Retrofitting the suburbs for sustainability

[chlamor]

‘Permaculture’ is a system of “consciously designed landscapes which mimic the patterns and relationships found in nature, while yielding an abundance of food, fibre and energy for provision of local needs. It is a vision of permanent (sustainable) human culture based on permanent (sustainable agriculture). See: David Holmgren (2002) Permaculture: Principles & Pathways Beyond Sustainability, Holmgren Design Services – www.holmgren.com.au – ISBN: 0646418440



The suburbs of our Australian cities have, in the main, become sterile wastelands, lacking in any true spirit of community, impoverished of local resources, and filled with fearful people whose daily efforts are focussed elsewhere. What has happened to the Australian “suburban dream”?

To find the foundation of the so-called ‘suburban dream’ and the reasons why it has proved illusory, we need to look back to the post World War II economic boom of the 1950s. At that time, Australia was riding high on the sheep’s back, with wool prices around $2.40 per kg, and there was also cheap and abundant fossil fuel and timber. Furthermore, the government of the period provided widespread war-service housing, low-interest loans, and substantial public infrastructure such as roads and utilities to facilitate suburban growth.

The typical ‘baby-boom’ family of the 1950s lived on a single income of around $50-$100 per week, with a housewife and three children at home. These home owners, who had grown up through the “Great Depression” and wartime hardships, had an ethos of proud self-reliance and domestic frugality, reinforced by their wartime experiences. Many suburban ‘back yards’ had an actively worked vegetable garden and one to a few productive fruit trees. Produce swapping and home preserving of seasonal surpluses were common. And this was also the heyday of several great consumer icons – the FJ Holden car, the Victa lawnmower, and the Hills Hoist clothesline.

But there were problems with the suburban dream and the resulting rush of young families to “nappy valleys” on the city fringes, notably “urban sprawl”. As the suburbs spread, they displaced important agricultural activities such as the market gardening and dairy farming that formerly provided fresh foods with minimal need for transport. Not only did public infrastructure become increasingly poorly used, but the disproportionate rush to build roads and sell more Australian cars led to a general decline in the use of public transport – leading eventually to the phenomenon we see today, that our suburbs are designed for cars not people.

Along with “sprawl” has developed an increasingly dysfunctional economic situation. We see speculative inflation of land values, capital invested unproductively, declining household (non-monetary) production of food and “backyard industry”, and a massive rise of consumer addiction based on rising household debt.

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