By Ianto Ware

There’s a famous story about the Broadwater Farm estate in North London where, in 1985, tenants rioted and started a fire. When the fire brigade turned up, the rioters pelted them with rocks until they went away, leaving their homes to burn. Incidents like these form the narrative of social housing and, whilst the tone varies, the basic story is always the same; poor urban design turns poverty into madness.

The response varies between blame and benevolence; hyperactive policing on the one hand, and community art projects on the other. There’s an obvious ‘othering’ at play in either response, in which residents of an area become synonymous with the worst extremes of that area. The heterogeneity afforded to citizens of a functioning metropolis is replaced by a caricature of either wretchedness or evil.

Having simplified the citizen, it becomes possible to simplify the place in which they live and, from there, invent fables as to how things might be improved. The narrative of Richard Florida’s ‘Creative Class’ is the obvious example; a fable adopted by numerous regional cities struggling in the face of Globalisation. Like a sedative before the long, dark sleep of economic collapse, it enables policy makers to dream that they can send their remaining impoverished citizens down an Activated Laneway, where they will be magically transformed into wealthy young media consultants. The Belgian academic Bas van Heur calls this a “metropolitan imaginary”, a sort of traumatised psychological response to the shock of adapting to the radically different economic conditions of the Neo-Liberal age.

A corresponding suburban imaginary takes place when we consider the ‘regeneration’ of Australian suburbs. A non-functioning outer suburb can have its faults blamed on poor urban design, as if its residents would cease to be poor if only the streets were laid out differently. Like Florida’s Creative Class, the fable works because it’s not wrong. Just as regional cities have struggled with globalisation, poor urban design has been a major factor in the subpar living standards of the outer suburbs. It’s just that there are numerous other factors, and their inter-relationship is hard to comprehend.

Of course, it’s easy to say that the success or decline of a place is the result of a plethora of complex forces. Unfortunately, developing any practical strategy to act upon this ambiguity is mind bogglingly difficult, which is why we so frequently seize one aspect—urban design, the creative class, laneway activation or something similarly discernible—and build a fable around it. In larger, wealthier cities, integrated design strategies might bring these various stories together, but this requires resources beyond the reach of local government agencies in areas with limited resources.

It’s notable that, regardless of the location or budget, culture arises so commonly in fables of urban regeneration. Again, this isn’t incorrect; functioning cities do tend to have a cultural underpinning. But defining how this comes about, or how to replicate it, is difficult. As Raymond Williams noted, “Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.” Turning it into an urban policy framework is hard. By contrast, pointing at artists and saying “We need some of those!” is extremely easy. Thus, the artist enters the narrative of urban regeneration with alarming frequency.

When I got off the bus in Airds, I wandered over to Bennett Miller’s work, The Myer-Briggs All-Stars. He’d set up a stall at which people could do the Myers Briggs personality test. His stall had been damaged the night before when a band of local youths overwhelmed the security guard and physically attacked it. Like the residents of Broadwater Farm Estate, the immediate question is why a community would break something ostensibly built for their entertainment. Was this a political gesture; a violent critique of the use of rigged demographic assessments to justify the re-development of Airds? Or were they just smashing things for the hell of it?

Contemplating it, I recalled an incident I’d seen whilst walking to school in my early teens. The Council had installed a new children’s playground just outside the school gates. A group of my classmates were standing around it whilst one of them was laboriously, joylessly smashing the slippery dip with a large stick. None of them seemed particularly invested in the act, and there was no apparently logic to it. They did it like an illogical instinct.

The suburb in which I spent my youth wasn’t bad per se, but it had the reputation for that illogical violence central to the narrative of failing suburbs. One of my classmates, aged all of fourteen, went to a friend’s house after school, imbibed an unusual mixture of chocolate cake and homemade amphetamines, and had a psychotic episode. Waving a kitchen knife, he chased his playmate down the street until they took refuge in the cubicle of a public toilet. Whilst they cowered inside, he hacked at the toilet door until the police arrived. I had to sit next to him in computer class and, for the six or seven lessons he attended, he was only marginally less aggressive.

Continuing my reminiscences, I recalled the regular visits my school received from youth theatre companies. I have no idea where they all came from, but every few months we’d be pushed into the drama room and exposed to the most horribly didactic theatre. They’d perform at us for a couple of hours and then suddenly the fourth wall would drop and one of them would descend like a hawk into a flock of pigeons. An awkward youth would be clutched in their talons and forced to join them on stage for ritual humiliation. Aside from instilling a life long hatred of audience participation in me, I couldn’t figure out what this was supposed to achieve.

Years later I worked in a university with a social inclusion research unit, which focused heavily on the mechanisms through which disadvantaged youth could be ‘encultured’ through exposure to the arts. Instead of theatre, they concluded modern young people needed to be forced to paint endless ‘urban art’ murals and corralled into gym halls where they were made to play guitars at each other.

This explained why I’d been forced to sit through so much theatre, but it still seemed illogical. My mother had taken me to see plays before; I’d seen Hamlet, theatrical versions of Beowulf, and was permanently and indelibly marked by a particularly good rendition of The Pirates of Penzance. Why did the school feel obliged to expose me to youth theatre companies? As I would later discover, it was my postcode that did it. There was some logic that suggested the socio-economic status of the place meant we needed outside help in accessing culture.

Did exposure to culture stop me being poor as a youth? No. I was poor because I came from a single parent family and my father refused to pay child support. Did it alter my neighbourhood? Not particularly, but now I work in policy I can see it offered, at the very least, a path of action infinitely preferable to simply leaving things as they were. It might not have transformed the place, but it helped produce a fable about how things might be different, a story about a place in which children watched theatre rather than smashing apart playgrounds and chasing each other with knives.

The Airds redevelopment is “expected to transform the original 1470 social housing homes into a sustainable mixed income community of over 2000 homes where 30% will be social housing.” In doing so, “about 800 households will be relocated to other parts of Campbelltown and the Sydney metropolitan area.”[1] That’s a forced relocation of more than fifty percent of the current population.

The shift is expected to “have a big impact on residents and their families”.[2] In an attempt to manage this impact, throughout 2009 and 2010 Housing NSW “consulted with local residents about their ideas for the future of the area”, identifying their need for a community market, a fruit and veg co-op, the establishment of a Men’s Shed, landscaping and support for a local ‘Community Change Makers Program.’ Again, this is paradoxical. Why provide these services to a community being, for the most part, relocated?

A similar process was undertaken in neighbouring Rosemeadow in 2009, when then Housing Minister David Borger declared it needed to be ‘de-Radburned’.[3] He was referencing the urban design principles originally pioneered by Clarence Stein and Henry Wright in the late Twenties. They’d built on Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City, re-geared to manage the conflict between automotive transport and safe environments for pedestrians, particularly children. In Rosemeadow, around 100 houses were demolished, a further 550 renovated, and streets were renamed in an effort to rid the place of its stigma. The same thing happened in Minto and Bonnyrigg. These suburbs were barely forty years old. Borger’s message was that their design was so outrageously bad the only option was to wipe the slate clean.

There are worse examples; Manchester’s Hulme Crescents was the largest public housing development in Europe when it was built in 1972, but was abandoned by the mid-eighties and demolished in the early nineties. The Ronan Point tower block just outside London was completed in March 1968, and vacated barely two months later after poor design and construction caused part of the building to collapse, killing four of its new tenants. After years of being patched up, it was finally demolished in 1986. In stark contrast to Radburn, these designs owe more to the vertical streets of Le Corbusier—the polar opposite of the Garden City—yet with remarkably similar social and economic problems.

The obvious question that arises when we consider the demolition of these areas is whether the destruction of poorly designed suburbs erases the negative impact they had on their former occupants. Or, more directly, will the residents of Airds cease being poor once they’ve been forced to relocate? I think it unlikely. Would their financial situation change through further exposure to community markets, co-ops, Community Change Makers or, indeed, artists? Again, the answer is probably not. It’s unlikely a community market would break an entrenched cycle of poverty, nor re-direct the global economy to shine upon Sydney’s outer West. So why embark upon such schemes? Again, there are particular fables that come into play.

At one extreme is a story that positions these schemes as gentrification strategies, akin to the experience of places like Shoreditch in London or Williamsburg in New York; artists, community gardens and the like are employed to attract private development, force property prices up and price existing tenants out. These fables apply a model from the world’s largest economic powerhouses to failing regional Australian outposts. It’s a cohesive narrative, but somehow I think it unlikely that Airds will become Surry Hills. Yet, the fable isn’t entirely incorrect. Airds, made up of more than 95% social housing, has been re-zoned to attract private investment, and that will inevitably price the existing residents out. Whatever its place, art has been used within that process.

The alternate fable is one of renewal in a more positive sense. In this, the inherent design fault of concentrating disadvantage miles away from transport, education and economic infrastructure is being undone; an alternate mix of social and private housing will be enacted, and a strategy of community building and arts will be employed to help existing residents deal with the shock of change. Again, this is entirely logical. The combination of isolation and concentrated poverty is an inherent design flaw, and—as the enthusiasm of participants in David Cross’s Skyball attest—the art did help foster a sense of community and empowerment. But it’s a fable to assume Airds is being renewed. It is being knocked down and its citizens largely replaced.

Herein lies the complexity that makes us turn to simplistic fables in the first place. Both fables are simultaneously correct and incorrect, and the space between them is a veritable fog from which no clear strategy can emerge. Unless we can magically restructure the global economy, erase poverty, overcome isolation and pull a perfect policy and design framework from thin air, the renewal/gentrification of places like Airds will continue to be a paradox.

Within Temporary Democracies itself, the work I thought best engaged with this was Kate Mitchell’s Psychic Shopfront. In this, Mitchell races through green fields to a shop front labelled “Psychic”. Desperate to know her future, she dashes to the door only to have the building reveal itself to be a thin façade, which falls away as soon as she touches the door knob. It’s an apt metaphor for the way we deal with the bewildering interweave of capital, culture and land; a continual quest to find a simple narrative of our future, routinely thwarted by the discovery that both places, and the people within them, are unavoidably complex.