Revival of the suburban dream after the coronavirus comet

The Australian home is a fortress as we rediscover the neighbourhood.

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It is the forlorn, the forgotten, the ridiculed and the forsaken. It is the great Australian suburbia. The place so exquisitely parodied by the mostly London-based wit Barry Humphries as Edna Everage, by those suburban foxes Kath & Kim (and their netballing friend Sharon), and by the achingly authentic Darryl Kerrigan to the extent that they left nothing unexamined about the ordinariness of Australian suburbia.

For a generation, bright young things escaped their dreary far-flung parental homes and went off in search of the bright lights and the activated streets of the inner city. For here was camped their tribe: the educated, the connected, the childless, the godless, the creative and a smattering of the well to do; their politics were different; their causes were passionate; they lived an oh-so-European lifestyle that many colonials so desperately wanted.

And so it was for a generation that Australian households tithed their young as offerings to the inner-city gods. But out of left field came a comet from the eastern sky making landfall mid-March 2020. What ensued can be described only as a risorgimento of the Australian way of life. Out with handshakes and air-kissing and eating and drinking at close quarters. In with social distancing and masks and hand sanitiser and Zoom meetings.

Workers were laid off; others were sent home on palliative support sourced by government borrowings. The corona comet up-ended the logic of the Australian way of life that had pulsed between suburban home and inner-city workplace.

Here was an act of daily commuting deference that pumped life (and in the process destroyed souls) between the rich creamy yolk of the inner city and the flat suburban white that spilled outwards in every allowable direction.

But then something remarkable happened. All those workers, and kids, pumped into the suburban footprint all day and every day for weeks and months, injected life and energy into the streets. Neighbourhoods sprang into shape. New friendships were made. Local retail strips were rediscovered. A new appreciation for small, struggling businesses inspired an uncommon local loyalty. Bike paths and parks once rarely used were now navigated with all the care of a freeway drive. The suburbs were springing into life and the locals loved it.

The Kerrigans. Picture: Roadshow

It was as if all the energy that had ebbed and flowed between suburbia and the inner city was being retained at its source, activating and inspiring a new way of life. At its core is the fortressing of the Australian home. The home office is now a broadcast outlet. The garage morphs into a home gym. The backyard flower bed is now a veggie patch. The millennium drought left suburbia with water tanks; the corona comet will make the household even more self-sufficient.

In this bold new world the suburbs cast aside their pre-corona personas and create localised communities pivoting to work-near-home collaboration spaces and education and civic facilities. The urban fabric loses its fried-egg logic and scrambles into a patchwork of self-contained but interconnected communities. Bike paths, walking trails, local tramway networks radiating from — wait for it — non-CBD hubs reorganise the logic of Australian suburbia. Spidery webs of trails and pathways and tramways radiate from places such as Parramatta, Monash-Chadstone and Mount Gravatt.

It is bold. It is brave. It reduces carbon emissions. It spreads the demand for property, making housing more affordable. It requires investment in public transport and accessibility by state and local governments. It is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to press the reset button and rebuild the kind of Australia that is sustainable and workable and affordable and that is kinder to our mental health.

The cultural divide between the city centre and the suburbs as a consequence is diminished across time. The inner city is rekindling some of the aura it had when first abandoned by the parents of baby boomers in the 1950s; at that time, this part of the city was regarded as dirty, dark, cramped and congested. Why live in a 200sq m terrace house when you could live in a three-bedroom brick veneer home on a quarter-acre (1000sq m) block amid the light and space of suburbia?

The return to or the reinvigoration of Australian suburbia is consistent with a new zeitgeist extolling the many virtues of authenticity. The fakery, the chimera, the influencer-inspired curation of every public aspect of every private life returns to base with the great post-corona suburban push. A lockdown absence of house guests and visitors killed off the out-of-control pillowfication of the home’s every bedroom. The pragmatic post-corona mantra is: what is the purpose? What is the utility? Why do it?

Same goes for fashion. If more workers work from home in the future then perhaps there’s no need for five (or more) glamorous work outfits. In post-corona suburbia, what matters is authenticity, reality, personal relationships, the home and the community. High fashion and tiny twee entrees in crowded restaurants just do not fit the “new reality” schtick.

Australian suburbia in many respects has always had a colonial deference about it. The CBD was London or New York. The suburbs were lesser and distant. The ambitious abandoned their suburban (and regional) roots and thrived amid the richly oxygenated atmosphere of inner-city cafes, bars and restaurants, and they luxuriated in the surety of tenured knowledge work in the CBD. From this vantage point the suburbs look mightily drab and tediously dreary.

Or at least that was the case up until the coming of the coronavirus and then all the assets of the inner city flipped into liabilities and all the liabilities of suburbia converted into assets.

Australia’s urban world is turned on its head and is boldly reimagined. It is the kind of cultural revolution dreamt about by the climate lobby involving a whole-of-society shift in thinking, working and daily orientation.

But the looming big suburban shift has not come about because of brave activism. It is change that stems from within. It is a deep-seated human survival response. Why commute to work when bosses now accept at-home productivity? Why spend a motza on inner-city housing when cheaper housing offering more space is available in the suburbs? Why mix and mingle in inner-city cafes and restaurants when you don’t know who’s in there and whether they’re carrying infection?

There is the thinking that eventually everything will return to normal. But this is unlikely. The old normal wasn’t working. We have discovered a new way of living that is fairer, kinder, more communal, more affordable and that fits the times. If there is one common trait that has marked Australians for more than a century, it is the relentless pursuit of lifestyle.

And though this new lifestyle was thrust upon us, we have come to realise there is another way of organising the city, of conducting our lives, that delivers better outcomes for more people. Not every aspect of our corona lives should be carried forth but other bits, the good bits, the celebration of suburban living, can help deliver a better way of life.

And so for that reason I think the next decade and beyond really will be suburbia’s time in the sun.

Bernard Salt is managing director of The Demographics Group.