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New Communities, New Attachments:Planning for Diversity in Melbourne'sOuter-SuburbsRimi KhanPublished online: 12 May 2014.

To cite this article: Rimi Khan (2014) New Communities, New Attachments: Planning forDiversity in Melbourne's Outer-Suburbs, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 35:3, 295-309, DOI:10.1080/07256868.2014.899953

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New Communities, New Attachments:Planning for Diversity in Melbourne’sOuter-SuburbsRimi Khan

This article reflects on the cultural policy and planning challenges raised by thechanging demography, particularly the increasing cultural diversity, of new, outer-suburban Australian communities. While there is much scholarly thinking about theforms of spatialised belonging that exists in urban, multicultural Australia, there is lessdiscussion of Asian identities in more dispersed suburban communities that have avery different relationship with the cultural infrastructure of the inner-city. Asianpresences in Australian cities have been discussed in terms of racialised discourses ofdysfunction and strategies of ethnic commodification, but these do not account for thepractices of belonging and self and community-making that take place in these outer-suburban areas. An analysis of cultural programmes and urban planning documentssurrounding a residential development in outer-suburban Melbourne – the proposedQuarry Hills precinct – reveals that these instruments mobilise limited frameworks ofknowledge about these communities. Such governmental discourses struggle to accountfor the implications of cultural diversity, and the forms of belonging and attachmentthat are enacted in these areas.

Keywords: Cultural Planning; Multiculturalism; Belonging; Growth Area; Whittlesea

The Quarry Hills Municipal Reserve comprises 115 ha of elevated bushland, about 25km north of Melbourne’s Central Business District. The parklands surround some ofthe city’s newest suburbs and long-established agricultural land. They containsubstantial biodiversity, as well as many sites of Aboriginal and post-contact cultural

Rimi Khan is a Research Fellow in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her research interests includecritical cultural policy and multiculturalism. She is currently involved in an Australian Research Council-fundedproject which seeks to develop cultural indicators for local, state and federal government cultural agencies, aswell as other research examining the relationship between arts and cultural participation and ecologicalcitizenship. Correspondence to: Dr Rimi Khan, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne,Parkville, VIC 3010, Australia. Tel:. +61383447635. Email: rpkhan@unimelb.edu.au

Journal of Intercultural Studies, 2014Vol. 35, No. 3, 295–309, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07256868.2014.899953

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significance. To the east of the park is Darebin Creek, a waterway that marks animportant corridor of Aboriginal settlement and displacement in Melbourne’snorthern suburbs. A visit to the Quarry Hills Park is one of the many heritageactivities offered by the area’s local government authority which seeks to connect thearea’s residents with these sites, practices and histories. As one of a busload ofparticipants on this tour, I was shown protected River Red Gum trees, eagle nests anda variety of native plant specimens that inhabit this area. From the top of theseparklands, our guides also pointed out the direction of a proposed new freewaydevelopment and the faint contours of the city skyline, visible on the horizon.We were aware of our distance from the city – being in the park made us feel likewe were in the bush. But looking out from the hill, this vista was also a reminder ofthe proximity of residential development, and the points at which the bush andsuburbia meet. The space is an ambivalent one. It is marked by its Aboriginal culturalheritage and ecological significance, as well as increasing tensions between the ruraland the (sub)urban.

The Quarry Hills parklands are situated within the City of Whittlesea, amunicipality that has been officially designated by the state government of Victoriaas one of five ‘growth areas’, and whose population is projected to almost doubleby 2031 (Department of Planning and Community Development, Housing, n.d.: 1).It comprises a large geographical area, encompassing a handful of establishednorthern suburbs, more recent outer-suburban development, agricultural land andthe semi-rural township of Whittlesea. With about one-third of the population froma country where English is not the first language, the municipality is now one of themost culturally diverse areas in greater Melbourne. The area has a long history ofAsian settlement and today Indian, Vietnamese, Chinese, Filipino and Sri Lankanmigrants are among the fastest growing groups in the area. The municipality is alsohome to a number of newer communities from the Middle East and the Horn ofAfrica (City of Whittlesea). In this article, I want to reflect on the significant culturalpolicy and planning challenges that are raised by this increasingly diverse populationin dispersed outer-suburban spaces. I consider the forms of attachment andbelonging that are possible for migrant communities to construct in these areasand how this might shift current imaginations of Asian-Australia. There is muchscholarly thinking about the spatialised belonging that exists in urban, multiculturalAustralia (Hage 1997, Dreher 2006, Noble 2009, Wise and Velayutham 2009).However, there has been notably less discussion of the ways in which migrantidentities are articulated in these emerging suburban and peri-urban spaces whichhave a very different relationship with the cultural infrastructure of the inner-city.

The Quarry Hills tour alludes to ambiguous yet important articulations ofdifference that cannot be understood in terms of either dysfunction or urbanvibrancy. The experiences and meanings generated by the tour cannot be easilyinstrumentalised and deployed across existing governmental frameworks. Prevailingplanning frameworks mobilise insufficient understandings of the possibilities ofcultural participation and the diverse kinds of belonging such participation enables.

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I begin by briefly profiling the Asian community in the City of Whittlesea and goon to situate this within existing academic and policy discourse on urbanity andcultural diversity. While policy-makers in multicultural Australia have historicallybeen good at celebrating diversity in the inner-city, particularly when it is linked toeconomic objectives, there are fewer precedents for policies which negotiate culturaldifference in the outer-suburbs. Given this context, I consider how to make senseof the experiences and identities of Asian migrants in the City of Whittlesea.The Quarry Hills tour points to forms of spatialised belonging that are difficultto conceptualise in terms of existing discourses on Asianness in Australia. Despitethe significance of these everyday articulations of place and identity, there isuncertainty surrounding how this can be translated to cultural and urban planningdiscourse.

Urban planning strategies currently being developed in Melbourne’s ‘growthareas’, including the proposed Quarry Hills residential precinct, reveal an ambiguitysurrounding the role of culture in managing this population growth and the forms ofbelonging that might be fostered through cultural participation. These officialstrategies struggle to engage with the complex lived identities and attachments thatthese new residents may have.

Asian-Australia in Whittlesea

While the significant population growth and suburban expansion in the City ofWhittlesea has only taken place over the last couple of decades, Asian migration tothis area has been documented as far back as the 1860s. Gold was discovered in theKinglake area in 1863, where hundreds of Chinese migrant workers settled andbrought with them a range of home- and self-making practices. These migrantsdeveloped market gardens, practiced Chinese medicine and cooking, and establishednetworks of cultural and commodity exchange both within the local Chinesecommunity and outside it (Yong 2008: 7). The main market garden was particularlysignificant because of the connections it formed between Asians and agriculturalAustralia – relationships that are rarely accounted for in narratives of Asianmigration to urban Australia.

Today, Asian migrants in the City of Whittlesea are concentrated in theestablished and well-serviced suburbs of Thomastown, Lalor, Bundoora and MillPark. Indeed, there is a higher concentration of Vietnamese, Indian and Sri Lankancommunities in these suburbs than in the rest of greater Melbourne (City ofWhittlesea). In recent years, increasing numbers of these migrants have been settlingin the outer reaches of the municipality – residential areas that straddle the urbangrowth boundary and which lack the cultural and social infrastructure of the inner-suburbs. The forms of belonging that might take place in these spaces are ambiguous.The history of Chinese settlement in Whittlesea, for example, demonstrates thetransient kinds of attachment migrants have had to this area. In a study of Chinesehistory in the area, Yong (2008) describes how throughout their lifetime, migrants

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moved around different parts of the municipality, studied in other areas inMelbourne or took up professions with various regional or global connections.Constructing a bounded and localised ‘sense of place’ to understand these diverseattachments is difficult, but this is the task of programmes like the Quarry Hillsbus tour.

This particular activity is offered by the City of Whittlesea’s Community CulturalDevelopment Department (CCDD) as part of a broader suite of programmesencouraging place-making through cultural participation. When I attended, therewere about 35 other people on the bus – a mix of older couples and residents in thearea, whom I was told were ‘regulars’ on these heritage activities, as well as a numberof families from diverse cultural backgrounds. As the bus wound through these newand future suburbs ‘structure plans’, ‘heritage overlays’, and various other officialplanning schemes were described to us. As well as explaining some of these morebureaucratic aspects of the Quarry Hills precinct, the tour guide – a staff memberfrom the Environmental Management Department of the City of Whittlesea – drewattention to details in the natural landscape and described Aboriginal and post-settlement histories of the area that were new to many of us. In this way, the toursought to forge connections between the area’s diverse residents and their localenvironment. It did so by offering a reimagining of suburbia; it defamiliarised themundane and made the everyday landscape significant and singular. The programmeencouraged participants to look at aspects of their surroundings they may otherwisehave ignored, or to think about histories they were not previously aware of. Inrewriting the physical terrain this way, the tour encouraged participants to find waysof enacting their relationship with these surroundings that are distinct from existingconceptions of Asian identity in Australian cities.

Limits to Thinking Cultural Diversity in the City

In both academic and policy discourse, discussions of the implications of culturaldiversity in cities have tended to focus on the inner-urban – concentrating either oncities as spaces of racialised dysfunction or as sites for the commodification of ethnicdifference. Despite the apparent recession of multicultural discourse in bothpopular and policy rhetoric, there has been much celebration of city spaces asenablers of hybridity and an affirmative cosmopolitanism (Landry and Bianchini1995, May 1996, Sandercock 1998, Robson and Butler 2001, Devadason 2010). It iswithin such spaces that the tensions and possibilities arising from diversity are seento be most clearly articulated. As Ash Amin has argued, the shared public spaces ofthe city become:

[…] symbols of collective well-being and possibility, expressions of achievementand aspiration by urban leaders and visionaries, sites of public encounter andformation of civic culture, and significant spaces of political deliberation andagonistic struggle. (2008: 5)

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Such understandings of the city link urbanism to a democratic civic culture. Urbanpublic spaces – as opposed to private sites of meaning-making – are equated withvalues of citizenship, pluralism and ‘tolerance of diversity’ (Clark et al. 2001: 29,Stevenson 2003). However, the significance of these instances of urban encounter isdebatable – Robson and Butler (2001: 70) point out, for example, the way that certaindiverse neighbourhoods are marked by the segregated or ‘tectonic’ existence ofdifferent groups, along race or class-based lines.

Such thinking is reflected in characterisations of Asian presences in Australiancities in terms of racialised dysfunction, tension and criminality. Scholarly and mediacommentary on the 2005 Cronulla riots and the attacks on Indian students in 2009reflect this focus on the conflicts surrounding the territorialisation of racial difference(Grewal 2007, Noble 2009).1 As Baas suggests, these events illustrate how ‘issues ofspace and spaciousness are crucial to understanding how the Anglo-Saxon/whiteAutralians look at their own country and those who they perceive as newcomers’(Baas 2009: 37). Accounts of areas such as Cabramatta in Sydney as ethnic enclave orghetto, also sit within this broader narrative of problematic Asian presence(Brook 2008).

Turner points out how attempts to redress perceptions of Asianness as threat haverelied on arguments about the transnational cosmopolitanism seen to accompanycultural diversity (2008). These arguments involve a valorisation of the imaginedencounters in diverse cities and advocate governmental strategies to create more‘vibrant’, ‘dynamic’ or inclusive public urban spaces.2 In the last decade, theVictorian state government, for example, has issued a number of planning strategiesfor Melbourne which seek to enhance the ‘vitality’ of the city (Victorian MulticulturalCommission 2012). Such strategies situate ‘vibrant’ city spaces as an essentialbackdrop for the performance of contemporary globalised identities. To some extent,these policy initiatives can be regarded as strategies for rectifying the perceptions ofdysfunction described above.

Of course, these strategies must also be understood in the context of the cityeconomies in which they circulate. The formation of ‘vibrant’ global cities is tied upwith the competitive acquisition of symbolic capital and economic value. Theseagendas have been reinvigorated in recent years by a ‘creative cities’ discourse,where economic success is seen to be dependent on the ability of a city to attract a‘creative class’ or workforce (Florida 2002). In Richard Florida’s work, culturaldiversity is one measure of a city’s ‘creativity index’. In the Australian context, diversecommunities are said to create the ideal conditions for nurturing the forms ofcreativity and innovation that might contribute to the ‘knowledge economy’(National Institute of Economic and Industry Research 2004: 90). In this way, thevalue of cultural diversity in cities is reconstrued as economic value. While thepolitical relevance of multiculturalism is debated, the perceived economic value ofcultural diversity continues to garner political support.3 One result of such policyframeworks has been the promotion of what Gleeson and Low describe as ‘ethnicconsumption spaces’ (2000: 60). In Melbourne, there has been significant state

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government investment into the ‘revitalisation’ of ‘cultural precincts’, such asChinatown, and Greek and Italian areas in the inner-city (Victorian MulticulturalCommission 2012). These projects have involved enhancing the visual profile ofthese precincts – so that their ‘ethnic’ character is highlighted and the area becomes adistinctly branded site for tourism, consumption and private investment.

Chinatowns in Australia can perhaps be seen as embodying both of thesenarratives of Asian presence in the cities – historically, as insular enclaves ofhomeliness or more recently, as an example of the commodification of Asian‘vibrancy’ for Anglo-Australian consumption (Lee 2006, Ang 2013). The cosmopol-itanism of Chinatowns has also been read as part of processes of diasporic belonginglinked to globalised economic and cultural flows (Kwok 2011: 86, Ang 2013: 9).Kwok points out that these ‘social dynamics have implications for the expression ofdiasporic Chinese affinity and constructions of Chineseness’, highlighting the waythat spatialised attachments shape identity (2011: 86).

Importantly, the terms on which these accounts of cultural diversity take placeprovide little precedent for the ways in which cultural diversity in the outer-suburbsmay be thought.4 Amin suggests that it is ‘urban surplus’ – spaces which are ‘open,crowded, diverse, incomplete, improvised, and disorderly or lightly regulated’ – thatprovides the setting for the ‘virtues’ of public space and civic culture to emerge (2008:8). This surplus leads to an agonistic public culture enabling individuals and groupsto negotiate the tensions associated with diverse cities. However, while Amin remindsus that the ‘urban’ should not be regarded as a privileged site of such ‘surplus’ andintercultural encounter, there have been few scholarly efforts to imagine what suchsurplus might look like outside the city.

Planning for ‘Culture’ in Whittlesea

In this section, I consider the questions of identity and attachment raised by theQuarry Hills bus tour and the broader question of how experiences of culturaldiversity in areas of suburban expansion can be thought by existing policy discourses.Specifically, I look at how official understandings of ‘culture’ in these areas arereflected in a number of urban planning instruments.

The Quarry Hills tour is a programme of the Cultural Heritage Unit of City ofWhittlesea’s CCDD. The CCDD manages an array of activities, events andinteractions aimed at strengthening local identity, histories and practices ofbelonging. The department has significant focus on addressing the complexitiesraised by the increasingly diverse character of the local population. The CulturalHeritage Unit is specifically concerned with the intersections between culture andspace that are embodied in material forms as well as in intangible ‘ways of life’ orpractices (Honman and Johnston 2012). The notion of ‘cultural heritage’ in thiscontext emphasises the value of these forms, their contribution to local identity andthe need to support, preserve or develop them. However, ‘cultural heritage’ is also anambiguous category. Interviews with staff involved in the municipality’s Cultural

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Heritage Unit reveal an uncertainty surrounding what sorts of programmes toinclude in its remit, whether there should be an emphasis on historical forms or‘living’ heritage, which cultural groups should be given priority and on what basistheir activities should be supported or made visible. Nonetheless, the breadth of theterm enables the CCDD to support the activity of a range of ethnic (and other)community groups. Representatives from these community groups, including theWhittlesea Chinese Association, Whittlesea Reconciliation Group, Northern GujaratiAssociation of Melbourne, and Parks Victoria, sit on the Cultural Heritagecommittee and are responsible for initiating activities such as the Quarry Hillstour. One of the important functions of the Cultural Heritage Unit is its ability togenerate the transient and indeterminate forms of belonging that take place in theQuarry Hills tour. These kinds of local government programmes exemplify efforts todevelop new narratives of place and belonging that are not available within prevailingnarratives of dysfunction and vibrancy.

The ambiguity of what is generated in programmes such as the Quarry Hills tourmean these programmes cannot be easily defined or instrumentalised. Subsequently,there is a problem in translating these experiences into understandings of culturalparticipation that can be deployed in other policy frameworks. This is evident whenwe consider the urban planning instruments regulating residential development inthe Quarry Hills precinct. These documents have an important role in definingpatterns of (projected) cultural participation and the forms of interrelation thatmight exist between the area’s diverse communities. In this respect, they set the termsfor, what Lisa Slater has described as, a particular ‘ethics of cross-culturalengagement’ (2009: 171). The documents I consider here do not explicitly concernthemselves with ‘culture’; rather, they use rhetoric such as ‘connected’ or ‘sustainable’communities to promote certain ways of being and interacting (ASR Research 2012:28). In mobilising these policy categories, however, these frameworks struggle toacknowledge the implications of the cultural diversity of these new communities,despite this diversity being an inevitable aspect of population growth. The planninginstruments make use of – and contribute to – frameworks of knowledge about thesecommunities that are limited by their emphasis on quantitative assessment and theirlack of attention to the forms of interrelation and negotiation that will take placebetween new residents.

It has been suggested that the suburbanisation of Australian cities has beenencouraged by governments since as early as the nineteenth century and that by theturn of the twentieth century, suburban sprawl in Australia had surpassed that ofmany European and American cities (Frost and Dingle 1993: 20). However, in thelast two decades this suburban ideal has been re-evaluated. The pursuit of thequarter-acre block has been curbed by urban planning strategies promoting newvalues, such as ‘sustainability’, and the desire for ‘vibrant’ forms of community life.This has resulted in preferences for ‘mixed-use’ developments and smaller blocksizes, reflecting patterns of development and land use in the inner-city (Kelly andBreadon 2012: 44).

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Recent development in the City of Whittlesea exemplifies how contemporaryurban planning strategies must respond both to the demands of population growthand the need to manage this growth sustainably. Relevant local and state governmentauthorities have developed a raft of planning documents, infrastructure assessmentsand surveys of natural, built and historical heritage aimed at managing this tension.The municipality is, for example, one of five designated ‘Urban Growth Zones’ – aclassification made by the Growth Areas Authority, a state government agencywhich, among other things, is concerned with ensuring the ‘sustainability’ of thesedevelopments. The zones have been established in response to an increasing demandfor housing development and are designed to streamline the process of granting thenecessary permits and approvals to expedite development. Twenty per cent ofMelbourne’s population now live in these growth areas, which are a mix of already-established suburbs and new residential developments (Department of Planning andCommunity Development, Economy, n.d.). A number of these areas are contained by‘urban growth boundaries’ – another official delineation aimed at regulating growth.These boundaries mark the limits of long-term development, where ‘non-urbanvalues’ and land uses are prioritised.5 However, standards for what constitutessustainable growth are uncertain and in 2010, Melbourne’s urban growth boundarieswere expanded to make an additional 43,600 hectares of land available for suburbanexpansion, including development in the Quarry Hills precinct.

While these regulatory strategies are clearly informed by anxieties related topopulation growth, for the most part, they fail to acknowledge the diversification thatwill inevitably accompany such growth. These shortfalls can be illustrated if weconsider the proposed Quarry Hills development. The precinct, which is presentlycomprised mainly of agricultural land, has been earmarked for a development thatwill accommodate an estimated population of about 6500 people (City of Whittleseaand Growth Areas Authority 2012: 3). It is a ‘greenfield’ development, meaning thatmuch of the new housing will be built on previously undeveloped land. Because theprecinct falls within an official Urban Growth Zone, development in the area issubject to a ‘Precinct Structure Plan’ – a framework devised by the relevant localgovernment in conjunction with the Growth Areas Authority. The plan seeks to‘realise the vision of developing liveable communities’ by bringing together a range ofassessments relating to biodiversity, Aboriginal heritage, ‘post-contact’ heritage,analyses of employment opportunities, as well as anticipated transport and otherinfrastructure needs (Growth Areas Authority – Precinct Structure Plans, n.d.).Although it seeks to address complications that are raised by these histories andpossibilities, the specific cultural and social agendas informing development are notmade explicit in the Precinct Structure Plans. The purpose of these documents, itseems, is primarily instrumental – to streamline the planning and approval process.

If we look to a number of other planning instruments, it is possible to glean moredetail about the vision of ‘community’ that informs these developments and theforms of cultural participation that are anticipated and valued. The ‘Whittlesea GrowthArea Plan’, for example, states that it seeks to maximise the area’s ‘“country-like”

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atmosphere with plenty of open space’, as well as a ‘thriving community life’(Growth Areas Authority 2012: 2, 4). This can be read in the context of the stategovernment’s ‘indicators of community strength’ which emphasise the importance of‘amenity’, ‘community participation’, ‘ability to get help when in need’ and a beliefthat ‘multiculturalism makes life in the area better’ (Department of Planning andCommunity Development 2008). This is not an exhaustive list of the measures ofcommunity strength, but it begins to describe a particular ideal of ‘community’ that iscohesive and high in social capital and civic participation.

These sorts of ideals are supplemented by documents which set out the practicalrequirements for creating such a community. The Wollert/Quarry Hills Social andCommunity Infrastructure Assessment (hereafter, the Infrastructure Assessment), forexample, anticipates the ‘community infrastructure’ needs of the Quarry Hillsprecinct based on population forecasts for the area.6 A series of calculationsdetermine the facilities and infrastructure required for this hypothetical geographicalcommunity including schools, health centres, parks and open space, communitygardens, and so on.7 It is suggested, for example, that the area should have one‘Neighbourhood Activity Centre’,8 one performing arts centre and one communityarts centre to service the surrounding suburbs (City of Whittlesea and Growth AreasAuthority 2012: 27). There are obvious limits to the usefulness of such quantitativemethodologies. Clearly, the question of cultural diversity within a population – andits attendant cultural infrastructure needs – cannot simply be understood via a seriesof formulas based on sheer population numbers. In this respect, the InfrastructureAssessment constitutes a particular and limited way of knowing these newcommunities. Such forms of knowledge belong to a broader discourse of govern-mental knowledge and population management through which they acquirecredibility and legitimacy.

The document also envisages the cultural infrastructure needs of the communityprimarily in terms of built infrastructure and, in doing so, privileges public forms ofcultural activity, participation and interrelation. It is possible to trace this emphasis toa particular discourse of urbanism where a vibrant, democratic, civic culture isequated with activity that takes place in public spaces and institutions. The ‘cultural’needs of a community are seen to encompass facilities such as schools, performingarts centres, and so on. It is by facilitating these forms of activity that the tensionsaccompanying cultural diversity are seen to be successfully managed (Stevenson2003, Amin 2008). Such thinking overlooks the possibility that the tensionsassociated with diversity and life in these peri-urban communities might also benegotiated in private spaces. There is much evidence to suggest that migrants inhabitcomplex subjective worlds that must mediate local and global attachments andidentities. These multiple commitments are not only negotiated in public spaces but,for example, through the use of domestic technologies (Yue and Hawkins 2000). Theuse of online technologies to maintain relations with family and friends at ‘home’ is aform of cultural participation which potentially contributes to, rather than detractsfrom, the processes of settlement and belonging to new, Australian communities – or

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what Ghassan Hage calls practices of ‘homemaking’ (2007: 104). Interviews andobservation research with current residents in the City of Whittlesea similarly attestto a range of domestic practices and private forms of meaning-making that areimportant ways for migrants to negotiate past and present places and identities.

Where built infrastructure is used by migrant communities, it may be for purposesthat are not always anticipated by planning schemes. A sporting facility may be usedfor community meetings. A library function room may be used for prayer or religiousfestivities. Calculations about built infrastructure requirements need to allow forsome flexibility and take into account the range of uses and meanings that these sitesmay take on (Watson and McGillivray 1995: 170). A recent report has pointed outhow certain types of built infrastructure – such as large commercially ownedshopping centres – are less amenable to diversity and unable to accommodate, forexample, small food stores catering to Asian migrant communities (Kelly andBreadon 2012: 44). There is a risk, then, in planning strategies which overdeterminehow spaces might be used and simplify the ways in which new communities willinscribe sites with meaning.

I want to suggest that these problems emerge from a more general inability toaccount for the experiences of culture and difference in these areas and the kinds ofinterrelations and exchange that planning instruments should support. Urbanplanning documents relating to the Quarry Hills development refer to the issuesraised by changes in ‘household types’ and ‘composition’, but this acknowledgementof shifting demography does not extend to considerations of cultural diversity(Department of Planning and Community Development – Housing, n.d.). The largelyquantitative Infrastructure Assessment identifies the problems of ‘isolation’ and ‘poorhealth status’ within the surrounding communities and attributes these to a numberof factors, including a lack of ‘community services’, ‘community connectedness’ and‘recreation opportunities’ (ASR Research 2012: 17). What is interesting is that theseproblems are not acknowledged as ‘cultural’ or described in terms of ‘intercultural’relations. Rather, the problem is envisaged as one of community cohesion and‘resilience’ and draws from the communitarian discourse of social capital. In doingso, these instruments fail to comprehend the role of cultural participation – that is,forms of cultural activity that articulate identity, enable expression and theproduction of personal and collective narratives that might contribute to a range ofencounters and negotiations between diverse groups.

Conclusion: New Forms of Knowledge about New Communities

This article has traced the way that cultural programmes and urban planningframeworks surround the Quarry Hills development. An analysis of these officialinstruments reveals a problem of translation – specifically how the kinds of complexbut quotidian practices of attachment and belonging generated by an activity like theQuarry Hills bus tour are not adequately captured by the assessments and formulascontained in planning documents. This is related to an inability to make explicit the

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significance of cultural participation for Asian communities settling in these outer-suburban areas. There is a tension surrounding how to use culture within urbanplanning frameworks and the kinds of cultural participation and place-making theseframeworks should imagine.

There is a need for planning strategies to directly address the fact that these outer-suburban communities will be among the most diverse in Australia, and to do thisvia a more explicit recognition of the implications of ‘culture’. Precisely, how thismight be achieved, however, is more uncertain. The urban planning frameworksand policies I have described above do not exist in isolation but as part of, whatFoucault might describe as, an assemblage of instruments and techniques that setout to govern spaces and bodies (1991). The Infrastructure Assessment makesreference to other discourses of knowledge about the proposed new communityand the need to include these in any overall planning framework for the area.It recommends appointing a local community development officer, establishingfacilities which encourage participation in community life such as play groups, healthand fitness programmes, as well as arts and craft activities for young mothers, musicevents for youth, and so on (ASR Research 2012: 3). This reference to the discourseof ‘community development’ is a telling one. What is known in Australia as‘community cultural development’ promotes creative activity as a form of expressionof individual and communal identities and as a means of addressing a raft of ‘social’problems. It exemplifies the way in which, as Tony Bennett has explained,governments have used ‘culture’ to ‘work on the social’ (2007). It constitutes analternative way of ‘knowing’ the community that responds to some of the limitationsof other (more technical) ways of working on the community, such as the forms ofquantitative assessment I have described.

Attempts to incorporate the knowledge of a community cultural developmentofficer into this framework attest to the shortcomings of dominant approaches withinurban planning. As well as the conceptual issues which limit the extent to whichthese discourses can account for the complexity of cultural experience here, there arepractical barriers to these discourses engaging with one another. The City ofWhittlesea’s CCDD, which manages the Quarry Hills tour, was also enlisted in theplanning process for the Quarry Hills development. Staff in this department holdspecialised forms of expertise: developing cultural programmes that engage diversecommunities; enhancing their ability to form place-based identities; encouragecultural exchange; express themselves creatively and enjoy a range of convivial typesof interaction. Despite these specialisations, these staff are not necessarily equipped tointervene in what are largely quantitative modes of population managementand urban planning. There is a need for more effective ways for these forms ofknowledge – about diverse communities, built infrastructure and more immaterialways of being – to speak to one another.

Urban planning is by its nature about projecting futures. For this reason, it is aspeculative and uncertain discourse which must predict what the outcomes of urbanencounter between communities might be, what sorts of exchange are most desirable

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and how these might be facilitated. When such knowledge is put to work by policy-makers they form part of broader efforts to manage diverse populations. However, asAmin has shown, the results of multicultural encounter are not always possible topredict (2002). A range of technical categories have emerged which attempt toaccount for some of these effects. The documents I have described in this article, forexample, seek to capture the social dynamics of diverse communities throughconcepts such as ‘vibrancy’, ‘liveability’ and ‘amenity’. However, there is a need toextend these policy categories to account for the complex flows and connections thatconstitute contemporary Asian-Australian identities. May argues that ‘place’ shouldbe understood, not as a space with clear parameters, but as a more fluid formation –as a ‘unique point of connection in a wider series of flows’ (1996: 195). Thisperspective provides a useful way of thinking about the sorts of relations betweenlocal and global attachments that set the terms on which Asian migrants to these newcommunities may position themselves. Significantly though, May argues for a‘bounded’ conception of place – one that accounts for these multiple attachments andflows that make up identity, but which is still anchored in the materiality of place(1996: 195).

There is a need to think about the forms of place-based belonging that might bepossible in a new community such as Quarry Hills. Competing designs for thesespaces inform imaginations of what sorts of communities might exist. This isparticularly important if we are to gauge what the role of public cultural institutionsand cultural policy might be in this context. What are the possibilities opened up bythe outer-suburbs and their proximity to park and bushlands? To what extent arethese physical, public spaces drawn into individuals’ private strategies for makingsense of their place in the world? It is likely that migrant communities will inscribethese areas as sites of identity formation in ways that are distinct from their inner-city counterparts. It is these meanings and uses that cultural policy-makers andurban planners could benefit from paying closer attention to.

Funding

This work was supported by an Australian Research Council Linkage [grant numberLP110100039].

Notes

[1] The 2005 Cronulla riots refer to a serious of violent clashes that were instigated by aconfrontation between Anglo-Australian surf lifesavers and young men of Middle Easternbackground in the beachside suburb of Cronulla, Sydney. The riots spread to other parts ofSydney, with continuing tension between groups attempting to assert belonging to bothSydney’s beaches and an imagined Australian identity. In 2009, there was significant publiccontroversy surrounding a number of robberies and violent attacks on Indian tertiarystudents in Melbourne, and their perception as racially motivated crimes. Both of theseincidents prompted intense public debate and scholarly discussion about racial conflict inurban Australia and the status of Australian multiculturalism.

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[2] For example, Clark et al.’s Culture and the Metropolis Report, which forms part of theVictorian state government’s Melbourne Metropolitan Strategy, incorporates these argu-ments about the civic benefits of cultural diversity into a statement about the importance of‘cities’ as the site of communal cultural activity (2001: 3).

[3] See, for example, the Victorian state government’s recent policy statement, Vision forCitizenship in a Multicultural Victoria which restates the economic contributions ofmulticulturalism (Department of Premier and Cabinet 2012: 3).

[4] There have been some efforts to examine the ways in which ‘creative cities’ frameworksmight be expanded to acknowledge the creative production of the outer-suburbs. Luckman,for example, examines the place of the natural environment and how spaces outside of thecity might contribute to creativity (2009). There has also been some recent interest in thesorts of meanings and uses that can be attached to open space within urban developments.One study, for example, is concerned with ethnic communities’ uses of open space and thepractice of converting small parks into community gardens in the City of Darebin, anothernorthern municipality of Melbourne (Freestone and Nichols 2004: 118).

[5] The Urban Growth Boundary (UGB) clearly distinguishes land that is designated urban, tobe used for housing, industry and commerce, from non-urban land. Non-urban land is to beused for activities such as conservation, agriculture, resource development and suitablecommunity infrastructure like airports, water supply and sewage treatment facilities thatrequire large areas of open land.’ (Growth Areas Authority – Urban Growth Boundary, n.d.)

[6] The report anticipates a population of between 5600 and 7500 people for the population area(City of Whittlesea and Growth Areas Authority 2012: 27).

[7] The report states that the ‘provision ratios’ used for these quantitative assessments ofinfrastructure needs were derived from standards used by Federal and State GovernmentDepartments and Agencies, and the Growth Areas Authority Precinct Structure PlanningGuidelines (City of Whittlesea and Growth Areas Authority 2012: 28).

[8] In this document ‘Neighbourhood Activity Centre’ refers to a commercial centre includinga supermarket, ‘specialty’ retail and other non-retail floorspace (City of Whittlesea andGrowth Areas Authority 2012: 27).

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