The Conversation, in conjunction with Griffith Review, is publishing a series of provocations in the form of asking some big questions to encourage a robust national discussion about a new Australian identity that reflects our national, regional and global roles.

Bernard Gleeson says that the  suburb contained  the  desire   lines  of  modern  fulfilment  that  in  the  twentieth  century  became  the  map  work  of   suburban   expansion.   It   was   also   a   model   of   human   growth   freighted   with   self-­‐‑ endangerment,  which  become  clear    late  in  20th  century. He adds:

we now view human possibility solely through the lens of the market economy. Consumptive suburban and city landscapes franchise and confine the human conversation about development and self-realisation. It is a model of urbanism dependent upon resource and human exploitation, largely in the developing world....The desired urban model is opposed to, but also dependent upon, the shifting, boiling hinterlands that constitute the alternative and larger human reality – what the American urban theorist Mike Davis calls the “planet of slums”.