June 13, 2012
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”.
There is a need to develop new structures and ways of living but this requires breaking out of the closure of a neo-liberalism that holds that free markets define democracy, and thus the prospects for human freedom and fulfillment.
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