suBLURBia

BY Robert Barton

In the stainless steel and mirrored lift of the large urban planning office where I used to work, someone had vigorously scrawled three words in fine black marker. Written slightly above eye level, they cleverly intersected the visual trajectory of disenchanted workers, who seem always to gaze upwards and outwards, even in confined spaces. That’s how they caught my attention. The three little shivering black words scratched a cry for humanity out of the thick, waxy silence of the corporate elevator. They read: “Does Suburbia Disturbya?”

It seemed to pulse from behind the first layer of whatever mirrors are made of. I could almost hear the words being whispered, as if a spider had dropped from the lift hatch to give me a secret hint that I wasn’t alone in my queries. I had started to become disillusioned by the task of drafting people’s personal environments from a computer, following orders from above – not from God, but from sweaty developers trying to play God as they inflicted their real-life Sim City catastrophes on the world. It was comforting to know that among the machinery of that neo-suburbia-spewing factory, amid the barcode-wrinkled faces on pay day, between the suits who carry coffee like ghosts droop their lanterns, another human being was questioning the farce of the glittering Australian Dream.

What we were questioning is the deception behind home ownership and the master-planned environments I like to call SuBLURBia – new fringe suburbs that market themselves with a blurb, rather than any richness of text. You’ve no doubt heard of them; you may even have the jingles in your head. Developers buy large rural or city fringe property in massive land grabs and then convert it into ‘communities’ faster than kids these days are turned into fatties by burger clowns. In fact, you may even say that SuBLURBia is the housing market’s equivalent of fast food.

However, if you haven’t ventured outside Zone 2 in the past five years, then I ask you to come on a brief journey to a glittering ‘utopia’. “Come see for yourself because it speaks for itself.” I promise the journey will be “cheaper than rent”.

According to our glossy brochure, where we are going is only “20 minutes from the CBD”, but it’s not in the Melway directory. It’s a long 20 minutes. The afternoon sun is shining straight into our eyes. We should have left earlier. A not-so-nice term I have heard for people who live in the west is ‘squinters’ because they have to squint into the morning sun on the way to work, and into the setting sun on the way home. I expect to see a smattering of optometrists along the way. We don’t.

We do, however, see many sights for sore eyes. Golden arches spout from the terracotta sea of roofs ahead, like gold fountains made solid by alchemists, their laboratories turning grease into gold below. Battlefields of dying cars sit next to new car yards. American-sized pickups stand shoulder to shoulder, grinning out at us, wearing diagonal price sashes like contestants in a beauty pageant. We drive through established suburbia, past milk bars where Redskins will be either surprisingly cheap or unsurprisingly rock-hard. I swear I see one of those ‘Save Our Suburbs’ signs with a local campaigner on it, but a truck cuts us off, and I’m left wondering whether it wasn’t just a sign saying ‘Save at Subway’ with a picture of Jarrod on it. There are purple and cream function centres, monolithic odes to the wedding cakes inside them. There are neon-lit service stations, car washes and factory outlet stores, shopping centres and warehouse-sized crèches where you can dunk your crying child into the silence of a thousand coloured foam balls. There are fluoro-spattered bistro windows, “Kids Eat For Free”. The architect Robin Boyd’s words ring true: “Most Australian children grow up on lots of steak, sugar, and depressing deformities of nature and architecture”.

This is a landscape of convenience. I pretend the car is still, and that the streetscapes either side are simply revolving past us on two lazy susans, certain items coming around at intervals. Billboards flash past like those pesky porn pop-ups, and someone has discovered the added selling power of the progressive billboard. I wonder what the next one will say. It’s edge-of-the-seat stuff. I see the first billboard for where we’re headed. It’s exciting. We’re getting closer.

This billboard tells us that if we lived in Suburb A, we would be home by now, obviously appealing to those who live even further out. The image below the text shows a woman welcoming you into the yellowy warmth of your new home. She could be your wife. She smiles cheekily, her leg creeps around the door. She looks horny, but even at 80 kilometres an hour you notice that her ketchup-lipstick face resembles the pie you dropped back at the service station.

The next billboard shows us what we have seen on the brochures. An Aryan family glides effortlessly through a lush green park against a backdrop of mansions. The blonde, blue-eyed boy and girl need no training wheels here. Their rollerblading parents don’t even need to look down; they stare right at us, grins wide and white. Apparently cloning is only bad for sheep.

The third billboard simply gives us directions to “our new life”, a big “next right turn” arrow. Then the existing streetscape drops away; the next right turn isn’t for another 5km. Buildings taper out; we drive past semi-rural land, sugar gums and “rabbit-proof” rock walls, dry brown fields of the great western lava flow. Explorers noted that this was once covered with magnificent wildflowers, but only 1% now remain in the state. Instead we pass abandoned tractors, exploded Toranas, a caravan selling “fresh fish” and greyhounds pacing up and down mesh mazes. In the middle of the dusty fields ahead, a haze of roofs smears the afternoon horizon.

I am excited as we pass through the “iconic” entry feature of the estate. Our first trip into SuBLURBia! Perhaps the large gates are meant to mark the threshold into paradise, but I feel more like I am entering a safari park. I find myself on the lookout for wildlife, to witness the gregarious herds of white humans in our shiny brochures. No sign of life yet, but as we drive on into this “Eco-Friendly Suburb”, my view is occupied by a large glimmering puddle ahead. It’s not a mirage: it’s water. From the drought-scoured wilderness of one minute ago, a lake! O sweet baptismal fountain of the frontier! We have passed from the desert into Eden – a reversed Genesis! Not only are we quenched of our thirst, but also look how the lake spurts: a mystical whale surely swims beneath! The grass is cut and green around us. Exotic, water-thirsty trees flourish. A breeze blows; they wave us down the road. In my rearview mirror, an autumn leaf blows off a London plane tree, and the exposed hand of twigs gives me the finger. “Have a shorter shower for me,” the tree seems to gloat.

Up ahead we see something moving. Could it be? We get excited; I accelerate 5km over the speed limit. We roar ahead at 15km an hour.

“There they go!” you shout, pointing to the side of an enormous Edwardian/Victorian/Neo-Gothic/Brutalist mansion. I go to turn but it’s a one-way street; I keep going and try to take the next left, but it’s a one of the “quiet cul-de-sacs” in the brochures. Cul–de-sac is French – “the arse of the bag” – and the surrounding cheap mansions confirm that’s exactly what this is. We keep going to the next roundabout. You urge me to go the full circle around it; I scorn you for being silly. I then go around it not once but twice. We both nod. It is always funny to do that.

We end up on a street named after a bird species not sighted in the region for 50 years, and in the distance ahead see the new wildlife moving. A rush of blood comes to me and I take the car to 20km/hour, getting some major airtime on 30 friggin’ speed humps. We arrive brain-shaken and as we get close, wind down our windows. I turn off the car. We are silent.

In front of us, Aryan parents push a blonde baby in a stroller. In the distance, two parents rollerblade behind their children. It seems we have come to the watering hole. All life is gathered here. A man in white chinos looks over the expanse of the artificial lake. A gaggle of young mothers, dressed in leggings and white sweaters, power-walk around its circumference. I cross off the photos in my pamphlets as we go. It’s like cliché bingo. Two children ride past us on bikes adorned with floral baskets and safety flags. They turn their heads in unison and stare at us. Children of the damned, they know we’re not from around here. I turn the car back on and we move off.

I think back to the little scribble in the lift. It turns out that suburbia does disturb me, though not in a way that I’d imagined. I half-expected there to be a discrepancy between the marketing and the reality. In fact, it is the opposite: there is no difference at all, at least not on the surface. The glittering facade imagined is the glittering life lived, to a sickening degree. People are buying into the dream: the featurist mansions, the double carport, manicured lawns and 2.3 children to help inhabit them. But the gold is hard to find. It’s all so uncomfortable.

We drive around for another hour but find nothing special here. It is nothing more than a highly organised table setting of materialistic clichés. The suburb was designed as a master plan, and people seem to be living it. It was designed in an instant, and the materials of the buildings will last just that. I worry about the sustainability of the oversized houses and their oversized air-conditioners, and I certainly worry about the nature of buy-off-the-plan architecture. I mean, surely a builder is not an architect no matter what they tell you. This is not considered, sustainable design; this is a façade.

Not only is the architecture like a movie set, but the community also seems more than a little scripted. There is a distinct absence of the richness we treasure in communities that have developed slowly. We see no grandmas sweeping porches, no emo teenagers bumming smokes, no pseudo-hippy uni students or old Chinese grocers. In terms of a demographic, this ‘community’ is decidedly narrow.

I am bewildered that such a place exists and naturally seek a culprit — but which came first, the chicken or the egg? It is hard to know whom to blame for the adoption of the SuBLURBban Dream. On one hand it is easy to blame developers for creating the myths, the blurbs about the lifestyles that people will lead in their shiny new developments. On the other hand, a dealer can’t deal without the druggies. People are buying the dream. Is it because there is nothing else? That people will eat whatever’s on their plate? Or is it because the people are defining the menu?

But the push for suburbia is not new. Do these new fast-food suburbs simply carry the legacy of long-running national obsessions with featurism and unlimited space that Robin Boyd talked about in his book The Australian Ugliness back in 1960? Are our new developers simply responding to the demands of the market when they provide faux-Victorian mansions with double carports, or are they telling the market what they want? Do people believe that master-planned utopias can provide all the ingredients for happiness? Based on what we’ve seen on our brief journey, you’d have to say that yes, people believe that are they attaining a happy modern life by buying into these places. Maybe they are happy; that’s not for me to say. What I am worried about as an urban designer, or even just a guy with a hunch, is that SuBLURBia is poorly fabricated in almost every way, and might well crumble in the future, both physically and socially. But that’s all in the long term, isn’t it? For now all I can say is that it is certainly disturbing to witness the consumption of community as a product. This is what SuBLURBia is. A whole lot of glitter.

Recently I found another scribbled message, this time a lone quote by a man named Robert Penn Warren on a poorly copied page of a book. It read, “The dream is a lie, but the dreaming is true.” So does suburbia disturbya too?