaces, a policy which suggests the primacy of the car, even in the inner­city.

Finally, an ethos of privacy akin to the suburbs can be discerned in current town planning policies for densely consolidated inner­city areas. The Brisbane City Town Plan (2006) stipulates that all verandahs or windows placed within 6 metres of side or rear fences must be screened so that neighbours are unable to overlook one another. This recalls the suburban privacy ethos elaborated in Chapter 4. For Brisbane, with its sub­tropical climate and where ‘life on the verandah’ was a significant feature of the Queenslander house, in the suburbs one was assured of a high degree of privacy. However, the adaptation and expectation of this style of living to the inner city is clearly problematic, and is an issue which requires different habits of living. Notions of privacy are inherited from Anglo­ Celtic culture and remain steadfast in Australian culture. Yet in traditional Greek villages, for example, having an outside area of the house that joins or overlooks a neighbour’s house is seen as an asset. This space is regarded as social space where one can chat with neighbours, rather than being concealed from them. 11

The Brisbane City Council’s framework for long­term planning, Vision for Living in Brisbane 2026, details eight themes that are to inform the development of the city. Among them are ‘Well­designed sub­tropical city: where we can still see the stars at night and hear the birds in the day’, ‘Friendly, safe city’, ‘Clean, green city’ and so on — all themes that articulate the endurance of the planner’s utopian impulse. The BCC’s themes are something of a wish list of a style of living more readily found in the suburbs. As Donald (1999) has noted, the impulse ‘to get the city right’ is an enduring and potent one, and wishes away an essential disorder which is intrinsic to the city.

162 CONCLUSION

Brisbane’s physical transformation has resulted in greater opportunities for engagement with the public life of the city. A significant increase in both commercial and public buildings, spaces and cultural venues — particularly in the case study area — encourages particular urban affiliations and identifications, shaping people’s experience of urbanity and relationship with the city. As the previous chapter argued in relation to the cafe, these spaces are also social spaces and are the arena within which citizens may encounter the Other.

The experience of urbanism is intensified by the growth in the construction of inner­city apartments, resulting in densely populated inner­city living. This is unprecedented in a city where, from the outset of its development, urbanism was kept at bay. With its small population and sub­tropical fecundity, Brisbane provided a model of verdant and spacious suburbanism. The shift from suburban to urban living requires people to live in very different ways. Thrust into close proximity to strangers amongst large aggregates of population, residents are confronted with a myriad of sensory input — the noise, sight and occasional smell of their neighbours, building sites, traffic and so forth. Tolerance and the acquisition of new forms of civility are required when living in densely populated urban environments. Moreover, the process of urban regeneration produces its own new brand of conformity: the suburbs comes to the inner city with expectations of order, privacy and the unity of the suburbs, while paradoxically being drawn there for its diversity and amenities.

Residents’ varied expectations inevitably clash and are expressed in neighbour conflicts, symptomatic of the contested nature of urban space. Many examples of this are evident in the New Farm, Fortitude Valley and Newstead areas. They include gay bashing in Fortitude Valley, long­term habitation of New Farm Park by groups of Indigenous residents in conflict with other users of the park, sex workers’ use of street corners and the hundreds of complaints the Brisbane City Council receives each week about sex workers,

163 noise, neighbours and other intolerances. 12 These are the ways in which the city’s past disrupts and resists the city’s cool new surface.

The area’s unruly past, and the conditions of high­density living, may inevitably result in an unsustainable exercise in urbanity for some new residents. But the assertion of the past, together with the complexity and conflicts of urban life, is inevitable. This experience is explored in the following chapter.

At this point, the reader should view the documentary ‘Everyone has Their Own New Farm’: Narratives of Neighbourhood Change’, prior to reading Chapter 6.

NOTES

1 The Pineapple Rebellion was staged by the League for Social Justice and demanded a series of industrial reforms, principally for primary producers. The League forcibly took over Parliament House in 1939 (Rickertt 2004). The Battle of Brisbane took place in 1942 when over a million servicemen were based in the city. Brisbane’s population at the time was under 330 000.Tensions between Brisbane men and the American servicemen grew to such an extent that several riots ensued throughout the city. No fatalities were recorded, though witnesses allege a death did happen (Evans and Donegan 2004).

2 Although the media in Brisbane tended to reflect the conservative values of the city, it was not always entirely supine. During Premier Joh Bjelke­Petersen’s rule, The Courier­Mail’s criticisms of the government resulted in a withdrawal of government advertising for a significant period of time.

3 Education Queensland, Department of Education and the Arts 2005, A Chronology of Education in Queensland (1926–1950), < http://education.qld.gov.au/information/service/libraries/edhistory/state/chronology>, accessed 11/05/06.

4 The ABC’s Chris Masters based his Four Corners report The Moonlight State on local journalist Phil Dickie’s investigations of the links between police and political corruption in Fortitude Valley. It became a national cause celébre, partly because it signalled the demise of the Bjelke­Petersen government’s notoriously repressive rule. The Fitzgerald Inquiry into Police Corruption subsequently identified Fortitude Valley as the home of many illegal brothels and gambling houses, whose existence flourished under paid police protection. Many politicians, high­ranking police officers and businessmen were prosecuted and gaoled. It brought down the long and ultra­conservative reign of the National Party.

5 Interview with Kevin Hayes, architect, 6 May 2006.

6 Frank Mort (2000) discusses the ways in which ‘an ethnography of space’ is useful for identifying practices of resistance and analysing spectacle, performance and regulation in urban space. Mort links these aspects of urban life to manifestations of sexuality in the city.

164 7 REIQ Profile for New Farm,, accessed 23/11/05.

8 At a time when Australia was embracing libertarian reform across a range of areas, Queensland was marked by political oppression and conservatism, at the behest of Sir Joh Bjelke­Peterson’s National Party. Under Sir Joh’s regime, street marches were banned, punitive drug laws were passed and police brutality was common.

9 Such was the emphasis on maintaining a grungy aesthetic that painting contractors who had inadvertently cleaned off the graffiti were instructed to restore it.

10 Author’s knowledge as a long­term resident of the area.

11 I was told this by a local when staying in a Greek village on the island of Rhodes in 2005.

12 Interview with Meg Hinchliffe, administrative officer for Brisbane City Council’s Central Ward.

165 CHAPTER 6

NARRATIVES OF THE NEW BRISBANE: RESIDENTS’ EXPERIENCE OF CHANGE

The point is I guess that change is not inherently bad, but simply that until recently life was lived differently in Brisbane. (Birmingham 2002: 4)

The previous chapter identified major historical and political forces that have helped shape Brisbane and underscore the significance of transformations occurring in the city. Since it began emerging from its parochial origins, many factors have contributed to Brisbane’s recent development as a place in which difference is now normative. The impact of globalisation is evident in Brisbane’s changing demography, in the growth of social and cultural infrastructure and in the development of its inner­city areas, where new social and cultural formations are developed and adopted. Inner­city apartments are replacing traditional single dwellings and this, along with other developments, signals a profound shift in ways of living for many of the city’s inhabitants.

This chapter examines the lived experience of the changing city through the perceptions and experience of three cohorts of residents living in Brisbane’s inner­city areas of Fortitude Valley, New Farm and Newstead — areas that have undergone enormous change in the past two decades. An interpretive approach is used to explore interview and survey data collected amongst the three resident groups. In using an interpretative approach, this chapter draws upon psychoanalytic theories expanded upon in Chapter 2, which elaborated upon the intrapsychic processes involved in place attachment, identity­ formation and the concept of the Other. Although I do not refer at length, to psychoanalytic concepts discussed in Chapter 2, they underpin my interpretation of the qualitative data. Thus when respondents talk about their perceptions and affiliations to

166 their neighbourhood, it can be assumed that the ways in which meaning is constructed them, is informed by Freud’s theories of introjection and projection. Here meaning is constructed through the modalities of the unconscious, the imagination and the external world, in this case their neighbourhoods and the city in which they live. Similarly, the data showed how concepts of the Other are registered in residents’ responses to the issue of diversity and difference, and the analysis here — while not explicitly stated — rests upon psychoanalytic knowledge of the concept.

Two surveys and a collection of face­to­face interviews were conducted with residents in Fortitude Valley, Newstead and New Farm. The interviews are part of the 20 minute documentary ‘Everyone has Their Own New Farm’: Narratives of Neighbourhood Change and, while sections of the interviews are analysed in this chapter, the following chapter reflects on the process of producing the documentary. As a record and oral history of neighbourhood change through the accounts of interview participants, the interviews are vital to this chapter. The survey data constitutes two cohorts of residents: those who at the time of the survey had bought apartments in the area but had not yet moved in; and those residents who had recently moved to the newly converted wool stores in Newstead. Survey data used a combination of both closed and open­ended questions.

BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY

The material collected provides a substantive basis from which to make interpretive observations about the subjective and social dimensions that inform people’s experience and perceptions of place in a rapidly changing neighbourhood. For this purpose, I will refer to the theoretical frameworks discussed in Chapter 2 to help provide an understanding of the perceptual and experiential dimension of urban living. It is worth reminding the reader at this point that Chapter 2 made interpretations from not just from psychoanalysis, but also used semiotics and theories of affect to explore the connection between subjectivity, meaning­making and place experience. What follows is a brief

167 recap of the central conceptual platforms of the thesis, which are then applied to qualitative and quantitative data.

While psychoanalysis and semiotics are widely used to explore a range of subjective and cultural phenomena, it is only recently that cultural and urban studies scholars have taken an interest in the ways in which affect is implicated in cultural theories of space (see, for example, Thrift 2004). The importance of affect within this study of urban change is that it provides another modality through which to understand quotidian experience. Affect is intrinsic to the subjective and social dimensions that inform people’s experience and perceptions of place. As such, this chapter draws upon recent literature in the field that foregrounds the ways in which lived experience, through emotion, embodiment and the sensory, is significant to theorising the subjective and social dimensions of urban change as discussed in Chapter 2 (Milton 2005; Maffesoli 1996; Pile 1996; Robins 2001; Thrift 2004). Affect is an embodied experience, and it is our bodies, feelings and senses that are the instruments through which we experience the environment. The ‘different way of living’ of the commencing quote refers to the different embodied experiences between living in a flimsy, timber Queensland house and an air­conditioned or masonry dwelling. The former connects its inhabitants with the sentient, outside world and the latter insulates against it. Notwithstanding the literary and perhaps exaggerated purpose of the claim that no one lives in timber houses anymore, there are other ways in which urban transformation has changed the way people inhabit the city of Brisbane, and these are explored throughout the chapter

The experience of embodiment is critical to the ways in which a sense of belonging of place and habitus are formed (Allon and Anderson 2004: 96). Mugerauer (2004) suggests that embodiment is constitutive of subjectivity and a sense of belonging:

To become human is continually a matter of embodied placement and displacement and the attempt to arrive at or establish a new place, where we understand place both as a physical site and a site of meaning. (2004: 66)

168 For Bridge and Watson (2000), there is an ethical dimension to our relationship with place which can be transformative and enable self­development (2000: 13). The key here is memory, and the ways in which memory is spatialised, where the ‘complex textures of the city are a rich source of memory’ and may provide the capacity for reflection — an enabler of change. Although it seems to me that the idea of self­development in this context is not a priori — there are too many obvious examples to the contrary and such a concept is dependent upon a range of other factors which jostle and compete with environmental ones — it is the relay between the affective, embodied experience of place and cognition that suggests environmental factors might well provide the potential for an ethics of citizenship at least. After all, living in close proximity to strangers pushes us up against humanity, our own and that of others, for better or for worse.

Recognition and understanding of subjective quotidian experience is important for a study examining rapid urban change in Brisbane. As Brisbane transforms from a regional town to a city, encounters with difference are one of the significant adaptations required of the city’s inhabitants. Living in close proximity to strangers produces a register of experience that has tangible consequences: the sound, smell and sight of others are part of the white noise of life and they can erupt and turn into neighbour disputes. Equally, close proximity enables the conviviality of shared experience, and activities such as regular neighbourhood get­togethers or meetings in the city’s newer urban amenities respond to the human impulse of sociability.

This thesis has also argued for the importance of representations and discourses, and the ways in which they contribute to a psychodynamics of place. Discursive resources are an important part of how we symbolically construct a relationship with place, and psychoanalytic theory and semiotics are useful here, for accounting for the ways in which meaning is constructed using these resources. Thus the ways in which the city is represented and imagined inform our subjective experience of the city.

While it was not the purpose of the interview data used in this chapter to make specific empirical links between the domains of experience and representation — a vexed project

169 from the start — nonetheless the interpretative approach of this chapter allows connections to be made, particularly as part of the study examines people’s perceptions of place prior to moving to the area. How, for instance, are these perceptions formed? Why do people see a particular place as desirable when in fact they have never lived there, and when it might be quite different in every way from the place from which they have come? In other words, to what extent might the imaginary and mediated city play a role in constructing ideas about the pleasures of inner­city living? While this study has a modest ability to arbitrate this hypothesis, the dialectical interplay between experience and imagination — fuelled by images and narratives in film, media and literature — is now widely recognised as a key matrix in place construction, an argument established in Chapter 2.

METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH

Two surveys (see Appendix 1 and 2) were sent to two different groups of people. One group was sent to people who had purchased, but had not yet moved into, their apartment in the newly refurbished, historic Sun apartment building in Fortitude Valley. The second group constituted those people already living in three of the recently converted wool stores in the adjacent Newstead area.

There were two main, shared aims of the surveys. First, the surveys assist in identifying the demographic characteristics of people moving to the area, including where they had moved or were moving from. The second aim was to gain an understanding of people’s reasons for moving or purchasing in the inner­city area of Fortitude Valley or Newstead. The survey conducted among residents in Newstead also asked questions about the experience of living in the area. Thus the surveys asked questions related to perceptions of inner­city living to determine what might have informed people’s moves, and to lifestyle characteristics such as the types of amenities people considered important in their decision and their experience of inner­city living. The survey included a mix of open­ended and closed­box response questions.

170 At the time of the survey conducted among owners of units in the Sun apartment building, Fortitude Valley, respondents had yet to move into their apartments as renovations were still being completed. The fact that people had not yet moved into their apartments was important for the data, as one of the aims was to find out what attracted people to Fortitude Valley — particularly as the area had only recently begun to be gentrified and it still had a lingering reputation of crime and disorder. In identifying where people were moving from and whether or not they had lived in the inner­city before, a move to the Valley could represent a significant change of lifestyle if a person had been living in the outer suburbs, or if the person had not had experience of dense inner­city living.

Forty­two surveys were mailed out to people who had purchased apartments in the building, corresponding with the number of apartments. The building comprises 39 one­ and two­bedroom apartments and three penthouses. Thirty people responded, comprising 29 completed responses in total, representing a very high response rate of 71 per cent. Moreover — and this was critical for the survey results — the overwhelming majority of survey respondents (at 86 per cent) intended to live in their apartments once they were completed and not rent them out. The fact that most people intended to live in their apartments rather than use them as an investment is indicative of a strong desire for inner­city living and adds strength to the core aim of the survey.

The Sun apartment building in Brunswick Street was the first major conversion in Fortitude Valley of an historic commercial building into apartment dwellings. In a small city such as Brisbane, which for many years had only one daily paper, the building is significant in the social history of the city. The Sun building was formerly the city’s main newspaper production house and workplace — hence its name, which comes from the Sun newspaper. It is located on the corner of a busy intersection of Brunswick and McLachlan Streets, and is flanked on its other side by a popular nightclub, The Press Club.

171 Built in 1923, it ceased operation as a newspaper house in 1996, when News Limited, the company who owned both the city’s newspapers, moved its production base to the suburb of Colmsley. The transformation of the building into an apartment block was completed in 1999. The architects responsible for the conversion, Kevin Hayes Architects, incorporated features of the building’s heritage into its redesign. This included the maintenance of large sash windows, original floors, the retention of a rooftop common area and the construction of a stainless steel water fountain in the shape of a roller with paper running through it, a reference to the old printing presses. In the survey, which asked respondents why they chose to purchase their apartment there, 17 per cent indicated that they were attracted by the heritage appeal of the building.

The second survey was sent to three of the Newstead converted wool stores: McTaggarts, situated on the river at Vernon Terrace, Paddy’s Wool Store in Macquarie Street and Teneriffe Apartments in Commercial Road. A total of 270 surveys were sent and 93 were returned, equating to approximately one in three occupants. While the main aims of the wool stores survey was similar to that for the Sun apartments — that is, to identify the appeal of the area and to determine where residents had moved from — additional questions were asked about the experience of living in the area. Residents in the wool stores had been living in the area for approximately eighteen months at the time of the survey. The differences between the two surveys might then be summed up as follows: the emphasis for the Sun apartments survey was on perceptions of the area and inner­city living, while the emphasis on the wool stores was on perceptions and experience.

Some summary findings concerning the demography of the respondents for the Sun apartments and the Newstead wool stores reveals the following information. The respondents in both surveys were distributed across a range of occupations and were not clustered in any one group, so there were representatives across the professions, trades, public sector and service and creative industries. The age of respondents indicated a youthful demographic. In the Sun apartments, 41.3 per cent were in the 21–29 age group and 24.1 per cent in the 30–37 age group. In the three Newstead wool stores, age was more widely distributed, but the majority of respondents were still under the age of 40.

172 Thirty­three per cent were in the 21–29 age group and 32 per cent in the 30–37 age group. The gender distribution in the Sun apartments was even, at 50 per cent male and 50 per cent female respondents, and similarly across the three wool stores, with 45 per cent male and 55 per cent female respondents.

Most interesting for the intent of the Sun apartments survey was the fact that, of the survey respondents — that is, those people who had yet to move in to the area — 23 out of 29 (79.3 per cent) at the time of the survey lived in Brisbane’s middle to outer suburbs. This represents a significant change in ways of living.

The remainder of the data analysed why people chose to move or buy into the area, what they found or perceived to be appealing about it, and what concerns respondents might have about the area. The results are clustered thematically, a reporting which conforms with the type of predominantly open­ended responses received for this section of the survey. While the themes are given identifier titles — lifestyle, diversity, community and belonging, identity and memory — arguably the thread that unites the first four themes is ‘people’. Thus the category of people featured strongly both throughout the survey responses and across a range of topics. The idea of people being part of the appeal of the area was both real and imaginary. So, for instance, respondents might state that a lot of their friends lived in the area, or it might be that one of the elements that attracted them to the area was that there appeared to be an ‘interesting and diverse group of people’ living there. For some, this was articulated as an abandonment of suburban monoculture, described by one respondent as soulless suburbia; another stated that his reason for moving to Newstead was because it ‘was not suburbia’.

I include in this chapter where appropriate, comments from the interviews conducted with the twelve participants in the documentary ‘Everyone has Their own New Farm’: Narrative of Neighbourhood Change. A detailed discussion of this documentary is discussed in Chapter 7.

173 LIFESTYLE, LIFESTYLE, LIFESTYLE

Of all Brisbane’s inner­city areas, Fortitude Valley is the most congested, dense and sparsely vegetated. These features make it distinctive for Brisbane’s inner city, which is characterised by a verdant suburban aesthetic and sense of space. The Valley has limited residential infrastructure, and the area is comprised mainly of commercial buildings. Two main roads which link the city’s south with the north carve up the area and carry heavy traffic that makes walking along the Valley’s streets a noisy and unpleasant experience. There is very little public space, apart from its two malls — one that appears to be seldom used. From the turn of the twentieth century to the 1960s, the Valley thrived as a shopping precinct centre, with retail giants such as TC Beirne, McWhirters and Overalls (Bailey et al. 1992: 5) creating an alternative shopping precinct to the city. However, as outlined in Chapter 5, the advent of suburban shopping centres in the 1960s saw the degeneration of the Valley, with a slow recovery occurring from the mid­1990s.

Despite the Valley’s lack of residential infrastructure and pedestrian­unfriendly streets, since gentrification people have been keen to live there. Converted commercial and industrial buildings and new apartment buildings all appear to sell well. The growth in urban infrastructure, such as cafes, restaurants, bars, music venues, niche shops and galleries, is commonly understood to be a large part of the attraction for people choosing inner­city living, and the Valley’s development has followed this pattern of gentrification. Access to urban amenities such as those listed is frequently couched in terms of the catch­all term ‘lifestyle’ in promotional literature for inner­city apartments.

It was not surprising, then, to find that the notion of lifestyle featured strongly in survey respondents’ reasons for moving to the area. In the open­ended question relating to reasons for moving or attraction to the area, the majority of all sets of respondents across the Sun apartments and the three Newstead wool stores cited ‘lifestyle’. This was variously articulated as simply ‘lifestyle’ or as ‘access to facilities such as cafes, movies, clubs and restaurants’ and so forth. Although the area of Newstead does not have the same level of entertainment and cultural infrastructure, its proximity as adjacent to the

174 Valley makes access to those amenities attractive. In the three wool stores surveys, people were asked to identify which activities among ten — including eating out, visiting a gallery, cafe, movie or club — they had participated in over the last three months. All respondents indicated that they had participated in at least seven out of the ten activities nominated.

Clearly, urban amenity is an important feature in the notion of lifestyle. But why? For those respondents moving from suburban areas, the inner city — with its greater number of amenities — represents the possibility of a more interesting and varied life than the suburbs. While the opportunity for entertainment is one obvious appeal, why are these particular forms of activities and cultural consumption more highly valued than, say, gardening, or sitting at home watching television? Most of the amenities identified involve some form of consumption, whether it is food, drink or music, but it is too simplistic to assume people are unwittingly duped into consumption activities at the service of the economy. Rather, it is more pertinent to see urban amenity and the forms of consumerism implicit in the term ‘lifestyle’ as enabling of sociability and social participation — a key factor in the life of the postmodern city, and discussed throughout this thesis.

As argued in previous chapters, the growth in urban amenity is also a growth in the social spaces of the city. Cafes, restaurants and entertainment venues have gained significance as sites of sociability that support changes to the social structure. These are social spaces in which both friendship and professional networks are developed. Several survey respondents, citing access to cafes, restaurants and other amenities as a key attraction for moving to the area, identified the social impulse behind their importance. A female in the 21–29 age bracket put it this way:

I spend a lot of time dining in the Valley’s restaurants and going to the clubs and pubs in the area. I have quite a few friends and family also living in the area …

175 The link between sociability, social networks and the sites of urban amenity was most clearly articulated in a statement from a female in the 18–29 age group living in the Newstead Woolstores who stated:

It is close to areas such as the Valley where myself and friends shop, socialise and relax.

Similarly, a male in the 21–29 age group stated that his main reason for moving to the Valley was because ‘most of my friends live in the area’. Several other respondents made similar remarks. The predominantly youthful cohort of respondents also alludes to the importance of sociability and lifestyle considerations for people at a particular stage of their life. As identified in Chapter 2, Maffesoli and Watters argue that one’s friends and acquaintances assume greater importance when marriage and having children are delayed. While a growth in urban sociability does not preclude people who are married with families, the demographic data of the surveys highlights its significance for an under­40 age group. Fortitude Valley in particular, with its well­established music scene, is popular with this age group. A 29­year­old survey respondent identified the area as particularly important for her age, stating her reasons for moving to the Valley as:

The fun factor, I’m 29 — this may be my only chance to live alone and so close to everything.

The importance of the city’s amenities in supporting varied and increasing forms of sociability is pursued further later in this chapter. However, while the material city of the last 20 years has seen an increase in its social spaces, the imaginary city also reinforces the perception of the city as a site of social connection. Inner­city lifestyles are given texture and meaning through the types of media representations discussed in Chapter 3. In television series such as The Secret Life of Us, the inner city is a vibrant social space inhabited by mostly youthful characters, a space in which friendships are forged and activities pursued in ways that are sustaining and essential to contemporary social networks.

176 Another lifestyle factor many people identified was the area’s proximity to the city’s Central Business District (CBD). While some respondents cited the importance of proximity to the CBD for work, others didn’t elaborate on why this was important. To what extent did proximity to the city loom large as an imaginary site? If people were attracted to the inner city for its amenities, what more could the city offer? The ontological fuzziness of the city makes it ripe as a site for the projection of fantasies and desires, which are imbued with subjective meaning.

In addition to those lifestyle factors identified by survey respondents and amplified in media constructions of inner­city living, the general affordability of many inner­city apartments continues to make this style of living attractive to an investment­conscious generation. For many people, it is their entrée into the property market; in this early phase of urbanism in Brisbane it is not yet clear to what extent inner city living might be part of a life­cycle phase for many of the younger people who have moved to the area. However, although not in the majority, survey respondents also reflected a considerable number of middle­aged and older people who had chosen this style of living for similar reasons to younger age groups. Moreover, since the surveys were conducted, several new apartment blocks such as Cutter’s Landing in New Farm — some of whose units sell for well over the $2 million mark — have been built around the river edge. Marketing for these apartments appears to be aimed at an older demographic than marketing for the wool store apartments in adjacent Newstead.

DIVERSITY

If friends and people are a tangible and important part of lifestyle, for other respondents the category of ‘people’ assumed a more imaginary and subjective quality. Its significance here is expressed in terms of population diversity. It seemed that people were attracted to both the idea and reality of living among strangers. So, for many respondents, a part of their attraction to the area was to live amidst people whom they had never met, but whose outward appearances made them seem interesting. Thus another appealing

177 characteristic of the area identified by respondents was the type of people who lived in or frequented the area. These were variously described as ‘diverse range of people’, ‘interesting people’, ‘variety of people — social classes’, ‘people variety’, ‘diversity of people’, ‘diversity of socioeconomic group’, ‘street life — interesting people’ or simply as ‘the people’. One respondent was quite specific about the meaning of diversity. A female (21–29) from the Sun apartment survey stated: ‘variety of types of people, for example, poor, rich, gay, straight, multicultural …’

In the documentary, for both Nicky and Holly it is New Farm’s diversity that makes the area interesting, expressed for Holly as: ‘It’s got a collection of so many different people, really interesting people.’ and for Nicky as: ‘It’s diverse … there’s an interesting cross section of people, very multicultural … New Farm grows nice people.’

For these respondents, an affect­laden quality is inherent in notions of diversity which might be seen to add texture, vibrancy and potentiality to their neighbourhood. The statements, with their reference to multiculturalism as an asset, also draw upon notions of cosmopolitanism in which the values of tolerance and ‘open­mindedness’ are implicit. As the concept of ‘diverse’ and ‘interesting’ people is expressed as a positive attribute of the neighbourhood, it assumes a set of shared values and world­view among others, which may or may not be real. A male (21–29) from the same cohort identified his neighbours as having particular sensibilities and values when he stated one of the appeals of the area was ‘liberal (open minded) inhabitants’.

Diversity has its limits of tolerance for some people, however, and socioeconomic and cultural population mix can be discomforting when it is perceived to be threatening. For one Sun apartment respondent (female, 45–54), the line between diversity and urban disorder was blurred and a source of concern. In response to the question of whether purchasers of the Sun apartments had any concerns about moving into Fortitude Valley because of its lingering reputation as a site of urban derogation (although this implication was unstated in the question), she stated:

178 The Aborigines and drunks in the parks where we have to walk to get to the city; the graffiti and general cleanliness of the streets!

However, this type of response was the exception to the majority of responses to that particular question, in which the concern expressed by several respondents was that the area might become too gentrified and lose its diversity. This is best represented by one of the respondents (male, 21–29), who stated that:

my main concern is that the area will be overdeveloped and lose its cultural diversity and become homogenised

What is it, then, that is so attractive about diversity? Why do people want to live among people who appear different from themselves? For Barthes, this is the very essence of the city, ‘a place of our meeting with the Other’ (1982: 96). Perhaps the appeal of our meeting with difference can be seen in several ways. First, difference is part of a metropolitan aesthetic in which diversity of not just people but also of the built environment is intrinsic to the idea of the city as a spectacle. While we might not actually want to mix intimately with people who are not like us, we are happy to look at them and participate in difference at a superficial level, such as eat in ethnic restaurants and attend ethnic or cultural festivals — an activity which engages voyeuristic and sensual pleasures. Critiques of multiculturalism’s endeavours, for instance, point to the fragility of commitments to diversity and suggest that it has had more of a cultural impact than a political one. Hage (1998), in White Nation, adopts the term ‘cosmo­multiculturalism’ to refer to patterns of consumption he identifies with an urban­based bourgeois cosmopolitanism. Similarly, Skrbis and Woodward’s (2007) qualitative research on the values of cosmopolitanism — that is, people’s attitudes towards openness and difference — reveals that behavioural components of the cosmopolitan disposition related to the consumption of food, overseas travel and music are positively valued. Interestingly, the research was conducted mainly among Brisbane residents, from a diverse range of localities.

179 Despite this, difference is nonetheless part of the performative aspect of city life. The type of psychic and bodily engagement that Simmel identified as peculiar to metropolitan life encourages individual differentiation and performativity (see Chapter 1). According to Simmel:

man [sic] is tempted to adopt the most tendentious peculiarities, that is, the specifically metropolitan extravagances of mannerism, caprice and preciousness … of ‘being different’. (1950: 416)

In other words, difference is what we expect of cities and what, according to Simmel, the metropolitan environment psychically develops.

Second, for Brisbane — a city which until recently was distinctive for its lack of population diversity with its majority Anglo Celtic ethnicity — the area’s diversity can be seen as part of its appeal precisely because of the contrast with what it did not have. Diversity signifies a sense of the cosmopolitan, part of which is acknowledging the difference of others. Diversity for those respondents might signify that the city has finally come of age; it is a marker of Brisbane’s arrival amongst the legion of larger global cities. One respondent (female 30–36), who had moved from the larger city of Melbourne, stated:

Coming from Melbourne, this area seemed to be like a small slice of Melbourne. The diversity of people is much more interesting than in many other parts of the city.

Similarly in the documentary, for Albert who came to New Farm from Italy via Sydney in the 1960s, the appeal of New Farm was its resemblance to the inner­city harbour area of the larger city of Sydney. He observed: ‘It gave me the impression that it was like Elizabeth Bay in Sydney.’ Such comparisons with larger cities from which people have moved articulate a metropolitan sensibility that highlights a desire for difference. Difference here is seen as valuable for the type of experience it affords.

180 Third, one of the main promises of diversity is vitality. As a central feature of metropolitan life, diversity might well be understood as being synonymous with vitality, animating a sense of what is truly metropolitan. Columnist Cyril Connolly, writing about New York in one of its most vibrant epochs the 1940s and 1950s, summed up the vitality of that city, a highly prized outcome of its diversity:

where every language is spoken and xenophobia almost unknown, where every pursuit and appetite is catered for, where every street with every quarter and the people who inhabit them are fulfilling their function, not slipping into apathy, indifference, decay. (cited in Clarke 1998: 328)

Here, vitality stands in opposition to decay and indifference, and is injected into the city spaces through variety and difference — a factor and experience of metropolitan life which is actively constituted across the material and imaginative modes of engagements. Finally, the idea of diversity — that is, of living among strangers — is part of a romanticism and big­city sensibility operating at the imaginative and symbolic level of desire; it expresses the dream of serendipitous chance encounter, the opportunity of self­ invention, the excitement of the unknown, a reprieve from the familiarity and routine of everyday life.

Despite the imaginative potency of diversity as a concept — and its desirability — it is also paradoxical. The experience of diversity can give rein to the difficulty and conflict that can be associated with living among people who do not share the same habits and values as ourselves. The aforementioned quote from a respondent moving into the Valley that ‘the Aborigines and drunks in the parks’ were a concern reveals the limits to the types of tolerances and types of diversity that some people are willing to endure. It would be salient, for instance, to know in what ways the desire for diversity is commensurate with actual values of tolerance, generosity and a good civic ethic amongst those who claim its importance. Further, as gentrification tends to ameliorate diversity, it may in fact become less of a lived experience in the survey area, where there are already many indicators of this — perhaps the most notable being the demolition or refurbishment of houses previously used for low­cost accommodation. One respondent (male, 21–29),

181 alert to this fact, observed that he liked the diversity but was concerned it would not last: ‘mix of people (rapidly too yuppie now)’.

The desire for diversity, with its subjective associations, expressed by survey respondents and participants in the documentary is not dissimilar to the ways in which ideas about community were expressed in the survey and documentary. Both ‘a sense of community’ and ‘diversity’ were identified by respondents as important appeals of the area for them. Yet to some extent these concepts are abstractions, suggesting a strong affective and imaginative dimension. This is because in many ways diversity and community are antithetical and oppositional to one another: diversity celebrates difference, and community celebrates belonging and cohesion. Community assumes those ‘like us’, while diversity assumes the Other.

COMMUNITY AND BELONGING

Kevin Robins’ assertion that the city is above all a group experience, in which ‘the collectivity both invests meaning in the city and discovers meaning there: the collectivity creates the city and the city creates the collectivity’ (1996: 137), is evident in the ways in which many respondents expressed the notion of community as part of the appeal of their inner­city neighbourhood.

Community, as discussed in Chapter 1, is a notoriously slippery concept, and can mean many things to many people. The imaginative process by which people conjure up notions of community is acknowledged at the outset of this study, and extends beyond locality or social networks to the mosaic of subjective meanings that people attach to the place itself and to their relationships within those places (Williamson in Byrne 2004: 69). Thus the symbolic nature of community in constructing people’s sense of belonging and place, and its meaning in reference to identity, are widely acknowledged (Anderson 1983; Blokland 2003; Cohen 1982, 1985). Previous chapters have also examined the ways in which community is imagined and represented through culture, in which community is evoked nostalgically — such as the working­class community represented in the film The

182 Full Monty, where everyone pulls together in times of hardship. In other accounts, community is reconfigured in less traditional ways, as groups of people who are intimately connected across interest and lifestyle vectors. The ways in which our culture’s narratives interact and influence our ideas about concepts such as community do not have to be empirically proven — they are, after all, collective dreams, fears and desires writ large on the cinema screen, in the novel and taken up as rhetorical strategies by urban planners, politicians and publicists. Community is as ubiquitous as it is vague and imagined. The term appears consistently in urban planning documents, and is promulgated in the Brisbane City Council’s Urban Renewal Report (1999) for the Fortitude Valley and Newstead area. The quote in this report, from one of the area’s residents, also reveals the ways in which the establishment of new residential precincts facilitates the formation of communities in this area:

One of the key attractions is the strong community spirit, which is missing from a lot of suburbs these days. Because Teneriffe was transformed almost overnight from an industrial to a residential area it meant that everyone moved in around the same time.

All the buildings have on­site managers so they introduce newcomers. The precinct around Blu Poles has become a bit of a meeting place and you’re always running into someone you know. (Lockley 1999: 17)

The desire for belonging is a powerful and universal force, and as notions of community are linked with the process of meaning­making, the concept is instilled with an affective register. In the survey responses, the emotive use of the term is evident in the language some respondents used to describe the appeal of their neighbourhood when referring to community. For instance, many respondents used the verb ‘to feel’ when articulating the appeal of the neighbourhood. A female (18–29) respondent stated that it was ‘the community feel especially among people my age’ that attracted her to the area, while another female (37–45) referred to the ‘community feeling’ as an asset. The crucial role of the affective sphere in meaning­making and sense of place is discussed in Chapter 2, and is also articulated by many of the respondents and interview subjects in the documentary ‘Everyone has Their Own New Farm’. It is invariably linked to their networks of friends and sociability. For Nicky and Andrew of New Farm, living among

183 friends was identified as a strong factor in their attachment to the suburb, expressed by Andrew as a sense of community:

There’s a strong sense of community in New Farm, you’re always running into friends. It’s nothing to jump on your bicycle and visit Nicky for example. If he’s not home there’s someone in the next street.

In the documentary, Andrew elaborates this point, identifying the places within New Farm that were the site of his social network’s interaction — where they got together, hung out, played games or ate, such as the Merthyr Bowls Club and New Farm Park for picnics and a game of soccer.

Nicky and Andrew’s expression of, and the value they place upon, community recalls Maffesoli’s (1996) ‘emotional community’ (after Weber) in which social groupings are intrinsically affective. Maffesoli’s thesis is elaborated in Chapter 2, but it is worth reiterating his central argument. Along with Thrift (2004), Maffesoli argues that a focus by some scholars on a world increasingly marked by anomie, isolation and individualism overlooks the ways in which new types of social structures are being forged. For Maffesoli, these types of social groupings or tribes can be united by lifestyle or other factors, but their strength lies in the power of basic sociality, of ‘being together’, instilled with a Dionysian quality of the ‘transcendent warmth of the collectivity’ (1996: 4). Tribes are typically fluid, unstable and open — members will belong to any number of tribes and move freely among several tribes. Watters’ (2004) ethnographic study of contemporary social groupings is illustrative of and supports Maffesoli’s ideas; in Watters’ account, the tribe’s natural habitat is the city.

Although not central to Maffesoli’s thesis, the postmodern city’s increased amenity, such as its coffee shops, bars, parks and restaurants, provides the social arena in which tribes forge their relationships. The cafe’s role in supporting this purpose was discussed in Chapter 4 and one does not have to look very far in the case study area to see examples of this.

184 For many people recently moved into Newstead and Fortitude Valley, the appeal of community is expressed by its vitality, diversity and emotional sustainability. In both the survey responses and from interview subjects of the documentary, the consistent expression of comments such as ‘this is where my friends all live’ and ‘sense of community’ when asked to state the attraction to the area, and when there were no questions which used the specific terms ‘community’ or ‘friends’, all indicate the importance of the emotional sustainability of community, however this might be realised. Indeed, the importance of friendship communities for many people is such that they have become the family that we’ve chosen (Thrift 2000: 243).

The symbolic nature of community construction does not diminish the role of place in the development of community networks. Maffesoli emphasises the spatial, and the ways in which neighbourhood is the locus of networks of relationships, which allows them to be cemented by affective, neighbourly practices. Similarly, in Blokland’s study (2003) of communities undergoing change, the author observes that it is where people’s daily activities take place that matters most to questions of community (2003: 11). While many people spend many hours at a workplace that may be located some distance from where they live, the local shops or shopping centre and other local facilities take on particular meanings for people and are implicit in ideas about community. One female (30–36) respondent, when identifying community as an attraction of the area, indicated that the shops were intrinsic to her idea of community, expressed as: ‘sense of community — Coles and shops, etc.’. During the period of this study, the New Farm shopping centre, Merthyr Village, was expanded to include additional shops besides the existing Coles supermarket, greengrocer and chemist. The inclusion of cafes and restaurants into the shopping centre means that the shopping precinct has become much more of a social hub for many residents. 1

For residents of New Farm and Newstead, there was also something about the geographical boundedness of the area as a peninsula that some people identified as

185 contributing to the area’s sense of community. In the documentary, Holly contrasted New Farm’s community feel to other suburbs she’s lived in:

Milton and Toowong are kind of very decentralized whereas New Farm’s got more of a community atmosphere while being more city like than West End.

For Sue, when asked what she liked about the suburb, the first statement she made was ‘it’s not a thoroughfare, so it’s at the end of a line’. A respondent (male, 18–29) from the Newstead wool stores also identified the peninsula as one of the features that attracted him to the area, adding that it was away from major roads. Perhaps what these responses allude to is the bounded sense of community, both real and imagined but more easily imagined when tangible physical boundaries exist. The river rings the area’s peninsula, and it is as if this sense of spatial enclosure works also as a kind of psychic enclosure, in such a way that inhabitants on the peninsula feel more connected and cohesive.

AFFECT AND THE SENSES

As revealed throughout the survey responses, the affective domain constantly arises in reference to the lived experience of place and in respondents’ perceptions of community, expressed either implicitly or explicitly in terms such as ‘feel’ or ‘sense of’. The centrality of affect in the interpretation of people’s experience of place requires some further discussion here, not only because it is implicit in notions of community, but also because it was registered in interesting ways in the survey data. Chapter 2 offered Kay Milton’s (2005) account of the ways in which emotion operates in the relationship between the individual and their environment, highlighting the centrality of emotion in people’s sense of place and belonging. Milton observes that:

the individual’s mode of engagement with their surroundings is essentially emotional — that emotions connect us with our surroundings, enabling us to learn from them, defining the quality of engagement, shaping our memories and therefore our knowledge. (2005: 7)

186 Indeed, it is easy to see how affect can have very tangible consequences in the way city space is used. As feminist scholars have long observed, fear of sexual assault can be a very real and limiting experience in women’s use of public space, especially at night (Stanko 1985). Similarly, fear of homophobic attacks may pose real limitations for gay men. When discussing the changes to his neighbourhood, one of the first things Andrew noted, as a self­identified young gay male featured in the documentary, was that the area had become a lot safer since gentrification. Prior to gentrification, he observed that ‘you had to have eyes in the back of your head’, particularly in Fortitude Valley. In fact, gay bashings were such a common occurrence in Fortitude Valley that at one stage vigilante groups operated to protect gay men in the area. Andrew’s feeling of enhanced safety no doubt adds to his sense of belonging and quality of life. We have all experienced fear: its bodily effects of muscle tension, increased heart rate, shallow breathing and so forth can be deeply unpleasant, can affect how we walk and comport ourselves, how we use the city.

It was interesting to note how, in the use of terms to describe the appeal of their neighbourhoods, residents called upon affective registers of meaning. Following Maffesoli’s view that sociality is expressed in terms of ‘ambiences, feelings and emotions’, it appeared that the dominant lens through which respondents reflected upon their neighbourhood was an essentially affective and social one. So, apart from articulating this as a ‘sense of community’ and ‘community feel’, people used ambient and aesthetic descriptors such as ‘village feel’ (male and female, 30–45), ‘high energy atmosphere’ (female, 30–36), ‘the feeling/atmosphere and locality’ (female, 18–29), ‘ambience of district’ (male, 37–45), ‘inner city buzz’, ‘the industrial feel of Teneriffe’ (male, 30–36), ‘colourful culture’ (female, 18–29), ‘artistic flavour and people variety’ (female, 46–54) or simply ‘ambience’ (male, 30–36). One resident simply wrote ‘feel’ at the top of a list that included cafes, river, transport and other tangible amenities. For Kevin, featured in the documentary, New Farm has:

187 a strong sense of urban life about it, it’s a suburb but it’s got qualities you expect to find in bigger cities …

Holly animatedly described New Farm as having an ‘amazing atmosphere’ and said it was an interesting place to live because of this. Sometimes the ambient slipped into quasi­spiritual associations, such as a female (18–29) wool stores respondent who stated the area had ‘a good ora [sic — aura] around it, with cafes, parks, eating out, etc … it has a young people’s tag to it’.

Other comments that singled out the character of the area contrasted it with the suburbs. A female (37–45) stated that she liked the area’s ‘old industrial buildings with character rather than soulless suburbia’.

Affect is also registered in negative ways. As previously mentioned, prospective residents in the Sun apartments were asked whether they had any concerns about moving into the area, and one of the two respondents who answered in the affirmative expressed fear over safety issues. Interestingly, one female respondent (30–36) observed this to be a combination of safety and economic factors, the possible decline in property values that might follow:

Lingering reputation as a red light district with its associated vices and problems. Security of self and assets, together with depreciating property values due to environment.

Fear, anger, joy, happiness, revulsion, ennui — these emotions all bump up against each other in the crucible of the city. Cities are also places of sensory immersion, in which sound, sight, touch and smell may activate affective and bodily experience through encounters with the multiplicity of strangers or simply through characteristics of the environment itself. Simmel emphasises the social character of the senses, while Rodaway shows how the senses are spatial — each sense contributing to people’s orientation in space, and to the particularities of spatial environments (cited in Urry 2003: 389). So,

188 when Venero in the documentary reflects on his return to the New Farm of his childhood after a period of absence, it is the sight, texture and colours of the new buildings that have so transformed his neighbourhood, that were so offensive to him that he registered his disquiet at the level of disgust:

… when I came back, it was all so clean … and so kind of pastelly and plastery and apricot coloured and mauve coloured — it looked disgusting to me. I didn’t like it at all.

For Venero, the changes to New Farm are so steeped in affective resonance that they represent the abject. Following Urry (1990), it is the sense of vision that has dominated the other senses in Western culture for many centuries, and its many tropes, uses and displays are part of the ontology of the postmodern city — it is little wonder that this is the sense most frequently used as a frame of reference to articulate change in people’s neighbourhood. For Nicky, who regards New Farm as a ‘beautiful place’, it is the parks, with their old and verdant trees, that are significant for him. Sue registers the importance of the suburb’s ‘fabulous old houses’ and Albert first noticed New Farm because it ‘looked like Sydney’s Elizabeth Bay’.

Allon and Anderson (2004) suggest that the sensory interconnections between people and places are significant for the ways in which they actually shape society and place. For them, the sensory is:

not just a set of expressive, secondary phenomena, but a constitutive fibre that actually stitches the city together. The sentient therefore needs to be recognised as part of the fabric of material, organisational and institutional settings, as well as key registers of experience through which social and spatial relations are lived and formed. (2004: 92)

Perhaps, then, this is what constitutes the sensibility of a city — the difficult to define and articulate, but palpable, sense or expression that permeates a city, giving each place its unique ambience and character.

189 The visceral, corporeal characteristic of the sensory register exists in both harmonious and conflictual ways, at times confronting and opposing each other so that tensions over the visible and auditory features of a cityscape in flux are inevitable. The types of intense responses to features of a city in transition, such as new buildings, new architectural styles and the many auditory disturbances of construction noise, are indicative of how the city is experienced in sensual and embodied ways. In the case study area, resident grievances over noise from bars and clubs, opposition to high­rise development, to construction noise, to the buzz of jet­skis on the river, are in fact all responses to the fractures in sensory, bodily, habituated modes of being in a place. The material consequence of any number of those experiences is highlighted, for example, by the persistent opposition from a minority of residents in the Valley to music from neighbouring nightclubs, which resulted in the Brisbane City Council’s ‘Loud and Proud’ campaign, discussed in the previous chapter. If vision and smell reform themselves to constitute the evolving spatiality of the nineteenth century city, then the sense of noise may well be on the ascendant in the postmodern city. Urry remarks that there appears to be a reinvigorated oral culture in cities, reflected in the sounds of muzak, loudspeakers, ghetto blasters, traffic and mobile phones to which we are constantly and increasingly exposed in urban life (2000: 395).

A SENSE OF PLACE: IDENTITY AND MEMORY

One of the central threads of this thesis is the role of perception and imagination in our experience of the city. Donald has defined a relationship with the city as an abstraction which our unique, subjective experience of the city makes into ‘the imaginary reality of our mental life’ (1999: 8). Pile uses psychoanalysis to argue for the pivotal role of place in the formation of subjectivity and identity. Using the psychoanalytic tropes of identification in which fantasy is foregrounded, Pile argues that subjectivity is forged across space at the intersection of geography and the psyche — place and self — through perception, cognition, affect and the drives of the unconscious (1996: 236). Indeed, in this chapter we have already seen how ideas about, and the desire for, ‘community’ and ‘diversity’ are expressed partly through an

190 imaginative and symbolic process of place construction. Along with our abstraction of the city, of our neighbourhood, our personal narratives, histories and memory all work to construct this ‘imaginary reality’, a meaning­making process through which we make sense of ourselves and the places in which we live. This process is part of what determines our lived experience of the city.

Philosophers have also charted the links between the formation of subjectivity and identity to place, a point elaborated in Chapter 2. Following Heidegger, Malpas (1999) asserts memory as a key modality for the ways in which subjectivity is embedded in place, and is spatialised (Malpas 1999: 176). Other scholars, such as Watson and Bridge (2000), have noted an ethical dimension to place memory in which the recognition of a city’s past might contribute to its future, to a better future.

The writer Robert Hughes observes:

A city needs deep memory, without which it becomes merely a stage set. You cannot throw out the past like a Kleenex … intelligent preservation is democracy at work. It affirms that we have a shared history, out of which come shared forms of consciousness. (cited in Atkin 2001: 89)

The documentary participants who had a long­term connection to New Farm were able to draw upon their memories and experiences of places in their neighbourhood in ways that frequently reflected the centrality of place for aspects of their identity. For instance, because of the selective nature of memory, what we choose to remember and describe might well say as much about us as it does about the place we seek to recall (Pamuk 2004: 316). Madge and Iselet’s memories of their childhood, described by Madge as a ‘lovely childhood’ in New Farm, where they had ‘plenty of fun’, was also representative of their cheerful and philosophical approach to the changes to their neighbourhood, expressed at the conclusion of the documentary. Inserted into a logic of identity, memory is actively constituted in subjectivity, and given weight and timbre in recollections of place and place experience. We remember and conceive of place in relation to our dreams, desires and other products of our imagination. This is eloquently illustrated by Venero, who articulates

191 the hopes of the migrant dream of a better life with his anecdote about Italians who had lived around Sicily’s volcano, Mt Etna, and who moved to Brisbane’s New Farm:

At night when they walked around the streets of New Farm they could look up at the lights of the Cloudland Ballroom, and for them it was a little bit like the Italian dream come true. No longer did they have to look up at a volcano, you know … with all those lights they could look up at a ballroom.

For Italian migrants living in the New Farm area, Cloudland Ballroom may have been a potent symbol for their newfound prosperity and opportunity, but it is Venero’s writer’s imagination that marks out the two sites of Mt Etna and Cloudland as iconic polarities of the Italian migrants’ past, and their future hopes and dreams. Yet in that oppositional trope of past and future, nature versus civilisation, is an ironic inversion that places Brisbane as an index of culture and civilisation. For a city whose status in the national mythology has been profoundly anti­urban, a natural wonderland with undertones of barbarism, its elevation to a symbol of culture and civilisation for Italians in particular only works in the reconfiguration of the Italian as Other.

Yet inner city Brisbane, with its ramshackle timber dwellings did not represent the apotheosis of civilisation and, as Venero points out, most Italian migrants who moved to the area in the 1950s and 1960s eventually moved to the outer suburbs, once they’d established themselves financially. Part of this was to do with the fact that ‘they didn’t really like the wooden houses … the architecture of the place, they all really wanted a nice, brick home’. The timber houses and inner­city living, with its associations of poverty, did not fit many migrants’ dreams of success and, following Ernest Burgess’s theory of concentric zones, the inner city is represented as a zone of transition, a phase of movement outwards towards the suburbs — the move being associated with social and economic mobility (Howe 1995: 142).

192 Venero and Albert’s identity as Italian migrants kept asserting itself in their recollections of New Farm, although in quite distinct ways from one another. Albert is a generation older than Venero, and arriving as an adult with a migrant ethic to do well in his adopted country, he saw opportunities in New Farm real estate in the 1960s. Observing that New Farm was ‘so close to the city and having a beautiful river’ where the real estate potential had not been exploited, Albert helped to realise his dream of opening up the area to development, a strong source of identification for him. Albert maintains his pride in the fact that he suggested to his builder friends to come to the area, resulting in the building of a number of 1960s and 1970s medium­rise apartment blocks which have become somewhat iconic of the area.

By contrast, Venero’s recollections of New Farm as a child of Italian immigrants are charged with the nostalgia associated with a happy childhood:

For me it represented this innocent period, I remember it as a child’s paradise and that’s how I feel when I come here … just walking around New Farm Park, walking the dog, I remember just how free and exciting everything seemed …

As a trigger for memory, place can be an evocative site — as Frisby notes, ‘memory is stronger on space than on time’ (2001: 128). Similarly, Zukin has observed the ways in which memory is often stimulated and provoked by the neighbourhood shopping streets of our childhood (1995: 191). It was places and shops within the neighbourhood that featured strongly in the accounts that Venero, Iselet and Madge provided in their recollections of growing up in New Farm. These places represented an index of change in their neighbourhood, with their memories of what lies beneath the palimpsest of the new urban fabric. Venero describes the shops of his childhood, in particular the ones that used to be on the corner of Moray Street, a precinct now animated by two popular cafes and an assortment of other shops:

193 It’s such a cosmopolitan corner and … I really, really like it but I can’t help thinking about what it was like thirty years ago … there was a little corner shop and a butcher shop that sold the most rancid meat on the planet.

Venero explains how this area ‘holds special significance’ for him because it was the first shop he was allowed to walk to on his own — because, although he had to cross a street to get there, it was only a small laneway. The experience is rendered as a pivotal moment in his identification of masculinity and its associated characteristic of independence. Venero recalls: ‘I remember feeling like a really, really big man’.

Madge identifies Garrets in James Street as the main grocer’s shop in the area when she was a child. Her description of the shop’s goods and how they were purchased vividly reveals the ways in which consumption practices were radically different to the modern consumer experience of shopping in the supermarket. Madge recalls this experience enthusiastically:

It was a terrific grocer shop. They had to weigh up all the different ingredients like sugar, flour and the butter they pat it up into pounds.

The recent change to the area’s shops is one of the less positive features for Sue, who lamented the loss of the ‘streetscape style of shops’, adding that she didn’t like the feeling of being ‘herded into a mall’ in the expanded Merthyr Village shopping precinct. The loss of corner shops — a common result of gentrification — is another concern for Sue, who regrets that the ‘daggy old fruit shops and corner shops’ have now disappeared from the area. Sue’s statements imply that there is something less authentic about the experience of shopping in the area’s upgraded consumer spaces of Merthyr Village, with its mall layout and new boutique­style shops. The identification of herself as a long­term resident with strong connections to the area, and thus to the shopkeepers of ‘daggy old fruit shops’, is ameliorated by the anonymous style of larger chain stores. In the daggy old fruit shops, one gets to know the shopkeeper.

194 Oral accounts of neighbourhood change provide insight and texture to the experience of place, offering glimpses into the everyday life of a neighbourhood that no image or photograph is capable of rendering with such precision and nuance. Madge and Iselet, in their seventies and eighties, have lived through periods of great change, yet their recollections also show how some things haven’t changed much at all. It seems, for instance, that Fortitude Valley’s reputation as a site of disordered and public sexuality, discussed in the previous chapter, is not confined to its recent past where sex workers on street corners and a visible gay male presence caused some residents to voice their disapproval to the Brisbane City Council. Iselet recalls that, when walking home from the Valley as a child, they passed a brothel in McLachlan Street. She says the daughter of the woman who worked there was in her class at school. In Iselet’s account, this was local knowledge and she shrugged it off as ‘not a problem’. The woman in question ‘was a nice woman and there was never any problems’ — here Iselet demonstrates the type of tolerance that Nicky feels about his neighbourhood today, when he says ‘it allows me to express myself in ways which are important to me’. Here, I assume, Nicky is alluding to his performativity as a gay male, which in another less tolerant and diverse neighbourhood may not be sanctioned in the way that makes him feel comfortable in New Farm. It is an interesting statement because it says a lot about place and identity, and the ways in which certain qualities of place that are quite ephemeral — such as neighbourhood ambience or feel — are registered in very meaningful ways in the quotidian experience of people’s lives.

For the conclusion of the documentary, I focused on participants’ responses to the question of how they viewed changes to their neighbourhood in general. While several responses to this question have already been discussed in previous sections of the chapter, other concerns registered were principally to do with the perceived loss of community and diversity. Nicky thought that the area was becoming a little less community oriented, and expressed a concern that the beauty of New Farm be preserved. Sue was concerned about the loss of New Farm’s old houses and shops, which was part of a larger concern

195 about the loss of diversity in the area. Madge and Iselet, perhaps after living though so much change in their lifetimes, gave the most sanguine response: ‘It’s still nice, I’m happy here’ and ‘Life’s like this, I mean you take it as it comes, the good and the bad – nothing stays the same’.

CONCLUSION

The survey data and interview participants’ responses support one of the principal assertions of this thesis: the importance for people of the city’s new amenities and spaces as sites which enable sociability. For survey respondents, one of the main appeals of the Fortitude Valley and Newstead area was the amenities and the diversity the area appeared to offer, and this was consistently borne out in respondents’ references to cafes, bars and entertainment venues as the main ‘lifestyle’ features that are valued. People’s desire for social connection is expressed through comments about ‘interesting’ people in their neighbourhood and the emphasis placed on community, however vaguely imagined and defined the concept is.

The significance of urban amenity as enabling sociability challenges negative critiques of the postmodern city which claim that the proliferation of such consumer­oriented spaces privileges bourgeois consumption and lifestyle practices (Hage 1998). While this study does not resile from the fact that urban gentrification can produce a form of cultural homogenisation, mainly by the displacement of low­income and marginalised residents, it notes that there are other factors at play. Broader social changes to the family structure, to work patterns and practices, increased mobility among people and technological developments have contributed to changes in lifestyle practices and to ways of inhabiting the city. The city’s growing amenities support social change in such a way that more people — particularly women — are actively engaged with the city. Moreover, arguments about the privileging of bourgeois modes of consumption overlook the diversity of amenities which cater for diversified demographic groups. Fortitude Valley’s cafes, restaurants and music venues attract a broad range of social groupings, including marginal youth groups.

196 That the concepts of community and diversity were clearly important to people was reflected both in survey data and among several of the interview participants in the documentary. While diversity and community can to some extent be materially assessed, both of these concepts have a symbolic and imaginative quality, which underscores the imagination’s role in place construction and experience. Thus, for people moving to the area, the perception that the area might offer more of a community spirit than where they presently live is an untested one that relies on an imaginative association between community and inner­city life. Similarly, the perception that a diverse range of people live in the area was also appealing because of an imaginative link between diversity and those values which diversity appears to uphold, which can be assumed to be consonant with the values of the respondents who expressed the appeal of diversity.

The nature of the survey data means that the information gained is sufficient to make tentative interpretations only, but nonetheless some link must be drawn between people’s perceptions about what city life has to offer and the plethora of media and cultural constructions of the city which abound through television, advertising and film. As discussed in Chapter 3, place representations reflect our own collective dreams and desires — about place and ourselves — and one of the key tropes in discourses of the postmodern city is its site as a pleasure playground. All narratives have their mythic function, and contemporary stories of the city are frequently about urban sociability, of communal forms of belonging — a type of utopian longing. The imaginative nature of these narratives does not make them in any sense less real, as Warwick Mules observes:

In mass mediated societies … communities are always imagined at the same time that they are experienced as quotidian realities. Ideas, attitudes, events and knowledges circulating in the mediated realm of mass media and other symbolic forms and are appropriated by the reader into meaningfulness of localised contexts in which the daily rounds of life take place. (1997: 56)

197 Moreover, the importance of this is underscored by a world in which traditional forms of social cohesion are being replaced by more informal and less easily discernable networks, as discussed throughout this study.

The relationship between place, memory and subjectivity is evident in those participants in the documentary who had a long­term association with the area and drew upon their memories to describe the neighbourhood of their childhood, or the past. Here it seems evident that place is not only encountered in experience, but is ‘integral to the very structure of and possibility of experience’ (Malpas 1999: 32). It follows that, in a period of profound change, experience per se will continue to alter, and thus urban living will be quite distinct from what it once was in the area, indeed in inner­city Brisbane generally. Long­term residents in the documentary did not meet the changes to their neighbourhood with uniform equanimity and enthusiasm. In general, the concerns expressed were often to do with factors such as loss of diversity, the threat of social and cultural homogenisation, loss of architectural heritage and a possible loss of community — some of which are well­documented factors in gentrification.

In spite — or perhaps because — of Brisbane’s history as a non­urban provincial town, most people recently moved to the case study area expressed enthusiasm about the city’s increased urbanism and the style of living this offers. Several of the respondents and interview participants were attracted to inner city living in the Valley, New Farm and Newstead precisely because the area appeared to offer qualities that they could not find in the suburbs. The fact that many of the survey respondents were moving or had moved from middle and outer suburban areas to the inner city suggests a desire for inner­city living which is in both real and imaginative. Diversity, community, entertainment and urban amenities were expressed as valuable assets for a neighbourhood, and seen as drawcards to the area. As the majority of respondents were in the 21 to 37 age group, a longitudinal study would identify whether or not the adoption of inner­city living was part of a lifecycle phase where people might move back to larger suburban dwellings when and if they started families.

198 NOTES

1 However, the gentrification of Merthyr Village has also enabled the development of strategies of exclusion for some elderly and marginalised residents. Increasingly, the boundaries between private and public space are blurred as individuals develop and own spaces whose common usage is so ubiquitous it is public, such as shopping centres. In these instances, the owners of shopping spaces also become regulators of that space, so that in the redevelopment of Merthyr Village, the owner’s decision to remove public seating went unchallenged. The removal of public seating was a strategy to discourage pensioners from hanging around the centre — they were not the type of clientele the owner wished to encourage, particularly with the redevelopment of the centre which included expensive boutique­style shops.

199 CHAPTER 7

REFLECTIONS ON THE PRACTICE OF PRODUCING THE DOCUMENTARY ‘Everyone has Their Own New Farm’: Narratives of Neighbourhood Change

This chapter charts the background to, and provides a reflection on, the practice of producing the documentary ‘Everyone has Their Own New Farm’: Narratives of Neighbourhood Change. It combines personal observations on the practice and outcomes of charting people’s experience of urban change in documentary format.

The documentary component of this thesis was produced with the support of a Brisbane City Council (BCC) Local History Grant awarded to me. I applied for the grant with the intent of documenting residents’ experience of the rapid changes occurring in my neighbourhood of New Farm and recording how the area looked in this particular cycle of its development. My proposal was to combine interviews with several local residents with contemporary and archival footage of New Farm in a straightforward manner. Having lived in the area for ten years at the time of applying for the grant, I was surprised at how rapidly New Farm and its adjacent suburbs were changing, as well as the types of developments that were occurring, and was curious about the impact of change for other people living in the neighbourhood. For historical purposes, I thought it would be interesting to have a visual record of the area at what appeared to be a pivotal moment of its history. The grant of $2660.00 enabled me to hire crew, some equipment and purchase videotapes. One of the conditions of the grant was that the project be completed within twelve months, which it was, and that the BCC receive a copy for its library catalogues. The New Farm Neighbourhood Community Centre held a public screening of the video at the Brisbane Powerhouse, Centre for the Live Arts in New Farm in January 2001. The first part of the title of the documentary, ‘Everyone has Their Own New Farm’, is from a quote by one of the interview participants, Brisbane­based novelist Venero Armanno.

200 Filmmaking is a collaborative project and, while I undertook the role of producer and director, I employed the assistance of a cameraperson, Mark Leonard, and an editor, Angela Trabucco, who were both film students at the time of production. Both have subsequently gone on to secure permanent jobs with the Australian Broadcasting Commission, Angela as editor for the series Australian Story.

My role as producer and director involved the following: I selected the twelve interview subjects, organised times for the meetings and locations for interviews, compiled the questions, conducted all the interviews, sourced archival material from the Queensland State government’s Oxley library, co­directed with Mark, and oversaw the editing process with Angela. I have had previous filmmaking experience as a student and on a freelance local level, although I no longer practise. Approximately twelve hours of footage were shot, which included interviews and shots of the local area. This was edited to the 20­minute final cut and was subsequently digitised from Super VHS to DVD format. The following is a rationale for and reflection on the process of making ‘Everyone has Their Own New Farm’: Narratives of Neighbourhood Change.

BACKGROUND TO THE PROJECT

‘Everyone has Their Own New Farm’ is an integral part of the thesis for two reasons. First, it is a record and in part an oral history of neighbourhood change through the perceptions and experience of the twelve people who were interviewed. The documentary’s focus on the subjective experience of place is congruent with the thesis’ theoretical exploration of the perception and experience of urbanism and urban change. The documentary provides another component to the topic: it is the practical evidence of human attachment to place and the experience of urban change from people who are living in the midst of it. As asserted in the Introduction to the thesis, the significance of subjective experience and meaning for understanding and animating social and historical events — whether they involve neighbourhood change or a cataclysmic event such as war — is critical for its capacity to relay the nuance and texture of experience in a way that official, written historical records do not

201 permit. The uniqueness of human inquiry that prioritises the world of first­person, subjective experience is acknowledged by social scientists, particularly for those who have pioneered in the area of feminism and marginal identities (see, for example, Schaffer 1988; Mort 2000). The feelings that memories provoke — of joy, pleasure, discomfort, pain — all bring alive those elements of experience, and are evident in accounts of interview participants’ responses to their neighbourhood. The documentary itself, as a record of people’s experience, is a legitimation and affirmation of the experience of everyday life.

Along with the survey material conducted in Newstead and Fortitude Valley, the documentary interviews form part of the experiential evidence of the thesis, and as such are used as in the interpretations of the experience of urbanism and urban change in Chapter 6. The use of the documentary material for the interpretative purposes discussed in Chapter 6 must acknowledge the constraints posed by the practice of filmmaking and the generic conditions of documentary practice. Much of this is to do with the way material is presented in a manner that makes it accessible for a viewing audience with particular expectations of the medium, and how the interview participants’ responses are mediated by the process of filmmaking itself. For instance, in the latter case, the fact that participants were interviewed with the technological interventions required of filmmaking raises the question of how this intervention impacted on the response and performance of interview participants. Being placed in front of a camera while microphones and lighting are adjusted and sound is checked can be a time­consuming process prior to the interview, and may have an impact on the participant’s performance. As participants were conscious of their presentation to a wider, unknown audience, a certain amount of performance on the part of the participants was to some extent inevitable. Nonetheless, this methodology still affords a deeper, interpretive exploration of the experience of place and change than a survey might produce. Indeed, as it turned out, the interviews allowed for greater exploration of some of the topics raised in previous chapters about notions of community and identity and the ways in which they are intrinsic to people’s experience of place.

202 The second purpose of ‘Everyone has Their Own New Farm’ was as a work of creative practice. I made the documentary with an audience in mind, and therefore artistic merit and accessibility were important. I did not want to simply present the interviews as part of the qualitative research component of the thesis for analysis or record. In this, I had to be attentive to the artistic conventions and techniques of filmmaking, and the documentary is assessable on this basis. The technical and creative competencies to be considered are the attention paid to composition, structure, editing, sound and lighting — all of which result in the quality of the documentary’s production values. I felt it was necessary to develop a coherent structure for the film, which I hoped to achieve through the selection of interview subjects and by the questions posed to them, and finally through the selection of footage through the editing process itself. Before I reflect on the process of making the documentary, a brief discussion of the genre of documentary follows, outlining its conventions and addressing its discourses as a genre which represents reality.

GENRE CONSIDERATIONS

Documentary, like other discourses of the real, retains a vestigial responsibility to describe and interpret the world of collective experience. (Nichols 1991: 10)

It may seem a little overstated to situate the 20­minute audio­visual component of this study in the documentary tradition of filmmaking, but nonetheless, as an artefact that combines people’s experience through narrative, memory and observations of place with current and archival images of New Farm, Fortitude Valley and Newstead, this is the category with which it is most closely aligned. The process of producing the documentary as a work of creative practice demanded the strategies and skills required of a documentary filmmaker. My reflections on the practice are situated in the tradition of documentary filmmaking.

Some mention, then, must be made of the role of documentary and its contribution to systems of knowledge. Although I do not intend to engage in any detailed way with

203 debates about documentary’s claim to represent reality, it is necessary to talk about the partiality of representation and to some extent examine my involvement and its impact on the outcome of ‘Everyone has Their Own New Farm’. In the multi­method approach used for this study, the documentary offers another perspective among several on the topic of urban experience and, similar to sociological studies, it offers a particular perspective. I will elaborate on this point later in this chapter, when I reflect on the process of making the documentary.

Documentary’s generic purpose to represent reality has at times been challenged, raising questions of veracity, power, authority, ethics and the setting up of audience expectations (Nichols 1991: 5). The critique of documentary’s claim to represent reality is based upon the genre’s use of the narrative conventions of filmmaking, principally through the selective nature of the photographic image and sound, which are seen to give documentary its potential to blur the boundaries between fact and fiction. Particular facts and evidence are presented in particular ways, while others are omitted.

For Nichols, documentary is too often excluded from what he refers to as ‘discourses of sobriety’ — that is, legitimised forms of knowledge and truth such as science, economics, politics and education, whose relation to the real is regarded as ‘direct, immediate and transparent’ (1991: 4). Clearly, there are notable counter­arguments to the claims against documentary’s veracity, not least poststructuralism’s challenge and exposure of the ideological underpinning of many traditional systems of knowledge and truth. Poststructuralist theorists (e.g. Foucault, Barthes, Eco) have shown how all legitimised forms of knowledge operate within regimes of power that are ideologically charged, which makes an ontology of reality something of a minefield. While I do not subscribe to the more extreme views of postmodern relativism, this thesis’s exploration of perception and experience engages with the subjective and discursive nature of reality in an attempt to reveal the multi­dimensional nature of urban life. Thus it asserts the legitimacy of less commonly accepted forms of knowledge which are well represented via the medium of film or video.

204 In Nichols’ affirmation of documentary’s ability to render the truth, he presents a useful psychoanalytic metaphor to draw attention to the difference between fact and fiction:

Fiction attends to unconscious desire and latent meanings. It operates where the id lives. Documentary on the other hand, attends to social issues of which we are consciously aware. It operates where the reality — attentive ego and superego — live. Fiction harbours echoes of dreams and daydreams, sharing structures of fantasy with them, whereas documentary mimics the canons of expository argument, the making of a case, the call to public rather than private response. (1991: 4)

So, while ‘Everyone has Their Own New Farm’ documents subjective experience and perception, it also raises larger issues around urban development, gentrification and social change generally. The participants’ responses are unique to the inquiry, but they also reveal a commonality among people living through accelerated change in this period of the city’s development per se, not just in Brisbane. The implications of increasing urban density, new forms of amenity which replace traditional neighbourhood shops, and a perceived loss of community are all shared concerns in responses to gentrification.

With its inquiry into residents’ experience of urban change, the documentary is driven by the same epistemological concerns as the theoretical component of the thesis. The documentary genre’s concern with representation of the historical, social and experiential world and its emphasis on the spoken word, often prioritised over image, as well as its inclusion of participants and social actors all guide it to ‘towards the truth’ (Nichols 1991: 16). Its realistic style takes shape around an informing logic that requires a representation or a case, often operating in an argument about the historical or social world (1991: 17). Although ‘Everyone has Their Own New Farm’ is not in the expository mode of documentary with a persuasive argument, it is guided by certain representational conventions and logic so that accounts of human experience appear coherent and logical.

205 The creative process of filmmaking, even for a genre concerned with truth, means that I had to make many choices and decisions — about the interview participants, what local area footage to film and use, archival footage used, shot set­up, lighting, music and the myriad decisions required in the selective process of editing itself. Thus the account of neighbourhood change is offered through a selective number of differing perspectives and is presented in a particular way. One of the purposes of this chapter, then, is to reflect on the process of filmmaking — to examine how the choices made contributed to the outcome of the documentary.

REFLECTIONS ON PRACTICE

When selecting interview subjects for ‘Everyone has Their Own New Farm’, one of the key criteria was to represent a cross­section of ages, genders and socioeconomic backgrounds, and people with differing periods of attachment to the neighbourhood. I thought it might prove fruitful to hear contrasting opinions from people who had lived in New Farm for over 20 years, compared with those who were more recently arrived and may have formed quite different types of attachments. Twelve people were selected altogether, six of whom appeared as a pair, interviewed together. A secondary method of selection of interview subjects was on the basis of accessibility. As a resident of New Farm for ten years at the time of making the documentary, with the exception of Venero Armanno I approached people either because they were known to me, or because other people in the neighbourhood recommended them. Iselet and Madge, Albert and Hollie all fell into the latter category. Everyone I approached to be interviewed was instantly agreeable and, apart from real estate agent Albert Kuceli who expressed some reticence, participants were surprisingly enthusiastic. I thought this indicated a commitment and interest in the area that is reflected in the interviews.

In attempting to present a diverse snapshot of New Farm residents, which I felt was representative of the ‘old’ New Farm — that is, prior to the mid­1990s gentrification — I was also careful to select participants from a range of professional and non­

206 professional backgrounds. Thus there is Hollie, who is a university student, and Nicky and Andrew, who are casual arts workers and active in the gay community (and who were neighbours of mine at the time of production). Sue is a part­time child­care worker known to me through local school networks, and her adopted daughter, Jee, is a school student. The selection of Albert fitted several purposes. I thought his role as a businessman and real estate agent in the area for 30 years might provide an interesting historical perspective on the ways in which the area had developed over that period. As an Italian immigrant, Albert might also provide insights into the migrant experience of New Farm.

Iselet and Madge are pensioners, and I thought that their long association with New Farm — they were born in the family house Madge has since moved back to — would form an interesting backbone for the documentary. Indeed, they were positioned in the film as the greatest witnesses to momentous neighbourhood change, not just over the past ten years of gentrification, but in their lifetime connection to the suburb.

Two interview participants were selected for reasons other than to talk about their experience of neighbourhood change. Local architect Kevin Hayes appeared for his knowledge and history of the area, and of the town planning policies that have driven urban renewal since the federal government’s first initiative, its ‘Better Cities’ program in 1995. Kevin was interviewed to set the context of the current period of urban regeneration, to present the ‘facts’ of urban change. As such, he was set up as an authority figure. I must disclose my affiliation here: Kevin is also my long­term partner and we both share an enthusiasm for cities and the development of Brisbane. Besides Kevin’s role as an architect, however, and his accessibility as my partner, he does have other relevant characteristics which support the role he plays in the documentary. He has lived and worked in the New Farm area for over fifteen years, in the inner city for 25 years, was a member of the Brisbane City Council’s Heritage Advisory Committee for ten years, and has sat on several BCC urban planning advisory committees. As an architect, he has something of a reputation for his ability

207 to deal with the complexities of urban planning regulations. His company, Kevin Hayes Architects, was one of the first architectural firms in the area to design mixed­ use development and has won several regional and state awards.

The other interview subject who didn’t fall neatly into the category of New Farm resident was Brisbane­based writer Venero Armanno, who grew up in New Farm but no longer lives in the area. Venero was included because of his generational links to New Farm, where he lived as an Italian migrant child, but it was mainly his profile as a writer that interested me. New Farm appears as a backdrop in his novel Romeo of the Underworld, and I thought that his observations and skills as a writer might produce some eloquent insights and responses to my questions. So the inclusion of Venero was with an eye to the artistic merit of the film. On the one hand, he was the articulate voice of an Italian immigrant experience, on the other I had hoped that his writer’s observational and expressive skills might contribute some memorable commentary. I was not disappointed, and the title of the documentary ‘Everyone has Their Own New Farm’: Narratives of Neighbourhood Change, was based on one of his concluding comments. Venero was an eloquent and generous interview subject, his memories of childhood often in free­fall — he did not take much prompting.

‘Everyone has Their Own New Farm’ uses the river as visual coda — the documentary begins with an establishment shot of the river and concludes with a shot of the river. As well as providing a good visual motif relevant to the New Farm peninsula, which is bounded by the Brisbane River, water can also signify change, flux and movement. Contemporary and archival images of New Farm appear in the first sequence to identify the suburb and support the theme of change. Through the juxtaposition of old and contemporary images, of black and white and colour, the theme of a place in transition is established. The first person to appear is local architect Kevin Hayes, who as expert continues to elaborate New Farm as a place of change, talking about urban renewal plans for the area as well as providing a brief account of his own connection with and views of New Farm. Thus, in the opening few minutes, the theme and mode of the documentary — principally an interview­based inquiry — is established. Following the opening sequence,

208 the testimonies and memories of interview subjects move backwards and forwards between participants, interwoven with current footage and archival material of New Farm.

The documentary mode of ‘Everyone has Their own New Farm’ is, by Nichols’ definition, interactive. By documenting people’s experience and memories with an emphasis on images of verbal testimony or exchange (1991: 44), its heavy reliance on testimony and speech aligns it most with the ‘discourse of sobriety’. For instance, in law, education and journalism, hearings, testimonies and cross­examination are all instruments of scientific reason and argument. The interactive text also draws its interview participants into direct encounter with the filmmaker (1991: 47). Because of this, there is a sense of partialness, of situated presence and local knowledge that derives from the actual encounter of the filmmaker and the interview subject.

As interviewer, I chose to remain off camera and was therefore ‘masked’, but my unheard interactions with interview participants may have resulted in more detailed responses from participants as I prompted them or followed up on answers. In eliciting answers to my question, I was conscious of making participants feel at ease and distracting them as much as possible from the apparatus of filmmaking. So a lot of chat occurred off camera, prior to and during interviews. The time spent setting up sequences was lengthy, and I had to be careful, while talking to participants before the camera rolled, that I didn’t cover too much of the ground I intended to address in the questions. This was because I wanted to ensure I captured, on camera, all responses to the questions so that we would have sufficient material from which to select.

By taking the form of personal testimonials and recollections, the documentary is grounded in individual perspectives. The process of assembling discrete pieces of testimony, personal recollections and being addressed by others who speak directly to our surrogate or us, for Nichols ‘shifts the text closer to discourse than histoire’ (1991: 56). In ‘Everyone has Their Own New Farm’, it is people’s narratives of their neighbourhood which make up the story of neighbourhood change.

209 The participants’ narratives are forged through the complex interactions between their subjective experience, their memory — what they choose to remember or reveal of their memories — and place. It was interesting to see the ways in which issues around place and identity were revealed in the participants’ responses. For example, Venero and Albert’s narratives are defined by their identity as Italian migrants and the Italian migrant experience, yet neither was asked a specific question about their ethnicity and how it related to their experience and memory of New Farm. As a writer, Venero’s recollections were vivid and keenly observed when commenting upon his Italian migrant experience of the area, some of which is discussed in the previous chapter.

Similarly, I couldn’t fail to notice, once we’d compiled all the footage, a distinct gender division in participants’ forms of identification with their neighbourhood. It seemed clearly evident that three of the male interview subjects — Albert, Venero and Kevin — had all exerted control and authority over their environment through their various professional endeavours. Albert did so by the establishment of his real estate agency and, as he states, by encouraging his builder friends to come and ‘open up’ New Farm in the 1970s, resulting in many of the area’s blond­brick high­rise apartment blocks. Venero exerts control over the New Farm of his childhood by shaping it into coherence through his novels and writing, and Kevin by the design and construction of his buildings, which are dotted throughout the area. The women had no such territorial stake, and neither did Nicky or Andrew. Although, of course, this is a small, diverse sample where another selection of people might reveal different associations of power to place, it is nonetheless indicative of the historical gender divisions that occur across space and were referred to in Chapter 1 in more detail. For Iselet, Madge and Sue, changes to their neighbourhood were observed partially by their observations about changes to the shops. Zukin notes the tendency for girls to develop a ‘domestic’ conception of neighbourhood shopping streets, while boys experience them as part of a more aggressive public life, of territories and display (Zukin 1995: 196). For Venero, the streets of his childhood New Farm were articulated around an awareness of his developing masculinity: his first act of

210 independence — crossing a street and going to a shop — and his reference to the fact that he felt safe among the gangs in the New Farm of his childhood.

The participants’ individual stories are presented in a type of narrative logic that might satisfy audience expectations of narrative convention — its arc and resolution — even though it is a non­fiction work of filmmaking. This was achieved mainly by the way the responses to questions were structured in a series of sequences. When first viewing the documentary, it soon becomes apparent that people were asked a series of questions. In general, these fell under the umbrella of four main questions which were focused chronologically: what brought the interview participants to the area and how long they’d lived in New Farm, what they thought was distinctive about New Farm and what they enjoyed or didn’t enjoy about living in the suburb, and how they felt about the changes to their neighbourhood. The response to the last question — what residents thought of change — was further structured in the editing process into negative and positive reactions. Off camera, the conversation between participants and myself deviated at times from these four key questions. This came about either as an effort to elaborate participants’ responses, or to encourage a greater rapport between participants and myself to make them feel more at ease, with the view that this might produce a more informative and less inhibited response. Also, other questions arose as a consequence of the particularities of participants’ responses. However, as a way of structuring the footage into an over­arching logic with a semblance of narrative structure, in the selective process of editing those responses that most clearly articulated the four key questions were the ones that were foregrounded.

The meaning of neighbourhood change is registered in the act of narration, in the responses of interview subjects that were occasionally offered as anecdote. Several of the participants frequently lapsed into a narrative recollection, particularly the older participants, their anecdotes prompted by the memory of past events that had occurred in their neighbourhood. Memory as a force in place attachment was discussed in Chapter 1, and it was particularly evident in Madge and Iselet’s accounts of change, and those of writer Venero. Here, the link between memory, imagination

211 and place is evident and is significant for this thesis, which asserts the importance of imagination in the experience of the city, as Bridge and Watson observe:

The buildings and spaces of the city are formed in, and themselves from, memory, while memory becomes spatialized. Drawing on memory, learning from the past in one’s relationship with the city is part of this self­development and self­actualization. Memory plays a part in the way cities are imagined. (Bridge and Watson 2003:13)

It was evident, too, that participants’ memories provoked affective responses. For example, 73­year­old Iselet’s pleasure is very noticeable as she recalls the neighbourhood of her childhood, flying kites from the Crase Street cliffs around the corner from her house in Kingsholme Street. Iselet’s description of the cliffs, where cows grazed and boats were visible on the river, is as nostalgic as it is evocative. Now the cliff top is a road lined with houses and the river is no longer visible, concealed by the jutting shards of the wool stores’ roofs, built at the bottom of the cliff in the 1930s. The potency of personal experience and recollection is vividly rendered in the documentary. Certainly a photograph can capture this transition, but an image cannot describe the meaning and experience for a person whose attachment to place has been intimate and enduring.

As mentioned, Madge and Iselet’s reflections — because of their long association with New Farm — were to provide the backbone around which the documentary was structured. In hindsight, the positioning of these two older women as the experience of change may have contributed an unintentional nostalgic tone to the documentary. Meaning in the documentary is conveyed through locations, shot composition, music and the juxtaposition of images. The combination of Iselet and Madge photographed in their house with their Victorian furniture and flowery carpet, the cutting back and forth to black and white stills of their family in the garden, a soundtrack that is highly evocative of a much earlier period, and the emphasis some participants placed on the loss of the ‘old’ New Farm all convey strong nostalgic meanings. However, by filming Iselet and Madge in their family home, I had hoped that these visual motifs would work as a contrast to the external shots of new apartment blocks and underscore the significance of change for Madge and Iselet, and change generally. The inclusion of their black and

212 white family photographs was again to highlight the theme of change, but also to create visual diversity and interest in an otherwise conventional documentary style.

Albert was filmed in his office, a strategy to identify him as a businessman — a role of which he is clearly very proud. He appears across a table that looms large, and he is positioned some distance from the camera. This was partially a practical decision — the room was small and dominated by the table and there was not much area to manoeuvre a camera. However, the positioning of Albert across the table creates a curious impression and emphasises his authority in a way that could be construed as slightly comical and was not intentional. Albert’s obvious pride in his comments about bringing his friends to build apartment blocks in New Farm in the 1970s, and his sense of responsibility for the development of the area, could also appear to be undermined by the sequence of shots directly following his statement, which show the rather bland 1970s style high­rise buildings he helped develop. Some viewers may regard these buildings as ugly, but the buildings have gained cachet in recent times for their fashionably ‘retro’ style and their generous spaces compared with many comparable units being built today.

Other shot set­ups are less noteworthy, but the music — the clarinet of Benny Goodman — adds to the distinctive nostalgic tone of the documentary. The power of sound in film is easily under­estimated, yet it engages a distinct sense mode and offers the possibility of unifying both image and sound. It can alter our understanding of images and direct our attention within the image (Bordwell and Thompson 1993: 292). I did not anticipate the dominance that the music, once laid on to the soundtrack, would have in ‘Everyone has Their Own New Farm’. There was, in part, a pragmatic reason for the choice of music. I would have liked to have a soundtrack composed for the documentary, but due to time and budget constraints this wasn’t possible. It was necessary, then, to find music that was no longer restricted under copyright legislation. Benny Goodman’s clarinet piece was available from a small selection and seemed to fit the theme of change, and it had the whiff of nostalgia about it that I thought was appropriate. However, once laid on to the soundtrack, the repetition and the amount of

213 times the music was used seemed too heavy handed and monotonous. It certainly lacked a levity and funkiness I would have preferred to fit with the emerging New Farm. However, this was not possible. Once the soundtrack was laid on to the tape, because the music cut in over voices, there was no changing it.

It has also been brought to my attention that the music is classically resonant with New York City. Benny Goodman first became known as an accomplished session musician in New York in the 1930s, and was also known in that city from his radio broadcasts, later earning him an international reputation as the ‘King of Swing’. A psychoanalytic interpretation might assert that the connection between my choice of Goodman’s music for a documentary about burgeoning urbanism in New Farm is no accident, that it is in fact representative of a fantasy­wish of urban life!

Resolution for a documentary that explores residents’ experience of neighbourhood change presents certain challenges. Forcing the participants’ differing perceptions and experience of their neighbourhood into some sort of coherent resolution did involve the imposition of an internal logic which may ultimately have given the impression that participants unanimously agreed that change was good. The narrative strategy I used in the editing process was in the selection of concluding or summing up comments that were then placed at the end of the documentary, and were presented a resolution of sorts. Indeed, in the selection of interview material generally, and in the final overall positive remarks included by the participants, an argument —or at least a persuasive tone to the documentary — is apparent. It is that change to the neighbourhood is in general welcome. To some extent, I concede that this is a reflection of my own views. Although the bulk of the material includes both positive and negative reflections on the changes occurring in the participants’ neighbourhood, the positive note on which the documentary concludes presents or assumes a collective agreement, to the effect of ‘well there’s good and bad to the changes occurring in our neighbourhood, but overall we don’t mind and things are OK’.

214 This is brought home by the sanguine statement provided by 83­year­old Madge and her observation that ‘progress has to happen’ as the concluding statement. In some ways, the presentation of a narrative resolution, such as it is, tends to diminish the complexity of people’s relationship to their changing neighbourhoods, much of which was teased out in interviews but for several reasons — not the least of which was the time factor — could not be included in the final cut of the film. But it was a decision made with the conventions and aesthetics of filmmaking in mind; moreover, the contraction of material into a limited time frame is, of course, a key element of film itself. In conforming to the narrative conventions of filmmaking — even for a work of non­fiction — the highly nuanced, subjective and textured way that people engage with their environment is necessarily ironed out.

OMISSIONS

One of the obvious questions to ask about any format that purports to represent the real is, of course, what was not shown? Aside from the choices made about who to interview, what to show of their responses, there were also choices about what visual material to use to convey the overall image of New Farm. My intention was to capture the material aspect of urban change by a sort of architectural discovery tour of the old and new houses and apartments, and capture unique features of the area such as the river with views out to the Story Bridge, iconic New Farm Park, the Powerhouse cultural centre, the wool stores, the heritage­listed Village Twin Cinema and some of the local cafes. I wanted to convey the architectural diversity of the area and New Farm’s public spaces, its parks and amenities. In hindsight, this selection of images — which showed grand Queenslander houses as well as more humble homes, the leafy streets and New Farm Park — combined with the overall positive tone of participant’s comments — Sue’s ‘I love New Farm!’ and Nicky’s ‘New Farm grows nice people’ — resulted in something of a song of praise to New Farm that might not be out of place in a promotional context (the Brisbane City Council would have been pleased, I expect). Although a variety of buildings were represented, I did not photograph many of New Farm’s shabbier, narrow streets that may have better conveyed a greater impression of the diversity of the area. Nor did I film the

215 prostitutes who solicit for clients on the corner of Brunswick and Kent Streets — there were ethical considerations here — or the diversity of people one sees walking up and down Brunswick Street. These are an assorted and possibly diminishing lot: students, boarding house and hostel residents, backpackers, transvestites, the aged — all those for whom dependence on public transport surpasses their use or ownership of the car. Despite these omissions, there is no denying that the area is physically appealing, and this is part of its attraction for many people.

I kept interior shots to a minimum, partially to overcome issues with lighting and to minimise the technological intervention of filmmaking. I did not want the technology to impact too greatly on the comfort and spontaneity of the participants. Madge and Iselet were the only participants to be filmed in their home, for reasons previously discussed. The decision to film Albert in his office was because it seemed to be an appropriate fit for a businessman. If I had filmed the other participants in their homes, this might have conveyed a stronger sense of who they were, adding a richness to the documentary which supports the theme of the diversity of New Farm. For instance, Nicky’s bed­sit apartment, which wasn’t shown, is painted in vivid colours and is theatrically decorated, conveying a strong sense of his persona.

Overall, however, decisions were driven by the interviews and not by style, though of course this was a consideration. I was keen to extract sufficient responses from participants so that a lot of the work of the production would be done in the editing process. Above all, I wanted to capture what was significant about the place for a reasonably diverse group of people, and I think the documentary achieved this.

While this is not an ethnographic study in which I am an active participant, nonetheless — given my long attachment to the area — my views may be revealed through the tone of the documentary, through choices made about participants, their responses and the selection of visual footage used. Perhaps a little of the sense of the utopian city emerges in what may be perceived as the celebratory tenor of the documentary. If the viewer can tell that I think the changes to my neighbourhood are for the better, then they are right.

216 Not all changes are good, but for me the good outweighs the bad. The growth in amenity, of arts and cultural facilities such as cinemas and theatres along with the addition of boardwalks and aesthetic enhancements to the parks and streetscape, have made the area a more enjoyable and vibrant place to live. When I first moved to New Farm in 1990, none of this existed and there was only one cafe in the suburb. The area’s attraction was its diversity of people and buildings, its connection to the city and its sense of urbanism, however small, in a very suburban city. It is probably no coincidence that one of the assets of the area was that most people I met when I first moved to New Farm, were people like myself — that is, from somewhere else. The loss of diversity as expressed by many respondents and participants echoes my own concerns, and it seems that since ‘Everyone has Their Own New Farm’ was made, the suburb has become more homogenous, despite local and state government efforts to retain low­cost housing. Housing prices have escalated so it is now one of Brisbane’s most expensive suburbs in which to purchase a house, though the development of many apartment buildings means that people can afford to rent in the area, these appear to be predominantly young people.

Finally, although there was a somewhat philosophical acceptance of change in their neighbourhood among the participants in ‘Everyone has Their Own New Farm’, there is no neat conclusion or summary comment for a documentary that explores people’s — and, it must be acknowledged, to some extent my own — experience and attachment of place. The relationship between self and a place in rapid transition is underscored by an ambivalence which will no doubt continue to inform that relationship.

217 CHAPTER 8

CONCLUSIONS

The thesis has argued for the importance of place in identity formation and experience, and as such has sought to understand the ways in which people form attachments to place. With its focus on the psycho­social dimensions of urban experience and perception, it affirms another legitimate way of knowing the city, one which has been under­represented in scholarly writing about the city — or at least not well represented in any practical way. In the case study area of Brisbane’s inner city, research into residents’ experience and perceptions of urban living and change reveals several commonalities. Through the exploration of experience in the specificities of place, the study also charts a significant era in the history and transformation of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia at the turn of the twenty­first century.

This research has taken a multi­method approach and covered key features of the discursive, symbolic and material city to reflect the complex and multi­dimensional nature of lived experience within a rapidly transforming city. There are several themes to the thesis, which are driven by two main assertions in relation to Brisbane. The first is that Brisbane’s emerging urbanism is situated in a tension between its parochial, inward­ looking past and its future — its development as a postmodern city, discursively framed as open, inclusive and tolerant to difference. In this context, Brisbane is unique among Australian capital cities; urbanism was actively kept at bay for most of the twentieth century, and Brisbane remained the most suburban city in the country. Second, the transformation of the city has resulted in an increase and recasting of public space, which offers opportunities for different modes of engagement and ways of inhabiting the city. Uniting these two themes is the understanding that difference — that is, ethnic, sexual and cultural difference — is central to the city. This signifies a significant sociocultural shift for Brisbane. The city’s new and enhanced public spaces and amenities, together

218 with its rapid population growth over the last decade, positions the city as an emerging global city in which encounters with difference are commonplace occurrences. The study investigates people’s response to their changing environment and is alert to how difference and diversity are perceived in the recast spaces of the city. Underpinning both assertions is the notion that the ways in which the city is imagined, both subjectively and culturally, are intrinsic to our experience of it.

MAJOR THEMES AND FINDINGS

This section will review the major themes of the thesis, which are organised around its five main chapters. The first major theme, explored in Chapter 2, examined the importance of place in lived experience and in identity formation. Here, the theoretical ground covered attempted to bridge subjective and cultural influences which help to understand the relationship between self, the social and the environment. The chapter drew upon psychoanalytic theory, theories of affect and semiotics to map out this relationship and to argue that it is through the modalities of perception, imagination and the unconscious, and the materiality of the environment, that people form identities and attachments to and across space and place. Moreover, for a study focused on Brisbane — a city which has historically been hostile to outsiders (Fitzgerald 1984) — the psychoanalytic concept of the Other can productively be employed to account for attitudes to difference. An example of how difference is negotiated in the city’s recast spaces is provided in the case study area of Fortitude Valley and borne out in resident survey responses detailed in Chapter 6. It will be referred to again later in this chapter. Fortitude Valley was, for many years prior to urban renewal, discursively framed as a ‘no­go’ zone for middle­class citizens. In the discourse of urban degeneration, the Valley was the site of crime, ethnic rivalries and disordered sexuality; the locus of prostitution and gay male activity. Thus the study was interested in examining people’s perceptions of inner­city living in areas such as the Valley, which has become increasingly popular as an entertainment and residential precinct but whose legacy of contestation and difference remains.

219 With its focus on people’s perception and experience of urban change, the study asserts that the relationship between perception and experience is an imaginative and embodied one. For Thrift, the material objects of the city, its signs and texts and discourses, are ‘a vital part of the world that they cannot be separated: they are a vital part of embodied perception’ (Thrift 2000a: 402). In this context, representations and discourses matter, they articulate culture’s and the subject’s desires and fears about urban life, and about living in close proximity to strangers. Thus the imaginary city, the second major theme of the thesis, is important for the ways in which representations are central to our experience of urbanity. Access to media content has been accelerated by globalisation, and urban values and lifestyles are transmitted rapidly around the world. Notwithstanding the variations of local interpretations, this study asserts that, in general, urban lifestyles are more commonly represented positively, as the integration of global, pluralised cultures that include the values of tolerance, openness and sociability (Turner 2007). In representations of the city, discourses typically shift from the dystopian to the utopian, and this thesis makes a claim for the contemporary emphasis on the utopian city.

Chapters 3 and 4 identified several key tropes in representations of the postmodern city, beginning with New York as an iconic metropolitan city that offers a model of urbanism with an enduring and wide representative field. One of the questions around representations of the city was to understand the ways in which global urban desires and imaginings are adapted and reconfigured to local discourses — that is, how the idea of a culturally mature metropolitanism is reworked into the discursive framings of Brisbane as it emerges into a global city. From the selected texts in these chapters, two central tropes emerge which are articulations of hybrid, plural urban cultures: the feminisation of the city and the city as a site of sociability. While critics might argue that representations such as those depicted in the American television series Sex and the City, discussed in Chapter 3, are connected to the rise in consumer­oriented, bourgeois cultures (see Hage 1998; Turner 2007), this thesis asserts that the recast spaces of the postmodern city, including the case study of Brisbane, are also sites which enable the potential for new forms of sociability and civility, where the negotiation of difference is possible. Moreover, the ways in which the feminine is inscribed in city space have constituted a

220 major shift in both the production and representation of the city. Although Sex and the City offers a parodic display of female power, pleasure and privilege in the city, it nonetheless points to a recognition not only of women’s increased consumer capacities, but also of their increased social and political power. Similarly, representations of the city which transform it into a site of social engagement and cohesion are connected to new and emerging lifestyle arrangements grounded in the city, which are a result of an increasingly mobile and fragmented populations (Bauman 2000). Perhaps these pleasure­ focused articulations of the city are something of a dream­wish, as Donald (1999) has argued, wishing away the complexity, messiness and anomie of city life. Nonetheless, while textually the city frequently appears as a sociable place, so too the theme of sociability is strongly identified in resident surveys in Brisbane’s inner­city area. A majority of respondents identified the importance of their neighbourhood for providing networks and places of sociability. That is, this investigation revealed a real and predominant desire for the social, which was expressed variously as the importance of community, of people in living in the area and of friends who live close by.

Brisbane’s discursive reinvention, which harnesses the psychoanalytic tropes of lack and desire, reveals the city as a contradictory and conflicted semiotic site. In marketing discourse, the emerging city frequently appears as a reinvention of a European city, in which traditional forms of culture are paramount. The many free, glossy magazines that have appeared since Brisbane’s regeneration model a type of high­end, consumer­ oriented urban citizenry where material and individual achievement is lauded. This is a factor of postmodern urbanism, in which globalisation has served the interests of cultural and economic taste cultures, providing access to a wide range of consumer commodities (Turner 2007: 11). Yet earlier discourses of the city — particularly in literature — are positioned in contrast to contemporary global urbanism, and Brisbane is registered as a distinctly non­urban place in the national imaginary and in some literary accounts of the city. Here the city is frequently imbued with natural and paradisal associations; living in Brisbane is portrayed as an embodied and sensual experience where the city’s value is precisely its non­urban, benign characteristics. In literary and political discourse, Brisbane’s ‘naturalness’ frees it from the corrupting stain of larger cities, a rhetoric that

221 was popularly invoked by certain politicians throughout the twentieth century, an appeal to parochialism whose aim was to shore up electoral support (Whitlock 1992). Conversely, as in the case of writers such as Malouf and Lee, Brisbane’s small­town status is registered as lack; it is a city without maturity and sophistication, and as such carries a strong undertow of inferiority. Conflicting or shifting discourses of the city are no surprise — the city itself is a complex and highly contested site — but Brisbane’s identity remains uncertain and is poised at an interesting point in the city’s and in the national imaginary. Situated between its parochial past and its potential future, Brisbane’s fledgling urbanism is at an intersection in which clear articulations of the local, rather than global urbanism, have yet to make their imprint truly felt.

While the study has not endeavoured to make any cause­and­effect connection between representation and experience, nonetheless imaginative accounts of the city highlight the relationship between space and subjectivity, perception and experience, and they shape ideas about urban life. Representations might be dream­wishes but, as this thesis has revealed, they also reflect aspects of cultural and social life. Arguably, the relevance of the imaginary city for an emerging city such as Brisbane is greater than for other, more established Australian capital cities. Against the forces of global urbanism, Brisbane must seek to discover its own unique identity. The consequences of this are both material and symbolic. Urban scholars have shown for instance, the ways in which a city’s symbolic status is directly linked to its economy, and thus to the lives of its inhabitants (Murphy and Watson 2000; Lefebvre 1996; Soja 1989).

The thesis looked beyond media texts to other semiotic sites of Brisbane city, such as the cafe, whose ascendency makes it ubiquitous on inner­city and suburban streets. While the cafe conveys meaning semiotically, it is also instrumental in the changing experience of urbanity in Brisbane. Moreover, I assert in Chapter 4 that the cafe can play a significant role in the negotiation of urban civilities and has a potential role in the integration of difference. For Brisbane, with its historical antipathy to difference, the cafe assumes greater importance than it might in other capital cities, in which greater traditions of urbanism are evident. This notion drew upon Habermas’s proposition that in eighteenth

222 century urban culture, the cafe was one of the main public sites in which the development of citizens’ engagement with the public sphere occurred. Habermas’s conceptualisation is predicated on the cafe as a public meeting place where behavioural and conversational rules were established, based on reasoned exchange, the dialogic and egalitarianism (Johnson 2006: 23). Similarly, Ellis’s (2004) cultural history of the coffee house identifies the ways in which the establishment of coffee houses in seventeenth century London functioned as places of sociability amongst diverse groups of people — predominantly men. One of the main features of the coffee house was its inclusivity of people from a range of social classes, whose main intent was to participate in ‘the diversity of company and discourse’ (Ellis 2004: 57). While this thesis does not claim that Brisbane cafes are the locus of political action, Habermas’s concept, along with the cafe’s function as a space of hospitality, provides the basis for preliminary explorations into the contemporary cafe’s role for the cultivation of civility. Thus I have argued that that cafe can be seen as part of a renewed urban sociability, and furthermore that critiques of urban­based consumer culture and lifestyles overlook the important social role that cafes and other urban amenities perform.

The value of a growth in urban amenities was borne out in qualitative and quantitative data in the case study areas, in which the majority of respondents cited lifestyle factors as the main appeal of inner­city living. Unpacked, the term ‘lifestyle’ referred to access to the city’s amenities such as its cafes, cultural facilities, the river and parks and entertainment precincts. More significantly, the importance of these amenities was identified for their capacity for social engagement and participation. Similarly, the dominant lens through which residents reflected upon their neighbourhoods was an affective and social one, with many people citing ‘the community feel’ of the area and the category of ‘people’ — whether they were friends living close by or merely ‘interesting people’ — as being of major value. One respondent in the Newstead wool stores survey summed up this sentiment when she stated that the main appeal of Newstead for her was: ‘It is close to areas such s the Valley where myself and friends shop, socialise and relax.’

223 Critiques which focus upon the bourgeois consumption­based function of the cafe and other urban amenities also overlook the ways in which the semiotics of place convey meaning and impact upon who uses social spaces and when. Meaning is conveyed through the semiotics of décor, sound, food and staff, communicating and appealing to different cohorts of people. Thus, in the case study area of Fortitude Valley, cafes such as Fat Boys, Ric’s and the Cosmopolitan attract a clientele from a diverse demographic, including students, casual workers and other more marginal groups. In other words, the cafe is not an exclusively bourgeois form of cultural practice, and its consumption cost is minimal. Indeed, in Wickham Street, Fortitude Valley, the community service organisation Mission Australia has established Café One, a cafe specifically designed for its clients who may be intimidated or feel uncomfortable among the clients of other types of cafes in the area.

Brisbane in context is the third area addressed. The enormous scope of the change occurring in Brisbane is mapped out in Chapter 5, which documents the city’s political, social and cultural legacies. Throughout the twentieth century, the state of Queensland and its capital city have suffered under authoritarian and sometimes corrupt governments whose policies more commonly served the interests of a predominantly rural­based electorate (Fitzgerald 1984; Evans and Ferrier 2004). For many years, educational and cultural resourcing was negligent compared with that of other states in the country. Parochialism was encouraged, and an antipathy towards those from other states was evident in the rhetoric of long­serving Premier Sir Joh Bjelke­Petersen. As the city continues to develop its cultural, social and educational infrastructure, and its population continues to grow in diversity, it is rapidly shaking off its provincial past.

The case study areas of Fortitude Valley, Newstead and New Farm in particular have experienced momentous change in the last decade, partially as the consequence of targeted urban renewal programs. Although the area’s pattern of development is typical of gentrified inner­city areas in Western cities, it signals a profound shift in ways of living for many Brisbane residents. First, the area has experienced momentous population growth; and second, the rapid development of apartment and high­rise living stands in

224 contrast to Brisbane’s inner­city housing prior to urban renewal, where single­lot housing was the norm. One of the central platforms of the thesis is that living in close proximity to strangers, such as in apartment­style living, requires the adoption of competencies specific to urbanism — for example, greater tolerances of noise and of difference in general. There is evidence that some people have not made this transition easily, with a vigilant campaign by residents in the Sun apartment building against the noise of the adjacent nightclub. The case study area has become something of an arts and cultural precinct, served by many private galleries as well as state­ and council­supported multi­ purpose venues such as The Judith Wright Centre and the Brisbane Powerhouse, representing a significant shift for a city which lacked a diversified cultural infrastructure for many decades. In addition, the Valley has developed as a music precinct, housing both mainstream­style nightclubs and alternative music venues. New cultural taste­based practices and forms of identification are offered by the establishment of all these venues, and what is interesting here is the diversity this mode of engagement offers for the experience of urbanity.

The fourth and final theme which is consistently referred to throughout this chapter investigates the ways in which the experience of urbanism and urban change is registered by people living or moving to Brisbane’s inner­city case study area. This experience and perception of urban change was identified in two resident surveys conducted in Fortitude Valley and Newstead, and in the documentary ‘Everyone has Their Own New Farm’: Narratives of Neighbourhood Change, which explored New Farm residents’ experience of urban change. Chapter 6 provided an interpretation of qualitative and quantitative data collected, drawing upon both theoretical material in Chapter 2 and ideas about the urban imaginary explored in Chapters 3 and 4. The documentary, ‘Everyone has Their Own New Farm’: Narratives of Neighbourhood Change also provides an oral testimony and a visual record of New Farm at the turn of the twenty­first century.

The analysis throughout the thesis is indicative rather than generalising. Nevertheless, the analysis shows how merging subjective, theoretical and structural interpretations can animate the complexity of lived, urban experience. Significantly, too, this approach

225 affords a way of understanding the specificities of place through its exploration of the local. It is in the public spaces of the city where urbanism is experienced, where social relationships are enacted and where we meet with strangers (Patton 1995; Zukin 1995). The large increase in public and semi­public space in Brisbane has important consequences in articulations of the local, and for ways of being in this particular city. Semiotic analysis has been useful to interpret a range of meanings offered in these spaces, as illustrated by the reading of South Bank Parklands and Brisbane’s burgeoning cafe culture. Interpretations of survey data and interview respondents highlight the ways in which subjectivity is connected to the spatial — through perception and other modalities of identification.

Qualitative and quantitative findings were clustered into four main themes in relation to the experience and perception of urbanism and urban change in Brisbane. The themes were categorised as lifestyle, diversity, community and affect, and were based on the most frequently cited of these concepts by respondents and participants. On close scrutiny, the term ‘lifestyle’, which was offered by many residents as a key appeal of their neighbourhood, was something of an umbrella concept inclusive of the three other themes. For this study, with its focus on a city coming to terms with difference and the Other, respondents’ and interview participants’ registering of diversity as a main appeal of the area yielded some fruitful insights. Diversity was seen to add texture, interest and vibrancy to respondents’ neighbourhoods. Statements such as ‘diverse range of people’, ‘variety of people — social classes’, ‘people variety’, ‘interesting people’ or, more explicitly, ‘variety of people, for example, poor, rich, gay, straight, multicultural’ identified the idea of diversity of significant value. It was not the intention of this study to determine to what extent people actually moved among different social groupings; nonetheless, data revealed an appreciation of difference on a surface level, and perhaps for its imaginative and the potentiality that diversity might seem to afford. Respondents’ declarations of the value of diversity, however, must be weighted against other Australian­based research which shows a fragile commitment to diversity (Skrbis and Woodward 2007; Turner 2007; Hage 1998). Still, I would argue for the localised and specific nature of such research, which may reveal differences among demography and

226 locale. It may be possible, in other words, that many people who chose to live in areas of diversity do display more than a fragile commitment to the notion.

It was interesting to note that favourable comments about diversity were targeted towards people and not the urban environment. For instance, the area does offer a diverse range of venues and activities, as well as a variety of cultural and music venues — there are parks, river walks, bowls clubs, tennis courts and so forth. The emphasis placed on people highlights the second assertion of this thesis: that the city is essentially a social space, and that Brisbane’s recast spaces provide the opportunity for increasingly differentiated social experience and engagement. The importance of people for respondents and interview participants was also expressed in notions of community: the case study area was frequently cited as having a ‘strong sense of community’ or a ‘good community feel’. Chapter 6 discussed the symbolic nature of community, and the ways in which the concept is the vector for the mosaic of subjective meanings that people attach to place and relationships in those places. With this in mind, it is not difficult to discern that at the intersection of perception and experience is the imagination projecting the desires of its subject.

Having identified these themes, I need to conclude this section with a caveat. I want to emphasise that this study is not making totalising claims about the nature of change in Brisbane. Clearly, the inner city and CBD have undergone momentous change in infrastructure and demographic patterns, but Brisbane’s suburban areas have changed less. Aesthetically, many of Brisbane’s suburbs do not look very much changed from how they appeared in the early 1980s, but increasingly large suburban blocks within a 10 kilometre radius of the city are being subdivided into two allotments, and this will no doubt continue as the region continues to experience population growth. Also increasing are suburban precincts with nodes of cafes and restaurants as the culture of sociability is extending outward from the inner­city.

Finally, it is important to reassert that, as the inner city becomes more gentrified and less affordable, several outer Brisbane suburbs — because of their relative housing

227 affordability — have higher levels of residents who were born overseas in non­English speaking countries than does the inner city (ABS 2001, Statistical Portrait of Brisbane). It might be that the reconciliation and experience of living among strangers — a theme carried throughout the thesis — is one that takes place in the suburbs, not the inner city (see also Turner 2007).

AREAS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH

While I have mainly focused on an interpretive approach to the social dimensions of urban change, several themes were identified throughout the thesis, which in their follow­ up would make for more pragmatic, applied forms of sociological research. Three possibilities present themselves as useful areas of study for sociological and urban policy purposes.

First, the physical city has changed dramatically over a fifteen­year period. Brisbane has emerged from its parochial past to become a city which appears to have all the hallmarks of a typical postmodern city. It now has a robust cultural infrastructure, and urban, social and educational policies that pay attention to the needs of an increasingly diverse population. But to what extent are residents’ values and attitudes representative of the discourses of the postmodern city — that is to say, to notions of inclusivity, tolerance and openness? Glover and Cunningham (2003) have talked about Brisbane’s ‘unmastered past’ and its unremitting focus on the future, hinting at possible ruptures in the city’s new form and fabric. All cities, of course, have their dark histories — of inequity, exclusion and violence. But one of the interesting aspects of urban change in Brisbane is its rapidity, its sudden shift from a place that had a strong reputation for parochialism in which insular values were dominant.

Historically, like all small towns Brisbane was a place which people with artistic and other ambitions left. This raises a second research question relevant to public policy. In what ways does the new city provide opportunities for a range of talents across the arts, cultural and business fields that might hold a younger generation of people to the city? It

228 is, after all, the interests, talents and enthusiasm of a young generation that will continue to shape the city in important ways.

A third area for fruitful research is in the area of gender and the city. It has been acknowledged throughout the thesis that changes to the fabric of Brisbane are similar to patterns of change experienced by many Western cities. Congruent with social change since the 1970s, cities have become more hospitable and inclusive places for women. So, apart from the city’s public spaces such as cafes and restaurants offering myriad sites for participation, women are more actively involved in the production of city life than at any other point in the city’s history: as businesswomen, entrepreneurs and employees. Furthermore, the case study area of Fortitude Valley, Newstead and New Farm is an area that has been an incubator for small businesses, such as design­focused shops, art galleries, health spas, multimedia industries and hospitality services, and from an ethnographic perspective it appears that many of these are owned or managed by women. As a measure of women’s participation and contribution to the economy and social life of the city, research into this area might yield insights which could be fed into public policy to assist further participation in this area.

Fourth, my research addressed the experiential characteristic of inner­city living, and thus did not take a long­term perspective. While the data described demographic shifts to the inner city and identified reasons for moving to the area, a longitudinal study that takes into consideration people’s life­cycle stages would identify the extent to which inner­city living was a permanent or life­cycle phenomenon. Although the overwhelming majority of survey respondents (86 per cent) in the Newstead wool stores cohort indicated a desire to remain in the area, this might change as lifestyles change — as people partner and/or have children, or perhaps decide they would prefer and can afford to live in a house. The majority of the survey respondents for both the Sun apartments and the Newstead wool stores were in the 18–29 age category. Since this study commenced, small­lot housing density and upmarket apartment buildings have increased in Brisbane’s inner and middle suburbs, and many of the residents in these buildings appear to be middle­aged ‘empty

229 nesters’. A demographic survey would provide useful information for social and planning policy.

In conclusion, this thesis has charted the evolution of the city of Brisbane at a significant point in its development at the turn of the twenty­first century. As a place coming to terms with accelerated change and with difference, Brisbane offers an interesting site of study. With its focus on understanding the psycho­social dimensions of urban change, the study affirms experience and perception as vital modalities in understanding place and place attachment. The city is a complex entity, and there are micro and myriad ways in which it is experienced, encountered, written and made legible by its inhabitants. This is one contribution to its understanding.

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