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It's time for the burbs to be heard

KPMG partner and Demographer Bernard Salt looked at some of the changing demographics that also impact on Redfern Waterloo in this article in the Australian on 13 August 2009.

I HAVE a simple proposition. I argue that over the past decade there has evolved within Australian cities a significant and growing cultural divergence between different social groups.

And by this I mean a specific division between those who live in the inner city and those who live on the city's edge.

To some extent the city has always harboured social and economic division.

That the demographies of Toorak and Double Bay differ to those of Broadmeadows and Redfern is hardly surprising. This has always been the case; indeed, there is a niche for both rich and poor suburbs in every city.

But what I am suggesting is more broadly based. I am suggesting that there is almost a regionalisation of wealth, income and culture based on urban geography.

Battlers, migrants and assorted low-income earners who formerly lived in the inner city are now being flung out, as if by some centrifugal force, to the city's edge.

What is left in the inner city is an odd coalescence of tribes - namely students, singles, couples, dinks, gays, expats, corporates, divorcees and, most important of all, the professional and entrepreneurial classes.

And to this lot I might add the entertainment, information and media glitterati. As a general principle, none of this class would ever think of living more than 10km from the city centre.

Or if they do, it's a convenient leapfrog over the middle and outer suburbs on their way to a tree-change bolthole such as Mt Macedon or Bowral.

The outer suburbs are, in this world, "drive-through" places that are passed on the way to somewhere more exciting.

The outer suburbs, on the other hand - best known by pejorative terms such as "the burbs" or "the sticks" - are inhabited by a different life form: families.

Migrants are now likely to cluster in suburban places like Melbourne's Springvale and Sydney's Cabramatta. And suburbanites have different habitations, mostly separate houses on separate blocks of land rather than apartments.

One of the key drivers of social division within the city is income. Between 1996 and 2006 the average income per person in Melbourne's Melton and Wyndham and Sydney's Blacktown and Penrith hovered a few percentage points above or below the Australian average. For this entire decade these edges of our largest cities represented the heartland of "average Australia". 

However, it was a different story in the city centre. In Sydney's inner-western municipality of Leichhardt, income levels on a per-person basis jumped from 43 per cent to 73 per cent above the Australian average over the decade to 2006. Upwardly mobile Leichhardt moved mightily upmarket in a decade. The same upshift applied to Melbourne's City of Port Phillip, where income levels moved from 27 per cent to 50 per cent above the Australian average in a decade.

The bottom line is that income levels in the outer suburbs remained "average" during the boom, but in the inner city the gains in income were anything but average. And so not only is there a gap in income levels between inner and outer suburbs, but this gap has widened appreciably.

Little wonder that inner-city property values jumped in this decade. Or, indeed, that there was a rising market for the lifestyle accoutrements of inner-city sophistication: cafes, bars, restaurants, boutiques, warehouse conversions.

But the differences between the inner and outer suburbs go beyond income. In the inner areas of Sydney and Melbourne less than 45 per cent of households comprise families, whereas on the city's edge this proportion often exceeds 85 per cent. In the city centre less than 5 per cent of dwellings are separate houses on separate blocks of land; the balance is, of course, attached. On the city's edge the reverse applies.

At the heart of the differences is education. In the inner suburbs it's not uncommon for two-thirds of adults to hold a bachelor degree or higher. In the outer suburbs this proportion is less than a third.

But the social division of the city goes beyond demographics. The middle and outer suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney contain, depending on how defined, more than 6 million residents (in a nation of 22 million). And yet this is a voice that is rarely heard in the Australian media. Name a newspaper columnist, let alone a radio broadcaster or a television presenter, who projects their perspective on life from within the middle suburbs, never mind outer suburbia.

Why are there ample caricatures of unsophisticated suburbanites (Kath and Kim, Edna Everage, Kenny) but none of the inner-city elite? Is the educated well-to-do, inner-city-living class beyond parody or satire?

And it's not as if a suburban perspective is not relevant in this nation. The middle and outer suburbs account for the majority of the city's residents and for the vast majority of the city's growth.

The problem I have is that city planning, and more often Australian culture, appears to be determined by those whose lives are based in the inner city, and not by the silent majority of average Australians who live in the suburban heartland.

Perhaps it's time to listen to what the latter have to say about the kind of lifestyle they want to lead in suburbia.

Source: www.theaustralian.news.com.au/business/story/0,28124,25920990-14741,00.html