New Communities, New Attachments: Planning for Diversity in Melbourne's Outer-Suburbs

Abstract

This article reflects on the cultural policy and planning challenges raised by the changing demography, particularly the increasing cultural diversity, of new, outer-suburban Australian communities. While there is much scholarly thinking about the forms of spatialised belonging that exists in urban, multicultural Australia, there is less discussion of Asian identities in more dispersed suburban communities that have a very different relationship with the cultural infrastructure of the inner-city. Asian presences in Australian cities have been discussed in terms of racialised discourses of dysfunction and strategies of ethnic commodification, but these do not account for the practices of belonging and self and community-making that take place in these outer-suburban areas. An analysis of cultural programmes and urban planning documents surrounding a residential development in outer-suburban Melbourne – the proposed Quarry Hills precinct – reveals that these instruments mobilise limited frameworks of knowledge about these communities. Such governmental discourses struggle to account for the implications of cultural diversity, and the forms of belonging and attachment that are enacted in these areas.