Cinderella suburbs: your time is nigh

Watch this space: Australian suburbia

It started 20 years ago with the release of a report scoping the strategic plan for Melbourne by 2030. It was revolutionary. It included the idea of an urban growth boundary: the city’s sprawl was to be contained. The concept soon spread, in various forms, to other large capital cities in Australia.

The idea of an urban growth boundary ticked all the boxes. The outward sprawl of suburbia was unsustainable; it required extensions to freeways and railways as well as new hospitals and schools. The infrastructure demands were unrelenting. Planners were on board. Politicians loved it. There was a groundswell of popular support.

The environmental movement, too, argued at the time that Australian cities needed densification, more public transport and less reliance on carbon-emitting vehicles. The outer suburbs, the logic went, were soulless, energy-sapping places that activated only at night when workers returned home, whereas apartment towers leveraged whole communities into the urban grid, closer to shops, schools, hospitals and public transport. More people could be packed into the existing infrastructure, jumbled together, creating a frisson of urban sophistication. Paris, London and New York be damned.

To be sure, this movement had its critics, including various groups that sought to preserve the sanctity, and no doubt the serenity, of low-density suburbia. “No worries,” was the planners’ riposte, “we will diligently protect precincts of historic and cultural significance.” The rest, though, would be better repurposed as townhouses, especially those positioned along transport corridors.

And so the cities slowly but surely densified. Traffic clogged. Public transport crammed. Property prices in the inner city surged as people competed for a premium piece of CBD proximity. Our cities were shaking off their dreary suburban personas and adopting a more globalised posture.

There was some redefining, along the way, of the urban growth boundaries when it made sense from a planning perspective. And Australian cities began to take on a distinctly Londonesque look and feel. Not so much in the streetscape, but in the mix of people. Australia’s biggest capital cities have become melting pots of students, business travellers and immigrants from China, India, the Philippines and beyond. Take your Aussie-accented colonials of British descent, toss in the obligatory Kiwis and mix with a smattering of South Africans, and there you have the eclecticism of Sydney, Melbourne and increasingly Brisbane. How will this mix of people and the operation of our cities shift in a post-lockdown world?

Open borders will retrieve some students, visitors and immigrants throughout this year. And having more people working from home will certainly enliven suburbia and obviate the need for some intra-city commuting. Instead of our cities fizzing around a single CBD, we may see activation of entire suburban regions that instead fizz around local central places such as Parramatta, Werribee and Chermside.

I’m sure this isn’t what the planners had in mind 20 years ago when the urban growth boundary concept was introduced. But it could well be that in the 2020s, as more workers make the decision to cut the commute, the once-derided dormitory suburbs of middle Australia will collectively garner just a sliver of the energy, and the glamour, of the city’s CBD. Cinderella suburbs: your time is nigh.